Grey Gardens' Mad Women

Peter Stranks / HBO Decades after the cult documentary on the eccentric Beale family, Caryn James says the masterful HBO film explains how Big and Little Edie went from socialites to social misfits.

Imagine the ghost of Little Edie Beale. She’s fluttering over the red carpet at tonight’s overbooked, glittery premiere of Grey Gardens , HBO’s terrific drama based on Albert and David Maysles’ documentary about Edie and her mother—those now-culty figures who bicker, sing, and live in isolated squalor in their crawling-with-cats house. I see Ghost Edie as she appears in the opening of The Beales of Grey Gardens, the film of outtakes from the 1976 documentary that Albert Maysles compiled a few years ago: Wearing pink scarves tied into a sarong and a red print scarf on her head, she steps onto the front porch and sings an oddly mournful version of “You Ought to Be in Pictures.” Edie always assumed she was meant to be a star.

“We need the Beales to seem off-kilter today, assurance that for ordinary people setbacks like a tanking economy won’t lead to life with Mom and raccoons.”

No one could have foreseen the cockeyed path of her fame, though, or the persistence of Grey Gardens, which hits so many cultural nerves it gains significance as the decades roll on. The new drama is more than just a showcase for brilliantly deep performances by Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie, aging from the 1930s through the '70s. Taking cues from the original documentary, the new Grey Gardens is partly about fame. The HBO tagline, echoing newspaper headlines of the day, is “Inside the Incredible World of Jackie’s O’s Relatives;” who would have paid attention otherwise? It’s also partly about voyeurism: Here David and Albert Maysles appear as minor characters and occasionally roll their eyes behind the Beales’ backs. (Who can blame them? They have to put flea collars around their ankles before entering the dilapidated house.) We—entertained, judgmental viewers—are implicated in this unsettling intrusion, the predecessor of so much reality television.

Perhaps most of all, we are still drawn to the Beales by one endlessly fascinating question: How did two socially prominent women turn into crazy cat ladies? Their downward spiral carries extra resonance today, with fortunes tumbling all around us.

Let’s not be coy about how loopy the Beales were. Grey Gardens cultists insist they weren’t cracked, just eccentric. This theory makes Little Edie, with her upside-down skirts and cardigans as hats, a fashion trendsetter, as if she were some Emily Dickinson of designers, putting together costumes that would only be appreciated after her death. (“This is my sweater-on-my-head to the world/ That never wrote to me.”)

But the horrendous, garbage-strewn house was not some artistic quirk. Even Lange, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, couldn’t fathom the mystery of those empty cat-food cans piled up in the living room. “Why don’t you put them in a garbage bag?” she wondered. “It’s not that hard.”

The film does more than the documentary or the Broadway musical (which debuted in 2006) to fill in the gap between the two beautiful women we meet in 1936 and the social outcasts we see 40years later, when elderly Big Edie stays in bed and boils corn on a hotplate on her night table, and middle-aged Little Edie manically waves a flag as she dances and flirts with the Maysles.

The Maysles’ documentary doesn’t explore what went wrong with the women over time; it offers raw, partial evidence, handing us the Beales as a puzzle. The musical simply lets the women morph from young beauties to near-recluses during intermission.