Jessica Lange's Secret Passion

Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange in Grey Gardens (Courtesy of HBO) Lange is more at ease discussing Grey Gardens, her latest film project, which will be released on DVD July 14. Directed by Michael Sucsy, the film is a re-imagining of the popular 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, the brothers who trained their camera’s cold eye on Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith (“Little Edie”), the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy. The reclusive pair was found living together in bohemian squalor (feeding bread to raccoons and feral cats, taking meals in their beds) in their rambling old house, nicknamed Grey Gardens, in East Hampton, New York; a few years later, the Maysles arrived to film. Big and Little Edie (played in the remake by Drew Barrymore) surely rank as one of the most flawed mother-daughter pairs in history—they break the sound barrier of co-dependency—with Big Edie assuaging her loneliness by guilt-tripping her daughter into remaining with her at home, and Little Edie subordinating herself to her mother as a way of avoiding the harsh realities of the outside world.

“At this age, for an actress… to keep working at that level and quality of work that you used to… that’s rare now.”

The HBO film tunnels back into the past to recreate the circumstances that led to the Beales’ baroque dysfunction. “It’s a great role,” says Lange, “The scope of it. The fact that I could play this woman over a 40-year time period was really exciting…to try to imagine or re-imagine her life earlier, I mean, for an actor it was just luscious, you know?”

During the 40-year period the film covers, the Edies evolve into a single maladjusted organism. Each is resentful of the other—and, crucially, angry with herself—for being unable to escape their mutual dependency. This narrative of grievance forms the backbone of both films; for Big and Little Edie, the issue, at every moment, is the entirety of their shared life. “You just can’t stand that the whole world is going to know the truth… about how you’ve held me back all these years!” Little Edie hollers at her mother. “You don’t leave—you say you will but you never do,” her mother counters. As is the case with most familial relationships, the truth is too complicated to parse. Their symbiosis is both nightmare and fantasy.

Lange plays Big Edie with to-the-letter precision. Edith Beale’s voice, her loopy singing, her casual cruelty (“You can’t dance at all,” she tells her daughter), her unwavering but pathological determination to remain tethered to Grey Gardens: The exactitude with which Lange portrays all this is eerie. But Lange strove for mimesis. When the voice coach hired to train her asked whether she would prefer to perform her own version of “Tea for Two,” one of Big Edie’s amateur singing numbers, or to study the documentary and replicate it, Lange chose the latter. “I said, you can’t get any better than this, and there’s no reason to change a beat. So we studied every"—she pauses for emphasis—"single"—pauses again—"tiny facial expression, gesture, voice, everything.” Lange, in fact, continued to watch the original documentary throughout the shoot. “It would be the first thing I’d do when I’d come to the set in the morning; everyday, I’d put it in. And I would listen to her voice, because as soon as I found her voice, I could find the character.”

Still, the role presented its challenges, even for a veteran like Lange. Grey Gardens was, for instance, the first film for which Lange had to sing. “I’m thrilled I got away with it, you know?” (When Lange played Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, she lip-synced.) The actress also felt the pressure of playing an “iconic character,” for which there existed tangible, visual, historical evidence. “You had the voice, the accent, all the mannerisms, and to try to thread it all together so that it was believable… and then to sing, and to dance…” she says. She knew that if she got it wrong, the film’s many obsessed fans—they watch the documentary like others watch Star Trek or Donnie Darko—would inform her of her errors. “I hadn’t watched the documentary when it first came out. I wasn’t, you know, one of those people,” she says, jokingly referring to the Grey Gardens disciples.