The beauty that is Grey Gardens

Picture from Indiewire.com article Best Documentary's that never got an Oscar.

"I only cared about three things: the Catholic church, swimming and dancing and I had to give them all up." (Little Edie)

The documentary Grey Gardens follows the lives of Jackie Onassis' aunt and cousin.   For six weeks directors Maysles & Maysles entered the wonderfully wacky life of "Big" and "Little" Edie - both formally known as Edith Bouvier Beale.  

The mother and daughter combination is magnetic.  They are two soul-mates who could have done so much more with their lives, if they had resisted the need to be together.

"I didn't want my child to be taken away.  I'd be entirely alone."

Set in East Hamptons in New York, their decrepit mansion sits alongside beautiful wealthy estates that glisten in the sun.  For the two ladies they are the sun shines in their own destruction that is Grey Gardens.

I wish I could have spent time with them - absorbed their cackling squabbles, rummaged through their memories covered in cobwebs and cat's piss.  Their bickering made them sound mad.  They had been moulded by their own realities and to them it it was the world beyond their front door that was crazy.

Big Edie: 'The cat's going to the bathroom right, right in back of the portrait.'
Little Edie: 'God, isn't that awful?'
Big Edie: 'No, I'm glad he is.  I'm glad somebody is doing something he wanted to do'

They are frustrated, but yet content by the ram shackled world they call home.

"I went to cocktail parties to stop the gossip about me being a recluse.  Most of them looked at me like I was from Mars.  I shouldn't have gone.  If you don't do what everybody else does out there...you're written off as crazy."

Now in her late 50s, Little Edie is still very much the twenty year old starlet that replays in her mind.  Never allowed to really grow up, the ageing beauty entertains us with her innocent, formidable, yet poetic intelligence.

Her home is her stage.  The camera is her audience as she dances on the stairs, whisks herself across the veranda singing with a voice her mother disapproves of.  At one point she recites a poem by Robert Frost were she gets it wrong, but yet it still sounds so right.

"I came upon a yellow forest with two paths. In pondering one, I picked the other and that made all the difference."

Video footage lets us relive Little Edie's days as a beauty queen.  Black and white pictures make you

yearn for her yester-years as much as she does.  Rich men wanted her, she wanted them, but she left it all behind, to live in splendid squalor and isolation.

"Here, I'm mother's little daughter.  In New York, I see myself as Edith."

I talk about Little Edie, because it's her I remember the most when I think about Grey Gardens.  I've watched Hollywood's version with Drew Barrymore's playing may favourite character.  It fills the missing gaps and I see the glitz and glamour the women once stepped in.  

Grey Gardens should never have been the end of their fairy-tale.

"To my mother and me, Grey Gardens is a breakthrough to something beautiful and precious called life.  We're proud of it.  It's us!"  - Little Edie