Looking for Life in a Human Litterbox
In 1975, Albert and David Maysels filmed a documentary which rose to a cult status due to the extraordinary nature of its two heroines: Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, dubbed Little Edie. It started as Lee Radziwill’s vanity project to mythologise her own roots in the affluent Bouvier family. Her sister was first lady Jackie Kennedy who briefly returned into the life of the two women and stole yet another show from her younger sister. Primarily because the directors eventually dismissed Lee’s ideas and decided to focus only on the Beales and their delapidated home called Grey Gardens. It’s very fitting because when you look at the state of affairs in the house itself, grey is the only color that comes to mind apart from various shades of brown due to the many cats who turned it into a giant litter box. Amidst all of that biohazard, a paradox where two women so closely related to the highest ranks of American society live in squalor.
This is the dark side of the American dream no one talks about: from riches to rags. It’s infinitely more difficult since it tends to be a road with no return. How did it go that far in the first place? Edith Bouvier was a wealthy heiress who had it all laid out for her: from debutante balls to a wealthy husband and a prolific socialite who needn’t worry about mundane details of harsh realities outside her gilded bubble. But nothing in our lives is set in stone, as she would later learn the hard way. Unfortunately, she turned out to be a bit too eccentric for her father’s taste, who disinherited her for it. Another disaster struck in 1946 when her husband sent her a telegram from Mexico with news of divorce. He had a side hustle with an another woman and decided to elope. It reminded me of Carrie Bradshaw’s Post-it breakup. In the end, Edith got the house but no alimony. From the top of the pile she was suddenly reduced to a destitute crazy cat lady.
It’s almost heartbreaking to watch the scenes of her daughter feeding stray raccoons in the attic of the house, amidst all the mementos of their former lives, with portraits that make mom look like a Russian countess in the prime of her youth before everything went south. Listening to their rambling gives away hints of mental illness, with constant bickering, self-deprecating monologues and outbursts of song and dance. The old lady is now reduced to an eccentric who lives in her bed covered with cats, old photographs and food. The other one tries to hold on to last straws of sanity while stuck in something between a hospice and prison. After losing her hair due to alopecia she wrapped her head in a shawl as tight as a burrito, giving the Hamptons a spice of Saudi Arabia. It turned a trauma into a fashion statement after she added a brooch on top of it. From the very start, there’s a feeling of uneasiness and discomfort due to the obviously codependent nature of relationship between mother and daughter.
What happened here is something that those from the lower classes know all too well: outside the enclaves of the elite, people like this can’t make a decent living because they never needed to learn how. There was always someone to take care of the kitchen, gardening, children etc. If the lady didn’t know how to drive, it wasn’t exactly due to patriarchy, but also the fact that having a personal driver makes a licence redundant.
Yet, if you find yourself on the wrong side of that fence, there’s a reckoning with something average people learned to live and make do with. As things kept deteriorating and the home, once lavish, started falling apart devoured by vines, rodents and dust, they hit rock bottom. The sad thing about it is that human beings are able to adjust to almost anything. For the Beales, this was no reason to leave, though their neighbors begged to disagree.
In fact, it took an intervention by Jackie Kennedy herself to make the house at least habitable again and prevent it from demolition. If you didn’t know who these women were, you might mistake the documentary for a rather extreme episode of the tv show Hoarders. Listening to the mother talking about her former glory days, you get a feeling she slightly resembles the fictional Miss Havisham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. A deluded woman reluctant to acknowledge reality and wallowing in her past like a sinking ship. One of the qualities that make this such an important piece of the documentary genre is how it makes the viewer rethink his own choices and influences that parents have on their children, subconsciously or not. In a scene that’s poignant due to its harsh honesty, the daughter yearns for freedom to which the matriarch cruelly quips she can’t have it.
The film might induce an unexpected anxiety attack in conservative single people, especially after Edith starts reciting the long list of wealthy men who were lining up to propose to her picky daughter. Yes, she could have been living in a swinging mansion with a husband and children by now instead of this dump, mommy dearest. But it has to be her own decision. And then she doubles down on it by telling her at 56, it’s too late for whatever she was planning to do with her life. Especially a singing career that the girl aspired to during her life in New York where she quit the position in her father’s company to pursue her ambitions. Sadly, those hardly amounted to much apart from modeling. That was a career choice beyond comprehension for someone of her station back then. As she later confesses to the camera, she’d now settle for a single room in New York just to get out of Grey Gardens. There’s some genuine desperation in her voice.
All of us go through phases like these when it comes to our own parents. You feel either estranged or suffocated, and it’s an accomplishment to find a common ground where you won’t be at each other’s throats. This is especially the case in multigenerational living, where quite a few people live under the same roof. There’s issues of freedom and privacy, as well as all the underlying issues that come with it. It’s important to avoid mistaking relying on each other for codependence since the other can be quite toxic. Watching our mothers fading away in their old age or struggling with health problems is difficult if we’re trying to share something deeper than just a family name. In the world where moving out on your own is treated as an important milestone which it is, it’s easy to neglect these bridges that connect us to important people who shaped us the way we are as adults.
In my corner of the woods, it’s considered almost as an insult to let your parents move into a retirement home. Still it doesn’t have to be a bad idea. The disgusting estate from the film is worlds apart from what the elderly American middle class gets to enjoy in Florida before they kick the bucket. That’s why they say it’s a place to die for. Better still, a place to die at. I’m not sure anyone here would allow their parents to endure the horrors of Grey Gardens. When mommy dearest died, the other stayed there to fulfill the promise she made to her. Watching their slow-motion meltdown feels voyeuristic and inappropriate yet you can’t keep away from it. Many viewers condemned Big Edie as a condescending and manipulating creature who couldn’t handle the prospect of living on her own. This is much closer to a live action Cinderella than you’ll ever get at Disney, just without the happy ending with Prince Charming.
The house was later sold and she finally got to leave and pursue her dream of a career in music. However, her shows in New York were met with such disastrous reviews that it was made sure she never sees them. The tragedy of her life is that she discovered too late the very thing she put all her hopes in was nothing but a vapid dream because she was no good at it. But maybe there’s a silver lining to it. Had she devoted all those years to futile chasing of a stage career instead of feeding stray raccoons in the ruins of her mother’s past, she might have stayed anonymous. This way, her dream came true, although in a different way. Grey Gardens remains as captivating as ever. In 2009, director Michael Sucsy turned it into a movie with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore in leading roles. In 2006, composer Scott Frankel made a musical of the same name with lyrics by Michel Korie.
What the Maysels brothers encountered in 1975 is now unrecognizable: Beale sold it on the condition that it stays preserved. The new owners invested enough time and money to bring it back to its original beauty. I’d dare to say that the one true Cinderella here is the house. The only one of the three that got a happy end. Its last prisoner moved to Bal Harbor in 1997 where she died in 2002 at the age of 84. As a final indignation, she was allegedly found five days after her passing. Whatever she thought of her achievements, she was immortalised in a way which wasn’t necessarily flattering but certainly revolutionary. It anticipated modern reality shows like The Osbournes on MTV. With the difference that Ozzy was indeed a successful musician, yet his lot was infinitely more irritating than these two women who made loneliness and misery look remarkable.
