By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – Some of us have a crazy aunt in the attic. Jackie Kennedy had a deeply eccentric one in the Hamptons. Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, known as “Big Edie,” and daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”) were every bit as strange as Jackie was sleek, at least as portrayed in “Grey Gardens,” which premiers on HBO April 18 at 8 p.m. New York time. All three shared a similar fate: Their lives were not what they had hoped for. The film builds on a 1973 documentary about the odd couple, who lived in a dilapidated 28-room mansion in East Hampton, N.Y. The documentary made cult heroes of both women. This film, which stars Jessica Lange as “Big Edie” and Drew Barrymore as “Little Edie,” will likely be seen as high points in both careers. Using the making of the documentary as a central plot line, the film covers 40 years to tell how the mother and daughter went from riches to rags, starting in 1936 when Little Edie is about to come out as a debutante in New York. This was a strategic ploy. “You’ll never get a man to propose to you if you don’t have a debut,” Big Edie advises. Little Edie’s has other dreams. She wants a stage career and flees her party, only to be run down by mom, who feeds her a pair of whoppers: “You can have your cake and eat it too in this life,” she promises. “Get married and you can do whatever you want.” As the film progresses, we watch the cake disappear, along with Big Edie’s husband and Little Edie’s lover and hopes for fame. Mom’s marriage was no advertisement for marital bliss. While husband Phelan (Ken Howard) practiced law in New York (and practiced love with his secretary), she stayed home with her glib accompanist, George “Gould” Strong (Malcolm Gets), who eventually bolted. Little Edie’s flame, former secretary of the Interior Julius “Cap” Krug (Daniel Baldwin), dumped her to protect his marriage. At her moment of crisis mom convinced her to come home to Grey Gardens, where neither found any time whatsoever for housework. Indeed, as former President Kennedy might have put it, they did squalor with “great vigor.” The house filled with trash, raccoons, cats and the critters’ various byproducts. If excretia were gold, the Beales would have made the Rockefellers look like paupers. In the early 1970s the health department moved in; media reports brought the former first lady into the picture. Her visit is one of the film’s most captivating moments. Jackie (Jeanne Tripplehorn) rolls up in a chauffeured Lincoln, totally composed until she enters the house. Suddenly she’s in gag city. “That cat is going to the bathroom right in back of your portrait,” she tells Big Edie, who takes it in stride. They repair to the gardens, where Little Edie tells Jackie she had dated Joseph Kennedy and, had history taken a different turn, could have ended up first lady. “I wish it had been you, Edie. I really do,” a world-weary Jackie responds. It’s hard not to sympathize, especially when Edie follows up with: “Is it true that Jack Kennedy gave you gonorrhea?” Jackie saw to it that the house was brought up to code. Both women put in brilliant performances, with Lange’s character undergoing the greatest changes. She starts out a saucy babe and ends a gray, sagging crone who cooks sausages on a hot plate parked on her bedside table. Director/writer Michael Sucsy’s script shows mother and daughter caught in a cycle of hostility and sympathy. When Little Edie says mom won’t like the upcoming documentary because it will tell the “truth about how you’ve held me back all these years,” mom shoots back: “If you’re stuck Edie it’s only with yourself.” Moments later, mom says “I should have let you stay in New York” to which daughter responds, “I could have gone any time.” Little Edie did depart, but not until after her mother died in 1977. She fulfilled her dream of performing in cabarets (though to bad reviews) before her death in 2002. She was never the star she hoped to be, though her view of the 1973 documentary could be applied to this glittering portrayal of her life: “If you don’t win 90 prizes for this movie I’ll be very surprised.” (Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this story: Dave Shiflett at dshifl@aol.com.
