Grey Gardens (1975)

Seventy-nine year old Edith Bouvier Beale and her fifty-six year old daughter, Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, are Jacqueline Kennedy’s aunt and cousin. Living alone with several cats, fleas and raccoons (the latter, wild, which live in the attic but who Edie feeds), the Beale’s are discovered living in filth and squalor in Grey Gardens, their 28-room family mansion located in East Hampton, Long Island, the mansion which doesn’t even have running water. Edie moved home twenty-four years earlier to care for her ailing mother.

In what Edie considers a “raid” on their privacy, the Suffolk County Board of Health orders the Beale’s to clean up the house or be evicted. With few exceptions, the Beale’s are suspicious of the outside world. The Beale’s comply with the order and renovate the house with financial help from their more famous relative. Mother and daughter are outwardly combative with each other, but their constant bickering masks a protective attitude each has for the other.

Both cling to their past lives, with each still believing that that life can exist, Edith as a singer, and Edie as a social débutante (Edie is always sporting a fashionable scarf around her head). Old habits die hard as even two years after renovations on the home have begun, Edith lives primarily in her bedroom in her twin bed which is covered with garbage and cats, who use the corner of the room as a bathroom. And Edie constantly dreams of a time when she can return to living in New York City as a débutante and dancer, although one realizes that she is only using her mother as an excuse for what she really considers her comfortable current living situation.

Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary film by Albert and David Maysles. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive, upper-class women, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived in poverty at Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York. The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival but was not entered into the main competition. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer also directed, and Susan Froemke was the associate producer. The film’s editors are credited as Hovde (who also edited Gimme Shelter and Salesman), Meyer and Froemke.

In 2010, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted Grey Gardens the joint ninth best documentary film of all time.

Directed by: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles
Starring: Edith Bouvier Beale, Edith ‘Little Edie, Bouvier Beale, Brooks Hyers, Norman Vincent Peale
Screenplay by: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles
Cinematography by: Albert Maysles, David Maysles
Film Editing by: Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Portrait Films
Release Date: February 19, 1976