Of Course I'm Mad About Animals But Raccoons and Cats Become Boring. For Too Long a Time...

Almost certainly not a good idea to watch Grey Gardens when you wake up in the middle of the night, though the documentary is thought-provoking, poignant, brilliant. A Tennessee Williams play taken straight from life.

Edith Bouvier Beale, Jackie O’s auntie, lives in a crumbling, Gothic seaside mansion in East Hampton with her daughter, also named Edith Bouvier Beale. Big Edie and Little Edie. The year is 1976. Most of the mansion is boarded up. Raccoons have taken over the attic and are threatening the downstairs. Cats are everywhere. There is no running water. The rooms are filled with antiques, 1920s portraiture, old phonograph records, garbage, fleas.

Both women are incredibly witty, and Little Edie, closing in on 60, is actually rather attractive with a broad, freckled, unlined face straight out of a Courbet portrait and incredible fashion sense – drapery improvised from tablecloths, curtains, and whatever else was on hand, paired with spike heels and her trademark head scarf always fastened with the same heavy gold broach. Little Edie suffered from alopecia in middle age. There’s some dispute over whether it was a disease or she brought it on herself by setting fire to her hair in a fit of pique.

(Interestingly enough, some 40 years after the documentary was filmed and 10 years after her own death, Little Edie has become a fashion icon.)

The movie is an editing triumph. The Maysles’ reportedly filmed something like 70 hours of the two women floating around their derelict mansion. The editors managed to pare the footage down to an hour and thirty-five minute, gave it a cohesive storyline.

That storyline?

The most primal folie a deux imaginable. Mother and daughter.

Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis ain’t got nothin’ on the Beales.

To indicate the passage of time, the Maysles focus on one wall in Big Edie’s bedroom, more-or-less intact at the beginning of the film but half-demolished by bigger and bigger swarms of raccoons by the film’s ending. I thought this was a particularly brilliant touch.

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Let me tell you about the very rich, writes Scott Fitzgerald in his short story The Rich Boy. They are different from you and me.

Ironically, given the absolute squalor of their lives, nowhere will you find better proof of Fitzgerald’s theory than in the lives of the two Edies.

In true Gatsby tradition, the Bouvier dynasty sprang from the loins of an arriviste named John Vernou Bouvier, nicknamed The Major, who made his money doing tycoonish things on Wall Street – one imagines violations of the 18th Amendment were involved – and then concocted, printed, and privately circulated a fictional family biography tracing the descent of the Bouvier family from French nobility.

(In fact, the Bouviers had been farmers and tailors. “Bouvier” means “herdsman” or “cowboy” in French.)

One of the Major’s offspring went on to beget Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, possibly the most famous First Lady and international style icon of all time.

Another went on to become Big Edie.

Big Edie wanted to be an opera singer. Her flamboyant behavior and disregard of convention eventually alienated her husband, a partner in The Major’s law firm, and alienated her two sons as well, both of whom went on to live boring lives doing boring things.

Not her namesake daughter.

Little Edie’s fabulous coming out party in 1936 happened at the Pierre Hotel. One imagines the champagne flowed like oil in Texas, and that Little Edie and beau strolled tipsily over to the Plaza to take a plunge in the iconic fountain. Subsequently, Little Edie spent a decade and a half trying to make it as a dancer but couldn’t and retreated back to Grey Gardens in 1952. Did she come back to take care of her mother or did exigent circumstances force her back? Mother and daughter debate this point endlessly.

How did they end up in such appalling squalor?

Mr. Beale refused to give Big Edie alimony, and Big Edie refused to give up the mansion.

The mansion was hers, goddam it! Never mind that she was destitute and had no means of keeping it up.

Poor people are forced to make pragmatic choices.

Rich people never dream of making pragmatic choices.

I suspect this is the distinction that Scott Fitzgerald sensed but never articulated fully.

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The Edies fascinate me, too, because I sense their star will keep rising. The documentary has already spawned an HBO miniseries starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, and a Broadway musical. One senses that the legend-making has just begun. That a hundred years from now when high school civics classes confuse John F. Kennedy with James Garfield, when the Hamptons are no longer trendy, when the US itself is a toothless wannabe, when the technology is unimaginable, that people will instantly know who the Edies are.

The triumph of influence -- for which read art -- over power, doncha know.