When she lived in Grey Gardens, I had spirited conversations with Little Edie, and even now I enjoy the occasional imaginary chat with her about how famous she has become. “Of course I am celebrated,” she tells me, her plummy pre-war debutante accent stressing the vowels. “The recognition was inevitable, but the damn shame is that it came so late, and posthumously,” she confides in a stage whisper. But fate also taught her to be philosophical about time. “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, awfully difficult,” she said in an actual conversation back in 1978. There was, after all, no clock in Grey Gardens, and no need for one.
It is no exaggeration to say that Grey Gardens has now become a cottage industry, at least in the way the sprawling mansions of the rich were called cottages in the first half of the twentieth century. Books, websites, merchandising, Broadway and Hollywood have all interpreted and sometimes exploited the Grey Gardens mystique. Some get it right—make that reasonably right—and some don’t get it at all.
(For a genuine, gorgeous, eye-opening glimpse of Little Edie, check out the early photographs and her own writings in Edith Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens: A Life in Pictures, compiled by Eva Marie Beale and published by Verlhac Editions.)
The biggest media event of all is the upcoming HBO film Grey Gardens, in which Drew Barrymore sensitively reveals the unconventional humanity of Little Edie. It’s a big challenge for an actor, but Barrymore has the talent and the look—and above all she is able to express the inherent bad girl quality they both share. The casting, with Jessica Lange as Big Edie, is perfect.
Interpreting Edie takes skill, and more than just impersonation. In reality she had a wonderful and original—if abundantly unorthodox—mind. She maintained an unexpected balance given the circumstances of her life, the years virtually trapped in the house. Her grip on reality was occasionally shaky, but no more so than many other artistic people. She clung to her resilience and innate intelligence like a life preserver. What I remember above all is Edie’s unwavering dignity.
This depth eludes an easy portrayal. The mannerisms can be readily imitated, but the character is harder to capture. Lurking behind the inventive way she dressed in the later years was the elegance and radiant beauty of her youth, just as behind her dramatic conversational style with its theatrical flourishes was a keen analytic and observational wisdom. Barrymore gets beneath the surface and she gets it right.
Any fictionalized version has to clean things up a bit and romanticize the reality. A film has to interpret rather than try to show literally the dreadful conditions, the very real dirt and smell of Grey Gardens, and the difficult, claustrophobic lives of its inhabitants. You can’t, after all, hand the viewer a can of flea spray to use on your lower legs, the way I used to do years ago when visiting Grey Gardens.
But it can be done well. I’m sure Little Edie would be entirely sympathetic to this whole enterprise. She always thought of herself as a singer and dancer, a storyteller and entertainer. She appeared before audiences a few times in cabaret performances and loved it. She would no doubt consider Barrymore her artistic peer, someone to talk to, actor-to-actor, pro-to-pro. The easy camaraderie of one big star playing another big star.