‘Grey Gardens’ at 50: Were Little Edie and Big Edie Exploited, or In On the Enjoyable?

In the few quick months main as much as its large launch, the filmmakers behind Grey Gardens have been in a frantic state of injury management. Albert and David Maysles’s now iconic documentary, chronicling the eccentric lives of high-society dropouts “Big” and “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale—Jackie O’s aunt and first cousin—had been courting controversy even earlier than its fall 1975 debut on the New York Film Festival. Critics at its first press screening referred to as the movie disgusting, accusing it of exploiting each its oblivious topics and the beloved former first girl. “You just sloughed off Jackie Kennedy,” reviewer Rex Reed spat on the Maysles brothers as they took the stage after the credit rolled. The Trenton Times gossiped that the movie “nearly provoked a fight.”

Grey Gardens was hardly the Maysles’s first foray into controversy, however their newest feature-length movie was additionally their first to characteristic feminine topics as principal characters. The filmmakers’ timing—smack-dab in the course of the ladies’s lib motion—was both impeccable or atrocious, relying fully on whom you have been asking. Those interpretations hinge upon how a given viewer would possibly interpret the Beales themselves: Were they financially determined and doubtless mentally unwell victims of patriarchal techniques that embarrassed and exploited them? Or have been they defiant objectors to societal norms, rightfully cashing in by telling their story of non-conformity on their very own phrases?

Even now, half a century after Grey Gardens hit mainstream theaters, followers, students and critics are not any nearer to a consensus concerning the enduring legacy of the movie. Let’s assessment what of the eccentric Beales endures—and what, as Little Edie would say, was merely one of the best costume for the day.

David Maysles, Edie Beale, Edith Bouvier Beale (seated) and Albert Maysles, 1975.©Janus Films/Everett Collection

The seeds of Grey Gardens

In 1960, a younger Albert Maysles labored on the JFK marketing campaign movie Primary. Tasked particularly with filming Jackie Kennedy, Maysles did that job and extra, capturing telling moments—the longer term first girl nervously fidgeting along with her white gloves, for instance—that traditionalists felt ought to have remained non-public. In the early 60s, explains Georgetown University professor of communications, tradition, and expertise Matthew Tinkcom, intimate pictures like these have been a part of a brand new and controversial filmmaking fashion referred to as “direct cinema” (or, in fancy French terminology, cinéma vérité). “Filmmakers were supposed to be a fly on the wall and no more present than you need to be,” says Tinkcom, writer of BFI Film Classics: Grey Gardens.

Jackie was a passionate cinephile who will need to have appreciated the revolutionary method: A full decade later, Lee Radziwill, Jackie’s little sister, remembered the Maysles’s work and selected them to shoot a subsequent private challenge about her and Jackie’s society-girl summers within the Hamptons. The Beales have been simply two of many would-be topics from the prolonged Kennedy clan. But as quickly as Albert’s digicam (with David on sound) captured the pair on movie, their charisma stole the highlight—and Radziwill’s self-importance challenge was shelved. Instead, the brothers determined to inform the Bouvier family members’ way more fascinating story: a reclusive mother-and-daughter duo dwelling in squalor with dozens of cats and a handful of raccoons. The prim and polished Bouvier sisters have been horrified, and forbade the Maysles from utilizing the footage they’d already shot.

The brothers later circled again, sans each Bouvier sisters, to persuade the Beales to look in an experimental movie. It wasn’t troublesome. “They said, ‘These are our lives. Take them. Record them’,” Albert informed The Trenton Times. In return, the Beales have been paid a paltry $5,000 every (about $30,000 right this moment) to reveal themselves to the world. Like many documentary topics earlier than them, they hoped for ample royalties on the opposite aspect—however as normally occurs in circumstances like this, that cash by no means really materialized.