Little Edie, of course, was slightly more averse to staying confined, noting from the vantage point of her “youth,” “I suppose I won’t get out of here till she dies or I die.” The “she” being her mother, Edie Sr. a.k.a. Big Edie. But Little Edie got used to it (as much as one can get used to a thorn perpetually lodged in her side) over time, thanks to the example of Big Edie, content to remain reclusive in the Georgica Pond abyss of East Hampton. There in Grey Gardens. A moniker that would come to signify their own greying snatches more than just the mist from the ocean or the nondescript hue of the dunes. Or maybe she got used to it because Big Edie felt obliged to remind her that she was being supported, and there’s no “freedom” when you’re being bankrolled by someone else. Little Edie would counter, “I think you’re not free when you’re not being supported.” Big Edie shrugs, “It’s awful both ways.” Rather like the constant struggle between deciding what’s worse: going out and realizing you just want to go back home or staying home and feeling like the walls are closing in and you ought to go out.
In the case of both Edies, “interfacing” with the public is categorically ill-advised, particularly since their uppity upper class neighborhood is scandalized by their entire mode of living. One that includes the decay that serves as an obvious nod to poverty–by rich people’s standards. Indeed, it was what Big Edie called the “raids” on their home by the Suffolk County Health Department after articles appearing circa ’71 and ’72 in both the National Enquirer and New York Magazine covered the duo’s squalid living conditions that prompted renewed interest in the Beales. Eventually, Grey Gardens filmmakers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer were alerted to their existence by Lee Radziwill, the youngest sister of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, with Little Edie and Big Edie being both women’s cousin and aunt respectively. This connection, to be sure, was a large part of the reason why the Edies were branded as so “unseemly” by both the media and their neighbors–for their manner of living was not behavior befitting of the socialite/high society set.
Of course, when nothing matters and you’ve got no one to see and not much left to lose, your perception on what constitutes “squalor” tends to alter–providing a slippery slope toward madness. The sort that prompts one to dance around in short shorts and heels with an American flag as though she’s still a teenage girl. Which, obviously, is exactly how Little Edie still sees herself, a perception, it is maintained, that stems from never having been married or bearing children. Even admitting to her captive (a word laden with dual meaning here) documentarians, “You don’t see me as I see myself.” The great tragedy not just of Edie’s life, but also the lives of many others, being that they cannot see themselves as they really are. At the same time, this is an essential defense and coping mechanism for survival. Especially in the isolated setting of the Grey Gardens compound, where Little Edie’s sole source of companionship is her mother, with each woman feeding off the other’s psychosis in both a detrimental and self-affirming way. At least, from time to time, the now infamous gardener, Jerry, whom Little Edie refers to as the Marble Faun (a nod to her rich girl educatedness in making a Nathaniel Hawthorne allusion), makes an appearance to spice up the dynamic.
Her coquettish approach with Jerry is also manifest in her interactions with the film crew. Little Edie’s sudden resuscitation over the presence of all these cameramen interested in what she thought was her banal and ordinary daily existence speaks to the notion that people truly do come alive when they have the company of others. That is, before the inevitable treason is committed. For humans, as a rule, can’t help but betray their fellow man, most temptingly when it means securing a bit of grandeur for themselves. Accordingly, Grey Gardens was not redemptive for the Beales, so much as an immortalized confirmation of what everyone had long suspected: they were crazy old bats. Unwitting camp queens to be emulated by gay men. And all that craziness stemming from the moment Mrs. Beale’s husband, Phelan Beale, abandoned both women in 1931 and then managed to finagle a divorce by 1935 (informing Big Edie by telephone from Mexico). A trauma like that, naturally, sends one into self-preservation a.k.a. blackout mode à la Norma Desmond committing murder and thereafter pretending the journalists in her home to cover the story are nothing more than cameramen there to facilitate her big close-up directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
The Edies, obviously, both possess more than a touch of Desmond, as do we all in this period of quarantine. For the average person cannot handle being alone without going a bit loco. And the ones who claim they’re fine alone might be doing much worse than they believe, having no cognizance whatsoever of how far off the rails they’ve gotten, as evidenced by Big Edie remarking, “I lived alone at least thirty years. I didn’t mind. You get very independent when you live alone. You get to be a real individual.” The path we’re all taking at present, as the concept of “big society” grows ever-smaller in a quest to look after number one and keep our physical health about us as we sacrifice the mental in exchange. For, as it is said in Grey Gardens, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too in life.”
Yet Little Edie still tries, even if through the unhealthy method of self-deception and chicanery. Case in point, the headscarves worn by our faux ingenue throughout the film were not a statement on glamor, so much as a means to cover up her alopecia totalis. Which just goes to show that a daily application of self-delusion is extremely important, particularly when your quarantined life is being made into a documentary (a trend that could very well reemerge as streaming services run out of content). Like Big Edie said, “It’s very hard to live nowadays. Living is very difficult.” Why complicate it with reality when you’re living in a self-made one that springs, inescapably (pun intended), from an existence spent in seclusion?
