Folie à deux in the Hamptons

The cult film "Grey Gardens" followed the descent of mother-daughter socialites into feral living. Can the new musical version re-create the magic?

By Cintra Wilson

Read more: Cintra Wilson, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features

Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson in a scene from "Grey Gardens."

March 10, 2006 | On his 2002 album, "Poses," Rufus Wainwright named a song for David and Albert Maysles' 1975 cult documentary, "Grey Gardens":

Trying to get my mansions green
After I've Grey Gardens seen

I think this line speaks to something universal in the film, which tapped into a strangely exhilarating fear that we all share. What befell the residents of Grey Gardens could happen to almost anyone: What would happen, the movie tacitly asks, if we let go of the rope, went with the flow and let entropy have its way with us?

The film will cause a shudder in anyone who has felt insufficiently vigilant in regard to fending off decay.

Some flirt with entropy more than others, but the Maysles' documentary certainly scared many viewers straight, inspiring them to tighten up and keep their "mansions green," both physically and mentally. I know I ran home sober, did the dishes, paid the bills and exorcised all the cobwebs I'd been choosing not to see in the corners. "Grey Gardens" showed that it might be terrifyingly easy to get caught in that undertow: Start with eccentricity, fall on a streak of hard luck, add a certain wishful, bohemian overpermissiveness, top it all off with a manor-born inability to work for money -- and voilà! Even members of the ruling class can be reduced to living like raccoons.

Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith -- Big Edie and Little Edie, as they were known -- were the deranged, black-sheep aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. They were sheltered, educated and, by all reports, very beautiful high-society debutantes, who in their later years became a powerful demonstration of the bumper-sticker maxim "If You Can't Be a Good Example, at Least Be a Horrible Warning."

When the Maysles brothers began shooting the Edies, they were virtually feral socialites, living like homeless squatters with numberless cats in their own East Hampton, N.Y., mansion. They had recently been saved from eviction by Jackie O. herself, who intervened when the city cracked down on their unsanitary living conditions. Jackie's rescue mission was not enough to halt the march of squalor, however -- the documentary captures the women two years later, back in a full-blown state of domestic ruin.

People had wildly divergent opinions about the film "Grey Gardens" when it was released. The largely gay, witty cocktail crowd was delighted by the sweetness, tragic humor and fey craziness of the Beales -- handsome women with style, manners and exhibitionist tendencies who happened to be sinking in a New England version of the Tennessee Williams tar pit. This proto-example of reality TV was voyeuristic, but somehow it also wasn't; you didn't pity the Beales, mainly because they did not pity themselves. "Grey Gardens" was a charming black hole you didn't mind spending a couple of hours in, but it did take you a few minutes of moral adjustment to fully enjoy it.

Then there were others who saw "Grey Gardens" and only felt sad, repulsed and dirty for watching it. For them, the spectacle of the Beales' colorful decay was akin to looking at images of freakishly disfigured people in old medical manuals. They saw nothing redeeming in it.

So turning "Grey Gardens" -- a plotless tightrope walk between compassion and schadenfreude -- into a musical that could appeal to a wider audience than the film's fans was a difficult task, the dramaturgical equivalent of arranging to take a bunch of tourists on a ski trip to the South Pole. But Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright, who wrote "Quills" and "I Am My Own Wife"; Michael Korie, who wrote the libretto for the opera "Harvey Milk"; and Michael Greif, who directed "Rent," boldly set out on the adventure.

And they did not exactly fail.

"Grey Gardens," the musical, which just opened at New York's Playwrights Horizons, is a riveting example of the inconsistency of genius, and the pitfalls that can happen when brilliant people outsmart themselves. A great deal of the production is breathtaking; some parts are perplexingly bad. It is perilously uneven, but so much about "Grey Gardens" is so great that one hopes the rough spots get ironed out so that the play can have the long, eccentric life it deserves.

Most problematic is the creators' superimposing of a plot on the Beales. Act 1 takes place in 1941, in the back story, while Little Edie and Big Edie were still rich and beautiful and not yet crazy. Little Edie -- "Body Beautiful Beale," as she was called in those days -- is a leggy, sun-kissed Hamptons debutante, on the verge of marrying JFK's brother Joe Kennedy.

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