Last night, Eric brought home Grey Gardens. Not the documentary, but the new HBO movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. I’ve seen the documentary about the Beale’s, part of the Bouvier family. Well, I’ve seen about an hour of it. It was too much for me. I couldn’t make it through. To this day, it is hard for me to put into words what I saw in that film. The mansion was a horror! It made the biggest impression on me. It is hard to describe their living situation to someone who hasn’t seen it. It pains me to think of what it must be like to live with a hoarder, but these ladies were not hoarders. They were just too broke to clean up!
The director of the new movie chose to show the lives of the ladies in flashback. It helped me see where they came from and gave me insight into how they could have gotten here. I really appreciated having the history. You see, before I quickly wrote the two women off as nut jobs. Now, I had a clear picture of the pain these women were in and how that pain led to the destruction all around them.
Drew Barrymore was amazing. As was her makeup man! Did you know on a movie set, apart from the people credited in the beginning of a movie, the makeup head is the highest paid person? Sound man is next, just an fyi. They turned gorgeous, young Drew into a woman in her 60’s who was bald and had a little paunch. They even made up her arms so that when the actress wore the sleeveless creations little Edie fashioned for herself; you saw the hanging skin and uneven complexion. Very impressive.
On that same note, Jessica Lange also a beautiful woman has impressed me in the past by not getting any (or little) work done. Not anymore. I don’t understand a woman thinking that youth is represented by a tightly pulled eye and cheek area. There are levels on the plain of a face, people! You aren’t meant to have a flat face! You look weird! Especially, when they had to put makeup on you to look your age! Ridiculous!
Everyone, including the Emmy committee, can tell you about the amazing acting in this film. I am choosing to talk about the set. In both the documentary and the new film, the mansion these two women occupied was a living, breathing character. It began its journey as a loved show place, with acres of beach front property and a gorgeous garden. It was situated in the affluent community of East Hampton/ Suffolk County, with neighbors like Nora Ephron! To be Nora and to glance out your window and see that dilapidated ghost house and not get outraged and want to tear it down, is amazing. It fell into disrepair for over 20 years before someone tried to get them out and the home condemned. Rumor has it that the whistle blower was Eddie’s own son. The trust was gone and he wanted them out and moved to Florida. Edith wouldn’t sell. After all of the hubbub with Jackie Kennedy and her public slap on the wrist for letting her family fall into ruin like that, he would reluctantly pay all of the back property taxes on the place.
20 years of filth and trash and disrepair. The ladies lived off of $150-$300 dollars a month. There were large stretches of time when there was no heat or running water. The roof had caved in, the garden had overgrown the home and the windows were cracked. But inside was the worst, there was peeling wallpaper, rotting floor boards, mold from water damage. The house cried out in pain everywhere you looked. Seeing it in the documentary, I had to turn it off.
Raccoons were living in the attic. Little Edie would go up there and lay out bags of bread. Most of the time the mother and daughter lived in one room…they cooked there, they slept there, they spent all of their time there. Did they ever take out the trash? It cost money, money they didn’t have, to take the trash away. 1000 bags of trash would be removed when Jackie paid to get the place up to code.
On screen you can even smell the mansion. Feral cats were everywhere. There were no liter boxes. The new owners say, when it rains you can still smell cat urine. There were over 50 cat carcasses left in the house when they bought it. The house was bought AS IS, for $220,000 in the 80’s, about two years after Edith Beale died. Little Edie would dance out of the house singing, “It only needs a coat of paint.” Amazingly, they didn’t tear it down; it was the one stipulation in the contract to buy the house. And the new owners didn’t want to tear it down. They could see the original bones and the craftsmanship under the dirt and grime and filth. They restored the home to its previous splendor. It is open for charity events and weddings. Crazy, huh?
