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20080827-in-all-their-glory-by-ag-harmonThere are times when an interpretation cannot match the thing itself, and others when the mere attempt will prove an embarrassment. No elegy, however triumphant, can equal the event it celebrates. To have fought on St. Crispin’s is greater than to sing of it, as even the bard would concede.

In 1976, Albert and David Maysles made one of the greatest documentaries in modern cinema, Grey Gardens. The story involved Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and first cousin, 80 year-old “Big Edith” and 56 year-old “Little Edith” Beale, whose overgrown, animal-infested home had been raided by the East Hampton police as a health hazard.

Part of the cinéma vérité movement, the Maysles befriended the women and were invited to film at Grey Gardens during the summer of that year. In ninety minutes, the picture captures the face of tragedy, and paradoxically, glory, in its modern form.

When the separated Edith Beale became ill at her Long Island home in 1952, Little Edie, after only six years of “freedom in New York City,” returned to take care of her. She never left again. Both women had been incredible beauties when young—as their scrapbooks and portraits testify—and jewels of the social register. The tragedy of a great fall is all the greater for the height of the plummet.

Little Edith is introduced on a glorious morning, her face peeking out from the neck of a sweater she’s tied like a cowl about her head. She wears pantyhose and some kind of cloth safety-pinned around her waist. “It’s the best kind of costume for the day,” she explains in her patrician accent, already betraying a tenuous hold on reality. Meanwhile, her mother suns herself on the cat-filled veranda, her sagging body barely covered in a makeshift bathing suit.

Somehow, over their twenty years together, the two women have drifted into an unimaginable borderland, a sanity of twilight and dawn. They spend their days philosophizing in the cadence of a bygone era, talking in complete sentences, both humorous and profound, of topics they display like beach glass: “You can’t get any freedom when you’re being supported”; “I think you can’t get any freedom unless you are”; “I’m extremely organized—I just can’t find it”; “You don’t see me as I see myself. But you’re very good—what you do see me as?”; “I adore animals, but cats and raccoons become boring after a time”; “I only care about three things: The Catholic Church, swimming, and dancing”; and “It’s hard to keep the line between the past and the present.”

Yes. Alas. It is.

Often, they pull a Bakelite radio out from beneath their squalid beds and listen to music; once, they tune in Norman Vincent Peale. The camera pans to Big Edie’s face, a ravage of age and confusion. Her portrait in the corner looks out at us, demanding respect for who she remains in spite of what we see. “Look in the mirror,” Peale’s voice calls. “Ask yourself: Who am I? Am I weak? Defeated? Inferior? No. I am a child of God.” The agony in the old woman’s visage, the flutter of her eyes as she recalls her dignity, is as poignant a thing as has ever been captured on film.

Big Edie was a singer, and her voice warbles out to match the records she made. Little Edie was a dancer, and her march to a VMI parade song, waving the American flag, is only matched in its exuberance by a late night scene in which, dressed as midnight, she waltzes about the foyer with a taut scarf between her hands. She might be Blanche Dubois on a lonely evening at Belle Rive.

Although at times she rages at the frustration of her life, Little Edie also concedes, even proudly claims, that she could not abandon her mother when she needed her; “I would’ve had to be a different person.” The hallmark of aristocracy is responsibility, she says, with a nobility that was already dying thirty-two years ago. And in a 1976 interview accompanying the DVD, she’s also amused at a rumored film deal, featuring Julie Christie as herself: “I don’t want anybody playing Edith Beale but Edith Beale.” The Maysles laugh in the background. This is why they are documentarians; nobody plays Edith better than Edith.

Nevertheless, time passed; the Beales have both died, and even David Maysles is gone. After their loss, a musical was made, and now, this very year, a film is coming out, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. But whatever the merits of the attempt, the doom of the project lies in the character of the Beales, originals in every sense.

So I entreat you to look at them instead, or at least first—at the women and not their image. Watch their frayed beauty and desperate hope, their mad raving at life’s betrayals and exhilarated salute to life’s gifts. Drew Barrymore cannot hold a candle to Edith Beale, even now, long after her death, when God’s balm has finally soothed the bruises of her mind, and God’s smile has finally valued the loyalty of her sacrifice. May heaven be her bed tonight.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: A.G. Harmon

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