Grey Gardens (1976) on Netflix
PG19761h 35mDocumentary
At Grey Gardens, a derelict East Hampton estate, Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale live with cats and raccoons. The two talk about their past.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.5/1017,106 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, share the Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton, New York, where they have lived for decades. The house was bought in 1923 by Big Edie and her husband Phelan Beale, and its name refers to the shade of the dunes, the concrete walls of the garden and the mist from the sea. By the early 1970s the two women rarely leave the house: fleas, cats and raccoons fill the rooms, water no longer runs and decay spreads. Health department inspections and newspaper stories followed, and with eviction and demolition threatened, Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill paid for repairs in 1972. Cameras then let mother and daughter describe their past in their own words.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Grey Gardens (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In the fall of 1971 and into 1972, after inspections the Beales called "raids" by the Suffolk County Health Department, their flea-infested, cat- and raccoon-filled, waterless house was exposed in the National Enquirer and New York Magazine. Facing eviction, they were saved when Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill paid to repair the house in summer 1972.
- Albert and David Maysles first went to Grey Gardens in 1972 with Lee Radziwill, who had suggested a documentary about her own East Hampton childhood. Her film was shelved and its footage lost, so the brothers returned in 1974 without her support to shoot Grey Gardens.
- The film's subjects, Edith "Big Edie" Beale (1895-1977) and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Beale (1917-2002), were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
- Jerry Torre, the teenage handyman Little Edie nicknamed "The Marble Faun," was sought by the filmmakers for years and found by chance in 2005 driving a New York City taxicab. A 2011 documentary, The Marble Faun of Grey Gardens, showed he was by then a sculptor at the Art Students League of New York.
- When Grey Gardens was released, some circles felt Albert and David Maysles were exploiting the Beales, who seemed to be mentally ill; Maysles replied that the women were asserting themselves and "were always in control."
- Grey Gardens was adapted into a Broadway musical; Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson each won Tony Awards for their performances, and it was the first musical on Broadway ever adapted from a documentary.
