NEW YORK — Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, the reclusive mother-daughter team in the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” still intrigue the fashion world. And, thanks to filmmaker Albert Maysles, there will soon be more of them to watch.
Three decades after Maysles and his late brother, David, made what has become a cult classic film with the Beales, Jacqueline Kennedy’s cousins, he is putting together a “Grey Gardens” DVD scrapbook to be released by the end of the year.
Maysles said in a telephone interview that the film has inspired “Grey Gardens” parties at which people dress up like the characters and recite favorite lines such as, “C’mon in, we’re not ready,” or “They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday,” and “The hallmark of aristocracy is responsibility.”
Maysles, who during his 50-year career turned his lens on John F. Kennedy, Truman Capote, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Bill Blass, is stumped on why the film has such appeal to the fashion crowd. In April, the short film “Ghost of April” made it’s debut at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Having worked as a psychologist before getting into film, Maysles said while Freud examined the Oedipal complex at length, not as much attention has been paid to the combustible mother-daughter relationship. Analysis aside, it’s Little Edie’s outlandish outfits and mane-like headscarves that wow designers and stylists. About 15 designers, stylists and artists gathered last week for a “Grey Gardens” screening at the Dactyl Foundation, a SoHo art gallery.
Afterward, Vena Cava co-designer Sophie Buhai said, “Little Edie is the ultimate do-it-yourself fashion icon.”
David Covell, creative director of JDK Design NY, watched the film for the second time in two weeks. “‘Grey Gardens’ is a quintessential portrait of aristocracy run amok and the sublime mix of high and low culture, ideas that seem to endlessly inspire designers,” he said. “The two old dames are the kind of unique characters that seem lost to a bygone era of real eccentricity.”
In addition to unused footage, the release will have a ‘where are they now?’ quality. Jerry Torre, the handyman who befriended the Beales at their dilapidated estate, Grey Gardens, and is now a New York City cab driver, recently tracked down Maysles and invited him for a sentimental journey. The filmmaker obliged with camera in hand.
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Maysles happened upon the Beales in a roundabout way. The photographer Peter Beard steered his friend, Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister, to Maysles to make a film about her childhood in the Hamptons. While filming, Radziwill received a phone call saying that Grey Gardens was about to be condemned by the East Hampton board of health. She invited Maysles to tag along on a visit.
In addition to the DVD scrapbook, Maysles is finishing an HBO film about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park project, “The Gates,” with fellow filmmaker Antonio Ferrera. He is also working on “Handheld and From the Heart,” an autobiographical flick, as well as “In Transit,” a film about his interesting train encounters in six countries.
Looking back at “Grey Gardens,” Maysles said there is no telling whether Little Edie put much thought into her many costume changes. However, she did hint at exactitude years later. In Montreal for a screening of one of his films about Christo, Maysles met with Beale, who had moved there for a spell after her mother died. He said she told him, “I spent six hours dressing for this occasion.”