The Curious Case of Grey Gardens (with Watch What Crappens)

Transcript

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Speaker 11 Hello, dear listeners, and welcome to our second episode of Out of Frame.

Speaker 11 This is a series where we will be exploring some of the more obscure corners of Hollywood and filmmaking and discussing a little more of the off-camera lives of our favorite on-screen subjects.

Speaker 11 And today, we're talking about big and little Edie Beale and the making of one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Gray Gardens.

Speaker 11 And we are joined by probably the two most perfect guests for this episode because they are reality TV and pop culture experts.

Speaker 11 And as we'll discuss, I think The Real Housewives owes an awful lot to the Beals.

Speaker 11 So welcome, Ben Mandelker and Ronnie Carom from Watch What Crappens.

Speaker 10 Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 10 Hey, thanks so much for having us. What an honor.

Speaker 11 Oh my God. Are you kidding me? I am so I am obsessed.
I'm obsessed with your show. There are entire franchises of The Real Housewives that I watch exclusively because you recap them.

Speaker 11 So Bravo owes you a lot of money.

Speaker 10 Oh, I love that.

Speaker 11 Thank you. And my husband and I also would like you to know that the only reason we watched House of the Dragon was for Winter is Krappening.

Speaker 10 Wow. Oh, God.
Oh, my God. Thank you.
I love House of the Dragon, though. I'm one of the only ones I think who genuinely loves that show.
Are you going to watch the new one?

Speaker 10 What is it called? The new Game of Thrones thing coming in. Is that supposed to be a wacky thing at all? A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Speaker 11 Thank you.

Speaker 10 I would have been here 20 minutes going, you know, the one, there's a guy with the sword.

Speaker 11 Yes, I will watch it, but only as long as you you are covering it on what is happening

Speaker 10 i think it's like a game of thrones sitcom or something it's short form and wacky

Speaker 10 a multicam yeah

Speaker 10 i guess game of thrones but it's fine wow coming next on what went wrong we decided to do a game of thrones sitcom mindy cohen is the star the most popular format right now is those little 60 second microdramas have you guys heard about these no called shorties no like the folders like was like the taste for choice couple in the in the 90s i I guess.

Speaker 10 Yeah, now they're called like microdramas.

Speaker 10 They're 60-second, or they're basically for reels form, you know what I mean, or TikTok or whatever, but they're like made by studios, these like terrible melodramatic studios for that format.

Speaker 10 And the Writers Guild has sent emails about: if you're working on these, you still have protections, blah, blah, blah, because they're so popular, especially for folks, you know, out of work.

Speaker 12 Oh, I, how, the algorithm has completely failed me. I want to be served stupid 60-second melodrama.

Speaker 10 Why are you showing me ads for like can openers?

Speaker 12 I'm like, please, algorithm, this is Ben speaking. Give me the melodrama.

Speaker 10 You're obsessed with can openers anyway. You'll get melodramas about can openers now.
I would love that. Well, maybe I'll become a writer after all because I can take 60 seconds.

Speaker 10 Got to fit a lot into that 60 seconds. A lot of turns.
We can do it.

Speaker 10 All right.

Speaker 11 Well, as I said at the top, we are talking about Gray Gardens today, the 1975 documentary directed by the Mazels brothers and a couple other people who we're going to talk about as well.

Speaker 11 And as always, the IMDb log line is, meet a mother and daughter, high society dropouts, reclusive cousins of Jackie O, managing to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle echo of the American Camelot.

Speaker 11 Tell me, Ben and Ronnie, had you seen this before? What was your experience upon re-watching it? And just what's your relationship with Grey Gardens in general?

Speaker 10 Well, I found this in gay college, you know, where I was like young and some older gays were like, oh, here's gay things you need to watch in order to be a proper gay. And this was one of them.
And

Speaker 10 it was right after Mommy Dearest, which I found super

Speaker 10 dark, obviously, because I watched it in a room with a bunch of gay guys who were cracking up while this little girl is being abused. And I was like, I don't know if I'm

Speaker 10 fit for gay college, you you know?

Speaker 11 That was me and my husband watching Mommy Dears and I'm just laughing. And David's like, this is not a comedy.

Speaker 10 I think I was like 18 or 19. And I thought, I don't know that I'm cut out for gay college.
But then this one was next on the roster.

Speaker 10 And this I was down with, you know, and I've, I, you know, resonated. It resonated with me so young, I felt like little Edie.
And now, of course, I'm becoming like a mixture of both.

Speaker 10 But I'm definitely at the time where I'm like, my house is cleaner, but am I really that far from that lady? Not really.

Speaker 10 It's like still walking around with shirts on my head, blaming my mother for everything. So I'm on my way.
I love it. I just love it.
I've seen it so many times and watching it again for this was,

Speaker 10 it was beautiful. And I was laughing all over again.
There's so many things you even forget.

Speaker 12 I, I had never seen it all the way through, actually. Since we recap the Real House I was of New York and Sonia Morgan, like the comparison to Great Gardens comes up a lot.

Speaker 12 So I knew sort of the broad strokes. And I was like in my mind, I was like, okay, is this like, like, what's her name? Mrs.
Havisham from Great Expectations or something.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 I was on the most that scene of it was I was on a plane a few years ago and I was watching documentary now where Fred Armiston and

Speaker 12 what's his face?

Speaker 12 Bill Hater. Bill Hater did like a parody of Great Gardens and it was so funny.
And then the plane also had Great Gardens. I was like, oh, let me watch some Great Gardens.
And so I started watching it.

Speaker 12 And then I think we landed. So I never finished it.
But this is my first time sitting and watching the whole thing. And I was like, Wow.

Speaker 12 And then afterwards, I went up to my bedroom and like I hadn't made the bed that day. And there was like laundry out.

Speaker 12 And I was like, Everything that looked dirty in my apartment, I was like, oh my God, I have to clean this up. Otherwise, I'm becoming both EDs right now.

Speaker 10 I had the opposite reaction. I was like, I don't need to clean anything.
They're happy. Yeah, they were pretty happy.

Speaker 10 I mean, you can smell their house just sitting on the couch and they seem just happy as clams.

Speaker 11 That's true. Yeah, they're something.
Totally.

Speaker 11 Chris, what about you?

Speaker 10 I didn't go to gay college, but I

Speaker 10 actually was exposed to a lot of the same movies you were talking about.

Speaker 10 Like, and then, especially in undergrad, and then like Pink Flamingos was another one, for example, that I feel like was a big one. Like, kind of transgressive, like alternative cinema.

Speaker 10 And then I saw Grey Gardens and it didn't make a huge impression on me at the time. I thought it was like a curiosity.

Speaker 10 But then every time I've watched it, it feels like such an important American documentary in so many ways.

Speaker 10 and then now i watch it and i'm a parent and i have aging parents although they're knock on wood doing great and i

Speaker 10 it

Speaker 10 you know causes a little anxiety in me when i watch it even though on the one hand i'm envious uh of how close and obviously supportive in some ways of one another little etie and big eatie are

Speaker 10 But I do always worry, you know, I think all parents do. Am I holding my child back in some way? Am I helping them achieve their potential? Am I pushing them too far? And there are a lot of

Speaker 10 interesting tensions that this movie explores on that front.

Speaker 10 But one thing I really noticed every time I watch this is how much does Kristen Wigg owe to Little Edie?

Speaker 10 I feel like every character she has done over the last 20 years is just Little Edie in her American flag outfit, like prancing around. Yo, what made us sing? Like this whole time.

Speaker 10 But I just, yeah, I think

Speaker 10 it's a really interesting,

Speaker 10 you know,

Speaker 10 capture of opulence and decay. And there's something so fascinating and tragic about that.
And it's a weird foil to the Kennedy family as well.

Speaker 10 And then, of course, and the really thing I noticed was. with seeing the old photos of Little Edie.
My sister says she looks like Erica Christensen from the 90s and early 2000s, like swim fan.

Speaker 10 I think she looks like Adele Exarchopoulos, the french actress from blue is the warmest color i'm not sure if you guys are familiar with her um but when little but she was so

Speaker 10 the other reason this is so tragic is like both these women were like very talented and very beautiful and they had access to wealth obviously and yet here they are feeding raccoons in the attic

Speaker 10 those are their friends raccoons are cute

Speaker 10 i know and i just love that it's like well gotta feed the raccoons you know they didn't seem rabid gotta dump your wonder bread in the attic for the raccoons to come out Who's stealing my books?

Speaker 10 It's like, probably the raccoons. The raccoons ate your books.

Speaker 12 I love the way that little Edie would talk because a lot of times you see these older movies or you see a musical and you're like, no one really talks like that except in musicals.

Speaker 12 But she would talk that way. She's like, you know, Eugene, he was a very decent man.
He was a decent, decent man.

Speaker 12 And like, it's like, oh, I went with him. Oh, you know, food's going up.

Speaker 12 Like, all these, all these sort of expressions that like you kind of just think are kind of like heightened musical theater dialogue.

Speaker 10 is actually maybe it was the way people talked there's nothing worse than a staunch woman yeah staunch woman staunch character

Speaker 10 you don't know what you're gonna get i was so good i mean i just i just kept watching her thinking this is brilliant acting i mean both of them you see all the emotions go over their face yeah over every you see so many emotions cross their faces over every little thing i thought this is great acting and that it wasn't acting is yeah you know beautiful when they're listening to that like radio Bible sermon and Big Eddie starts, you know, crying because it's so on the nose.

Speaker 12 Like talk about a harbinger for reality TV because I know that an American family, I just looked it up, came out, I think in 1973.

Speaker 12 And that's often considered the first, like the first building block of reality TV. But just seeing the way

Speaker 12 that like you have these two women who are, we're obviously documenting two women, but the way they're all still kind of like playing to the camera the entire time.

Speaker 11 Yes, that's the thing to me.

Speaker 12 And the way they're kind of like pleading their case to the audience and to the, and to the people behind the camera and like hamming it up.

Speaker 12 Like little Edie, this has got to have been the most exciting thing that had happened to her in 20 years.

Speaker 12 I mean, the way she's prancing around and dancing with that American flag and doing all her singing and being sortatious with Jerry. And like you kind of feel like she's like, this is my moment.

Speaker 10 This is when everyone's going to see who I am.

Speaker 10 And you see, it's like the housewives.

Speaker 10 We always say with housewives, the first season is their shy season. The second season, the bitch flower blooms, you know, which is where they just start being cracked.

Speaker 10 They start getting cracked by all, because

Speaker 10 there's so many setups and stuff like that. And everybody knows, you know, they don't really go to lunch with the camera crew every day and stuff like that.

Speaker 10 So, you know, it's kind of set up, but the reality comes in when it really starts to crack their psyches and they start going crazy.

Speaker 10 And you really see that happen to little Edie in this, where she's holding herself up to this, you know, entertain as this entertaining showgirl type thing.

Speaker 10 And by the end, she's like, I'm out of here. I'm out of here.
In five minutes, I can't take anymore. You know, she's starting to spend another winter in the country.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 Another winter. I got to get away from the ice box.
This is it for me and Grey Gardens.

Speaker 11 That's a very astute observation because this sort of is the second season, which we're going to learn about when we talk about this a little bit.

Speaker 11 This was not the first time that the cameras visited the Beatles.

Speaker 11 It's a really, really interesting story. I'm so excited to get into this.

Speaker 11 I have seen Grey Gardens so many times. And as with much of my sort of cinematic upbringing, I was introduced to this by my mother.

Speaker 11 So I got the experience of watching Grey Gardens multiple times with my own mother and sitting on the couch wondering, oh no, is this where I'm headed as well?

Speaker 11 She also showed me Mommy Dearest.

Speaker 11 And I will say this is the first time I've watched this since having my own daughter eight months ago. And, you know, I always thought that this was so crazy and weird.

Speaker 11 And like, how did they get here? And, you know, how is this possible? And they're so strange and so funny.

Speaker 11 And this time I was watching, and I was like, bah, if I wind up on a twin bed next to my daughter with a little canisterno making cat food, is that really so bad? She's cute.

Speaker 10 Like,

Speaker 11 I'm like, I get it.

Speaker 10 I definitely had that same feeling of watching it at this point in my life.

Speaker 10 I think the only difference is I didn't feel like, how did they get here? To me, it's like very clear how they got there.

Speaker 11 And it seems like a very simple path it seems like i'm doomed i really i really did think wow this could very easily be me very soon and am i okay with that and i kind of was i mean hand me a baton you know i think you're gonna be okay based on sort of the downward trajectory of the beals so let's get into it we're gonna talk about how this movie was basically a total accident how the Beals, as we've already discussed, set the stage for the reality TV franchises that we love so much, and why its success is not just due to the two women in front of the camera, but also two women behind it, which I did not know about at all until we started researching this.

Speaker 11 By the way, Ben, I think you're spot on that the big difference to me about this documentary is how much they are interacting with the cameramen. And we're going to talk about that quite a bit.

Speaker 11 But that reads as confessional to me.

Speaker 11 That reads as like the awareness that we see now of reality TV stars that they are on a reality TV show, which I think has become kind of like a cornerstone of the genre.

Speaker 11 All right, so let's talk about the actual house itself.

Speaker 11 In 1895, there was a newspaper heiress named Margaret Bagg Phillips, what a name, who commissioned a famous architect to build her dream home in East Hampton for herself and her husband.

Speaker 11 But her husband just pretty much immediately died. And he left his entire estate to his wife, which made his brother really angry.

Speaker 11 His brother contested the will, claimed that Margaret had pressured her husband into making her the sole beneficiary, and actually said that she'd cremated him before they could do an autopsy so that his brain couldn't be searched for, quote, evidences of insanity, which were surely there.

Speaker 10 Yes. Wow.
God, those were the times, weren't they? Yes.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 11 Good time to be a lady.

Speaker 11 But Margaret won, actually, and she got to build her dream house, which was a 6,652 square foot, 28-room mansion.

Speaker 11 So I don't know if you really get a sense of how big big Gray Gardens is from watching this. It's enormous.

Speaker 12 28-room. Yeah, because you really only see like three rooms.

Speaker 10 The foyer, the staircase, your attic, the bedroom.

Speaker 12 There's that one room towards the end, and then there's the one moment kind of in the kitchen area, but you do not get a sense that there's that there's like, I don't know, like 15 more rooms.

Speaker 10 Which is also very real housewives.

Speaker 10 You know, you always see these huge houses, and then you see the living room, the kitchen, and occasionally the bedroom when they have to pack or something, and everything else is left off limits.

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Speaker 11 So, this woman sold it to a couple who lived there for about a decade. They spent a ton of money on landscaping.

Speaker 11 They import concrete garden walls from Spain, beautiful pale flowers, and they're the ones who give it the name Grey Gardens. And it's because of the color of the gardens themselves.

Speaker 11 Not that you can tell from the state of them by the time we get the documentary.

Speaker 11 Big Edie, or Edith Ewing Bouvier, was born in New York the same year that the design for Grey Gardens was commissioned, 1895. Her father was a super wealthy lawyer.

Speaker 11 She had two older brothers, and she was the baby of the family until she was 11 when her mother gave birth to twin girls. And that ruined everything for Edie.
She was not happy about the babies.

Speaker 11 So she ends up kind of working overtime for her parents' attention, and she particularly thrives musically.

Speaker 11 She loved playing the piano, desperately wanted to be an opera singer, and also she was absolutely stunning, which we see, you know, a little bit of in the documentary.

Speaker 11 And in 1914, when she was 18 or 19, her family bought a different summer house in East Hampton. Also, couldn't stop thinking about summer house when watching Grey Gardens this time.

Speaker 10 These are very close. Put them in that house.
They're always looking for a new house. That's where

Speaker 12 they should have a Grey Gardens party on Summer House. They're always doing themes like aliens and like cowboys.
Let's do Grey Gardens party. It's appropriate.

Speaker 11 Absolutely. Yeah, they need that house.

Speaker 10 Put Lindsay and her kid in one of the rooms, you know, and just let her go. Just let her go for 20 years.

Speaker 11 That's where she's going for sure. So this this is where Big Edie really became the belle of the ball.

Speaker 11 She was known around the Hamptons as a great beauty and a musical talent, but this freedom was pretty short-lived because a year and a half later, she's already engaged to Phelan Beale.

Speaker 11 And he's about 14 years older than she was. He was a lawyer, again, who would go on to work for her father.
They got married when Edie was 21, reportedly in front of thousands of guests.

Speaker 11 And the wedding was perfect. Except for one thing.
She had arranged for a huge choir and a soprano solo, and she was pissed that she didn't get to sing it herself. Not the star of her own wedding.

Speaker 12 How would she not be able to sing at her own wedding?

Speaker 10 I don't blame her.

Speaker 10 If I set up a whole wedding to sing and you hire some other singer, you're out of there. I'm divorcing you right there.
I'm leaving you right there, annulled. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, I think her family probably was like, shh, no, no, no.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Sit down.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 So she starts popping out kids right away, beginning with Lil Edie in 1917. And then she has two boys in 1920 and 1922, but who cares about them? So Little Edie, a lot like her mom.

Speaker 11 First of all, she is absolutely stunning, maybe even more so than Big Edie.

Speaker 12 When they showed those photos of her like walking in a fashion show, I mean, she's really like gorgeous.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Yeah, I think it's difficult to express

Speaker 10 how

Speaker 10 just beautiful.

Speaker 10 Little Edie was and Big Edie, but more notable with Little Edie because it does make the fact that she never found a life life partner outside of her mom, you know, kind of all the more intriguing.

Speaker 10 Yeah, well, she rejected them, right? She did reject them, wasn't she? Saying she loves them. Yeah, so I know she rejected at least one person.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 11 So we'll definitely talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 10 Paul Getty, according to her mom. Jay Paul Getty.

Speaker 11 Yeah, there's a couple of major suitors.

Speaker 11 Also, according to one pretty creepy family story, she lost her bathing suit while diving at the pool and from then on became known as the body or body beautiful beal. Wow.

Speaker 11 As one does after accidentally getting naked in front of your entire family, I guess.

Speaker 10 The body.

Speaker 10 If it wasn't her family, it'd be a totally fine nickname.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that it's her family. It's kind of weird.

Speaker 11 It's weird all around. So, like her mother, she's very theatrical.
She loved to dance.

Speaker 11 And her mother was very supportive of this, but her dad, according to New York Magazine, quote, violently opposed his daughter's being on public display in any way.

Speaker 11 So when she was 11 years old, she suffered from bronchitis and asthma, and her mom decided to keep her home for a year or two.

Speaker 11 And this is interesting because it's like, yes, she was sick, but also then her mom would be like, time to go to Paris and just take her off to Paris. So I don't think she was that sick.

Speaker 11 I think they really loved spending time together even from this early an age.

Speaker 11 And Lil Edie kept a diary during this time. So to give you a sense of how close she and her mother were, even this early on, here's a little excerpt.
And I will do my best, Lil Edie.

Speaker 11 I apologize for my mid-Atlantic accent. Most children think that mother love is a thing taken for granted.
It isn't. It's love, all right, but a different kind of love.

Speaker 11 I have two great loves in my life. First, the love for my mother, which will always go on, never forgotten or forsaken.

Speaker 11 Second, my burning love for a boy, which is no crush, but as true, steady love, as much as my ML parentheses, mother love.

Speaker 10 Wow, that's really good. You did a great job of getting that accent.

Speaker 12 Because we have, can we talk about her accent for a second? Yes. Which is like when you first hear her, it almost sounds like she's doing a weird quasi-British accent.

Speaker 12 But if there's like, it's New York-y, but then there's like this weird kind of like flourishes and and like it goes in strange directions that you don't expect.

Speaker 10 Well, it's the 50s. It's like you were saying earlier, how it sounds like a movie from the 50s, a melodrama from the 50s.
It's that that kind of voice, you know? I think she sounds so much like JFK.

Speaker 10 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 10 There's almost when I listen to his speeches and think not of what your country can do for you, but what you like it really the way they draw those vowels out that it just really reminded me of like the kennedy accent that i have in my mind well if you listen to jackie oh and her sister lee radzowel who will appear quite a few times in this episode um i'm sure a last name that you two recognize um

Speaker 11 they sound just like this too. They just, they, the things they're saying are less crazy, so it doesn't sound as strange.

Speaker 11 But this is like, I don't know, my, my grandma kind of sounded like this. My, my New England grandma, a little bit.
There's like the vestiges of that sort of 1950s, 1960s mid-Atlantic accent.

Speaker 11 I like it. I, there's something very charming about it.
And it's weird. It almost feels put on, but they really talked like this.

Speaker 11 So one question is, do we think she really loved her mother this much? Or was she scared that Big Edie might read her diary someday?

Speaker 12 I think she loves her mother.

Speaker 10 I don't know.

Speaker 10 I think so, too.

Speaker 12 There used to be this character on SNL that

Speaker 12 I'm forgetting the name of the actress, but like the whole character was this like 11-year-old girl who just like loved her mom and thought her mom was the coolest.

Speaker 12 And she'd be like telling all her friends all the time, like, guess who I'm going to hang out with afterwards?

Speaker 10 My mom. Yeah.

Speaker 10 So cool. See that dream in the corner? That's my mom.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 It was

Speaker 10 Asim.

Speaker 10 Nassim Pedrad, I think. Nassim Pedrad.

Speaker 10 She was great.

Speaker 11 I loved her.

Speaker 10 Yeah. She was really good.

Speaker 11 So these diary entries are really interesting.

Speaker 11 She spent a lot of time wrestling with who she wants to be, whether it's a wife and a mother, which obviously is what's expected of her by society, or if she wants to be a star.

Speaker 11 And obviously we know she wants to be a star. And around this time, the Beals lived in a very fancy Park Avenue apartment with servants.

Speaker 10 who took care of everything for them.

Speaker 11 So they're not particularly used to keeping a house by themselves. And in 1923, they bought Gray Gardens.

Speaker 11 By the late 20s, little Edie spent almost every weekend there, probably because her parents' relationship was an absolute disaster. Now, some sources claim that Big Edie cheated.

Speaker 11 Others claim Phelan cheated. Doesn't really matter.
They were just a terrible match from the beginning. She really wanted to perform and sing and hang out with artists.

Speaker 11 And like, she's very colorful and big.

Speaker 11 And he's just kind of a stick in the mud. He's like, can you please iron my tuxedo? Like and sit back down in the corner.
He really did not, I don't think he liked her that much.

Speaker 11 And by the mid-1930s, they were separated and they were running out of money. They survived the stock market crash in 1929, but they were nowhere near as rich as they used to be.

Speaker 11 But as many a bravo star has done, they kept spending in order to keep up appearances.

Speaker 11 So Phelan actually asked Big Edie not to tell Little Edie about their financial situation because he felt it would, quote, rob all her joy.

Speaker 11 So Little Edie had no clue that they were running out of cash.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 12 And Big Edie's like, wait, Little Edie had no clue about something?

Speaker 10 It's crazy.

Speaker 11 Listen, she might be more aware than we give her credit for.

Speaker 10 And Big Edie does a great job.

Speaker 11 She kept a full household of staff. She sent Little Edie to a fancy prep school.
One of the reasons that Big Edie was able to do this is because she was still being supported by her father.

Speaker 11 And just like her husband, her father was prioritizing keeping up appearances.

Speaker 11 It turns out that he was bankrolling really extravagant summers for his 10 grandchildren by selling like all of his stock and putting the money in annuities, which I don't understand finances, but apparently this means that he was getting a high return while he was alive.

Speaker 11 But as soon as he died, it was not going to be worth anything. So he was sacrificing the future for the present and not telling anybody that he was doing that.

Speaker 10 Very bravo.

Speaker 12 Very bravo coded, I'd like to ask.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 11 So one of those grandchildren enjoying these lavish summers was Little Edie. Another was Jacqueline Bouvier, who would, of course, become who?

Speaker 12 Jackie O, Jackie Kennedy first, actually.

Speaker 11 That's right. Jackie Kennedy and then Jackie O'Nassus.

Speaker 11 So it seems to me like they are constantly being pushed to keep up appearances by the men. in their life.

Speaker 11 And this was kind of maybe the first time that I sort of understood that while watching this documentary is that this was literally their job. I don't know

Speaker 11 coming from sort of the world of Bravo in terms of like how much you are required to kind of keep up with the Joneses, like what do you all make of this in terms of them kind of being forced into this level of lifestyle, even though they cannot afford it?

Speaker 10 Well, I mean, were they forced into it or did they just, that was just what it was? I mean,

Speaker 10 I was just trying to hang on to that, hang on to that cash and play it out, you know?

Speaker 10 I mean, we see it happen all the time still today with everything going up and down and people just clinging on we just saw somebody get arrested for their fraud you know trying to defraud insurance companies doing the exact same thing that they were doing so i don't know i think once you live like that you don't know how to live any other way you know like to them living poor or living how they ended up living is beyond their comprehension i don't even think they would have understood that none of their peers and 10 grandchildren all living like that too i don't think there was any understanding that there was anything else you know yeah there was a guy in the hamptons about a year ago a year and a half ago who died by suicide because he was this, he was like a financier or he was something with finance and he went, he was broke.

Speaker 12 And so he became more and more desperate, but he was hiding it. And his wife was a socialite and an influencer.
And it was a whole thing. And everything came crumbling down.
And he killed himself.

Speaker 12 And then,

Speaker 12 and then she fell out of society. It was like a whole giant article in the New York Times that was riveting.
But like, this is like, this is.

Speaker 12 what happens. I mean, this is, it just time and time again in history.

Speaker 10 Yeah. It's just wild because it's like the whole premise of arrested development is this

Speaker 10 setup. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 But what's wild is like, had they let go of the need to meet these wild expectations, they would have been fine.

Speaker 11 Like, you know, as we'll get to what their financial situation was, it was completely survivable had they not tried to maintain this kind of lifestyle.

Speaker 10 So well, they would have been fine. They would have been fine monetarily, but they wouldn't have been fine in their standing in their community, in their family.
They would have been outcast.

Speaker 10 That's probably the most terrifying thing to them. That's true.
Yeah, that line they have, the hallmark of aristocracy is responsibility.

Speaker 10 And like, what's the responsibility to maintain, you know, where they are right now, the status quo.

Speaker 11 And instead, they go so far in the other direction. So during this time, Little Edie, who was now...
an adult had made at least three attempts to start her own life outside of Grey Gardens.

Speaker 11 But interesting in her diaries, she always refers to these as running away from home.

Speaker 11 And she gets dragged back by her father pretty much every time. Now, Chris, you mentioned this.
She dated quite the run of suitors, including Howard Hughes,

Speaker 11 Joe Kennedy Jr., which is why she insisted that she would have been first lady had he not gone down in that plane crash.

Speaker 11 And Jay Paul Getty. The last two of those, she most likely did have proposals from.
We can't for sure confirm that, but people seem to think it's true.

Speaker 12 So funny of that time when you would just like, you would have, you'd be pretty and you'd be a debutante. You'd be like, come out into the world and a rich guy would come up and be like,

Speaker 12 I'll choose that one.

Speaker 10 I propose.

Speaker 10 I'll take this one.

Speaker 11 And then she starts talking.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Yeah.
Well, it's like, it's what's interesting is that Joe was supposed to be the one who was going to be president and like who had been groomed by Joe Sr.

Speaker 11 and then John was kind of the fuck up.

Speaker 10 Well, and also like he wasn't in good health growing up. He was a little scrawny.
Right. And then he becomes this unexpected war hero.

Speaker 10 And so Joe signs up for the most dangerous possible mission, you know, basically a suicide mission, bombing mission in the Air Force, dies. And then Jackie O, weirdly, her cousin becomes first lady.

Speaker 10 Like that's, it's such an odd sliding doors moment there.

Speaker 11 It really is. And I think that stuck with Edie forever.
I think she was very jealous of Jackie and also Lee.

Speaker 10 I'm jealous of Jackie. I don't even know her.
And could you imagine? Like, that's, that's your cousin, Edie. I don't know if I'm jealous of Jackie.

Speaker 11 It looked like she had a horrible time with JFK and everything she was dealing with there. I am jealous of Lee Radziwell.
She was so gorgeous. Her clothes were fabulous.
I think she had a better time.

Speaker 10 Well, yeah, I mean, I think of better times, but growing up, just all I ever saw of Jackie was just, you know, glamour and gorgeous pictures and like keep the tears inside. Yes.

Speaker 10 You know, until you're at home. You know?

Speaker 11 Yeah. She always looked great.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, the relationships never lasted for whatever reason. I think a lot of the time Edie was dumping them.

Speaker 11 Um, and she had a habit of ripping their faces out of their photographs together after the relationships had ended. Yeah, to go.

Speaker 10 As one tough, yeah, yeah, good for her.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Love her more every minute of this.
She loves ripping things.

Speaker 11 Now, sometime in her 20s, her hair also started to fall out, but she got creative about concealing it. But eventually she climbed a tree at Gray Gardens and lit what was left of her hair on fire.

Speaker 10 Well, you know, yoikes.

Speaker 12 Truly going out in a blaze of glory.

Speaker 10 Yes. Was Was this just like hormonal alopecia?

Speaker 11 They believe that it's related to stress.

Speaker 11 Kind of unexplained, but it seems like maybe an autoimmune condition related to stress.

Speaker 11 So meanwhile, Big Edie was also having a really rough time. Her mother, who had been her closest ally, died in 1940.

Speaker 11 A couple of years later, which is mentioned in the documentary, Phelan did divorce her by telegram from Mexico and married another woman. That's one of my funny.

Speaker 10 I don't recognize Mexican divorce.

Speaker 10 Yeah, sure. It just doesn't recognize that.

Speaker 10 It doesn't count.

Speaker 11 No, no, we had the happiest marriage.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Sam. Fake Mexican divorce.

Speaker 10 Fake Mexican divorce. Nobody recognizes that.
Nobody recognizes it. It doesn't matter.
The three most important things to me, the Catholic Church. What was her other things?

Speaker 11 I only cared about three things, the Catholic Church, swimming, and dancing. And I had to give them up.

Speaker 10 Swimming and dancing. You had to give up the Catholic Church as well.

Speaker 10 That was so good. Yeah.

Speaker 11 The fake Mexican divorce is one of my favorite moments in that. It was real.
It was very real.

Speaker 11 And she came away from the divorce with some child support, but this is really interesting. No alimony.
That's the one thing that makes me wonder if she was doing a little something on the side.

Speaker 11 Because to walk away from a marriage with no alimony at that time, I think may be somewhat unusual.

Speaker 10 I don't know.

Speaker 11 But she got gray gardens. And that's kind of all she got in the divorce.

Speaker 11 So with no money from her husband to maintain it, you have to assume that she was just relying on her father, which as far as she knows, her father is still very, very wealthy.

Speaker 11 So she's probably like, it's fine. Except in 1948, her father also passed away.
And Big Edie and her siblings were mighty surprised to discover that he had way less than they thought.

Speaker 11 And beyond that, he had a habit of rewriting his will when his kids pissed him off. And Big Edie had pissed him off just a couple years earlier.

Speaker 11 She did this by showing up late to her own son's wedding and swanning up to sit in the front of the church. And he did not like that.

Speaker 11 So he left her $65,000 in a trust controlled by her own sons, not even controlled by her. That would be around $870-ish thousand dollars today, which sounds like a lot.

Speaker 11 Except when you think about what it would cost to run a house like Gray Gardens and maintain that lifestyle, in which case, that's not very much at all.

Speaker 10 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 11 She was very depressed. She started gaining weight.
And eventually she couldn't afford to send Little Edie money anymore.

Speaker 11 So in 1952, at 34 years old, Little Edie finally gave up and returned to Gray Gardens to be with her mother. And she would stay there for the next 25 years.

Speaker 10 Wow, 25 years. 29th.

Speaker 10 That's a long.

Speaker 12 That's a lot of winters in the house. A lot of winters at Gray Gardens.

Speaker 11 It's a lot of winters.

Speaker 10 I just love that line when Big Edie says, it's very hot on July 29th in New York City. Like, not, it's hot in July or the summer.

Speaker 10 July 29th.

Speaker 11 She's very specific.

Speaker 12 It's the hottest day known for it.

Speaker 11 So one year later, Jackie Bouvier became Jackie Kennedy when she married JFK. And suddenly the Beatles of Grey Gardens were related to, well, he would become the president.

Speaker 11 By the early 70s, the house had fallen into pretty insane disrepair. Actually, worse than you see in the documentary Gray Gardens.

Speaker 11 And that's because a local paper ran a headline that Jackie O's relatives were being told to clean their house by the health department or they would be kicked out.

Speaker 11 So health department officials got a search warrant. They entered the house and one of them told the paper, quote, three people vomited when they went back outside.

Speaker 11 Boots were needed to walk through the house. There were fleas everywhere.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 11 So they told the Beals, you have to clean up or we are evicting you.

Speaker 11 And the paper reached out to Little Edie's brother, Phelan Jr., who told them, quote, my brother and I have done everything possible short of kidnapping them to get them to move.

Speaker 11 They just left him.

Speaker 10 I mean, where's the effort? Where is the effort? Yeah.

Speaker 12 Short of kidnapping. Hello, dude.

Speaker 10 They kidnapped. Yeah, but have you seen those ladies? I mean, I don't think there's any telling those two what to do either.
You know, I think they probably were like, this is, we're staying.

Speaker 10 And I don't know what the connection to, you know, what the remedies for mental health weren't great at that time either.

Speaker 10 So, you know, I think their options were probably like, do we just let them stay? Do we have them committed? I mean, what do we do?

Speaker 10 And probably the most humane thing to do would have just been to let them stay, right?

Speaker 10 Because I think a lot of people would have committed them, especially if you're walking in the house and people are walking out vomiting, you know. That's true.

Speaker 11 That's true. My guess is they just didn't.
they hadn't checked on them in years.

Speaker 11 I mean, you could send someone to help clean it. You could send someone to help them maintain it.
You could send them some money because they were destitute. They didn't have any money.

Speaker 10 Jackie did.

Speaker 11 Uh-huh. She did.
So

Speaker 11 this kicked off a series of raids by the health department on Gray Gardens, which they talk about in the documentary. And these were actually like pretty inhumane.
They showed up and they like.

Speaker 11 removed the women from the house. They came in with a hose and just like fire hosed everything down, which I don't know how that's supposed to make it better.
That's just going to mildew everything.

Speaker 11 They were just constantly pestering them, bothering them. You know, neighbors are complaining, but they're not complaining about, like, can someone take care of these women?

Speaker 11 They're complaining about, you know, what the outside of Grey Gardens looks like.

Speaker 11 In spring of 1972, finally, Jackie and her sister, Lee Radzowel, got involved.

Speaker 11 So Jackie visited the house in May, and then she sent a high-powered lawyer to a hearing before the health department, which ended up getting them to leave them alone.

Speaker 11 By June, the house was also being cleaned and renovated. But Lee Radziwell turned up with cameras.

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Speaker 11 Leah decided to spend that summer in the Hamptons because she wanted to make a documentary about her own childhood, and she thought it would be fun to have my eccentric aunt narrate it, meaning Big Edie.

Speaker 11 Which this to me right away, I'm like, I don't get it. I don't totally get what she's doing here.

Speaker 10 A little exploitative, right?

Speaker 12 Like, I I want to have my eccentric aunt, big Edie of all people, to be your narrator.

Speaker 12 I think she's just like, my aunt's crazy and I got to include this into my documentary because people are going to want to see this.

Speaker 11 I think so, too. But as we're going to discuss the footage that ends up getting shot, you can actually now see in a new documentary, newish, in the last like eight years called That Summer.

Speaker 11 And Lee Radziwell is a complicated character because I actually think she does care about them and love them. But to your point, I don't know why she wants to shine a spotlight on them.

Speaker 11 I don't know that she knows why either. So she brings on her friend, photographer Peter Beard, and he brought on his friends, documentary filmmakers, David and Albert Mazels.

Speaker 11 Now, have you ever seen any other Mazles documentaries?

Speaker 10 I have not.

Speaker 12 I've seen some of Gimme Shelter.

Speaker 10 Maybe I saw the whole thing in.

Speaker 12 in school.

Speaker 12 I took film class. I took a lot of film classes in college.
And I feel like, actually, you know what? I think I watched Gimme Shelter, but I think I may have fallen asleep during part of it.

Speaker 12 Sorry, Mazles. R.I.P.

Speaker 10 But they look fascinating. Salesmen, a look into the lives of four door-to-door Bible salesmen.
I mean, hello. Salesmen is good.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 I saw salesmen a long time ago, and it's, it's really interesting. And it's also interesting.

Speaker 10 It's again, I think it, it feels obscure for door-to-door Bible salesmen in the same way that Gray Gardens might feel obscure or niche, and yet it feels incredibly universal in how American it is.

Speaker 10 The intersection of like commerce and independence and libertarianism and sales and religion, you know what I mean, in America at this point in time.

Speaker 10 That's a good documentary. I like that one.

Speaker 11 You should watch Gimme Shelter. That's what they were probably most known for at this point.
It had come out in 1971. If you don't know what it is, they were following the Rolling Stones on tour.

Speaker 11 They end up at the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Raceway, which ended up just being a complete disaster. Someone hired the Hell's Angels to supply security.

Speaker 11 It goes horribly wrong, and a man is shot to death in like the the front row of the concert, which you see captured on camera from like right behind Mick Jagger's head.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 11 It's incredibly well done. A lot of it is actually the Rolling Stones watching the footage back and like experiencing, you know, themselves on stage seeing this.

Speaker 11 And it's just, it's sort of fascinating to see these like massive, massive rock stars just completely stripped down. Anyway, highly recommend it.
But

Speaker 11 they were big on cinema very ta. And Chris, could you explain what that means in this context?

Speaker 10 Real cinema.

Speaker 10 Yes. Okay.
Yes.

Speaker 11 So, I mean, basically, they end up being very focused on showing the truth. And to them, that also generally involves exclusively observing.

Speaker 11 They do not want to be involved in what they're capturing at all. A little different than what we wind up with, but that was their intention.

Speaker 12 I was about to say, they're like eating tomato hors d'oeuvres being passed around by you.

Speaker 10 That's okay. I know.
I don't think you have a choice with those ladies. You know, they call the shots.
I thought they were bad.

Speaker 12 I would, first of all, I would have a hard time just like being in that house, but also when they pass around that sort of like amorphous tomato thing.

Speaker 10 This crackers for the cameraman. Yeah, I'll be like, no, thank you.
No, and they're like literally eating liver pets. They're basically eating cat food.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 It is cat food.

Speaker 10 They're eating cat food and ice cream. Yeah.
A lot of them. Well, I got to get away from the ice box.
I just, that is the ice box as the antagonist.

Speaker 10 That's the funniest.

Speaker 12 I'm taking these like weird like little mini, mini, mini scoops, but like that's for like Big Edi's sort of like pawing at it as if like there might be something under the vanilla that's like more vanilla-y.

Speaker 12 And it's just

Speaker 10 like saying her ice cream bill was $171, which at that point in time is so much money. Well, they open that ice box and it's all ice cream.

Speaker 10 And then little Edie's just eating it with a knife, which cracks me up. And she's like, I'm not gaining the weight back.
I'm not gaining it back.

Speaker 11 So this sort of documentary filmmaking filmmaking that was very unobtrusive is the reason that Peter Beard suggested bringing the Masles along.

Speaker 11 Apparently, Lee was concerned that they were not going to let them into the house with cameras. So Peter Beard suggested them because he's like, listen, they're very unassuming.
They're very charming.

Speaker 11 They shoot on 16 millimeter. Like, they're not going to freak out the Beals.

Speaker 11 According to Lee, she says that they spent weeks driving back and forth to the house to try and get the EEs to let them in.

Speaker 11 But this is a bit conflicting to Albert Maisel's version of this. Now, this is what Albert says.
He says, when she called him up, he was skeptical.

Speaker 11 He said, quote, at first I thought, how come you're making a film of your childhood when it all took place in the past? And she said, no, no, no.

Speaker 11 I have a list of some 40 people and things going on right now that would be in the film. And she said, come over, let's talk about it.
So we got the list. Item number 34.

Speaker 11 was, as she described it briefly, her eccentric aunt and cousin. So we made a deal where she would pay for the filming and we began making this film.
So I don't think they're super invested in this.

Speaker 11 It feels like a bit of a vanity project, but they're just kind of doing it because she's paying for it.

Speaker 11 And one day while they're working with Lee, Albert says that she got a call from Little Edie asking her to come help them with the health department because they were harassing them again.

Speaker 11 And so the Mazels are like, okay, I guess we'll come along and take our cameras. And as soon as they got to that house, they started rolling and they were like, This is

Speaker 11 it. This is what we want to see.
We don't want to see anything else. This is incredible.

Speaker 11 Also, Jerry Torrey, aka the mobile fawn, said that Lee was very uncomfortable during the visit, potentially because she didn't understand what the actual state of the inside of the house was until seeing it in person.

Speaker 11 And again, it was a lot worse than it is even in Grey Gardens because she actually additionally called Jackie again, and she ends up getting Aristotle Onassis to come and pay for them to repaint parts of it.

Speaker 11 So, what you're seeing in Grey Gardens is not only professionally cleaned, it's also repainted. Like that's how bad it was before.

Speaker 10 Oh my God.

Speaker 11 It's crazy. So the Mazels get like a couple hours of footage and they show what they have to one of their frequent collaborators, Ellen Hovedee.

Speaker 11 And she helped them pull together a little reel in about a week that they took back to Lee because they were like, hey, this is it. This is the movie.
This is what we should make.

Speaker 11 Will you please fund? this for us to go back into Grey Gardens. And what do you think Lee Radzawell said when she watched the footage?

Speaker 10 Hell no. Hell no.

Speaker 10 You're going to make me look crazy. You're going to make my whole family look crazy.
I'm not paying for this.

Speaker 11 It's exactly right. She took the negatives and said, no more of this.
And she thought that it was done. Except that the Masles could not stop thinking about the Edie's, especially not David.

Speaker 11 And he apparently owned a summer house not very far from Grey Gardens. And he actually kept talking to Little Edie about making a film.
Apparently, Big Edie did not want to do it.

Speaker 11 It was Little Edie who was like, yes, yes, yes, let the cameras in. And eventually in late summer of 1973, the Mazels were allowed back inside the house and started shooting Grey Gardens.

Speaker 11 So I said this at the top, but while the Mazels get pretty much all the credit for Grey Gardens, there were actually four directors.

Speaker 11 Albert and David Mazels, obviously, are the two that you see in the documentary. They're the ones that are constantly referenced.

Speaker 11 But there were two women working with them, Ellen Hovedy and Muffy Meyer, both of whom are credited as directors and editors on this documentary. So only the Mazles ever physically entered the house.

Speaker 11 They actually didn't even let the assistant cameraman in. But that seemed to be okay with everybody because the house stank horribly.

Speaker 11 Albert and David said that they would park far away from the house and hose themselves down with bug spray while tying flea collars around their ankles.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 11 But they didn't really care because they were really obsessed with Big and Little Edie.

Speaker 11 And the Beals seemed to feel the same, particularly Little Edie, who kept bringing the brothers into into the conversations on camera, despite this being something that they were actively trying to avoid.

Speaker 11 So we discussed this a little bit, but like, what does that do sort of for the movie for you all as viewers?

Speaker 10 Well, it adds a lot because they don't really... they're never overpowering with it, you know, and you can tell that they're only talking when they need to talk.

Speaker 10 And a lot of it is when it's little Edie alone just mumbling to herself, you know, and it sounds like ramblings of a crazy person. And so, having him there to kind of

Speaker 10 ask her what's going on is keeping it on track. And it's also making them look less crazy.
I mean, it does humanize them a little bit because you can tell

Speaker 10 they've been around each other so much that they can speak in grunts and sighs to each other and understand what they're talking about.

Speaker 10 And they go on these loops every day of the same thing over and over again. I could have been something.
I could have been something. No, you couldn't.
You couldn't have done anything.

Speaker 10 I didn't do that to you. Yes, you did it to me.

Speaker 10 I mean, it's just like constantly, it's like your own inside chatter in your brain that we all go to therapists to shut up, you know, but they're both doing it out loud and to each other.

Speaker 10 And I think having someone else there asking them put it, puts it into

Speaker 10 context and it makes it an actual conversation instead of just, you know, someone under a freeway rambling like a crazy person. So I think it actually brought some humanity to it.

Speaker 10 I think they did them a huge favor with that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it actually is like brings a little bit of warmth in a weird way because

Speaker 12 there, you can see that these are are also kind of like two lonely people. They only have each other.
And like Jerry, when he comes by, or maybe the person who's doing some of the landscaping.

Speaker 12 And you can see

Speaker 12 little Edie is like so excited just to be able to plead her case to someone, just to show off, just to be a little seductive at times, to do her dancing. It's like a kid, you know.

Speaker 12 Ron and I were just joking on our podcast. about, you know, being young and your parents have like a dinner party and you come out and like entertain all the adults and you're so excited.

Speaker 12 And that's kind of like the vibe you get from her, which is which it's like sad because you see how lonely she is, but it's also

Speaker 12 warm. And also, they kind of are pleading their cases, like they've had these long-standing arguments and disagreements.

Speaker 12 And finally, they have someone that they can turn to and be like, This is what I think.

Speaker 10 This is why she never made it. She had all sorts of wonderful men.
She turned them down.

Speaker 12 And like, they finally get to plead their case to someone else. Um, but uh, I think it actually adds

Speaker 12 it. Well, it makes the documentary much more, more,

Speaker 12 it adds layers to it. It makes makes it much more accessible too.

Speaker 10 I agree. I think it makes little Edie more charismatic or it reveals her charm.

Speaker 10 She's charming. She's a charismatic person.

Speaker 11 She's funny.

Speaker 10 And she's funny. Very funny.
She's a good performer. And I do think what's interesting is even with reality television, if your stars are not charismatic, it doesn't work.

Speaker 10 And one of the, I think it's easy to say, oh, the only reason these people are famous is they're willing to do ridiculous things, or it's that they live in such squalor. But it's that they're

Speaker 10 again, it's if Edie was not charming and charismatic, this movie would just be a real bummer to watch. Yes, they're both pretty charismatic, actually.
I agree, both of them.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's just with Edie, you get the more one-on-one, I think, interactions. Yeah, and she's one of those people that if this was today, she would be a huge star.

Speaker 10 She would be a huge star, have her own show. She would have made $100 million

Speaker 10 on like OnlyFans slash TikTok and like Instagram and

Speaker 10 have her own show on HBO Max. It's so hard now that reality has been out, reality TV has been out for so long that it's one of the biggest problems with it is finding people who are themselves.

Speaker 10 I mean, everybody has learned to play up to the cameras and they're doing it for the likes and the followers and this and that and they're making stuff up. And,

Speaker 10 you know, to find somebody who can like legit be themselves is really hard. And she can't, she's just herself.
I don't think she knows how to do anything else.

Speaker 10 You know, even when she's trying to do something else, you can tell it's just that little girl playing with the shirt over her head. Yes.
And she's lived an interesting life.

Speaker 10 Howard Hughes, J. Paul Getty,

Speaker 10 Joe Kennedy Jr., like Jackie O'Nestus is her cousin. This is a fascinating person.

Speaker 12 She also does not leave dead air.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Like they, those two are talking the whole time. And it's actually, their report is so fast.
It's actually like, it's amazing to watch. So, you know, she'll say one thing like, oh,

Speaker 12 he was a decent man who came by. He thought it wasn't that decent.

Speaker 12 no he was very decent you know what you know you don't know a decent person i had to send him away you'd send them away why'd you send him away yeah it's like part of that's like a very new york kind of banter but there is like that element of like

Speaker 12 Like she's filling the screen with content in a way that like a really good reality star does.

Speaker 10 Yeah, you see, there were a lot of comparisons, like Ben mentioned earlier, to Real Housewives of New York, because there was a season where Luanne, who's the glamorous countess,

Speaker 10 has to move in with Sonia, who's the ex-billionaire wife, you know, the ex-wife of a billionaire who is living in a home that's in disrepair. It's this huge house.

Speaker 10 She doesn't have the money to take care of it. She's got brown ice.
The hot water doesn't work. Nothing.

Speaker 10 And so the comparisons, I think at the time, a lot of people took it as like these two crazy ladies stuck in a house together. But I don't really think it was that.
I think it was Sonia.

Speaker 10 It was Sonia being in this house and being so completely delusional and seeing everything as like, aren't I fabulous? Like, look at this, look at this townhouse I live in.

Speaker 10 And she just figured they would be cutting all the parts where the water wasn't working.

Speaker 10 She just is so delusional that in her mind, she's still telling stories of John John and partying, you know, with,

Speaker 10 you know, all these people. And it's exactly little Edie.

Speaker 11 You mentioned John John, which is in reference to JFK Jr., right?

Speaker 11 And you know who corrected her on that show, that no one who knew him actually called him John John.

Speaker 11 It was Carol Radziwell. Yeah, Carol, yeah.
Who is, of course, the daughter-in-law of Lee Radziwell.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's all connected.

Speaker 11 Who is Jackie O's sister? It's all connected.

Speaker 12 But there is something, I mean, like, Sonia, like everyone compares Sonia to Grey Gardens because even when she was out of her townhouse, that was like falling into disrepair, which it was, the townhouse was in bad shape.

Speaker 12 To be fair, it was never like Grey Gardens. Like, like this, Grey Gardens is like.

Speaker 10 Nothing is like this.

Speaker 12 But, you know, Sonia winds up in an apartment at one point and she doesn't like people seeing into her, into her bedroom. So she starts taping towels to the window.

Speaker 12 And it's like, there's just something about like, it's, there's a certain kind of personality that's like, I'm going to live fabulously, but I'm going to do just crazy ass things to maintain my sense of luxury.

Speaker 12 I can't afford drapes. So I'm going to tape towels up.
And that's just what I'm going to do. And it's like kind of wild to watch.
Like, so, I mean, look, Sonia is, that is an open case.

Speaker 12 There's a lot, there are a lot more years for Sonia, and she may want, she is a very good candidate for winding up in the ED lane.

Speaker 12 Great. But

Speaker 12 so far she's not there, but she's got our eyes on her.

Speaker 11 So Muffy Meyer, one of the other directors and editors, also pointed out that, quote, in hindsight, I also think it was important that it was two men engaging with them.

Speaker 11 Little Edie would flirt and so on because the absence of men in her life was such a strong part of her character and in the end of the film.

Speaker 11 There were also days where David, Albert, Edie, and Edie felt so amazing about what they'd captured that they'd shout out, it's been a banner day.

Speaker 11 So like they were really having fun and I think really enjoying the time with these women. In fact, the biggest issue was not what to film, but actually what to keep.

Speaker 11 And after about five weeks of filming, they had 80 hours of footage, 70 reels of Wild Track, and 30 to 40 additional reels of just random shit. One has to imagine at least 20 of those are just cats.

Speaker 11 And I watched the documentary that summer, which is the one that is the footage that Lee shot. And it's actually really interesting.

Speaker 11 You know, it's sort of less cohesive than Gray Gardens is, but one of my favorite moments in the whole thing, there's this one orange cat and little Edie goes, isn't he just the image of Teddy Kennedy?

Speaker 11 Of course, before he got fat.

Speaker 10 And it's like, you're talking to Teddy Kennedy's sister-in-law.

Speaker 10 It's so funny.

Speaker 10 Well, it was so beautiful how they used the animals and the cats and they really conveyed like, wow, these cats are even looking at them like, what the hell?

Speaker 10 You know, I mean, they had one of the cat just standing on the very top of the not even the window sill the actual window frame just staring at them like with kind of a scared look in his eyes but also just they showed how fascinated even the animals were with them which was interesting the editors apparently were like thank god for the cats because there was something to cut away to all the time for the reaction shots yeah well my favorite was the cat that wound up like pooping behind her portrait yes

Speaker 12 pooping behind but the portrait is the only thing she got something to do and they cut to the cat like behind the portrait be like oh my God. And it's like the cat's also equally as mortified.

Speaker 10 Like really like, this is not a good moment for me either.

Speaker 11 So Ellen and Muffy sat the Mazles down with a tape recorder and they were like, okay, like, what do you want this to be? What do you want this documentary to be?

Speaker 11 What is the story that you're trying to tell with this? And the Mazels apparently kind of had no clue.

Speaker 11 Ellen said the material was all very repetitive and that she and Muffy really had to be the ones looking for motivations and to kind of dig out the psychological tones that were present in this story.

Speaker 11 story. And they frequently didn't agree with the Mazels about what those tones were.
So let me ask you all this. What do you think the main conflict or question of this documentary is?

Speaker 10 Well, to me, it's about like the truth of who did what to who.

Speaker 10 Like did the mom hold the daughter down or did the daughter, was the daughter just crazy and has been relying on her mom this whole time and her mom's really propping her up.

Speaker 10 Yeah, like was mom an excuse to return home or was mom forcing me to come home? Yeah. Who depends on who more? Right.
Because so many of us have that conflict in ourselves.

Speaker 10 I mean, you look at, you look at your own life and it's like, well, how much of this is how I was raised? Like, how much of my craziness is because I inherited that?

Speaker 10 And how much of it is my own doing? You know, and whose fault is it?

Speaker 10 And then if it's true that it's inherited and a lot of like my behavior patterns don't even come from me, then where did they come from for my mom?

Speaker 10 And then if I listen to, obviously I'm projecting, but if I listen to my own mom's story, that all came from her mom.

Speaker 10 So it's, I think a lot of people can relate just thinking, what the hell is going on with me? You know, like

Speaker 10 is this all in my head? Because we see the truth come out multiple times where at first you're believing Edie, like, oh, this woman dragged me back and this and that.

Speaker 10 And then the mom's saying, no, I didn't. I never did anything.
I wanted you to be married. I wanted you to be happy.
You could have done this. You could have done that.

Speaker 10 But then the mom admits at one point, she's like, of course I brought her back. Then I, what am I going to be? I'd be all alone without my daughter.
That's all I have.

Speaker 12 you know I think the I think even the the the the deeper question for me is like how did they get here and like it kind of ties into all of that stuff like what got them to this place was it is it the daughter does the daughter have mental illness is it the mom is she like manipulative like everything that ronnie just said but like but still even an even larger question is with all that what were the building blocks to this to this lifestyle that they have right now how did how did that lead to this?

Speaker 12 That was what was going through my mind the entire time.

Speaker 12 And trying to piece together, like, oh, I reading, hearing their stories and piecing together all these little elements and these fragments that you hear, you start to put together a picture of these two codependent women and how they wound up in squalor.

Speaker 11 Well, everything you both said was very nuanced, beautiful, and complicated. But according to David Maisel, the main conflict was, is little Edie going to leave?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, I mean, sort of no. Muffy and Ellen were both like, she's never leaving.

Speaker 10 She's never had any intention of leaving. Yeah.
Like,

Speaker 11 that is not what's happening here. And I think it's so interesting that the two women were like, sirs, no, like that's, that's not what we're doing.
As Muffy put it, nothing really happens.

Speaker 11 And so Ellen and I realized that since the Beals didn't change, we had to make the audience change how they felt, not about the Beals, but about the power dynamic between them.

Speaker 11 So it's exactly what you just described. They absolutely nail this.

Speaker 11 So they start to weave together three narratives. You said all of them.

Speaker 11 First, big Edie is taking care of her daughter who can't take care of herself because she was too messed up to live her own life.

Speaker 11 Second, they flip it and show how Edie was really the one taking care of her mother who was manipulative and demanding and had maybe stolen her daughter's life from her.

Speaker 11 And then finally, third, they combine those two to show that it's really a symbiotic relationship and sort of both things can be true.

Speaker 11 So they start showing the rough cut to close friends and then going back to a bulletin board where they have every scene numbered out and they're rearranging and trying and adjust the emotional arc of the film.

Speaker 11 But as they continue to sift through the hours of footage, they realized there was basically no room tone or silence between the dialogue.

Speaker 11 So they actually sent the masals back and they were like, hey, we need you to grab room tone. They also asked them to go back and get.

Speaker 11 particularly little Edie to repeat certain sentences so that they could get them cleaner. And they said she did it perfectly.
She was a total pro.

Speaker 11 They would play her the recording and be like, this is the context in which you're saying this. This is the emotional weight.
And she would re-perform re-perform it exactly how she had in the moment.

Speaker 11 So I think like, well, yeah, she's done it a thousand times.

Speaker 10 She can tell all that stuff coming out of her mouth. She's said so many times.
She says it every day. She, they just go through these loops, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 10 And I think the most interesting thing is, you know, we talk about like, how did they get to this point? And how did they get to live in such squalor and such dirt?

Speaker 10 I don't think to me, that's not the point at all because I don't think them. They think of themselves as living in squalor at all.
I think they're both so completely delusional.

Speaker 10 All they see is they've, they've got this mansion.

Speaker 10 they're part of this family, and they still think it's very glamorous, and they're perfectly happy just living in their own loops because that's the only place they can live in that reality.

Speaker 10 You know, anywhere else they go outside, the reality is crushed by everybody else's perceptions. Yeah, right.
But it's kind of like,

Speaker 12 how did those, they are not, but it's like, how did those, how did they wind up into this, like falling into this delusion?

Speaker 12 Like, what were the things that fell apart in their lives that like made them have to build this, this this delusion up so that way they could sort of like

Speaker 12 find this like like elegant and beautiful and and like you hear about like love like never having the husband and then having to come back and the mother who wanted to be a singer and like as you piece those together you see how they like wound up in this place which is really interesting to me but um i what i think is really interesting hearing about this is

Speaker 12 hearing how the filmmakers had to pull these narrative threads And when you watch the documentary, it really does feel like nothing happens.

Speaker 12 You just feel like you're watching people and you're just learning about them. But it's really cool because there is like a sneaky nuance to it where you are learning about things.
And like

Speaker 12 pretty much the last scene, the last major scene is where she really, little Edie has that sort of bigger reaction about that one guy who it seemed like that was someone that she actually liked.

Speaker 12 And the mom sent him away. And it feels like, oh, like it felt like we did reach kind of an emotional climax there.

Speaker 12 And they're like, wow, this movie is so interesting, how, like, nothing's happening, but there are all these subtle elements that are moving forward, which is, by the way, very much a precursor to the Real Housewives because you can watch 20 episodes or 15 episodes of people just having lunch or going to parties, where, like, you could say there's not really a story happening here, it's just people socializing, but it advances all these subtle things that by the end of the season, you're everyone's like riveted.

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Speaker 11 So Ellen and Muffy really felt the need to protect the Beals. They wanted to make sure they were not exploiting them, not exposing them to any ridicule.

Speaker 11 And apparently, that's something that the Maisles were a lot less concerned about. There's one scene in particular that they fought about quite a bit that did end up getting cut from it.

Speaker 11 And it showed little Edie like leaning out the balcony window and kind of waxing poetic about Richard Nixon and how much he sucked. And Ellen and Muffy were like, this is great.
She's very funny.

Speaker 11 She's smart. This shows that she's not as narcissistic as we're painting her.
She is paying attention to current events. She has opinions on them that are actually like intelligent.

Speaker 11 And the Masles kept cutting it.

Speaker 11 They were like, no, it's going to date the film. And, you know, Ellen was also like, I I think he thought it was self-serving because she's basically a Kennedy.
She's related to them.

Speaker 11 And, you know, she's criticizing a Republican. But I do think it's interesting that they were cutting that kind of stuff in favor of maybe making them look a little bit even crazier.

Speaker 11 And the two women behind the camera were like, no, like we, we need a little bit more of this context.

Speaker 10 That's interesting.

Speaker 10 I can see an argument for cutting that, though, just because when you bring something like politics into it, it distorts it immediately. Like a viewer is immediately going to take sides

Speaker 10 no matter what they've already seen. They're going to already make something, make a decision about your personality or whether or not they like you based just on that.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 That's true. That's a good point.
But I could, but I could, I definitely would like to see it as well.

Speaker 11 Well, they were successful in convincing the Mazels to add a different sequence to the film, which is the opening tracking shot that shows all of the beautiful East Hampton houses and then finally lands on the Grey Gardens.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 10 That was beautifully done. And just how they got the picture from the newspaper to exactly match up.
Yeah. Yeah.
It was really great. That's elegant.

Speaker 10 And also showing, also showing all the other homes. I don't know why it stood out to me because I know it's just how it is, but they showed all these other homes right on the beach.

Speaker 10 And then you kind of have to go back away to their home where the, yeah, they've got the wall of the gardens as kind of like the jail.

Speaker 10 cell like hedging them in there, you know, kind of keeping them in from the glamour that everybody else is living. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, there was a third woman as well, Susan from Key, who is credited as an editor and associate producer on the film.

Speaker 11 So a lot of women working behind the camera on this, which I think is a big part of the reason why it works as well as it does.

Speaker 11 And she said the editing process took about two and a half years because they had so much footage to get through.

Speaker 11 So finally, it was time to show the film to the Edies. And according to Albert, Little Edie said, the Mazels have created a classic.

Speaker 11 And I would say she was right.

Speaker 11 It screened September 27th, 1975 at the New York Film Festival, and then it got a limited theatrical release in the U.S. Little Edie absolutely loved it.

Speaker 11 Muffy gave her a bouquet at one of the first screenings with an audience and she started throwing the flowers down into the audience and the orchestra.

Speaker 11 The critical reaction to this movie

Speaker 11 surprised me. Given what sort of a pivotal classic it's become over time,

Speaker 11 it was really panned by critics.

Speaker 11 A Virginia newspaper wrote, the movie may strike you as a depressing rip-off of two women whose lives are infinitely sad and who lose whatever vestige of dignity their privacy afforded.

Speaker 11 It's a painful movie, not because it's sad to see the gulf between the way they were and are now, but because of their exploitation is so cruel and the film's laughs are at their expense.

Speaker 11 The New York Times said, to watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves for better or worse in in the habit of not being looked at.

Speaker 11 And what happens when the carnival moves on?

Speaker 10 I have to disagree with those reasons. I do too.

Speaker 10 I think it would, I think that's the easy thing to say. Like, oh, they're exploited, but it's not at all.
I mean, I think it's a dream come true for little Edie.

Speaker 10 I mean, you've got someone here who always thought she was going to be a star, but was never. never told, she was always told she wasn't good enough or didn't have what it takes and this and that.

Speaker 10 But she knew that she did. And she just kept being her crazy self.
And then finally she did become a star and she really didn't have to do anything but be herself that whole time.

Speaker 10 Like she was recognized. I think that the people who like Grey Gardens don't like it because it's like, oh, these two sad ladies living.

Speaker 10 I think they like it because it's these ladies who don't live in a traditional sense of what would make you happy.

Speaker 10 Like the way they live is how you would think of as the bottom of the barrel, but they're actually two of the most.

Speaker 10 happy people ever. I mean, they've got the love of each other, which is very strong.
And it doesn't seem,

Speaker 10 it doesn't seem gross or, I mean, I'm sure there was a manipulation obviously we see going on but it doesn't seem like one is lording over the other as this big monster they seem to be together because they want to be together and they're both living a genuine genuinely happy life with a million cats and raccoons eating bread that they feed them I mean I think in their minds they're living the dream life so I think it's kind of a black mark on reviewers like that who can only see it as, oh, these poor people, we should just ignore them and pretend they never exist.

Speaker 10 You know, by even looking upon people like that or giving giving them any kind of attention is humiliating instead of thinking, well, it's kind of your snobbery that's turning it humiliating in the first place.

Speaker 10 There's no humiliation in it, except that you're turning it into that with your judgment, you know?

Speaker 12 Yeah, the implication is like they must be so mortified that they can't live like us. And like, we shouldn't be dwelling in their humiliation.

Speaker 12 But like Ronnie said earlier, These are two women who don't seem actually very embarrassed about their environs.

Speaker 10 Like they are, they're perfectly happy there.

Speaker 12 They have guests over. They put down newspaper, you know, like, like, you know, you watch, you're like, oh my God, they're putting down a newspaper for people to sit on.

Speaker 12 But actually, to their mind, they're like, oh, we're doing something nice. Like, or like, we understand it's a little dirty.
We'll put, we'll put this out.

Speaker 12 She's like happy to show that one bedroom, which was her, her brother's bedroom where she does her makeup. Like, she goes upstairs and shows, like, feeds the raccoons.

Speaker 12 And it's sort of like this is just their life. And like, it's horrifying probably for us, you know, as the flies flies are crawling along the bed frames, et cetera.

Speaker 12 But they just are totally unbothered. And it's just, they're happy.
They just banter back and forth all day. They were the original podcasters, really.

Speaker 11 That's true. That's true.

Speaker 11 Well, Albert and all of the filmmakers defended it, but he said some people just don't understand the difference between getting to know somebody very intimately and somehow or other hurting them and exploiting them.

Speaker 11 There's an interesting word in this regard.

Speaker 11 The word is vulnerability, as if through the process of being very open with another person, you're going to get hurt, because that's what the word vulnerable means.

Speaker 11 You're exposing yourself to the possibility of getting hurt, which I think is a beautiful way of describing this.

Speaker 11 Weirdly, many years later, he said, I hope that most people who see it are shocked by it and don't want to see anymore.

Speaker 11 And I couldn't find more of his sort of explanation around that, but the rest of the filmmakers did very much stand by it. And so did the Beals, by the way.

Speaker 11 Apparently, they called up all the filmmakers and told them, don't worry about it. Like, we're not worried about the criticism.
It's not true. We believe in this picture.
Like, please don't be upset.

Speaker 11 And a lot of the criticism was saying, you know, oh, they're mentally ill. They're mentally ill.
And all the filmmakers were like, we don't necessarily agree with that.

Speaker 11 Like, they're, you know, they are functional in their own weird way.

Speaker 10 So people, if they had still been, if they had still had money and been in beautiful dresses and well-groomed and still had those exact same personalities, nobody would call them crazy.

Speaker 10 No, not at all.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's a great point, Ronnie. That's such a good point.

Speaker 10 You know, we'd celebrate them.

Speaker 11 Yes. And it's not their fault.
They didn't have any money. Like, they were completely abandoned by whole portions of their family.
So Big Edie died just two years after the movie came out in 1977.

Speaker 11 And according to Albert, when Mrs. Beale was dying, Little Edie happened to be with her and turned to her and asked, Is there something we want to say to the world?

Speaker 11 And Big Edie said, there's nothing I want to say. It's all in the film.

Speaker 11 Little Edie sold the house shortly after her mother's death, and she only agreed to sell it to someone who would never tear it down. And journalist Sally Quinn kept that promise.

Speaker 11 She bought the house in 1979 for $220,000, which by the way, is probably a lot less than Edie could have sold it to somebody who would have torn it down.

Speaker 11 And with her husband, they spent over $600,000 to restore it.

Speaker 10 Also, wasn't her husband Ben Bradley? Yes. Of the Washington Post during Watergate.
That's right. With another presidential tie.
Wow.

Speaker 12 It's very interesting also, like, that she sold the house after her mother died.

Speaker 12 It also makes you wonder, like, for all her talk about wanting to leave, wanting to leave, it sort of shows that, like, she wanted to, I think she clearly just wanted to be with her mother.

Speaker 12 And then once her mother wasn't there, she didn't need this house anymore. And she, like, cause obviously she could have left at any time, right?

Speaker 10 But yeah,

Speaker 11 she got out immediately. And I love this.
According to Quinn, Edie insisted that it just needs a fresh coat of paint. That's all.
That's all it needs.

Speaker 11 Ma'am, there's raccoons in the insulation.

Speaker 11 Also, you'll love this. Liz Lang, fashion designer to Pregnant Ladies Everywhere, bought Grey Gardens in 2017 for $15 million.

Speaker 10 That's crazy. I just looked that up.
I was looking at Liz Lang's

Speaker 10 Instagram right now.

Speaker 11 Yeah, she has Grey Gardens.

Speaker 11 You know, Ben, you just pointed this out, but so many people thought that little Edie couldn't survive without Big Edie and that, you know, maybe she'd never leave the house, but she did better than survive.

Speaker 11 She thrived. She moved to New York City, then Florida, then Montreal, then California, and finally back to Florida, where she passed away at the age of 80.

Speaker 11 But while in New York, she got to enjoy a few cabaret runs. She had an absolutely wonderful time.
She also traveled. She made friends.
She danced.

Speaker 11 And then the last place she lived, she got to swim every day.

Speaker 10 Oh, I love that. That is that ending for her.
That's great.

Speaker 12 And I think it's actually really warming that she really, she just, I think she just really loved her mother.

Speaker 12 And as much as she blamed her mother for things going wrong in her life, and as much as her mother probably did contribute to that, like she just wanted to, I think on many levels, she just wanted to be with her mom as long as possible.

Speaker 12 And then she went off and then lived her life.

Speaker 11 Well, her mom also understood her and like even from an early age, seemed to be one of the few people who did actually support her in the things that she was trying to do in a way that, you know, her father and grandfather did not.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And her mom was never telling her, you're not talented.
You can't do this. You can't do that.

Speaker 10 I mean, we had the one thing where she's like, she shouldn't sing like she shouldn't be wiggling while she's singing like, yeah, she's got to do that.

Speaker 10 Cause there, you know there came the little competition where it's like well i'm the real the trained singer and she's just this but the whole film was her saying oh you should have you know you could have been a dancer she's a great dancer and she could have been an actor and she's so beautiful yeah

Speaker 10 yeah

Speaker 10 and uh looking up this house uh online i just put gray gardens now and what they've done to it is gorgeous. I can't believe it's still standing and looks so beautiful.
So

Speaker 10 what a happy ending. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Well, that wraps up our coverage of Gray Gardens. Any sort of final thoughts on what we've learned today?

Speaker 10 Well, that's fascinating, everything that you just said. I mean, I had never looked into it beyond that, you know, so it's so great to know that it ended up happy for her.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's a fascinating story. It's like you want to really learn more about it.
And, you know, as soon as I finished watching it, I did like a deep dive.

Speaker 12 Well, by deep dive, I mean I went onto the Wikipedia.

Speaker 10 And then I just read it and then went to sleep.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 still, like you, like you want to know what her life was like and what she, you know, it's it's crazy i actually the thing that was it's what's so amazing to me is how it's such a big like

Speaker 12 cultural touchstone now like that is if you're referring to someone whose house is dilapidated but they're kind of like but the people inside it are living like in a sort of a sense of delusion it's like that's great gardens like that's that's the phrase that you use that's what it's known about and to know that it was panned And then now everything I read about it last night, everyone's saying it's basically considered a masterpiece of the documentary genre.

Speaker 12 It's It's like a crazy story around all of it.

Speaker 10 I agree. And

Speaker 10 my, I, I've, well, I'll just say I think one of the smart things they did in not focusing on how did they get here

Speaker 10 is because

Speaker 10 they were always there. The whole point is, this is what happens when you don't change and you don't adapt to changing circumstances.

Speaker 10 They, like you mentioned, they continue to have the same arguments and they continue to act as if they're living in this rich environment, even though there are raccoons in the attic.

Speaker 10 Raccoons, raccoons, as I call them.

Speaker 10 My wife and I were watching it, and she was like, Oh my God, when she saw it, and I was like, Oh, yeah, there's raccoons up there.

Speaker 10 And she goes, Is that outside? And I go, No, no, no, no, that's in the attic.

Speaker 10 Um,

Speaker 10 and I think you know, it's a Edie gets her momentum again, but I think it shows my biggest fear is

Speaker 10 ending up

Speaker 10 a burden to my child or trapped in, you know what I mean, in

Speaker 10 my own entropy in some way. And so I think it's just, it's an example of why momentum is important.
And,

Speaker 10 you know, or is it? I mean, did they die? Did they die?

Speaker 10 I mean, did they live as the most original people on earth who just refused to bend to the will of society and not give a shit what anybody thought? That's how I look at it.

Speaker 10 I mean, I look at it as kind of heroic. And Edie kind of coming out a huge star in such a weird way when that's all she really ever wanted was to be appreciated by people.
And look how she is.

Speaker 10 I mean, to me, it's kind of a story of winning. So I don't know.

Speaker 10 For me, with Little Edie, she is so invigorated by the presence of the documentarians that I have to imagine that there were 25 really hard, lonely winters there. Oh, 100%.
And

Speaker 10 I think that, and then to know that she did so well going to New York and Florida and California, Who knows what the alternative could have been?

Speaker 10 But I just, I see somebody who clearly wanted more from life and yet felt this tie. I think, you know, it was coming from her.
She wasn't forced into it. But

Speaker 10 I agree with you with regards to Big Edie. But with Little Edie,

Speaker 10 I feel like she got, I'm thrilled that she got out. for at least a portion at the end of her life.
Yeah.

Speaker 10 Well, one of my questions was while watching it was, is she tied there by the mother or is she tied there by thinking that she failed?

Speaker 10 Because, you know, they get to a point where she says, well, you're 30, you know, you were 34. You didn't make it.
You had lines on your face.

Speaker 10 You know, like, I think there was a sense of like, I failed. So she was partly there for a mother and partly giving up on herself.

Speaker 10 So to see it kind of end up in a way where she could be her authentic self and still find a happy life, I just

Speaker 10 found to be. oddly inspiring.

Speaker 12 I think that's what's one thing that's like really great about the documentary that we're all kind of touching on is that like we all have these things that we're kind of projecting onto it and taking away from it because it doesn't really, it doesn't really answer any questions.

Speaker 12 It just presents people, complicated people where it's not like as simple as like, oh, there was a failure.

Speaker 12 So she came home and she was never able to face her failures, her, you know, her failures ever again. But it's like a, it's a big swirl of a lot of.

Speaker 12 things in terms of like expectations of society and what you want to be and youth gone and love for a mother and manipulation and generational trauma.

Speaker 12 It's like all this stuff swirling together and like, were they happy? Were they not happy?

Speaker 12 It's hard to say, but like, that's what's so interesting about it is that we're just like looking at two people living and trying to kind of like figure them out. And it's really hard.

Speaker 12 And another thing I also want to point out in terms of, you know,

Speaker 12 something

Speaker 12 that sort of supports how this really wasn't that exploitive is the sort of like Jerry coming, you know, in and out of this movie.

Speaker 11 This guy, Jerry, he shows up, but he's really interesting.

Speaker 12 he doesn't like smirk at the camera or give the camera lies like oh my god this is crazy right he's just there and he's just hanging out and at one point he's like lying down on eatie's bed and like eating corn he treats yeah i can't believe he's lying down on that or eating the corn i know i but he's but tim is like these are just ladies and it sort of shows like like he's not winking at the camera it's like these are people they have interactions with people outside the world just not a lot of them you know so a little bit about Jerry, the marble fawn,

Speaker 11 is that he was actually a young, I believe, homeless gay kid who was in the area kind of doing work

Speaker 11 on other houses. And he sort of stumbled onto the property and met these women and just, like you said, was really fascinated by them and I think loved them.

Speaker 10 You see gay icons. You see, Jerry saw it.

Speaker 11 Jerry saw it immediately.

Speaker 10 Did he end up moving in with them?

Speaker 11 I don't know if he lived with them for different periods of time, but he definitely visited them quite a lot.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 And you're right that he could have like Jim Halper did it. You know what I mean? Yeah.
And been like,

Speaker 10 and like mugged.

Speaker 11 No, no. He liked it.

Speaker 10 No one really did, which I thought was interesting. Nobody on, nobody on camera did that.
You know, and I thought that the guests who came over for the birthday party would do that, you know?

Speaker 11 Oh my God, the birthday party.

Speaker 10 Yeah, they didn't. Yeah.
And, you know, even the daughter, or I think it was his daughter he was with, right? She was just, here we are. You know, let's get her.

Speaker 11 I know, but you know, they were like, TikTok, get out of here before the fleas start climbing up our legs.

Speaker 10 Yeah. They got their half hour in and skedaddled.

Speaker 12 So I looked up those people and I don't think they actually were related, but the younger woman, her name was Lois. And she's like into like, she's like a psychic tarot card reader and everything.

Speaker 12 And she actually made like a little bit of a career out of.

Speaker 12 being in the documentary. She has like a book called like I survived like living in Grey Gardens or whatever.

Speaker 12 And she has pictures of herself older, like with like in Grey Gardens memorabilia or whatever, but she definitely like took that and ran with it.

Speaker 12 But and the other guy was had just a totally different name. So I'm not sure if they were really related, but they were just two people.
But again, they didn't like.

Speaker 12 I mean, it was sort of funny because you're looking at her face. I was looking at her face and I was like, is she cringing? Is that smile like hiding utter disgust?

Speaker 12 And that's kind of like the fun of this movie is you're kind of like trying to peek behind, you know, the words and the eyes and the expression. Like, what are people really feeling here?

Speaker 12 Like, what's really going on?

Speaker 10 No, I think she really liked her and she gave her that little notebook. I mean, I think that just goes to prove.
I mean, it's because it seems like, wow, what a dinky little gift.

Speaker 10 You know, you brought, you bought her like a little five-cent notebook as her birthday gift, but just how much she loved it. Like, yes, this is exactly what I need.
I'm going to get on top of things.

Speaker 10 Just like,

Speaker 10 just like the self-help, just like the self-help thing was teaching them the whole time. I'm going to get on top of it.
That's all I need to do is write things down.

Speaker 11 Well, speaking of, you know, some of these little moments, if anybody wants a little bit of further viewing in the Gray Gardens universe, I do recommend watching that summer.

Speaker 11 It's streaming on AMC Plus right now. It's really interesting.
It also kind of gives a bit more into sort of like Studio 54 meets the Hamptons vibe. Like Andy Warhol's in it.

Speaker 11 Peter Beard, Lee Redzowel's boyfriend/slash friend, is like just a very hot 70s man. Everybody has like normal hot person 70s faces, which I really miss.

Speaker 11 And it was really, it's just, it's good.

Speaker 11 It's, it's, it's even more slice of life than Grey Gardens is, maybe a little less coherent, but you get to see them interacting with the health department quite a bit, which is very interesting because they're actually like pretty nice to the health department.

Speaker 11 So I do recommend that. And then.
If you haven't seen it, the HBO movie Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Wang is actually great.

Speaker 10 I really recommend it. Beautiful job of that movie.
I wasn't expecting expecting that at all. When I watched that, I cried in that.
That was just a beautiful, beautiful movie. Loved it.
Yes.

Speaker 10 You could see like the bad Ryan Murphy version, you know what I'm saying? Getting made that feels exploitative or like unnecessarily melodramatic or whatnot.

Speaker 10 And I think partly because maybe with like Barry Moore comes from a Hollywood family and whatnot, there's just something that feels dignified about it that they give them dignity in that movie, I think.

Speaker 10 They do.

Speaker 10 And it was made by people who get it. You know, they watched it and they got it.

Speaker 10 And they, they weren't, because, yeah, like you said, they could have just been making fun of them the whole time and made it like almost a parody, but it was a beautiful, beautiful movie. Loved it.

Speaker 11 Well, thank you both so much for joining us. This was so much fun.
Is there anything that we can plug for you all coming up?

Speaker 12 Just our podcast. We are recording

Speaker 12 our show. You know, we put up a new show pretty much every day of the week.
We have a cool Patreon. It's patreon.com slash watch for crap ins and our Instagram is instagram.com slash watchercrappins.

Speaker 12 So yeah, just find us. Find us out there in the world.

Speaker 11 If you haven't listened to their show, you must.

Speaker 10 Yeah, thanks for having us. This was great.
It was great talking to you guys. And what a beautiful film.

Speaker 11 Oh, thank you so much. Well, this was an absolute dream for me.
It was so nice to meet you. So fun to talk about this.
And please come back anytime if there's any other movies you want to talk about.

Speaker 10 Oh, heck yeah.

Speaker 11 Or talk about a regular What Went Wrong episode.

Speaker 10 We really appreciate you being here.

Speaker 12 Thank you so much for having us.

Speaker 10 Thanks so much, guys.

Speaker 15 Go to patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

Speaker 15 What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.
This episode was researched and written by Jesse Winterbauer.

The Curious Case of Grey Gardens (with Watch What Crappens)

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