This story of two formerly well-to-do eccentrics continues to hold sway in the popular and artistic imagination. It opens this week at the Ordway Center.
They were a couple of upper-crust eccentrics who lived with scores of cats, raccoons and possums in a haunted, junk-strewn mansion surrounded by unkempt grounds in the exclusive Hamptons. Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale -- better known as Big Edie and Little Edie -- might have been footnotes in a text on the history of obsessive-compulsive behavior had it not been for the confluence of their genteel pedigree, their almost feral living conditions and film.
The story of the two women, an aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was memorably captured in a 1975 cult documentary, "Grey Gardens." A part of that film, by Albert and David Maysles, is being remade by writer/director Michael Sucsy for HBO. It stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the mother and daughter.
By Rohan Preston, Star Tribune
