Shabby chic, the musical

FOR much of the summer, behind the manicured lawns and privets of the privileged, gossip insatiably centered on the distinguished Astor family as the grandson of Brooke Astor, the 104-year-old doyenne of American society, sued his father over his grandmother’s alleged mistreatment. With front-page headlines blaring the claims of forged codicils and illegal transfers of property, jewels and art, the lawsuit drew the unsettling picture of a now-helpless old lady sleeping on a urine-soaked couch in her Park Avenue aerie because of her son’s gross negligence. Many were left to wonder: How could American royalty fall so low, so fast?

That’s precisely the question posed in a new Broadway musical, “Grey Gardens,” which purports to tell of a social scandal that had tongues wagging in the early 1970s: the saga of the eccentric Beales -- 77-year-old Edith Bouvier Beale and her 56-year-old daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, or “Little Edie,” who were discovered to be living in squalor in a crumbling 28-room East Hampton, N.Y., mansion overrun by dozens of cats, raccoons and vermin. When the board of health threatened them with eviction, their famous niece and cousin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, came to the rescue, paying for hundreds of bags of detritus to be removed and issuing a press release describing the situation as a “private family matter.”

But while the Astor scandal is likely to recede into a footnote of social history, the tale of the Beales has proven resilient. A veritable cottage industry has sprung up, beginning with the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens” by Albert and David Maysles, which established Edie as, yes, nutty, but also a fashion totem and philosopher. In its wake have come lavish Vogue fashion spreads, pop songs, cult screenings, numerous fan websites and camp parties a la “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in which cross-dressing participants speak only lines from the documentary.

A renewed burst of interest has now brought forth the Broadway musical; a new documentary, “The Beales of Grey Gardens,” comprising outtakes of the original film; and next year will bring a feature film and a coffee-table book of photographs.

Ode to opportunity lost

IN the original documentary, released on DVD in 2001, clouds of regret and recrimination hang over the manse as the women bicker in finishing-school accents amid the clatter of cat food cans and a constant parade of Little Edie’s eccentric fashion choices. They break into old songs or listen, lying on stained mattresses surrounded by clutter, to scratchy recordings of Edith, a decaying memory of the show business aspirations that once afflicted both. “It’s so difficult to draw the line between the past and the present,” Edie says, memorably. The terrain is Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee crossed with Samuel Beckett as Edie threatens to move on but can’t. Little wonder then that dramatists have been so attracted to the material. But why have the Beales continued to exert such a “staunch” -- to use their favorite word -- hold on the public, a fascination that made the musical one of last season’s hottest tickets during its off-Broadway run earlier this year?

“It’s a personal Rorschach test,” says Michael Sucsy, who has written and will direct a feature film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore that is slated to begin shooting next summer. “Your response to the story really depends on your insecurities ... dreams deferred, mother-daughter issues, the fear of losing everything. There are so many complexities and contradictions to it. When I saw the [Maysles’] documentary, I just started writing down questions. I ended up with 30 or 40.”

The musical, which opens this week on Broadway, purports to answer some of those questions with a first act that predates by about three decades the events of the documentary, which are covered in the second act. It establishes the Beales’ competitive and at times monstrous relationship by imagining the circumstances surrounding the brief, real-life engagement in the summer of 1941 between Edie and Joseph Kennedy Jr., the scion of the famous political clan who was being groomed for the presidency but would be killed in combat three years later. Set on the day of a glamorous engagement party, the romantic elegance of this Grey Gardens, despite all the presentiments of rot setting into the timbers, makes its coming decline all the more vertiginous.

“We have such a conflicted relationship with class in this country. On one hand, it doesn’t exist, but on the other we elevate families like the Bouviers and the Kennedys into royal family status,” says “Grey Gardens” book writer Douglas Wright, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “I Am My Own Wife,” who is making his musical theater debut. “There is a natural fascination and perverse schadenfreude that people take in looking at those to whom everything is handed and they come to a tragic pass. But in almost every neighborhood, there is that overgrown house with too many cats and a crazy witch inside. Grey Gardens was the nation’s spook house.”

As such, Edie was a doppelganger of sorts to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Had she married Joseph Kennedy Jr. and had he lived, Edie might well have had the life of her younger cousin -- a twist of fate apparently not lost on Edie. Wright recalls she reportedly told Joseph Kennedy Sr. at the inauguration of his son, John F. Kennedy, that she had almost made it to that podium. “Jacqueline Kennedy acquired the life that Little Edie presumed she’d have herself,” Wright says. “We wanted to build those near-miss qualities into the play.”

In fact, the first act of the musical includes young girls playing the Bouvier sisters, Jackie and Lee, who were frequent visitors to Grey Gardens. The show’s producers have not been shy about trumpeting the Kennedy connection in their marketing, including the tag “The incredible story of Jackie O’s most outrageous relatives” in their ads. But if people’s curiosity is piqued by such labeling, the creators hope that audiences will recognize something else in the funhouse mirror: themselves. “People always accuse me of writing about eccentrics, but eccentrics are human foibles distilled, and none of us are exempt from them,” says Wright, adding that the parent-child dynamic in the musical is a universal touchstone. “Every parent both makes the wound and applies the balm. Children routinely break their parent’s heart and stitch it back together. It’s how we love and destroy each other.”

Albert Maysles, whose brother, David, died in 1987, ending a collaboration that had resulted in such documentary classics as “Gimme Shelter,” says he was never worried that a musical would soften the edges of the documentary. “I was more concerned that they get the relationship right because it is so complex and contradictory,” he says, adding that he is pleased with the musical. “It’s so easy to simplify and depict Mrs. Beale as the cause of all of Edie’s problems. But they both contributed to what was good about the relationship and what was bad. It’s a love story.”

Michael Korie, who wrote the songs with composer Scott Frankel, says people can relate to the Beales for other reasons. “What woman can’t relate to Edith saying, ‘I’ll take a dog over a man any day’?’,” he notes. “What we discover is that when aristocrats fall, they’re people just like us.”

Indeed, the creators of “Grey Gardens” say they initially were intimidated most by the proprietary nature of the documentary’s many fans. Edith died at age 81 in 1977 after a fall; Little Edie died in 2002 at 84. Like Maysles, Korie and Wright say the women had an openness and aching vulnerability that elicited feelings of respect. “There was an enormous responsibility to depict them truthfully,” says Korie, noting that when the musical was first announced, outrage coursed through the Grey Gardens chat rooms. “They are now largely supportive,” he says. “I think they thought we were going to turn their underground icons into some crass Broadway image. And inasmuch as they were eccentric, they didn’t want that normalized or turned into a commodity.”

Whether that bodes ill or well for the commercial prospects of the Broadway run remains to be seen. “Grey Gardens” was a sellout at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons even before it opened to largely favorable notices -- with the exception of the New York Times review, which dismissed the show while raving about its star, Christine Ebersole, who plays Edith in the first act and Little Edie in the second. The uptown transfer offers greater challenges, not the least of which is a distinctly inhospitable clime for “serious” musicals. With only nine in the cast, the weekly running costs are low; and while advance sales are modest by usual standards, they are stronger than many insiders had predicted.

Celebrating their spirit

KELLY GONDA of East of Doheny, the lead producer, says her businessman husband, Lou Gonda, at first warned her off such dark subject matter but changed his mind after seeing the show. Gonda says she wanted to transfer the production because she was mesmerized by the mother-daughter relationship. But she feels that the musical can introduce a new generation to the Beales because of another quality: their maverick ability to live their lives as they saw fit without apology. “My 24-year-old daughter, Eva, responded to Edie’s fierce spirit and intelligence,” she says. “They were staunch women to the end.”

Maysles contacted Edie shortly before she died to get permission for a musical to be made. Though both women had been supportive of the documentary -- despite some vicious reviews that accused the filmmaker of voyeurism and exploitation -- Maysles wasn’t sure what Edie might say about a musical. “She was thrilled and happy with the idea,” he recalls. “She told me, ‘Of course, our lives should be a musical. They were joyous.’ ”

After her mother died, Edie sold Grey Gardens to Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, and his wife, writer Sally Quinn. Edie abandoned her stage dreams for good after her cabaret act in New York City was panned. She chose to satiate her sun-loving self in Florida. While Edie talked fondly of her mother during the more than two decades she survived her, one of her last wishes was that she not be buried next to her. “They couldn’t be Bouviers and be themselves,” Maysles says. “But they could be recluses and be themselves. And they could be themselves in front of our cameras. I think that’s why it’s such an extraordinary experience for some people.”