‘Grey Gardens’ is one colorful story

McClatchy Newspapers

What is, is never the whole story. What made it that way — that’s where deeper fascination lies.

Especially when it’s as stranger-than-fiction bizarre as Little Edie, Big Edie and their rambling wreck of a Hamptons manse immortalized as the title character of the cult documentary “Grey Gardens.”

Its cinema-verite portrait of mother-and-daughter grande dame eccentrics, filmed by Albert and David Maysles, has only soared in fame and fandom since its 1975 premiere. Many of the film’s most ardent aficionados weren’t even born when this camp-courting tale of faded wealth and exuberant behavior initially achieved renown.

That was back in pop culture’s original “reality” era, when TV was learning to eavesdrop ... when PBS’ mid-’70s shocker “An American Family” kept cameras rolling as an “average” married couple unraveled toward divorce.

Private behavior on public display is commonplace now. But it was astounding at the time. And despite today’s self-revelation saturation — or perhaps because of it — “Grey Gardens” is on its second wind. The co-dependent recriminations of its aging mother and daughter, isolated in a filth-infested country house, have recaptured the public imagination. There’s been a Broadway musical, fan sites on the Web and now a new HBO movie expanding on the Maysles’ actuality.

This “Grey Gardens” (8 p.m. Saturday on HBO) boasts immersive performances by Jessica Lange, as the larger-than-life mother keeping her daughter close, and Drew Barrymore, as the flamboyant yearner idling in her gilded cage. HBO’s saga looks back beyond the documentary to chart 40 years of the pair’s past, to reveal how two charmed lives — mother Edie was aunt to Jacqueline Kennedy; daughter Edie was her cousin — devolved into seclusion and squalor.

They radiated amusement, too. Both mother Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (1895-1977) and daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (1917-2002) had wanted to be showgirls at a time that wasn’t proper for their social status. Thwarted in public, they performed in private, initially for others, and finally for each other.

Three decades later, the writer-director of HBO’s movie, Michael Sucsy, would come to that same door, after the once-grand home had been restored by new owners Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn of The Washington Post. When he saw the Maysles film in its 2001 DVD release, he was blindsided by its very personal, yet universal, impact.