A Long-Lost Prequel to Grey Gardens Resurfaces, Starring Lee Radziwill
It’s hard to imagine a property that’s loomed larger over the worlds of film and fashion than the one depicted in Albert and David Maysles’s 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens, which follows the aristocratic and deeply eccentric “Little” and “Big” Edie Bouvier Beale as they natter around the crumbling East Hampton pile they share with an ever-expanding number of stray animals. The Beales, cousins to the famous (and famously well-heeled) Jackie Onassis and Lee Radziwill, had an assuredly different sense of style compared to their rarefied cousins, preferring fraying housecoats and carefully clasped-together turban-topped ensembles made out of lace curtains and bedspreads to the chicly streamlined sportswear of the early 1970s, and similarly eschewing the tony enclaves of the Upper East Side for their decrepit estate on the East End of Long Island. There, they perform for their company like prom dates, alternately flirting with the filmmakers and wistfully wondering aloud over the many perceived mistakes that delivered them to their current predicament of near-gothic decay: broken engagements, abandoned creative endeavors, an errant husband, so many missed chances.
The Beales became an indelible pair of pop culture icons thanks to the Maysleses’ film, a sort of sobering “there but for the grace of God” duo for the 1970s that spoke to the decline of WASP culture while presaging the culture-swallowing behemoth that would become reality television. A certain breed of cult stardom followed, as did a Broadway musical, an HBO film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, and a lasting legend about the project starring Radziwill that had gotten the Maysleses in the door in the first place. Now, after 45 years, that early footage has been found.
A new movie, called That Summer, has been made from the early film shot by famed fashion and art photographer Peter Beard while in Montauk and at Grey Gardens with the Maysleses. It’s been re-excerpted and edited by Göran Hugo Olsson (The Black Power Mix Tape 1967–1975) and his coeditor, Per K. Kirkegaard, and combined with additional footage by Andy Warhol (whose Montauk compound Radziwill and Beard were summering in at the time), Jonas Mekas, and Vincent Fremont. “The original idea for the film was about my return to East Hampton after 30 years and to have my aunt Edith narrate my nostalgia and hers,” Radziwill told Sofia Coppola in 2013. “Peter [Beard] said, we’ll get the Maysles[es], because they have 16mm cameras, and the Beales wont be frightened of that, and the Maysles[es] will be charmed by them. And the Beales were terribly attracted by the Maysles[es], because they adored having their picture taken and they adored screaming at one another constantly, and they said, ‘Listen, we don’t want this to be Edie narrating for you, for your nostalgia; we can really make something extraordinary from this.’ It took me weeks of drives from Montauk to East Hampton to get them to open the door and talk.” What happened next, as they say, is history. Watch the exclusive trailer for That Summer below.
That Summer premieres theatrically May 11.
