How ‘Grey Gardens’ Predicted the Age of Perpetual Performance

In 1976, Grey Gardens confronted audiences with two women from one of America’s most prominent families who invited a documentary crew into their collapsing East Hampton mansion. The film follows a mother and daughter who share the same name, Edith Bouvier Beale—Big Edie, the elder, was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt; Little Edie, then 54, was Jackie’s first cousin. They lived surrounded by cats, messy bric-a-brac and decay in what was once an elegant estate. What shocked viewers wasn’t just the squalor, but that these women performed for the camera deliberately staging their eccentricities, not as actresses in a scripted drama, but as themselves without apology. 

In an era when respectable women, especially those from prominent families, were expected to maintain appearances or retreat quietly from public view, such visibility felt transgressive. Viewers weren’t just watching a documentary about decline, they were watching members of “America’s Royal Family” inhabit a world radically outside the frame of American aristocratic lore.

Five years earlier, in 1971, local authorities had raided the Grey Gardens house due to unsafe living conditions. Big Edie’s husband had abandoned her decades earlier – he divorced her by telegram from Mexico – leaving her with a monthly allowance that eventually ceased. Little Edie returned from New York in the early 1950s and never left. Without financial support, Grey Gardens slowly collapsed. 

The raid caused sensational headlines: “Jackie’s Aunt Told: Clean Up Mansion,” announced the New York Post. “Mother and Daughter Ordered to Clean House or Get Out,” reported another publication. When Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill stepped in to fund the renovations, the press coverage intensified: “Jackie Cleans Up East Hampton Mansion for Kin,” read a 1972 Daily News headline. 

That year, Radziwill hired documentary filmmaking brothers Albert and David Maysles, known for their direct cinema approach, to document the Bouvier family’s East Hampton history. During preliminary filming, the Maysles brothers encountered the Beales. Radziwill abandoned the project, but the filmmakers saw something more compelling in the two women and returned in the fall of 1973 to film them over several weeks.

What they captured was a collaborative performance, shaped as much by the Beales as by the filmmakers. Throughout the film, Little Edie speaks directly to David Maysles (“David darling, where have you been all my life?”), adjusts her costumes mid-scene and choreographs her movements for the lens. In another scene, shot on the Fourth of July, she performs a drum majorette routine with a small American flag. Her movements are precise, her body still holding the discipline of a trained dancer. She’s not confused or unaware, rather she’s deliberately performing, staging herself for the camera.

Big Edie performed too. From her bed she sang classic American songs like Tea for Two, revisiting numbers she performed at family gatherings and recitals before her husband’s departure ended those ambitions. For both women, daily life has become inseparable from theatrical display. 

Early critics could not accept that these women were in control of the production. They saw women living in filth and assumed mental incapacity, or an inability to understand what they were agreeing to. The possibility that the Beales not only understood the camera but actively sought it out and orchestrated their performance was unthinkable.

Walter Goodman’s New York Times review, published in 1976, captured this reaction precisely. The film “made [him] angry,” he wrote. His outrage was centered on the act of looking itself: “Would anyone have bothered with these people had they not been related to Jackie Onassis?” he asked. “Why were they put on exhibition this way?” Goodman acknowledged that the Beales had signed contracts, consulted a family attorney and would share in profits. The consent was explicit and legally sound. Yet he still viewed the filming as a violation. “If my grip on things should one day become as uncertain as that of Edie Beale,” he wrote, “I hope that my friends will try to stop me rather than make a movie of the performance.” He noted Little Edie’s constant awareness – her poses, flirtations, shifts of tone – but interpreted these as “symptoms of vulnerability,” and evidence that she didn’t understand what was happening to her, rather than intentional performance.

Other critics amplified the reaction. Molly Haskell, writing in The Village Voice in 1976, dismissed the Beales as “travesties of women,” while Charlotte Curtis, in Vogue a year before, compared Little Edie’s wrapped skirt to a diaper, reducing her inventive styling to infantilization. The refusal to perform shame disturbed these critics more than the fall from privilege itself. That refusal could only be interpreted as madness or manipulation. The alternative – that the Beales were in control – was simply unimaginable.

Yet those who spent time inside the house saw something else entirely. In her 2007 memoir My Life at Grey Gardens, Lois Wright, the Beales’ neighbor who became close to them during the filming, described a household governed by routine not chaos. She recounted Little Edie preparing deliberately for the camera, selecting outfits with intention, timing her remarks to match the filmmakers’ schedule. “They knew what they were doing,” Wright wrote. “They decided who entered, when, and how.” The Beales set the terms of access and established boundaries. Wright’s testimony reveals a dynamic removed from exploitation, confirming what the film already suggested: the Beales acted as co-authors of their own story.

This becomes clear in the film’s opening scene, where Little Edie introduces her outfit: a skirt worn upside down with a sweater wrapped as a turban. “I have to think these things up, you know?” she says. The line captures the constraint of her situation and her creative response to it. She’s staging herself and turning scarcity into spectacle because performance demands it, even when resources have dwindled. 

Speaking to Interview magazine in 1976, Little Edie was asked what she wished the Maysles had done differently. “I wish they had more of me dancing,” she said. “My mother wanted more of her songs sung. That’s really the only thing we live for.” Although this gave her the perfect moment to discredit the film’s portrayal of her life, she only mentioned that she wished they had included more footage of her dancing. In The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006), a documentary assembled from the unused 1973 footage, Little Edie states plainly: “I don’t want anybody playing Edith Beale. I don’t want anybody playing me.” She wanted to be seen, not represented by someone else. 

Ellen Hovde, one of the film’s three female editors, later countered accusations that the Beales were mentally unfit to consent to being filmed. In a 1990 interview with film scholar Alan Rosenthal, she said: “It is presumptuous to make decisions for other people about what they do or do not understand.” The film offered its own evidence: Little Edie discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun with the Maysles, demonstrating literary knowledge and critical thinking. While Big Edie responded to Norman Vincent Peale’s radio sermons with dry, ironic commentary, her faculties were clearly intact. These aren’t the behaviors of women incapable of understanding a contract or grasping what it means to be filmed. 

The moral crisis that Grey Gardens provoked in 1976 has shifted. What once generated outrage – the act of filming itself – now sparks different questions: about exploitation, consent and whether vulnerability can ever be ethically commodified. But the fundamental assumption has changed. We no longer question whether such filming should happen but debate how it should be regulated. Little Edie performed in the theatrical sense by creating a deliberate spectacle with staged entertainment and the conscious presentation of talent. Fifty years later, we’ve dispensed with that requirement entirely.

The introduction of reality television in the early 1990s normalized the viewing of domestic conflict and daily minutiae. The Real World, which premiered on MTV in 1992, established that everyday life could be edited into dramatic entertainment without theatrical performance. As Emily Nussbaum writes in The New Yorker, the show pioneered a format in which young strangers lived together, their mundane interactions transformed through editing into a soap opera narrative, establishing “the look and rhythm of modern reality TV.” The Real Housewives franchise, which began in 2006, refined this approach by turning wealthy women’s domestic routines into consumable entertainment. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, launched in 2007, further perfected the model by making the quotidian itself the spectacle.

Then the advent of social media – Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Instagram in 2010 – completed the shift. Today, anyone with a smartphone can curate their everyday routines for public viewing. We consume the content of people preparing breakfasts (Nara Smith building elaborate meals “from scratch”) and oversharing their relationship drama (TikTok’s viral “Who TF Did I Marry” series). The camera is constant and so is the performance. In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) sociologist Erving Goffman argued that all social interaction involves performance and that we continuously present versions of ourselves depending on our audience. Little Edie understood this long before the rest of us turned it into daily practice. In the context of today’s social media landscape, it’s interesting to imagine how the Beales might have thrived. 

Both Grey Gardens and today’s reality TV shows grant viewers access to women whose lives are so far removed from most viewers’ reality that they function as entertainment, even comedy. Yet the fascination with the Beales differs fundamentally from that of The Kardashians or The Real Housewives. Content creators documenting poverty, hoarding or mental health struggles attract a different kind of attention: curiosity tinged with voyeurism, the same uncomfortable fascination that drew 1976 audiences to Grey Gardens. 

The difference now is our scroll-trained tolerance. TikTok has conditioned viewers to move seamlessly from content that disturbs to content that gives a dopamine hit, desensitizing us to what might have provoked moral outrage 50 years ago. Little Edie has become an icon detached from that discomfort: a Halloween costume, a pin on a Pinterest mood board, a shorthand for eccentric glamour scrubbed of its original context.

Goodman’s original outrage rested on the belief that certain kinds of exposure were degrading, that vulnerability should not be commodified and that watching people in distress was morally corrosive. That fear of being watched and judged by strangers and of having our private lives dissected publicly, remains. But it no longer restrains us from participating. 

However, we continue to debate the boundaries of what should be shown. Recently, TikTok users argued over whether to watch Kendra, a young woman who posted over 30 videos documenting her obsessive fixation on her psychiatrist, declaring her love for him in livestreams, while performing tarot readings and moderating out critical comments. The case raised questions about voyeurism, mental health and the real-world consequences for the psychiatrist whose career became collateral damage. Yet the debate didn’t stop people from watching.

Grey Gardens arrived ahead of its time, capturing an audience-viewer dynamic the culture wasn’t ready to recognize. The Beales grasped what the camera could offer: an audience, attention and the possibility of being remembered. Audiences in 1976 were unsettled by the Beales’ desire to be seen. Fifty years later, that desire is universal. The film no longer reads as a cautionary tale but as a blueprint. Little Edie knew something the culture would only learn later: being seen, even imperfectly, beats being forgotten.