Why Grey Gardens makes me queasy

So, the Grey Gardens movie premieres on HBO tonight, with Jessica Lange as "Big Edie" Beale and Drew Barrymore as her daughter, "Little Edie."

I won't be watching, since I dropped HBO a few months ago. All of their original programming is available on dvd soon enough and I can just get it from Netflix. Also, I'm not totally on the Big Edie, Little Edie bandwagon.

When I saw the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens about the Beales - aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - my initial reaction was, these women are mentally ill. They're living in squalor in a decaying Long Island mansion and clearly have trouble coping with everyday life. I felt that filmmakers Albert and David Maysles exploited them a bit.

I guess I'm not the first person to raise the issue because it's addressed on the commentary track. The producer and director argue that Big and Little Edie were nonconformists, that their lives were examples of how opportunities for women of their era were constricted. If they were British we'd be calling them eccentric and their behavior would be considered charming.

Later, I saw Christine Ebersole on The View. She played the older Edie in the first act and the younger Edie in the second act of the Broadway musical Grey Gardens, and won a Tony award. One of the hosts brought up the same question: Wasn't there something emotionally wrong with these women? Ebersole gave pretty much the same answer, that they were artistic types, nonconformists, etc.

But leaving food out for the raccoons in your attic is not normal behavior. Neither is leaving bags of garbage - and worse - around your house. I felt these women were being romanticized and their plight explained as "nonconformity" when it was really closer to mental illness.

I've softened a little bit. There's an audio interview with Little Edie that was recorded a few years after the documentary came out. On it, she talks about how much she and her mother liked their portrayal. And she actually sounded more lucid than she did in the film.

Also, I subsequently saw Grey Gardens on Broadway and Ebersole was great. She absolutely channels Little Edie in the second act. And she creates a memorable Big Edie in the first act, really out of whole cloth, with no documentary to guide her. I think Little Edie would have been thrilled and flattered by her performance.

Still, I couldn't get away from the fact that I'd seen the documentary. The way those two women lived was not okay. No one would want to live in those conditions. Check out this 2002 New York Times obituary for Little Edie for the details.

I'm definitely curious about the movie. But I just have a tough time seeing the Beales as icons, as cult figures to be lionized. To me, they were two lonely, troubled women who needed help. And there's nothing charming about their circumstances.

Denny and Edie

I've got kind of a soft spot for William Shatner. Sure, he's an easy target. He's been around so long, and in so many incarnations - the iconic Captain Kirk, T.J. Hooker, game-show contestant, Priceline.com pitchman. Not to mention his singing career.

I'm not a huge fan of Star Trek or police shows, but I like Shatner as Denny Crane, the eccentric lawyer he plays on ABC's Boston Legal. He's often misogynistic, bigoted, needlessly combative, obnoxious, and downright clueless. Despite everyone telling him that, he never changes. Denny's a train wreck waiting to happen every week, and it's fun to watch what he'll do next.

I'm especially looking forward to tonight's episode, the show's first in its new 10 p.m. Wednesday time period, because Christine Ebersole is a guest star. It's kind of fun now to see actors I've enjoyed on stage do guest spots on television or in movies. And I'm kind of interested to see how she'll play off Shatner.

I haven't seen Ebersole in anything since last summer, when I watched her Tony-winning performance in the musical Grey Gardens. She was terrific playing socialite Edith Bouvier Beale in the first act and her daughter Little Edie in the second act, as their lives moved from comfort to squalor in their Long Island mansion. If you've ever seen the documentary, it's especially amazing the way Ebersole brought Little Edie, with all of her eccentricities and bizarre fashion sense, to life.

On Boston Legal, she's playing a cattle rancher who hires Denny to sue the FDA to stop the sale of cloned meat. Ebersole told the New York Daily News: "It's funny, it's touching, and it was just a blast to do it." While this is a one-time shot, Ebersole says that she'd be interested in returning. "It sure would be a lot of fun," she said. "The show is incredibly clever and well- written. It's smart."

But first up, according to this story, Ebersole is making a pilot for a Lifetime situation comedy called Libertyville, where she plays a divorced woman whose grown daughter and father both live with her. And she's releasing an album, Sunday in New York, on May 13. You can hear the title track at her Web site. There's also a free mp3 download of Ebersole singing "Lullaby of Broadway,'' from the album In Your Dreams.