Word: edith
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Black Jack Bouvier moved into Grey Gardens in between the wars with his wife, his sister Edith and her husband, a lawyer. Then came the Wall Street crash and the Bouvier fortune was smashed. The Bouviers moved out and Edith's husband ran off, leaving her as the sole mistress of the mansion. Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier were brought up there with Edie, who at the time outshone them both--her prospects seemed boundless. But things reversed themselves. Jackie went off to marry Jack Kennedy, Lee became a princess, and Edie was left behind, never quite able to break away...
...picture emerges from the movie of two different women, differing radically in temperament, locked in a timeless, unchanging struggle with each other. Edith, nearing the end of her days, reviews her life with contentment. "I had my cake, loved it, masticated and chewed it," she tells us. "I had everything I wanted. I had a very, very happy, satisfying life." Her daughter is profoundly embittered, looking upon her time at Grey Gardens as a waste, hating it, but incapable of leaving, and holding her mother responsible for her disappointments...
...original sources of these conflicts have become obscured to such a degree that the truth is impenetrable. Each woman has her own version of the past. Edie refers to one suitor who was twenty years her junior, and reiterates her charge that Edith scared him away. Edith on the other hand claims, at a moment when Edie is out of the room, that the man said of her daughter: "How can a woman with such a beautiful voice be so cold in person?" and for this reason the mother suggested that he not come back to visit them...
...Edith and Edie don't feel that their privacy was invaded by the movie. Edith is now bedridden with arthritis, but her daughter has been actively promoting the film, giving press conferences and granting private interviews. Associate producer Susan Froemke said in an interview on Monday that Edie believes the film has "given her back to herself," and is grateful to the Maysles for understanding her so well. She even entertains hopes of doing a nightclub act in New York. It is almost as if it is 1952 again and she is waiting for that call from Max Gordon...
...WOULD LIKE TO think that this time things will be different and that, when her mother dies, she will be able to begin her own life. But the old patterns die hard. A woman who appeared for a moment in the film, Lois Wright at Edith's birthday party, had a similar relationship with her own recently deceased mother. Lois has since moved in with Edie and Edith. Froemke reports that Edith seems to be reproducing her relationship with her mother in her relationship with Lois the same strains, the same resentments, are appearing. Now Edie complains that Lois...