Decades ago, socialite Lee Radziwill (sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and artist-photographer Peter Beard were two of the "beautiful people." As "That Summer," the new documentary by Goran Olsson, begins, they are seen frolicking with the likes of Onassis, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Truman Capote on the exclusive beaches of Montauk, NY, where the very rich go to spend their summers. That summer of 1972, Radziwill and Beard decide to make an "environmental film" about the Hamptons. Radziwill comes up with the idea of getting her "very eccentric aunt" to narrate the film.
Said aunt turns out to be Edith Bouvier Beale, who lives in squalor in a dilapidated mansion with her even more eccentric daughter, Edith (Little Edie) Beale. These are the same two ladies who, a few years later, would achieve cinema immortality when they were featured in the classic documentary "Grey Gardens." Radziwill and Beard shot four reels of film with the Beales, giving up on their environmental film idea and focusing their camera almost entirely on these two crazy cat ladies, whose house is so filthy the county threatens to evict them. Those four reels make up the bulk of "That Summer."
Many years earlier, the Beales had been part of high society. By 1972 they were living in a pigsty that would frighten a hoarder, yet they continued to behave as though they were part of the ruling class. They bicker a lot, seemingly oblivious to the horrid conditions they've living in. A lot of what they say makes little sense. They talk about the raccoons outside their window, wondering if the food they'd fed them had made them sick. County inspectors converge on the house and force a cleanup. The ladies view this as an intrusion.
"That Summer" is a strange, fascinating look at two women who defied conventions and walked to the beat of their own drum. More than likely they were mentally ill, with Little Edie the more far-gone. She often starts whispering in the middle of conversations, her ramblings going nowhere. She bursts into song, offering a cringe-inducing rendition of a 1940s pop tune, "My Adobe Hacienda." Yet, strange as they are, there is something likable about this pair. Their familial connection to Mrs. Onassis adds to their mystique.
Radziwill and Beard abandoned their project, and the footage they shot went unseen for decades. But one of the cinematographers they'd hired was Albert Maysles, a documentary filmmaker who saw the potential in telling the Beales' story. A few years later he and his brother David returned to the house and convinced the Beales to go before the cameras again. "Grey Gardens" was the result.
After her mother died, Little Edie had a brief cabaret career (her reviews were horrible) before moving to Florida, where some say she kept a nice apartment and lived an uneventful life. It's easy now to view the years that she and her mother spent together as a tragedy.
"I never thought of the Beales as unfortunate, sad, or anything except excellent at feeling what it was like to hold onto the past," Beard, who serves as one of the new film's producers, says in "That Summer." The film is now available on DVD.