June 2, 2016

In the 1990s, composer Scott Frankel became a keen fan of Albert and David Maysles’ famed 1975 documentary film, “Grey Gardens,” the story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ most down-and-out relatives.

Back in the 1940s, Onassis’ aunt, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, along with Edith’s daughter, “Little Edie,” had lived in splendor at their magnificent East Hampton, N.Y., estate dubbed Grey Gardens. Edith, or “Big Edie,” held court at musical salons and Little Edie was the most promising debutante of her day. Nicknamed “Body Beautiful Beale,” Little Edie dated the likes of Howard Hughes, a Rockefeller bachelor and even John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph, to whom she was briefly engaged.

“She was the real ‘It girl’ of her time,” said Frankel, who turned the documentary into a Tony Award-winning musical, in collaboration with lyricist Michael Korie and book writer Doug Wright. The musical opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on July 13.

By the early 1970s, the Beales had spiraled downward into poverty. The documentary chronicles their fraught relationship in a mansion that had become filthy, decrepit and infested with cats and raccoons.

“Yet even though the camera showed them in this hovel, they carried themselves as very elegant, regal, upper-crust ladies,” Frankel said in a telephone conversation from his home in New York.  “They were eating cat food and calling it ‘paté.’ I was riveted by that juxtaposition. And the mother and daughter had this incredibly co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship. They supported each other and needled each other. They would go from a very calm scene to roiling fury and then to something very funny. I was fascinated that their makeup allowed them to turn on a dime emotionally.”

Throughout the 1990s, Frankel, now 53, watched the documentary myriad times at private gatherings and at screenings in Cape Cod, Mass. At parties, his friends would quote lines from the film and dress up as Little Edie had in the film.

Composer Scott Frankel. Photo courtesy of Center Theatre Group

“She had this wonderful, eccentric head gear where she would wrap sweaters, scarves or even skirts on her head in a kind of unmistakable way,” Frankel recalled.  “And the way that both the women spoke was very studied; it sounded like you were in the middle of a Tennessee Williams play.”

Around 2000, Frankel, a Yale graduate who grew up in a Jewish home in suburban Cleveland, was looking for a new musical project when he remembered his fascination with the women of “Grey Gardens.”  

“Everybody thought I was insane,” he said. “No one else had ever attempted to turn a documentary into a musical.”

But Frankel saw the possibilities — particularly because the Edies had fancied themselves as performers, which would work well for a musical. Little Edie loved to dance, and her mother was an avid soprano “who would perform at the drop of a pin,” Frankel said. “She’d show up to her cousins’ weddings and break into an aria, unsolicited and unwanted. She always liked to be in the spotlight, and if she wasn’t, she made sure that she was.”

And Little Edie had always said that while she adored the Maysles’ documentary, she wished that there had been more singing and dancing in the film. “So I thought I could oblige her,” Frankel said.

The composer turned to his friend, librettist Korie, 61, who had grown up in an Orthodox home in New Jersey and previously written operas on the subjects of kabbalah and Jewish gay activist Harvey Milk. Korie was looking to break into musical theater, and quickly warmed to Frankel’s idea.

The librettist had seen “Grey Gardens” years before, but when he watched it again, he was captivated by one pivotal scene that seemed to sum up the Edies’ complex relationship.

“Old Edie is cooking corn in a crockpot by her bed, as if it is lobster Thermidor,” Korie said from his home in New York. “Their young handyman, Jerry, is there, and the mother is saying what a good mother she is because Jerry likes her corn. But really what she’s doing is using Jerry as a kind of surrogate child to criticize her daughter. I thought, ‘There’s so much mother-daughter stuff just in this one scene.’ And I felt there could be something universal in this story about parents and their children.”

With Korie on board, Frankel approached Albert Maysles in order to purchase the rights to the documentary. Frankel was crestfallen to learn that an opera composer from Toulouse, France, had already asked about an adaptation. So Frankel immediately set up a meeting with Maysles to convince him that a musical would be the best way to go.

“The music that was important to these women was not primarily of a classical nature,” he told Maysles. “They sang popular American songs of the 1940s: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and some light operetta.” Maysles saw Frankel’s point and promptly gave him and Korie the go-ahead.

Persuading playwright Doug Wright to sign on to the project proved much more difficult. Wright insisted the documentary was primarily a psychological portrait, without the narrative plot crucial for a musical. “He declined, repeatedly, for a year,” Frankel said.

Then Frankel and Korie had a revelation. While the documentary reveals the protagonists only in their impoverished state, the musical’s first act could capture the mother and daughter in their heyday in the 1940s. That way, audiences would know how much they eventually lost. Act II could take place in the early 1970s, and closely follow the action of the documentary. “We went directly to Doug’s home in Brooklyn to tell him our idea, and he agreed on the spot,” Frankel said.

For Act I, the collaborators condensed some devastating true events into one fateful afternoon:  Joseph Kennedy breaks off his engagement to Little Edie on the same day that Big Edie learns her husband is in Mexico seeking to divorce her.

The music in Act I is inspired by the popular tunes of the 1940s, while the songs in the second act are eerier, darker and a bit more discordant, Frankel said.

“The unknowable question that hangs over the piece is, how could this have happened to these two women,” Frankel added. “How could they have started out with looks and smarts and societal influence, only to end up recluses with no money, isolated from their family and at each other’s throats?”

The creators sought to answer these questions by studying the documentary, plus some unreleased Super 8 footage from the film.

One winter’s day, they also visited the real Grey Gardens, which by then had been purchased and meticulously restored by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Post journalist Sally Quinn.

Korie recalled standing in the tiny bedroom in which most of the documentary was shot. “To save on heat, the Edies would hole themselves into one small room and cover the windows with cloth and plastic,” Korie said. “I looked out the window, and it was just so desolate and dead in the middle of winter. I felt how lonely Little Edie must have been in that house with just her elderly mother and her memories.” The result was the winsome song “Winter in a Summer Town,” which captures those bleak emotions.

Big Edie died in 1977, but her daughter lived long enough to learn from Maysles about the plans for the “Grey Gardens” musical. In a letter not long before her death in 2002, Little Edie wrote, in girlish script, that she was “thrilled, thrilled, thrilled” about the prospect of the show.

Some charge that the documentary exploited the two women, but Frankel disagrees.

“There has long been the accusation that the two women were somehow duped into letting it all hang out, warts and all, in front of the camera,” he said. “And it is true that the house is truly filthy and the flesh is truly sagging. But the women themselves felt particularly angry about that charge; they felt that the camera showed them exactly as they wanted to be seen. Both women had this incredible desire to be seen and heard. And our musical serves the same purpose.”

“Grey Gardens” begins previews at the Ahmanson Theatre on July 6. The show opens July 13 and runs through Aug. 14. For tickets and information, visit www.centertheatregroup.org