The Beale Inside Me

Who can really say how it all begins. There's a lack of money, to be sure, but also a lack of overall warewithal. Back turned to family, friends, neighbors, you seek out the company of cats and racoons. You can't afford to have the trash hauled away, but a 28-room mansion affords plenty of space to simply fill up a closet, then a hallway, then parlor, dining room, and finally the bedrooms, one by one. Because you don't leave the house the only way you feel time's passage is in your joints and in the way one litter of kittens leads inevitably to another. Eventually you become an American Miss Havisham. You are a Beale of Grey Gardens.

Every town has its own notorious recluse, its own crazy cat ladies. Few of them become the subjects of Maysles documentaries, Broadway musicals, HBO docudramas. Few of them become cult heroines, but then few of them are the aunt and cousin of Jackie O. Staunch personalities aside, Big and Little Edie occupy a permanent space in my psyche not because of the weird circumstances in which they came to live but because of the ever-hidden reasons why. How does a debutante become a crazy cat lady? How does wealth become squalor?

All they wanted to do was sing and dance. In an upper-class culture that remained essentially Victorian well into the 20th century, in which women were to marry, raise proper children, marry off those children in turn, in which women were definitively not to be heard, all they wanted was a voice. They wanted to perform, to take the male gaze that would enshrine them in domesticity and instead profit from it, flaunt it, overspill its boundaries. Today we would find nothing transgressive about this, but in their day this was transgressive enough for husband and father, sons and brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins all to abandon them. They were poor because their rich family outcast them.

Who wouldn't in turn reject the world that first rejected you? That they ultimately had only each other was no doubt both a curse and a saving grace, a curse because with one another to rely upon there was no reason to leave the house, and a saving grace because neither was alone. It didn't have to be that way. Big Edie's husband abandoned the family because she refused to behave the way he expected her to behave, and Little Edie didn't marry after her debut because she didn't want to, because she wanted a different sort of life. They provided may things for one another, without a doubt, but what each provided the other was primarily an audience. Each allowed the other to perform, to enact, to transgress.

They are pre-feminist heroines who suffered the fate of their ilk. Fifty or 100 years earlier they would have been thrown into an asylum as hysterics; Big Edie's ownership of Grey Gardens instead provided asylum of a different sort. They fascinate me because they could have been me, were I born in a different time and of a different class. Instead, I've been free to transcribe my own life, free not to marry, free to live performatively through the written word in a way they were never free. Because I live in a culture where a woman is free to be an artist, I'm richer than they ever could have been.

High Atop the Grassy Knoll

It's the week before Thanksgiving, which means it's time for our annual reconsideration of the Kennedy assassination. PBS got things started last night by rerunning Oswald's Ghost, a documentary that's useful in that it outlines the day's events and all explanations of said events, both logical and illogical, in a mere hour and a half. Lone gunman, magic bullet, grassy knoll, CIA/Bay of Pigs/Castro, FBI/mob, David Ferry and a band of not-so-merry gay men, Oswald as government agent, Oswald as KGB agent, Oswald and his mother as nut cases: it's all there.

I'm just young enough that November, 1963 means nothing to me personally. I can tell you exactly where I was when Kennedy was shot: in a bassinet in Brooklyn, sleeping or crying. I was about a month old. What's interesting to me is our culture's absolute and resolute refusal to put the "mystery" of who was behind the tragedy to rest. If anything, the intervening years have only added more and more layers to the onion, rather than providing answers.

Could Oswald have acted alone, out of a desire to enter history? I guess. Sure, he was apparently dyslexic and failed his sharpshooter exam, but everyone gets lucky once in a while, and maybe that was his day, where he could get three shots off in six seconds and hit his moving target. Could a shadow government have used him as a patsy? I guess. Sure, all sorts of things happen beyond the knowledge of the public. What's interesting is that the public believes lone gunmen were responsible for every other assassination, or at least most of the public believes this. John Wilkes Booth, acting along. Sirhan Sirhan, acting alone. James Earl Ray, acting along. John David Hinckley, alone and obsessed with Taxi Driver. Each of these men could just as easily have been patsies and part of a larger conspiracy, but most of us don't go there. For some reason, though, we've decided the Warren Commission was part of a larger cover-up and that there's more to this particular story than meets the eye.

Undoubtedly the times had much to do with this. The same administration that rushed out the Warren Report was also lying to the public about Vietnam. The intervening years didn't exactly engender a larger trust in government, what with Watergate, Iran/Contra, Whitewater, Lewinsky, WMD and the rush to Iraq. On the other hand, it's not as if 190 years of scandal-free government preceeded the assassination; Teapot Dome, anyone?

What probably makes the events of that long-ago November stay with us as a mystery and a controversy is the fact that, in many ways, the hegemony of the post-war era ended with the flight of those bullets. I don't mean the cliched end of Camelot, end of idealism here, I mean the beginning of distrust, unrest, and disaffection that lasted for the next 20 years, until everyone decided they'd had enough and it was morning in America again. Whether or not he acted alone, Oswald accomplished his purpose. He entered history.

Robert Francis Kennedy, 1925-1968

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but the GNP - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead...and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage...it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

- RFK, speech at University of Kansas, March 18, 1968