The world is just mad about the Maysles. With the original documentary 30 years in the can and both Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie laid safely to rest, the line between exploitation and celebration has been permanently obscured, and we can squeal over the aristocratic squalor without an ounce of guilt. (Did Little Edie just go upstairs to feed the raccoons a mound of Wonder Bread and cat chow?!) The musical version of Grey Gardens opened and transferred to Broadway, a narrative film starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange has been announced, Albert Maysles has pillaged his own discarded material to create the "sequel" The Beales of Grey Gardens (reviewed on page 88 and available on DVD on Tuesday, December 5), and Variety reports he's now making a new hour-long documentary about the musical based on his own film. The furor is excessive and cannibalistic, but anything less would be an affront to the Beales' legacy—a reminder of the fragility and discomfort of camp appreciation in an era when the aesthetic is anticipated, cultivated, and inadvertently warded against.

In Grey Gardens, Edith Bouvier Beale (the aunt of one Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) and her daughter Edie (Jackie O's cousin) live in a 28-room mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, filled with knickknacks and cats and seemingly endless cartons of ice cream and tins of liver pâté. Big Edie, splayed on a narrow bed that serves as her throne, warbles "Tea for Two" and issues imperious commands to her daughter. Little Edie wears ludicrous outfits, vamps for the camera, peers through a magnifying glass at her astrological love matches, and declares her ardent love for the Catholic Church. She also says some amazing things. "The relatives didn't know they were dealing with a staunch character!" she snarls. Or intones wispily, "It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present." She alludes to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. Little Edie is stringing out baubles from her fancy education (at Miss Porter's School in Farmington) for their intended, if belated, purpose: display in high society, or as close to high society as she can find. In her former life as a debutante, she may have consorted with J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes—but parading for the Maysles will have to do.

There is no real story in Grey Gardens, just the rehearsal of old stories slashed to bitter shorthand. We have no idea how Little Edie, the sunny darling in the amateur fashion show, transformed herself into the turbaned wildcat we see prancing to a military march. We have no idea why Big Edie really called Little Edie back to live at Grey Gardens. We have no idea what happened to Little Edie's hair. But the Beales' fall from grace would have been a tragedy; as it is, Grey Gardens is tragic and warm and mysterious and oh so tenderly camp.