"A Touch of Grey" Vogue 2009

One afternoon in New York recently, the powers that be at HBO invited Lee Radziwill to her own private screening of Grey Gardens, which airs on April 18 on the premium cable channel. Inspired by Albert and David Maysles’s 1976 documentary of the same name about Lee’s eccentric paternal aunt, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, the film stars Jessica Lange as Big Edie and Drew Barrymore as Little Edie, her equally eccentric daughter. It was Lee who had persuaded the Beales to let the Maysleses film them in their decaying, raccoon- and cat-packed, 28-room "cottage" in East Hampton.

Anything perturbing about the screening—particularly one scene when Lee’s older sister, Jacqueline Onassis (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn), visits Grey Gardens—was like water off a swan’s back. Lee sailed home to the comforts of her immaculate, light-filled apartment on the Upper East Side, praising the remarkable performances of Drew and Jessica. She settled on a pearl-white sofa near a vase of snow-white roses and poured tea.

In the original conceit for the aforementioned scene, Aristotle Onassis was to accompany his wife on the visit. Executive producer Rachael Horovitz wanted Karl Lagerfeld to play Mr. Onassis and the willing Steven Soderbergh and Alexander Payne to portray the Maysleses, but the network, never keen on "stunt casting," the famous playing the famous, nixed the notion.

"Well, that’s all right. I don’t remember Jackie and Ari ever going there," Lee said and began recounting how Grey Gardens happened in the first place. After about 20 years of living in London, Lee had the idea of coming back to the United States "to relive my childhood in the places I loved" by doing a documentary film "through the voice of my aunt Edith, an original from day one with a great appreciation for East Hampton." Aunt Edith had always been "the black sheep" of her father’s siblings, "and my father was very close to her, always helping her out because he felt that she had been treated too roughly by their father, Major Bouvier, who was a very severe man."

With the photographer Peter Beard, Lee rented a Montauk property owned by Andy Warhol and filmmaker Paul Morrissey. Excited about her idea, Beard proposed working with the Maysleses, who had just made Gimme Shelter. "It took me six weeks to persuade the Beales to let the Maysleses into the house, but once they warmed to them, all of a sudden they imagined themselves stars, big stars!"

Lee laughed. "After a few months of filming, of course, the Maysleses didn’t want my film about East Hampton nostalgia and Aunt Edie—they wanted to focus on mother and daughter."

But as the HBO version points out, Lee, portrayed briefly by costume designer Catherine Thomas, never withdrew from Grey Gardens. When one health inspector gave the Beales a month to bring the place up to code, Lee and Mrs. Onassis cofunded a cleanup mission.

"On the day this very nice health inspector came back, I told my aunt and cousin they had to behave themselves," Lee remembered. "Aunt Edie went into a big act of trying to charm him completely, telling him how handsome he was, what a fascinating life he had, telling him the history of the house, and thanking him so much for coming." The house was not condemned.

Audiences may wonder why no one in the family didn’t intercede sooner to return Big and Little Edie to some semblance of Old Guard East Hampton respectability. "I think it would have shown great narrowness to judge them," Lee explained. "Yes, Little Edie’s mother was a beast to her, but Little Edie adored her mother. And I think they loved their screaming relationship with each other."