EDIE SEDGWICK: “The whole family story is not to be believed. Very grim. It teaches you a great deal, really tremendous amounts of things about human nature and all the terrible things people do to each other. I’m going to find my own way, free of my parents.”
DONALD LYONS: “Edie Sedgwick gave to me the impression of being born just before we met her, and a raging, furious desire to assimilate as much of life as she could.”
SUKY SEDGWICK: “My sister Pamela’s husband saw her on vacation and said he just couldn’t imagine a more pure vision of absolute beauty possible than Edie walking across a tennis court.”
NICO: “Edie was so lovely, like a little bird that you wanted to hold in your hand.”
SUKY SEDGWICK: “Mercedes 190-SL. Pretty glamorous. With our sunglasses on, feeling like two movie stars. Sizzling along the highway with the music blaring and with our fancy scarves over our hair and our big sunglasses on our faces. It was just fun, it was dress-up time in the car with the music, but there was the fine line, a razor line, too, between our fun and hysterics. Because, coming back from Anderson’s Pea Soup diner, I think we screamed all the way home. Somewhere along the line, I seem to remember that the screaming turned into tears.”
SUKY SEDGWICK: “Suddenly her glamorous world would evaporate, would shatter. Then Edie would become that hundred percent butterfly creature that she was underneath. The absolute purity and defenselessness that belonged to all the stories she told, and absolute tenderness. There would be openings in the clouds and she would throw her arms around me and cry.”
LAINE DICKERMAN: “Sometimes she could be magical. I remember one time toward the end of the winter term Edie and I stayed up late into the night. We sat on the floor in the hall outside our rooms with the moonlight coming through the French doors onto the Oriental carpet… She had on a white slip that night as a nightgown, a strap sliding off one of her shoulders… She seemed fragile, vulnerable, and serious. She invited me to come to the ranch that summer. She made it sound like the perfect life and her family like gods. I imagined all those dark, handsome Sedgwicks. It sounded wild and romantic, not like boring East Coast tennis parties. We imagined adventures we’d have riding all day in the mountains getting sunburned and then at night we’d wear long white dresses and bare feet and sit at the long family dinner table in candlelight with all those handsome brothers.”
DAVID DALTON: “Meanwhile… out at Rancho Notorious, her father Fuzzy is on the edge of his nineteenth nervous breakdown. Displaced insanity. He demands that Edie be institutionalized, and so at 19 she, too, is put in Silver Hill. Prankish and inventive, she makes empathetic little drawings of animals… her familiars, worthy of Beatrix Potter. While there, she steals her friend Virginia Davis’ soul and gets away with it. In photos of her at Silver Hill – black tights, legs in plie position on her bed – she looks deliriously happy. But then, she always felt at home in the bins.”
DONALD LYONS: “I gave her a history of the ancient world. I don’t think I actually read it myself, but I think she did. She was incredibly absorbing and retentive, and it all came fresh to her. It had no context, ancient Iraq or Rome, you know, it might have been last week in New Jersey, but it had the force of a life she didn’t know. You got the impression that the creature, that Edie, was made literally by Zeus three weeks ago, that there was no past to her save what she picked up from books and people. She indeed would compare Raymond Chandler or Jane Austen or ancient Rome to what she experienced last night with the tuna fish, but it was marvelous and fresh.”
DAVID DALTON: “In desultory fashion she’d studied sculpture in Cambridge with her cousin Lily Saarinen, spending an entire year modeling a T’ang dynasty horse, scraping the clay off, patching it, reshaping it. That raveling/unraveling compulsion, mending the invisible flaw, were chronic speed freak symptoms. Mercurial, changeable, impulsive Edie, seeing a shrink three times a week, picnicking up in Mount Auburn Cemetery where Mary Baker Eddy is buried with her telephone. In and out of haute loony bins and, in a perfectly surreal touch, being driven straight from the nut house to see ‘La Dolce Vita.’”
FRED EBERSTADT: “There was a young man at Harvard and what he said to me was, ‘Every boy at Harvard was trying to save Edie from herself.’ And that’s the quality I think she had, of being quite vulnerable and quite odd, maybe sort of a little loony but very beautiful and very, very attractive. And that, more than her physical appearance, had to do with her great appeal to guys.”
CHUCK WEIN: “I had some fantasy of Arthurian knighthood and Lancelot, and – being sort of rebellious – I thought I could challenge this sickening family that had destroyed this girl. She was charming, but she was like a child, and she was very willful and difficult.”
SUKY SEDGWICK: “Edie didn’t want anybody too close to her. As soon as there were men who were interested, she would wriggle away. It was physical protection. In the beginning, both Edie and I went to some coming-out parties, but by the end of the year they were all-night orgy things. She ended up at breakfast in long evening dresses. It became a kind of feat. Hers was a non-stop zoom, zoom, zoom. I do remember moments of desperation, but she was consuming different experiences… spinning faster and faster.”
EDIE SEDGWICK: “I was thinking of how when I went to Cambridge after I’d gotten out of two years of hospitals, where my parents had me committed, I went to Cambridge and I started going out a lot. And then I never came back at night at all. I was out with different men every night, practically. And my younger sister and youngest brother tried to get me committed to McLean for my bad behavior. They thought I was really being terrible. But I didn’t go.”
CHUCK WEIN: “She was like a wind-up doll who had lots of delightful bits, but she was excessively bubbly, compulsively giggly. You had to slow her down, calm her down, look her in the eye and talk to her to get her out of the defense. She had a whole armada of defenses, just and amazing repertoire of stuff, and she seemed to be very, very on top of it. But there was a faraway look in there.”
EDIE SEDGWICK: “The basis of my faith in living at all is somebody like Chuck who will understand what I say and whom I could understand, who was the first person to say something other than I was insane and brilliant, or something that means zero. If I didn’t do the normal thing, I might as well die.”
ED HENNESSEY: “We enjoyed ourselves most by going to parties. Entering the door was like going on stage.”
SUKY SEDGWICK: “She was acting out the repression of our mother’s generation by blasting out each day constantly. In a way, she was a metaphor for the young of that time who were not political.”
GORDON BALDWIN: “The word ‘winsome’ comes to mind, that elegant, slim figure on the table-top. It seemed so purely Fitzgeraldian. That’s what made it glamorous.”
JOHN ANTHONY WALKER: “The moon rose out of the ocean, spiraling up in the dark. It was the final touch – a nice moon rippling on the ocean and turning everything silver. Edie was very sensitive to enchantments. She broke away from the form completely and was doing these totally free dance movements. We looked out from under the marquee, and there she was on this deserted lawn. And she was cartwheeling across it, cartwheeling. I remember the music dying down as the focus of attention shifted to her out there… Edie had the capacity to create instantly the world around her. You entered Edie’s world and nothing tangential made any difference – everything else fell away and there Edie was in the middle of a pirouette.”
JOHN ANTHONY WALKER: “I remember spending one night with Edie drinking coffee in Cambridge… this was sort of splendid because she didn’t have the seventh party to go to. As cup of coffee after cup of coffee kept mounting, she described her sense of the big dimensions, of multitudes… the mass and the multitude. Edie disliked rules; she disliked boxes; she disliked the door locking behind her in Silver Hill; she disliked going to sleep. She had to try for the biggest stage possible, and that’s why she moved to New York.”
JOHN SEDGWICK: “Edie’s story reaches past the particular terror of the stunning downfall of a great beauty to evoke something central to her era, something that is hard to capture or express… In many ways, Edie outdid all of the Sedgwicks to become the very personification of the sexy, incandescent nowness that remains the most distinctive aspect of that strange, psychedelic era. In the ranks of the Sedgwicks she stands unique in another way as well. Although Edie’s style became THE style, she could never really be said to DO anything at all. She just WAS. A presence… And so she represents another turn of that great wheel, from active to passive to an eerie neutrality, just being there, for others to make of what they would. She was like one of the pacifist Buddhist monks who maintained a transcendent serenity as they burned themselves alive. There is the same eerie silence as Edie’s flaming mania consumed her, while a nation watched, mesmerized. This was her brilliance.”
MINDY LEWIS: “Jane and I sit on Edie’s bed passing a hash pipe, concentrating so hard on being quiet that we’re soon choking on smoke and laughter. Later we talk. Edie is interested in our life stories, and very open about sharing hers. She tells us about growing up on the ranch in California, running wild with the horses, raised by servants under the egomaniacal eye of a father who dominated her mother and everyone else, and about her passionate love for her brothers. She cries when she talks about them. Two of her brothers died, one by suicide, one in an accident. ‘What a fucked-up family,’ she says. ‘I had to get away from them, but it’s impossible to really get away.’”
