Blonde on Blonde

EDIE SEDGWICK: “I lived a very isolated life. When you start at twenty, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.”

GORDON BALDWIN: “I helped her pack and drove her to New York in her Mercedes-Benz. The car was completely filled with mismatched luggage, boxes, parcels, and such miscellaneous objects as stuffed animals, straw baskets, and a large collection of unpacked hats. On one of the turnpikes Edie pulled into a Howard Johnson’s under the impression that it was a long row of phone booths. Her visibility may have been bad with all that luggage, but that was typical of Edie’s kind of vagueness.”

DANNY FIELDS: “She came to New York as the darling of Cambridge, and these were all rich kids. What she learned of New York, then? I don’t know. She learned how to use the telephone and how to fill ashtrays and steal jars of Listerine.”

DAVID DALTON: “With a sense of desperation, of things catching up with her, she entered the disenchanted circle of New York’s phosphorescent nightworld to take her place as its rightful queen… Edie zoned in on the hot spots, the places where the magma rose to the surface from sulfurous underground springs fed by restlessness, perversion, and amphetamines. Exquisite rooms in which hot house creatures lounged and dreamed and talked in fantastic stream-of-consciousness raps that short-circuited themselves and set off brush fires in the mind.”

DAVID DALTON: “Edie enters the Factory in her otherworldly daze. She is at once natural and a creature of pure artifice. Everything about her – her tights, her long legs, her high heels, her preternaturally skinny body, her huge eyes – seems to drift upwards as if the cigarette she is smoking were made of helium.”

DAVID DALTON: “With Edie Sedgwick, Andy was going to introduce the concept of the superstar into the murky, anonymous casting system of underground movies. A pop oxymoron, a kind of superlative diminutive, the word superstar is so camp, so over the top and silly. A tatty wig, heels, swaths of rouge, and a lot of amphetamine and – voila! – you were a superstar performing in a tawdry, incomprehensible tableau.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Edie had arrived in France wearing a white mink coat over her T-shirt and tights and carrying one little suitcase. When she ‘unpacked’ at the hotel, I saw that the only thing she’d brought with her was another white mink coat! She wore one of them to Castel’s that night and when someone offered to check her coat, she clutched it around her and said, ‘No! it’s all I’ve got on!’ She had a low, husky voice that always sounded like she’d been crying.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Warhol was a star too, and he caught people’s eye, if only because it was so hard not to stare at him. But it was his companion Edie Sedgwick who conquered their hearts. Elfin and boyish, wide-eyed but not yet the legless tragedy of future legend, bubbling with charm and the innocent beauty that so enraptured Warhol that he wound up destroying it. The previous evening, dining with Salvador Dali at the Crazy Horse Saloon, it was Edie who broke the ice between the artists when she leaned over to the grandfather of surrealism and asked, ‘How does it feel to be such a famous writer?’”

JOHN SEDGWICK: “For Andy, Edie was a brand name only, whose selling power came, aside from her cover-girl beauty, from being steeped in subliminal associations with old money, New England prep schools, European aesthetics, fine art, generations of breeding, and a certain knowingness – everything, in short, that Edie ran away from as nothing at all. But it was everything to a bewigged, asexual, pale-faced, hollow-hearted immigrant’s kid from the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania who had, along with an innovative brilliance, an uncanny feel for the class consciousness that underlay a big part of the 1960s zeitgeist. He destroyed her, but he made her first.”

JOHN SEDGWICK: “To keep an eye on her, my father invited her several times to Sunday dinner, a tedious affair with roast beef, cheap sangria, and the same Churchill stories. She came only once, arriving behind the wheel of a gray Mercedes her parents, in a moment of weakness, had bought for her, the sort of car my parents would never own. It was a hot, bright day, and she wore sunglasses, a tight blouse, and short pants. I was spellbound. Edie livened the lunch up considerably, though, by skipping out on dessert to slip out through the French doors to the backyard, where she stripped down to her panties to sunbathe half naked. I remember nothing but a sense of spectacular whiteness against the green lawn – while the grown-ups sipped coffee from demitasse cups, unaware.”

GERARD MALANGA: “Edie was the personification of the poor little rich girl. Her features, slight and symmetrical with no outstanding facial bone structure were brightened by the vivid and penetrating eyes, full of small timidities, which recorded perhaps the shock that too great an honesty expects from life. Most of her wardrobe consisted of shirts with tails hanging out and leotards. She knew how to wear them with a style and grace unachieved by anyone else. She liked to wear large earrings. She applied a great deal of make-up before going out. When she spoke she made sense. She could not be the fool or be made to look foolish.”

DAVID DALTON: “The usual drone of cocktail party chatter, ‘Eight Days a Week’ playing softly in the background. Suddenly, a strange girl in black tights, striped t-shirt and giant earrings enters the room. With her odd birdlike gait, she twirls into the very center of the room and remains there, simply… twirling. A few giggles. Someone wonders what she’s on, poor thing. But as they’re talking, right under their very noses, the room begins to spin.”

JOHN PALMER: “It’s childlike in one sense. You’re going in somewhere that’s forbidden, in the sense that you’re being invited into somewhere that’s kind of mysterious and special.”

PATTI SMITH: “Black-eyed, ermine-haired Edie Sedgwick in her white, white furs. There was something about her. It wasn't necessarily sexuality but a charismatic energy that seemed as much rooted in intelligence as beauty. She seemed completely connected with the moment. There was something international about her. She made everywhere seem like Paris. She had a sweet, expressive face like Monroe but possessed a slim, modern body. She was edgy yet so fresh that even her false eyelashes came off as real.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “On a hot summer eve, I open the door of the Factory. I am facing a vision. A slim, oh-so-slim sylph silhouette, dressed in a black leotard cut above the knees. Its hair is streaked with silver. Wearing black desert boots, it seems to walk on air. Could this hermaphrodite be, if not a twin, an offspring of Andy’s? This mannequin turns around. It has striking beauty and immense eyes engulfing the world, now! An angelic and milky complexion adorns it. Vulnerability exudes from every fine pore of its skin. Its smile is held open like the curtains of a Broadway stage. Spotlights seem to follow this creature wherever it turns. Andy addresses me: ‘This is Edie Sedgwick. You have not met before.’ A shimmering cluster of rhinestones hangs from one ear. Her skin reminds me of the tender skin of a famous Spanish matador Dali and I once visited in his dressing room. Dali and I touched the matador’s skin right before he entered the arena. We frantically brushed his skin as one would a reliquary. Half an hour later, that same skin was torn and spattered with blood.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Andy says to Edie, ‘Are you in a mood to be filmed? Remember, we are doing your life story on film.’ Edie maintains her smile. ‘It’s getting late,’ she says. ‘My chauffeur is waiting outside.’ Edie, Andy and I hop in the backseat. Edie has her face pressed to the window, her eyes open wide, oh so wide, as if to comprehend and absorb the whole city. We drop her off in the East Sixties. On the way to Andy’s place, he turns to me and says, ‘Should Edie OD, we must film it. Stay in close touch with her.’”

ULTRA VIOLET: “Vulnerability exuded from every pore of her skin. Like a precocious preppy puppet, she rocked and rolled unconsciously to the sound of a radio station inside her head. She was always high. And Andy liked high people.”