STEPHEN KOCH: “A snapshot. It is 1966. The elevator moans to the fourth floor; the silver door is pushed open. In the middle of the silvery haven, Edie Sedgwick sits on a huge quilted red couch, her face warm but sharp, her eyes alive. She smokes a cigarette, sips a Pepsi. People in groups talk or romp, and the whole place is hollowly resonating with Maria Callas in ‘Traviata.’ Two goofy-looking girls in one corner are taunting a beefy-looking young man in blue denim. A hustler who doesn’t yet know quite where he is, his foursquare face bewildered. Around the turn of the L-shaped space, Warhol sits on an old trunk, watching one of his own films. Chewing his gum, he stares at the nearly unchanging image, one hand lightly lifted toward his chin, his fingers trailing on his skin. He seems utterly self-contained, at peace. Back in the main space, Billy Name greets the newcomers and plunks one under a key light before a permanently installed Bolex. A reel of film is run through; a film portrait has been made. Nothing is happening. It is Billy’s incessant task to record it. Then the caterers arrive. The elevator unloads a rock band, which begins to set up. There is to be a party.”
ROBERT HEIDE: “Being with Andy and Edie was like running with a teenage gang. Edie was not only very beautiful but there was a lot of sensitivity. She had a kind of Judy Garland quality with the legs, the deep penetrating childlike eyes, vaporous skin, people would stop and stare. It wasn’t the real bad drug period, although she was taking drugs like everybody else. I remember one party at the Factory that summer: everybody was there, like Tennessee Williams, Nureyev, Judy Garland, and Edie was very high up on a rafter doing the twist for the longest period of time, alone. She often talked about trying to get close to Andy. She had some kind of fascination that bordered on sister-brother incest crush, but she was always frustrated that she never could get close to him on some emotional level.”
TONY SCHERMAN: “Edie’s dalliances with lipstick and makeup were epic. Chronically late, she could easily spend three hours doing her face to the exasperation of anyone who happened to be waiting for her to show up. Her belated arrivals at parties and openings, hours after she was expected, created a sense of drama and seemed the sign of a true diva. But to those who were a part of her everyday life, she had become a maddening, self-absorbed child. Her inveterate tardiness turned even the implacable Andy into a scolding parent.”
DANNY FIELDS: “Edie Sedgwick was close with all those people who were close to the Kennedys. Edie had affairs with a couple of them, didn’t she? I think one would come in the front door and the other brother would go out the back. So it was at the same time, but not the same minute. Everyone knew that. I loved Bobby Kennedy. He was my political idol. Sometimes Edie would say about Bobby, ‘Oh, he was so cute and cuddly,’ but I wasn’t going to ask her about him. I mean, what are you going to ask?”
RICHIE BERLIN: “What fun she was to be with! All my friends are the most divine mixture of horrors. Darling, you have no idea what it was like to get up, get into a Donald Brooks dress, put on my Zuckerman coat, get my gold shoulder earrings out, get my Margaret Jerrould pumps on, and go around with Edie to Lord and Taylor’s on the ground floor with my paranoia and tell them I’m rich. To go into a store was like Broadway. This was it. You’d go in and you’re up for the Academy Awards on the ground floor.”
BILLY NAME: “When Edie came into a room, everybody would be en pointe. Her poise was so natural and her charm was so engaging. She wouldn’t hesitate to go up to anyone and talk to anyone. She was like a creature from another world.”
JOHN SEDGWICK: “’Space’ has not one Edie, but four. For the movie is two films projected side by side, simultaneously each of them showing Edie in close-up, great peacock earrings dangling off the sides of her face and her hair done up a la Marie Antoinette as she chatters to Warhol offscreen, while another, slightly larger Edie in profile talks to her from a TV set. It’s Edie as animated pop icon, a Marilyn or a Jackie. She is certainly captivating. Her skin has the creamy softness of skin that’s never been touched by anything but air. And the alertness of her, the way she is so plugged in to Andy, her eyes locked onto him, her voice breathless for him, it is almost perverse, like something we shouldn’t see. Take away all the artsy, high-tech proto-Cubism, and it was a screentest of the next Judy Garland. Warhol saw that in her, and more, he saw a kittenish innocence, too, which gives all the cameras – and the sense of Warhol himself as the man behind all the cameras – a ghoulish quality. It’s the movie of a woman being devoured by her own image.”
DAVID DALTON: “An existential Ophelia high on Desoxin, you can see the wheels of her mind spinning in cycles and epicycles.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Straight line, anthracite eyebrows, silvery moist lips, white hair, Edie dances the Sedgwick – that’s what we call it – wearing a million bangle bracelets, perched on the highest of heels with her God-created perfect legs arabesquing in her rock and roll ballet with fluid grave. Out every night, Edie picks up the tab for her entourage of thirty leeches, including Andy and myself.”
HENRY GELDZAHLER: “They were both these pale, frail, glamorous people, but Andy had always felt himself to be unattractive and to be with Edie was to be Edie for a season. He loved running around with her appearing in public. She was one of his ego images. And Edie thought she was Andy’s. She felt possessed.”
RICHIE BERLIN: “It was during that whole era, darling, of ‘where shall we go before we go to the Hippopotamus and before we go to Le Club? I mean, everybody in the eyelash set went to Dr. Roberts to get their hearts started! To keep thin and keep it going. I walked all the way to the Village. I flew around the house. I cleaned. I charged in stores. I didn’t even know I was in Bloomingdale’s; I just had to acquire more and more things. I wrote notes. I wrote a 65 page letter telling somebody I wanted him. I knew exactly where my head was going the whole time.”
ETHEL SCULL: “Edie and Andy were at an opening at Lincoln Center with the cameramen as hysterical as if Mrs. Kennedy was making an entrance, lunging at the pair of them. Edie just preened… absolutely enjoying every minute of it. So did Andy, who sat humbly with his head down, wearing his leather jacket, and whispering to Edie what to do. Directing her... Edie loved it. I once asked her, ‘How does it feel to be a superstar?’ and she said, ‘It’s frightening and glamorous and exciting at the same time. I wouldn’t change it for anything! After the bad and sad times in my life, it’s something I want to do.’ At intermission that night she stepped out into the aisle of the State Theatre in her black leotards, doing her kind of free-form dancing… no music… with the whole audience watching.”
CHUCK WEIN: “We drove around in that gray Mercedes, staying up all night after the discotheques closed at four.”
DANNY FIELDS: “She would drive her Mercedes on acid. I thought that was the most daredevil thing she’d ever been into… I mean, she’d go up on curbs sometimes, and she’d never pay much attention to traffic lights.”
ANDY WARHOL: “She always wanted to leave. Even if a party was good, she wanted to leave. It’s the way they work now in St. Moritz: I mean, people who spend fortunes to have parties can’t wait until they’re over so they can go somewhere else. I don’t understand that. Can’t wait to go… and there’s no place to go. These people in big, expensive cars can’t wait to get to the next party… and there’s no next party. They just get up and leave. It’s really funny. But Edie was like that. She just couldn’t wait to get to the next place.”
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: “I met Edie at an opening. In any situation her physicality was so refreshing that she exposed all the dishonesty in the room. I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created.”
TONY SCHERMAN: “On the night of Andy’s one-man museum show in Philadelphia, Andy arrived an hour or so late, with Edie, Sam Green, Gerard Malanga, and Chuck Wein in tow. By this time a crowd estimated at a thousand had gathered. There was supposed to be dancing in the back room, where Andy’s entourage repaired, ‘but already,’ Green recalled, ‘the room had crowded to the point where several people were pushed out the window, broke things, and wound up in the hospital. Then we heard there was a wave of more people coming. We not only called the campus police, but they called the Philadelphia police. Andy was afraid for his life. He thought he’d be torn to pieces.’ Linking arms, the Warhol group ran for cover just as the second wave surged through the entrance… ‘And there we were, stuck in this birdcage,’ according to Green. ‘We were trapped, and that crowd was angry: partly because there was nothing to see and partly because the people had come to see and meet Andy Warhol, and nobody could get close to him. There were also people who hated Andy’s art – there were placards protesting Pop.’”
SAM GREEN: “Edie was like Evita on the balcony: ‘Oh, all you people who’ve come here to see this wonderful artist, and this wonderful show at the University of Pennsylvania. There’s my friends down from Harvard – hi, Pete! – and we’re all here, we just love Philadelphia. Wave to them, Andy! And here’s Gerard – take a bow, Gerard! And wait a minute, is that you, Steve – Steve from Harvard? Come on up!’ And Steve so-and-so would come and so-and-so would go up, and she’d talk with them and kiss-kiss and send them back down again. It was partly narcissism, but it was partly, she realized, her job. She kept everybody down there kind of calm, she kept the focus on herself rather than the unpleasantness of being down below shoved around. She was very smart; her sense was, ‘These people came to see something. They’re not having a good time. Whatever they came for, I’d better give ‘em something, whatever I can, to calm down this situation.’ [Wearing a Gernreich dress] with twenty-foot rollup sleeves, she dangled them from her perch and people were jumping to try and grab them. If they had, she’d have been pulled into the mob.”
ONDINE: “There’s no way people can stand outside a museum and chant ‘Edie and Andy.’ But they were out there, chanting and screaming. They were that relevant. Edie told me afterwards, ‘Ondine, I cannot believe that they were out there chanting ‘Edie and Andy! Edie and Andy!’ She said it was like an insane response from a whole culture. I said, ‘Well, that’s what it is. These people are relating to you for a very good reason.’ If you’re going to be that kind of culture hero, my God! Assume the mantle. Wear it! Be the culture hero. Edie was, literally, the queen of the whole scene. Totally the best of them all.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “The changes in Edie were obvious in Philadelphia. Her eyes looked like hollow black sockets. She had started wearing long-sleeved, floor-length dresses to hide the scratches on her arms and legs, and to mask her face she made herself up like a death’s-head. Increasingly, in public, she seemed more like Andy’s zombie than his partner – he directed her every movement with whispered commands to ‘stand up, move around, pose.’”
JOHN PALMER: “She wasn’t there, the way she would move and the way she would comport. And that was one of the reasons people would be sitting around her, astonished that a person could be doing this in real time as a living being.”
GERARD MALANGA: “A night out with Edie was the kind of activity you’d read about in a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald. One would never dream it could still happen. Edie made it happen. She added something to the ambience of every public place or private home she entered. She was an archetype. Edie was not career-oriented at the time she met Andy. Edie was a blue-blood. She had no active goals other than to enjoy herself to the fullest. She could be very easily molded. She had the one ingredient essential to be a star – glamor. Glamor is aura. The person who possesses aura becomes beautiful. Andy was deeply fascinated with glamor on this level. He had an eye for it.”
BOB NEUWIRTH: “She went through limousine companies the way people go through cigarettes. She never paid her bills, so the limousine people would shut her off and she’d shift to a new company. The drivers loved her madly, because she’d dole out these 25 and 30 dollar tips.”
NAT FINKELSTEIN: “She showed me one after hours bootlegger where you could get Chateau Marmont. Seriously. She knew where to get caviar. She knew where to get the most expensive anything after hours.”
DONALD LYONS: “Life was something you danced out in the afternoon, something you danced out in the evening.”
PATTI SMITH: “Watching Edie dance was like seeing a black and white movie in person.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Aux Puces means ‘of the fleas’ or ‘flea market,’ and Nilo DePaul named his discotheque that because everything in it was for sale. If you like the chair you were sitting on, the table you were at, or the birdcage hanging over your head, you could buy it and take it home. Aux Puces became known for its opulence and intimacy, its gay, straight, hooker, drug-dealer, socialite, and celebrity clientele, but most of all for its fabulous music.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Cerebrum was a kind of pleasure dome for trippers, designed by John Storyk (who later designed Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios). There was no bar, alcohol, seating, stage, dance floor, or band at Cerebrum. Instead, it featured state-of-the-art sensory stimulation devices. You took your clothes off upon entering, donned a long, flowy caftan, and lounged around on white-carpeted platforms, where a mixture of music, sound effects, lights, smells, projections, fogs, mists, glowing orbs, and an enveloping white parachute kept you entertained. Meanwhile, sexy young nymphs massaged your feet with body cream, rubbed minted ice cubes on your lips, and encouraged you to ‘share in the oneness.’”
ANDY WARHOL: “[Edie] would spend most of the day at lunch uptown at Reuben’s ordering their Celebrity Sandwiches – the Anna Maria Alberghetti, the Arthur Godfrey, the Morton Downey were her favorites – and she would keep running into the ladies room and sticking her finger down her throat and throwing each one up. She was obsessed with not getting fat. She’d eat and eat on a spree and then throw up and throw up, and then take four downers and pop off for four days at a time. Meanwhile, her ‘friends’ would come in to ‘rearrange’ her pocketbook while she was sleeping. When she’d wake up four days later she’d deny that she’d been asleep.”
JOHN CALE: “The whole Factory, every evening, would go to some restaurant, some event. To the Ginger Man, where Edie had an account; she'd pick up the bill. Nothing to eat during the day except milkshakes, junk food, then we’d go out and WOW, steaks, hamburgers, dessert. Everybody would order a dessert which nobody would eat, except Edie. She would eat everybody’s dessert. Thin as a rail, but she could eat like a horse. I think Barbara Rubin said she learned how to lose weight from Edie, when they met in upstate New York, wherever this mental hospital was where they were incarcerated. I think that’s how Barbara introduced Edie to Andy. They used to eat, and she would throw up. Bulimic, exactly.”
STERLING MORRISON: “When we were riding in the limousine, after Edie had just come out of Capezio, and had bought brand new shoes, she was carrying on about how she loved the shoes. Had spent a lot of money on them. And after taking a second look at them, she decided she didn’t like them, rolled down the window and threw them out. That’s the essential Edie. Not a happy person.”
ROBERT HEIDE: “One image I have of Edie is at a party… dancing, dancing, dancing, just kind of whirling and twirling. I was a little spaced out myself but I remember thinking, When is she going to stop? What is she on? I was sort of like one of those dolls that spin out of control.”
ONDINE: “Part of the reason this whole Warhol thing worked in the sixties and was so fabulous was because of Edie. She was essential. But she was on drugs. She was a nonstop drug addict period. And Andy didn’t force her to take drugs. That’s such a crock of shit. She was on drugs long before I ever met her. She had pharmacists. One of my duties as her French maid was to go to the pharmacist and get her uppers and downers and betweeners or whatever and throw them in her face.”
EDIE: “Ondine, every time I pick up this glass I spill it.”
ONDINE: “Maybe the liquid doesn’t want to be contained.”
EDIE: “Do you think it means anything?”
ONDINE: “Maybe it wants freedom.”
EDIE: “Maybe it means I shouldn’t have any more.”
DANNY FIELDS: “You could be in love with anybody and still be in love with Edie. You didn’t have to stop being in love with anybody to be in love with Edie. The circle of magic that she presented was big enough to take you in. You knew that you couldn’t really have her, that she was doomed. You just knew that.”
