DOMENIQUE BOURGEOIS ROBERTSON: “Edie sat at the makeup table in the middle of her kingdom, with the most absurd collection of bric-a-brac. Lighters. I remember a cigarette lighter shaped like a toy telephone. There was an open closet full of bizarre fur coats with square shoulders, a straw basket full of strange hats, a box of wigs. She unrolled a small Japanese carpet and began her modern dance exercises. I remember thinking of her as a strange, fragile doll about to break, a kind of tragic clown.”
DAVID DALTON: “Late morning, early afternoon. Edie consulting the I Ching, as she did every morning. Tiny prognosticating T’ang goblins rise up from the page and announce the News of Things to Come. Then there’s the almost Kabuki-like dedication to her maquillage, hours upon hours, painting and repainting her self-portrait. Spidery lashes, white lips, gold dust eyelashes.”
SANDY KIRKLAND: “I used to hang around her apartment with her. Chaos! Piles of clothing on every piece of furniture. Easels. Canvases. There was a portfolio of very small, scrunched up rodent drawings with funny little monster men... a top hat on one of them. Bleak little pictures. She would try on 25 different outfits, but every gesture was very slow. Do you remember how she moved? Like a Japanese Noh dancer – very dreamlike and slow. Lighting twenty cigarettes and putting them down.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Her Black-Capped Chickadee’s voice is on the other end of my telephone, ‘I want you to help me with my new hairdo. Can you come over?’ Her apartment is a gallery of clothes, fur coats – red fox, leopard – fur scatter rugs, embroidered pillows. I see huge peacock-feather earrings, tens of dozens of tights, a complete line of cosmetics. She has drawn on the wall right above her bed the life-size galloping Arabian stallion she left behind in Cambridge. She calls Reuben’s restaurant and says, ‘Please, caviar and blinis, immediately.’ She turns to me and says, ‘To be eaten with vodka or champagne.’ Dancing to the sound of Ornette Coleman, she says, ‘I am dyeing my hair silver.’ She cuts it shorter and applies a mauve glittery lotion with one of her paintbrushes. ‘To match Andy’s.’”
ANDY WARHOL: “This guy we knew, Carlos, always said Edie stole his leopard-skin coat. I remember he sent a Contessa down to the Factory to try to get the coat back. But you know, now that I think about it, I guess Edie probably did steal it, but only in fun.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Edie is Andy’s counterpart, more boyish than he – his gestures girlish, her motion muscular. Edie is all Andy ever wanted to be. Now that Marilyn is dead, here is Edie.”
ANDY WARHOL: “[Edie] had an incredible amount of makeup in her bag and in her footlocker: fifty pairs of lashes arranged according to size, fifty mascara wands, twenty mascara cakes, every shade of Revlon shadow ever made – iridescent and regular, matte and shiny – twenty Max Factor blush-ons… She’d spend hours with her makeup bags Scotch-taping little labels on everything, dusting and shining the bottles and compacts. Everything had to look perfect.”
PAT HARTLEY: “What I loved about Edie most was her extraordinary attention to detail. Every bracelet. She seemed to have a lot of patience for that kind of thing. Putting herself together. I thought that was just wonderful, that she could take the time to do that. Layer it, paint it, put it together. She was incredibly strong.”
BIBBE HANSEN: “Everybody would be sitting there, cooling their heels, while she obsessed, speeding her brains out, obsessed for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on just her eye makeup.”
GENEVIEVE CHARBON: “She did it very well, because she would go out for twelve hours, leaving in the afternoon and not returning until the next dawn, a hundred parties in between, and her makeup would never budge. Absolutely flawless.”
FRED EBERSTADT: “She was wonderful to watch… When she couldn’t think of anything else to do she danced. She would kind of dance across the room. She danced all the time.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “She performs for hours, creating her own choreography, borrowing from the fox-trot and the twist. As she spins, sparks of glamour fly off to an admiring crowd of young men with floppy neckties and flipped-up handkerchiefs in their breast pockets, who hang around her. Since sixties people worship the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone stares at the beaming energy of Edie, trotting with youth on her thorough-bred legs.”
