RONALD TAVEL: “’Vinyl’ was Edie’s first Warhol film. Andy propped her up on a huge trunk, smoking a cigarette, and occasionally flicking her ashes on the boy who was being tortured. She sat there, sort of stretched out, and the camera just went berserk looking at those eyes. The outfit she wore was certainly calculated… she had no breasts, but she had legs that didn’t quit, so why not show everybody the legs all the time? What do you do with legs like that in the middle of winter, I don’t know… freeze to death?”
PAUL JAY ROBBINS: “I dig reading Poe like any morassed romantic, I savor Beardsley like a feather on my privates, I read Kafka and de Sade in my intimate wine-cellar of fermenting forbidden fruit; even Alistair Crowley sits on my book shelf hypnotically swinging his legs. Such artists may be described as morbid or aberrated or even simple-sick – but only by way of attitude, not worth. Warhol, too, has his place. His movies are no longer the innocent surveys and inspections of the Empire State Building or sleeping persons or even the ingenuous ingestion of a banana of someone of suspect sex. They are down-home bondage freak-out flicks, complete with silver-bossed leather head-masks, excruciating whips, stiff white rope. Still uncut and plotless, they retain Warhol’s concept of film as a microscope aimed at what we always look at but never see. In this sense, along with all non-Art, it has a certain didactic value. The dehumanizing perversions he infers, are those we all feel but seldom confess. Nothing exalting or noble or healthy or graceful or humorous is offered – but, by God, everything else is there! Does it all sound unbearable and evil? Perhaps evil, but certainly bearable. As I said, even de Sade can be a kick if you don’t depend on him too much.”
GERARD MALANGA: “In ‘Vinyl’ I was giving my juvenile-delinquent soliloquy when Andy threw Edie into the film at the last minute. I was a wee bit peeved at the idea because it was an all-male cast. Andy said, ‘It’s okay. She looks like a boy.’”
RONALD TAVEL: “Andy was sabotaging me on ‘Vinyl.’ That one I wanted to rehearse for a week. He gave me a week’s time, but then he would take the actors… Malanga was the star, and every single time it was rehearsal he was out drinking and not memorizing his part. As soon as rehearsal started, Andy sent him out on a messenger delivery. Bring this there, that, the other thing, so that I wouldn’t have any rehearsal time. I felt that was just uncalled for because I knew what he wanted, and we had done that already without the rehearsals. I wanted to see what would happen if we went a step further. You are still not going to have acting; they are not actors. I wanted a new dimension and to have the audience wondering ‘What are they doing? Are they acting?’”
TONY SCHERMAN: “The juxtaposition of the exquisite Edie, occasionally flicking ashes on Gerard’s chest, against the brutal S&M sequence, adds a perverse twist to the scene. Edie sits on a silver trunk, legs crossed nonchalantly, smoking and filing her nails while the cops torment Gerard. Her only line is virtually inaudible, but a walk-on was all it took; her quirky career was launched. Edie’s fusion of artifice, grace, and mischief was irresistible.”
ONDINE: “After we saw a few reruns of ‘Vinyl,’ some of us got an inkling of what was going on in there with her in the Factory… a power that we hadn’t expected.”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “A superstar is somebody who deserves to be on the screen all the time, preferably in close-up. The initial impact that the star makes is always the best. You’ll find, with almost every performer, that their very early works – if not the very first – are almost always the best. And at that point where they start thinking of themselves as performers, that is the point they lose most of what they have.”
