American Gothic

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.’”

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.”