On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl
Edith Minturn Sedgwick, known as Edie, lived a brief, tempestuous life. She made her mark in popular culture in the sixties in New York City as an “It Girl,” spending her time associating with the burgeoning counterculture and its most famous and influential members. Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Joel Schumacher, Nureyev, Jasper Johns, poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Truman Capote, and the Velvet Underground (and Nico) were some of the people she spent time with in those days of Warhol’s “Factory,” setting fashion trends, breaking rules, making art, and doing drugs. Every kind of drug, in every form.
Edie, circa 1965
I’ve owned the same copy of this book for forty years, and it shows. But I’ve never given it up, and back in the day, I read and re-read it several times. While some of the themes of familial mental illness, addiction, and family trauma have stayed with me (I can relate), the horror of what happened to her and her family of origin is just as upsetting to me now as it ever was, and maybe it’s even more impactful now that I know and understand how such events shape a person’s entire life.
I’ll try to explain just how aristocratic Edie Sedgwick’s family was. Her great, great, great grandfather was an ally to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and was the Speaker of the House of Representatives. One of her great uncles founded Groton, the elite prep school in Massachusetts, and another was the editor of Atlantic Monthly. Every male member of her paternal side graduated from Harvard. It’s mind-boggling, how wealthy and influential the Sedgwicks (and the de Forests, her mother’s side) were. And I think that’s why Edie’s life and death made such an impact on American culture—you couldn’t believe this ball of beauty and energy and daring who was a member of one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in America could end up dead at 28.
Edie was the seventh of eight children born to Francis “Fuzzy” Sedgwick and Alice Delano deForest. She was raised on a 6000-acre ranch near San Francisco, where she and all her siblings learned to ride horses at a very young age. The ranch had its own private primary school staffed by tutors, so the children didn’t leave the ranch except for medical or dental appointments. The effect of being a kind of prisoner in their father’s bell jar was that the kids had no socialization with other kids their ages—just each other. Fuzzy was an odd duck, to put it mildly, who had already suffered two nervous breakdowns and subsequent psychiatric hospital stays before he even married Alice. His diagnosis was “manic depressive psychosis,” and the facts given by the people who talked for this book support the theory that mental illness can be passed from parent to child.
Fuzzy was, in the years after his children’s births, a tyrannical narcissist and alcoholic, and the things Edie and her siblings experienced at his hand were pretty horrific. They are all detailed by various family members in this book. All of them are included in the story at this link:
Edie Sedgwick was a socialite and model who became a muse to Andy Warhol in the 1960s.
Edie’s older brother Francis Minturn Sedgwick “Minty” suffered a mental breakdown in 1963 and was committed to Bellevue, in New York. He was transferred to a private psych facility in Connecticut, Silver Hill (the Sedgwicks should have received a frequent flyer discount here.) Reportedly, Minty communicated to his father that he thought he was gay, Fuzzy disowned him, and Minty hung himself with a tie in his hospital room.
Her eldest brother Bobby attended Harvard in between his stays at various mental hospitals and actually managed to graduate. He died while riding his beloved Harley, crashing it into the side of a bus on New Year’s Eve, 1964. Edie and her surviving siblings considered the accident to be suicide.
Tragedy after tragedy upon tragedy would be an appropriate motto for the Sedgwicks. At this point in the book, one feels the gathering clouds of dread that await our subject. Edie was bulimic, starting before her teens. She was committed to Silver Hill in 1962 at age 19, but its policies were found to be too relaxed—she wasn’t recovering at all—so she was transferred to New York Hospital’s Bloomingdale facility. She was erratic, suffered from extreme mood swings, and the bulimia had made her so thin, people mistook her for a boy. She was released, and soon after, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, ostensibly to study sculpture with Lilian Saarinen, but probably mostly just to hang with the Harvard/Radcliffe students. She was noticed, she was popular, and developed a social circle consisting mainly of very rich, very attractive young gay men. She quickly became a star in the Cambridge art society circle.
During the Christmas holidays of 1964, Fuzzy demanded she return to California. She was on the other side of the country when Bobby had his fatal accident, but she soon had her own: she was shopping in Santa Barbara when she totaled her car and broke her knee. She was put in a hip-to-toe cast, but that didn’t stop her from returning to New York to live in her grandmother’s enormous upper east side apartment. Edie made an immediate impact among the artistic circles of the city. She soon moved into her own apartment, where the only art was a big pencil drawing on the wall behind the sofa that she had done of a white horse. She furnished it with odd pieces: heavy crystal lighters that never worked because she never filled them with lighter fluid, cushions covered with handmade textiles in bright colors, a big leather rhinoceros, and maribou feathers. VOGUE magazine dispatched a photographer to her apartment, and Edie posed in her ever-present black tights, Rudi Gernreich miniskirts, and huge, dangly earrings. The famous photo of Edie in an arabesque on top of her leather rhino, is below. They called her a “Youthquaker.” A young Patti Smith saw that photo spread, became obsessed, took the train into Manhattan and waited outside Edie’s apartment building just to get a glimpse of her exiting or entering, always from or into a limousine.
Edie in Vogue Magazine, summer 1965
It was inevitable that Edie would meet Andy Warhol, and it was probably equally inevitable that Andy would be fascinated with her. She dyed her hair silver so that she and Andy could be twins. Both were small, slight people—Andy with his trademark white hair and Edie with her short silver hairstyle—and they attracted much attention from the New York underground art scene. She became a regular at Andy’s “Factory” art studio/pleasure palace, mingling with the rest of his eccentric collection of artists, junkies, musicians, and devotees, many of whom would star in Warhol’s films, Edie included.
The number of truly astounding people who dropped in on the Factory—and the mix of personalities—and the drug use—is staggering. I can’t begin to list them all. Nobody who visited ever intended to actually live there, and although Edie had her own place, she came close. Andy certainly lived there, plus a smattering of boys he liked and who worked with him to produce his art and his films. Nonstop, 24/7 party people, all believing they were creating ART, and some of them were. But there were a lot of shady hangers-on whose reasons for crashing at the Factory weren’t about art. These people were shooting up speed, and the Factory was all about the drugs. Andy managed The Velvet Underground, who had their band gear set up in the Factory, and Andy designed that iconic banana on the cover of their album. Bob Dylan wandered in and out for a time, and it is said that his songs “Leopard Print Pill Box Hat,” “Just Like A Woman,” and “Like A Rolling Stone” were about his brief affair with her.
I can imagine the bright lights/big city atmosphere her wealth and status afforded Andy. He was already a rising star, but Edie and he arguably publicized themselves as The Power Couple of the underground art world AND A-listers invited to grand society events. Edie was a superb acquisition for Andy. She had a family background to die for, she was beautiful and rich, and she was seemingly up for anything. He cast her in his films. He attended glittery Manhattan parties with Edie on his arm. They frequented a club called The Scene where everyone danced, and Andy, as was typical, would watch. Sometimes Edie and Andy would dress identically. They went to museum openings, film openings, the works, but theirs was no romance. Andy was gay, and Edie loved being among the gay men of New York. They worshiped her.
Andy said that in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. In 2021, that statement seems very prescient indeed. It’s nearly true now, and it probably will be true in the not-so-distant future. Andy was a star maker, and he let his “superstars” have their 15 minutes, then tossed them aside. Edie split with Andy and the Factory crowd when she signed Albert Grossman as her manager. He was Bob Dylan’s manager, and Edie “ran off” with Bob Neuwirth, a friend of Dylan’s and former Factory habituè. Grossman had told her she would star in a movie with Dylan, which never materialized. Her exit from the Factory was the end of the Edie/Andy relationship.
Edie decided to try modeling, and VOGUE did a photoshoot with her again in 1966. Shortly after, Edie nodded off with a lit cigarette, and her apartment caught fire. Back to a hospital, this time Lenox Hill. After her release, she moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where another fire happened AGAIN in the exact same way. She went home to California for Christmas in 1966, tried to fill a prescription from a NYC doctor for speed, and her parents were notified. They committed her to the local county hospital.
This fragile person, on massive amounts of drugs, both prescription and illegal, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for the rest of her life. None of her admissions were voluntary. Some of them lasted four to five months. Bellevue, Gracie Square, Manhattan State, and Lenox Hill in New York; Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. It’s absolutely staggering to read how someone with so much promise was so hell-bent on destroying her body with all the shooting up, snorting, and smoking of acid, barbiturates, speed and heroin. One reads the last part of this book with a heavy heart, as if reading about someone you love.
Her father died in 1967 of pancreatic cancer. His brother Minturn told the biographers:
“I went to stay with Francis and Alice at the end of Francis’ life. I heard him say, ‘You know, my children all believe that their difficulties stem from me. And I agree. I think they do.’ He stated it; he felt it; he knew it.”
In 1970, the producers of Ciao, Manhattan! wanted to finish the movie they had begun in 1967. Edie had been the star, and they needed her to complete her scenes, so they brought the production to Los Angeles. They had an empty swimming pool that they used as Edie’s apartment, all painted with furniture installed, and Edie did, in fact, finish that movie. She had changed so much physically that actors had to say new lines that were written as exposition to explain why. She had gotten breast implants where before she had no breasts at all. Her hair wasn’t silver. She wore a fall—a long sweep of hair—but it was just brown. She had a year to live.
In July of 1971, Edie married Michael Post, another drug casualty, whom she had met while they were both inpatients at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. They had been engaged for a very short time. It seems that she intended to try to make the marriage work, although she told a few people that she knew it wouldn’t work out long-term. On November 15, after attending a fashion show that was being filmed for the new, buzzworthy PBS reality drama, An American Family, and after drinking a lot at the afterparty, Edie died in her sleep. Her husband woke up to find her already past saving. The official cause of death was acute barbiturate intoxication, with acute ethanol intoxication as the secondary cause.
She was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, California. It’s a very out-of-the-way place, which I think she would have hated, being so eager for publicity and fame her whole life. Her gravestone reads “Edie Sedgwick Post, wife of Michael Brett Post, 1943-1971.”
I could link to any of the number of songs written about her. Edie Brickell’s 1988 “Little Miss S,” The Cult’s 1989 “Edie (Ciao Baby),” or the Dylan ones. I could list the movies that have been made about her life, like “Factory Girl” with Sienna Miller. I could transcribe the beautiful poem Patti Smith sat down and wrote immediately after hearing of her death. I could quote what people who loved her, or who were dazzled by her, said upon learning the awful news. I could write hundreds more words about her life and struggles, her overdoses, her self-destructive impulses and urges, all the fires she accidentally set. But I don’t need to. Her enduring impact and influence on pop culture makes her immortal.
Al oeste del Edén
Jean Stein
Con traducción de Amado Diéguez
Anagrama, 2020
Adentrarse en la lectura del libro de Jean Stein es disfrutar del privilegio de hablar con familiares y amigos de los pioneros de Hollywood. Un lugar en el que escuchar (en este caso leer) conversaciones distendidas a través de las que vamos descubriendo cómo se fue levantando ese gran sueño.
