Edie (18 page)

Drawings by Edie

But Edie was mostly interested in herself. She was enormously into taking care of her skin and body; she had Germaine Monteil creams all over the place. The rest of us didn’t much care, but she was always very fastidious about her appearance. We wore sweaters and shirtwaist dresses. She wore tights, always. Dark tights.

What was crazy about someone so fastidious was that Edie used to vomit after every meal. Edie would gobble up enormous amounts of food and then vanish up the stairs. She would never admit this; she would run off and do it privately. She knew it was destroying her body, but she told me that was something she wanted to do. Her body was threatening to her. After meals we would go out for walks together. She walked so fast it was hard to keep up with her. I was fat for a teenager—a hundred thirty, forty.

Edie was successful with anything she undertook at Silver HI’ll . . . externally, that is. We learned any number of different kinds of billiards. But in other ways the place was of no use to her. Her weight kept dropping until she was only ninety pounds, in spite of a nurse kept around to keep her from vanishing. She went on from there to Bloomingdale, the Westchester Division of New York Hospital.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 They finally had to send edie to a “closed” hospital, where she couldn’t pull any tricks or manipulate the situation as she had at Silver Hill. Her doctor felt that if she went on that way, irreversible changes might take place.

At Bloomingdale her doctor was Jane O’Neil. You couldn’t get in to see Edie without meeting with her first. Bloomingdale was a definite place with definite rules, and they meant business. They meant to cure. Edie’s diet and activities were monitored very carefully. There was no gentility about it. She began to graduate from one ward to another. Edie blossomed in there. It was the only time in her life that I saw her look the way she should have: natural, beautiful . . . I mean, just breathtaking. I used to come away from there sobbing so that I couldn’t see to negotiate that long driveway . . . it was so heartbreaking to see that child in that place. I visited her at least once a week unless my mother was there or somebody else was going. I felt I couldn’t abandon her. She would beg me to get her out of there. Beg and beg and beg. Very painful. I would transmit all this to Jane O’Neil.

Jane O’Neil was a big, masculine woman like Edie’s first baby nurse, with gray hair and glasses. Vigorous, very vigorous . . . knew what she was doing. She was not going to be moved by desperate cries for help. She wouldn’t play Edie’s game. Edie couldn’t seduce her. As for Edie, she was only interested in getting out. She regarded Dr. O’Neil as an authority figure whom she respected, but she hated being bossed around. She behaved like a normal, unruly girl stuck in a boarding school.

One afternoon Edie took me on a walk around the grounds, which are beautiful, like a great English park. There were no obvious fences or boundaries. Edie was very gay. It was one of the first times she had been allowed to walk around outside the hospital. But after we got back into the building she said that she’d taken me into an off-limits area, laughing because she had broken the rules and involved me in it at the same time.

NITA COLGATE
 The system at Bloomingdale was hierarchical. The patients were assigned to floors depending upon the severity of their particular case. The most difficult cases were assigned to the lowest floor. It was the only floor with a name—Nichols. When they got down there, people would really give out with their emotions because they couldn’t sink any lower. But the people who were on the next floor up always kept themselves under control because they didn’t want to fall back into Nichols. You actually graduated from one floor up to the next. The fifth floor was where you were getting ready for the outside. Then you could actually leave for two hours with your husband when he came, rather than have to stay on the grounds. But there was always this fear that you would be demoted to Nichols. After that there was no place worse they could send you, except to the state hospital. When you got to Nichols, all responsibility was taken away from you. You didn’t even decide when to wash your hair. That was done on Friday night: you stood in a line and it was washed for you by a student nurse. And your arms and legs were shaved. People were coming to see you on Saturday.

The place was drenched with student nurses. I was on what they call “constant observation”—CO—which meant that no one was going to let me out of their sight even when I went to the bathroom. The lack of privacy was devastating. And yet there were locks everywhere. Oh, yes, locks and locks and locks.

One was so anxious to move up. I went into shock treatments smiling, ever so cooperative. They wrap you in a wet sheet the first time,
but I was told by my friends that if you didn’t give them any fight they wouldn’t wrap you in a sheet after that. It was really like helping with your own execution . . . you’d be sweet and nice because they were doing something for your benefit that was going to leave you with a splitting headache and no memory and a few other side-effects, too, but it was “all for your good, my dear.”

Actually, the place was quite ritzy. We sat down to dinner at little round tables with white tablecloths and were served our food. There was occupational therapy in the mornings. There were degrees of responsibility and privilege. The staff there really were behaviorists. Perhaps they didn’t view it that way, but when you moved from one floor to the next, you found yourself more on your own. You could choose when to wash your hair. One of the benefits of this sort of tit-for-tat arrangement was that I certainly never want to go back to that hospital. Lots of people go back to other hospitals but not to Bloomingdale. It cured me. It made me feel if I was ever to commit suicide again, it had to be done. No more attempts. No more games.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Edie got pregnant near the end of her stay at Bloomingdale and she had an abortion. Kate told me about it. She was very bitter because Edie made my mother go through everything that she disapproved of. My mother was so old-fashioned. We older sisters couldn’t have gone to her for anything like that . . . an abortion. If any of us was having an affair, my mother would have turned us out forever.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (From tapes for the film
Ciao!Manhattan) This tape is supposed to be about love, and I guess the distortions of love. The Love Tape. Do you have any questions you want to ask me?

MAN:
 
Tell me about the boy you loved first
.

EDIE:
 
Oh, my God. Bloomingdale. Well, that includes . . . I don’t realty . . . I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I had lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me . . . from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching . . . a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn’t fall for that either. I just felt . . . I had no reason to feel . . . Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn’t feel turned on by them
.

I’d been two years locked up in hospitals. I was twenty when I got out from Bloomingdale and I met a young man from Harvard who was very attractive in a sort of Ivy League way. And we made love in my grandmother’s apartment and it was terrific, it was just fabulous. That was the first time I ever made love, and I had no inhibitions or anything. It was just beautiful. I didn’t get my period and so I had to tell my doctor. The hospital pass was given to see if you could handle yourself outside. I was terrified to tell him that I thought I was pregnant, but I finally did. I was pregnant. I could get an abortion without any hassle at all, just on the grounds of a psychiatric case. So that wasn’t too good a first experience with lovemaking. I mean, it kind of screwed up my head, for one thing. This fellow found out. I was upset . . . and he asked me, and I said, “I’m pregnant. Tm not going to ask you for anything, so don’t get uptight, but its just kind of making me uncomfortable. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do about it.” He split, and I didn’t see him again until the summer had passed and I went to Cambridge for my first free year
.

SHARON PREMOLI
 Edie swept into Cambridge in the fall of 1963. She decided to study art with her cousin lily Saarinen. Edie was very elegant. She’d get into her great gray Mercedes and she looked just like an ad. She was sculpting then. The first time I met her she was coming out of Adams House at Harvard wearing a rubber apron covered with clay.

One thing that I thought was amazing about her was that although she was incredibly beautiful, her
hands
didn’t seem to belong to her body. She chain-smoked, her fingers had nicotine all over them; she had clay and stuff under her fingernails. Those hands didn’t belong to this incredibly beautiful girl.

LILY SAARINEN
 She was the most talented young person I’ve taught art to. She’d come in late and very tired. Sometimes she’d stay an hour; sometimes she’d stay five. She’d have her friends come in, and pretty soon more came. I had the feeling that she needed an audience. She was very insecure about men, though all the men loved her. She was always chic and adorable. Pretty soon my life was Edie because I couldn’t do anything else. She worked
frantically
. She wanted to do a horse. She said she’d ridden them all her life and knew every inch of them. Young girls do love horses. It’s wonderful to have a great, powerful creature that you can control . . . perhaps the way
she would like to have controlled her father. So she worked on this one horse. It looked like a Tang horse. It took her all winter; it had the most beautiful buttocks. Though that was a world she knew a great deal about—the life of the great ranch—she never seemed particularly interested in doing cowboys.

Edie was about the only one I was teaching that winter. I had to fit my day to hers. She was completely erratic. She’d say she was going to come and she wouldn’t. Or she’d come when she wasn’t supposed to come. She was a will-o’-the-wisp. Very energetic. High-strung. She never came out with much about herself. But she had so much to give and be creative about. She was full of beans. I think she should have ridden horses in Cambridge. She didn’t have any exercise there except to go tearing from one high spot to another, and that’s not exercise, is it?

ED HENNESSY
 I saw that horse a hundred million billion times ! It seemed to me that it never changed form. It was always just perfect. Edie’d say, “Look! Look what I’ve done to the leg !”

“Oh, yes, Edie, yes. Oh, much better !”

But I could never see what she’d done. That horse went through the whole year. It just wouldn’t end, that horse. I wonder if that crazy father of hers ever saw it.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN
 The first thing you ever knew about Edie was that she came from this truly remarkable and totally insane family in California. Somebody would say: “Oh. See over there, that’s one of the Sedgwicks; they come from California and they’re all crazy.” Of course, growing up around Boston, everybody’s slightly mad. Old-families have strange people in the attic. Staying with one family, you’re told never to speak to Uncle James. One day a friend of mine looked out and saw a naked man under his car looking at the mechanism of the undercarriage. It was Uncle James.

BARTLE BULL
 I first met Edie one evening that fall. I was bemoaning that I had been stood up for a picnic lunch the noon before. I stI’ll had the gear for the picnic lunch in the trunk of my car, so when I ran into Edie, I asked her for the next day, and we went to the Mount Auburn Cemetery and had a super time. Oh, yes, Mount Auburn was my regular picnic spot. It’s a charming place because the
grass is as smooth as a pool-table top, and it’s full of flowers and old shrubs. No one is around. Mary Baker Eddy, the Christian Scientist, is buried there. She has, or had, a telephone in her crypt. For years the church paid the telephone bills on the off-chance she’d call up from the beyond, but the light never blinked on the switchboard.

So we sat on that smooth grass, opened up the picnic basket, and we had daiquiris, white wine, pâté, caviar, cheese, chicken—the whole thing—out of two big paper bags. Edie was charmed by it all. We saw each other more or less steadily for die next year or so.

She had recently come out of a psychiatric institution, obviously pleased to be loose, but she wasn’t running around wild, either; she seemed quite balanced at the time . . . spending her time sculpting or with her shrink in Cambridge, or fencing with her family members as they came in and out of town. She was going to the shrink at least three times a week, perhaps five, but she was uneven about seeing him. She had a fatalistic sense about her family being doomed.

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 Edie came to visit us—die sort of duty visits one pays one’s uncle—every once in a while when she was beginning her art studies in Cambridge. The telephone started ringing about three days before. It never stopped while she was there, and it went on for a while after. It was really an eye-opener how many young men were calling. There was one particularly odd young man. I finally said to him, “As an old hand, I think you wI’ll make more ground if you pay less attention to her.”