Edie (27 page)

Edie at a society dance, 1964

I used to hang around her apartment with her. Agonizing . . . even to me then. Chaos 1 Piles of clothes on every piece of furniture. Easels. Canvases—she was painting at the time. 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. Art was her ostensible thing, her reason for being in New York, according to what she had told her parents.

Sometimes I went over there with Chuck Wein, her Cambridge friend. He would be plotting out the next move of their great strategy—whom he was going to introduce to Edie that night, what they could do for her. She would try on twenty-five 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.

Chuck had a real promoter’s vision about her, and she’d act kind of coy about it. He knew that she had this quality, but that she was totally disorganized and wouldn’t be able to pull it off by herself . . . so he took over her life.

CHUCK WEIN
 She couldn’t really cope with the day-to-day reality, and she always needed to have friends who understood that. Edie provided the glamour, you see, and the glitter . . . when she walked into some place, the whole room turned. And if they didn’t, she’d do something in the next twenty seconds that would make them. She’d giggle, or she’d dance and spin around.

She was voracious for people. Edie was one of the great devourers of all time. But her method of devouring was to entice. If you had a room full of twenty people and Edie came in, there was an energy uplift. It got everybody off their boring number. Here was this glamorous freak. People were willing to let Edie be the star. They just wanted to be around her because the glamour was there and it was like a beautiful-child vibration. If Fuzzy was going to play the game of “Ranch King,” she could play the game of “The King’s Daughter.” She played princess everywhere she went.

There was one guy who was madly in love with Edie. Son of the chairman of the board of some major corporation. One night he was supposed to be coming to pick her up at the Sixty-third Street apartment. She and I got into this long rap, and he arrived at the door before I could get out. Edie said, “Oh, he’s so jealous and upset. He’s got this whole fantasy about wanting to marry me” . . . he’d taken her out twice. So I hid under the bed the whole time he was there,
lying under this brass bed with half of Edie’s wardrobe and all those boxes from Bendel’s. He went through this whole tear-jerking declaration of love . . . high comedy I He was sitting on her big leather rhinoceros; she was on the bed. Poor man I He poured out his entire existence onto her. She knew that he was reaching out and that he was as desperate as she was. He finally left. I came out from under the bed. Edie laughed; she loved it.

KEVIN MCCARTHY
 She was always going out and glittering in the night somewhere, but the fact that you couldn’t rely on her drove you nuts. If she said she was going to see you, she might or might not be there. You weren’t equals. If you were a prosaic person, you’d take her to dinner, go to the theater, read poetry aloud together, or even roll around and wrestle a little together, but at the same time there was this feeling that she was from another world. It was intense and sweet and troubled. Maybe she was from the underworld. She reminded me of Montgomery Gift. He once said to me: “I would like to go down into the depths of the underworld, the depths of darkest experience, and come back and tell about it.”

CHUCK WEIN
 Edie could keep everybody busy getting her things . . . eight guys calling her up from eight different social strata. She’d be off to a jet-set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip. She kept everybody going!

Edie meets Andy Warhol

CHUCK WEIN
 It was at Lester Persky's place that Edie met Andy Warhol. It was early 1965. She was doing her dance there—a sort of balletlike rock ‘n’ roll. We’d had an idea of opening up an underwater discotheque where Edie’d dance her ballet to Bach played at rock ‘n’ roll tempo. So Andy invited us down to the Factory the next day and he said, “Why don’t we do some things together?” Andy spotted her energy. Everybody else was tired and going through the trip.

GORE VIDAL
 Lester Persky was sometimes known as the Wax Queen. Among his advertising accounts in the Fifties was Six Months Floor Wax. He had a penthouse on East Fifty-ninth Street, and a good income, and a collection of famous writers, like Tennessee Williams and BI’ll Inge and me, and who else? Jack Knowles later, Capote later. Lester would have parties in his penthouse, to which were invited attractive ephebes . . . everybody looked like John Travolta in
Grease
—but then this was the Fifties. These evenings were true symposiums, in Plato’s sense. Lester was, essentially, an educator. “What? You’ve
never
heard of Tennessee Williams? He’s the most famous writer in America.” I have many vivid memories of those waxy evenings.

LESTER PERSKY
 Andy and I became good friends in the early Sixties. He was interested in what I was doing . . . being very successful
with these hard-sell TV commercials—Roto-Broil and Glamorene and Charles Antell. Andy once made a film which he called
Lester Persky: A Soap Opera
because he’d been infatuated with my hard-sell commercials. I was sort of an idol, I guess. I was the secret custodian of that period . . . the catalyst.

I’m a big party-giver. In those days I would invite six, and Andy would account for twenty uninvited. We always had candlelight. I never had
any
electricity in the dining room. We ate what Saga, my Japanese houseman who’s now dead, would prepare—very rarely Japanese dishes, which weren’t fashionable then. He usually did kosher food, which I detest.

Andy would arrive with his crowd. He was busy having superstars, of course. He had Baby Jane Holzer, but she was sort of running out of speed. I told him: “You’ve got to have a new superstar. You’ve got to meet this girl Edie Sedgwick. She wI’ll be your new superstar.”

I arranged to have Edie at the party. She had a friend in tow, Chuck Wein, and they wanted to be involved in film and in theater. She had a certain quiet dignity and a beauty that was quite extraordinary. Although she was always surrounded by these somewhat
manqué
people, she herself always had a fantastic poise. And it was at my house, at this marble table, that I brought the two—Andy and Edie—together. Andy, as I recall, sucked in his breath and did the usual popeye thing and said, “Oh, she’s so bee-you-ti-ful,” making every single letter sound like a whole syllable, as he does. He was
very
impressed.

RONALD TAVEL
 You went up in that tiny elevator about which there were so many stories because people who hated each other would get stuck in it for hours. Once I was in there with Tennessee Williams. I sat down and spoke to him, and he didn’t understand a word I said. He kept looking at me and saying, “Yes,” which is what he always says to me: “Yes, yes, yes.” It’s an automatic response.

At that party I conducted myself in a semi-facetious way, which is what I always do, especially with a few drinks. I’d say, “We’re here on business. I’m scouting for stars. You interested? I’ll write the script. We’ll call you up and make a movie.” I said that all the time to people. I said that to Montgomery Clift when I met him: “I’ve been watching your work since 1947, and I think you’re ready to make a film with us.” He said, “Thank you.”

I did the same with Edie. I told her she was Nioka the Jungle Girl, and I pictured her in that kind of setting. She had a beehive hairdo, dark hair, and a leopard suit. She probably wondered what I was talking about. I was very surprised when I saw her show up a few weeks later at the Factory to look for Andy Warhol. I think she was slumming when she first came in—just checking out the scene with a small entourage, to see what was going on.

Andy at the Factory. Photograph of Tennessee Williams and Lester Persky in background

SANDY KIRKLAND
 When Edie met Warhol, it was this immediate thing. They were going to make movies. Andy started escorting her, and drew her into the fold really fast. She became this extraordinary camera object, which was incredible for me to see because I had known her only as this waif. She suddenly became a person who went to the Factory, and any time the camera was turned on, she would gravitate toward it like Gloria Swanson at the end of
Sunset Boulevard.
She had this real romance with it. She could be a totally bedraggled, wiped-out wreck, and then the camera would go on and she would just be this magical star. It was crazy, but it was very powerful.

RENÉ RICARD
 
SO
 Edie became the Factory’s superstar. Edie and Andy! You should have seen them. But you
did
see them! Both wearing the same sort of thing—boat-neck, striped T-shirts. Andy wore black corduroy jeans, banana-shaped high-heeled boots—terrible boots. I hated them. He never could stand up in them. He never had a good wig in those days, the poor thing. Edie was pasted up to look just like him—but looking so good! The T-shirt. The black stockings. Long earrings. Just the most devastating, ravishing beauty.

Edie brought Andy out. She turned him on to the real world. He’d been in the demi-monde. He was an
arriviste.
And Edie legitimized him, didn’t she? He never went to those parties before she took him. He’d be the first to admit it.

ISABEL EBERSTADT
 He was madly flattered. Although his words communicated so little, one could tell how excited he was. There was this rich, beautiful girl, who seemed to be dressing and looking just like him, and he didn’t know what to make of it: what did it all mean? Edie and her entourage seemed to be taking him everywhere in a car. Should he do it? He had a very dependent way of approaching one and saying, “Oh, you won’t stop calling? You won’t stop coming around, wI’ll you?” That was very characteristic of Andy at that time of his life: asking you for advice about where he should go and whom he should see. I think he always knew what he wanted to do. He just wanted to put it in your mouth.

Andy is a terrific snob. He was a fashion creature and he absorbed a lot of the snobbish values of the fashion world. They were stI’ll part of him when he met Edie. Some of Edie’s glamour to him was certainly enhanced by the fact that she came from a marvelous family. That was amazingly important to him.

TRUMAN CAPOTE
 I think Edie was something Andy would like to have been; he was transposing himself into her
à la
Pygmalion. Have you ever noticed a certain type of man who always wants to go along with his wife to pick out her clothes? I’ve always thought that’s because he wants to wear them himself. Andy Warhol would like to have been Edie Sedgwick. He would like to have been a charming, well-born debutante from Boston. He would like to have been anybody except Andy Warhol.

DUANE MICHALS
 I was brought up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where Andy says he comes from, a steel town at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny. Because our rivers were orange I thought all rivers were orange. At night the steelmills lit up the sky; it was always this incredible kind of inferno. The mills made a lot of noise; you could hear the cranes dropping enormous things and booming all the time. There was a certain drama about it, kind of scary, too. When I was a kid, I thought it was terrific . . . just the best place to live. Of course, my family lived in a community that was completely homogenized—Germans across the street, Poles up the block, and somebody we knew lived next to an Italian family, and somebody else next to the Hungarians. It was a wonderful mix—in no sense a ghetto. Down where the rivers meet, there was a section which was really much more of a ghetto. I have read that Andy’s family lived down there.