Edie (47 page)

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 She was really weird when she arrived at the ranch. Like a stick, no body at all, and wearing the shortest skirts I’ve ever seen, super-fake eyelashes hanging so heavy her eyelids drooped.

She was an alien. She’d pick up what you were about to say before you’d say it. It made everybody uncomfortable. She wanted to sing, and so she would sing . . . but it was a drag because it wasn’t in tune. A painted doll, wobbly, languishing around on chairs, trying to look like a vamp.

You could see not only the insecurity but the need for love . . . but
it was so hard to accept her. She had two selves. I wanted the inner to come out; my father was mad at the outer. Poor Edie, both the inner and the outer, got mad at my father. I wasn’t there when they had the fight.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (from tapes for the movie
Ciao!Manhattan) I went home to California because all my friends were home for Christmas and I didn’t want to be by myself in New York. It was a very unpleasant experience.
. . . I
was on drugs in New York, and out in California I tried to refI’ll a prescription. My mother found out about it and talked to her doctor, who said, “Thais very bad.” It was Eskatrol, which is a variety of speed. I’d been used to strong shots, and I used a lot of pills to keep from shaking the balance Td arranged in my system.

That night my parents woke me up every few hours for maybe five hours and gave me a couple of Nembutal. I had just been out one day and I was determined not to have a fight with my father, and hopefully not with my mother, so I didn’t argue about their giving me the pills or anything.

If I disagreed with my parents, I said so. And they couldn’t take that. So they figured, “Lets just tone her down and give her some Nembutal.” I must have been very stoned when they finally woke me up and said, “You have a temperature of 105.” They had put a thermometer in my mouth. I didn’t even
think . . .
you know, I just believed them. They said an ambulance was coming to take me to Cottage Hospital, which was where I was born in Santa Barbara. I’ll go and be treated and whatever, just be cool about everything. Outside, there was a police car! I asked where the ambulance was, and the policeman said, “The ambulance had an accident on its way over the San Marcos Pass.
We’ll
take you to the hospital.”

It was one of those regular police cars with the screen between you and the driver. We started off from the ranch. Then I noticed my father was driving his big 300-D Mercedes behind the police car. It seemed strange. If I’m supposed to be comfortable and I’m sick, I’d be a lot better off in that big car lying on the back seat than in the back of a police car. I didn’t understand it. What I didn’t know was that my father had given a report to the police that I was homicidal, suicidal, threatening bodily harm to my sister and my mother, and that I ran around screaming naked. Well, the last part of it appealed to me, but I hadn’t done any of it. So we went not to Cottage Hospital, where I was born, but to the County Hospital.

Edie’s paraphernalia

BOB NEUWIBTH
 I tried to reach Edie on the phone in California. I pushed and probed, and after a while it turned out she was sick and couldn’t come to the phone; finally I discovered she was in a hospital. “Well, listen, is she in a medical or a psychiatric ward?” It turned out she was in the psychiatric ward. All very confusing. I knew she was not crazy or trying to kI’ll herself.

Edie’s father finally came to the telephone. He seemed rather proud when he told me how he had committed her. I guess it was the only way they could think of controlling her . . . hand out the job to a professional. If you can’t get your windows clean, hire a window-washer. I told him that I had several lawyers in Los Angeles. If she wasn’t at home to answer the phone the next afternoon I was going to get the lawyers, who were poised in Los Angeles to rescue her. He tried to neutralize the situation by saying, “Well, please come out here, and if you can’t afford it, I’ll send you an airplane ticket.” I remember saying that putting her in a psychiatric ward was so out of keeping with the holiday spirit. Something I said worked: they let her come home.

When I finally reached Edie on the phone, she called out to me: “Get me out of here! I’m a prisoner.” Shortly afterwards she was on a plane back to New York, where she arrived smiling and completely covering up the discomfort she had experienced at home. She had a certain puritanical way of not letting her blues get in the way of her life-style.

DOMENIQUE BOURGEOIS BOBEBTSON
 She came back to the Chelsea after her bad experience in California. I was living there with Robbie Robertson of The Band and I interviewed Edie for a French-Canadian newspaper,
Photo-Journal.
Edie sat at the make-up table in the middle of her kingdom, with the most absurd collection of bric-a-brac surrounding her. Lighters. I remember a cigarette lighter shaped like a toy telephone. There was an open closet full of bizarre fur coats with square shoulders, a straw basket full of strange hats, a box of wigs. She unrolled a small Japanese carpet and began her modern-dance exercises. She said it was the only real discipline she imposed on herself. I remember thinking of her as a strange, fragile doll about to break, a kind of tragic clown. She said she’d refused two Hollywood contracts, one of which had her co-starring with Nancy Sinatra and the other with Burt Lancaster. She went on to say she didn’t intend to become a monster of publicity, and that she was more interested in her cat, who was called Smoke. He was iron-gray, and Edie said he
was wild and fierce like a young lion, or maybe a black leopard—”a symbol,” she felt, “of life, presence, and pride.”

I left her doing her exercises. I remember the phone ringing and someone reminding her that her limousine had been waiting for over an hour.

NORMAN MAILER
 Edie tried out for my play,
The Deer Park,
but she wasn’t very good. That is to say, she was very good in a sort of tortured and wholly sensitive way—the sensitivity of a movie actress. She gave immense amounts of herself to each phrase, each sentence, each thought, and never did the same thing twice. That she’d had no stage experience was obvious. She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances. When we turned her down, I must say she didn’t seem terribly downcast. I think she had a sense of how impossible it would be.

PATTI SMITH
 A few months later, Edie and Bobby Neuwirth parted company. I never asked why. Bobby was often in destructive relationships, but not because he was strong or heavy like a Svengali. It’s usually very fragile people who bring out the fragility in somebody else, especially in a tough place like New York. It’s like being injured. It’s rough to be an injured person in the city.

BOB NEUWIRTH
 Edie was desperate because she felt her edge was going. She didn’t want to make any more fatuous films with Andy. But the establishment moguls didn’t think she was capable of handling big parts. She was hot at one point and she hadn’t capitalized on it.

Anyway, we drifted apart. It started off with her mistreating herself. I couldn’t believe that a person of such intelligence would mistreat herself to that extent. But I’m sure, reflecting on it, that it was caused by desperation and a lack of outlet for that incredible energy.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (from tapes for the movie
Ciao!Manhattan
) It
was really sad
—
Bobby’s and my affair. The only true, passionate, and lasting love scene, and I practically ended up in the psychopathic ward. I had really learned about sex from him, making love, loving, giving. It just completely blew my mind
—it
drove me a little insane. I was
like a sex slave to this man. I could make love for forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, without getting tired. But the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills. He had more or less quit using drugs . . . When I first knew him, a friend of his used to come up with him to my apartment and they’d do a number in the bathroom. This guy eventually died of a heroin overdose, and Bobby left drugs alone after that. But if I wasn’t practically in the act of lovemaking, I would be thinking of how to get hold of drugs. I really loved this man.
. . .

What happened was that Bobby said, “Let’s go to a party. They’re making an underground movie,” and he said that I, the Warhol heiress, queen, star, socialite, blah, should be there. Bobby really wanted to go. I had a bad scene with him. I pulled out a knife and I wasn’t going to let him out the door until he made love to me. I always get really dreadful. But we finally went. I went through it all. I was furious
—
this after about two years of our continuing relationship. Finally I said, “Now Fm going to leave this party. Tm fed up.” He said that was all right: he’d met all the people he wanted to meet, and he’d watched the film being shot. So we got into my limousine and he said, “Where would you like to eat?” I thought I was going to explode. Where would I like to
eat?
I screeched at him, “Why the hell can’t you make up your own mind where we’re going to eat? Why do I have to make all the decisions?” 1 was just
livid,
out of hand. I got madder and madder as we drove along, and just as we drove by the Chelsea Hotel I did something. I’ve never done anything to hurt anyone, and yet I was so furious that I pressed the button and rolled down the window screen
—
the glass plate between the front and back seats
—
and I told the chauffeur that the man in the back was molesting me; he was a junkie !

I was so horrified by what Td said, so
flipped
out by that, that 1 jumped out of the car into the path of the oncoming traffic, certain that my head would be crushed. All that happened was that I got bruised, badly bruised, but no broken bones. I mean, I was conscious, not destroyed at all. But Td done such a terrible thing! I couldn’t reconcile that. I had been about to explode. The hotel people came out, and they and Bobby carried me in. I had to pretend I was unconscious because I couldn’t comprehend the fact that I had tried to get him busted, to hurt him seriously.

He was the only person I had ever gotten violent about. I take out whatever violence comes into my system much more heavily on myself than on anyone else. But that was a pretty tight squeeze. I really craved making love to him.

BOB NEUWIRTH
 Man, that was a terrible night. Some little model had called to say she was at the airport and asked where she should go. Edie had taken the message from my answering service and she thought I was not being straight with her. She was in a fury. She burned her cigarette out in my face. It was at some club. I dragged her out into a limousine. She tried to throw herself in front of a truck. It was a horror story in that limo. She was having a fit. When I finally got her to the Chelsea, she began playing the non-violent role, and I dragged her across the street—it was slushy the way New York streets can get—and into the lobby. I handed her over to the bellboy. Take her up to Room 105.”

Frankly, I was sure that as soon as she got upstairs and a hold of herself, she called up one of her limousine services and took off for one of the social scenes that were on that night.

RUTHERFORD JOHNSON
 Bobby Neuwirth and Edie were at the end of their affair. She was putting him down and he was not showing up very frequently. If you’re in an unhappy love affair, dope can come on like magic. Edie was getting hooked. She was at an early, innocent stage—she’d depend on me and this chick who was the connection to turn her on. I’d come from the East Village and knock on Edie’s door. I would “hit” her up. She wasn’t a real junkie, so she couldn’t do it herself. If she’d been a junkie, she’d have been out trying to score.

With Edie, I’d shoot her up, in the ass. It’s called “skinning it.” it’s a very sexy thing, a girl’s ass, and though there was no question of taking advantage of her, certainly there were sexual overtones: shooting up is very sexual—you get the flash, like an orgasm.

If you’re obsessed with a person and helpless, there is a way out—to fall in love with heroin. The other person can have no control over you. You have a new lover and a new honeymoon. You feel beautiful: it comes on like an illusion, like the few minutes after a terrific balling. The honeymoon can go on for days or weeks.

But then you get hooked and you run around chasing the heroin, and it becomes just what you’ve escaped, like waiting for your lover to call . . . and then you’re in the bad part of the habit, which can go on for years. So it’s like a bad love affair—you suffer. You see, it’s immaterial if it’s heroin or sex. It’s very basic: the two are interchangeable.