Edie (52 page)

Allen Ginsberg, In a scene from
Ciao!Manhattan,
in Fort Lee, New Jersey

My son, Bob, had told me that
Ciao!Manhattan
would cost us about fifty thousand dollars. It ended up costing about three hundred fifty thousand dollars. The film began, so I thought, as a day in New York in the life of Edie Sedgwick, and it wound up trying to portray the entire scene of that era—the counterculture, the short-short skirts. The first time I ever met Edie she was wearing the first real silvered hairdo I ever saw, and she wore this abbreviated-abbreviated costume, which indicated to me that she was somewhat uninhibited. Very daring. She would walk around the studio in the buff. We talked quite frequently. For the most part, she was really a little out in left field. She talked about her life—but very sketchily. I don’t think she understood what was going on. She thought her father was a very evil man on Monday, and on Tuesday he was sitting there holding God’s hand.

Of course, I was so much older than the whole group. I tried on many occasions to straighten things out, but it was very difficult to impose my point of view on a generation I just really didn’t understand. To this day I don’t understand those so-called groups that were prominent at that time. That was a time of confrontation rather than consultation.

The film had no story line. Nobody really knew what they wanted. Their minds, their attitudes were somehow circular; everything would go around and around and never break out. Chuck Wein, who was the writer, was perhaps a very brilliant man in his field—but I don’t know what his field was: I never discovered it.

They borrowed my Cadillac for an hour and it came back six months later—a shambles. They used it until it fell apart. They lugged their mattresses around in it; they filmed from it; they used it all over town. They destroyed that and they destroyed my son’s Porsche and a couple of other cars. If your ambitions are to see something successful come of your son’s ventures, I guess you become a little super-generous. I just couldn’t control the thing.

BOBBY ANDERSEN
 Fort Lee is where Edith reached the point where they all decided they were through with her. It was at the end of the shooting. She was at her most divine, her most fabulous, her most inspired . . . but she was unbearable. They must have shot every scene a hundred times. she just had no concept of what she was doing. she held it up for hours and hours. she had to do her exercises, she had to
do this, she had to do that. I just loved every minute, egging her on: “Don’t pay any attention to them. You’re having a good time, Edith. That’s all that matters. It’s about time you had a good time”—as if she’d never had one before! We danced most of the day and we disappeared in the castle attics for hours. With a photographer. Taking photographs, and posing, and gossiping. We had so much fun hiding from them in these secret rooms in the fabulous old house.

As for Margouleff’s parents, I think they really almost
died
from it! About a week before Fort Lee, I’d been up at their offices where they were extremely hostile to all of us. especially their son Bob. They kept dragging him into little rooms, off to the side, and I kept hearing screeches and shrieks. I mean, to go through so much money and find they’d been spending it on a bunch of drug addicts who sat there cutting the film into tiny one-inch strips showing some pigeons in the air and saying, “How fabulous!” They cut I don’t know how many hours and ended up with two squares of celluloid of pigeons that they thought were the
best.
Just sat there on the floor, all wired up.

ROBERT MARGOULEFF
 More and more they got into these crazy things. There was this scene which was supposedly on a beach. So they took my studio and filled the entire place with sand. Tons and tons of it. The place was destroyed. I had a really nice office which was absolutely ravaged, right? I was horrified. I was straight: I had short hair, I wore three-piece suits, and my office—the one they dumped all the beach sand into—was full of antique furniture. My partners ran for the hills. I used to run around with a broom, always sweeping up, trying to keep the place in at least some semblance of order.

Finally I sent the whole crew on vacation. I thought, “Well, hell, why not?” and they went to some volcanic island in the Mediterranean for a week while I got the studio cleaned.

That film reduced me to chicken-salad sandwiches, a little one-room office over a bar on Third Avenue, and holes in my shoes. It really changed the course of my life.

BOBBY ANDERSEN
 After the film project began to go to pieces, Edith wanted to get back with Andy. She saw him a few times—making up with him—and they did a little film together. The
Ciaol
people got paranoid about it because they heard Andy was going to release it and call it
Ciao!Manhattan.
They were absolutely terrified. A close friend of Andy’s had come around and said,
“Dears,
I want you
all to know that Andy has already filmed, edited, and published
Ciao!Manhattan.
It is very soon to be released with Edie Sedgwick, and it is the real
Ciao!Manhattan”

ONDINE
 We filmed a scene—a small scene—that was later called
Ondine and Edie.
I don’t think it wI’ll ever be seen; it’s in Warhol’s closet. I was the one who asked her to do it, because I had the feeling that if Edie was going to make it, she really should make it with Warhol. But I didn’t realize there was so much pressure and that so much had gone on between her and Warhol that it was no longer viable. Once Andy makes up his mind against you, you don’t return in a Warhol film. But in this case he tried.

Edie had gotten really nervous. It’s absolutely the most excruciating piece of footage you’ll ever see in your life. It’s a whole reel of the total collapse of a person . . . Edie trying to be charming and delightful, smoking cigarette after cigarette, talking to me about things she thinks I’ll enjoy, playing actors and actresses weirdly . . . and it just didn’t work. It begins to get really painful because she is so obviously coming apart at the seams. Just coming apart! My lover and a couple of other people watched it at the Factory once and they asked Warhol to please take it off. Someone said it was literally the most painful movie he’d ever seen in his life.

GREGORY CORSO
 I got on Warhol about Edie. It was at Max’s Kansas City. He happened to be sitting alone. I was with Allen Ginsberg. I said to Warhol, “You suck, you know that? You make these chicks into superstars and then you go off into your own thing and you drop them . . . literally, like that. You pick these little birds out and make superstars out of them. And look what happens to Edie!” I really got on his ass. Ginsberg whispered to me, “Gregory, you’re laying too much weight on this man. It’s really not his fault. Don’t you think you should apologize to that man?” I said, “No way.”

PAUL MORRISSEY
 Sepp Donnhauer, a big rock ‘n’ roll promoter, was there when we filmed that night, and right afterwards Edie took off with him in a car and drove to California like a hippie beatnik.

DANNY FIELDS
 The Castle is very high in the Hollywood hills. The land was completely neglected. A swimming pool down the hI’ll was full of algae and moss. It hadn’t seen the touch of a gardener in years. Bela Lugosi’s house is right across the street, which looks like a Mayan pyramid and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Castle has a two-story-high living room, a fake-gold-leaf vaulted ceiling, big windows, a grand piano, a spiral staircase, and off it are several weird, irregularly shaped bedrooms. there is a tower room. It all looks like it was made of papier-maché. In the living room you could hear a roll of toilet paper being unrolled up on the third floor. It was a famous haunt for rock ‘n’ roll people when they first went to Hollywood. They could rent the whole place. The Jefferson Airplane stayed there. So did the Velvet Underground.

We drove up to the Castle. Edie had left Sepp and was going with Dino Valente then—he wrote this one song, “Come on, children, let’s all get together, smile on your brother.” It became a classic, but it was a one-shotter. Edie was with him up at the Castle. As soon as I got up there, she was after me: “Oh, do you have any downs?” I said, “Nope.” “Aw, come on, I just need a Tuinal to get through tI’ll tomorrow. I need three Tuinals a day and I’ve only had two. Last night I took six and they didn’t work.” In fact, I did have some pills with me, but I wasn’t going to let her get near them.

Relationships were built entirely on drugs . . . the only thing going. “Do we have any junk for tonight?” I hid my suitcase under my bed that night. I took the pills out and hid them somewhere in the room. A few hours later, and don’t you know, Edie found them? They were all gone. She must have had a nose for them, because she didn’t even have to rip the room apart to find them.

MICHAEL POLLARD
 When I met Dino with Edie at the Castle, he looked at me and said, “Hey, man, ants, man, ants. Watch out—ants!” He said “ants” like he was drowning in them.

NICO
 After Dino, Edie was very much in love with Patrick Tilden. He was Bob Dylan’s best friend. Bob had been staying at the Castle before the Velvet Underground moved there. Bob’s song “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” is written about Edie. Everybody thought it was about Edie because she sometimes wore leopard. Dylan’s a very sarcastic person . . . It is a very nasty song, whoever the person in it might be.

When Edie and Patrick fell in love, I thought it was a very romantic thing. She lived downstairs in Severn Darden’s old room, the spookiest room of all. It was haunted. There was a pentangle in the entrance. I heard the shrieks and funny noises . . . I hear things rather than feel them. Every morning at four, at the same spot, somebody . . . the ghost . . . would make this noise like a broomstick pounding on the floor.

I met Jim Morrison while Edie was staying with me, and he had a fetish for red-haired shanties . . . you know, Irish shanties. I was so much in love with him that I made my hair red after a while. I wanted to please his taste. It was silly, wasn’t it? Like a teenager.

PAUL ROTHCHILD
 Everything at the Castle was theater. Jim Morrison was another colossal madman pursued by his own demons. He was a tester, too, like Dylan but much more cruel. He took Nico up in a tower, both naked, and Jim, stoned out of his mind, walked along the edge of the parapet. Hundreds of feet down. Here’s this rock star at the peak of his career risking his life to prove to this girl that life is nothing. This is theater. I’m doing this theater for you.” He asked Nico to walk the same line and she backed down. Edie would have walked it.

The filming of
Lulu. (Above)
Bob Neuwirth putting the finishing touches on Edie.
(Below and opposite)
Edie with Richard Leacock.