Edie (61 page)

She called me Daddy . . . always did. If I didn’t give in, it was, “Daddy, you’re always on me. I’m always wrong. It’s me that’s causing the trouble.” And she’d break into tears. So I’d say: “Really, what d’ya want? D’ya want to continue this screwed-up life of sleeping pills to bed, pills for this, pills for that, just pills, pills, pills? I’ve had my fI’ll of pills. If s ruining both of us. This
game
about pills. The drugged-out
mornings. It’s Dr. Mercer in the afternoon. Then I get home from school and by that time you want to do something: “Let’s go dancing’ . . . party, party, party.” “Daddy,” she’d say, “I’ve been to so many hospitals so many of these past years that I’ve got a lot of time I’ve got to make up.”

TOM GOODWIN
 I knew Edie well in the Cambridge days and at her apartment on Sixty-third Street in Manhattan, so when I got a job working on the television program “An American Family,” I tried to call her. I didn’t know her married name so I just called the ranch and they said she wasn’t there. They were really nasty. I figured I was going to be in Santa Barbara for a long time working on the program, and that I’d just run into her. We were going to film Lance Loud at this fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum—a big event for the Santa Barbarians. Edie was there with her brother-in-law. She had on a simple low-cut dress—flowers on the front. Her neck bones were very gaunt. . . thin, really. She looked very clean and beautiful; her smile when she turned it on was just beautiful Edie. I went up to her and said, “Hey Edie. It’s Tom Goodwin.” Somehow her recognition process was very slow. It took about ten minutes. She finally remembered. “Tomkin, how are you? Where have you been?”

JACK BAKER
 In the lobby of the museum I met Lance Loud and his girl friend, the cameraman, and the producer of “An American Family.” The museum wouldn’t let them through the door to the fashion show because of the way they were dressed. Lance always dresses eccentrically, and Jackie Horner was divine-looking, with black dots around her eyes, her body surrounded with a sort of feathered boa,
and she looked like some gorgeous black bird. I managed to get them through. The museum director wanted me to guarantee that they would behave. The museum is quite stuffy, and he was terrified that they were going to
do
something.

LANCE LODD
 It was quite a struggle at the door. I don’t want to label myself as “counterculture” because I was totally brought up on Post Toasties, but I was dressed in elegant “opposite class.” I was with Jackie Horner, and when you come in with her, it’s like coming with the Hope Diamond. She blinds everybody. And the Santa Barbara matrons didn’t like it at all. They thought we were monsters. That scared me. I was in shock after we got in, and that entire evening when they were shooting “An American Family” I was freaked out. But Edie came up . . . drawn by those cameras. She said, “I haven’t seen you for eons!” I asked her where she’d been, and she said, “I’ve been put away for a while,” and she giggled. She introduced herself to someone standing there as “Edie Sedgwick Post . . . temporarily.”

I knew all about her. One Sunday some years back my father was reading
Time
magazine. He was chuckling, he always thought
Time
was very funny. He had opened it up to the art section and said, “Look at this crazy, crazy, crazy guy” . . . and he showed me this picture of Andy Warhol and Edie. I said, “Well, what’s wrong with him?” My father said, “Well, this guy has dyed his hair silver and his girl friend has dyed
her
hair silver, and she wears these big ball earrings.” He read me the article.

I immediately fell in love with them. They were so non-vocal, and yet it seemed, from what I could tell, they were getting their way . . . really just riding, riding, riding the wild surf of New York society. My eyes were big as saucers. I just fell in love with that idea.

So they became the only hobby I ever had. I went to the library; I read up on Pop Art. I read
everything
I could about Andy Warhol, about his underground Factory, and all that jazz. I went
crazy
for it. As for Edie . . . I thought she was just like the fairy princess of the whole thing. How lucky she had to be . . . and how dynamic to be alive and her and to go to parties all the time. I got really bubbly when I thought about it!

So time went by and I started writing these letters. I’d write Andy and ask . . . oh . . . what does he think about, who’s he going around with? I heard that Edie was being phased out. I didn’t know why. But since I was indebted to Andy more or less, and Edie was just part of his art, I assumed that if Andy moved on to someone else, it was obviously for the better.

An American Family
from the public television series

Edie (with bare arm) in
An American Family,
filmed on the last night of her life

He
finally
wrote me a letter. It was a crinkled piece of paper inside a big envelope, just a little wadded piece of paper on which was typed: “My number is . . .” and then his phone number. That was all. My eyes . . . oh, God! . . . my heart, my soul, my toenails started blooming. I was just going
crazy
for him.

Before I called him, I got six girls to phone him up and I had them say: “Oh, hi, I really like your stuff. Oh, by the way, I live in Santa Barbara . . .” just to see if he might say, “Oh, do you know Lance Loud?”

I finally called him myself, and we talked. I would call him collect every weekend, Friday and Saturday night, three or four in the morning my time, six his time, and he’d stI’ll be awake to tell me what he’d done that night and how exciting it was. In Santa Barbara it was quite a chore to find something to do until
eleven,
even on a weekend night. So I’d get a girl and we’d drive around up and down the streets until it was time to call Andy. I’d stop at gas-station phones and call and call until he got home. He would talk to me about my parents and how I owed it to them to be a good boy, and stuff like that. He’d get angry at me because I told him how much I hated my parents. I told him I was going to run away to New York, and I asked him if he’d please let me be in a movie. He said, “Sure . . . but you can’t stay at my house because . . . well, no one stays at my house because I have a thing about that. But I’ll find you a place to stay.” I was all set to go. I was so excited. There was
nothing
that kept me from going except my own laziness.

Oh, he was really great. I believed it when he told me to be good to my parents. I believed
anything
he told me. Then he’d say, “Oh, tell me you love me.” I’d say, “I love you, Andy.” He’d say, “Oh, say it like you
mean
it. Oh, tell me again.” He wanted a nude picture of me. So I sent him one without a shirt on. I sent him a big package full of clothes—some underwear which I spray-painted fluorescent pink, and a spray-painted T-shirt, and all this jazz—and I poured all my mother’s perfume in the box . . . all of it . . . and all my father’s after-shave lotion. I sent it to him, and over the gas-station phone one night I asked him, “Did you get my package?”

Andy drew his breath in like this, “Uhhhh,” and he said yes, they had received all the clothing, but they’d given it to people they didn’t like so they’d be able to smell them coming.

After he got shot, he changed his number and I never spoke to him
again. The whole relationship fell down. I tried to write him, but the letters came back. He suddenly became very, very private. He got very scared after that for a long time. So I never met him.

One day I was up in Isla Vista to look at all the sexy college boys at the beach . . . they’re so stupid you feel like you could talk them into anything if you really wanted to . . . and while I was sitting there looking around, this big German Shepherd ran down the dusty road onto the beach, followed by this girl with brown hair with flowers stuck in it, and a sort of pixie dress, brown and very short. She was carrying a bouquet of lilies, it looked like, and weeds and these old dandelions. She and the dog ran together, just beautifully, right into the water, and she ran right up until the water touched the hem of her dress, and stood there with the dog swimming around her.

It was so neat, because she had just flown down the beach on this Indian Summer day and everyone stopped everything: all those big men playing football, and those crazy, crazy biceps flying all over the place, you know, like fireworks . . . and everyone’s eyes bugged out.

Well, it
was
Edie Sedgwick. And I, you know, just died. I knew who it was even though I had never seen photos of her with brown hair, and hadn’t really heard anything about her except maybe some mumblings that she was a drug addict and all that jazz. Well, I have a roped-off pew in the church of my heart for the obsessed.

I walked up to her, and the closer I got, I thought, “Oh, it has to be” . . . because those eyes were so sad and so descriptive. I walked up to her and said, I’ve wanted to meet you for the longest time.” She said, “Oh, thank you,” in this little baby voice. We kissed and all that. She said, “You aren’t a fag, are you?” and I said, “Well . . .” but before I got a chance to give her my bit, she said, “I’m so tired of fags. That’s all I ever knew in New York. Fags. Fags. Fags.” I said, “Really?” and she said, “Yeah. I don’t ever went to meet another one in my life. All the boys were so pretty, but they all liked other boys.”

Well, if that was so, she certainly was making up for lost time there in Santa Barbara. I had a friend who went to visit her in the Cottage Hospital—he’s one of those blond surfer types . . . so sexy that you think they can’t
have
sex; they have to stand around on the beach all day—and he said she had boys in there all the time for sex; she’d lock the door so the doctor couldn’t get in . . . “Oh, come on, come on! Let’s do it right now!” Really frantic.

I never visited her. She asked me to down there on the beach. I went home and died a million deaths. I was going to go and visit her,
but I was very shy, and, besides, I thought our meeting on the beach was the tops. I don’t want to bother popular people. I’d rather idolize them.

It was such a surprise to see her at the fashion show. Edie came up, drawn like a moth to flames by those cameras. I was frightened. I thought suddenly it would appear that I was standing there with a ghost of myself in the future. It would seem like “Oh, look, there’s Lance, and there’s what’s going to happen to him.” I didn’t know what to do. She seemed to be grasping that ray from the camera. She just stole the scene. It was a natural thing . . . as though the need for it was great.

MICHAEL NOVARESE
 My clothes were the ones being shown that night. I had six models and the girls had sixty changes. We showed day clothes, suits, coats, cocktail clothes, evening clothes, fur trims, and also beaded clothes. It lasted for about an hour—quite an elaborate show. I sat on a stool, center stage, and talked about the dresses. Edie was sitting in the third row center of the audience, and throughout the entire show she didn’t take her eyes off me . . . as if I were hypnotizing her. She would follow the model, but as soon as the model would leave her area of vision, her eyes would come directly back to me. It was a weird, very eerie feeling, because we had not met. She seemed almost transfixed. I was not offended that she was staring at me. When someone’s staring at you, you receive it: i’s pleasant. But then you become curious as to why.

After the show was over, she came backstage and introduced herself and said she had never known such moments of happiness as she had watching the clothes; the clothes were so beautiful; the models were like gazelles. She said she’d had the greatest impulse to get up on the runway and model herself—to model what she was wearing. When I asked why she hadn’t, she said her husband would not think it was a good idea. She wanted to see some of the dresses up close; there was a particular red chiffon which she adored. She tried it on. She said, “I haven’t seen clothes like this in so many years. I have been away.”