Edie (62 page)

She went up to a few of the models and told them how beautiful they were, and what poise, and how steady they’d been on the runway, which had not been an easy one to work.

Just before Edie left, she went and stood in front of the standing mirror; it was a natural pose, the champagne glass in her hand, and she stood there staring, no change of emotion, very quiet, intense . . . the mid-morning stare that one has at times. You know? You’ve had
a bad night the night before; it’s ten in the morning, and you look in the mirror wondering, “Why did I drink so much last night?” with that almost disgusted, hard-edged stare. . . .

JACK BAKER
 After the show was over, Lance and Edie ended up dancing down a long corridor of the museum arm in arm singing that Fifties song “Young Blood”—“Looka there, Looka there, Young Blood . . . I can’t get you outta my mind.” I had been invited to a number of parties; Lance, Edie, Jeffrey Post, and Jackie Horner wanted to go with me. They talked me into taking them, which is one of the biggest social mistakes I ever made.

An awful evening! I got absolutely loaded, but I spent a lot of time talking to Edie. She was talking about the future, oddly enough, with a childlike kind of enthusiasm. It was a very touching kind of performance, because she seemed terribly weak—like a fluttering, fading moth. She wasn’t strong enough: when she would walk from room to room, she would always be leaning against her brother-in-law, Jeffrey Post. I felt I should help her. Yet there was an incredible kind of radiance, a smiling . . . an inner glowing quality about her which I felt was so unique. But there was something very ancient about her. She reminded me of Isak Dinesen, a magnificent old lady, despite the fact that she was stI’ll a youthful and beautiful girl. . . some of that aged quality that turns up in some of the photographs of Dinesen—the gold hat, the turbans, terribly wrinkled, but with that same birdlike quality. There was something Japanese about her whole performance that night. The mothlike quality, the slight fluttering, the terribly feminine fragile quality that you find in Kabuki theater. I almost remember her as having Japanese white rice powder on her face.

MICHAEL POST
 I’d just gotten home from night class when Edie phoned me up and said, “I’m at a really neat party, won’t you come on out?” I told her that I had a French test at eight in the morning and I had to study. She said, “Daddy, I really need you out here.”

So I said, “Well, all right. I’ll be right out.”

JEFFREY POST
 One group there was talking about dope . . . going on about speed and pot and how great it was. That’s what made me so proud of Edie. She told them, “I’ve had it, I’ve had the whole thing, and let me tell you it’s not worth it. Don’t do it.
Don’t.”
To hear her say it to a gathering of people, most of them strangers, not to just Michael and me, was really fantastic. Of course, they were being
pseudo-sophisticated and saying things like, “You have to take it to survive.”

That was why it was ironic later when Veronica Janeway got so vicious. She was saying to Edie, “You’re sick! You’re an addict, a dope addict. You’re a heroin addict.” Edie was wearing a sleeveless dress. She had two cats which had scratched her arms. Veronica was pointing at the marks. “Look at that! Look at that! I do volunteer work in a hospital and I know all about this stuff.”

I said, “Those aren’t heroin marks; that’s from a cat.”

Edie was just thrown back. Veronica was very loud. Then she began on how ugly Edie was—a jealousy in her about beautiful women. On and on she went. She must have been drunk. When Michael arrived, right away she lit into him: “Who do you think you are—looking like Jesus Christ? What are you doing here?”

Edie whispered to me, “This woman hates me.”

I said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be all right.”

MICHAEL POST
 She had a drink in her hand when I got there. It was vodka. She’d definitely had a couple of drinks before . . . she had this look . . . a sort of sad look, as if she were feeling an overall physical and mental ache of some sort.

Veronica Janeway was dragging Edie down. They were talking about hospitals. She was saying, “Listen, dearie. I’m sorry, but you’re doomed and your marriage is doomed and everyone’s doomed.” Edie was trying to tell her that you can learn something by going through the hospitals . . . and that it’s not a completely dark, dismal, dead-end road. She was saying, “Look . . . I’ve been through all that. I’m getting out of it now. I’ve just gotten married. We’re trying to build this whole marriage-type ideal plan. . ..”

Veronica Janeway said, “Oh, God! You’ll only stay with him a few hours or a few days.”

I looked at her and I felt like saying, “Well, listen, Toots, who the hell do you think you are!” I squatted down next to Edie and I said, “Let’s leave right now.” She said, “No, I can’t. I’ve got to make her see this.”

It was at this point the host asked Veronica Janeway to leave. “Split!. . . Take her away.”

JOHN PIERCE
 I was sitting with a grand old lady in her mid-eighties—Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce—and this girl came up and threw her arms around Mrs. Bryce. It was Edie. I had never seen her before.
I said, “That’s a splendid, friendly way to meet people.” She turned and threw her arms around me. I thought that was very pleasant. We spent part of the evening together after that. She was very frank. She told me that she had an incompatible marriage with her husband and had only married him because—as she said—“He came to see me in the hospital.”

She said she wanted to talk to me the next day. “I like to fuck first. I have to before talking; it relaxes me.” I said that certainly there were other ways of relaxing. “Not for me,” she said. So I said, “Go ahead and take care of that with somebody else and then we can have our talk.” She said she guessed that would be all right.

She was sitting on my lap. People sort of stared. Her eyes were lovely. I said that no one with her face and eyes could be anywhere as bad as she said some people thought she was. Sort of trying to build her up. That seemed to please her, though I don’t know how deep it penetrated.

MICHAEL POST
 On the way home from the party she told me she’d met this guy John Pierce from New York and she’d told him she was married but she didn’t know how long it would last. I don’t know if she was testing me or trying to run or trying to hurt.

I guess I knew she was going to leave me one day. I honestly felt that she was in love with me, but that I was beneath her. She wanted me really to manage her money, her career, be her agent. But I couldn’t feel comfortable doing that. I couldn’t ride on her coattails. I had to find my own way. Because with her I couldn’t really speak up. I wasn’t refined. I hadn’t experienced or seen society the way she had. I wasn’t literate in the arts or music or literature. At parties it was Edie always talking, not me. I felt like a sore thumb walking around.

It was one o’clock when we got home. She said how troubled she was about the woman who attacked her. I told her that the woman was so far gone that she didn’t even know what she was saying. I tried to get her to forget it. She said, “But, dammit, I just wanted to get through to her.”

Something then happened that was really strange. A lot of psychic things happen to me. I asked her to come over. “You know,” I said, “I want to hold you.”

It seemed such a really nice thing. I thought to myself, “I’ll close my eyes right now and in my mind go shooting through space holding
Edie.” For some reason I really wanted to imprint that scene for eternity in my mind.

But then I said to myself: “No, I won’t close my mind and do that. I’m growing out of that stage of living on past thoughts and daydreaming. I’m married now, with school to finish, and getting some sort of job, and then making it on my own and with Edie.” I gave her the “meds,” and she started falling to sleep really fast. Her breathing was bad—it sounded like there was a big hole in her lungs . . . this sort of flopping, rough noise. She was such a cigarette fiend. It was a fixation with Edie to feel the heaviness of smoke in her lungs. She wanted to stop when she was thirty. That night it sounded so bad that I thought of waking her up and telling her that if she didn’t stop tomorrow I was going to give her a spanking or something. After all, it was our first anniversary, November 15,1971 . . . six months exactly from the first night that we had sex.

MICHAEL POST
 The Alarm Went off. It was seven-thirty. I opened my eyes, closed them, and then opened them again . . . started to get up and move around. I looked over and I noticed Edie was stI’ll in that exact same position . . . on her right side with her head facing down on the corner of the pillow. It was odd because usually she would flop the pillow on the floor and lay flat on the bed. Well, I thought. . . well, I had done that once or twice in my life. . . woken up in the same position I’d gone to sleep in.

But that morning I touched her on the shoulder . . . and she was just. . . just cold. I sort of freaked out. My whole body lifted off the bed. I fiddled with the phone and started screaming and yelling, “I think my wife’s dead! Get someone over I Haul ass!” Then I rolled her over and tried resuscitation. Her jaw was locked . . . cold and stiff. I kept at the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until I heard the doorbell ring and a policeman came in.

The policeman touched her wrist to see if there was a pulse; he was not doing
anything
, you know. So I started yelling at him, “Do something, do something! I believe in miracles. Get her up! Resuscitate her!” Same thing when the guys from the ambulance came in. They said, “You know, there’s nothing we can do,” before they’d even tried to do anything. It was like they were all telling me, “Just forget it. Forget it.” All those school years I’d heard that even if someone’s
completely blue in the face, resuscitation works. But no one did anything. I was running around . . . no clothes on . . . tears streaming down my face.

They were rude. I just got furious. Edie didn’t have any clothes on. They wanted to take her body away. I said, “Well, not without any clothes on.” They kept asking about drugs. Dr. Mercer arrived. He talked about the medications. She just looked so helpless.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I immediately said on the phone: “Don’t let them get to her I She’s not dead yet, man I” I felt she’d simply astro-projected, which means that you’ve separated your consciousness from your body and you’re stI’ll connected by some sort of energy: some call it a silver thread, or a silver cord. Jimi Hendrix went out on it and never came back. Edie did, too.

I tried to see if we could stop it, but they’d already taken the blood out of her, and once that’s done, you’re dead.

JANET PALMER
 Michael was carrying on. “My baby is dead! Last night she was all right and today she’s dead. I killed my baby. . . .” All I could think of was how awful it would be to wake up and find someone dead lying next to me. For ages I used to poke John at night. I was afraid he would the in the night.

BRUCE WILLIAMSON
 I went to see Brigid Berlin about an article I was planning on Edie Sedgwick. Anyway, Brigid played a tape for me on which she phoned Andy Warhol to tell him about Edie’s death. A rather strange, cryptic tape, vague, though it went something like this—

Brigid told Andy that Edie had suffocated, and Andy asked
when?,
not sounding particularly surprised or shaken. But then, that’s Andy. Brigid pointed out to him that Edie hadn’t died of drugs, she had suffocated in her sleep. And Andy asked
how
she could do a thing like that. Brigid didn’t know. Then Andy asked whether
he
would inherit all the money? (I took the
he
as a reference to Edie’s young husband at the time of Edie’s death.) Brigid said that Edie didn’t have any money. Then, after a pause, Andy continued with something like, Well, what have
you
been doing? Then Brigid started talking about going to the dentist.

PATTI SMITH
 I remember the day I heard the news. It was a nice day out. In this thrift shop I saw an ermine jacket . . . little ermine tails all over it. Though it was falling apart, I said, “111 take a look at that.” It reminded me of Edie—of Edie’s hair. I don’t want to make it seem like all I thought about was Edie Sedgwick night and day. But she was one of the many things that moved me . . . Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock. Anyway I put some money down for the jacket and kept saving. It was eighteen dollars. I finally got it. It had a cotton flowered lining that had been sewed into it. It looked cheap, but it was really a cool cut. That night I put it on my pillow and slept on it because it was really soft. The next day I went down to get the New York Post and opened it up. There was that picture of her. It was such a shock, really. I didn’t usually think about her too much. Perhaps it was because I had bought that jacket. It really killed me. God, it was weird.