Edie (63 page)

Then that day Bob Neuwirth called me. He said, “Well, the lady’s dead” . . . just this little sentence. The same thing he said when Janis Joplin died. Then we went on with this whole other conversation—as though he had to get that bit of news out of the way. But then he said that I should write a poem for her because he couldn’t deal with it. Bobby was the one who really got me to write, really pushed me. I hung up the phone. I felt really bad. I feel a real responsibility to the images I get attached to. I had the phone in my hand, just putting it down, and I just got this thing . . . dah, dah, dah, dah, and I thought, “Oh, oh, I’m going to write a poem.” The rhythm persisted and the poem, “Oh it isn’t fair, oh it isn’t fair, how her ermine hair turned men around.” It was like it was not even my own voice. I was alone at the Chelsea Hotel holding the phone and babbling this poem. I just copied it down. It was like tracing a face. It came in perfect rhythm without any effort from someplace. It had to be written. If I would have held my mouth, it probably would have come out of my ears. I always think these kinds of poems are important . . . I don’t mean important to art or to anything except maybe to some lost soul that needed some classification or some peace. When I finished it, it was like somebody could go to sleep.

EDIE SEDGWICK (1943-1971)

’I don’t know how she did it. Fire
She was shaking all over. It took
her hours to put her make-up on.
But she did it. Even the false eyelashes.
She ordered gin with triple
Times. Then a limosine. Everyone
knew she was the real heroine of
Blonde on Blonde.’
Oh it isnt fair
Oh it isnt fair
how her ermine hair
turned men around
she was white on white
so blonde on blonde
and her long long legs
how I used to beg
to dance with her
but I never had
a chance with her
oh it isnt fair
how her ermine hair
used to swing so nice
used to cut the air
how all the men
used to dance with her
I never got a chance with her
though I really asked her
down deep
where you do
really dream
in the mind
reading love
I’d get
inside
her move
and we’d
turn around
and she’d
turn around
and turn the head
of everyone in town
her shaking shaking
glittering bones
second blonde child
after brian jones
oh it isnt fair
how I dreamed of her
and she slept
and she slept
forever
and I’ll never dance
with her no never
she broke down
like a baby
she suffocated
like a baby
like a baby girl
like a lady
with ermine hair
oh it isnt fair
and I’d like to see
her rise again
her white white bones
with baby brian jones
baby brian jones
like blushing
baby dolls

JEFFREY POST
 The funeral itself was very small. Michael took care of every detail—the ceremony, what was to be read at the church and at the grave site. There was no organ music, no singing. The casket was covered with magnolias. Edie’s wedding bouquet had been done up with magnolias.

The casket was in the church. My eyes were focused on it the entire time because I knew that within an hour it was going to the burial site and that was it. I was twenty-two and Michael was twenty-one. The flowers, the casket . . . all of those are objects . . . but when you go to the cemetery itself, where you’ve seen your brother select a plot for Edie and also buy one for himself right next to it, that rips you.

JEFFREY BRIGGS
 I went to the funeral, but that was because I don’t think I had anything better to do. I wasn’t working at the time. But anyway it would have been bad if she’d had her funeral and no one from her
Ciao!Manhattan
situation had shown up. I ordered up a bunch of flowers. David Weisman had called up from New York and said to get diem . . . and to get Margouleff to pay for them. So I called up a Santa Barbara florist and ordered three floral pieces and charged them to him. Seventy dollars. Nice flowers. No corny posies. Margouleff and I drove to the church. We didn’t intrude on the family scene. We sort of made our appearance so the family would know
that we were represented. it’s a very pretty church—light, polished wood. Nice morning light coming through the windows. We stood outside until everyone else had filed in. Some real old geezer was up in the pulpit talking. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people there. Tops. Michael and Jeff Post, of course, and the Sedgwicks. You could spot those Sedgwicks from a mile away—black eyebrows like straight lines, same cheekbones and facial structure, same complexion. I didn’t introduce myself to any of them.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 The funeral was a drag, man. Everybody was feeling sorry for themselves. Michael was feeling sorry for himself. Mummy was feeling sorry for herself. Krista and I were the only people there who felt sorry for everybody else.

I cried. I hurt a lot about Edie, and I hurt a lot about Minty, and I hurt a lot about Bobby, and I hurt a lot about Fuzzy. Sometimes I wonder how many people a family can destroy with their stupidity.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Edie was buried in the Oak HI’ll Cemetery in Ballard, up over the San Marcos Pass. It used to be a dingy village so small that if you went through it at fifty miles per hour you’d miss it. It’s in the Valley, but it’s nothing. A few live-oak trees. No one would ever go there except to see the veterinarian.

JEAN STEIN
 On the day I drove into the Santa Ynez Valley to see Edie’s grave, the big sprinkler systems worked across the alfalfa fields. That evening the deer would come out of the hills for the water.

The main street in Ballard is called Baseline Avenue—just a couple of blocks long. A sign by the Presbyterian Church was advertising a variety of funeral services . . . a white “limosine,” an organist, humanist services, and even burial at sea.

Edie’s grave is a simple slab of polished red granite that reflects the trees. The inscription reads
EDITH SEDGWICK POST, WIFE OF MICHAEL BRETT FOST
, 1943-1971. In the lower right-hand corner I noticed the words
ROCK OF AGES
, which turned out to be the quarry’s trademark.

JOHN ANTHONY WALKER
 Living in Auroville, India—twenty thousand miles from anywhere—is a very attractive person called Mike Brady from Boston. He’s Irish, a fireman and a very high being . . . and a beautiful drunk. We were sitting one night in Pondichery in an Indian drinking place. For some reason Edie was very strongly on me that night so I decided to have Myers’s daiquiris because it was Myers’s daiquiris that Edie and I had in the Casablanca, where the whole Cambridge scene between us took place. They had never heard of a daiquiri in South India so we had to make them ourselves. They got the lemons out from behind the bar and we bought a bottle of dark rum. When they finally brought out a jug . . . I think it was a metal can . . . we took the lemons and we squeezed them, and then they brought out the sugar little by little to add to the mixture. India is a very poor country and there’s never enough sugar. We set up a glass for Edie, which is an Indian thing . . . a way of honoring some spirit that was killed. So there was a glass for Edie sitting on the other side of the table from my friend Mike and I. I remembered that Edie smoked, so I put a cigarette in the ashtray there. The cigarette wasn’t lit and it just sat there. And the drink sat there. And I talked about Edie.

For years and years I had this whole Edie imago that I would play out, this sort of fantasy . . . this set piece. All these things I knew better another day, another time, but I faded out on Edie when I moved to India. The truth had been drained out of me by telling her story over and over again, and it is difficult to be truthful about things. My memory is very bad and my recollections are really not that cleat for being fantasized. But I tried to tell Mike all about her. One has to try.

I used to have many ready-made statements about Edie. I can tell you the first time I met her was one of those flashes one has that stays fixed as years go by. There she was, and everything else fell away. it’s recognition . . . we were like children coming together on the sand. Edie had just come to Cambridge from Silver Hill. She was beautiful, she looked like an Italian roadside madonna. She was very central to me then; there was something expressing itself through Edith which I could respond to, but it was larger than humans could handle at that point. Edie was a star who by mistake got incarnated into a human body, and never could figure it out and wanted to get back up there.

I remember spending one whole night with Edie drinking coffee in Cambridge . . . this was sort of splendid because she didn’t have the seventh party to go to. As cup of coffee after cup of coffee kept mounting, she described her sense of the big dimensions, of multitudes . . . the mass and the multitude. Edie disliked rules; she disliked boxes; she disliked the door locking behind her in Silver Hill; she disliked going to sleep. She had to try for the biggest stage possible, and that’s why she moved to New York.

I really don’t know what Edie was. If she could have chosen a family, Edie would have chosen
her
family . . . nothing less would have suited her. But I don’t know why she couldn’t pull it together. There was something mat was non-destructive in her—echoes of other planets, other worlds (hat would shine through. The last time I saw her was in New York at the Dom, and her head was shaven and blond. She was with a friend who was a bum off the street called Teddy or something. She kept saying,
”1
want you to meet my friend,” and he was a down-and-outer, a panhandler. I spent time with them, and that was all he was. But she wanted to have that aspect of her life accepted along with everything else about her.

There was no end to the vortex that swung around Edie. If one got too close one could whirl out and hit one’s Utile head against a fire hydrant or sewer line. I kept my distance; I wasn’t going to do that. Edie could devour anything and I was survival-oriented and would never commit myself to saving her. But it would have been a delectable death.

You want to know how I feel about Edie. That night in Pondichery I think I spilled it all out, which is maybe why I can’t come back with it . . . she might not stI’ll be in close enough to evoke her presence. I don’t have the same capacity to be at a table at the Casablanca with Edie that I could have then. But that night at the bar in Pondichery I told Mike Brady all about her, and the drink sat there and the cigarette sat there. It was really weird, she came down so solidly. Twenty minutes later, I looked across the table and the cigarette was lit and smoking. Edie was there.