Edie Sedgwick

Acrylic high, horrorous, yodeling, repetitious echoes of an infinity so brutally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is.

Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick (20 April 1943 – 16 November 1971) was an American actress, socialite, and heiress who starred in many of Andy Warhol's short films in the 1960s.

Quotes

I do love Alice in Wonderland though, that's something I think I could do very well.

A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand.

• I do love Alice in Wonderland though, that's something I think I could do very well. Don't you think we ought to do an A.W.? A.W.'s Alice in Wonderland? Andy Warhol's Alice in Wonderland? A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand. It, uh, it would make a fantastic film. So I wanted somebody to write the script for it, in a modern sense. I think it would be the most marvelous movie in the world, if it could be done. Don't you think? Really, I don't think they've done one since they did a Walt Disney one — which isn’t really doing it. In a sense it is, but not in the way it really should be done. What's needed right now is a real scene. I mean not just cartoon characters, but the actual character of people because there's so many fantastic people that you might as well use the people.
  • Inner and Outer Space (1965), directed by Andy Warhol

Edie : American Girl (1982)

Quotes of Sedgwick from Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.

• It's okay — I know.
  • On being told by a palm reader that she had a very short life line

• The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot.
  • Referring to the Warhol crowd in New York

• The real Edie is where the action is. Fast cars, fast horses, and people doing things!
  • Response to a question in an interview, New York World-Telegram (18 August 1965)

• I made a mask out of my face because I didn't realize I was quite beautiful. God blessed me so. I practically destroyed it. I had to wear heavy black eyelashes like bat wings, and dark lines under my eyes, and cut all my hair off, my long dark hair. Cut it off and strip it silver and blonde. All those little maneuvers I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me.

• It's frightening and glamorous and exciting at the same time. I wouldn't change it for anything! After the bad and sad times in my life, it's something I want to do.

• Fashion as a whole is a farce, completely. The people behind it are perverted, the styles are created by freaked out people, just natural weirdos. I know this because I worked with all those people while I was modeling.

• I moved out to Santa Barbara to straighten out, supposedly, and I started using drugs, which I found were plentiful in Isla Vista, around the college campus — UCSB. And then I started rollicking around with all kinds of kids a lot younger than me. Anywhere from 15 to their 20s, but I was kind of in my late 20s. And, uh...I had fun, but I really didn't have anyone I particularly loved. And I still don't, except for loving friends, but I mean I haven't been in love with anyone in years and years. But I have a certain amount of faith that it'll come.
  • On coming home to California in the late 1960's.

• Everything that happened to me has been a paradox for life. The very things that I should have done would have been the trap. The very things I might have given into, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I found hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. You have to work like mad to make people understand... Even if I don't make it, you know, I really insist on believing, and then I fall off the edge because there's nobody else to follow it. And I would just fall off the edge.

• Dr. Roberts says, "Hello, girls . . . how are we today? Are you all ready? Okay. Hop up. Put all your weight on this leg. Okay? ready? My god, this rear end looks like a battlefield." You went to hear something I wrote about the horror of speed? Well, maybe you don't but the nearly incommunicable torments of speed, buzzerama, that acrylic high, horrorous, yodeling, repetitious echoes of an infinity so brutally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is. It's hard to choose between the climactic ecstasies of speed and cocaine. They're similar. Oh, they are so fabulous. That fantabulous sexual exhilaration. Which is better, coke or speed? It's hard to choose. The purest speed, the purest coke, and sex is a deadlock. Speeding and booze. That gets funny. You get chattering at about fifty miles an hour over the downdraft, and booze kind of cools it. It can get very funny. Utterly ridiculous. It's a good combination for a party. Not for an orgy, though. Speedball! Speed and heroin. That was the first time I had a shot in each arm. Closed my eyes. Opened my arms. Closed my fists, and jab, jab. A shot of cocaine and speed, and a shot of heroin. Stripped off all my clothes, leapt downstairs, and ran out on Park Avenue and two blocks down it before my friends caught me. Naked. Naked as a lima bean. A speedball is from another world. It's a little bit dangerous. Pure coke, pure speed, and pure sex. Wow! The ultimate in climax. Once I went over to Dr. Roberts for a shot of cocaine. It was very strange because he wouldn't tell me what it was and I was playing it cool. It was my first intravenous shot, and I said, "Well, I don't feel it." And so he gave me another one, and all of a sudden I went blind. Just flipped out of my skull! I ended up wildly balling him. And flipping him out of his skull. He was probably shot up . . . he was always shooting up around the corner anyway.
  • Tapes for the movie Ciao! Manhattan, on her first experiences with heavy drugs.

• Oh, wow, what a scene that place was - that heavenly drug down sexual perversion get their rocks off health spa. I was already so bombed I don't know how I got there. I got down to the pool, where all the freaks were. I met Paul America at the pool and I told him we were probably in danger if we stayed, but we were so blasted we forgot what was good for us and what wasn't, and the whole place turned into a giant orgy . . . every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs . . . oh, everybody eating each other on the raft, and drinking, guzzling tequila and vodka and Scotch and bourbon and shooting up every other second . . . losing syringes down the pool drains, the needles of the mainline scene, blocking the water infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night just going on an incredible sexual tailspin. Gobble, gobble, gobble. Couldn't get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I've ever been in or ever hope to be in. I should be ashamed of myself. I'm not, but I should be. Sex and speed, wow! Like, oh God. A twenty-four-hour climax that can go on for days. And there's no way to explain it unless you've been through it; there's no way to tell anyone who hasn't tasted it. I'd like to turn on the whole world for just a moment . . . just for a moment. I'm greedy; I'd like to keep most of it for myself and a few others, a few of my friends . . . to keep that superlative high, just on the cusp of each day . . . so that I'd radiate sunshine.
  • Ciao! Manhattan tapes, recalling its pool spa orgy scene

• "The Siege of the Warwick Hotel." I was left alone with a substantial supply of speed. I started having strange, convulsive behavior. I was shooting up every half-hour . . . thinking that with each fresh shot I'd knock this nonsense out of my system. I'd entertain myself hanging on to the bathroom sink with my hind feet stopped up against the door, trying to hold myself steady enough so I wouldn't crack my stupid skull open. I entertained myself by making a tape . . . a really fabulous tape in which I made up five different personalities. I realized that I had to get barbiturates in order to stop the convulsions, which lasted either hours. Something was spinning in my head. . . . I just kept thinking that if I could pop enough speed I'd knock the daylights out of my system and none of this nonsense would go on. None of this flailing around and moaning, sweating like a pig, and whew! It was a heavy scene. When I finally cooled down to what I thought was pretty good shape, I slipped on a little muumuu, ran down the stairs of the Warwick, barefoot to the lobby. My eye caught a mailman's jacket and a sack of mail hanging across the back of a chair in the hall way entrance, and before I knew what I was doing, I whipped on the jacket, flipped the bag over my shoulder, and flew out the door, whistling a happy tune. Suddenly I thought: "My God! This is a federal offense. Fooling around with the mail." So I turned around and rushed back and BAM! the manager was waiting for me. He ordered me into the back office. They telephoned an ambulance from Bellevue and packed me into it. Five policemen. I was back into convulsions again, which was really a drag, and I tried to tell the doctors and the nurses and the student interns that I'd run out of barbiturates and overshot speed. . . . I could speak sanely, but all my motor nerves were going crazy wild. It looked like I was out of my mind. If you had seen me, you wouldn't have bothered to listen, and none of them did. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Finally six big spade attendants came and held me down on a stretcher. They terrified me . . . their force against mine. I got twice as bad. I just flipped. I told them if they'd just let go of me, I would calm down and stop kicking and fighting. But they wouldn't listen and they started to tell each other what stages of hallucinations I was in . . . how I imagined myself an animal. All these things totally unreal to my mind and just guessed on their part. Oh, it was insane. Then they plunged a great needle into my butt and BAM! out I went for two whole days. When I woke up, wow! Rats all over the floor, wailing and screaming. We ate potatoes with spoons. The doctors at Bellevue finally contacted my private physician, and after five days he came and got me out. They sent me back to Gracie Square, a private mental hospital that cost a thousand dollars a week. I was there for five months. Then I ran away with a patient and we went to an apartment in the Seventies somewhere which belonged to another patient in the hospital, who gave us the keys. The guy I ran away with was twenty, but he'd been a junkie since the age of nine, so he was pretty emotionally retarded and something of a drag. I didn't have any pills, so, kind of ravaging around, I went to see a gynecologist and a pretty well-off one. He asked me if I would like to shoot up some acid with him. I hadn't much experience with acid, but I wasn't afraid. He closed his office at five, and we took off in his Aston Martin and drove up the coast . . . no, what's the name of that river? The Hudson. We stopped at a motel and he gave me three ampules of liquid Sandoz acid, intravenously, mainlining, and he gave himself the same amount and he completely flipped, I was hallucinating and trying to tell him what I was seeing. I'd say, "I see rich, embroidered curtains, and I see people moving in the background. It's the Middle Ages and I am a princess, " and I told him he was some sort of royalty. We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty. He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn't come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead" . . . the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man . . . it had been a one-night jag . . . he was married and had children . . . and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone. He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head. It was lucky . . . I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital - he had been a good friend - I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals - not psychiatric but medical - and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off. But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox Hill Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called . . . and then BAM! I started breathing again. I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn't understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tunials a day, plus alcohol. They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was still in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital - committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime - an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn't hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it - I'd get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn't going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn't get tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young . . . a resident . . . and I just told him, "You think I've taken drugs. There's no point in even reasoning with you. I'll just go to some other hospital." I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward's Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory - there were two with about ten beds in them - was pushing speed and heroin. And because I'd been warned that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you'd be criminally punished, I didn't touch any drugs during the three months I was there.
  • On her near-death experience and final days in New York

• I think drugs are like strawberries. That was something I was very much a part of, but at the same time there's that incredible nightmare paranoia . . . it drives human beings crazy. It frightened me to see it around me . . . I had everything that could be moves stolen by speed freaks. Things began to disappear. The Queen Bee Speedfreaks and Amphetamine Annie had found out where my apartment was. All my jewelry was stolen and all my expensive clothes. Dior, Balenciaga . . . just tons of originals. By the way, have you heard anything about my furs? Everybody's wearing them.
  • Tapes for the movie Ciao! Manhattan

• I'd been two years locked up in hospitals. I was twenty when I got out from Bloomingdale and I met a young man from Harvard who was very attractive in a sort of Ivy League way. And we made love in my grandmother's apartment and it was terrific, it was just fabulous. That was the first time I ever made love, and I had no inhibitions or anything. It was just beautiful. I didn't get my period and so I had to tell my doctor. The hospital pass was given to see if you could handle yourself outside. I was terrified to tell him that I thought I was pregnant, but I finally did. I was pregnant. I could get an abortion without any hassle at all, just on the grounds of a psychiatric case. So that wasn't too good a first experience with lovemaking. I mean it kind of screwed up my head, for one thing. This fellow found out. I was upset . . . and he asked me, and I said, "I'm pregnant. I'm not going to ask you for anything, so don't get uptight, but it's just kind of making me uncomfortable. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do about it." He split, and I didn't see him again until the summer had passed and I went to Cambridge for my first free year.
  • On becoming pregnant after her first sexual experience

• I'm a little nervous about saying anything about "the Artist" because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. Warhol really fucked up a great many people's - young people's - lives. My introduction to heavy drugs came through the Factory. I liked the introduction to drugs I received. I was a good target for the scene; I blossomed into a healthy young drug addict.
  • On tapes for Ciao! Manhattan

• kk kk ggg ddd wowo well uh, well, no, well sa-ay. I I I know know know I I can but it's ha ha ha hard.
  • In Santa Barbara, unable to talk or walk properly, suffering from permanent brain damage after being taken out of Manhattan State Hospital

• 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, 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 I'm going to leave this party. I'm fed up." He said that was all right: he'd met all the people he wanted to meet, and he'd watched the film begin 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?" I 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 I'd said, so flipped out by that, that I jumped out of the car into the path of the oncoming traffic, certain that my head would be crushed. All that happened was the I got bruised, badly bruised, but no broken bones. I mean, I was conscious, not destroyed at all. But I'd 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.
  • Edie describing a low point in her relationship with Bob Neuwirth

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Quotes of Sedgwick from Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

I'm a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many people's, young people's lives.

• It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way.

• I have an accident about every two years, and one day it won't be an accident!

• I act this way because that's the way I feel like acting. If people like it, fine. If they don't, that's their problem.

• I came to New York to see what I could see — that's from a children's book, isn't it? — and to find the living part.

• The very things I might have given in to, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I fought hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. And um, what makes that sane is that I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

• I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

• I had no money. My parents closed down all credit. I couldn't get any money, and they were trying to lock me up again because I'd taken some acid and told my psychiatrist about it. I just told him what the experience was like and he jumped, and at the same time he read about Andy Warhol's "pornographic" movies in Time. I was in the studio a lot, so my psychiatrist got really upset and called my parents and was gonna have me put away, so I ran away to Europe with Andy and Chuck.
  • On being financially cut off from her parents in 1965

• I want a further step for me...that's my process of development. I don't want to cut it off. I understand where it's been cut off for other people, and I understand the whole process in that order of things, but I see no way in that isn't a trap, that will let me out again without damaging too much, you know?

• I heard about this doctor who gave vitamin shots, and they were very stimulating and kept you going for quite a while. I was under treatment with vitamin therapy, just multivitamin shots. But I heard about this super deal that this other doctor had. A guy I was going out with at the time told me not to go to him, never to have his shots. So I immediately took them, thinking there must be something special about them...And there was. And I went, and that was the beginning of injecting drugs. I went to a doctor for it. I didn't handle it myself until a year later. I turned into a total speed freak for a few months. That's about as long as I could survive, and then I placed myself in the hospital.

• You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way...you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.

• I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it's worth being a public fool if that's all you can be in order to communicate yourself.

• They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.

• It's not going to interfere with the film. I heal miraculously. I've been in an auto accident and another fire. They thought I'd need plastic surgery, but I haven't a scar...No, I don't think I'm accident prone, but it's strange.
  • Referring to a house fire

• It's like my having to walk down thousands and thousands of white marble stairs...and nothing but a very very blue sky, very blue, like...Yes, and I'd have to walk down them forever. I never thought about going up...I don't know, don't you think that must mean something? It never occurred to me to turn it around, I mean, why didn't I think that way? This was after I had the car accident.
  • Describing a dream to Chuck Wein

• I think something very weird's going on now, 'cause the power that is permitted to youth is quite extraordinary. And they are sort of run by that kind of power.
  • Referring to the 60's youth movements

• It's sort of like a mockery in a way of reality because they think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers when there is something bitter to taste. And to pretend there isn't is foolish. I mean the ones that wonder around and know, at the same time, and yet wear flowers, and they deserve to wear flowers. And they've earned their smile...you can tell by people's eyes.
  • On the 60's flower children

• Isn't that sad! I'm so fragile. It's tragic [laughs]. Can you believe it? That's so sad.
  • Response to watching herself on a monitor

• When I started going around with Andy people thought I had a press agent. I didn't. After a while I got sort of paranoid about all the publicity, and I holed up in my apartment and cut off the telephone for two months. I saw only two people. Then I felt ready to go out again. I want to do more acting. I like it, but it's hard — the long hours, getting the lines straight, I didn't have to do that with Andy.

• I say the word death a lot … think of it as … primal relations, opposite, so if I say death a lot, it means I'm concerned with life. It's true.

• I'm out of my mind! Somebody told me that a long time ago. Some idiot! [laughs] … In a dream. I don't want to think about dreams now.

• When I was in the hospital, I was very suicidal in a kind of blind way, I was starving to death and just 'cause I didn't want to turn out like my family showed me, you know, that's all I ever saw of people, was my own family. I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone. Oh, God. So I didn't want to live.

• I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me … from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching … a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.

• But I really, since I exist, at all, I believe that it's possible for people...I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic...That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that there's to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe in it. And I refuse, like, since I'm still alive and done the things I've done and seen things and understood things as far as I have, and I am alive, I mean physically intact. When I shouldn't be, according to medical reports and so forth. I mean I should be, not here. That's all there is to it. So the magic's working and it's a rare situation.

• Why do people stop developing, or, like they stop the way you can rate their, psychologically, their development? Where they stop, and just from being children to maybe stopping at a very adolescent age, and they stay there until they die. Physically die. I mean, they react adolescently. They don't change. They don't develop. They don't — it's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.

• If all I cared about was me, I could make a million. And that's what they will never understand.

• In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem....Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

• The colors...oh, I see the most fantastic things. Do you realize when people just close their eyes what they see? It's unbelievable. Colors and things, forms of every sort. I wonder if that happens for everybody?

• I'm afraid of habit patterns...It would be too much of a routine if you had to establish definite ways of getting through things. You'd get very bored.

• You live alone, creating your life as you go.

Quotes about Sedgwick

Alphabetized by author

• We had some good times. We would go to the Park and have a picnic. Or lock the doors to be sure no one was coming into the hotel. But those time never lasted very long. Somebody was always coming over. I threw a lot of people out who were bothering her . . . who had come to rip her off. I threw them out as soon as they came in. She didn't dig that, because she dug the scene of a lot of people. She called the bellman and tried to have me thrown out. So I left and didn't come back.
  • Paul America, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Fort Lee is where Edith reached the point where they all decided they were through with her. 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 Ciao! 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."
  • Bobby Andersen on Edie's last scene from the original Ciao! Manhattan tapes, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She took her first and only subway ride in New York. The people on the train just loved her. She never sat down the whole way out - the train was so crowded we stood all the way from the East Village to Coney Island. She was in all that mad regalia with a bikini underneath so we could go swimming. The people loved her. She was talking to everyone and getting along. We rode in the first car so she could look out of the window in the front. She was fascinated by the tunnels and the weaving of the train and the clacking. Just fabulous. She'd never experienced anything like it. We did everything. We had cotton candy; ate hot dogs at Nathan's; we went on the parachute jump, the roller-coaster; we went swimming in the surf and lying in the sun. We collected shells and rocks and brought back two completely chewed corncobs for souvenirs. We did everything. The funhouse. She was just incredulous . . . all wild-eyed and goo-gaa. The distortion mirrors. And the laughing and the laughing. She screamed all the way up and all the way down the parachute jump, the big peacock-feather earrings standing straight out from her head. We got on the log sluice ride with those big silicone logs, and you came down this big sluice, and water splashed over her feathers and hat and everything, and she just loved every minute of it. I took her on the ride where the man in the gorilla costume chases after you car - one of those spook house things. She just loved him, carrying on with him and asking him into the car with us. On the carousel she rode the swan - a double or triple-seater with the silhouette of a swan on either side. She said, "Birds of a feather ought to stick together." We went swimming - leaving all this velvet and feathers strewn all over the beach in the midst of these Puerto Rican people and black people and everything. We went way over our heads swimming. Then we came home on the subway with all the rush-hour crowds. The front car both times. Oh, she just loved it! We came home so exhausted.
  • Bobby Andersen recalling a day spent with Edie on Coney Island in the late 1960's, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie was not that involved in her horse sculpture; she kept covering it with damp towels and there was a question of whether or not it would dry out irreparably. She felt that the Casa B and Cambridge were "not enough." New York had a real night life. It was a natural migration. I helped her pack and drove her to New York in her Mercedes-Benz. I think her idea was to model in New York. Much of that summer of 1964 she went to a salon where they literally pounded her legs into shape. Her legs were not good in those days - piano legs - but by the time the course was over she ended up with those legs that were so famously beautiful.
  • Gordon Baldwin on Edie moving from Boston to Manhattan, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Almost at precisely the same time Bobby ran into the bus on New Year's Eve, Edie was in a bad accident out in California. Edie was driving. There was flashing red light and she didn't stop. A big saloon car drove right into us. The car went into a lamp stand on the next street. My head went through the windshield. The car was totaled. They had it on TV - "How did two people step out of this car alive?" I was cut around the right eye and had to have twenty-two stiches. Edie, it turned out, had broken a knee. Edie was very scared that her father was going to use this accident as an excuse to put her back in the loony bin. We talked things over in the hospital room. She decided that we'd leave undetected. Her mother was in cahoots with her. She came and picked us up in a station wagon. Edie's leg was in plaster. Mrs. Sedgwick drove us to the ranch, and then we took our stuff and I drove Edie directly to the Los Angeles airport where we had a drink, and then she boarded the next plane for New York. I never saw her again.
  • G. J. Barker Benfield on Edie's car accident in California, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

She was a sweet simple girl. I don't know the other sides of Edie. I know the sweet, wide-eyed, enthusiastic Edie. ~ Betsey Johnson

Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs whoever gave them to her. ~ Nico

• I don't think Edie had ever given up on a regular, on at least the concept of having a regular, easygoing kind of life. Although it might have been a little out of her reach, she would emulate that …It was like she could see, just out of her reach, she could see how it could have been her, what she could offer, the fine quality of thought that she was capable of.
  • Jeff Briggs, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She thought it was funny that people thought they were important.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I think she had a naiveté. That's how she was able to dominate...because she had no self-judgement, except on this deep level.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She would do almost anything that came into her head.
  • L. M. Kit Carson, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• When they let her out, we began living together. One thing I remember . . . well, how she smelled. In sex your body takes on a certain odor. Edie had a particular smell that came out in lovemaking . . . a sweet but somewhat sickly smell, like orchids. I always thought it had something to do with her burns and the chemicals involved in reconstituting her body. To fuck her was like fucking a very strong child, a twelve-year-old girl . . . athletic and coltish. We finally moved into the Warwick Hotel, registering there as Mr. and Mrs. Carson because she was afraid they wouldn't let her in under her own name. She thought she was on a hotel blacklist for burning her room in the Chelsea. She had kept me up for about a week straight. Then one day in the back of the toilet I found the little plastic top they put on hypodermic needles, and I realized she was on speed. I really got pissed off. I had a kind of messianic Jesus Christ complex . . . getting involved with girls who are victims and trying to save them. So I got the drugs and took them away from her. We stayed there for two more days without her being allowed to shoot up, and I watched her disintegrate. I had to hold her down on the bed; she writhed; she bounced off the walls. She turned from being Edie, this beautiful woman, into a monkey. It got very violent. we were both being violent, threatening to jump out the windows and kill each other. I told her I was going to kill myself if she didn't stop it. I guess I was trying to make myself into the victim that she would have to save, turning into Edie Sedgwick, doing an Edie Sedgwick number. She got insulted because I was threatening her. Finally I called her doctor and said, "She's driving me crazy." I told him I was losing a lot of weight, and that I was a wreck. I was over the edge. "What can I do?" I told him I couldn't take care of her and she wouldn't voluntarily commit herself anyplace any more. . . . He said, "Leave. Get out!" I was at that state where that was all I could do. I called Warhol and got a hold of Ondine to come and take care of her. Andy wouldn't do it. He just couldn't handle it. But Ondine was enough of a monster to handle Edie, who was another monster. One speed freak knows a lot about another. So he got on the phone and he screamed at her and she screamed at him, but they were having a great game: she was finally being handled by somebody who knew exactly what she was up to. . . . Then three minor Warhol people came up to the room, but not Ondine. They got all the dope she had in the room and laid it out on the bed. They had a funny way of handling it . . . opening up the capsules on the bed and tasting the stuff and saying how great it was, really good speed, and childing her for not letting them know that she had all this stuff. They were packing it up to use - right? They said to me, "Okay, we'll take care of her. Go ahead and leave." Edie was delighted, because she thought she was among friends; I guess she'd gotten tired of pushing me around and playing tricks on me. . . . So I left. I got on a plane and went back to Texas and went to sleep for a couple of days. Three or four days later the police came to the house in Texas and said they'd gotten a call from the manager of the house in Texas and said they'd gotten a call from the manager of the Warwick Hotel in New York saying that my wife was in Bellevue Hospital.
  • L. M. Kit Carson on living with Edie, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Before he went to jail, it was Paul America who took a hand with Edie. Paul had been on heroin, but he had gotten off it, and as it turned out, he took up residence with Edie in the Chelsea and he got her off it as well.
  • Genevieve Charbin as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She had a looseleaf notebook with photographs of herself . . . newspaper clipping and cut-outs, mostly from fashion magazines. I remember being saddened by that. She'd show it to the patients so that they could be made sure that she'd been a model and been in the movies, and that she was Edie Sedgwick. She talked about that stupid horse sculpture that the state bought from her father and then gave to Earl Warren Showgrounds. She was putting him down but at the same time letting people know that she was somebody.
  • Peter Dworkin, recalling being in Cottage Hospital with Edie, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I never had that much to do with Edie Sedgwick. I've seen where I have had, and read that I have had, but I don't remember Edie that well. I remember she was around, but I know other people who, as far as I know, might have been involved with Edie. Uh, she was a great girl. An exciting girl, very enthusiastic...But I don't recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I'd remember.
  • Bob Dylan, famously rumored to have been Edie's lover, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie on one level was an unparalleled exhibitionist, but on another level she was very shy. I think the thing about Edie, her antic quality had a lot to do with her charm. She would go to any length to please. She needed to be accepted really on a visceral level, not the way most of us need to be accepted — kind of casually.
  • Fred Eberstadt, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• It was sad but not shocking. There was something about Edie that said, "This is a one-act play. It's not going to go on forever."
  • Fred Eberstadt, on Edie's death, in Edie : Girl On Fire, David Weisman and Melissa Painter. (Chronicle Books, 2006)

• Edie would drive her Mercedes on acid! I thought that was the most daredevil thing she'd ever been into . . . I mean, she'd go up on curbs sometimes, and she'd never pay much attention to traffic lights. It was like everything else: her own rules applied.
  • Danny Fields recalling Edie during 1964, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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 till 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.
  • Danny Fields recalling Edie going to the Castle in the Hollywood Hills in 1967, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie Sedgwick was close with all those people who were close to the Kennedys. Edie had affairs with a couple of them, didn't she? I think one would come in the front door and the other brother would go out the back. So it was at the same time, but not the same minute. Everyone knew that. I loved Bobby Kennedy. He was my political idol. Sometimes Edie would say about Bobby, "Oh, he was so cute and cuddly," but I wasn't going to ask her about him. I mean, what are you going to ask, "Does he have a big dick?"
  • Danny Fields, as quoted in Please Kill Me : The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

• You knew that you couldn't really have her, everybody knew that, that she was doomed. You just knew that.
  • Danny Fields, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She wanted to move on. She was as great in the little movies made in the Factory as anyone was in a four-million-dollar movie from MGM. So Edie used to wonder: "Should I go to Hollywood? Should I break away from Andy? Should I get a real agent?" People were toying around with her. All sorts of leads. But she'd meet them and come back and say, "Oh, God, they're such assholes! I can't work with them. I have to be with my friends. I want to be with people I love. I could never love those people. They're all stupid. Morons. Forget it." That's not your most professional of attitudes. I'd say to Edie: "You have to do it. If you want to make it in show business, you have to deal with morons. It doesn't matter if they don't like you for exactly the right reasons, or pamper you the right way, or are too stupid to appreciate you for what you really are." But it was hard to get away from the Andy thing. It was so much fun; it was party time. She felt she couldn't make the transition into the real crap you have to deal with in order to make it. Once you were in those silver aluminum rooms in the Factory, you were in the world like going though the looking glass in a way a point of contact where everything is happening and one is recognized and creative.
  • Danny Fields on Edie's film career, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I suppose Edie thought of herself as a caterpillar that had turned into a butterfly. She had thought of herself as just another kid in a big, rather unhappy family, and all of a sudden the spotlights were on her and she was being treated as something very, very special, but inside she felt like a lump of dirt. Then when she was being paid less attention to, she didn't know who she was. That possibility of destruction was built into the weakness of her personality. We have to get used to the reality that we're alone. If you can't get used to it, then you go mad. And she went kind of mad.
  • Henry Geldzahler, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She was something of a wild child but there was such an innocence about her and a childlike thing at the same time … She was just so sweet, you know. There was just no malice in her.
  • Sally Grossman, w:Albert Grossman's wife, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She would go out and get pissed: she was on Seconal and vodka. She became totally different. She didn't know where she was. "Is Paul America here?" she'd say. "Let's go somewhere" . . . and we'd have to tell her, "Edie, we're in California, not New York."
  • Wesley Hayes, who played Butch from Ciao! Manhattan, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• There seemed to be this almost supernatural glow to her that's hard to describe. Literally there was an aura emanating from her, a white or blue aura. It's as if Edie was illuminated from within. Her skin was translucent — Marilyn Monroe had that quality.
  • Robert Heide, as quoted in Factory Girl, David Dalton

• Her looks, her expressions, I think, were her sense of humor.
  • Jane Holzer, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• All of the clothes at Paraphernalia were experimental. Always changing. It had nothing to do with the customer. I had everything to do with the time, the moment. We were giving the customer something brand new, something that she didn't have a clue she wanted. It was all very spaceship. "What would you wear on the moon?" That was the big question of the Sixties. Everybody felt real future, real positive, real up, optimistic, and the whole Timothy Leary drug trip. Edie and Andy were just the ultimate, you know. Edie and the rock 'n' roll groups were it. The Stones, the Beatles were where you could hear it. John Cale from the Velvet Underground. Paraphernalia was where you could buy it. . . . Edie was my first fitting model. Very boyish . . . in fact, she was the very beginning of the whole unisex trip.
  • Betsey Johnson, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She was a sweet simple girl. I don't know the other sides of Edie. I know the sweet, wide-eyed, enthusiastic Edie.
  • Betsey Johnson, Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Andy represented a threat and challenge at the same time. Fuzzy was a conservative, and the idea that perhaps Andy was sleeping with his daughter was very disturbing to him.
  • Ernest Kolowrat recalling Fuzzy meeting Andy and Edie, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I went to the bathroom and there I saw the most incredible creature I have ever seen, and it was this young woman with alabaster skin, incredibly pale, paler than me actually, which was difficult to do. She had short, Jean Seberg kind of platinum hair, and the shortest, shortest, shortest garment I've ever seen on anybody ever, also white...So I was looking at this creature...and I see her in the mirror with an eyeliner pencil, painting a scar on her forehead in black with cross-stitches...I don't know what it meant, but I was terrified.
  • Larissa, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She loved the things she did not know. She was eager to learn, not in the way of a pupil, but somehow in the way of an artist.
  • Donald Lyons, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She was incredibly absorbing and retentive, and it all came fresh to her...You got the impression that the creature, that Edie, was made literally by Zeus three weeks ago, that there was no past to her, save what she picked up from books and people. With her there was no traditional structure, no formal structure. She indeed would compare Raymond Chandler or Jane Austen or ancient Rome to what she experienced last night with the tuna fish, but it was marvelous and fresh.
  • Donald Lyons, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• When I knew her, she was not of this Earth. She was, indeed, never of this Earth. She was born of madness and suffering and declined into madness and suffering. But she had a period when the sun shone for her, when life was smiling. And she was smiling with it.
  • Donald Lyons, in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006), David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Warren [Beatty] told me that Edie Sedgwick, she wanted to meet him, so he said "OK" cause he was curious, as any red-blooded American male would have been. She came over and he said she had a completely see-through raincoat on and nothing on underneath it. Isn't that funny? He didn't fuck her. Isn't that unusual?
  • Madonna, Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)

• She wasn't very good...She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances.
  • Norman Mailer, on why he declined to cast her in his play, The Deer Park, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• The first hints of the split between Andy and Edie came with the making of the film My Hustler in July, 1965. Chuck Wein conceived of this film for Andy. He didn't write anything in it for Edie - not surprising since it was a homosexual film - but he did include a brief sequence with Genevieve Charbin. I don't know what Chuck's motives were, but Edie complained.
  • Gerard Malanga on the split between Andy and Edie, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• When we were riding in the limousine, after Edie had just come out of Capezio, and had just bought brand new shoes, she was carrying on about how she loved the shoes. Had spent a lot of money on them. And after taking a second look at them, she decided she didn't like them, rolled down the window and threw them out. That's the essential Edie. Not a happy person.
  • Sterling Morrison of The Velvet Underground, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She actually walked out on us, she said, "I am tired of making these films with Andy Warhol, I don't like the scripts, I don't want to learn the scripts, I think he makes me look ridiculous sometimes." You know, she was really upset about how she felt she appeared in Warhol movies, even though everyone else thought she was fantastic.
  • Billy Name, on why Edie departed The Factory, Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie went through limosine companies the way people go through cigarettes. She never paid her bills, so the limousine people would shut off her credit, and she'd shift to another company. The drivers loved her madly, because she'd dole out these twenty-five and thirty-five dollar tips. This one shiny black Cadillac limousine with a terrified driver would wait maybe three or four hours for Edie to come out of some sleazy artist's loft on the Bowery down beneath a bridge by the Fulton Fish Market with nothing around but trucks and derelict cars. She had the ability to relate on all levels . . . with chauffeurs or ranch hands . . . understanding the human condition, yet at the same time because of that upbringing of hers, rejecting anything less than numero uno. She would order fish and invariably ask the waiter, "Is this fish fresh?" Of course in New York there's hardly any fresh fish, but whether it was a sleazy little restaurant downtown or Le Pavillion, she would invariably ask that question.
  • Bob Neuwirth, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie got cut off about the time she started living in the Chelsea - no more allowance - so we got her a professional money manager, Seymour Rosen. He tried to get her family to contribute to the easing of the financial situation, but at that point they weren't ready to trust anybody. So she had no money coming in. The only people she had to turn to were people from her own social circle' some of them were generous, some weren't. To give Edie a check for a thousand dollars was like giving most people ten.
  • Bob Neuwirth, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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.
  • Bob Neuwirth recalling, having a phone conversation with Edie from Cottage Hospital in California during Christmas Holidays. As quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• That is unusual, to look like you had just walked out of a fairy tale. She had nothing human about her, just mystery.
  • Ivy Nicholson, a former Factory regular, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Some things you are born to, and Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs whoever gave them to her.
  • Nico, Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Anybody who could tell a girl like Edie Sedgwick that she was being stabbed in the back by Andy Warhol, of all people, were idiots, it's where she got her fame and basically the reason why Edie was even known was because of Warhol. Let's just face it, it's all Warhol, Warhol, Warhol. People turned her against Warhol for their own devious reasons. They convinced her she was the next Marilyn Monroe. I think personally she was a great screen presence. But I don't think she was the next Marilyn Monroe because she wasn't a Hollywood type. Who would use her out in Hollywood?
  • Factory regular, Ondine, as quoted in The Austin Chronicle magazine (October 2003)

• After Ciao! Manhattan she came back to the Factory and we tried to make a movie with her, Warhol and I, but we just wiped our hands of her, there was nothing we could do with her. How many times can you tell a person to stop doing something without really getting bored with it? I'd never seen Warhol walk away from his camera in a fit of just absolute, abject disgust but during that filming, a little movie of his called Edie and Ondine he just said, "Stop, I won't film anymore." He said "this is disgusting, just absolutely disgusting." She was so full of self-pity and so humble and so everything else it was just awful, it was horrible, intolerable.
  • Factory regular, Ondine, as quoted in The Austin Chronicle magazine (October 2003)

• There's no way people can stand outside a museum and chant "Edie and Andy." But they were out there, chanting and screaming. They were that relevant.
  • Ondine, describing the scene at the Philadelphia art gallery, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie still had fantasies about making more films. Michael was going to be her agent. She was waiting to see what was going to happen to Ciao! Manhattan.
  • John Palmer, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I think Edie was one of those personages. When you came in contact with her, you came away with a deep impression of her. And then she moved in circles where almost automatically with that impression came a story or some sort of an event or a happening. Everywhere she went things began to buzz and happen around her.
  • George Plimpton, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• 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."
  • Jeffrey Post, brother of Michael Post, recalling the last night of Edie's life, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I'd just gotten in. The first day. The nurse said, "This is your room and this is your roommate, blah, blah, blah." It was about ten-thirty in the morning. I lay down on the bed, put my hands behind my head, and was just about to take a deep breath and go Ahhhh, when Edie came in. She was wearing one of those white cloth things that they make you wear for X-rays. She come in smoking a cigarette - this horrible, raspy cough - and she looked as light as a feather . . . like she was walking on air . . . and she sort of came down and lighted on one side of the bed. She held my wrist. I thought, "Oh, wow, this chick really looks like she's been through the war! The war." she said "I'm Edie Sedgwick." "My goodness," I thought, "this sure is a friendly hospital." I said I'd read something about her in the paper not too long before . . . about her father being a sculptor. We went on like that . . . just kind of small talk, really. That's how I met her. There wasn't anything sexual between us while I was in the hospital. I didn't want to be another statistic on the boards. I saw her go through a number of guys. Like once a guy named Preacher came in filthy jeans, black leather jacket, Hell's Angels type guy and I thought, "What is she doing with him?" Before that, it was somebody who'd just gotten out of prison notorious as the Santa Barbara cat burglar. He would steal people blind while they were right in bed sleeping . . . take the rings and watched off their fingers. He was with her. I didn't want that. Besides, I had made a vow to myself that I would not make love to anyone before I was twenty-one. But I thought Edie was fascinating. I was in Cottage Hospital to quit the drug world. To get away from it. But even in the hospital I couldn't. People in the corridors kept coming at me to ask, "Can you get me this? Can you get me that?" I would say, "But I'm a patient here. How in the world am I going to get that?" They wanted me to get, like, hundreds of thousands of pills. Speed pills I took very rarely. Just on Friday or Saturday night.
  • Michael Post on meeting Edie the first time and being her roommate at Cottage Hospital and his time spent there, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Our wedding was on the 24th of July, 1971. The ranch gets scorching hot in the summertime, but on that day there was a nice, cool breeze. Edie wanted a formal wedding. I objected to a certain degree, but I thought, "Well, might as well go through with it."
  • Michael Post, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie was just a fabulous dancer. Always on air except when there was too much booze in her, and then I'd have to sort of hold her up. But she'd always insist on it even if she couldn't dance under her own power. It was always dance, dance, dance. She'd say, "Well, I've got to dance some things out." But then it was time for me to go back into school. She got a bad ear infection in October and they gave her antibiotics to cure it. She turned out to be allergic and came down with serum sickness, which is in your bones and makes you ache twenty-four hours a day. So she was on pain medication for that and then the pills started coming back. She stayed in bed a lot of the time and I read children's bookes to her - Winnie-the-Pooh.
  • Michael Post, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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 still 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! 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 worse. 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.
  • Michael Post, Edie's husband, recalling her death, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Even in her most far-out sort of state she had tremendous appeal. That's what was so incredible about her, is that she could be really spaced beyond belief, and she still could put a sentence together that would blow your brains out … That one-upmanship kind of thing.
  • Michael Post, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created.
  • Robert Rauschenberg, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie wasn't crazy in any way, shape or form...drugs would simulate madness.
  • René Ricard, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• She made you feel privileged to be there.
  • René Ricard, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• I love orchids. It was a personal thing from me to her. I said, "You really need to fix yourself up, my dear. Put them on you somewhere." She cried out, "I hate them! I don't want to be beautiful!" She wrecked the flowers. Edie was hating me. We were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing . . . I loved Edie, but I couldn't stand being in the movie with her the way she looked. She was horrible in the movie, and mean. The things I was saying were so horrible.
  • Rene Richard recalling the final Andy Warhol film Edie took part in, in which he mocks and plays as Andy Warhol. As quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• The Warhol people felt Edie was giving them trouble - they were furious with her because she wasn't cooperating. So they went to a Forty-second Street bar and found Ingrid von Schefflin. They had noticed: "Doesn't this girl look like an ugly Edie? Let's really teach Edie a lesson. Let's make a movie with her and tell Edie she's the big new star." They cut her hair like Edie's. They made her up like Edie. Her name became Ingrid Superstar . . . just an invention to make Edie feel horrible.
  • Rene Richard recalling Edie being phased out of the Factory, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• There was some sort of problem about continuing with Edie at Vogue. Perhaps the magazine's policy became involved. The whole thing kind of collapsed. It was never pursued again. We lost a moment when we could have captured it . . . which was sad. She disappeared from our lives. Edie's timing was a fraction off. She almost did become a part of the family at Vogue. If that had happened, she would have had tremendous protection. But she was identified in the gossip columns with the drug scene, and back then there was a certain apprehension about being involved in that scene people were really terrified by it.
  • Gloria Schiff from Vogue magazine, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• It was a hot, bright day, and she wore sunglasses, a tight blouse, and short pants. I was spellbound. Edie livened up the meal considerably by skipping out on dessert to slip out through the French doors to the backyard, where she stripped down to her panties to sunbathe half naked — I remember nothing but a sense of spectacular whiteness against the green lawn — while the grownups sipped coffee from demitasse cups, unaware.
  • John Sedgwick, Edie's cousin, recalling a visit to his father's home, in In My Blood : Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (2007)

• One night Edie and I were sitting there. She was drinking coffee to speed herself up some more - God! - when out of the blue she said, "Hey, Jonathan! I think you should make love with me!" I said, "No, Edie, no, I'm not into that!" "I really think you should do it, Jonathan. I'd like to." She reminded me of the time when she went to London with Suky and my mother, and I came over from Germany, from the Army; Edie wanted to make love with me, and I didn't do it then either. She said, "Everybody always wanted me. My father wanted me. He tried to make love to me. All the men on the ranch wanted me. Even you wanted me, Jonathan." I said, "Yeah I did. For sure." So in the coffee shop she kept saying, "I think it's something you should do. Jonathan, I . . . I really think you ought to make love with me now." She was very high on speed her head was shaking up and down. "Jonathan, I think we ought to do it now." I felt maybe we should find out what our love was for each other. She was beautiful; I liked her. I knew she'd teach me something . . . but I didn't do it.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick recalling his sister Edie after she moved back to Santa Barbara, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She was an alien. She'd pick up what you were about to say before you'd say it.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick, on Edie going back home to Santa Barbara for Christmas, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• When she was walking along the street, she dropped her purse and a whole bunch of reds and things fell out. A cop car pulled up, 'What ya doing?' And then the cops get the idea that she was carrying drugs on her. So they got out and threw her up against the car, her hands up over the hood, at which point her purse spilled open again and they're whites, the reds falling everywhere! The cop who had pushed her against the car turned around and began picking up the stuff, so she wheeled around and gave him a kick in the ass man, with all the energy and hate she could. The court put Edie on probation for 5 years. After the bust she became a patient at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick, Edie's brother, describing her arrest, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I immediately said on the phone: "Don't let them get to her! She's not dead yet, man!" I felt she'd simply astro-projected, which means that you've separated your consciousness from your body and you're still 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.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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.
  • Jonathan Sedgwick on Edie's funeral, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I think as she got older, the recklessness got stronger, and it really would have been far more brave for her to try to do otherwise than what she was doing. She was the opposite of brave. She let the tide carry her along. And the tide was a destructive one, and she became a smaller and smaller speck as she simply let herself be swept along in its flow.
  • Robin Sedgwick, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• Edie seemed superficially sane. Rather than anxious or disturbed, she seemed angry and resigned. But then at lunch I saw her heap her plate and eat in that bizarre way that anorectics do, picking and wolfing . . . and then she would get up and disappear. When I heard what the choices were - that unless Edie went to the mental hospital at Silver Hill where Minty had been, my father would leave the family. I said to my mother, "You're in a situation where you have to choose between your husband and your children." She said, "Oh no, there's no question of leaving my husband. I couldn't."
  • Saucie Sedgwick on the first time Edie was sent to a mental hospital. As quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• I was a great, great friend of Edie Sedgwick … Edie and I were in several of the early Andy Warhol films … Edie was beautiful beyond words. She was absolutely breath-taking and a very sweet person. Edie was a precious person. She was heavily into drugs which caused her death. … Edie was very glamorous. And truly beautiful, breathtaking, and I think it was a great loss she died so young.
  • Artist Harold Stevenson, as quoted in "American Art Icon Calls Idabel home" in McCurtain Daily Gazette (27 February 2006)

• Edie didn't belong with the bikers. Like, she was a rich hippie. the rich hippies, their mommy buys them a chopper - a four-thousand-dollar chopper - and they drive it until the weather gets cold and they get themselves a nice, warm car. Your true biker takes his bike out whatever the weather because he loves it. When a rich hippie gets in an accident, he sells his bike, what's left of it. "Oh, I got hurt, I don't want this." The good biker fixes his. I've been lucky. I've been down quite a few times . . . tasted the pavement quite a bit. You live by a bike; you die by a bike, That's what I believe.
  • T Talley, biker, friends of the boyfriend of Edie coming out of Cottage Hospital at the time called Preacher Ewing. As quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Once, when she saw the script of Shower - probably the best one-actor I've ever written, in which Edie and Roger Trudeau spend the whole thing in the shower- she started screaming, "I will not be a spokesman for Tavel's perversities!" That was the first time I'd ever heard my work described as perverse. I was to hear it in years to come from some of our best-known critics . . . but that was the first time anyone cared enough to say such a thing. "I will not be in it!" Edie cried, and marched out. "I won't do this!" The end really came when Edie tore up the script of a movie called Space, saying she wasn't going to memorize anything. She started to read a few of her lines: "What is all this about? How stupid!" and tore it up, right in front of everybody. That's when I walked out. That may have been the last time I saw her.
  • Ronald Tavel recalling his problems with Edie the actress, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• The maid said, "Can I take your coat?" She said, "No, I don't think so. I'm a little cold." Later Edie told me the real reason she didn't want to take her coat off was that she wasn't wearing any clothes under it.
  • Wendy Vanden Heuvel as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• It must have had an effect on Andy - Edie leaving him for Dylan, or whoever. He was probably in love with Edie, with all of us - a sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so that you had no time for any other man. When Edie left with Grossman and Dylan, that was betrayal, and he was furious . . . a lover betrayed by his mistress.
  • Viva, Warhol Superstar, on Edie leaving Andy for Dylan and Grossman, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie loved parties. Edie adored parties. It was a very comfortable party. People dancing. The moon rose out of the ocean, spiraling up in the dark. It was the final touch — a nice moon rippling on the ocean and turning everything silver. Edie was very sensitive to enchantments. She broke away from the form completely and was doing these totally free dance movements. We looked out from under the marquee, and there she was on this deserted lawn. And she was cartwheeling across it, cartwheeling. I remember the music dying down as the focus of attention shifted to her out there. Edie had disappeared. It was a bit spooky. Somebody said, "We saw her go swimming." She was nowhere in sight on this beach. "Is that her? Way, way out?" Edie was way out...a little dark head...such a distance. She seemed to be going under and then surfacing again. I could see the shine of her legs as she dove. It was like her dancing the night before. She was playing … totally natural and involved in the element of water; she was like a porpoise. She seemed only to exist freely in atmospheres that were removed or enchanted … most people are happy swimming by the shore, but she was happy out there.
  • John Anthony Walker, recalling when Edie visited Fishers Island as a weekend guest of his in the Spring of 1964, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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 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 lemon 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.
  • John Anthony Walker, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• One person in the sixties fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known. And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love. now. But her name is still going. It seems incredible, doesn't it?
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

• She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody's private fantasies.
  • Andy Warhol, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She was also a compulsive liar; she just couldn't tell the truth about anything. And what an actress. She could really turn on the tears. She could somehow always make you believe her — that's how she got what she wanted.
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975)

• Sort of Egyptian, with her head tilting in just the right, beautiful way. People called it 'The Sedgwick', and Edie was the only one who did it — everybody else was doing The Jerk.
  • Andy Warhol, on Edie's dance moves, in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She'd be off to a jet-set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip.
  • Chuck Wein, Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie saw herself as tough like a little tomboy.
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : Girl On Fire (2006) by David Weisman and Melissa Painter

• It was at Lester Persky's place that Edie met Andy Warhol. It was early 1965. She was doing her dance there - a sort of balletlike rock 'n' roll. We'd had an idea of opening up an underwater discotheque where Edie'd dance her ballet to Bach played at rock 'n' roll tempo. So Andy invited us down to the Factory the next day and he said, "Why don't we do some things together?" Andy spotted her energy. Everybody else was tired and going through the trip.
  • Chuck Wein on the first time Edie met Andy Warhol, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie could keep everybody busy getting her things . . . eight guys calling her up from eight different social strata. She'd be off to a jet set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip. She kept everybody going!
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie was very smart, you know, too smart. Because she came from such an insular place, she had an interesting commentary on what went by, 'cause she saw it like it was rather than in some social context like we all would.
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• She couldn't really cope with the day-to-day reality, and she always needed to have friends who understood that. Edie provided the glamour, you see, and the glitter . . . when she walked into some place, the whole room turned. And if they didn't, she'd do something in the next twenty second that would make them. She'd giggle or she'd dance and spin around.
  • Chuck Wein, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• Edie was back in Cottage Hospital the summer of 1970 when I made my first attempt to recontact her and finish Ciao! Manhattan. Actually, at this point she seemed like she had really gotten a new grip on her life. That was one of her tricks: "I've really been to the depths, but now I want to start a new life. A normal, simple life." That was the image that Edie was projecting at that time, and I got very caught up in it. "Okay, Edie, we're going to finish Ciao! Manhattan; we're all going to do it together; it's our project; we believe in it."
  • David Wesiman, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

• 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 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.
  • Bruce Williamson, as quoted in Edie : American Girl (1982) by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

External links

• Profile at IMDb
• Blast Magazine Article "Girl on Fire"
• Profile at Find a Grave