It’s her birthday today.
Her influence on me was massive and I came to her young. I discovered her in high school through the famous oral biography by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, which I inhaled, over and over again. I must have run across it in my after-school job as a page at the library. I discovered a lot of books through re-shelving them. I was deeply intrigued by what I read, drinking up all the pictures. It scared me a little bit. I had no frame of reference. She came to me with no context. There was a darkness in her story. An anecdote that made a huge impression on me was a friend describing going to see The Blue Angel with Edie – maybe at the Brattle? This was pre-Warhol – and when Emil Jannings cracked and goes insane, Edie apparently shrank down into her chair, staring up at the screen, horrified, shook. There was madness in her family, the ancestral line peppered with early deaths and suicides. Her family tree was wild. (Andy Warhol’s movie Poor Little Rich Girl was basically the vibe. She really was.)
The entire Factory scene was long over by the time I read about it, but it exerted a pull. I was young and impressionable and I am trying to put into words the FEELING I absorbed. It wasn’t particularly coherent at first. Edie worked ON me.
Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)
In high school, I had a ripped denim jacket which I decorated with purple magic marker, a peace sign, other things, and across the back I wrote “Ciao! Manhattan”. I was a very NICHE type of nerd. I have a picture of myself in it, at a street fair in Chicago (we were walking advertisements for our friend Christina’s hat-making business.)
My dream of going to New York City wasn’t really about joining a downtown-cool-kid group, like Edie at the Factory. When I dreamt of New York, I dreamt of All That Jazz. Edie was a model, she was compelling and charismatic, and of course drew people to her, the movers-shakers, the fashion designers and magazine people and art-scene people. She was glamorous the way Hollywood actresses were glamorous, but she was somehow divorced from actually having to DO anything to PROVE she deserved to be looked at. She just WAS. In other words, she wasn’t waking up early to go to cattle calls, dragging her dance bag around town, going to auditions, dance class, working a waitressing gig after your jazz class at Broadway Dance. There was this whole other THING going on below Houston Street. I discovered All That Jazz and Edie around the same time, and they hovered in opposition, almost, as versions of the New York City in my imagination. (Itt’s not like I lived in Kazakhstan: I went down to New York a lot as a kid. My aunt was an actress and singer, so my “version” and experience of New York City was already the All That Jazz one. What I’m trying to say is that discovering Edie – and Andy – and that whole scene, all those people, was a mesmerizing counter-point. I couldn’t really get a GRASP on it as a teenage kid, which I think is why I kept going back to the book again and again, staring at the pictures over and over. I remember just falling into this picture like it was a bottomless pit:
This was around the same time I was learning as much as I could about the Group Theatre, another close group of eccentric people, and far more my speed … but the dream was the same. Edie’s never really left me. By the time I tripped over the book, Ciao! Manhattan was available on VHS. So I rented it. There’s an insouciant overlay to the action – a sort of “look at the kookiness and freedom on display” but then … there’s shock therapy, and this desolation seeping into everything, a desolation of waste. You get the sense she didn’t stand a chance. The ’60s destroyed a lot of people. Or, the people destroyed themselves. There have always been addicts and the 60s drugs were particularly gnarly.
Most of Warhol’s stuff wasn’t accessible back then, I’d have to see those films later. But I inhaled Ciao! Manhattan and it freaked me out. It was so cool to actually see her in action, this woman who glimmered in my imagination. You can see her charisma. The charisma isn’t alive, though, somehow. It doesn’t spark with impulses, her inner life illuminating her face. Her charisma is somehow static. Another word for dead? A lot of the models in the ’60s were “flat” like this, and now, of course, deadpan is the accepted trend for models. Whatever the source, it doesn’t even matter, Edie is riveting with her huge tragic eyes. It’s a cliche but it’s true: You can’t take your eyes off of her.
When I got to college and met Mitchell, turns out he had a similar trajectory. He read the book. He saw the movie. He knew all about Warhol and that whole crowd. So we decided to be Edie and Andy for Halloween. This party was legendary – the whole town showed up it felt like (to be clear: we did not invite the whole town. But word got out). At its height, the party was like a Mad magazine cartoon. The cops arrived. People in full costume fled into the night. It was a mess. But we were so proud of our costumes. We fell asleep in bed, still in costume.
You never forget the people who come into your life at a certain moment when you are receptive to whatever it is they bring. If I had discovered Edie – and that whole crowd – in my 30s, it still would have been interesting, of course, but I would have had a bit more distance. I would have looked at it in a more abstract way, and I would have had a larger frame of reference for all of it. Also, by my 30s, I had been through a lot of heavy shit. I wouldn’t have been as afraid of Edie, or afraid FOR Edie. But Edie came into my life a year after I read The Bell Jar for the first time and a year before I read The Handmaid’s Tale. She arrived just in time.
“I’m in love with everyone I’ve ever met in one way or another. I’m just a crazy, unhinged disaster of a human being.” — Edie Sedgwick
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