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In the background, Warhol's movie, Beauty Number II, unreeled against a wall displaying Edie in brief undies lounging on a bed and chatting (soundlessly) with a male companion in shorts. In the foreground, Edie and her companions frugged, jerked and twisted beneath hot studio lights. Edie was dressed in her "uniform," a pair of leotard mesh stockings topped by tight black panties, a blue surfer's shirt, and huge earrings that hung down to her collarbone. The rest of the Warhol entourage included Chuck Wein, Harvard '60, who peroxides his hair and wears it long, and Don Lyons, another Harvard man, who is a teaching fellow in Greek classics, wears his hair short and leaves it plain.
Andy, it seemed, was making an underground movie of people seeing an underground movie, letting his camera automatically scan back and forth between the world of coupons and caviar and that of pop and pot. After several paper cups full of champagne and apple cider, the socialites unbuttoned their suit jackets, set their ties at half-mast, and mixed it up with the denizens of the underground on the dance floor. Said one girl in a Pucci gown: "This is a gas! I mean, this is what I call a real party!"
Great-Niece. The artist and his "superstar" reached their present social pinnacle from different sides of the tracks. The son of a construction worker from McKeesport, Pa., named Warhola, Andy scarcely seemed destined to reach Fifth Avenue drawing rooms. Pale beyond the pale and shy to the point of sequestration, he arrived in New York at the age of 24 as a struggling artist with little training and less money. Gradually he earned enough through advertising illustration to eke out a comfortable bohemian existence on the Lower East Side. When the art world suddenly went pop in 1962, Andy found himself lionized by the white-tie world of the Museum of Modern Art. But he cut few social capers, clung to the company of fellow artists.
Then came Edie. The great-niece of the late Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick, the great-granddaughter of the Rev. Endicott Peabody (Groton's founder), Edie was definitely born a lady. But it was not a role she enjoyed. She quit school after one year at St. Timothy's and refused to have a coming-out party, divided most of her time between junkets to Europe and sculpture lessons in Cambridge, Mass. After settling in New York last summer, she drifted aimlessly about, looking for modeling jobs by day and dancing at discotheques by night, invariably dressed in racy culottes or leopard-skin slacks. Last January, having nothing better to do, she showed up at a screening at Warhol's movie "factory," talked herself into a part, soon took over where 1964's "Girl of the Year," Baby Jane Holzer, had left off. Said she: "I didn't know I was replacing Jane. In fact−I'd never even heard of her. I hardly ever read the papers."