A hit book and a movie revive a '60s underground star
"What would you wear on the moon?"
That was the big question of the Sixties.
— Designer Betsey Johnson in Edie
Were there other questions worth asking in that turbid decade—about wars, revolutions, anything more dramatic than a lunar hemline? There were, but few seem interested in them now. The frenetic world of '60s sex and drugs makes for a kickier nightmare than Viet Nam or Watts or Kent State. It offers an escape into Hollywood melodrama, but with the frisson of real names and familiar faces. How else to explain the post-mortem celebrity of Edie Sedgwick? Once a footnote in any pop history of the decade, she is now the summer's hot number. Edie (Knopf; $16.95), a 450-page biography of her, is secure on the bestseller lists; and Ciao! Manhattan, a grotesquely autobiographical film she made eleven years ago, is being re-released in New York.
Who was Edie Sedgwick? She was a strikingly pretty young woman with a genius for self-destruction. Her pedigree and her rap sheet conspire to prove that truth can be as compelling as the most lurid novel: daughter of a distinguished, disturbed New England family; evanescent superstar of Andy Warhol's underground movies; blitzed-out druggie; a careless suicide at 28. The glamour, the abuse, the aristocracy of decadence—my dear, it's just too delicious.
Delicious and, like amphetamine candy, addictive. One gobbles up the testimony in Edie, culled by Jean Stein and George Plimpton from interviews with some 250 people who crossed paths or swords with the poor little rich girl. An awful fascination obtains to the book's elegant gossip. See Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and hitman of the double-domed Right, dance wickedly on the grave of one of Edie's ancestors. Recall the night that Rock Star Jim Morrison paid sexual obeisance to Jimi Hendrix on the stage of Steve Paul's nightclub, the Scene. Watch Warhol shrug as a woman invades his Factory, takes out a pistol and shoots a hole through the foreheads of seven stacked Marilyn Monroe portraits—just a few years before Andy himself would be shot by another female intruder. Gobble gobble. Yum yum.
The star of this Mylar melodrama had her own seductive pathology, much of which came from her bloodlines. A bizarre brood, the Sedgwicks. Their money was so "old" it just seemed to grow wild, like weeds on a lawn, or like the manic-depressive strain that led to suicide for several members of the clan. Uncle Minturn, who kept watch over the Sedgwick gravesite in Stockbridge, Mass., insisted on cheap pine coffins for the family and would lie inside them to test their fit. Edie's father Francis, a golden boy at Harvard in the 1920s who turned to sculpting and then brought his wife and children to California, was perhaps the most curious of the lot. To save the expense of hiring a model for his sculpture of a Crucifixion scene, he strapped himself to a large cross and observed himself before a full-length mirror. As children, Edie (born in 1943) and her younger sister Suky had needles of vitamin B injected daily in their bottoms. She recalled, or imagined, attempted rapes by her father and brothers. From the moment of conception into this modern House of Atreus, Edie was tracing a steep trajectory toward her own hell.