Edie Sedgwick

"It's okay — I know."

"The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot."

"The real Edie is where the action is. Fast cars, fast horses, and people doing things!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Isn't that sad! I'm so fragile. It's tragic [laughs]. Can you believe it? That's so sad."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."