Actors From California

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"She made you feel privileged to be there."

"Edie wasn't crazy in any way, shape or form...drugs would simulate madness."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"That is unusual, to look like you had just walked out of a fairy tale. She had nothing human about her, just mystery."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"She wasn't very good...She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Her looks, her expressions, I think, were her sense of humor."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You knew that you couldn't really have her, everybody knew that, that she was doomed. You just knew that."

"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?""

"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."

"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."

"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.""