Socialites From The United States

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

"She made you feel privileged to be there."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One night Edie and I were sitting there. She was drinking coffee to speed herself up some more - God! - when out of the blue she said, "Hey, Jonathan! I think you should make love with me!" I said, "No, Edie, no, I'm not into that!" "I really think you should do it, Jonathan. I'd like to." She reminded me of the time when she went to London with Suky and my mother, and I came over from Germany, from the Army; Edie wanted to make love with me, and I didn't do it then either. She said, "Everybody always wanted me. My father wanted me. He tried to make love to me. All the men on the ranch wanted me. Even you wanted me, Jonathan." I said, "Yeah I did. For sure." So in the coffee shop she kept saying, "I think it's something you should do. Jonathan, I . . . I really think you ought to make love with me now." She was very high on speed her head was shaking up and down. "Jonathan, I think we ought to do it now." I felt maybe we should find out what our love was for each other. She was beautiful; I liked her. I knew she'd teach me something . . . but I didn't do it."

"She was an alien. She'd pick up what you were about to say before you'd say it."

"When she was walking along the street, she dropped her purse and a whole bunch of reds and things fell out. A cop car pulled up, 'What ya doing?' And then the cops get the idea that she was carrying drugs on her. So they got out and threw her up against the car, her hands up over the hood, at which point her purse spilled open again and they're whites, the reds falling everywhere! The cop who had pushed her against the car turned around and began picking up the stuff, so she wheeled around and gave him a kick in the ass man, with all the energy and hate she could. The court put Edie on probation for 5 years. After the bust she became a patient at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara."

"I immediately said on the phone: "Don't let them get to her! She's not dead yet, man!" I felt she'd simply astro-projected, which means that you've separated your consciousness from your body and you're still connected by some sort of energy: some call it a silver thread, or a silver cord. Jimi Hendrix went out on it and never came back. Edie did, too. I tried to see if we could stop it, but they'd already taken the blood out of her, and once that's done, you're dead."

"The funeral was a drag, man. Everybody was feeling sorry for themselves. Michael was feeling sorry for himself. Mummy was feeling sorry for herself. Krista and I were the only people there who felt sorry for everybody else. I cried. I hurt a lot about Edie, and I hurt a lot about Minty, and I hurt a lot about Bobby, and I hurt a lot about Fuzzy. Sometimes I wonder how many people a family can destroy with their stupidity."

"I think as she got older, the recklessness got stronger, and it really would have been far more brave for her to try to do otherwise than what she was doing. She was the opposite of brave. She let the tide carry her along. And the tide was a destructive one, and she became a smaller and smaller speck as she simply let herself be swept along in its flow."

"Edie seemed superficially sane. Rather than anxious or disturbed, she seemed angry and resigned. But then at lunch I saw her heap her plate and eat in that bizarre way that anorectics do, picking and wolfing . . . and then she would get up and disappear. When I heard what the choices were - that unless Edie went to the mental hospital at Silver Hill where Minty had been, my father would leave the family. I said to my mother, "You're in a situation where you have to choose between your husband and your children." She said, "Oh no, there's no question of leaving my husband. I couldn't.""

"I was a great, great friend of Edie Sedgwick … Edie and I were in several of the early Andy Warhol films … Edie was beautiful beyond words. She was absolutely breath-taking and a very sweet person. Edie was a precious person. She was heavily into drugs which caused her death. … Edie was very glamorous. And truly beautiful, breathtaking, and I think it was a great loss she died so young."

"Edie didn't belong with the bikers. Like, she was a rich hippie. the rich hippies, their mommy buys them a chopper - a four-thousand-dollar chopper - and they drive it until the weather gets cold and they get themselves a nice, warm car. Your true biker takes his bike out whatever the weather because he loves it. When a rich hippie gets in an accident, he sells his bike, what's left of it. "Oh, I got hurt, I don't want this." The good biker fixes his. I've been lucky. I've been down quite a few times . . . tasted the pavement quite a bit. You live by a bike; you die by a bike, That's what I believe."

"Once, when she saw the script of Shower - probably the best one-actor I've ever written, in which Edie and Roger Trudeau spend the whole thing in the shower- she started screaming, "I will not be a spokesman for Tavel's perversities!" That was the first time I'd ever heard my work described as perverse. I was to hear it in years to come from some of our best-known critics . . . but that was the first time anyone cared enough to say such a thing. "I will not be in it!" Edie cried, and marched out. "I won't do this!" The end really came when Edie tore up the script of a movie called Space, saying she wasn't going to memorize anything. She started to read a few of her lines: "What is all this about? How stupid!" and tore it up, right in front of everybody. That's when I walked out. That may have been the last time I saw her."

"The maid said, "Can I take your coat?" She said, "No, I don't think so. I'm a little cold." Later Edie told me the real reason she didn't want to take her coat off was that she wasn't wearing any clothes under it."

"It must have had an effect on Andy - Edie leaving him for Dylan, or whoever. He was probably in love with Edie, with all of us - a sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so that you had no time for any other man. When Edie left with Grossman and Dylan, that was betrayal, and he was furious . . . a lover betrayed by his mistress."

"Edie loved parties. Edie adored parties. It was a very comfortable party. People dancing. The moon rose out of the ocean, spiraling up in the dark. It was the final touch — a nice moon rippling on the ocean and turning everything silver. Edie was very sensitive to enchantments. She broke away from the form completely and was doing these totally free dance movements. We looked out from under the marquee, and there she was on this deserted lawn. And she was cartwheeling across it, cartwheeling. I remember the music dying down as the focus of attention shifted to her out there. Edie had disappeared. It was a bit spooky. Somebody said, "We saw her go swimming." She was nowhere in sight on this beach. "Is that her? Way, way out?" Edie was way out...a little dark head...such a distance. She seemed to be going under and then surfacing again. I could see the shine of her legs as she dove. It was like her dancing the night before. She was playing … totally natural and involved in the element of water; she was like a porpoise. She seemed only to exist freely in atmospheres that were removed or enchanted … most people are happy swimming by the shore, but she was happy out there."

"For some reason Edie was very strongly on me that night so I decided to have Myers's daiquiris because it was Myers's daiquiris that Edie and I had in Casablanca, where the whole Cambridge scene between us took place. They had never heard of a daiquiri in South India so we had to make them ourselves. They got the lemon out from behind the bar and we bought a bottle of dark rum. When they finally brought out a jug . . . I think it was a metal can . . . we took the lemons and we squeezed them, and then they brought out the sugar little by little to add to the mixture. India is a very poor country and there's never enough sugar. We set up a glass for Edie, which is an Indian thing . . . a way of honoring some spirit that was killed. So there was a glass for Edie sitting on the other side of the table from my friend Mike and I. I remembered that Edie smoked, so I put a cigarette in the ashtray there. The cigarette wasn't lit and it just sat there. And the drink sat there. And I talked about Edie."

"One person in the sixties fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known. And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love. now. But her name is still going. It seems incredible, doesn't it?"

"She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody's private fantasies."

"She was also a compulsive liar; she just couldn't tell the truth about anything. And what an actress. She could really turn on the tears. She could somehow always make you believe her — that's how she got what she wanted."

"Sort of Egyptian, with her head tilting in just the right, beautiful way. People called it 'The Sedgwick', and Edie was the only one who did it — everybody else was doing The Jerk."

"She'd be off to a jet-set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip."

"Edie saw herself as tough like a little tomboy."

"It was at Lester Persky's place that Edie met Andy Warhol. It was early 1965. She was doing her dance there - a sort of balletlike rock 'n' roll. We'd had an idea of opening up an underwater discotheque where Edie'd dance her ballet to Bach played at rock 'n' roll tempo. So Andy invited us down to the Factory the next day and he said, "Why don't we do some things together?" Andy spotted her energy. Everybody else was tired and going through the trip."

"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."

"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 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.""

"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 could keep everybody busy getting her things . . . eight guys calling her up from eight different social strata. She'd be off to a jet set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli. And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip. She kept everybody going!"

"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."

"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!"