Socialites From The United States

"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 don't think Edie had ever given up on a regular, on at least the concept of having a regular, easygoing kind of life. Although it might have been a little out of her reach, she would emulate that …It was like she could see, just out of her reach, she could see how it could have been her, what she could offer, the fine quality of thought that she was capable of."

"She thought it was funny that people thought they were important."

"I think she had a naiveté. That's how she was able to dominate...because she had no self-judgement, except on this deep level."

"She would do almost anything that came into her head."

"When they let her out, we began living together. One thing I remember . . . well, how she smelled. In sex your body takes on a certain odor. Edie had a particular smell that came out in lovemaking . . . a sweet but somewhat sickly smell, like orchids. I always thought it had something to do with her burns and the chemicals involved in reconstituting her body. To fuck her was like fucking a very strong child, a twelve-year-old girl . . . athletic and coltish. We finally moved into the Warwick Hotel, registering there as Mr. and Mrs. Carson because she was afraid they wouldn't let her in under her own name. She thought she was on a hotel blacklist for burning her room in the Chelsea. She had kept me up for about a week straight. Then one day in the back of the toilet I found the little plastic top they put on hypodermic needles, and I realized she was on speed. I really got pissed off. I had a kind of messianic Jesus Christ complex . . . getting involved with girls who are victims and trying to save them. So I got the drugs and took them away from her. We stayed there for two more days without her being allowed to shoot up, and I watched her disintegrate. I had to hold her down on the bed; she writhed; she bounced off the walls. She turned from being Edie, this beautiful woman, into a monkey. It got very violent. we were both being violent, threatening to jump out the windows and kill each other. I told her I was going to kill myself if she didn't stop it. I guess I was trying to make myself into the victim that she would have to save, turning into Edie Sedgwick, doing an Edie Sedgwick number. She got insulted because I was threatening her. Finally I called her doctor and said, "She's driving me crazy." I told him I was losing a lot of weight, and that I was a wreck. I was over the edge. "What can I do?" I told him I couldn't take care of her and she wouldn't voluntarily commit herself anyplace any more. . . . He said, "Leave. Get out!" I was at that state where that was all I could do. I called Warhol and got a hold of Ondine to come and take care of her. Andy wouldn't do it. He just couldn't handle it. But Ondine was enough of a monster to handle Edie, who was another monster. One speed freak knows a lot about another. So he got on the phone and he screamed at her and she screamed at him, but they were having a great game: she was finally being handled by somebody who knew exactly what she was up to. . . . Then three minor Warhol people came up to the room, but not Ondine. They got all the dope she had in the room and laid it out on the bed. They had a funny way of handling it . . . opening up the capsules on the bed and tasting the stuff and saying how great it was, really good speed, and childing her for not letting them know that she had all this stuff. They were packing it up to use - right? They said to me, "Okay, we'll take care of her. Go ahead and leave." Edie was delighted, because she thought she was among friends; I guess she'd gotten tired of pushing me around and playing tricks on me. . . . So I left. I got on a plane and went back to Texas and went to sleep for a couple of days. Three or four days later the police came to the house in Texas and said they'd gotten a call from the manager of the house in Texas and said they'd gotten a call from the manager of the Warwick Hotel in New York saying that my wife was in Bellevue Hospital."

"Before he went to jail, it was Paul America who took a hand with Edie. Paul had been on heroin, but he had gotten off it, and as it turned out, he took up residence with Edie in the Chelsea and he got her off it as well."

"She had a looseleaf notebook with photographs of herself . . . newspaper clipping and cut-outs, mostly from fashion magazines. I remember being saddened by that. She'd show it to the patients so that they could be made sure that she'd been a model and been in the movies, and that she was Edie Sedgwick. She talked about that stupid horse sculpture that the state bought from her father and then gave to Earl Warren Showgrounds. She was putting him down but at the same time letting people know that she was somebody."

"I never had that much to do with Edie Sedgwick. I've seen where I have had, and read that I have had, but I don't remember Edie that well. I remember she was around, but I know other people who, as far as I know, might have been involved with Edie. Uh, she was a great girl. An exciting girl, very enthusiastic...But I don't recall any type of relationship. If I did have one, I think I'd remember."

"Edie on one level was an unparalleled exhibitionist, but on another level she was very shy. I think the thing about Edie, her antic quality had a lot to do with her charm. She would go to any length to please. She needed to be accepted really on a visceral level, not the way most of us need to be accepted — kind of casually."

"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.""

"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."

"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 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?""

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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.""