Socialites From The United States

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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?"

"You know what they say - the sweetest word in the English language is revenge."

"The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively."

"Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart."

"Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance."

"[the story] "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" is a tribute to Amy Lowell, I've done a lot of what you might call metaliterature; that is, literature that's saying, "Isn't Amy Lowell wonderful? This is sort of like what she did." (Q: Lowell's underrated now, isn't she?) A: She was a wonderful narrative poet, but narrative verse is totally out of fashion now. I think it was one of her reactions to being a woman and a lesbian. An outsider has to write outsider verse. She's one of those people who wrote so prolifically that a lot of it is not good, but some of it is absolutely superb. She has a collection that attracted me called Down East, which is poems in New England dialect, and she has written stories of the supernatural in verse that I absolutely love."

"Mr. Sandburg possesses a powerful imagination, which plays over and about his realistic themes and constantly ennobles them. ...strikes, and factories, and slaughter-houses, and railroad trains, all take on a lyric quality under his touch. ...When Carl Sandburg left college, he was no longer an unskilled labourer, working with his hands. He was a thinking man, with a brain charged with ideas and emotions, determined to do his part in bringing about the millennium. For Carl Sandburg... is a revolutionary; he must push the world to where he is convinced it ought to be. ...again and again, he deserts the seer's mountain peak for the demagogue's soap-box. ...Mr. Sandburg is like a man striving to batter down a jail with balls of brightly coloured glass. ...Whether constant preoccupation with disease is a healthy form of literature, whether it acts as a curative, is open to question. But we can surely say that to be curative the disease must be treated unsentimentally and truly. Mr. Sandburg has aimed at doing this, has striven hard to do it. For this, one honours him above his fellows. For this, and the spirit of beauty which pervades his work."

"To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader."

"I don't like bare floors."

"We were about ways to show money."

"Texture and pattern should function as a surprise."

"No white anything (except sheets)."

"Never put sofas against wall."

"Cooking is like decorating — it never bores me."

"Having people be impressed with a house is not a compliment. You don't want them to say, 'What a place!' You want them to sit down and enjoy it."

"I'll accept commissions from anyone who isn't frightened by my proposals."

"Find the ideal in something not ideal."

"A la Rothschild, a style I define as many good things used irreverently."

"I'll be dragged from the last room I do, screaming, 'More!'"

"Appearance is everything. I find that a view is secondary. Even in those apartments on the East River, it's dull, looking out at those little boats."

"Everything is really about lighting."

"The little man on the wedding cake."

"I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

"I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of a individualist … Well, a show-off anyway."

"I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development."

"I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches."

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."

"He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle."