As It Turns Out, page 1
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SPRING 2019
I have outlived my brother Bobby by more than fifty years now, and ever since he died I have been talking to him and making notes in my mind. I’m told that happens when you lose a sibling to whom you’re close: you’re left with a phantom presence, like an amputee with a phantom limb. It’s not that I keep track of anything systematically, I just find myself stopping from time to time to fix particular perceptions and ideas, trying to imagine what he would think, because things here have been going in a direction that neither he nor I would ever have anticipated. In the sixties, it was clear that a big shift was taking place, and from our different vantage points we were both hopeful, but as it turned out, it was not the radical social and political change that either of us was looking for. Instead, it turned out to be a shift in an entirely new direction, one that had to do with what Andy Warhol and our sister Edie Sedgwick represented when they got together in 1965. But Bobby didn’t live to see that, and I wasn’t paying attention.
And then, a couple of years ago, I happened to be visiting the Addison Gallery at Andover with my husband, and there on the top floor I suddenly came upon two very large images of Edie. Two close-ups of her head and face side by side on a film screen—one bright, one dark, in velvety blacks and chalky whites against a flat black ground.
I knew it had to be a clip from a Warhol film I’d read about called Outer and Inner Space, because what I was seeing was the image of a “real” Edie at the right responding to a video image of herself on a television monitor at the left and relaying her reactions to someone outside the frame. The monitor screen is large, and Edie’s face occupies it completely. She appears in profile, with her head tilted upward and fully illuminated so that her skin is pure white and her silvered hair shines. She looks up steadily with wide-open eyes and an inquiring, almost visionary, expression, while her lips seem to be forming words in slow motion, although I don’t remember any sound. The “real” Edie’s face is darker, and it’s also smaller, so at first I didn’t understand that this Edie is not behind or even beside the video image; instead, she’s in front of it—you can see her shoulder. So she’s not actually seeing her image, she’s listening to it and responding to what she hears … Her face is partly in shadow and further darkened by the sooty makeup around her eyes, and it’s framed by a pair of very long, dangly earrings that cast complex shadows on her neck as she moves. She’s never still. She reacts to every least nuance. She’s smoking, and a lot of the time she’s talking, but again, I don’t remember the sound. At first I was startled just to see Edie so alive and vital, when she’d been dead for nearly half a century, but what astonished me was the presence she had on camera. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. At the same time, I thought I was seeing a very complex play upon the figure of Narcissus, the beautiful Greek boy who fell fatally in love with his own image. But what I was really seeing, and seeing for the first time, was what Andy Warhol made of Edie Sedgwick.
I was completely stunned: stunned by Edie, stunned by all the layers and dimensions I was perceiving in the film, and above all stunned to realize what I had missed all these years. I know Bobby recognized something powerful in Edie, and I know he would have understood at the time what Warhol was up to. But in all honesty I don’t think I would have, even if I hadn’t been so badly shaken by our brother Minty’s death and then his.
Because this is how I found out. The telephone rang in the middle of the night in the apartment on West Ninetieth Street. I picked up the receiver and it was our father’s voice saying, “Minty hanged himself today.” Just like that. I had been sound asleep when he called, and I had a six-week-old baby sleeping in the next room. I began to tremble all over. An abyss opened and there it was, the absolute, black finality of death. Twist and turn as I might in the next hours and days, nothing more was possible. It was March 4, 1964; the next day he would have been twenty-seven years old. Then on New Year’s Day, some ten months later, I came home and there was an unsigned telegram under the door. (It was a long time before I realized it could only have come from our parents, and it meant they didn’t want to have to talk to me.) It said Bobby had had an accident, that he was in Saint Vincent’s in intensive care. When I got down there, I found him lying very still with a bandage covering his head. I took his big heavy hand, and from under the bandage tears leaked down his cheeks. Then the doctor came along and said it was the tubes irritating his nose. Some days later, on the phone, that same doctor said they were going to take him off life support. I had not understood, and I wanted to know what would happen. He said, “Well, he’ll just poop out.” Those were his exact words. So Bobby died too, and because he had crashed his motorcycle into a city bus, I had to go to the New York City morgue to identify him. I was shown into a dark chamber, a light flashed on, and there he was, handsome as ever, lying on a shelf in the wall. I gasped, the light flashed off, and the attendant let me out. Afterward, for a long time, I saw in my mind a bare branch sticking out of a swiftly flowing river. The branch was unmoving, but I was moving away from it, upstream against the current.
Edie had come to New York in the summer of ’64, and she was already exploding like a firework in the sky. Bobby had seen her in Cambridge in the spring, and it was as if he’d never known her before, he was so taken with her. I’m not sure if he was still an active Communist at that point, but if so he certainly forgot about it when he was with Edie. He was ten years older and so intensely political, and as far as I could see she was just a silly, spoiled child full of problems. When Christmas came round, he wanted her to stay in New York and spend it with him, but Edie listened to our parents and went home to the ranch. Then when she came back he was dead. A couple of months passed, and one night she went to a party given by a producer of commercials called Lester Persky, who thought she might appeal to his friend Andy Warhol.
That was the beginning of everything that I’m trying to think about now. I’m trying to figure out exactly what happened when Edie got together with Andy. I want to know what she had that I so totally failed to see, but that he saw and put to such effective use. I want to understand what he was up to, because right now it seems to me that when the two of them got together something was set in motion that led to the present that we are all living out. Edie is absolutely part of the present: to my surprise kids in high school know about her, and her image is everywhere. Open a glossy magazine, there’s a piece on the American ambassador’s residence in Paris, and what’s hanging on the wall? The photograph of Andy in the manhole holding a camera and Edie behind him with her legs in the air. Go into a bookstore and there’s a new book about Warhol full of pictures of Edie, and, of course, if you look her up on the internet, there’s no end to what you can find, and all of it seems as if it just happened.
Some kind of disjunction must have taken place, because when I call up images of the life we lived as a family and the rich disintegrating fabric of the past that formed us, it all seems very, very remote …
THE PAST
Alice de Forest and Francis Minturn (Duke) Sedgwick on their wedding day, May 9, 1929
I
When they were young, in the 1930s, our parents divided the year between California and Long Island. They spent the summer months in Goleta, in the foothills west of Santa Barbara, at a place that had been a wedding present from our mother’s parents. They hadn’t wanted her to marry my father: she was nineteen and he was twenty-three when he proposed, and although he was very handsome and came of an old New England family, he had a history of nervous trouble. But she was determined, and eventually they gave in. The marriage took place in New York, at Grace Church, on May 9, 1929, and oh, how radiant they were as they stepped out of the church, the former Alice de Forest and her new husband, Francis Minturn Sedgwick, he in his cutaway and she in a satin dress with a veil of tulle and old lace, carrying her train and a big beribboned bouquet. They spent their honeymoon in California, at the place in Goleta, which even now, more than eighty years later, I remember as paradise.
The house stood—indeed may still stand—facing south in a vast sweep of landscape that descended from the Sierra Madre to the coast. In style it was Spanish: one storey, white stucco with a tiled roof, and built around a patio. Plumbago and trumpet-flower vines and scarlet bougainvillea covered the outer walls so you could hardly find the yellow front door, and the patio was filled with flowering shrubs that sent their fragrance floating in through the windows. Outside the living room there was a large covered terrace lined with ivy, and an open terrace above it where our parents sometimes slept on clear nights. That side of the house looked out over steep gardens and orchards of orange and lemon trees and beyond, across open countryside studded with stands of eucalyptus to the ocean and the Channel Islands. Behind the house there was a cavernous white barn that served as the garage, and built onto the back of it was our father’s studio, where they gave parties that we could hear from our beds in the house. From there the land rose to a tawny hilltop where our parents had built a tennis court and a pool, each in its green wire cage, as well as another cage enclosing a sandbox and swings. Farther on, almost out of sight, there was a rough riding ring with jumps and a little wooden cabin lined with blue ribbons our mother had won before she married. Now our parents always rode together. If we children were in the playground, we could see them go by in the distance and disappear toward the foothills that rolled, yellow and sage blue, all the way up to the mountains. The sky above was immense, full of buzzards wheeling high up, and once the morning fog burned off it was blue, always blue, because in that place it was always summer.
Bobby and I were born there, I in the summer of 1931 and he two years later; however, our mother was not to have another child in California until Edie came along, and meanwhile our sister Pamela and the next three—Minty and Jonathan and Kate—were all born in a different climate and another landscape altogether.
Until the war, we spent the rest of the year on Long Island, first at our mother’s family place in Cold Spring Harbor, where we stayed until Pamela was born, and eventually in a large white clapboard house of our own on a pond a couple of miles away. There we three older children lived with Sophie, our dour gray-haired German governess, on the third floor, in little irregular rooms under the eaves. The doors all opened onto a large playroom that contained a big wooden table for Bobby’s Lionel trains, some chests stuffed with toys and tools and games, and a golden-brown hobby horse with real hide and hair. All around, the walls were lined with low shelves full of books. I remember distinctly the different worlds evoked by the illustrations of Kate Greenaway and Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle, but what I liked best was a set of St. Nicholas Magazine from the years 1910–1920 bound in large red leather volumes embossed in gold. I remember poring over the pictures—soldiers in jodhpurs and women in white uniforms standing beside ambulances, people in wooden boats hurtling across a frozen river, old ladies in long black dresses sitting on porches—trying to imagine what life might hold for me. There was a skylight over the playroom, but otherwise the house was dark, and in my memory the landscape outside was mostly dark as well. Blacks and browns and dull silver were the colors of the pond and the woods that rose from its margins, although in spring a queer pale green broke out on the trees, and the dogwoods bloomed.
Painting by Duke Sedgwick of the house in Goleta, 1930s
Painting by Duke Sedgwick of the view from the house, 1930s
The house stood on a wide sloping lawn between the pond and the road, which was out of sight behind a high gray cinder-block wall. Our parents built that wall to keep out the noise of passing cars, and even as a small child I was ashamed of it. I read English children’s books and I knew that walls were supposed to be made of brick or stone, and houses too, for that matter. The other thing I was ashamed of was our car, not the cars our parents drove but the one in which we were taken to the school bus. It was a pinkish-beige delivery van like the Dugan bread truck, fitted with pearl-gray vinyl seats. The other children came in station wagons with wooden sides, except for the Coes, who were driven all the way to school in a limousine.
The main thing I remember about that house in Cold Spring Harbor is all the rules. In our family the basic methods of child-rearing were disciplinary: rules, admonitions, criticism, shaming, and spanking were the degrees, and the rules concerned not only our behavior but also our manners and speech. Do as you are told. Don’t talk back. Ask “May I?,” not “Can I?” Don’t brag, don’t show off, don’t draw attention to yourself. Curtsy when you are introduced to a grown-up, look them in the eye and say, “How do you do,” never say “Hello.” Never address adults by their first names unless, of course, you are speaking to a servant.
The rules for table manners were endless: rest your left hand on the table, just the hand, not the forearm, never the elbow; hold the soup spoon parallel to your lips and dip it away from you; do not switch your knife and fork after cutting your meat. We learned to eat what was on our plates, because if we didn’t the plates would reappear at every meal until we did. Bobby and I dropped unwanted food behind the radiator, but Pamela put so many peas up her nose she had to be taken to the doctor.
There were rules for other eventualities as well. I learned that in public I should never let myself be seen entering or leaving a bathroom, and that I should always run the water so nothing I did could be heard. I also learned that it was wrong to begin a letter or even a paragraph with the pronoun “I,” and that I should always sign my name in my regular handwriting. No fancy signatures. Mainly, we learned to do as we were told and not to ask questions, particularly not where we were going or what was going to happen. “Wait and see” was the invariable response, even years later on the ranch, when we wanted to know where we were going to ride or whether we were going to town.
Then there were rules about language: we say “house,” “letter-paper,” and “trousers,” never “home,” “stationery,” or “pants.” All the children we knew called their mothers “Mummy”; no one said “Mommy” or “Mom.” They called their fathers “Daddy” or sometimes “Pop,” but we called ours “Fuzzy,” which was understood to be special, meaning something about him. Along with usage, we were taught pronunciation: not to talk through our noses, never to pronounce final Rs, and to say some words in a particular way. So when we moved to California for good, the other children in school would amuse themselves by asking me to say words like “orange,” “garage,” and particularly “squirrel,” which they pronounced “awrnge,” “grodge,” and “squirl.” And when I got to college a girl asked in front of a lot of people where I got my accent. I said I got it from my parents. She said her parents had a Yiddish accent, she had had to make up her own, and what did I think of that?
The house in Cold Spring Harbor had many levels, and so did the household. At the top was our father, who was the most inaccessible, in part because his interests didn’t include us and in part because he was gone all day. He would be driven to the station like everybody else’s father, wearing a dark suit and a coat and hat, but unlike them he didn’t go to an office. He went to his studio because he was an artist. Our mother was at home, but unless we got into trouble we mainly saw her at meals, except for supper, which we had at five-thirty. We could hear her during the day practicing the piano or talking on the telephone. After her mastoid operation went wrong, however, she began taking me with her when she went out to do errands or to see Dr. Wallig in Sea Cliff for electric treatments on her face. One side was smooth and drooping, so she only had half a smile, and from time to time her eyes rolled, especially the one on the droopy side. But nothing was ever said, and I am shocked now to realize how matter-of-factly we children accepted the change. The thing is, our mother’s self-control was such that there was absolutely no difference in her behavior. She was in her late twenties then, and she had been quite beautiful, a bit like Edie but more ladylike, and our father was so very handsome, so proud of his thick hair and fine physique.
We did see her if we got into trouble. Sophie was strict, and she could deal with manners and habits and ordinary misbehavior, but any real naughtiness was reported to our mother, who would lecture us and mete out minor punishments. In the case of egregious misdeeds and faults of character, however, she would shake her head and say that she had no choice but to tell our father when he came home. That meant hours of terror and abject behavior, because he never sent for us right away but waited until after our supper, after he had exercised and bathed and dressed for dinner, before spanking us. Three or four sharp smacks of a hairbrush on our bare bottoms, then he would comfort us and say it hurt him more than it did us. I say “us,” but it was usually me, because Bobby was diffident and kept to himself and Pamela was a very cautious and obedient child. I, on the other hand, was overeager and heedless, and to make matters worse, the instant I found myself in trouble I would try to lie my way out of it. It was not until late adolescence that I understood that the truth as I knew it to be was the only thing in the world I could count on.
