As It Turns Out, page 13
Griffin tries again. He says to Edie, “Now, you are a superstar, or you want to be a superstar … What is the difference between a star and a superstar?” and Edie tells him straight: “It’s two things. One is a joke and the other is possibly a real superstar … if there could be such a thing.” Griffin presses on, and when after a bit he asks her to define “superstar,” she responds: “Something either fantastic or ridiculous, and that remains to be seen.” She wags her finger, and now she says, quite emphatically, “It may be ridiculous. If we can’t get it off the ground it’ll be ridiculous.” So there you have what Edie thinks Andy Warhol’s underground movies are and how she regards her role in making them, including her reservations. Two things about the interview really surprised me: first of all, how masterfully Edie handled it, and second, that she obviously believed she was raising Andy’s filmmaking to a whole new level. As for Andy, he looked perfectly pleased with the way it all went.
I doubt very much if Edie knew anything at all about the technical side of filmmaking (not that Andy himself knew much), and I cannot imagine that she knew anything about Sleep. To begin with, it was only five and a half hours long, and the idea had come to Andy during a long night spent watching his lover John Giorno while he slept. They were staying at Eleanor Ward’s place in the country that weekend in the summer of ’63, when Jack Smith was making kind of a sequel to Flaming Creatures, and all sorts of people were there participating. Even Antonioni came to watch. Andy had brought along a borrowed 16mm Bolex, and he not only filmed some of the action for himself, he took a lot else from Jack Smith and the whole experience, including the term “superstar” and a bunch of actors, among them the great female impersonator Mario Montez. What Edie did know something about were the films that she and Chuck planned with Andy, where she had some input and Andy treated her as an equal, but as for the rest, you heard what she said to Ronnie Tavel about Kitchen.
Edie talking to Andy in the Factory (Photograph by Stephen Shore)
The costume that Edie wears in Kitchen was what she wore pretty much everywhere now, a top over a leotard and tights, and sometimes she didn’t even bother with the top. This was partly because she was taking dance classes, partly because she was short of money, but mainly because those were the clothes she was happiest in, and now the fashion world began to take notice. The magazines had been aware of Pop Art right along, and they had been using it as props and backgrounds for shoots. In mid-April, for instance, Mademoiselle had commissioned David McCabe to do a Pop world fashion shoot featuring Andy and an entourage. The entourage consisted of Edie, Gerard Malanga, and Chuck Wein, and McCabe photographed them in his studio, all stacked up with their arms out and bent so they look like a totem pole of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva: Edie cross-legged on the floor in front, Gerard right behind her, then Chuck, and Andy at the top. Edie still had her big beehive, which was sprayed silver, and she was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, heavy black tights, and knee-high black boots with high heels. Oh, and no earrings. Andy and Gerard were in proper suits, and Chuck had on a white fisherman’s sweater. So it was early days. But by the end of the month Edie was wearing her dance clothes more and more, and she caught the eye of a rising fashion designer her same age named Betsey Johnson. Betsey had started out as a teenager making outfits for her school dance recitals, and now she was interested in designing clothes that had some of the same feel. She was working at Mademoiselle at that point, and on the side she was creating custom-made silver clothes for various clients in the fashion world, using Edie as her fitting model. One day late that spring, Edie asked if she could borrow some samples, or rather, someone called from the Factory and asked her to send over all her silver stuff. So Betsey sent her silver knits, her metallic and glitter silvers, all she had, for Edie to choose from.
Edie chose the silver crushed-velvet jumpsuit you see her wearing in the extraordinary photograph that David McCabe took of her and Andy on the roof of his building. It looks like a Soviet Socialist Realist poster, those inspirational images of workers looking toward a radiant future: they’re seen from below standing on a metal ladder, gazing outward heroically with their arms stretching up to the skies and the Empire State Building soaring in the background. The image is so astonishing, so perfectly composed, that you are stunned; you don’t even notice the possible allusion to Andy’s film Empire, which really was eight hours long, and it never enters your mind that this picture is pure camp. To me it marks the beginning of the high season of Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol.
JULY–AUGUST
Kitchen was a critical success in the underground movie world, and so was the next film in the series about Edie, which they made in mid-July. It’s called Afternoon, and what it shows is Edie and friends—Ondine, Arthur Loeb, Dorothy Dean, and Donald Lyons—whiling the time away together in Edie’s apartment at 16 East Sixty-Third Street, talking and smoking to the accompaniment of vodka and amphetamines. The whole film seems really spontaneous, so I was surprised to learn that quite a lot of planning went into it, and a lot of discussion among Andy and Edie and Chuck Wein. The first time I saw it I couldn’t make out much of the dialogue; it was not until I read the transcript that the whole film came to life for me, and I was reminded of those private entertainments that used to take place in aristocratic houses. Afternoon is like a chamber opera, in which Edie, posed on the sofa charming as ever in her black leotard, a silky black top, and sheer tights, plays the presiding spirit, and Dorothy and Donald serve as the chorus, while Ondine and Arthur Loeb engage in an endless duet and Andy helps the plot along from the prompter’s box, which he shares with the inevitable Chuck Wein. See if this does not sound like a libretto:
O: There’s the Drella. [gasps] It isn’t, it isn’t, it is! Ah! Drella! I know!
ES: [laughs]
AL: Who is Drella?
O: You’ll never get it from my lips, you filthy cod.
ES: [laughs]
O: I swear secrecy, Drella.
ES: Sworn secrecy, Drella.
DD: Who is Drella? What is Drella?
Drella, of course, was the Factory’s name for Warhol (Dracula crossed with Cinderella) and after some long stretches of recitativo among the various characters, he intervenes and leads into one of the main themes by instructing Arthur to walk. Then Ondine picks it up:
Edie in her apartment with Donald Lyons, Dorothy Dean, Ondine, and Arthur Loeb, in Andy Warhol, Afternoon, 1965 (16 mm film, black and white, sound, 100 minutes)
O: Walk to them …
AW: Walk to us.
O: Walk to the camera, come on, love. Yeah.
AW: Walk for us.
AL: I thought making fun of cripples went out with Ben Turpin.
Finally, Andy tells Ondine to make him walk, and Ondine comes in fortissimo: “Move. Limp over there, Arthur. Fall down, Rigoletto. Now move.”
Now, if you never saw him, one conspicuous thing about Arthur Loeb, apart from his intelligence, was that he was quite crippled on his right side, which I always heard was due to an injury suffered in the womb. Throughout the film, his lameness is a recurring theme and the sadistic behavior of the others provides a lot of the action. So when there’s a lapse, Ondine and Dorothy intervene with insults and lines like “Pinch him. Pinch him.” Arthur says he can’t feel anything on that side, and Dorothy says: “You don’t feel anything anywhere, do you?” To all this Arthur responds quite lyrically but in a key of self-deprecation (once he even says, “I’m not defective, I’m retarded”), and clever Ondine sings opera buffa in counterpoint.
There are various secondary themes, such as the famous camp motif, which Andy introduces by telling Ondine to camp it up, to which Edie responds, “Oh, camp it up yourself,” and Andy tells her to camp it up. However, there is another minor theme to do with Edie that I find really interesting, and that is her ignorance. How on earth does she manage in this highly sophisticated and verbal company? For one thing, when something gets her attention you see her trying to catch on. Thus when Arthur mentions Ben Turpin, she immediately wants to know who that is. At another point, Arthur asks, “What distinguishes us from the Greeks?” and she starts out teasing, “Pretending we’re not bored?,” but when he answers that the Greeks didn’t even have a word for boredom, she’s eager to know if that’s true: “You’re kidding. They did not have a word?” But the most telling exchange occurs when Ondine declares that he himself is not an arsonist but he has a friend called Tally who set his mother on fire, and that prompts Edie to say she doesn’t like Joan of Arc. “Too martyr-ey,” she says. Donald Lyons interjects that Joan was killed for refusing to wear women’s clothes, and now Edie says, “You mean that’s an historical fact?” Then she gets suspicious and accuses him of making fun of her ignorance. She is ignorant, but does it really make any difference? Clearly not, because now she states that Joan of Arc was killed for believing in witches, and the others pretty much let it go. So Edie holds her own somehow, and to give her credit, she has clearly been picking stuff up, because when she hears Donald mention Brasilia she says, “Brasilia. Oh do you know they’ve taken over a new government there?” And when somebody says the Kennedy brothers didn’t expect LBJ to accept the vice presidency, to my great astonishment Edie says quite offhandedly, “That’s Arthur Schlesinger.” She also knows what she thinks of LBJ, which is not much.
Edie’s main aria comes after Chuck Wein prompts her to tell everybody about her space theory, which she says will take hours, but she has some cameo moments as well, for instance when Dorothy says she should marry Karim (that’s the young Aga Khan, whom I guess they had all known in Cambridge), and Edie tells about the time she tried to look him up in Paris. She describes walking through the streets in a leotard and tights with a girl named Rosie in a rag dress down to the ground and when they get to the house the butler comes out and takes them for beggars. Ondine has some cameo moments too, apart from his duet with Arthur, but all his solos are about getting drugs, first out of the car and then through endless attempts to reach the dealer they call Rotten Rita or the Mayor. This occupies a lot of reel three, and toward the end of the reel Ondine can’t wait another minute. He gets up to leave, saying he’ll give Edie a dosage and she must stick to what he gives her. He tells her, “Forty minutes before you see the man … take one quarter of it in a little piece of tissue. Make a little…” And that’s the last line of the film. It just ends there, and I am left completely appalled and bewildered by the treatment of Arthur Loeb. Just listen to how they taunt him: Ondine says, “Whenever I see a Jew I see red,” and Dorothy tells Arthur he’s sick sick sick, “You are always sick. You know, you are so boring because you’re so sick sick sick.”
What on earth is Warhol up to here? This is not just another example of his practice of throwing actors off balance, putting the screws on them to make them reveal themselves, because Arthur is entirely cool through it all. He parries all the barbs and insults with perfect poise, even invites and abets them, so he must have known what was coming and he’s acting his part knowingly. There’s nothing spontaneous about it. In that case, the screws are on me, the audience, and I am shocked by Andy’s transgressiveness. Come to think of it, both he and Edie were highly transgressive—they had that in common, but with her it was instinctive; she just would not recognize limits of any kind. With him, my sense is that it was intentional and highly focused. I even think it was intelligent. There’s one final thing about Afternoon: it makes me sad, because the third reel would have been the opening segment of Chelsea Girls, the most successful of all Warhol’s movies, only Edie had it taken out. She refused to let it be included, because she was under contract to Bob Dylan’s agent Al Grossman, and she had gotten it into her head that she was on her way to Hollywood.
Edie had been spending time with Bob Dylan right along, going to parties with him, visiting him at Grossman’s place in Woodstock, and Dylan really got under Andy’s skin. There were other reasons, but the main one was that he heard Dylan was going around blaming him for Edie taking drugs. Dylan had his own druggy world, only in his case, from what I read, the drug was heroin, whereas at the Factory it was always amphetamines, or speed. Andy took it in the form of a prescription diet pill called Obetrol, which he had begun taking in order to lose weight and now used to get himself jumped-up enough to be able to work fifteen hours a day and do without sleep. The truth is that Andy didn’t do that to Edie; nobody did—she came that way. Perfectly legal drugs had been a fixture in her life since the time on the ranch when our father called the doctor in to shoot her full of tranquilizers and they kept her drugged and in bed for I don’t know how long. And don’t forget what they gave her in the psychiatric institutions, not to mention what her doctor was prescribing now. No one knew that side of Edie better than Ondine, who told Victor Bockris, “She was a non-stop drug addict period. And Andy didn’t force her to take drugs … She was on drugs long before I ever met her. She had pharmacists. One of my jobs as her French maid was to go to the pharmacist and get her uppers and downers and betweeners…”
By July the weather had turned warm, and Ondine was living in Central Park. He didn’t need much money, he said, just enough to buy amphetamines, so when Edie mentioned that she needed a maid, he offered his services, and that’s how he became Edie’s French maid at a salary of thirty dollars a week. He’d get up in the morning, bathe in the lake, and head for Rotten Rita’s place on the West Side, where he would get his amphetamines and while away the morning listening to opera until it was time to get Edie up. Then he would walk back across the park to her place on East Sixty-Third Street and begin the process of rousing her. It was not easy because of all the barbiturates she took, but he would give her a little amphetamine and that helped. Then he would put on opera records and make her breakfast, and eventually she would come to life and they would talk while she did her exercises, or he would put on her big dangly earrings and they would consult the I Ching, and all the time the phone would ring and ring and ring. Ondine was really more of a companion than a maid because Edie already had someone to do the cleaning, and besides, there was nobody in the world more companionable than Ondine. The arrangement lasted all summer and into the fall.
Meanwhile, Edie’s fame had been building and she was getting more and more attention: in the mainstream press for her social persona as the beautiful young blue-blooded heiress who was said to have blown through a six-figure inheritance in a matter of months, in the Pop Art and underground film worlds for her association with Warhol and her superstardom, and in the fashion world for the novelty of her look. For Edie, with her cropped silver hair and tiny breasts and her bony athletic body, was truly androgynous. Remember, Twiggy didn’t come on the scene until the following year, so this was quite a new type for a public accustomed to goddesses, whether soft, voluptuous Marilyn or those stark, unattainable figures in static poses and extreme attire that Richard Avedon and Irving Penn were photographing for Vogue. Instead, Edie was a scamp, and totally kinetic. She would run, leap, and turn cartwheels; she would balance on a ledge or dance in the surf, all the time making a performance out of just being herself. So now Vogue took note of her and included her in the famous “Youthquakers” piece in their August issue, where she appears in a leotard and tights, balancing spread-eagled on one foot on the back of her leather rhinoceros from Abercrombie’s, the thing she called Wallow. The caption describes her as the star of Andy Warhol’s underground movies and reports that “in Paris Warhol’s gang startled the dancers at Chez Castel by appearing with fifteen rabbits and Edie Sedgwick in black leotard and a white mink coat.” In fact, Edie gets the biggest illustration and one of the longest captions of anyone on the list, and consider who some of the other Youthquakers were: Peter Serkin, Joan Rivers, Frank Stella, and Bill Cosby, all in their twenties then, all just starting out, and all of them already highly accomplished.
So when it comes down to it, what was it about Edie, really?
Patti Smith really responded to that “Youthquakers” picture, and what she said about it was: “[Edie] was such a strong image that I thought, ‘That’s it.’ It represented everything to me … radiating intelligence, speed, being connected to the moment.” The image captured Patti’s imagination so powerfully, she said, that she actually got a crush on Edie and would travel all the way to Manhattan just to hang around outside the discotheques that Edie frequented in hopes of catching a glimpse of her. And here’s how she explained it: “You have to understand where I came from. Living in South Jersey, you get connected with the pulse beat of what’s going on through what you read in magazines. Not even through records … I never saw people. I never went to a concert. It was all image.” There you have it: It was all image.
