edie sedgwick
Date of Birth
20 April 1943, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Date of Death
16 November 1971, Santa Barbara, California, USA (barbiturate overdose)
Birth Name
Edith Minturn Sedgwick
Nickname
Princess
Height
5' 4" (1.63 m)
On the last night of her life, Edie attended a fashion show in her home city of Santa Barbara and even managed to get herself on camera one last time when the documentary crew for "An American Family" (1973) showed up to film Lance Loud. Later that night, at a party, a palm reader grabbed her hand and was taken aback by her very short life line - to which Edie sweetly replied, "It's okay - I know."Edie burned down her Sutton Place apartment in October of 1966 and moved into the Chelsea Hotel. She burned down at least one more room at that historic residence before management placed her in Room 105 above the lobby - and just down the hall from the same room
Sid Viciouswould one day allegedly kill his girlfriend,
Nancy Spungen.
Was introduced to
Andy Warhol by television producer
Lester Persky in January of 1965 and appeared in
Vinyl (1965), her first official Warhol film, in March of 1965.
Dated singer/songwriter
Bob Dylan before he married
Sara Dylan; his songs "Just Like A Woman" and "Like A Rolling Stone" came largely from their relationship. (
Andy Warhol appears in the latter song, as "Napoleon in rags.")
Spent her entire trust fund from the Sedgwick family fortune in just a few months, promoting
Andy Warhol and entertaining his clients and hangers-on. This never seemed to register with Warhol, who continued to deride her as a "poor little rich girl" (also the title of one of his movies with her), and wondered out loud when she died if her husband of a few months would "get her money." (Warhol was told curtly by a friend "Edie didn't have any money. She spent it all on you.")
Was the 7th out of eight children.
Her great-great-great grandfather was Judge Theodore Sedgwick. He'd been Speaker of the House of Representatives in the time of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and had also been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Her husband, Michael Post, woke up on the morning of November 16, 1971 to find Edie lying dead next to him in bed. The Coronor classified her death as an 'accident/suicide' and the cause of her death as 'acute barbituate intoxication'.
Misha Sedgwick (no relation), portrayed her in a 2004 off-Broadway play.
In 1989, the British rock group,
The Cult, consisting of
Ian Astbury and
Billy Duffy, released their "Sonic Temple" album. One of the songs paid tribute to Edie Sedgwick. The song is called "Edie (Ciao Baby)".
Edie filmed the first part of
Ciao Manhattan (1972) from April to August of 1967. Filming completely fell apart when she spontaneously took off to California to eventually hang out at the infamous "Castle" with
Nico and sometimes guest
Jim Morrison - among others. After a brief trip to Boston to film Lulu - a short film by
Richard Leacock - she returned to Manhattan essentially homeless and, by early 1968, was repeatedly institutionalized in mental hospitals.
Grew up on an isolated ranch in Santa Barbara, California, where she and her siblings had their own private school. They made daily visits to the doctor's office, where they were given Vitamin B injections.
At her funeral, her casket was covered with magnolias. Her wedding bouquet had also been made up of magnolias.
On the last night of her life, she attended a fashion show and party for designer Michael Novarese, where she was berated by a fellow guest about supposedly being a heroin addict. The guest was a woman named Veronica Janeway, who was asked to leave after causing the disturbance.
Did not have her ears pierced until the late '60s when she stopped wearing her signature 'shoulder-duster' earrings.
Was a self-confessed kleptomaniac who would steal from department stores, gift shops, and occasionally from friends and family. Though later it would be mainly to support her drug habit, she would also steal small objects like silverware, pens, lighters, and figurines. According to Andy Warhol, she was also compulsive hoarder (another kleptomaniac trait) and stashed copious amounts of drugs and makeup in particular.
Personal Quotes
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.
I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.
It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way.
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 manoeuvres I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me.
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 "they" still can't understand mine.
It was really sad - Bobby [Neuwirth]'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 insane. I was like a sex slave to this man. I could make love for forty-eight hours, 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.
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.
But 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 modelling.
I'll have to put more earrings on. I bet that someone could analyze me and tell my condition by my earrings.
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.
[Describing the orgy scene in Ciao! Manhattan]: The whole place turned into a gigantic orgy, every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs, especially the needle and mainlining scene, losing syringes down the pool drains and blocking up the water infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night...Drinking, guzzling tequila, vodka, and scotch, and bourbon, and shooting up every other half-second, and just going into an incredible sexual tailspin. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Just couldn't get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I've ever been in or ever hope to be in, and I should be ashamed of myself. I'm not, but I should be.
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.
[On Andy Warhol]: 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. He really fucked up a great many people's, young people's lives.
I have an accident about every two years, and one day it won't be an accident.
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.
[On why she rejected offers from Hollywood]: I need the support of my friends.
[Describing the aftermath of a drug-fueled sexual encounter]: Something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, and I said, out loud, "I wish I was dead." And the reason I said it was the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience was really an alien experience in a way, because I didn't even know him. It was a one-night jag. He was married and had children, and I just felt really, like, lost. It just wasn't worth living anymore because I was all alone again.
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.
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.
[Referring to a house fire]: 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.
[Describing a dream]: 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.
[On Bob Neuwirth]: He very much disapproved of
drugs. The minute he'd leave me I felt so empty and so lost. If I wasn't in the act of love-making, I'd be scheming about how to get
drugs.
I think
drugs are like strawberries and peaches.
[On the 60's flower children]: 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.
{Addressing artist Salvador Dali]: What's it like being a famous writer?
[On the Factory crowd]: The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot.
[Describing Manhattan State psychiatric hospital]: It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We all did the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end.
You want 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, yodelling, 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.
[Describing a fight with her lover, Bob Neuwirth]: 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 said, so I flipped out by that, that I jumped out of the car into the path of oncoming traffic, certain that my head would be crushed. All that happened was that 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 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.
[On falling pregnant after her first sexual experience]: 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, so 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 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.
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.
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.
This is what growth is all about. 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.
