Forty years ago I read Edie: An American Biography which introduced me to the life of Edie Sedgwick. As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy was written by Edie’s older sister Alice Sedgwick Wohl (who is known as Saucie Sedgwick in her sister’s biography). I found it odd that there was no text at all on the front cover, however as this was a library book, I can imagine that perhaps the book was packaged with a wrapper or obi of some kind that indicated as much, which was later removed during processing. However, the more I look into this, I believe the hardcover edition was intended to be like this.
In this short book of 259 pages Wohl dives into her family’s past and provides a background for the tragic dysfunction that permeated Edie’s young life as her upper-class family criss-crossed the country between California and New York. I imagine that Edie wouldn’t necessarily know much about her own family history since she was twelve years younger than Alice and, as a wayward waif, was sent to boarding schools or, in her teen years, institutionalized. According to Alice, she and her six other brothers and sisters were brought up under a strict code of high society manners, yet Edie was given free rein to act however she wanted. That the family lived on an isolated ranch in southern California only contributed to Edie’s carefree way of living. Without a system of discipline and a landscape as far as the eye could see, Edie was fearless, yet throughout her short adult life was worried that people might be making fun of her.
For the first half of the book Wohl writes about innocuous family and personal details and the reader is left impatiently waiting for the section to end, since she doesn’t start writing about the year Edie and Andy met, in 1965, until page 121. I gather that writing this book was a revelation to Wohl, since she claimed several times that she never really knew who her younger sister was. Written fifty years after Edie’s death, what would a distant older sister be able to say? Their age disparity precluded them from establishing any kind of intimate relationship and Wohl didn’t dote on Edie as a big sister might, nor did Edie look up to Wohl as a big sister figure. By the time Edie became a Warhol superstar and darling of the party circuit, Wohl was long gone from her life.
Half a century later, Wohl was struck by the impact her sister still has on pop culture. In analyzing Edie’s appeal, Wohl wrote:
“Right from the start, Edie was conspicuous. She appeared on the scene as if from nowhere, beautiful, unattached, and eager for life. She was also unimaginably innocent, because literally everything was new to her. She had no experience, no frame of reference, no sense of scale, and no standards by which to calibrate her behavior or evaluate what she encountered. She was open and alive to absolutely everything, and that, together with her beauty and her enchanting presence, made her irresistible.”
Edie’s path from California out east led her to Cambridge, Massachusetts and then to New York City where she fell into the party and social scene where Andy Warhol was its grande dame. Wohl is an arts academic and a stickler for details; she tried to pinpoint the actual date and circumstances when her sister first met the King of Pop Art and disputed some claims that have been made.
The evening reporter for the Journal American, Mel Juffe, told Warhol:
“When I was seeing you and Edie, you two were at your absolute pinnacle as a media couple. You were the sensation from about August through December of ’65. Nobody could figure you out, nobody could even tell you apart–and yet no event of any importance could go on in this town unless both of you were there.”
Wohl critiqued all the Warhol films Edie starred in and looked at them seriously, which is quite the opposite of how Warhol likely intended his films to be regarded. One theme that came up in film after film is how Edie projected her figure and her shapely legs as the centre of attention. For a young woman who worried that people would be making fun of her after seeing her in these films, she definitely was in control (although she may have been strung out on barbiturates) by knowing how to show her best assets to the camera. Since Warhol never edited or stopped filming and left the camera in a stationary position throughout the entire duration of his films–at least the early ones here–Edie knew that once her best features (legs, face, eyes, earrings) were in the middle of the shot, she kept them there. Warhol’s films were tableaux to show off her beauty. I do agree that Edie was a gorgeous young woman. Men were drawn to her, however:
“She was never altogether comfortable with straight men and would complain of their attention while at the same time doing everything possible to attract it.”
Edie died in November 1971 after overdosing on barbiturates. She was never able to free herself from her drug addictions, and repeated attempts at rehab failed her.