Edie Sedgwick #1

[Klove1121]

That is a great article. I always find it interesting that Edie set the style even though she was not trying to. I thinks she wanted to be artistic in every aspect of her life and getting dressed and made up was a way to show off her artistic ability.

 

[IcePrincess]

Sedgwick didn't care what was in fashion. Being an individual was her genius. Warhol recognized it and so do we.

Thanks for the photos Liberty Bell

Great article!!! Edie was an individual, I can't stand it when people compare Edie to Paris Hilton etc...

 

[Klove1121]

Thanks for the photos Liberty Bell

Great article!!! Edie was an individual, I can't stand it when people compare Edie to Paris Hilton etc...

I hate that too!! I get so mad when people say, "So she was like the Paris Hilton of the 60's". I think steam starts coming out my ears! They have nothing in common but famous last names!

 

[Klove1121]

"One person in the sixties fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known. And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love." ~Andy Warhol



I had never heard this quote before I read it in the Girl on Fire book.
Any thoughts?????

 

[odelay]

^^^ It comes from the Taxi chapter of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol." Taxi's supposed to be Edie, though he never calls her that. It's a very genuine, suprisingly soft litany.

Poor Andy Warhol. He got blamed for everybody's sh*t. All the people he allegedly "destroyed" were already weak and crazy and just wanted a higher up to blame for their problems.

 

[madison01]

^ I agree, he is always painted as a villain. He was kind enough to house and pay for society's misfits who'd really belong nowhere else... he was their creative outlet. The only manipulation that went on was when everybody was hungry for drugs and competing for attention, they all did it to each other I think. But Andy does always get the blame... sadly. He actually seemed rather sweet... but heavily influenced by his childhood problems. A lot like Edie.

 

[Klove1121]

I think Edie and Andy both loved and cared for each other in a way that was unfamiliar to both of them. Edie sent Andy a "Get Well" card after he was shot and I am pretty sure that was a while after they had a falling out.

I agree that Andy does get blamed for alot of people's problems. He did not cause their problems but he did nothing to stop them either. I think he did not know what to do, so he just filmed them destroying themselves. But they did that to themselves.

 

[fairyx]

I agree with all of you on the subject of Andy.
All these people he supposedly "destroyed", would still have destroyed themselves even if they never met Andy. They would still have had problems, he never forced them to do anything they didn´t want to.
They were grown-ups for Gods sake! They had a mind of their own!

culture-cafe.net

 

[IcePrincess]

I think Warhol saw great potential in a lot of the people at the Factory, like Edie. They may have difficulty seeing it in themselves though. Your worst enemy cannot harm you like your own thoughts can.

 

[IcePrincess]

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2137999.ece

Edie Sedgwick: The life and death of the Sixties star

Rich, gorgeous and well-connected, Edie Sedgwick was the party girl who lit up Andy Warhol's golden circle. As her life story comes to the screen, Rhoda Koenig unravels a very Sixties tragedy

Published: 09 January 2007



"Her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls..." With three nouns, in "Just Like a Woman" (said to have been inspired by her), Bob Dylan deftly summed up his friend Edie Sedgwick, the wayward princess of Andy Warhol's multimedia Factory.
More than 30 years after her short, tumultuous life ended, Edie is still causing ructions. Last month, Dylan threatened to sue the makers of Factory Girl, a movie starring Sienna Miller as Edie, claiming that he is defamed by Hayden Christensen's portrayal of a singer whose rejection drives her to suicide.


This week, Edie's brother claimed that despite Dylan's insistence that he and Edie never had a relationship, she became pregnant with his child and had an abortion. The producers describe the harmonica-playing character (named "Quinn" in the press notes, but never called by name in the movie and identified only as "musician" in the credits) as a composite - which Dylan's lawyer argues is no bar to defamation.
The movie, which was frantically re-cut prior to its Oscar-qualifying release at one theatre in Los Angeles (though the director George Hickenlooper says the changes had nothing to do with Dylan's objections) will be edited again before its wider US release later this month.


Early reviews have been mixed, with The Hollywood Reporter praising its "bright intensity" and saying that Miller "brings to life Sedgwick's legendary allure"; the Los Angeles Times calling it "simplistic" and "superficial"; and Variety finding the movie "tame" and Miller "whiny".


It's no surprise, though, that the film should provoke reactions as varied as Edie herself did. To parents terrified of the influence of sex and drugs, she was an abomination; to the would-be cool, she was an ideal; to painters as eminent as Robert Rauschenberg, she was a living work of art.
***

American aristocracy ruled that a lady's name should appear in the papers only three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died. Edie Sedgwick changed that. As well as publicising her appearances in underground movies, her numerous committals for mental illness and drug addiction were widely reported. She met her future husband - a fellow patient - in the psychiatric wing of the hospital where she was born. On the last evening of her life, in 1971, she appeared on television, and then went home to die of an overdose of barbiturates. She was 28.


Edie's troubles began long before she was born. Her distinguished New England lineage (a Sedgwick was Speaker of the House of Representatives under George Washington, another edited the Atlantic Monthly for a generation) was also distinguished by hereditary madness, as far back as the Speaker's wife.

Edie's father (whose own father had moved his family to southern California) had two nervous breakdowns soon after leaving university, and his wife was told by her doctors that she must never have children. But the rich do not like being told what to do, and the Sedgwicks were rich-rich (not only had Edie's family inherited millions; oil was discovered on their property, enough to sink 17 wells).


Mrs Sedgwick defied doctors and fate and had eight children, two of whom died before Edie - one hanged himself, the other rode his motorcycle into a bus. As a father, Francis Minturn "Duke" Sedgwick was larger than life and much more terrible. A career as a monumental sculptor and owner of a ranch that was his own little dukedom (the children were tutored at home, and seldom left it) did not exhaust his energies. He seduced, or at least made advances to, his wife's friends, his children's friends and, Edie said, to her.
***

When Edie left California for Radcliffe, the women's college of Harvard (the Sedgwick alma mater), she had already spent time in mental hospitals, suffered from anorexia and had an abortion. What men saw, however, was a delicate beauty and an appealingly vulnerable quality. "Every boy at Harvard," said a former classmate, "was trying to save Edie from herself."


The less high-minded boys flocked to Edie for other reasons - even at wealthy Harvard, there were not too many students who drove their own Mercedes, or were so uninhibited. At one boy's Sunday family lunch, she left the table, walked out on to the lawn, stripped to her knickers and lay down to sunbathe.


Bored in Boston, Edie decided to swap the role of college girl for party girl and moved to New York, into the 14-room Park Avenue apartment of her obliging grandmother. At 21, she came into money of her own and got a flat - and clothes, clothes, clothes. Her stick figure, huge eyes and chopped-off hair suited the style of the early Sixties - Jean Seberg in the movies, Twiggy in the glossies- and Edie was, briefly, on the fashion pages.


Life magazine said she was "doing more for black tights than anybody since Hamlet". The Vogue empress Diana Vreeland praised her "anthracite-black eyes and legs to swoon over... She is shown here arabesquing on her leather rhino to a record of The Kinks." But, well before heroin chic, her drug-taking was becoming so notorious that editors stopped calling.


In 1965, Edie met an impresario who was more her style: Andy Warhol. Warhol and Edie were, horribly, made for each other. The Pittsburgh boy, son of Polish immigrants, wanted the Wasp heiress's company more fervently than any straight man wanted her body; the neglected daughter craved the obsessive attention of a famous man who demanded nothing from her in return. "If you had a father who read the paper at the dinner table," said Viva, another of Warhol's film-stars, "and you had to go up and turn his chin to even get him to look at you, then you had Andy, who would press the 'on' button of the Sony the minute you opened your mouth."


Edie introduced Warhol to her real father, but their one meeting was not a success. The artist thought Duke Sedgwick the most handsome older man he had ever seen, but the rancher said afterwards: "Why, the guy's a screaming ***!"

Warhol's clothes became smarter under Edie's influence, and she dyed her hair silver to match his. "I thought at first it was exploitative on Andy's part," says the photographer Fred Eberstadt. "Then I changed my mind and decided, if it was exploitative on any part, maybe it was Edie's."


"Edie and Andy," the non-couple, were the couple of the moment. She took him to parties where everyone else was listed in the Social Register; he stage-managed her appearances, pushing Edie to the cameras and the microphones, where she was white with fear but loved every minute.


Edie became an habitué of the Factory, Warhol's loft papered in aluminium foil, where the daytime was spent churning out silkscreen prints and the night on parties that mingled guests who contributed flash, trash and cash with a smorgasbord of illegal stimulants. (Some left the place in limousines, some in ambulances, a regular said.)


Flash-bulbs popped and crowds on the wrong side of the rope screamed when Edie turned up in leotards and her grandmother's leopard coat. The Velvet Underground, Warhol's rock band, wrote a song, "Femme Fatale", about her. Warhol put her in a movie called Horse, which, contrary to what one might have expected from the title, was actually about a horse. The actors, in cowboy gear, were brought together with the stallion and a placard was held up that read: "Approach the horse sexually, everybody." Edie was lucky for once - the indignant horse kicked someone else in the head.
***

Edie appeared in Beauty Part II, her nervous radiance apparent from the first. George Plimpton, a fellow aristocrat (who, with Jean Stein, later put together the oral biography Edie) remembered seeing the film, in which Edie, in bra and pants, lounged on a bed with a man pawing her, while an offstage voice gave her instructions. "Her head would come up, like an animal suddenly alert at the edge of a waterhole, and she'd stare across the bed at her inquisitor in the shadows... I couldn't get the film out of my mind."


Other films included Restaurant, Kitchen and the cruelly titled Poor Little Rich Girl, with Edie back in bed in her underwear, putting on make-up or answering offscreen questions in an offhand way. Her dreaminess, like her hysteria, was fuelled by cocaine, alcohol, uppers and downers, alone or combined.


Edie's favourite was a speedball - a shot of amphetamine in one arm, heroin in the other. Several times she fell asleep while smoking in bed; once she was badly burned as candles toppled while she slept. Even then, her imprimatur was one the fashion world was eager to claim. "When Edie set her apartment on fire," said Betsey Johnson, "she was in one of my dresses."


Edie moved to the Chelsea Hotel, famous for its artistic clientele, where she met Dylan - whose song "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat" she is supposed to have inspired as well - and his right-hand man, the record producer Bob Neuwirth, with whom she had an affair.


However, Jonathan Sedgwick, Edie's brother, says: "She called me up and said she'd met this folk singer in the Chelsea, and she thinks she's falling in love. I could tell the difference in her, just from her voice. She sounded so joyful instead of sad. It was later on she told me she'd fallen in love with Bob Dylan."


Some months later, he says, she told him she had been hospitalised for drug addiction and that when doctors discovered she was pregnant, they carried out an abortion, over her protests. "Her biggest joy was with Bob Dylan, and her saddest time was with Bob Dylan, losing the child. Edie was changed by that experience, very much so."


Dylan's lover of record at the time was Joan Baez. Soon after they broke up, he married Sara Lownds; Edie was said to have been devastated when she heard the news from someone else.


Even with her inheritance gone, and unable to count on money from home, Edie wouldn't economise. In all the time she lived in New York, she took the subway only once - to Coney Island, in a feathered evening gown over a bikini. The rest of the time it was limousines. She would never even settle for a taxi.


At the end of 1966, Edie went to California for Christmas. At the Chelsea, they were relieved to see her go - there would be terrible scenes in the lobby when she wasn't able to pay her bill, and she never could stop setting her room on fire.


As soon as she got home, her parents had her committed. And as soon as she could, she ran back to New York. But the spotlight never again turned her way. In 1967, her father died. A friend said: "Finally. Thank God. Now, maybe Edie can breathe."
But she became more depressed. Her money was gone, and she returned to her grandmother's apartment, to steal antiques which she sold for drug money. After eight months in increasingly grim and frightening mental hospitals, in the last of which she was made to scrub the lavatories, she returned, in 1968, to the ranch. But her drug habit had not ended, and she took up with a motorcycle gang, trading sex for heroin. "She'd ball half the dudes in town for a snort of junk," a friend said. "But she was always very ladylike about the whole thing."
***

In Edie's last film, Ciao! Manhattan, whose scenario was even more formless and bizarre than her own, she played a topless hitchhiker living in a tent in an empty swimming pool. There was a non-simulated orgy in a (full) swimming pool, fuelled by amphetamines and tequila. Not just Edie but the whole cast were on speed; the film-makers had to find a co-operative doctor and set up a charge account.
Edie showed off her new implants, but ascribed her larger breasts to diet and exercise. She pretended to undergo electroshock treatments - to which she was soon after subjected for real, in the hospital used for the filming. She also recreated being given a shot of amphetamine by one of the swinging doctors of the period, having to lie down because she was too thin to take it standing up.


Roger Vadim and Allen Ginsberg, the latter naked and chanting, turned up for some reason, and Isabel Jewell, the tough girl of such Thirties films as Times Square Lady and I've Been Around, played her mother. Edie would sometimes have convulsions from all the drugs she was taking. The director of the film ordered his assistant: "Tie her down if you have to."

 

[IcePrincess]

^ same article continued

In July 1971, in white lace, Edie married Michael Post, a student eight years younger, whom she had turned from his vow to remain a virgin until he was 21. Some guests threw confetti; one threw gravel. Edie could not live alone, she said, and would not live with a nurse. Post's job was to dole out her pills.
On 14 November, she went to a fashion show where she headed for the cameras like a woman dying of thirst to an oasis. A man she met that evening said she asked to come and see him the next day for a chat, but they would need to have sex first, otherwise she'd be too nervous to talk. The next morning, her husband woke to find her dead beside him. Whether her death was accident or suicide, the coroner was unable to determine. Post plays a bit part in the movie.


When Edie first crashed and burned, such stories of a misguided search for freedom and self-expression were rare. By the time she died, they were becoming common. Now, of course, there are too many to count. But the carefree innocence and optimism of the early Edie's photographs and films still resonate. "She was after life," said Diana Vreeland, "and sometimes life doesn't come fast enough."

Factory Girl is released in February
Inside the Factory: who else was who in Warholia

The main man: Andy Warhol
The artist, film-maker and experimentalist-in-chief at the Factory, Andy Warhol said everyone was going to be famous for 15 minutes. He was famous for considerably longer.

The 'fotographer': Billy Name
One day, late in 1963, Andy Warhol became bored with operating his complicated still camera, and handed the responsibility to one of his "Superstars" - and a fellow experimental artist - Billy Name, who would become the "Factory Fotographer".

The femme fatale: Nico
Nico (Christa Paffgen) - at various times the lover of John Cale, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, Iggy Pop and Brian Jones - was an enigmatic German chanteuse who made an enormous artistic contribution to the Warhol scene. The Velvet Underground teamed up with her for their landmark tour Exploding Plastic Inevitable. She also sang on their debut album and starred in Warhol's Chelsea Girls. Died of a drugs overdose in 1989.

The writer: Truman Capote
Given that Capote's fame had been ensured by a 1948 dust-jacket picture of him reclining on a chaise longue, it's no surprise that the writer was at home in the Factory - where the Couch was a centrepiece for a variety of collaborations.

The Welshman: John Cale
The Velvet Under-ground's instrumental engine room, and one of the few artists to successfully bring rock viola to the masses, John Cale was a proud Welshman and a Warhol acolyte. His stay in the Velvets, though, was short-lived - he was only in the band for their first two albums.

The transformer: Lou Reed
Very few people bought the Velvet Underground's early records when they were first released. It didn't matter. Lou Reed and the gang's place at the heart of Sixties' counter- culture was ensured, when, in 1965, Andy Warhol became their manager. The singer later documented his time at the Factory in "Walk on the Wild Side".

The artist: Robert Rauschenberg
In 1964 Rauschenberg became the first American winner at the Venice Biennale. He was the artist Warhol most admired, and feted at the Factory. Warhol was surely listening when Rauschenberg remarked that "the artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history".

The voice of a generation: Bob Dylan
Al Kooper once remarked of Bob Dylan's seminal 1966 album, Blonde on Blonde, that it chronicled a "quintessential New York hipster." Dylan - a regular at the Factory - might have denied that description himself, but he certainly met a few at Warhol's salon.

The rock god: Mick Jagger
Just as Warhol designed the iconic cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico, the Velvets' 1967 debut, he also created the artwork on Sticky Fingers for his Factory friend, Mick Jagger. The crotch on the cover, though, does not belong to any members of the world's biggest rock band - it is thought to belong to Joe Dallesandro, a Factory regular.

The model: Anita Pallenberg
Anita Pallenberg was fluent in four languages and three Rolling Stones. And between growing up in Germany and settling in London this pan-European actress and model became a regular at the Factory.

 

[IcePrincess]

http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-ca-ediemuse7jan07,0,5971694.story?coll=cl-music

January 7, 2007

CRITICS' NOTEBOOKS
Reshaping the muse mold

Edie Sedgwick, the focus of 'Factory Girl,' made a familiar role new in the counterculture era.

THERE'S a moment in "Factory Girl," the new film about Andy Warhol's most sparkling superstar, Edie Sedgwick, that almost gets things right. It occurs when the beautiful waif meets the film's nominally disguised Dylan figure, Billy Quinn. Pushed toward her backstage at a concert, he grabs Sedgwick and points her at the clutch of cameras recording the encounter. He knows her value — not as a girlfriend or artistic partner, but as a sort of living auto-focus device for the age of exploding flashbulbs.

This is what muses became in the Pop moment: guiding forces within an ever-expanding maze of media opportunities and radical-chic connections, styling and positioning their "great men" within a world that cared as much about their hairstyles as their art. Sedgwick never actually served this role for Dylan; his recent legal actions challenging the verisimilitude of "Factory Girl" rightly assert that, though they shared a scene and certain ambitions, he and Sedgwick were never that close. What is true, however, is that Dylan needed and found this kind of woman to help him up fame's moving ladder, as did most of the major pop stars in this era. Sedgwick emblematized that role in her relationship with Andy Warhol, and "Factory Girl," which opened in Los Angeles on Dec. 29 and is expected to open more widely in February, hints at her gift for modernizing the muse before devolving into a boring and implausible romantic triangle

As social-climbing bad boys like Dylan transformed rock from a teenage diversion into a countercultural force — and Warhol, from the other side, imbued art with rock's energy and flash — a remarkable group of women revived the role of the muse for a new cultural moment.

Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull with the Rolling Stones, Angie Bowie with her husband David, Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez with Bob Dylan: these companions were image enhancers, social connectors and informal educators for their men. Earlier muses inspired the works of artists and fashion designers and displayed them. In the rock era, the emphasis shifted from private to public with the rise of mass-marketed consumer culture. The muse became an arbiter of image and lifestyle.

"She transformed him," said writer and occasional Warhol collaborator Robert Heide of Edie's relationship with Andy. "Edie had an impeccable sense of style — with those long legs and the little striped shirt — she invented that shirt, by the way, it wasn't Andy." Andy and Edie became like twins, her adopting his silver mane, him copping style tips from her.

"I thought at first it was exploitive on Andy's part, and then I changed my mind, and decided if it was exploitive on any part, maybe it was exploitive on Edie's part," said photographer Fred Eberstadt of their mutual need. Early on, "Factory Girl" captures this mutual exploitation, but ultimately it posits Sedgwick as an innocent victim, downplaying the drive and artistry she exhibited through her public partnership with the man who "created" her.

If Andy and Edie created each other, they weren't the only pop pair to do so. A 1976 London Daily Express article described Angie and David Bowie, then seven years married, at home in London: "Angie glamorous, thinner even than he is, with ginger eye makeup to match his hair, and looking incestuously like his twin sister." Was this mere narcissism on the part of privileged men? Or did these women actually mold the men who seemingly dominated them?

The 1960s consorts of the Rolling Stones were famous as perfect rock chicks, and, later, drug casualties; but these cultured women did more than hang around. Pallenberg, especially, who first loved Brian Jones and, later, Keith Richards, was a classic upper-class bohemian whose links to a cosmopolitan, aristocratic scene gave the band a chance to become more than just rock ruffians.

"How Anita came to be with Brian is really how the Stones came to be the Stones," Faithfull, Mick Jagger's equally classy consort, wrote in her 1994 memoir. "She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée…. t transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons."

A strong woman's job

PALLENBERG also contributed to the Stones' descent into drug addiction; it may not be a coincidence that these strong-willed women were often prone to self-abuse. They were, in a strange way, as ambitious as the artists they helped mold. But when their efforts worked, and their consorts succeeded, often they were left behind.

This was the decade before feminism's second wave took hold, and these women didn't have a sense of their labor being worth anything. This was partly Sedgwick's problem, which "Factory Girl" suggests: her failure to establish a real career, more than her lack of a true love, ruined her.

In one case, however, a rock muse's efforts in transforming her man were so pointed and singular that she did get the credit she deserved. Forget Edie and "Billy Quinn" — it was Baez who helped shape Bob Dylan, and lost her heart, though not her head, in the process.

A few years later, the very concept of the rock muse was shaken by the resolutely equal partnership of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. "We are two halves, and together we're a whole," Lennon famously said.

Today, the glamorous partners of rock stars (or art stars) have prominent careers as writers or models or rock stars; they make their own money and tend to their own images. Most stay in the background, letting others direct their mates' public lives. After all, a new panoply of partners has arisen to tend the needs of rough-edged geniuses. They're called stylists. They might demand scale, but at least there's no trail of broken hearts.http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-ca-ediemuse7jan07,0,5971694.story?coll=cl-music

 

[Klove1121]

I noticed that after the first article....where it lists the other people in "warholia"..it was missing alot of people......are these the only Factory characters in "Factory Girl"????? Where are Brigid and Richie Berlin?? or Viva???or Paul America???or Ondine???or Baby Jane????? Does anyone know if they are characters in "Factory Girl"????? Just wondering??

 

[60swildchild]

Thanks IcePrincess for the fantastic article!! Hmmm, I do wonder why Paul America isn't mentioned that much, since at one time he and Edie had a strong affair going. Wasn't Baby Jane going out as Edie came in? I can't wait until this movie is released!
scan from Girl On Fire

Photographer: Terry Stevenson

 

[babydoll1125]

Wow, those articles got so many things wrong, i can't believe it!

 

[Klove1121]

Wow, those articles got so many things wrong, i can't believe it!

I know...some info was correct and some was crap......as with most news, not just Edie....I don't think anyone will ever know the real truth...that is something Edie took with her....

 

[fairyx]

you know what I just thought of? it would be so interesting to see pics of Edie´s siblings in their 20´s! just to see if they looked anything alike.

Liberty Bell, if you would like to share anything like that with us, it would be greatly appreciated, but if not, it´s totally understandable

 

[Klove1121]

you know what I just thought of? it would be so interesting to see pics of Edie´s siblings in their 20´s! just to see if they looked anything alike.

Liberty Bell, if you would like to share anything like that with us, it would be greatly appreciated, but if not, it´s totally understandable

There are pictures of Edie's brothers and sisters in Jean Stein's book about Edie. They all had very similar features. Some have dark eyes like Edie's. Both of her brothers who died (Bobby and Minty) were very attractive in their collage days.

 

[Klove1121]

I do not know if this has already been posted but I thought it was interesting.......

Feb 22, 2006:

BOB DYLAN WHOÕS WHO

SEDGWICK, EDIE

BY: ROBERT HEIDE

"This is in response to the recently published letter that I
originally wrote to the Village Voice and which was printed in
that newspaper on July 27, 1982 under the banner ÔVillage Õ65
RevisitedÕ. The subject of this letter encompassed the
relationships between myself, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Bob
Dylan.

This was brought to my attention by Sally Kirkland who called to
let me know she spotted it on the Bob Dylan WhoÕs Who site on the
internet. It turns out that Sally who was my upstairs neighbor
on Christopher Street from 1961 to 1966 is in the forthcoming
film ÒFactory GirlÓ playing Edie SedgewickÕs grandmother. During
the 2005 Christmas holidays Sally showed up in New York; and
friends John Gilman, Hoop, and myself took her to Donna KaranÕs
fabulous Madison Avenue store for a party celebrating the
publication of an illustrated Rizzoli book written by Jay Harris
whose twin brother and business partner Jed perished in the 800
New York to Paris flight which crashed over Long Island. On the
way uptown from the Village in one of HoopÕs ÔArt-CarsÕ Sally was
frantically calling the hospital where her lifelong friend
Shelley Winters lay dying hoping to check on her condition.
(Subsequent to this Shelley died of a heart attack on January 14,
2006 with Sally, an ordained minister, performing the last
rites.) When the four of us arrived at Donna KaranÕs the cameras
began flashing as we entered the packed emporium where the
partygoers included many Warholites including Sylvia Miles, Baby
Jane Holzer, and Ultra Violet. I introduced Sally to Kevin
Kushel the agent of factory photographer Billy Name who told us
the ÒFactory GirlÓ film was looking for someone to play EdieÕs
grandmother. Sally perked up at the news; and Kevin then offered
to help set up a screen test for her. Kevin told me that she was
just perfect in the test; and believed she actually somehow
ÔchanneledÕ the grandmother adding, ÒIt was eerie!Ó When Sally
made the recent call to me she was speaking from the set of the
movie in Louisiana. On the phone Sally reminisced about the
Warhol days and was feeling weird at the idea of being EdieÕs
grandmother. ÒItÕs ironic that both Edie and myself came out of
a kind of mainline Ð yet dysfunctional Ð society and that both of
us wound up in mental hospitals.Ó

SallyÕs mother Ð Sally Kirkland, Sr. Ð was the fashion editor at
Life Magazine who first put a Milton Green photo of Edie into
Life; and this along with Andy WarholÕs help put Edie over in the
media as the ÔnewÕ girl of the moment following fast in the
footsteps of Baby Jane Holzer. Sally also recalled in our
telephone conversation that I was witness to her many
manic-depression suicide attempts when she was living on
Christopher Street. I recalled her rehearsing scenes for the
Actors Studio upstairs and the occasions when scene partners like
Rip Torn or Keir Dullea would ÔaccidentallyÕ wander into my
apartment. In those days no one ever locked their door Ð at
least not in Greenwich Village. Once I heard Sally scream out
ÒBob..help..helpÉIÕm not acting!Ó When I ran upstairs I found
Sally hysterical and bleeding. One finger was almost blown off
by a tear gas gun sent to her in the mail by her ÔfriendlyÕ aunt
who was worried about crime in the VillageÉwhen she had opened
the package it exploded in her hand. We rushed to St. VincentÕs
Hospital where doctors worked to re-attach the finger. Sally
recalls this episode as a near death experience and tells me I
saved her life that day. In the mid to late sixties as kind of a
brother-sister duo Sally and I started to hang out at WarholÕs
silver factory along with regulars like Billy Name, Edie, Baby
Jane, Ingrid Superstar, Gerara Malanga, Pope Ondine, and others.
Bob Dylan showed up from time to time to check out things with
Edie. Andy filmed my play ÒThe BedÓ which was his first
split-screen movie and I also acted opposite Jack Smith in
WarholÕs ÒDracula /BatmanÓ and ÒCamp.Ó A young and vibrant Sally
Kirkland was cast in AndyÕs ÒScreen Test Ð 13 Most Beautiful
Women.Ó At this time which was around 1965 I remembered Sally
and Gerard Malanga emerging out of a seven-foot high cake in
celebration of AndyÕs birthday to everyoneÕs surprise. Enid Nemy
at the New York Times called it a great happening.

Andy had asked me to write a screenplay for Edie which became the
film ÒLupeÓ in which Edie as Lupe Velez commits suicide. At the
time I was riding around all over town in a limousine that made
pit-stops at various bars like The Ginger Man where Edie would
gulp down Bloody Marys. She never seemed to pay for anything;
always signing her name to the check. No one ever questioned
EdieÕs methods as they were always seemingly dumbstruck and in
awe of her great little girl charm and beauty. I later learned
that the limousine Edie was using belonged to Bob Dylan. Dylan
and his manager Albert Grossman it seems were conspiring to take
Edie away from Andy and somehow turn her into a bonafide movie
star.

Some say Dylan wrote ÒJust Like A WomanÓ after Edie Sedgwick and
that the Stones Ò19th Nervous BreakdownÓ was all about Edie.
Sally tells me that ÔBobbyÕ may have slept with Edie; but she
would not call it an affair, adding ÒWhen I joined him and Sam
Shepard in the country-wide tour of ÔThe Rolling Thunder RevueÕ
I fell in love with Bob and IÕve loved him all my life.Ó

Kevin Kushel who has seen rushes of Sally Kirkland as Grandma
Sedgwick in ÒFactory GirlÓ thinks Sally could be nominated for a
best supporting actress nomination in 2007 for her performance.
When I mention this to Sally who was nominated for a best-actress
Oscar for ÒAnnaÓ in 1987 she sighs, ÒOh, that would be great!Ó
Meanwhile viewers will be able to catch the Reverend Sally in the
movie ÒAdam and SteveÓ to be released on a national basis soon.
Oh, yes Ð in the end she presides over the wedding of the guys in
this very funny gay film.

For further reading on this subject see chapter entitled ÔThe Way
We Were Ð Albee, Warhol, Edie, Dylan, and Cino in the VillageÕin
the book ÒGreenwich Village Ð A Primo Guide to True BohemiaÓ by
myself and John Gilman, published by St. MartinÕs Press, New
York."

-- Robert Heide

 

[outdoorminer]

Yikes! Just saw Factory Girl. HORRIBLE!! If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask...

there were tons of holes in the plot, the costumes and makeup looked cheap, but what really bothered me was Sienna's lack of a neck...her voice continually changes from Briitish to something like Edie's...awful