EDIE ON THE EYES
She was here for a good time, not a long time, but Edie Sedgwick left her mark. By Sam Griffin
As soon as I saw the screen-print T-shirt in Old Navy with the monotone Edie-face staring out, I knew it was over. Since my college days when my first roommate (and first "cool" friend) took me under her wing, I had believed that Edie Sedgwick was the alterna-goddess. Understand, my roommate had an autographed Nick Cave book, a pierced nose, and black clothes, while I had only recently graduated from Belinda Carlisle to Madonna, and still wore neon tulle to parties. But there it was on the racks, a little sleeveless T-shirt available to anybody who wandered in off Broadway with $10.50 in their pocket. For general consumption. Not just general, but mass consumption. And it was Bedazzled!
That face. With whopping black eyes like saucers, two fingers worth of charcoal shadow across her eyelids, and her single-process crop, the doomed Warhol star looked like a pedigree Samoyed dog--after his pre-summer shearing--or a really thin panda bear. Or, if the animal similies seem out of place, food metaphors also work. Edie had dimples you could mix up a batch of brownies in and eyebrow as thick as anchovies. She wore false lashes so lush her eyelids drooped.
Chronologically, Edie fits in somewhere between the kittenish (Baby) Jane Holzer and the ethereal Viva in the Factory that was the Manhattan pop art scene of the '60s. The seventh daughter in an old New England clan that moved out to anta Barbara before she was born, Edie was here for a good time, not a long time. She died when she was twenty-eight.
As a beauty icon Edie was no Chaptick chick. Edie spent hours doing her face. Evidently, she was also a girl who could go out for twelve hours, drop by hundreds of parties and still have a face full of makeup--right down to the gold glitter dust that she meticulously applied. But then, bathroom visits for her had a whole different purpose. (All this I learned from the Edie bible, Edie: An American Biography by Jean Stein, handed down to me by aforementioned cool roommate.) For all the research and development that went into creating new long-lasting lipsticks, sweat-proof mascaras and won't-rub-off foundations, Edie had already discovered the secret back in the mid-sixties. (If I apply two coats of macara, it's on my cheekbones before they clear my salad plate.)
Edie had an unfortunate habit of falling asleep while smoking in bed. She was offended if people tried to take the cigarette from her before she dropped off, and since no one was willing to risk upsetting New York's ordained It Girl, she frequently awoke à la flambée. After one of these barbecue incidents at The Chelsea Hotel, she was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, where her uncle visited her. He asked what he could bring her. She had only one request: "Bring me my makeup." Apparently the shopping list was as long as his arm. He was able to fill her list from the hopital drugstore, but then they didn't have the cult makeup artist brands for which we now go to the ends of the earth.
Throughout the it-might-as-well-be-a-documentary Ciao! Manhattan (about $20 on eBay), two different Edies are intercut and they couldn't look more dissimilar. The let's-just-call-it-a-snuff-movie, which finished shooting just a few months before she died, shows a long dark-haired, Ali McGraw-esque Californian hippie chick, ruminating on a modeling career in New York when she had a close-clipped silver haircut. But it's not the different colored coifs that are most patent. Somewhere between filming the New York scene in 1968 and the California one in 1971, Edie figured that a flat chest was what stood between her and Hollywood. To witness the semi-comatose ex-supertar lolling around in a bedroom built at the bottom of a drained-dry swimming pool you get some idea of just how far plastic surgery has come since the late '60s.
For the most part Edie's image lives on in high-contrast, grainy photographs. Any narcissist will tell you that both of these characteristics eliminate virtually any skin flaws. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor who ordained Edie a "Youthquaker" in the pages of a 1965 Vogue, said, "She had lovely skin, but then I've never seen anyone on drugs that didn't." Well, DV was never lauded for her grasp of reality, and obviously didn't cocktail much in the Lower East Side, but I have to take her word as beauty gospel. I doubt, however, that the white-coated fellow at the Pond's Institute will devote many petri dishes to DV's hypothesis.
I love Edie's leggings and huge shirt look...with big earrings... 
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