Edie Sedgwick was born in 1943. She met Andy Warhol in 1965 and became one of the Factory regulars around March of that year. Warhol has often been blamed for Edie’s descent into drug addiction and mental illness but her family has a history of both.
She was first institutionalized in the autumn of 1962 suffering from anorexia and, like her brother, attended the Silver Hill mental hospital. Her condition deteriorated until she weighed only ninety pounds, at which time she was transferred to Bloomingdale, the Westchester Division of New York Hospital.
Silver Hill was fairly liberal but Bloomingdale was very strict. Paradoxically, near the end of her stay there she became pregnant and had to have an abortion.
Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde was released on May 16, 1966 and Edie is one of the women imaged on the inner sleeve. Some of the songs are rumoured to be about her. Nico thought that Dylan might have been referring to her in Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. Others have claimed that the phrase “your debutante” on Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again refers to Edie. It’s also rumoured that just Like a Woman is about her.
Edie Sedgwick’s husband, Michael Post, woke up on the morning of November 16, 1971 to find her lying dead in bed next to him. The coronor classified her death as an “accident/suicide” caused by “acute barbituate intoxication.”
This video 0f “After Hours” is a weird-sexy-sad classic. The vocal is by Moe Tucker, drummer with the Velvets.
Thank you for your great video- wanted to share this with you from the Edie Nation Website, because I think it relates.
WE WANT TO MAKE YOU A SUPERSTAR
(visit http://www.myspace.com/ediegirlonfire for more information about the screen test project)
Edie was a filmmaker, a collaborator and artist with other underground and experimental filmmakers at a time when making a non-Hollywood film was almost a revolutionary act. Like you she was young at a time when a wave of technological advancements– new video camera, audio recorders and film cameras– were putting power in the hands of the people to tell their own stories. This is a pursuit she believed in fiercely. She said often to fellow adventurers in her filmmaking pursuits, “It must be real, if it isn’t real, there is no movie.” On the eve of the release of a HIGHLY fictionalized Hollywood account of Edie’s life, we hope you will join us in our Internet and video experiment of making real screen tests of real people. WE know you can tell the difference, as she would have wanted, between what is real and what is not.
-Melissa Painter
“I do love Alice in Wonderland though. That’s something I think I could do very well. Don’t you think we ought to do an A.W.? A.W.’s Alice in Wonderland? Andy Warhol’s Alice in Wonderland? A.W. stands for a lot of things, I understand. It, uh, it would make a fantastic film. So I wanted somebody to write the script for it, in a modern sense. Think it would be the most marvelous movie in the world. If it could be done. Don’t you think? Really I don’t think they’ve done one since they did a Walt Disney one- which isn’t really doing it. In a sense it is, but not in the way it really should be done. What’s needed right now is a real scene. I mean not just cartoon characters but the actual character of people because there’s so many fantastic people that you might as well use the people.”
– Edie 1965
To be an underground filmmaker… one felt that you were engaged in forbidden activity, which of course lead us to Andy and 47th St and the factory because Andy was hosting this whole feeling of rebellion in image where we could all participate in doing things that were ridiculous and absurd… and so to get a bunch of people who all feel that the sky’s the limit to start being able to do crazy ridiculous image with Andy…
[John, what did it feel like to be in a movie that Warhol directed?] Well, it felt like you were talking your pants of. It was embarrassing. You wondered what were you doing? Why are you doing this? And yet at the same time you knew… You didn’t know then, but to think about it now, I mean imagine you are there and there’s a hundred million dollars worth of art lying around on the floor, and these people fooling around with cameras. Andy, and I’m there with him doing the same thing, and there’s Edie, and we’re all there doing this. And so on the one hand there’s the rebellion, because you know you’re not supposed to, and on the other hand you know that its really really important, and yet its just going to disappear. So that was a peculiar feeling.
-John Palmer
Those last three comments by silverhairspray are technically spam but I’ve decided not to delete them.
They promote a book and a movie or stage presentation related to Edie Sedgwick.
Ciao, honey.
Bush goes ballistic about other countries being evil and dangerous, because they have weapons of mass destruction. But, he insists on building up even a more deadly supply of nuclear arms right here in the US. What do you think? Is killing thousands of innocent civilians okay when you are doing a little government makeover?
What happened to us, people? When did we become such lemmings?
The more people that the government puts in jails, the safer we are told to think we are. The real terrorists are wherever they are, but they aren’t living in a country with bars on the windows. We are.
It was 1986, my sophmore year at University, and my girlfreind, three girls of mutual aquintance, Rik the Punk, a large bag of Livermore Hills’ psilocybe cianessiens and myself had turned a conservative New Years’ drinking in San Francisco into a witching hour meltdown in a claustrophobitropic hotel room on the morgue-slab end of Berkely.
The girls were old high school freinds. Field hockey players. So the obvious positive festivities were kicked to the curb with gleeful cleats in favor of a Sam Kinneson HBO special.
As the laughter gave way to a death-trance paralysis my girlfreind turned her internalization of the Edie Sedgewick biography she had finished reading (again) the day before into a trainwrecking spiral of hysterics that made me glad i was dead, pawing for a dimension that was less squished than the one i had slipped into but still alien enough to disallow the sensoria of sounds from this world.
Never have six people been so quietly and indelibly disturbed as their mutual relief at coming down imparted the Truth of the Trip: Hell really is other people, your freinds don’t know you nor you them, and that mutual genius we humans love to tout fails dismally and abruptly just shy of the grave or the Abyss.
Said girlfriend succeeded in drinking herself to death before the age of 30.
I’ve always hated Warhol.