letter21.doc

Andy Warhol was often blamed for Edie Sedgwick’s descent into drug addiction and mental illness. However, before meeting Warhol, Edie had been in mental hospitals twice and came from a family with a history of mental illness. She was only close to Warhol for about a year, from approximately March 1965 to February 1966.

Another fallacy was that Warhol ditched Edie after using her up whereas the truth was that it was Edie’s decision to leave the Factory, lured by promises of stardom by Bob Dylan and his manager, leaving Andy feeling slightly betrayed.

When Andy went to the opening of his exhibit at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris on April 30, 1965, he took both Edie and Chuck with him (as well as Gerard Malanga). Upon returning to New York, Andy told his scriptwriter, Ron Tavel, that he wanted to make Edie the queen of the factory and asked him to write a script for her: “Something in a kitchen. White and clean and plastic.” The result was Kitchen, with Edie, Rene Ricard and Roger Trudeau. It was shot at soundman Buddy Wirtschafter’s studio apartment. (L&D223/5)

After Kitchen, Chuck Wein replaced Tavel, being credited as writer and assistant director for the filming of Beauty No. 2 which she starred in with “Gino [Piserchio], a hunk in jockey shorts”. Beauty No. 2 premiered at the Cinematheque on July 17th and her onscreen appearance was compared to Marilyn Monroe’s. As a result of her popularity, she was getting a lot of advice from people to leave Andy and become a proper star. One of the people advising Edie was Bobby Neuwirth who has been described as “Bob Dylan’s right-hand man.”

After leaving Andy’s crowd, Edie, still in a relationship with Bob Neuwirth, tried modeling, appearing in Vogue on March 15, 1966. During her Factory days, she had appeared in Vogue in August 1965 as a “youthquaker” and also in a fashion layout for Life magazine in the September 1965 issue.

She never became part of “the family at Vogue” because, according to senior editor Gloria Schiff: “she was identified in the gossip columns with the drug scene, and back then there was a certain apprehension about being involved in that scene… people were really terrified by it… drugs had done so much damage to young, creative, brilliant people that we were just anti that scene as a policy”. (EDIE302).

Edie also auditioned for Norman Mailer’s play The Deer Park, but Mailer thought she “wasn’t very good… She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances”.

Edie married Michael Post on July 24, 1971. She stopped drinking and taking pills until October when pain medication was given to her to treat a physical illness. She remained under the care of Dr. Mercer who prescribed her barbiturates but she would often demand more pills or say she had lost them in order to get more, often combining them with alcohol.

On the night of November 15, 1971, Edie went to fashion show at Santa Barbara Museum, a segment of which was filmed for the television show An American Family, Lance Loud had already met Edie before on a beach in Isla Vista and she spoke to him in the lobby “drawn” by the cameras.

After the fashion show Edie attended a party and was verbally attacked by one of the guests who called her a heroin addict. The guest was so loud that she was asked to leave. Edie rang Michael who arrived at the party and could see that Edie had been drinking.

Eventually, they left the party, went back to their apartment where Michael gave Edie the medication that had been prescribed for her and they both fell asleep. When Michael woke up the following morning at 7:30, Edie was dead. The coroner registered her death as Accident/Suicide due to a Barbiturate overdose.

Saucie (Edie’s sister):

“Edie was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, up over the San Marcos Pass. It used to be a dingy village so small that if you went through it at fifty miles per hour you’d miss it. It’s in the Valley, but it’s nothing. A few live-oak trees. No one would ever go there except to see the veterinarian.”

  http://www.warholstars.org/stars/edie.html

I love them

gonna see them

in march at the Roxy theater

man the played all of my favorite songs like X and Y, birds of prey

available, and bricks, mortar

radical posture and war tapes played too

and they were cool too

man so hyphy when the show started

My friends Tandra, kikto, and jassy went with me

and we all got crunk to the techno beats

ahhhhhhhhhh

next show crystal castles

can’t wait

man I’m so happy tomorrow is gonna be so chill

I’ma push my way to the front row

and get hella crunk

I still haven’t bought my ticket for moving units

man i hope they aren’t sold out

but if it is I’ll just buy a ticket for emery

there pretty good too

but I’m still hoping they aren’t sold out

cause im gonna miss out on a great show

MOVING UNITS

JAN 26

AT THE GLASS HOUSE

!!!!!!!!!!!!GONNA GET HYPHY!!!!!!!!!!!!