Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  But with the Fitzgeralds moving around so much, many people were only able to catch a glimpse of the grace notes, flying by as quickly and effervescently as a comet, leaving an impression of glamour and godspell. While many peripatetic souls travel a great deal because they are blessed with a feeling that the whole world is their home, Scott and Zelda were more likely motivated by a sense that nowhere in the world was their home—there is no restful haven for an unquiet mind. In any event, mental institutions in locations as various as Geneva, Switzerland, and Asheville, North Carolina, were the few places that Zelda was ever settled in for long stretches of time—in one case, for over four years. She died alone in a fire in a psychiatric hospital, charred by smoke and bloated from insulin treatments. Not terribly glamorous.

  But if Zelda deserves to be remembered as much more than the premier beauty of between-the-wars Bedlam, Edie Sedgwick really and truly owes all her fame to having body and bones orchestrated in such a way that she made depression look fascinating, she made mania look fascinating, she made drug addiction look fascinating, she made nodding off look fascinating, she made wired look fascinating, she made speed freakouts look fascinating, she made bad trips look fascinating, she made burning down your hotel room while too sedated to care and almost dying of smoke inhalation look fascinating: Edie is such a convincing representation of the benefits of life gone wrong that were she still around today she would probably have to be a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. The scion of an old and large New England clan, Edie was a Warhol superstar celebrated in the August 1965 issue of Vogue as a “youthquaker,” a shining, shocking symbol of the dark, complicatedly arty counterpart to the hippy-dippy sixties scene that would be associated with San Francisco and Woodstock and college kids with shaggy hair and backpacks who had not yet arrived at the sophisticated, studied indifference that Edie and her lot were pioneering. Still, the only thing of consequence that Edie ever did with her life—and even in this case, not deliberately—was to end it early, at age twenty-eight, in 1971, by way of a barbiturate overdose.

  But Edie was exquisitely beautiful, all big baby browns with indelibly dilated pupils that made her eyes look like black spots Dalmatianed against eggshell-pale skin—a contrast so absolute that it evoked both the astonished openness and sweet opaqueness of a deer caught in headlights. It is this ineluctable projection of innocence that makes all of Edie’s bad habits look so good: the delicacy is never hardened, but the cool visual effect of self-destruction still shows against Edie’s pristine, pure backdrop, as fine and gentle as organza. You want to save her; you want to join her; either way, it’s all about her. “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die,” Harold Brodkey wrote of the leading lady in his short story “Innocence,” a line reminiscent of references to a face that launched a thousand ships and other evocations of a potency beyond ideology—of falling for someone so hard that the whole world, or, at least, left-wing political doctrine, seems to topple down with you. Edie, addled and addicted, seems to have had this effect on people, functioning as an often inanimate objet d’art even when she was still alive, and seeming to only further potentiate her power as a muse postmortem. Edie was said to be the subject of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”—“with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”—and the platinum streaks in her hair against the pallor of her complexion were thought to be the images evoked by the album title Blonde on Blonde. There is no such ambiguity in the Edie Brickell song called “Little Miss S.”—“Living the scene out of her limousine / Little Miss S. in a mini dress”—inspired by a shared first name that otherwise seemed to be attached to absolutely no one under fifty. Ms. Sedgwick was also the subject of an eponymously titled elegiac poem by proto-punk Patti Smith, beginning infectiously with the plaint “she was white on white / so blonde on blonde.” She is also the centrifugal force that unifies disparate factions and themes and scenes and settings of a best-selling oral history jigsawed together by Jean Stein and George Plimpton under the heading, at once simple and grandiose, Edie: An American Biography.

  The book is an awesome accomplishment—reminiscences cobbled together with such precision that it smooths into sensibility the serrated edges and irreconcilable absurdities of Edie’s life, of old money and boarding schools and Groton and Harvard leading into Warhol’s Factory and the Velvet Underground and Viva and Billy Name and silicone breast implants. When it was published in 1982, Edie became a best-seller in spite of its putative subject’s lack of a legacy of any apparent import, and it started a craze for oral histories—even fiction modeled on that form (Boy Wonder in 1988 and Boone in 1990)—none of which equaled Edie. Between the book and an art-house re-release of the feature-length Edie extravaganza Ciao! Manhattan in 1983—a film as busy, jumbled, noisy and ridiculous as its star—the long-dead Edie Sedgwick became a role model of sorts for teenage girls of a self-destructive bent. Clumpy, chunky platinum streaks in dark hair and a refusal to wear any form of hosiery other than black tights to re-create Edie’s signature anorexia aesthetic were the essential elements, but more ambitious acolytes could accentuate the basics with acid-green matte jersey, the curtain-ring earrings, the white mink coat, leotards, hiphuggers, Kenneth Jay Lane jewelry, anything by Rudi Gernreich, anything by Pucci.

  I think Edie’s appeal as a fashion icon and as a depression idol—over a decade after her death—may be because of, not in spite of, her seeming worthlessness, and the frivolity of her existence that meant her only meaningful pursuit was that of losing her own mind. Edie so thoroughly and singularly stood for going crazy—and yet this negative, often irritating and certainly destructive trait was enough to make her life memorable to others, enough to work up a fuss about the very nothingness that defined her. As a result, Edie is an ideal role model of what to do with yourself if depression is all you are, all you’ve got, all of everything. Even people who are not clinically depressed spend a good deal of time feeling bad—and at a certain point one thinks, If I have to feel bad, I might as well be stylish and glamorous while I’m at it. Edie did it. Most misery is just plain miserable, and no amount of purple mascara and gold lamé and dark sunglasses can change that. But Edie managed to make it something more, a fashion statement, a desirable mien. She is a beacon of hope to the hopelessly unhappy in her hypnotic intoxication.

  Edie, who was never gainfully employed in her entire brief life, is further significant because she set the tone for the vocational crazy woman, for the person who unravels not so much as performance art, but as a life endeavor. It is true that depression, if it is chronic and systemic, can be more a personality type than a limited-run disease. But for many public figures, mental health has become the whole story. Patty Duke is better known as a manic-depressive than as an actress (even though she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker). And with Superman replaced by Batman as the movie superhero of choice (I’ll refrain from making a joke about Christopher Reeve), Margot Kidder is definitely better known for being a nut than anything else she’s ever done. Marianne Faithfull, despite a cult following for her throaty, drug-damaged voice, is best known for the drugs and the damage and for being perhaps the most famous subscriber to England’s heroin-maintenance program before cleaning up at Hazelden. And does anyone really know what Dorothy Parker did for a living? While every memorable quip and biting insult in the American idiom seems to be attributed to her—and there is some vague sense of theater reviews and screenplays—like everyone else involved in the Algonquin Round Table scene, Mrs. Parker is most likely to go down in history as a colossal, suicidal drunk. On the other end of the spectrum, Nico would seem to illustrate that the less said the better; the silence of the lamb is always heard as deep and meaningful, rarely presumed a symptom of stupidity, vapidity or shrugged shoulders of the mind. The inscrutable Nico never really did much of anything—though spooked with a voice as comatose and indifferent as she herself seemed to be, and this kind of fashionable, club-scene approach to her dirgelike songs that made her seem like the hipster Warhol world
’s answer to the German cabaret’s smoky singers. Despite her distraught elegance, in the end Nilo was just Elke Sommer as junkie, or Joey Heatherton with dirty hair, a blonde lounge singer that the Rat Pack had somehow neglected to notice. And yet, it was still possible in 1995 to devote a two-hour documentary called Nico Icon to her deceased Zeitgeist, to a life whose prevalent activity was doing heroin. But the blank resume is the very thing that, as Hilton Als noted in The New Yorker, “allowed film directors and, in the end, rock audiences to project their dreams across her face, which she kept more often than not immobile as a screen, unmoved by their projections.”

  But there are others whose talent is recognized and renowned—whose work has not lost its luster as history marches on, whose legacy has actually appreciated in value over time—but who still seem defined by death, whose choice to die has become more memorable than the way they lived. It goes without saying that most people have not read a single poem of either Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, but many are aware of them as martyrs to suicide. And were it not for the fact that every child in America (on earth, for all I know) sees The Wizard of Oz, often with repetitious delight, most people who are even a few years younger than I am will know of Judy Garland only because of her bouts with the blues and pills, because of her drag-queen symbolism as an oppressed spirit. Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin will be nothing but junkies tossed in a heap of show-business roadkill not too far off in the future; Columbia and Decca will reissue old albums and assemble boxed sets, and still very few people will know what either of them sound like. People will know nothing about these two great singers except that they reached early and self-destructive ends. Many will never hear Billie Holiday sing “Good Morning Heartache” or “Strangefruit,” they will never know that soul music is nothing new, and many may even avoid the huge hungry voice of Janis Joplin, will hear cover bands do “Piece of My Heart” and think that’s how it’s supposed to sound. But as sacrificial songbirds, they may have a legend of quantum longevity. I don’t mind that Patty Duke or Margot Kidder has come to this, but women of real talent who are only identified by their pathologies are kind of like trees that are only good for timber, as if their gracious green leaves that provided shade and shelter and aroma, as if all the fruits and flower blossoms they bore in life don’t matter nearly as much as the way they will be pulped.

  In a way, none of these women has to do anything more than be remembered as crazy to maintain a fame that may even be eternal: certainly, Sylvia Plath is much more famous now than she was at the time of her death. But the allure of the madwoman seems to work both ways, with insanity giving the appearance of intrigue or intelligence to someone like Edie Sedgwick, but with it likewise detracting from the talent of many other well-known nutcases because it becomes all that matters. Evidently, as a personality trait, madness is a thick air—were it an odor, it would be strong as skunk, undiminished by any deodorizing forces. I think this goes far in explaining why many of these women ended their lives in suicide: they were consumed by a personality disorder of mammoth strength, from which, eventually, not even the brilliantly intense opiates could shelter them unless they took in so much that it ended up killing them along with the ache—the usual baby and bathwater scenario. But it is also because of the large nature of the mental illness that the people close to them were as likely to feel resentful, exhausted, used, abused and angry by the end—and too far away and alienated to come running to the rescue that one last time. “I wished for my mother to die,” Linda Gray Sexton writes in her memoir Searching for Mercy Street. “As much as I dreaded her suicide, I also craved it. I longed for freedom from the tyranny of her many neuroses that seemed, in the last year, to have overtaken her personality.”

  These days, so many images in fashion and culture thought to be beautiful and—yes—marketable are actually quite depressing, or even suggestive of mental illness, with expressions of distress and despair so reflexive in the current aesthetic that they have assumed the reverse fixity of the Cheshire cat’s unfading smile. The “college girl” romanticization of suicide and despair has been put to mod and manipulative purpose by clever art directors and commercial photographers, many of whom no longer seem worried at all that their ad campaigns may come across as negative, may make their perfume or blue jeans or bustier seem like a sullen, luckless albatross of a product that will bring a pox upon the purchaser’s home. In fact, it often seems that anything that doesn’t come across as morose will also fail to be seen as desirable and beautiful, as worth the price of a designer label or fit to be called haute couture: hence, a frail Amber Valletta lounging in a damp, dank rowboat with smudgy, kohled eyes illuminated only by a gray, sickly light is in an ad that is meant to make us want to wear Prada; for the same Fall ’97 season, a whited-out Stella Tennant, with hair sticking every which way—in what appears to be an attempt to do to her head what Richard Dreyfus found himself compulsively doing to mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—looks thoroughly mad in an ad that is supposed to make us want to buy Giorgio Armani. In the May 1997 Allure, Niki Taylor, the fresh-faced Floridian whose healthy glow has been a persistent counternarrative to glum glamour, is posed in a layer of spray-can sweat, smeary blue eye shadow, her stringy hair combined with ripped-bodice slips to achieve a tacky streetwalker stance. In the same Allure issue, a black-and-white photograph of Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino puts her at the center of a chaotic tableau, with the actress kicking and screaming, carried off by police officers, a nurse in attendance, with a caption—amid mentions of a suit by Todd Oldham, shoes by Sonia Rykiel—offering the offhand language of fashion copy: “Going mental: An ode to actress Frances Farmer, who was committed to an insane asylum in 1944 and later lobotomized.” On the next page, in full color, Sorvino is in a gold lamé gown—by Jacques Fath, we are told—a bandage on her forehead, a nurse carrying both a hatbox and a jar filled with would-be formaldehyde and Farmer’s frontal lobe, an image that is meant to be beautiful.

  But even before the instrumental break in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was played over highlights of the bobsled and luge races during the ’92 Winter Olympics—thus confirming my suspicion that no one even knew how to identify what was depressing (Nirvana) and what wasn’t (snow sports) any longer—the salable nature of that which is both beautiful and upsetting was understood. For years now, music videos and television spots and print ads and all manner of popular culture have routinely appropriated erotically unnerving and seductively sick images from sixties cinema like Belle de Jour and Persona and La Dolce Vita—film stills so commonplace that they have lost their context, pictures so pretty and fashionable when removed from the unpleasantness of plot that Anita Ekberg’s busty blondeness or Liv Ullmann’s remarkable gaze or Catherine Deneuve’s sunglasses are all that there is. These images are all bright colors and dull despair, used by creative executives who don’t even necessarily know who Buñuel and Bergman and Fellini are or what the French New Wave was all about or what continent Sweden is on or what makes certain situations Felliniesque—or what made the characters the films depicted so arresting to begin with.

  Alongside these visually compelling movie reels, many stock photographic images have themselves formed the template that art directors draw on when they want to depict despair, insanity, madness and the like: the “shock therapy” effect of Man Ray’s Surrealist solarization technique; the Depression era poverty and dignity in the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans; the grotesques, freaks and lost souls depicted by Diane Arbus; Bob Richardson’s mid-sixties photographs of models in desperate straits, of Nena von Schlebrugge (Uma Thurman’s mother) lying on a couch crying to her psychiatrist on the phone, or of Donna Mitchell in various states of sexual rapture, always looking, as Richardson puts it, “drugged and beaten”; the glamorous violence of Chris Von Wangenheim’s 1977 campaign for Christian Dior jewelry, in which the diamond-bedizened Lisa Taylor sits impassive, nonplussed, unfazed—and, to all appearances, sedated into submission—while a red
-eyed Doberman pinscher clamps its bare teeth on her braceleted wrist; the sadomasochism made beautiful by Robert Mapplethorpe, and the many very beautiful women made stark and sometimes ugly by Richard Avedon; Nan Goldin’s 1986 photoessay The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of Polaroid-blurry snapshots of strung-out people in seedy settings, some trapped and violated by love, others putridly at the mercy of their addictions; the chilly sexual cruelty of Helmut Newton, well into his seventies and still the reigning risqué fashion photographer, a native of Germany whose work has always given me the feeling that his parents read to him from Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs instead of Emil and the Detectives or some other Berlin bedtime classic—so primal is Newton’s decadence that it seems almost pre-Oedipal. (For instance: Now that whips and chains and handcuffs have been done to death, Newton has decided that disability—paralysis, limping, deformity—is his new frontier, or at least that’s the only conclusion I can draw from the layout he did of his compatriot Nadja Auermann in crutches, splints, braces, wheelchairs, as well as other corrective bodily gear, as part of a fashion spread for The New Yorker in 1996.)