Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  “Poor sweet,” I say. I want to pat her hair, but it is all sticky because of the silver dye.

  “I like that song,” she says, and turns up “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer,” with its lyrics by Charles Tobias.

  “You’re not eating,” I say, pointing to the caviar and blinis.

  “No, I started being anorexic in school. I ate less than my rat, Hunca Munca. I used to pig out—eating and stuffing. I filled up, crammed up, then threw up.”

  I tell her, “I went on a hunger strike at a French boarding school, hoping they would send me home. I tried to vomit, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Oh, it’s the easiest,” she says, picking up a scarlet ibis-feather earring and tickling her uvula with it. Hoagy Carmichael’s music covers the spewing and puking. Then her two dimples smile her satisfaction.

  “You didn’t answer me. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “After my father had me locked up, I got pregnant and had an abortion. It was easy. So my first romance was a real bummer. It really screwed up my head.”

  Poor child, I think. How could such an infant give birth to a baby?

  She changes her tights from pink to black. Her eloquent, athletic legs are absolute beauty. I tell her so. “I fly with my legs. Like I pick up the wings of a bird and play on a flute. I converse with animals, just like my brother.”

  She mounts her bed, draws in charcoal additional hairs on the forelock of the pedigreed stallion on her wall. She keeps singing, “Blowing in the wind, blowing in the wind,” as she strokes flying hair to his mane. “I love Bob Dylan. I also love nitroglycerin queens and aging pederasts—they’re no threat to my body.”

  In 1965 she becomes the girl of the year. She is featured in Life, Time, Esquire, Vogue. Her style—her black dancer’s tights, right out of Hamlet, her five-and-ten T-shirts, and her white mink coat—becomes her trademark. She sets the trend for that year.

  Edie and Andy, the androgynous media couple, become the toast of the town. They look alike, dress alike; both wear banana-shaped high-heel boots. At parties and openings, people ask, “Which one is Andy? Which one is Edie?” Of course we maliciously point to coltish Edie for Andy, while Andy whispers to Edie, “Will you answer for me?” Edie writes “Andy Warhol” in their fans’ autograph books.

  Edie is Andy’s counterpart, more boyish than he—his gestures girlish, her motion muscular. Edie is all Andy ever wanted to be. Now that Marilyn is dead, here is Edie.

  In March 1965, in a clipped coif, Edie debuts in Vinyl with an otherwise all-male cast, including Gerard and John McDermott and headed by amphetamine queen Ondine. It is a seventy-minute sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film, its general concept provided by playwright Ronald Tavel.

  Edie’s huge, fusain black eyes remain Popped as she watches Gerard do his juvenile-delinquent torture number on a runaway kid, Ramsey Hellman. Under the supervision of a real sadomasochist expert, Malanga uses the razor blade, candles, chains, and nails. Edie, in a black leotard, propped up on a silver-sprayed trunk, flicks the incandescent burning ashes of a cigarette on the tortured boy lying at her feet.

  Like Marilyn Monroe in The Asphalt Jungle, she steals the show with her five-minute sit-on.

  “How was your first filming?” I ask.

  She says, “Near the end, the entire room was stoned. Amyl nitrites and everything else. It ended up with everyone doing it with everyone right on the couch, in the bathroom, the hallway, the roof. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I walked over to Andy, but he was mechanically chewing on his hamburger.”

  “Did Andy give you any direction?”

  “He just said, ‘Work for no meaning.’”

  She becomes the Super-Superstar, dethroning Princess Baby Jane. She is so celestial, we feel no jealousy.

  Effervescent Edie stars in Poor Little Rich Girl, Bitch, Kitchen, Prison, Face, Afternoon, Beauty, Space, Outer and Inner Space, Lupe, and Vacuum.

  The enchantress becomes a piece of Pop Art. At shows, everyone looks at her, not the art. Art incarnated, she is so very beautiful to look at. “So effectively created, she exposes all the dishonesty in the room,” says Robert Rauschenberg.

  Rock singer Patti Smith says, “I am not into girls, but I have a real crush on her.”

  Fashion magazines pick up on the female Superstar. Edie makes things Pop for Andy. She opens doors for him. Patronesses of the arts Ethel Scull, Dominique de Menil, Lita Hornick adore her—and him. Now Andy covers the new ground of fashion, in addition to films and art. She lifts Andy up to new heights of social and fashionable strata.

  Straight line, anthracite eyebrows, silvery moist lips, white hair, Edie dances the Sedgwick—that’s what we call it—wearing a million bangle bracelets, perched on the highest of heels with her God-created perfect legs arabesquing in her rock-and-roll ballet with fluid grace. Out every night, Edie picks up the tab for her entourage of thirty leeches, including Andy, Edie’s friend Sandy Marsh, and myself.

  René Ricard, stylist, art connoisseur, underground actor, is on the scene the night Mick Jagger, most famous rock singer, meets Edie, most famous girl in New York. “Everyone watching, boy or girl, wanted to fuck both of them,” he says. An explosion of flashbulbs momentarily blinds the mob of kids screaming at The Scene. Police use their sticks to keep the crowds back. People outside chant, “Mick! Edie! Mick! Edie! Mick! Edie!”

  Edie is at her height, too high to last. Born innocent, not knowing right from wrong, Edie tightropes on the edge of the vortex that whirls her into the underground sewer, the darker depths of the underworld. As vertical as is her rise, so vertiginous is her fall.

  Edie is troubled by the stories told and retold around the Factory about Freddy Herko, star of The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, a flamboyant actor and a gifted dancer. On October 27, 1964, lean, naked, a Mozart freak, with the music of the Coronation Mass on full blast, he swirls with stunning velocity, advancing in great rushes toward an open fifth-floor window. In one extreme bound, in a grand jeté à la Nijinsky, he takes off with flying élan, free at last, a magnificent frigate bird, scissor-tailing across the sky above building roofs on his own momentum. In his ultimate leap, he lands on the asphalt, dead on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, a martyr of druggery.

  Andy’s reaction is, “What a shame we didn’t run out there with our camera to film it.” I see Edie’s terrified expression at that remark.

  Edie is troubled, too, by the movie Horse, which we see together. It was filmed in the Factory just before Vinyl. Andy rented a huge stallion for the day. The plot involved four guys who were to sexually assault the horse and make love to it; the theme centered on Western cowboy homosexuality, bestiality, brutality, animality. The boys, all stoned and boozed to the teeth, are coached by Tosh Carillo, who plays an S & M cowboy.

  With his obscenely prehensile toes, Tosh unzips the jeans of all the boys in sight. In full erection, they charge at the horse from all sides and from behind. The stallion becomes nervous. They give it amyl nitrite, passing the drug under the horse’s flaring nostrils for a quick fix. But the horse knows better and kicks Tosh full in the face. They’re all so excited with the stallion that Tosh keeps on charging the horse and gets kicked again.

  Edie screams in horror. As the excitement mounts, Tosh and the boys strip, while kissing and licking the stallion, then beat at each other, slam each other’s heads against the concrete floor of the Factory until some bleed, others howl in pain. We are told that at the shooting Andy keeps filming while Ronald Tavel screams, “Cut it out, cut it out.” But the beatings go on until Tavel separates the demented combatants.

  At the viewing, Edie cries, “How perverse. I’m thinking about the clay horse I left behind. How sweet animals are, sweeter than men.”

  As money runs out, fun runs out too. Edie goes through eighty thousand dollars in six months. Like nearly everyone else around, she uses drugs, especially with all her Cambridge friends, the Timothy Leary crowd. In her icebox she stores little brown vials of LSD to drop
on sugar cubes.

  By 1966 she is hooked. She is crushed when she is excluded from Andy’s next movie, My Hustler. For her, the music stops altogether. By 1967 she is falling apart. Her free will is eaten away by the chemical agents that take control of her. Ondine becomes her French maid. His primary task is to awaken her from her barbiturates. To get through to her, he has to ring the bell for a full hour, in his own amphetamine frenzy. For breakfast he serves her drug paraphernalia and a saucer filled with speed. Desperate for money, Edie steals English antiques and pieces of art from her grandmother’s elegant apartment and sells them to buy drugs.

  Edie calls me one day, screaming, “All my jewelry has disappeared, my diamond ring. They tell me it’s in my cold cream jar, but it’s not.” She calls an hour later: “My fur coats have disappeared too, and I can’t find my long white satin evening gown and my black ostrich cape.”

  Her designer clothes vanish, one after the other. She is stripped down to nothing. I call her to find out how she’s doing. She is out of control, her words are not connected. One day she alarms me when she tells me that during the night she passed out on the tiled floor of her bathroom and knocked her head on the toilet.

  “Can’t you go to your family?” I ask her. Surely there is someone who can take care of her.

  “No; they’re worse than the Warhol crowd.”

  The next time on the phone, she says, “I got white light all over, in my head.” I realize she is singing the words of “White Light/White Heat,” the song written by Lou Reed that goes on, “… ooh white heat watch that speed freak, gonna shoot it up ev’ry night of the week … ev’rybody want to kill their mother.”

  “Would you like me to call your mother?” I ask. There must be someone.

  “Oh, no; my family’s worse than Warhol,” she repeats. “My head is spinning. I have to shoot up every half hour. I cracked my skull when I fell.… I bleed through the nose, but a friend came over … gave me some coke to fix it. I felt low, so I popped more speed.… Then I start to hallucinate.… I scream.… I call Dave.”

  “Dave who?”

  “Don’t know. He plunged a big needle in my butt. No, my stomach; my butt is all bone. I went out for an hour. When I came back I felt worse. Dave gave me some acid.… It sent me insane.”

  “Edie, is that all you’re feeding on—speed?”

  “Haven’t had any food in four days except seventeen cups of coffee. I’m down to seventy pounds.”

  She goes into a coma and is taken to Manhattan State Hospital. I try to call her there but can’t reach her. I want to help her, but by this time I’ve been around enough drug people to know that even the most loving friend is powerless against the compulsion toward self-destruction. Edie is beyond lectures and appeals to stop. And if I try to take her drugs away, she will feel so threatened she will turn around and take a double dose.

  Dealing drugs, she gets busted, goes to jail briefly, and is put on probation for five years. I hear that in 1968 Edie Sedgwick and Valerie Solanas meet in the hospital on New York’s Ward Island, where Valerie is under examination to find out if she is rational enough to stand trial for shooting Andy Warhol, and Edie is struggling to recover the sanity she lost in the Warhol years. Do they discuss Andy? Do they compare grievances? I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know.

  A few years later, I see Edie in California. She has become a monster, with a wide skull and a limited range of emotions and thoughts. The mind-expanding drugs have enlarged her head. Her skeleton looks enlarged as well. She is a prisoner of the earth, and only death will deliver her.

  When she dies, in 1971, Andy is not at her deathbed to film her. Her death is only of passing interest to him now that she is cast out from stardom. At her funeral, her casket is covered with magnolias.

  On my next trip to California, I visit her grave in Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard. The heroine of “Blonde on Blonde,” a Bob Dylan song, rests at last under a slab of red granite, inscribed simply and almost anonymously:

  EDITH SEDGWICK POST

  WIFE OF MICHAEL BRETT POST

  1943–1971

  I know the fallen angel tiptoed all the way back to heaven.

  When the people at the Factory hear the news of Edie’s death, they say, “Oh, I thought she died two years ago.”

  I have an overwhelming feeling of waste for the little rich girl who did not inherit from her family even the most basic emotional securities. With her glorious smile like a Broadway curtain opening, self-lit with her spotlight, she became bait in the Warhol trap of fame, sex, and money, used as an irresistible decoy to lure live young boys, screaming headlines, and above all box office payoffs.

  I cannot shake off my sadness and sense of loss. I start to question Edie’s life and my own. Would she have been better off if she had stayed home with her family? Would I? This is a thought that has not occurred to me before. Maybe it’s time for me to put some distance between myself and the Factory.

  IN LOVE

  Suddenly and unexpectedly I am in love, madly, wonderfully in love, positively more in love than ever before in my life. My love is Edward Ruscha, an original talent, a promising West Coast painter. We first meet at a party in his house in 1970. He opens the door, I find him immensely seductive. I am attracted to him beyond reason. He has a wife and a child, a little boy called Frenchy. That does not deter me. I am too crazy about Edward to think rationally. I meet him in his studio. When he touches me, kisses me, I feel ecstasy. We make love divinely.

  I fly from New York to Los Angeles as often as I can to see Edward—King Edward I call him. I give him bags of gold English sovereigns with King Edward’s face. I give his son presents. From New York I make arrangements with a stable in California to rent the best stallion I can secure for one day, and on his birthday I have it delivered to his studio door in Los Angeles. He loves the horse. To thank me, he makes a painting using chocolate and violet petals instead of paint. He is famous for applying natural materials, such as mashed strawberries, black beans, carrots, to his canvases. He also likes to use words in his paintings. This one is titled Well Roughly, an expression I use all the time.

  For my birthday he does another painting for me. He uses his own blood to write on it the words “Oro Puro”—pure gold. I am stunned by the beauty of the painting and deeply moved by the gift of his life fluid. I lean it against the wall in my apartment and go into the bathroom. I hear my dog, Hello, make an unfamiliar sound. I come out to find her licking the letters of the painting. The blood! I move her away from the painting, but I do not have the heart to punish her.

  On Edward’s next visit, I show him the painting, with great embarrassment. He finds it much improved. “It’s gone from hard edge to expressionist,” he says.

  On one of my trips to California, Edward arrives carrying a huge box. “It’s a wedding ring,” he says. I unwrap the box. In it is a Black Beauty bowling ball. I insert three fingers, and an electric current charges through me. It is as if my fingers, my whole hand, then my arm and all my body become possessed by Edward’s love. I feel engaged to him. I wish I could marry him.

  I adore my Black Beauty bowling ball ring so much that I wear it almost all the time, or rather carry it, with three fingers of my right hand in the ball and my left hand bearing its weight. I am “wearing” the ball ring at a press party for rock star David Bowie on his first trip to the United States. He is astounded at my outsize “ring” and at my outrageous behavior when I give a press interview in a bathtub filled with milk.

  My love for Edward is intense, fierce. It dominates my entire life.

  I am so thrilled to be in love with an artist, for even though I’ve been a socialite and a superstar and have had recognition, money, lovers, it is art that has been the most rewarding element in my life. It gives me a sense of meaning and fulfillment, a reason for living. I have had unique relationships with artists, from Dali to Chamberlain, from Graham to Warhol. They have painted me. I have been their confidante as well as critic. I encou
raged unknown artists by acquiring their works, and at times we both benefited financially when I resold their paintings or sculptures.

  I vividly remember, while shopping with Andy in a thrift shop, discovering an inlaid wooden box fitted with cut-crystal carafes filled with liquors of various colors. It was so magical I bought it, knowing it belonged in the collection of Joseph Cornell, whose artistry lay in creating boxes that contained a universe of their own. Through Ray Johnson, another artist, I had the box delivered to Joseph’s house. Two weeks later, I received a poem and two violet-flower earrings, encased in a charming violet-color box, all of it made by Joseph for me. I subsequently gave it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

  Now that I am so happily in love and have edged out of the frantic Warholian whirl and no longer need to catch every opening and stalk every photographer and greet every dawn, I have time to read and think. I search for a sense of reason and fulfillment. After all, “Ultra” means “beyond.” I want to experience life more deeply. I seek out more profound meanings. I begin reading about spiritualism, astrology, numerology. I look into fortunetelling, magic, psychic phenomena. Luckily I never get into voodoo—my friend Hugh de Montalembert does and is blinded for life. I read and reread the writings of Alice Bailey, Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky. I try on disciplines the way I once tried on clothes.

  My search leads me to meditation, transcendental and otherwise. I follow the footsteps of Yogi Paramhansa Yogananda and then Sathya Sai Baba. I endorse the “I am,” a very pure and absolute religion founded in 1920. I flirt with Christian Science. I sit in the lotus position for days. I study the Scriptures, I read the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Urantia, a monumental book about the superuniverses including our own. I create, produce, direct, and star in my own cable-TV talk show on consciousness expansion.

  As my own consciousness expands, as I grope my way through discourses and holy texts, I become a little uneasy over my relationship with my beloved Edward. We are committing adultery. A detail like that never troubled me in the past. I have always taken love as it pleased me, reached out for it without regard to consequences. I’ve thought of a betrayed wife as her husband’s problem, not mine. But now I begin to think about my own role in this wrongful relationship. I become aware that adultery is forbidden by all the systems and philosophies I have been studying. Shaken by that awareness and in the light of ancient truths, newly revealed to me, I see that our love affair is immoral, forbidden. At least a thousand things in my past life were immoral, forbidden. It is too late to undo them now. But my passion for Edward is present, immediate, and immense.