Edie Sedgwick
Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post was an American actress, model, and socialite. Best known as a Warhol superstar, she gained widespread recognition as a style icon; in 1965, Vogue magazine named her a "Youthquaker," recognizing her influence on youth culture.
Sedgwick starred in several of Andy Warhol's underground films, including Poor Little Rich Girl and Beauty No. 2. After leaving Warhol's Factory scene in 1966, she pursued acting and modeling independently but never regained the same level of prominence. Her mental health deteriorated from drug abuse, and she struggled to complete the semi-autobiographical film Ciao! Manhattan. Sedgwick died of an overdose in 1971 at the age of 28.
Early life and education (1943–1964)
Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California, the seventh of eight children of Alice Delano de Forest and Francis Minturn Sedgwick, a rancher, sculptor and member of the historical Sedgwick family of Massachusetts. Sedgwick's mother was the daughter of Henry Wheeler de Forest, the president and chairman of the board of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Her maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Endicott Peabody, founded the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. She was named after her father's aunt, Edith Minturn Stokes, who was painted with her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, by John Singer Sargent. She was of English and French Huguenot ancestry.Despite the family's wealth and high social status, Sedgwick's early life was troubled. Initially homeschooled and cared for by nannies, Sedgwick and her siblings were rigidly controlled by their parents. Being raised on their father's California ranches, they were largely isolated from the outside world and were instilled with the idea that they were superior to most of their peers. It was within these familial and social conditions that Sedgwick, by her early teens, developed an eating disorder, settling into an early pattern of binging and purging. At age 13, her grandfather Henry Dwight Sedgwick died, and she began boarding at the Branson School near San Francisco. According to her older sister Alice "Saucie" Sedgwick, she was soon taken out of school because she had anorexia. Her father severely restricted her freedom when she returned home.
All the Sedgwick children had conflicted relationships with their father whom they called "Fuzzy." By most accounts, he was narcissistic, emotionally remote, controlling, and frequently abusive. He also openly carried on extramarital affairs with other women. On one occasion, Sedgwick walked in on her father while he was having sex with one of his mistresses. She reacted with great surprise, but he claimed that she had imagined it, slapped her, and called a doctor to administer tranquilizers to her. As an adult, Sedgwick told people that he had attempted to molest her several times, beginning when she was aged 7.
In 1958, Sedgwick's parents enrolled her at St. Timothy's School in Maryland. She was eventually taken out of the school due to her continuing eating disorder. In the autumn of 1962, at her father's insistence, Sedgwick was committed to the private Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. As the regime was very lax, she easily manipulated her situation at Silver Hill and her weight kept dropping. She was later sent to Bloomingdale, the behavioral health wing in the Westchester County division of New York Hospital, where her anorexia improved markedly. Around the time she left the hospital, she had a brief relationship with a Harvard student, became pregnant and procured an abortion, citing her present psychological issues.
In the autumn of 1963, Sedgwick moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began studying sculpture with her cousin, artist Lily Saarinen. According to Saarinen, Sedgwick "was very insecure about men, though all the men loved her". During this period, she partied with members of an elite bohemian fringe of the Harvard social scene.
Sedgwick was deeply affected by the loss of her older brothers, Francis Jr. and Robert, who died within eighteen months of each other. Francis, who had a particularly unhappy relationship with their father, suffered several mental breakdowns, eventually committing suicide in 1964 while at Silver Hill Hospital. Robert, her second oldest brother, also suffered from mental health problems and died after falling into a coma when his motorcycle crashed into the side of a New York City bus on New Year's Eve 1965.
On her twenty-first birthday in April 1964, Sedgwick received an $80,000 trust fund from her maternal grandmother. In September 1964, she relocated to New York to pursue a career in modeling. In December 1964, she was injured in an automobile accident.
The Factory (1965–1966)
Film career
In March 1965, Edie Sedgwick met artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol at a party hosted by producer Lester Persky and soon became a regular presence at Warhol's Midtown Manhattan studio, The Factory.During one visit, Warhol was filming Horse, which Sedgwick makes an appearance marking the beginning of her on-screen collaboration with him. Soon after, she made a brief cameo in Vinyl, Warhol's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Although the film featured an all-male cast, Warhol inserted Sedgwick into the project. Though her appearances in both films were limited, they attracted considerable attention and prompted Warhol to cast her as the central figure in his subsequent work. He dubbed Sedgwick his "Superstar," and their frequent public appearances helped popularize the term. Sedgwick herself explained the concept on The Merv Griffin Show, reflecting its novelty to mainstream audiences at the time.
Sedgwick's first starring role was in Poor Little Rich Girl, originally intended as part of a planned series known as The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga, which also included Restaurant, Face, and Afternoon. Filmed largely in Sedgwick's apartment, the film portrayed her daily routines in a casual, observational style. She next appeared in Kitchen, filmed in May 1965 and released the following year, written by Factory regular Ronald Tavel and featuring several members of Warhol's circle. After Kitchen, Chuck Wein replaced Tavel as writer and assistant director on Beauty No. 2, filmed in June and premiered in July; the film depicts Sedgwick reclining on a bed in her underwear with Gino Piserchio as she is being taunted by Wein off-camera. Throughout 1965, Sedgwick continued working with Warhol on films including Outer and Inner Space, Prison, and Lupe.
By late 1965, however, her relationship with Warhol had begun to deteriorate as Sedgwick gravitated towards the Bob Dylan crowd, and she left the Factory scene in early 1966. In May 1966, Warhol told the Los Angeles Times: "Edie was the best, the greatest. She never understood what I was doing to her. I don't know what's going to happen to her now." After being dismissed from Dylan's circle and surviving a fire in her apartment in October 1966, Sedgwick returned to the Factory seeking work. Warhol cast her in one final project, The Andy Warhol Story, in which René Ricard satirically portrayed Warhol. Filmed in November 1966, the film was never released and was screened only once at the Factory.
Modeling career
Warhol's films were for the most part shown only in underground film theaters and in viewings held at The Factory, and were not commercially successful. Despite this, Sedgwick attracted growing mainstream media attention for both her film appearances and her personal style. Her look—black leotards and tights, miniskirts, chandelier earrings, and heavy eye makeup—made her a fashion icon of the 1960s. She popularized the miniskirt by wearing altered children's skirts and cropped her naturally brown hair short, often spraying it silver to mirror Warhol's own silvery appearance.In an August 1965 Vogue photoshoot, Edie Sedgwick was photographed by Enzo Sellerio wearing only hosiery and a black ballet leotard, balancing atop a leather rhinoceros. Vogue anointed her an "It Girl" and a "Youthquaker." Sedgwick's mother disapproved of her modeling career and hoped she would return to sculpting and painting, which she had pursued before becoming a model. She also dismissed reports of Sedgwick's lavish fur collection as "utter nonsense", despite a New York Times account claiming she owned multiple mink coats and exotic furs. Later that year, Fred Eberstadt photographed Sedgwick for Life magazine's November 1965 pictorial, "The Girl with the Black Tights." Her cultural impact was underscored when artist Roy Lichtenstein and his wife dressed as Warhol and Sedgwick for a 1965 Halloween party. In 1966, Women's Wear Daily named Sedgwick one of New York's "fashion revolutionaries".
Later years (1966–1971)
When Sedgwick returned to California for the Christmas holidays in 1966, her parents put her in a psychiatric ward.Sedgwick attempted to forge a legitimate acting career. She auditioned for Norman Mailer when his 1967 stage adaptation of his novel The Deer Park was being produced. But Mailer "turned her down... She was very good in a sort of tortured and wholly sensitive way...She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances."
In March 1967, Sedgwick began the shooting of Ciao! Manhattan, a semi-autobiographical underground film co-directed by John Palmer and David Weisman. Due to her rapidly deteriorating health from drug use, the film was suspended. After further hospitalizations for drug abuse and mental issues in 1968 and 1969, Sedgwick returned to her family's ranch in California to recuperate. In August 1969, she was hospitalized again in the psychiatric ward of the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital after being arrested for drug offenses by local police. While in the hospital, Sedgwick met another patient, Michael Post, whom she married in July 1971.
Sedgwick was hospitalized again in the summer of 1970 but was let out under the supervision of a psychiatrist, two nurses and the live-in care of filmmaker John Palmer and his wife Janet. Determined to finish Ciao! Manhattan and have her story told, Sedgwick reconnected with the film crew and began shooting in Arcadia and Santa Barbara in late 1970. She also recorded audio tapes reflecting on her life story, accounts Weisman and Palmer incorporated into the film's dramatic arc. Filming completed in early 1971, and the film was released in February 1972.