Edie Sedgwick (1943 – 1971)
American actress, socialite, and heiress who starred in many of Andy Warhol's short films in the 1960s.
The very things I might have given in to, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I fought hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. And um, what makes that sane is that I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.
I was a great, great friend of Edie Sedgwick
Edie and I were in several of the early Andy Warhol films
Edie was beautiful beyond words. She was absolutely breath-taking and a very sweet person. Edie was a precious person. She was heavily into drugs which caused her death.
Edie was very glamorous. And truly beautiful, breathtaking, and I think it was a great loss she died so young.
She was a sweet simple girl. I don't know the other sides of Edie. I know the sweet, wide-eyed, enthusiastic Edie.
I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me
from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching
a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.
Even in her most far-out sort of state she had tremendous appeal. That's what was so incredible about her, is that she could be really spaced beyond belief, and she still could put a sentence together that would blow your brains out
That one-upmanship kind of thing.
Something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, and I said, out loud, "I wish I was dead." And the reason I said it was the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience was really an alien experience in a way, because I didn't even know him. It was a one-night jag. He was married and had children, and I just felt really, like, lost. It just wasn't worth living anymore because I was all alone again.
There seemed to be this almost supernatural glow to her that's hard to describe. Literally there was an aura emanating from her, a white or blue aura. It's as if Edie was illuminated from within. Her skin was translucent Marilyn Monroe had that quality.
The whole place turned into a gigantic orgy, every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs, especially the needle and mainlining scene, losing syringes down the pool drains and blocking up the water infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night...Drinking, guzzling tequila, vodka, and scotch, and bourbon, and shooting up every other half-second, and just going into an incredible sexual tailspin. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Just couldn't get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I've ever been in or ever hope to be in, and I should be ashamed of myself. I'm not, but I should be.
She thought it was funny that people thought they were important.
She made you feel privileged to be there.
I went to the bathroom and there I saw the most incredible creature I have ever seen, and it was this young woman with alabaster skin, incredibly pale, paler than me actually, which was difficult to do. She had short, Jean Seberg kind of platinum hair, and the shortest, shortest, shortest garment I've ever seen on anybody ever, also white...So I was looking at this creature...and I see her in the mirror with an eyeliner pencil, painting a scar on her forehead in black with cross-stitches...I don't know what it meant, but I was terrified.
She would do almost anything that came into her head.
But I really, since I exist, at all, I believe that it's possible for people...I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic...That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that there's to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe in it. And I refuse, like, since I'm still alive and done the things I've done and seen things and understood things as far as I have, and I am alive, I mean physically intact. When I shouldn't be, according to medical reports and so forth. I mean I should be, not here. That's all there is to it. So the magic's working and it's a rare situation.
She loved the things she did not know. She was eager to learn, not in the way of a pupil, but somehow in the way of an artist.
I want to reach people and express myself. You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it's worth being a public fool if that's all you can be in order to communicate yourself.
I'm a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many people's, young people's lives.
I don't think Edie had ever given up on a regular, on at least the concept of having a regular, easygoing kind of life. Although it might have been a little out of her reach, she would emulate that
It was like she could see, just out of her reach, she could see how it could have been her, what she could offer, the fine quality of thought that she was capable of.
When I started going around with Andy people thought I had a press agent. I didn't. After a while I got sort of paranoid about all the publicity, and I holed up in my apartment and cut off the telephone for two months. I saw only two people. Then I felt ready to go out again. I want to do more acting. I like it, but it's hard the long hours, getting the lines straight, I didn't have to do that with Andy.
It's like my having to walk down thousands and thousands of white marble stairs...and nothing but a very very blue sky, very blue, like...Yes, and I'd have to walk down them forever. I never thought about going up...I don't know, don't you think that must mean something? It never occurred to me to turn it around, I mean, why didn't I think that way? This was after I had the car accident.
Why do people stop developing, or, like they stop the way you can rate their, psychologically, their development? Where they stop, and just from being children to maybe stopping at a very adolescent age, and they stay there until they die. Physically die. I mean, they react adolescently. They don't change. They don't develop. They don't it's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.