New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s

Chapter 10. Edie Sedgwick: Girl of the Year

202 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 10 Edie Sedgwick Girl of the Year CHRISTOPHER SIEVING Edie Sedgwick is the girl that everybody is talking about. No one is quite sure who the everybody is who is talking about her, but no matter. There is too little new that is happening and too many words to write and television talk shows to film to leave a phenomenon like Edie Sedgwick alone. Edie Sedgwick is being talked about because she is here, there, and everywhere. (Nora Ephron, “Woman in the News: Edie Sedgwick, Superstar,” New York Post, 5 September 1965, 2:1) At the time of Nora Ephron’s September 1965 profile, Edie Sedgwick was known to New York Post readers primarily as the party-hopping, outlandishly clothed, oft-photographed companion of Pop artist and experimental moviemaker Andy Warhol. When their paths crossed for the first time Warhol was already arguably the most infamous avant-gardist in American film history, having outraged middlebrow sensibilities with his soundless, intolerably protracted studies of mundane events and objects— the two most notorious offenders being the six-hour Sleep (1963) and the eight-hour Empire (1964), a fixed-camera, dusk-’til-dawn contemplation of the Empire State Building. After Empire Warhol more fully committed to a couple of tendencies that had marked much of his 1964 work: (live) sound film production and, following the lead of Jack Smith’s cause célèbre Flaming Creatures (1963), a cinema founded upon the appeal of flamboyant onscreen personalities. Sedgwick, a vivacious, free-spirited debutante who had recently arrived in Manhattan by way of Cambridge, Massachusetts, would, under Warhol’s guidance, become not just the most radiant star of the New York “underground” film scene but also an aboveground celebrity. The Edie Sedgwick phenomenon that spanned much of 1965, originating in the spring with breathless mentions in the society columns of the New York dailies and culminating later in the year in fashion spreads for mass-market magazines and rampant gossip-page speculation about a Hollywood future, rests on what even at the time seemed like a paradox. The implicit question undergirding her Post feature—why are we paying attention to Edie Sedgwick?—is rooted in the assumption that stardom and, specifically, star publicity must have a clear referent; it must be grounded in and justified by some sort of tangible, marketable accomplishment. While Sedgwick may have seemed to be “here, there, and everywhere” during that chaotic year, there was one place from which her silver-haired countenance was typically and paradoxically absent: the movie screen. Even the best known of her Warhol-directed vehicles, most of which were shot in the spring and summer of 1965, were unseen and mostly unknown outside New York City, watched only by several hundred avant-garde aficionados within. The publicity accumulated by Sedgwick during her meteoric “career” suggests a star of the first magnitude. But star of what? The fact that her celebrity was definitively meteoric and her rise to movie fame retarded, thanks to her own self-destructiveness and the neglect of those around her, has secured for Sedgwick a lasting stardom. Her uniqueness is not, contrary to the popular conception reproduced in a recent biography, that she was “famous for doing nothing at all” (Painter and Weisman 12) but that her stardom was in large part predicated on the explosion of the dichotomies upon which traditional stardom rests. She was a mainstream fashion icon who acted in underground movies. Her look of apparent nonchalance was achieved only after hours spent trying on clothes and putting on makeup, and her androgynous synthesis of feminine beauty (seen in her large, expressive eyes and dancer’s legs) and boyish attributes (small breasts and hips and close-cropped hair) motivated one critic to liken her to“Peter Pan in drag” (Richard R. Lingeman, “Pop Sex: Some Sex Symbols of the Sixties, ”Mademoiselle, November 1965, 221). She was both a blue-blooded socialite and a nearly destitute charity case who blew through EDIE SEDGWICK 203 an almost six-figure inheritance in her first six months in Manhattan. She effortlessly transgressed the class lines that separated New York’s high society of aristocratic elites, its “café” society of the ebullient nouveau riche, and the underground subculture of artists existing on society’s fringes; her ease at bridging these chasms put her at the crest of the “new chic” trends memorably chronicled by Tom Wolfe...