Edie (21 page)

We finally left. We went leapfrogging down the stairs and through the lobby. I learned that at some coming-out party. You play leapfrog as you go down the stairs and you show your ass to the hosts. So we did those fabulous leapfrogs down to the
rez-de-chaussée
, and then, just as we were on the way out, Bob Smith, right in front of some Ritz official, reached into Edie’s enormous basket purse and pulled out piece after piece of table silverware, saying: “Edie,
now
I see why you can leave hundred percent tips. You steal silverware!”

Edie just turned
blue!
Bob Smith kept pulling it out, one after the other . . . “Look, Edie, all this silverware from the Ritz-Carlton.” Then he started giggling.

The Ritz man got angry. Bob Smith had to admit to the officials at the manager’s desk that he had done it all as a joke—sliding the silverware in one piece at a time during lunch. Oh, it really shocked the Ritz man standing at the whirlaround door.

JOHN ANTHONY WALKER
 When I first saw her in Cambridge, she looked like a Tamil child growing up in South India—huge-eyed, those children are, with faces just like Edie’s. I don’t care what she did or how wrong she was. She was a catalyst, what is known as a
shakti
in the trade. The female energy which dynamizes: by being in contact with her, the edges were sharper. An evening with Edie would only end when Edie had got to the point of exhaustion, which would be at the end of two or three days. There’s that old Yogi axiom: the higher you go, the further you fall. We all know that. She liked walking very close to extinction, always.

Edie had a very hard time handling the world . . . as would be the case with an Olympian god who had taken the wrong exit off Olympus and come down here into this mortal coil. She saw herself as somebody who, if touched, could be annihilated. You have to be very careful. Edie felt this, psychologically—that she must never be touched by the “brute, irredeemable facts of life”—that’s a quote of Henry James in Alfred North Whitehead.

I could never have held her. My father was never frightened by any of the ladies I hung around with. Except by Edie. He was perceptive enough to see that I could quite readily spend the rest of my life, and what money he would give me, trying to keep Edie happy and together.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 I didn’t see much of her even though I lived in cambridge that year. but I saw her whenever she was in trouble, and that became a pattern. whenever she was upset, she’d come to me or I’d go to her. she had flocks and flocks of people around her, telephone going all the time, and appointments to be made right and left, people looking for edie. and edie was just edie . . . being edie, she didn’t want to be possessed by anybody, in any shape or form. just like a fish, zoom, zoom, zoom, escaping in a lot of ways. and amusing herself in the limelight.

Suddenly her glamorous world would evaporate, would shatter. Then Edie would become that hundred percent butterfly creature that she was underneath. The absolute purity and defenselessness that belonged to all the stories she told, and absolute tenderness. There would be openings in the clouds and she would throw her arms around me and cry.

HARRY SEDGWICK
 Minty was picked up in Central Park in October, 1963, standing up on one of the statues, apparently making a speech to nobody. He had just fallen to pieces. He had a Bible with our family name in it, so they looked in the telephone book and called up my wife, Patsy, who called me. I called Minty’s mother out in California and I said, “Alice, Minty’s in Bellevue!” I asked, “Do you want me to make a reservation for you for tomorrow night?” expecting her to rush East. She said, “Well, I’ve got to do this and that, and I’ve got to be in Boston to settle Suky into the New England Conservatory of Music.” ! said, “Alice I Minty’s in Bellevue. Bellevue’s an unhappy place.” She said, “Well, I’ll call his doctor. Other than that, are
you
going to take care of it?” I was being asked to be the surrogate. Boy, that really shook me.

Minty was just a name on a roster at Bellevue. Nobody cared. He screamed and screamed and nobody heard. He yelled out for help and everybody who counted asked, “Did you hear a noise?” Evidently he’d lie on the ward floor and try to crouch into the corner. He’d crawl to interviews on his knees. He was hallucinating—one thing he kept saying was “Helicopters in the sunlight. The morning sun.” He told them he was an addict and an alcoholic and had homosexual impulses. At one point he said, “I’m not sure whether I’m Francis Junior or Francis Senior.”

Minty went from Bellevue to Manhattan State. I saw him there, too. He seemed like a tiny little boy in a terribly rough world. He just didn’t have the protective skin for that sort of place. It’s awful. There’s nothing more dramatic than the stark, barred windows and the pajama-clad emptiness of that place. He was sweeping floors. And, of course, the comrades were mostly in pretty rough shape. Minty looked scared . . . furtive. He kept saying, “I don’t want to go back to Silver Hill.” I spent some time with the doctor at Manhattan State. He was a fairly young guy, but he really spoke with enthusiasm about his patients. They weren’t just numbers like No. L 462. He said that in his judgment Minty was certainly not responsive to his doctor at Silver Hill, although doctors aren’t supposed to say that sort of stuff. He felt that it wasn’t a good idea to continue with that doctor. But when Alice finally came East, she stI’ll believed in Silver Hill, so Minty ended up back there.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 The psychiatrist at Silver HI’ll was just the kind my parents would go for. He made my mother feel comfortable. Very neutral sort of man, large and calm . . . an insulating presence, as if he were covered in layers of cotton wool. He had also been Edie’s doctor two years earlier. Minty would call up and say, “I’m taking medicine, but I’m all out of whack. My doctor says I’m not trying to get well.” Minty was so noble; he never asked for help. Never. He was polite to the last instant 1 He was dignified in a way that would just break your heart.

FROM THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S REPORT TO THE CORONER,
MARCH 4, 1964

. . . at about 7:30 p.m. Aim Ridge, a maid, was asked to check his room to see why he was not at dinner. She found the room in darkness and on investigating saw Sedgwick hanging against the bathroom door—he had fastened the tie around his neck and passed the remainder over the top of the door and attached the knotted end to a metal clothes hanger . . . .

I am satisfied that the said death was not caused by the criminal act, omission, or carelessness of any other person or persons, and that an inquest is unnecessary. In accordance with the statute I have delivered the body of said deceased to Hoyt Funeral Home, New Canaan—awaiting instructions from family for burial.

Silver Hill, New Canaan, Connecticut

Minty, fall, 1962

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Minty killed himself the day before his twenty-sixth birthday. The telephone rang in the middle of the night. I was asleep. I picked up the receiver and it was my father: “Hullo, Sauce . . . Minty hanged himself this afternoon.” He didn’t even say “Sit down,” or “How are you feeling?” or “I have some bad news.” He seemed to be handing it to me in a way that was as shocking and cruel as possible. If I had to give his voice a color, I would say it was black.

He asked me very coldly to tell my sister Kate and nobody else. He and my mother were coming East the next day, and they didn’t want anybody to know until they could tell Edie themselves, in person.

ED HENNESSY
 Edie was terribly upset. She was
furious
at her father. To the point where she’d go out and kI’ll him. She told me about Minty and his sexual problems, and that he had ended up at Silver HI’ll because he had fallen in love with another boy. According to Edie, he had finally come clean with Duke, who was harassing him all the time: “What’s wrong with you? What’s the matter? Stop being crazy, I can’t stand it. Stop being depressed. You’re a Sedgwick. You’ve got to stop doing this!” Finally Minty just broke down in tears and told him what the problem was. Instead of sympathizing and saying, ‘These things happen, let’s talk about it,” his father got furious and said: “I’ll never speak to you again, you’re no son of mine!” Within a matter of days Minty killed himself. Edie was just beside herself. She cried. Oh, yes. It was the first time I’d ever seen a lady with black stuff running down her cheeks.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 We met somewhere in Cambridge. Edie started beating me, hammering me with her fists in the chest, saying, “Come on, cry. God damn you!” She was just pouring tears. She loved Minty.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 Edie consoled me. I thought I was going to go berserk when I heard about Minty . . . I really did. I screamed. I just got hysterical. I was in shock—physical, total, mental shock. Edie put her arms around me in the back of the car.

Mummy and Fuzzy were in the front seat. They had picked us up in Cambridge, and were taking us to the Somerset Club, which is on Beacon Hill. It’s a very sophisticated, quiet, very Mummy-type place:
very old-fashioned and incredibly porcelain. Think of porcelain dolls and porcelain everything. And somewhat awful when you had just the four of us sitting in that room with that kind of news.

Oh, Edie sure as hell was crying, too. Oh, shit, man, who wouldn’t. Minty being . . . Minty was somebody to
us!
We knew who Minty was !

JOHN ANTHONY WALKER
 Edie told me minty had called her just before he died at Silver Hill. He told her that she was the only Sedgwick he could ever hope for. He sort of listed them all. We can infer from this that he was consciously committing suicide; he knew he was going to do it. He called up Edie because she was the last one he could talk with. Nobody wants to die without leaving a message. she was very wrought up.

It was a rainy night, when she came to see me, not long after, and she came to me as a friend, very strung up. She didn’t cry. Just an odd sense of anguish. She felt that space was closing in on her. Her family was going to get her, or the universe was going to get her, or with any luck she’d get herself first.

Well, that rainy night I decided the best thing I could do to get Edie out of her depressed head was to take her to a light and frolicsome movie. The Brattle was playing
The Blue Angel.
For some reason I had it in my head that
The Blue Angel
was a Second World War farcical movie that included Luftwaffe planes. So I thought, ‘Wow, we’ll take Edie to a little bit of light German burlesque.” Somehow I was crazy enough to think Marlene Dietrich was a comedienne. And then, of course, the name itself—Edie is an angel out of the vast blue. So it was appropriate.

We walked in. It starts out as an extremely funny movie. But then it becomes the most vicious movie. It spares you nothing. It was a trap that we walked into. You remember—the rigid, authoritarian Herr Professor in the college town who goes to the burlesque house to speak to the burlesque queen who’s been tempting his students . . . and he falls in love with her, marries her, and joins the circus. For a time you’re jollied into this feeling of empathy and camaraderie with Herr Professor and his new world of burlesque, with all these people who are like caricatures. But then it begins to go awry. They are
not
caricatures, and you watch the Professor slowly get enmeshed and crushed beneath the pressure of a totally unsympathetic society that totally exploits him.