Edie (12 page)

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 In the early Fifties oil was discovered on the ranch. I remember seeing a derrick at Corral de Quati, coming across it on a horse when I was very young, or seeing it from a truck, but there was no oil, it was a dry well. Then Flying A came in and by the fall of 1952 there was a lot of activity—trucks, and men everywhere. They had redrilled one of the old wells and went thirteen or fourteen feet further down and there was the oil. It had taken time for things to generate because it was low-grade oil which wouldn’t have been pumped in the Valley if it weren’t for the war, when Getty pumped it, and he did pretty well.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 My parents were neurotic about the oil. We weren’t allowed to drive or ride anywhere near the pumps. When I took these Italian boys—there weren’t any oil wells in Italy and I thought they’d be interested—why, you’d think I’d taken off my clothes, turned upside down, and displayed my bottom. That’s how obscene and shocking my parents thought it was. They always said it was the lowest grade of oil and practically worthless. So they must have felt fishy about the money. Before the oil, the money was my mother’s. My grandfather de Forest earned his fortune and so did
his
father. Nobody in our branch of the Sedgwick family made any money except that my father happened with the de Forest family money to buy a ranch which had oil on it. It must have made my father feel freer not to have to rely so much on my mother’s money.

Suky and Edie at Rancho La Laguna

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I think there were seventeen wells by the time we left. They were coming in the back door, literally. The last well went in fifty feet from the back door of the house, so the stench was getting pretty bad. Of course, the money coming in meant that my parents could move on. In July, 1952, my father bought Rancho La Laguna de San Francisco—the third of their California ranches—about six miles away from Corral de Quati as the crow flies. I remember when we first saw it. We all got saddled up and rode off with my father, the feudal lord, leading us, and suddenly we were riding up a hI’ll called the Ventura Field with pine trees on top, moving through the wild oats which were so tall, six or seven feet high, that on our small ponies it was like swimming through them. Edie flowed through the grass on her pony. She couldn’t see where she was going. Really exciting. I read somewhere that the prairies were like that without the cattle to browse the grass down to two or three feet, and that the Prairie Indians rode through tall grass all the time.

Then my father paused at the top of the hI’ll and looked down over the land like an emperor, just beaming with joy and pride, and announced : “Look at this! Since I came to this valley, I’ve always wanted this ranch. Isn’t this magnificent . . . as far as I can see it’s beautiful!” He was really talking about himself . . . really admiring himself. That was the first time we realized we were moving to Rancho Laguna. He was looking over his duchy, and we were part of it, too.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 The new ranch was gloriously beautiful. It was a natural balance that anything short of nature would have had a difficult time sculpting. The old ranch was less aesthetically beautiful and not as clean-cut. . . . I mean sharp like a blade that shines in the sun. Our human world was something very different from our natural world, deeply different but equally as intense. I’d call it something like a peaceful refuge from the pains of various types we experienced in our intensified play-works. Play-works, play and work. Little play but intense. All intensity . . . horse games.

Edie made us stick horses, and if one stick horse’s ear hung a little bit that way, she’d get what she called her “icky feelings.” Oh, they were awful !I mean, a detail would become an absolute torture. I’d want to get away from whatever she was feeling and go play, and she would be turmoiling over some useless and absolutely nonsensical detail. I
began to realize that Edie had times when she wasn’t totally herself. She couldn’t escape from it either. I knew it wasn’t her fault but I didn’t know what the hell it was.

Edie and I had a secret world that belonged just to us two. Only us two in the whole family. And in that sense we were twins. She made up a family called the Chieftains, and that was really something. There was a father, who was an Indian chief. He had red skin. I imagined him as being a big Indian Buddha with red skin. He was nothing but kindness and understanding. Absolutely no punishments or anything like that.
Ever, ever.
There was no mother, isn’t that curious? There were about eight or ten children. There was one just like Edie. And there was a horse I And a dog. Twinkleberry was the name of the horse. Edie used to be all these things; I mean in this imaginary world Edie would act them out. She would
be
each one of the family. This world was a pure world for both of us—pure in the sense that there could be nothing wrong in it—no evils or no injustices and no unhappiness . . . a family which was an absolute paradigm of joy ! Everything was wonderful when we played that game. It was just a very kind, soft world, as far as I can remember.

Another game we had was playing horse. You had to look at a picture and you would choose what you wanted to look like. Edie used to make me stare at the picture of a goddam horse’s face for hours, it seemed to me, so that I’d remember what she looked like. She inevitably chose something that was very delicate and very Arab, and I inevitably chose the opposite: something very strong and not so beautiful. Sort of solid workhorse type . . . but not quite a workhorse. And Edie was always a beautiful prancing princess-type horse.

At Corral de Quad, Edie and I had lived in a cottage with my sister Kate and the nurse, Addie. We were little savages, but we were independent little characters, both of us. And when the chips were down we were by ourselves.

We were brought up in one family, in absolute, total isolation, with people coming in the summer to visit us, and then as soon as you got fond of them, they never came back again, it seemed. A lot of people disappeared, a lot of people were sent away, a lot of people didn’t want to come back, I guess. We rarely left the ranch, but when Edie and I had to go to the doctor in the Valley, Minty would come and put on puppet shows for us with our stuffed animals. He’d make us laugh and distract us, and then somebody would get us dressed. We used to get vitamin B shots. They
hurt!
We got them every day.
Every
day. Edie and I both had allergy tests, too. Powders. With what seemed to
me something along the lines of a thumbtack, up and down our backs. Powder. Poke. Powder. Poke. Powder. Poke. Until you could throw up on the floor. With a lady doctor who lived in the Santa Ynez Valley near Ballard. We used to be taken over in the car as if we were going to the vet.

I saw the doctor bend a needle in Edie’s bee-hind and I felt like screaming because I was the one who was watching and I got mine next. You don’t give people shots in front of other little people who are going to get it next. That was a vitamin B shot . . . all shots in the rear end. “Pull down your pants and let’s have it over with.” Oh, shit! “And don’t you dare cry, or even whimper.”

Summer was the time when all of the children were home, and we rambled around and had games after dinner, and it was light until nine o’clock at night. And that was freedom for us! I’d compare it to a Shakespearean play—I mean Shakespearean tragedy takes intervals for comic relief. Well, that’s exactly the way our kind of playing was. It was extremely intense. Absolute bliss.

We
lived
the seasons ! It was living in an absolute. If you have the galaxies above you and the changing seasons below you, you live in another dimension. And the only thing that we had besides that were a few skimpy little actors on our stage, and that’s all.

Each new season brought new feelings. Fall brought deep sadness. Winter—Christmas pageantry and other rituals. It was exciting; it was the time when you gave presents. We didn’t have stockings, we had boots, and they were sort of rigid things. I would have preferred stockings. Isn’t that funny? Cowboy boots. And they were lined up in front of the fireplace in their various sizes. Then the heaps of presents around the room. We usually made presents for Mummy and Fuzzy. They made us understand mat anything we could buy was off the point. We didn’t have the money, anyway. Edie made some beautiful things. She made stamp holders—Mummy stI’ll has them—with a horse head on them. Kate made pictures. Minty made comics. All of us made things, usually useful things.

My memories of Corral de Quad are very splattered . . . something along the lines of a color in Pollock’s paintings, one of the underneath ones, I’d say. We used to have parties with all the people at the ranch. And that was really fun! The night before Christmas. All of the children and all the adults had a big party together and we all played games. Together. Just pure unadulterated fun, no strings attached.

There were also seasons of fire. And there were fires, big fires when we first got to the new ranch at Laguna. I mean that’s fire! Edie and I
used to sit by our window, which happened to look out over the mountains. The
whole
rim of the mountains was outlined in fire. The pass—that’s a trap, too—the pass road was cut off; that was the way to get to Santa Barbara. Behind us was real wilderness. We’d watch the sky get
BLACK
, the sky is filled with cinders. Hell is not too far away. When the two forest fires mount to the top, there’s an explosion, instantaneous combustion—
BOOM
 I What blows up then rolls down and starts new fires and winds are created. We lived through that kind of thing happening next door.

When nature was just calm and comfortable, it couldn’t have been more beautiful to us. The ranch has so many different places to go and different atmospheres to partake of. There’s Pine Needle Canyon, with big, lofty pine trees. You can actually hear the wind in the pines, which is a completely different sound than oak trees or just no trees at all. If s a beautiful sound. I love it. And I know that there were only two places on the ranch that you could go and really listen to it. It was music. And what else was there? Oh, there was the Uplands, and that’s where Edie wanted to stay. That was dangerous in a storm. So much violence. The ranch was potential violence—both human and natural.

Do you know Coleridge? “Kubla Khan”? In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down, to a sunless sea.” The ranch was all those things and, boy oh boy, does Coleridge know what he’s talking about. It was the pleasure dome. It was a sunless sea. And that’s funny, but it’s one of the few poems I’ve always remembered by heart.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Laguna, the new ranch, was twice as big as Corral de Quad—six thousand acres—and the land, even the approach, was much more dramatic—a long, flat valley between hills and the mountains at the end. At Corral de Quati, there were dairy cows and pigs, and the chickens wandered around loose. At Laguna there was no dairy or pigs, and the chickens were shut in these terrible dark hen sheds; they just stood on nets and dropped their eggs. Their feet got so misshapen they couldn’t have walked on the ground. My mother wouldn’t go out there to see them; she said it was too upsetting. The barns and the houses for the men working on the ranch were grouped together in a grove of live oaks. The main house was set apart, out in the Valley, and it was white. In between, my father built a tennis court, a big swimming pool with changing rooms, a guesthouse, and a large studio for himself, identical to the one at Goleta, our first ranch.

The house itself always seemed somehow banal to me—it had none of the magic of Goleta or the wonderful plain quality of Corral de Quati. The good furniture from Goleta was there, eighteenth century English mostly, and there were leather sofas in the living room. My mother put Fortuny curtains everywhere. My father bought his uncle Robert Mintrn’s family collection of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italian and Flemish pictures, had them restored, and hung them in the house. I remember also two Tang horses, very beautiful, but my father
said one was a fake, he could tell by this feeling he had. The food became suddenly much fancier. William, our butler on Long Island, who had milked cows at Corral de Quati, began wearing a white coat again and waiting at table. At Corral de Quad, I don’t remember my parents drinking or offering anything before meals except Dubonnet shaken up with lemon peel and ice in a cocktail shaker. They rather disapproved of people who drank. At Corral de Quati the normal drink had been milk, but at Laguna there was wine at meals, and I remember my father having a great tub of Scotch and soda at the table. And afterwards there were liqueurs—Tia Maria, of all things, or Brandy and Benedictine, sweet things, but strong. My brother Minty became an alcoholic at Laguna when he was about fifteen. He told me later it was because everything was so tense and the booze was so available. Maybe Edie got addicted to pills the same way because my parents took so many for their allergies and whatever problems they had.