Edie (14 page)

It certainly didn’t deter him. He would invite us to his studio. It was sort of like the emperor selecting a vestal virgin. We all knew we’d better not go. We all thought that this was against the rules . . . an eighteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old . . . no, no, no.

Duke was a presence—a
fauve,
a wild beast. I disliked him thoroughly. He sometimes could impress you as one of those militant boot-wearing fags. Did you know he used to wear shoes a size or a size and a half bigger because he thought his feet were too small? There was something
malsain,
a Marquis de Sade undercurrent that thirty years later I can feel in my flesh right now. The way he
looked
at people. He undressed every woman he saw. His eyes, they just would become cold. The way he dealt with women was a kind of brutalization. He thoroughly brutalized his wife. He was tough—very, very tough.

EMILY FULBRIGHT
 The busts in Mr. Sedgwick’s studio made it sort of a rogues’ gallery in the sense that many of them were of his different mistresses. It looked like a trophy room in a funny kind of
way. You had to prove yourself before you were put on a shelf in there. I was stI’ll too young.

The first time Mr. Sedgwick came to pick me up at my parents’ house, he was driving a little Mercedes sports car. I was terrified because he drove so incredibly fast. Even at that age—I must have been eleven—I realized he was showing off for my sake, because he shot up this little mountain road at about ninety miles per hour. I arrived at the ranch limp.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 There was a lot of machismo on the ranch, with my father and then Bobby and Jonathan with their guns and their stuff that they shot, and their ropes tied on their saddles, but Minty had pictures by Botticelli up on the walls and little bits of brocade. He was just a gentle person; he loved to ride, he loved girls, he was very masculine, but my father and brothers made him feel that he wasn’t.

CHARLES HOLLISTER
 Once Minty and I went hunting deer, high in the mountains, and that night at Saunders Knoll we were in two twin beds and we talked all night about sex. He was telling me that he lived in a world of games. He wanted to know how, being two years older than he was, I had so many neat girls. He wanted to learn how to unsnap a brassiere from behind. With just one hand. He wanted to know about pregnancy. Minty was not getting anything from his father . . . warmth, caring. “How can I have a lot of girl friends?” I said to be honest, be friendly, be warm, be human. And don’t play games. The point is that Minty didn’t realize that you didn’t have to be a Duke Sedgwick; you could be a friend of a woman. You didn’t have to score everybody you met. If s a sharing. It’s not a conquest. I knew from my father about Duke. He used to conquer, penetrate, ejaculate.

DIANA DAVIS
 When I met Minty, I was so pleased that he asked me to come to his family’s ranch. My parents were divorced or separated, I don’t know. It was a confused time. I was about fourteen. My father had a mistress who I felt didn’t want the children to stay in that house any more than we wanted to.

Minty picked me up and we drove over the mountains. I can remember the terrific approach to the ranch. We stopped at a knoll and the whole Valley lay out in front of us and off in the distance we could see the formation of this little civilization. Minty stopped the car and said, “There it is!” I went, “Oh, wow!” Then we drove down. Minty said,
“Come on, I want you to meet my father.” It was late afternoon. Fuzzy, as everyone called him, was in a white bikini and all glistening with oil. He was on a mat doing his exercises. I remember that green grass and the pool and this fantastic classical music coming out over the loudspeaker. God! He really was one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen; at fourteen for that to be someone’s father seemed so extraordinary. Then out of the woodwork came Monty’s older brother, Bobby. You know how beautiful
he
was. And here was Minty, who didn’t have that same kind of beauty, but he was very pretty, pretty more than handsome, and then the youngest brother, Jonathan. There was this whole additional group of kids; everybody seemed to have a friend.

Fuzzy liked me, or felt sorry for me. I went to him saying, “Oh, please don’t send me back to Santa Barbara.” He interceded for me. They seemed to like me. I wasn’t causing any trouble. I wasn’t sexy, so I didn’t make them nervous on that account. I was really a little string bean of a girl who was hardly aware of what was going on in other girls of my age.

While I was back home, a close friend of Mr. and Mrs. Sedgwick came to stay at the ranch with her daughter, and Minty took up with her. He telephoned me and said, “I don’t think you should come any more because this girl is here and I like her.” I was in anguish. It wasn’t so much that I needed Minty as I needed that place to go to. Fuzzy found out that Minty had done this, and the next thing I knew he was on the phone saying, “It’s ridiculous, Minty has made an error of judgment. He can’t choose her over you.” I kept saying, “If s Minty, Fuzzy, not
you
who’s making the choice.” Suddenly Minty was on the phone saying, “I’ve made a mistake, it’s really you I want here.”

Well, I went back to the ranch. I didn’t have any pride. I thought Minty was wonderful, my first crush. I was like a little child looking up at him. I can stI’ll remember the first pang of having another woman involved in my life. She was sexy. She was blonde; there were breasts and hips and things like that. I looked at her and felt sort of sick and wondered why I was there.

NITA COLGATE
 I was staying at the ranch that summer and I remember Minty kept saying that his father was a poor wretched devil, but his mother was the one he hated.

Sometimes the children fought back, but it was sort of pathetic. For breaking a date with a girl named Diana Davis, Minty got punished
for what his parents thought was grossly antisocial behavior. The decree was that he had to go to bed every night at ten o’clock.

This one night we were all listening to Fuzzy reading, and at five minutes to ten Minty got up ostentatiously, clicked his heels, and then went over and bowed good evening elegantly to a friend of Mrs. Sedgwick’s, shook hands with his mother, and stalked out while Fuzzy, in this steely, rather acid voice, kept on reading.

Finally I wanted to get out of there. I left a week early. I never held it against Fuzzy at the time, but later, when I looked back on what was going on, I realized I had not been in any sort of paradise at all.

DR. JOHN MILLET
 Francis and Alice seemed so involved in their family life. They always sent me Christmas cards and photographs and so forth from the ranch, and I’d see these marvelous-looking creatures getting bigger and bigger, all riding horses, looking like gods and goddesses. Wonderful-looking crowd. I thought everything was going hunky-dory now. Then these things began to happen.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 One by one, we started to have trouble. It wasn’t easy to rebel, because the parental grip was tight. I was the only one who rejected my parents completely, and I think it really threw them for a loop. I remember saying to my father in my grandmother’s car, a huge blue Cadillac like an airport limousine, that I had to live my own life and be responsible for my own actions until I knew who I was and where I was, and that I couldn’t stand any more disruption. I was really crawling along on the bottom rung—my father had tried to get me thrown out of Radcliffe for my personal life and I finally had to withdraw from the school. He went to the Dean and told her I had cheated because I was sick in the infirmary during exams, and that I was promiscuous. I guess he thought I was having an affair, which I wasn’t.

The real trouble went back a couple of years earlier, when I was engaged briefly to someone my father considered “unsuitable.” Ironically,
I
was the one who was unsuitable. I was a mess and my fiancé was a mature veteran who had been something of a hero in World War II; he had lost a leg. He was studying labor law at Harvard Law School. I didn’t know that I was rebelling, but I have to laugh at myself, looking back: I was working in a laundry and going around with a Jewish Marxist. My parents behaved pretty respectfully at the time, but it changed their attitude toward me so that they tried to take control of me.

My father and I had a big argument in the car. He said that if I insisted on having my own way it could mean the death of my mother—she was in the hospital at the time with one of her low-grade fevers. He said, “You’ll have it on your conscience all your life that you caused your mother’s death.” I remember my grandmother pushed the button that closed the glass window between us and the chauffeur.

What made it possible for me to stand up to my father was that a few days earlier he had made a sort of pass at me. We were staying at my grandmother’s on Long Island, and we were in evening clothes—he had taken me to dinner at the house of some friends of his, and he had shouted at me all the way there and back in the car, saying he wanted me to go into the WACS. I had been speechless at the party and in tears most of the evening. Afterwards he came into my room and began talking kindly to me. Then he came over—I was sitting on my open bed—and he put his arms around me and his head on my neck and he said, “Don’t you think I understand how all these men feel about you? After all, I’m a man, too.” I don’t know if he even realized that he was making a pass at me. Still, I thought, “Well, you filthy old creep. So
that’s
what the trouble is.” I never felt anything for him again.

That made it easier for me to escape than the others. But it wasn’t easy for any of us in the outside world. When we came off the ranch we used to laugh that we were unable to care for ourselves: it terrified us to take a subway or a bus, we didn’t know how. All the apparatus of life was a big mystery; every decision was a bolt from die blue, often disastrous.

HELEN BURROUGHS STERN
 I remember thinking it was so awful when Bobby and Minty were sent East to Groton, where they didn’t know anyone. Once Minty hid in the Los Angeles airport until the airplane had gone, and he had to be sent along later. Minty was just like his name, he was just “Minty”—little bone structure, pale, white face, and little, watering, frightened eyes that were so grateful. Very ethereal and very pinched; he looked like Oliver Twist. I liked him, the way you just like some people. I said, “You’ll be all right. These people are nice, and you’ll like it. You’ll be able to get cake for dessert, and pies.”

HARRY SEDGWICK
 Bobby graduated from Groton in ‘51 and Minty in ‘56.1 didn’t see much of them while they were at school, but everybody
was taken by them. I remember Minty as being just adorable. There was a great vulnerability and “please love me” look about him. He was such a lovely specimen, just a lovely kid. Girls would flip over him I And Bobby was unbelievably good-looking. He was sort of a composite of all the best-looking parts of his father and my father and our grandfather. I heard that neither of them was particularly distinguished academically, nor were they involved in sports at Groton.

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 Francis was terribly ambitious for his sons, particularly when they were growing up at Groton, and they weren’t good athletes. One spring Minty turned eighteen and he did not want to go home for vacation. I went out from Boston to see him. He was terrified at first because he thought I was going to try to ship him back to California. Then he opened up and told me why he didn’t want to go. Francis had given Minty a special football outfit. Minty said he wouldn’t be using it, because he didn’t like football. Francis said, “I’m ashamed to have you bear my name.” He had not been a great athlete himself, but he pushed his children. It was ill-advised. Minty wasn’t built for football.

Francis was very upset. He became quite illogical about Minty’s not wanting to come home. He wrote and telegraphed people, including Babbo, with whom he had rarely communicated since his marriage to Gabriella. Francis told everyone that if Minty asked to stay with them in the East, they were not to put him up. When I heard this, I wrote Francis at once that, like any relation of mine, Minty was more than welcome at my house at any time. He was a terribly attractive young man. The poor boy just didn’t want to play football.

So Alice came on East. It was the only time I ever saw her aware that she had a strange husband. She was always absolutely loyal. For once, she realized that Francis was wrong about Minty and the rest of them. That was the only time . . . the only time.

JAMES WATSON
 Minty’s masters at Groton were well aware of the strain he was under. It showed up in his work. When boys with fine minds have academic difficulties, it is customary at Groton, and other preparatory schools at which I have taught, to send them to be tested by an educational psychologist. The boys are given Rorschach tests all day long, and the psychologist then sends a report to the school and to the boy’s parents. Very often the learning problem turns put to be something caused by the boy’s relationship to his parents . . . and that was certainly true with Minty. As is so frequently the case with the parents of these boys, Mr. Sedgwick had plenty of warning, but he didn’t take heed.