Edie (45 page)

RICHIE BERLIN
 Diana Dew, the electric-dress designer for Paraphernalia, had those dresses where the tits would light up; or you could flash the crotch and
that
would go off. But they weren’t foolproof, and one night two girls went totally off in Max’s! I mean,
right
off. They went
BOOM!
 It’s true.

BETSEY JOHNSON
 ALL of the clothes at Paraphernalia were experimental. Always changing. It had nothing to do with the customer. It had everything to do with the time, the moment. We were giving the customer something brand new, something that she didn’t have a clue she wanted. It was all very spaceship. “What would you wear on the moon?” That was the big question of the Sixties. Everybody felt real future, real positive, real up, optimistic, and the whole Timothy Leary drug trip. Edie and Andy were just the ultimate, you know. Edie and the rock ‘n’ roll groups were it. The Stones, the Beatles were where you could hear it. John Cale from the Velvet Underground. Paraphernalia was where you could buy it.

Edie was my first fitting model. Very boyish . . . in fact, she was the very beginning of the whole unisex trip. Backless bathing-suit dresses. I remember doing those on Edie. All the silvers, like the silver fish dress. I liked leotardic clothes—body-conscious clothes. The jersey-bodied T-shirty silver second skin. That was Edie. Her body was very important to her. . . . I’ve got pictures in this album. Here’s Edie in the “skeletal”—silver outlining the collar bone, the arm, the pelvis . . . a kind of bone layout. I mean, that’s
timeless
. Spacey. Timeless. Here’s the “Story of O” dress, you’ll remember, with the grommets up the front, the leather “Noise” dress that had all these metal grommets clashing. Here’s the body-composition dress. Color compositions based on the body. I have all of these clothes up at home in Connecticut. But they’re wrecked. The kids in the family have been wearing them for Halloween.

GLORIA SCHIFF
 Somebody told me that Edie was adorable and available to be photographed for
Vogue
. I remembered from either a previous photograph or a previous description that she was an enchanting, beguiling little girl.

Edie modeling a Betsey Johnson design

We did the session out in Brooklyn Heights, where Gianni Penati photographed her. She and I and the hairdresser all had a rendezvous at the
Vogue
offices in the Graybar Building at eleven o’clock, which was a late hour for a sitting, but I thought it would be easier on her because she might be the sort of person if the hour was too early would not show. If s happened before.

She came dressed in a very Bohemian, very unsoigné way—a pair of blue jeans and possibly a pea jacket of some kind. The elevator man would certainly not have turned to look at her. No way! Some of those young girls can turn up in a rather conspicuous way. Twiggy would always appear beautifully turned out, along with her agent; there was always some sort of excitement in the hall when Twiggy or one of those girls would walk in. Professionals come with a hill, and their nails are done, and so is their hair. But not Edie. She came as an innocent. Her childlike hands were so funny, but she had no blemishes or discolorations. Her make-up was terrible—you didn’t really want a lot of make-up on that particular kind of face. Some people are very angular and Gothic, with tremendous contours and lids and enormous noses and big mouths, profiles, and they don’t smile. Then you want make-up, because you’re really painting a canvas that doesn’t move. Edie had a face that wasn’t a canvas; it was moving all the time. It never stopped.

On the way out to Penati’s studio I remember sitting in the car thinking: “My
God
, we’ve got a child 11 mean, she’s completely childlike.”

Penati creates a very nice atmosphere. He flirts, he’s mad, he’s fun. He says, “Ahhhh, you’re so beautiful! They never told me you were so beautiful I” That kind of thing. He’s a mad Italian. “Ahhh, there is the sex image of all time.” He’s adorable, and he has tremendous sex appeal. Totally charming and very childlike. He would be totally keen about a girl like Edie because she had a nymphet quality which he always adored.

She loosened up and became very with it . . . giggling and laughing, kind of oblivious to the camera, and you realized what wonderful things could happen to her as a model or a star . . . visualizing her dressed in different outfits or in other locations. I thought, “Oh, God, she’d be so much more beautiful in evening clothes.” There was a tremendous range in how she looked and the way she projected.

There was also a paradoxical side to her. She contradicted herself all day long. She’d be flirtatious with Gianni, then she’d be a child, clinging to me: she’d be cocky, then shy, then competent. She’d go
through a whole range of emotional behavior, which is typical, isn’t it, of a lot of stars. I adored her smile and the little fawnlike quality she had. What is amazing is that her face and her looks in these pictures are totally contemporary. They could appear in any fashion magazine tomorrow. They have no date to them. Don’t you agree? She was wise with her energy. Surprisingly wise.

We had an idea what we wanted to do with her. I knew we wanted to put black lingerie on her and that she would be terrific; she was so blonde and pale and light. Her hair was a bit of a problem because she hadn’t done very much with it. Her hair was not in what is called “first-rate” condition. Fortunately, this charming little hairdresser called Ingrid from Kenneth’s brought some hairpieces. Since the photos were black and white, there was no problem matching the hair, and the wilder and the larger the hairpieces Ingrid put on, the smaller and more beautiful Edie’s face became—like a little bird’s. Her eyes were black, like a snake’s. She was just unbelievably appealing and photogenic—especially with Gianni Penati’s lighting, which was very lenial—that means the light illuminates half a face, the other diffused. That is very Avedon or Penati, and it’s very helpful if your face isn’t absolutely perfect in proportion, and is a little Modigliani and off-balance. Any imperfection is somewhat concealed. We put some blush on her and lots of mascara and gloss on the lips to give them some life, and the rest was all her. It was a personality sitting: she was a personality girl. It wasn’t as if she were truly a model or a movie star: she was an enchanting, remarkable creature of the moment.

Some of the pictures weren’t used in the magazine. There was one in which she was wearing this corsetlike lingerie, a black one with suspenders; a little like that wonderful movie with Marlene Dietrich—what was it called?—
The Blue Angel.
Edie Sedgwick captured that quality in this black lingerie with the white stockings and her white skin. It had a little of Berlin in it; a little bit of something that was strange and not totally American, not totally collegiate or soigné . . . a little messy, a little bit out of control.

She wasn’t very strong. You felt that. Oh, dear, this girl . . . she talked about her life and her friends and the way she spent her time. It wasn’t sound, obviously, it was going to lead to trouble. She was very mixed up. But I was mad about her.

I remember going with the pictures to Diana Vreeland, who was the editor-in-chief, saying, “We’ve got a start There’s no doubt about it, she is terrific! A great model I We should do a whole issue on her.”

Edie In
Vogue,
March 15, 1966

DIANA VREELAND
 She had a little dance step in her walk; she was so happy with the world. She was charming. She suggested springtime and freshness. She was very clean and clear, and her hair was pulled back, almost
Alice in Wonderland.
Freshness and proportion and a sense of the sort of rollick of life, you know, the fun of life. She was a Youthquaker, wasn’t she?—one of the true personalities of the Sixties. Only twice in this century has the youth been dominant. The Twenties and the Sixties. Youth came through; the language changed; the music; the humor. The writers and painters produced something totally different from the years before. The two eras have a lot in common. In the Fitzgerald era, Prohibition was on; everybody was as wild as a March hare; everybody had great Stutz Bearcats, and Mercedes—great, enormous cars roaring through the night; youth was wild, rich, extravagant, and marvelous . . . though, unfortunately, it added up to very little . . . I think the Sixties wI’ll add up to much more.

I don’t call it a violently sex period. You might say, “Well, everybody slept with everybody like kittens.” It was just possible. Don’t forget, the PI’ll changed the world. Certainly, though, it was a very intensive moment of the beauty of the body. No question. Every girl thought every other girl was beautiful; every boy thought the other boy was beautiful; every boy thought every girl was beautiful; every girl thought every boy was beautiful.

But if you’re an
honest-to
-God model, you go to a gym before you come to work; you have one boyfriend who buys you your dinner. You go to bed good and early. No nonsense. You’d never see one in a nightclub.

That wasn’t Edie, though Edie had a wonderful look about her. Lovely skin, but then I’ve never seen anyone on drugs that didn’t have wonderful skin. There must have been some frustration. She was after life, and sometimes life doesn’t come fast enough.

GLORIA SCHIFF
 There was some sort of problem about continuing with Edie at
Vogue.
Perhaps the magazine’s policy became involved. The whole thing kind of collapsed. It was never pursued again. We lost a moment when we could have captured it . . . which was sad. She disappeared from our lives. Edie’s timing was a fraction off. She almost did become a part of the family at
Vogue
. If that had happened, she would have had tremendous protection. But she was identified in the gossip columns with the drug scene, and back then there was a certain apprehension about being involved in that scene . . . people were really terrified by it. So unless it involved very important artists
or musicians, we played it cool as much as we could—drugs had done so much damage to young, creative, brilliant people that we were just and. that scene as a policy. Not that we weren’t sympathetic . . . God!

TRUMAN CAPOTE
 Anyone who gets involved with the world of fashion has her own self-destruct built into it. The constant beat, beat, beat, and this girl wandering through it, the total victim, believing it all and destroyed by it through no fault of her own.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (from tapes for the movie
Ciao! Manhattan) I was Girl of the Year and superstar and all that crap. Yd do things tike . . . Everything I did was really underneath, I guess, motivated by psychological disturbances. Yd make a mask out of my face because I didn’t realize I was quite beautiful, God blessed me so. I practically destroyed it. I had to wear heavy black eyelashes tike bat wings, and dark lines under my eyes, and cut all my hair off, my long, dark hair. Cut it off and strip it silver and blond and all those Utile maneuvers I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me. Yd freak out in a very physical way. And it was all taken as a fashion trend.
Vogue
photographed me on top of this enormous leather rhinoceros that I had in my apartment on Sixty-third Street, in leotards and a T-shirt, as a new costume. And then the newspapers took it up because Andy and I ended up appearing in the same places. And I was kind of turned off for the time being, going out with men, because I was very upset that two of my brothers had committed suicide
—
two that I loved very much. And it kind of screwed up my head, so I just didn’t want . . . I just freaked out for a while. . . .