Edie (59 page)

She’d sneak out. Coerce somebody, which was very easy for her because her charm was always stI’ll there, always, into getting her booze so she could get totally blasted out of her mind and do these weird things. She’d go naked. Hitchhiking with her shirt open so her breasts would show. Sometimes she wouldn’t go to sleep until somebody came and slept with her. She said she wanted to have more silicone. Pop her breasts out some more. She’d say, “David, I want a shock treatment today.” She loved the sodium pentothal. She could be calm for a couple of days, but then,
pssssht
, she’d be right back up, hyper-city, back on the booze and stuff, responding to the stimulus and being outrageous. “Where’s Edie?” “I don’t know.” “Oh, goddammit, now we’ve got to find her. How’d you let her get away? Go out, search and search.” I tried to maintain my respect for her. But sometimes things became just too gross. One night Dave said, “You’ve got to come through for me. Edie’s got to have sex. You’ve got to go up there. It’s up to you, Wes.”

Edie in
Ciao! Manhattan

Edie in the shock treatment scene in
Ciao! Manhattan

I went upstairs to her. I felt sorry, not because I was offering myself as a sacrifice but because she was doing all these things. Her room was in total disarray. Lake a bad porno film. But she’d respond! That’s what made me mad. I kept asking, “Edie, what are you doing to yourself? We
know
you’re pulling this number. Why won’t you come through?”

“Nuh, nuh, nuh.” She would never give an inch.

JEFFREY BRIGGS
 Everybody was pissed at Edie. They were getting toward the end of
Ciao! Manhattan
. To get one damn line out of her would take hours . . . hours I Her longest marathon—which we all remember and joke about—was the last line of her role in the film. The line was: “Oh, God. That’s what I hate about California. They roll up the fucking sidewalks at midnight.” Right? Tough line, right? But, man, she got a hold of that sucker and we were
forever
trying to get it out of her right. She’d find more ways to fuck it up. She’d say almost the whole line: “Oh, God I That’s what I hate about California. They roll up the fucking sidewalks . . .” and then she’d stop and try to figure out what came next. Or she’d say “two a.m.” or “noon,” something like that just to screw it up. It must have gone on for three hours. She’d say: “Oh, fucking God! That’s what California . . .” Then, blah, blah, she’d say, “Oh, I screwed it up, I’m sorry.” “Cut!” “Beep.” “Sound whatever, scene whatever, take eighteen,” or “thirty-five,” some outrageous number. She was just lying there on the water bed half naked, with her corduroy pants on, and that one line to say.

DAVID WEISMAN
 I carried on like a Gestapo inquisitioner. I screamed in her ear so that I became so hoarse that in an hour I couldn’t talk. It was a locking of the horns. She was stronger than me; she broke me. I was determined, but she won.

Somehow she got the notion that we were finished with her and that
with the film almost done we were going to throw her away like a dishrag. So she did a song-and-dance those last nights. So that we’d have to keep on shooting the film forever . . . trying to get it right . . . so we wouldn’t abandon her.

MICHAEL POST
 They sent Roger Vadim, the French film director, upstairs to talk to her. We had used him as an actor in the film. Edie was interested in him. “When is Vadim coming? When is Vadim coming?” she had been saying all day. He told her that once she was finished with
Ciao! Manhattan
he wanted her to star in his film
Pretty Maids All in a Row
. Vadim had this big thing about how we were too strict with her and that what she needed was love. He would sit there for hours and tell her how she was going to be the biggest star the world had ever known.

Minutes later Edie came down and started to finish the filming. She was sick, with this bad cough, and she was going through the DTs, and was just so wanting of Vadim’s love and what he had promised her.

After a couple of minutes the film ran out . . . and everyone took off on their little trip. I went to sleep. Edie went off with Vadim to Malibu. Maxie, the thin nurse, was just violent. She put her foot down. “You’re not going with him. You’re coming back with us to Santa Barbara.” Edie shrugged them off. She had these thoughts of Vadim coming in and sweeping her off her feet and taking her to some movie Camelot . . . she’d be the next Brigitte Bardot or Jane Fonda. She went with him.

The next morning I woke up at Dave Weisman’s place. He came in early in the morning: “Michael! Michael! Can you go out and get Edie at Malibu?”

So I went up to Malibu. All right, as
usual
, I’d go out and pick her up . . . drive her to and fro. I drove her back to Santa Barbara. She was very sick. Vomiting all the way back. We went right to Dr. Mercer’s place and he gave her a shot. We went back to the apartment, where she kept writhing in pain. She finally said, “Well, I guess maybe going into the hospital is all right.”

It was so ironical. Here she went off to Mrs. Grace’s and did this whole bizarre film gig of shock treatments—off there to Hollywood, off to stardom—and then
BOOM
, back into Mrs. Grace’s to go through
real
shock treatments. Exactly what she had acted out. It was really a quirk . . . a weird twist of fate.

NAN O’BYRNE
 She’d call me from the clinic and ask me to come over and sew a button on for her. “Bring a needle and thread,” and she’d carefully describe what color I should bring. Pink. one of Edie’s favorites. So I’d go over there and say, “Now, Edie, I think it’s time that you learned to sew a button on yourself.” We sat down on the bed and she said, “You know . . . I just don’t know how.” That afternoon she was fairly close to remembering me . . . though I don’t think she remembered what we’d done together in New York. She just knew I was a friend. She told me, “The only thing about these shock treatments . . . though they say they’re good for me . . . is that I can’t remember anything. It really makes me mad.”

I said, “Don’t take any more.”

“I have to,” she said. “My doctor says I have to.”

So she began sewing the button on. Every now and then she’d stop and ask, “Is this right?”

I’d say, “Of course it’s right, look at it I”

“I don’t know how to tie a knot.”

I said, “Edie, tie a knot, man. You know how to tie a knot.”

She’d do it . . . very proud . . . very proud of that button.

MICHAEL POST
 She was in the clinic from January 17 to June 4, 1971. She had shock treatments—I don’t know how many—maybe twenty or more. Dr. Mercer told me that she’d had some shock treatments in the east. He authorized the new ones because he thought Edie could be close to suicidal. Really an ugly scene. But a couple of days after she was up there . . . she just looked out of this world again. Just really fabulous.

JANET PALMER
 Michael Post was the only person who ever stuck to Edie. He was always there, he was really marvelous. One of the charms of Michael Post, which was sweet for Edie, was that he was the only person she couldn’t get into bed. Michael was determined to stay a virgin until he was twenty-one. Then it was all to happen on a flat rock up on a mountain with the sun shining.

MICHAEL POST
 We had a big argument. She said I reminded her so much of her brothers. I didn’t want to be thought of as reminding her of someone who had died. I didn’t want to be a living death. so I said, “This is going a bit too far.”

The story of Edie Sedgwick Superstar of New York’s Silver Sixties

But I couldn’t forget her. I always knew from the start that she was the girl I was going to marry. She and I would never really split apart. On Valentine’s Day I sent her the world’s largest valentine. Then I went to see her at Mrs. Grace’s on her birthday. It was a foggy day in the city and as soon as I got halfway up into the mountains it was all sunny. I went to give her some yellow flowers. She came to the door in a satin pink-and-white bathrobe and pink ostrich feathers. She had on a tall wig. It looked horrible. It was one of those funky mail-order wigs that you buy one and you get the other for free. As soon as the door opened, she kind of zoomed out. She was really tired of the hospital routine. She said, “I wish you’d come and see me more often.”

When she got out, she wanted me to move into her two-bedroom apartment with her. She said, “Michael, I’ve got to be living with someone when I get out. Otherwise I’ll have Sherry and Maxie there, and I don’t want that. Here I am, twenty-eight years old, and how do you think it makes me feel when someone says, ‘Oh, so you have to have nurses living with you’? It makes me feel like I’ll never get well.”

I really was in love with her, but I was firmly resolved. Edie put me to the test. It really came right down to her actually raping me, it really did. It happened in her apartment one night. Edie delivered an ultimatum: “Let’s do it, or else. I need someone who’s got guts. If you’re not him, then let’s not see each other any more.”

Edie’s ultimatum came one month after I was twenty, and I thought, “Here I am, only eleven months from my goal.” But I really felt she was serious. She felt rejected, and as a way of defending herself, she came back at me with, “Listen, if we’re just going to have a hi-and-goodbye relationship, I don’t need it. You’ve got this fucking fantasy about how everything’s going to be flowers, violins, and all this bullshit when you’re twenty-one. You’re screwed up!”

So I did it. It sort of destroyed the fairy-tale idea of when I’d do it—but I was scared of losing her if I didn’t. And then, I suppose, I realized the game I was playing with myself about procrastinating was pretty foolish. I had always kissed with her and petted until there was only one thing left to do and I would say, “Well, it’s time for me to go and hit the books again.” She always seemed kind of disgusted. So this time, even though I was planning on leaving, I ended up staying.

MICHAEL POST
 I dreamt Edie in my dreams every night. I couldn’t control my dreams. Wilderness dreams, city dreams, beaches. High dreams, heavy dreams: masquerade balls, not gay or frivolous, but eerier and grotesquely bizarre. There was this one dream when Edie had on Indian buckskins. She had a big brown bag of Seconals. I was just totally wrapped up. I’d read half a paragraph and the next thing on my mind was Edie. I used to fantasize that I would even be making love to her on the night she died. It would be like a great send-off.