Tabloid train wrecks make for easy gossip fodder, especially these days, when it seems no intimate detail of their descent is too blush-worthy for the press or the public. In the sixties-before the now-tired routine of unbalanced star behaves weirdly; handler explains it away as exhaustion or bad fish; said star apologizes to fans and checks into rehab with a moralistic wag of the finger to the kiddies-Edie Sedgwick was a prolific train wreck who shot quickly to the heights of American pop culture and glamour, then sunk into obscurity and didn't live to see 30.
When a famous person dies young, one can usually assume it's drug-related, as Bill Maher recently remarked on a talk show when asked about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. That was definitely true in Edie's case, but her descent, unlike that of Anna Nicole (and possibly Britney), wasn't managed by agents and PR flacks and lawyers, nor dissected by a vampiric press and public. She was a free-floating siren of the fabulously drug-drenched sixties who burned bright and quickly burned out.
"The drug scene at that time was prevalent in all aspects of the culture. She imbibed drugs in the casual way that New Yorkers did at the time," said Billy Name, photographer and manager of Andy Warhol's Factory in the sixties, in an interview with The Hampton Sheet following the release of Factory Girl. "Her charm was not really manageable by Warhol or anyone else, so her career was not managed with skill and didn't go anywhere. I think the disappointment of that was more significant to her downward attitude than the drugs."
Billy and Edie became fast friends when the soon-to-be Warhol muse and her Harvard entourage first descended upon the Factory-which Name had decorated in silver foil and paint-in 1965. Name describes her as a "delightful person, very poised and charming. Coming up with the accurate word for her beauty is difficult. Beautiful is the wrong word. It's like if you saw Audrey Hepburn for the first time, you wouldn't say she's beautiful, but she's special. She was not the girl next door, but more of the dream girl you run into and are so overwhelmed with that you fall in love with her for life. Her chemistry was ultraspecial. She talked to you like you were very close friends from the very beginning. She had a very spacey mind, spacey in the sense that it was modern."
Name's friendship with Edie lasted until 1967, around the time her star faded from the Warhol galaxy and she moved to California. In 1968, the original Silver Factory was shuttered and Warhol opened the second Factory on Union Square. Billy was present the day deranged would-be writer Valerie Solanis visited the Factory in '69 and gunned down Andy. Name heard the shots, and came out of the darkroom (which was also where he slept) to find his friend lying in a pool of blood. He held the artist in his arms and raised him up to a sitting position. Valerie had fled, but the cops and ambulance hadn't yet arrived.
"It was very traumatic, you know, because-well, I started crying over Andy, because it looked so terrible," Name remembers. "And he said a very strange thing. In the sort of delirium he was in, he said, 'Oh, Billy, please don't make me laugh, it hurts too much.'"
The shooting marked the end of an era. The Factory was henceforth closed to anonymous drop-ins, and Name holed up in his darkroom for the next couple of years. One day in 1970 he taped a note to the darkroom door that read, "Dear Andy, I am not here anymore but I am fine. Love, Billy," and hitchhiked to the West Coast.
Billy didn't hear of Edie's 1971 overdose death until he returned to his hometown of Poughkeepsie in 1977 and found the George Plimpton-edited Edie: American Girl lying on a table in his dentist's waiting room.
Why do brilliant edgy people tend to die so young?
"It's not unusual for young people to die at that age," says Name. "In astrology it's called the first Saturn return. It's the first position that Saturn was at when they were born. It's like with Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison. It's the crisis of whether or not you've developed the skill or stamina to go on with life, and if you haven't, you just die. Drugs tend to make it easier for their life force to dissipate, and it just gives out."
But Edie's ultimate downfall, says Billy, had less to do with drugs and more to do with money and success: "When her father cut off her credit card and she wrecked her car, she was economically destitute; no money from Warhol, no money from Daddy, no money from Dylan, career going nowhere-this must have been a trigger for depression. She was living the life of luxury and ease, and suddenly she was zeroed. I think that's what caused her demise. It was just too big of a change-from poor little rich girl to poor little poor girl, and she really didn't like it."
Of the movies portraying Warhol and the Factory over the years, Billy's favorites are 1996's Basquiat and I Shot Andy Warhol (for which he served as creative consultant). His favorite Warhol was Jared Harris in the latter film, though "Bowie did a good job at portraying him [in Basquiat], but didn't have the look and movements down."
And what about Factory Girl?
"It's an okay movie, but there's nothing special about it, and the portrayal's on again, off again, but not really Edie. I'm asked, 'What do you think Edie would think of the movie,' and I say, 'What do you think Joan Crawford would think of Mommie Dearest? It's never the whole story, it's like the flashy part of her life.'"
"Edie is this magic icon of freedom for American girls even though her life ended in tragedy. She still symbolizes for them what it's like to be free. She's almost like a Joan of Arc to them all."
Stay tuned for more on Warhol and the Factory in the Memorial Day/June issue.
