ABSTRACT
The 1982 book, Edie: An American Biography, tells the story of the short, drug-addled, celebrity life of Edie Sedgwick. 1 Born into American pedigree and privilege, Edie was one of eight children in a family dominated by an abusive father. 2 By the age of thirteen, Edie was anorexic and bulimic. At age nineteen, she was sent to several private mental hospitals where she discovered her talent for art, her fashionable penchant for black tights, and also her aptitude for getting around rules (she became pregnant and had an abortion during her commission at Bloomingdale, the notoriously restrictive Westchester Division of New York Hospital). At age twenty, she went directly to Harvard—the family alma mater—to study art. At Harvard she exclusively befriended very smart, very beautiful gay men—"very nitroglycerine queens” and “Harvard dandies.” 3 However, after two of her brothers (Harvard graduates) committed suicide, Edie left Cambridge and moved to New York, where she was able to accelerate her climb to celebrity status, spending her inheritance on thousands of dollars a week of clothing, makeup, limousines, and other extravagances, further cultivating her chic “look.” She frequented old society clubs and the new discotheques, where she became an instant hit, dancing excessively and doing everything to the furthest extent of indulgence. When she wandered in with her entourage to Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1965, she immediately became his new superstar. They went everywhere together and she began to look and dress like him—whisper-thin and ghostly pale in black tights and boat-neck striped T-shirts, topped off with short, shaggy, silver-streaked hair. She starred in numerous early Warhol films including Vinyl (1965), Space (1965), and Kitchen 2(1965). In 1965 she was dubbed a “Youthquaker” in a Vogue magazine pictorial and became the most famous, most fashionable girl in New York, while high on amphetamines most of the time. She modeled, partied, and lived in the infamous Chelsea Hotel and, in her own words, “blossomed into a healthy young drug addict.” 4 She starred in Ciao! Manhattan, which was basically the story of a day in New York in the life of Edie Sedgwick—the debutante drug-addict, sixties underground hipster, and fashion trendsetter. 5 She moved back to California, was in and out of mental hospitals, underwent intensive electroshock treatments, and got breast implants (in 1971!) before resuming her role in the extended production of Ciao! Manhattan—Edie’s farewell performance. She died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971 at the age of twenty-eight.
