Once one of the most famous socialites in America and Warhol's superstar, Edie Sedgwick hid her deepest guilty pleasures behind a battered eyelash on her darkened eyes.
She was born Edith Minturn Sedgewick on April 20th 1943, the daughter of Alice and Francis in Santa Barbara, Calafornia.
Edie's father, Francis, whom she called 'Fuzzy', was a Santa Barbra rancher who prior to his marriage to Edie's Mother, had had three nervous breakdowns. Before the marriage, he suffered from a severe phase of manic-depressive psychosis. Doctors advised Francis and Alice to not have children, but instead they had a total of eight; Alice, Robert, Pamela, 'Minty', Johnathan, Katharine, 'Edie', and Susanna.
During the war, the family moved to Corral de Quati, in the Santa Ynez Valley, to a much larger ranch with the money inherited from Edie's maternal grandfather. Although losing a large sum of the fortune in the Wall Street Crash, Edie's mother inherited the rest of the money, summing up to several million dollars.
After discovering oil on the ranch in the early fifties, the family gathered another small fortune to their already wealthy inheritance and bought a new ranch, Rancho La Laguna de San Francisco.
Minty was Edie's older brother whom she was extremely close to. He was an alcoholic at age fifteen and due to the circumstances the Sedgewick children were put under by their parents, this was not unusual. He was forced into care by 'Fuzzy' at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital during the early sixties before hanging himself in 1964, after ringing Edie the night before explaining that she was' the only Sedgewick he could ever hope for'.
Edies other brother 'Bobby' also has psychiatric problems and was also sent to Silver Hill. He died in 1965 after riding his Harley Davidson into the side of a bus without a helmet, conspiracy has left us to believe this may have been by choice.
First instotutionalized into Silver Hill in the autumn on 1962, Edie was suffering from Anorexia. She was shipped between mental hospitals by 'Fuzzy' and fell pregnant whilst on a hospital pass, leading her to have an abortion.
In1963, she was released from hospital and moved to Cambridge, Massachusets, where she attended art school for a short time before moving to New York in 1964, at the age of 21.
In the January of '65, Edie met Andy Warhol at a party, held by Lester Perskey in his apartment. Soon after, she frequently began making visits to the Factory where Andy was mesmorised by her beauty and presence, leading him to put her into 'Vinyl' at the last minute and his film 'Horse' where she arrived at the Factory toward the end of the filming.
Despite Warhol's films not having commercial success, and rarely seen by people outside of the Factory circle, Sedgewick's fame grew and bled into the mainstream media, reporting on her appearances with Warhol and her appearances in his underground films, dubbing her his 'superstar'.
Edie's modelling career also took off at this point, developing of Edie's 'trademark look' of black leotards, mini dresses, hugely dark eyes and large chandelier earrings that would lay on her shoulders. After moving to New York, Edie began cuting her hair short and dying her naturally brunette hair blonde, after an unsuccessful attemp to spray her hair silver, which made rumours in the media of her being 'Warhol's twin'.
Edie met Bob Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth in December of 1964, approximately a moth before she met Andy. Dylan and Edie immediately had a connection although he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel with his future wife, Sara, and their three year old child from a previous marriage at the time. Whilst Sara took care of their child at the Hotel, Dylan and Edie would enjoy the nightlife of New York, Dylan was also having an affair with Joan Baez at this time which had begun before he met Edie whom he later broke up with. Edie and Dylan had a New York romance before Dylan married Sara in a secret ceremony in 1965, something that Edie apparently found out later in a argument with Andy at teh Gingerman Restaurant in February the of '66. Some of Dylan's later songs were roumered to be about Edie. And Andy.
By this time, Edie had become heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol after having a secret relationship with Dylan's best friend 'Bob Neuwirth'. She bacame dependant on Barbiturates althought there was no evidence that she was a heroin addict. The relationship was broken off in 1967 after it became too hard to cope with her drug abuse and erratic behaviour.
In April 1967, Edie bagan shooting the underground movie 'Ciao! Manhattan' which took five years to film due to Edie's drug abuse, arrests, and hospital adimissions. The tapes are living proof of Edie's last years and the lifestyle that she left behind. Whilst in Hospital she began a relationship with another patient, 'Michael Post'. They married in the July of '71 in Santa Brabra, Calafornia.
Edie died in the November of 1971, of a drug overdose.
Written by Matthew Needham
