Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
R.I.P.
By James Wolcott
Edie: An American Biography
by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton
Knopf, 455 pp., $16.95
For a brief spell in the mid-Sixties, Edie Sedgwick was the debutante princess of piss-elegance, an Andy Warhol 'superstar' whose fashion trademark was a snowy white mink draped over a dimestore t-shirt. Edie was always abuzz with debbie enthusiasm—as Warhol himself put it, even when she was asleep, her hands were wide awake. But the all-American Edie was soon eclipsed on the Warhol scene by the icily cosmopolitan Nico, whose moody, ghostly voice adorned the music of the Velvet Under-ground Like Nico, Edie had a fondness for soothing candlelight, but where Nico could bathe by candlelight without setting off fire alarms Edie nearly torched herself twice—once in her East Side apartment, the next time in her room at the Chelsea Hotel. She also banged herself up once in a traffic accident, engaged in monkey-wild bouts of indiscriminate sex, and spent a number of stretches in the swankier and, later, rattier loony bins.
Review, 3300 words
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