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Kevin Nuckolls

Kevin Nuckolls, an Honors Major at heart, is a junior Computer Science major. He wrote this paper as a creative writing assignment for Honors Contemporary Movements in Modern Painting with Mrs. Jana Travis. This paper was a written response to the book Edie: American Girl, the graphic biography of Edie Sedgewick. He wanted to share this piece because it was his first creative writing piece.

Fashion! Art! Movies! Clothes! Parties! Drugs! This was life for some in New York in the 1960s. Andy Warhol and his merry followers were cavaliering around the town, always thinking about the NOW NOW now now now. Many were on some wild drug binge but I mean really, who cared!? Everyone else was in on it too. Everything was moving fast! Fast! FAST! On to Dr. Roberts, get a poke. Down to the factory, shoot a movie. Off to the party, fashionably late, loaded with speed and dressed to kill. Ah yes, these kids loved it and they were the talk of the town. Everywhere they went there was talk about Edie and Warhol (EDIE AND WARHOL) [EDIE AND WARHOL]. The whole scene exploded when they arrived. They were the King and Queen of New York for a short while, but what made them tick? Why did everyone hinge on them, their successes and their failures? In fact, who was Edie Sedgewick anyway?

REWIND. Ten years earlier. Edie is a kid growing up on her family ranch in California. Her parents both had psychological problems and were told not to have any children (but everyone knows a father with a sex addiction like that could never heed that advice. Someone should have neutered him when they had the chance. MANY women had the chance…) Moving on, Edie and her siblings grew up on this ranch almost totally isolated from the rest of society. When they wanted to go into town her father would only reply with a “we’ll see…..” So needless to say, these kids were strange. Not only through the fault of their upbringing but the majority of the fault lied in their genes. Edie’s biography is just littered with members of her family (and especially Edie herself) wandering in and out of mental hospitals like nobody’s business. For afflictions ranging from anxiety, bulimia, burn wounds, etc. You name it; one of the Sedgewicks had it.

So for someone so burdened by the weight of psychological disorder, she seemed to play that off pretty well. After having moved out of the house she made her way to the east coast. She fit in perfectly. Men of all shapes and sizes would answer her every bidding. She was a queen of her own time (and this was before she even MET Andy.) She ran with a lot of big names at the time, I suppose the biggest one would be Bob Dylan. Obviously the following lyrics were written about Edie:

“Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do
You make love just like a woman, yes, you do
Then you ache just like a woman
But you break just like a little girl.”
- Bob Dylan (Just like a Woman)

I find that if I had to describe Edie to someone else, the sum of my understanding could be expressed in those words. In fact, for a time Edie was obsessed with Dylan. (As were many other women, but that’s beside the point. Or is it….) You see, Edie had a thing for Bob Neuwirth, and he was in good with Mr. Dylan. Then she had a thing with Mr. Dylan himself. There was talk about the two starring in a movie for a time, but I’m getting ahead of myself….

“Andy Warhol, you’re so scream. Hang him on my wall. Andy Warhol, silver screen. Can’t tell him apart at all.” Those are the eternal words of David Bowie (Hunky Dory: Never heard it? Shame on you. Each song is a masterpiece) Somehow this quiet shy man became the talk of the town. He started with pop art, the on to movies, and fashion, WHATEVER. The story of Andy Warhol is one of fast times, and wild stories but in retrospect it seems that all of his “SUPERSTARS” ended up washed up, drugged out, and Andy didn’t give a shit. But again, I’m too far ahead. When Edie and Andy met it was epic. You wouldn’t have known it at the time but this was the beginning of something BIG. Edie’s eventual elevation to level of superstar was just around the corner. She stared in many of his movies. They were just inseparable and everyone crooned over their every thought. She even calmed a mob at one of Andy’s art openings while they broke through the ceiling to escape their loving fans. Yes yes, I know. WYLDE TYMES.

But there’s a dark underbelly to all of these so called “wylde tymes.” Edie was becoming more and more of a drug addict. She needed Drugs to come up. Drugs to get down. Drugs to go to sleep. Drugs to act. Drugs to talk. Drugs. DRUGS. DRUGS. There are stories about her carrying around a picnic basket filled with a drug stash that could only be shown up by something you might find in the trunk of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Great White Shark.” You would think someone would notice that Edie was on a downward spiral, a one way ticket to stardom and death. But man, everyone was on it at the time. Everyone around her was visiting Dr. Roberts. This was a man who was just passing out syringes filled with SOMETHING WILD. Sometimes speed. Sometimes coke. Heroin (“It is my wife, it is my life. HAHA”). You name it, that man had the magic remedy for all your ills. Everyone in the factory was turned on to this stuff. All of these kids were blasted out of their minds and just loving it. Just loving it. Andy didn’t seem to mind. No one ever speaks of Andy doing drugs or having sex, but he was always there right on the edge, pushing things to the limit. He was the ultimate instigator. However he got his status is irrelevant. He was there, engineering every situation. All these drugged out fools were just lapping up whatever he had to say.

Lou Reed from the Velvet Underground even succumbed to his wishes that Nico be added into their original album. While that album IS a masterpiece (It has influenced more modern music than you know) and Andy had a big hand in the making of it, the overtones in the creation of the album are something that seemed to ripple throughout Andy’s life. Lou Reed didn’t want Nico on the album, but he succumbed against his will. Many eventually came to some compromise with Andy’s constant pushing. Eventually Edie succumbed as well. She wanted badly to be in this movie thing with Dylan and that’s when she and Andy split. You see, Edie thought she was something special with Dylan, only to find 4 months later that the whole time he had been secretly married. When Edie died Andy could not have cared less. He was always in the now, always exploiting and pushing. He was an interesting man and people listened to what he had to say but at a certain point the world stopped caring about Andy Warhol, and probably for good reasons.

If I were to tell you that Edie’s life peaked with her Warhol movement some would disagree, but I feel that was the beginning of many of the addictions that would eventually kill her about six years later. There are so many names in her biography. She seemed to know a little of everyone and everyone thought they knew Edie. But time and time again, one hundred pages later the same people who said they thought they knew Edie came back to say that they had no idea who she was. She was a social butterfly who reinvented herself as often as possible. The drugs really took a toll though. She burned down the Chelsea hotel and got thrown in hospital after hospital. When she went home for Christmas her parents tried to put her in a mental hospital. Bob Neuwirth eventually got her out by threatening her father with legal action (Although, I am of the opinion that no hospital could help Edie or quell her addictions). She was doomed from birth. Her father was the root of all the evils that haunted Edie’s spirit. He tried to abuse her sexually, and that was something I think she carried with her the rest of her life. She would do so much meth and go on sex binges, but I feel as if she had no connection to her body at this point. She trashed her body time and time again and people would have to save her from the depths of some binge. She had so many prospects. She could have been in movies or been a model for Vogue, but the drugs were like an evil spirit that followed her around like a shadow. When she died I feel as if there was a huge sigh that let out of everyone who ever knew her. “Finally” they would say. “How she ever held out as long as she did the world may never know.”

Works Cited

Bowie, David. "Andy Warhol." Rec. 1971. Hunky Dory. 

Reed, Lou. "Heroin." By The Velvet Underground. Rec. Jan. 1967. The Velvet Underground and Nico. 

Stein, Jean. Edie: American Girl. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Grove P, 1982. 

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