Edie: The Extraterrestrial

By RICHARD CORLISS

A hit book and a movie revive a '60s underground star

"What would you wear on the moon?"

That was the big question of the Sixties.

-- Designer Betsey Johnson in Edie

Were there other questions worth asking in that turbid decade--about wars, revolutions, anything more dramatic than a lunar hemline? There were, but few seem interested in them now. The frenetic world of '60s sex and drugs makes for a kickier nightmare than Viet Nam or Watts or Kent State. It offers an escape into Hollywood melodrama, but with the frisson of real names and familiar faces. How else to explain the post-mortem celebrity of Edie Sedgwick? Once a footnote in any pop history of the decade, she is now the summer's hot number. Edie (Knopf; $16.95), a 450-page biography of her, is secure on the bestseller lists; and Ciao! Manhattan, a grotesquely autobiographical film she made eleven years ago, is being re-released in New York.

Who was Edie Sedgwick? She was a strikingly pretty young woman with a genius for self-destruction. Her pedigree and her rap sheet conspire to prove that truth can be as compelling as the most lurid novel: daughter of a distinguished, disturbed New England family; evanescent superstar of Andy Warhol's underground movies; blitzed-out druggie; a careless suicide at 28. The glamour, the abuse, the aristocracy of decadence--my dear, it's just too delicious.

Delicious and, like amphetamine candy, addictive. One gobbles up the testimony in Edie, culled by Jean Stein and George Plimpton from interviews with some 250 people who crossed paths or swords with the poor little rich girl. An awful fascination obtains to the book's elegant gossip. See Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and hitman of the double-domed Right, dance wickedly on the grave of one of Edie's ancestors. Recall the night that Rock Star Jim Morrison paid sexual obeisance to Jimi Hendrix on the stage of Steve Paul's nightclub, the Scene. Watch Warhol shrug as a woman invades his Factory, takes out a pistol and shoots a hole through the foreheads of seven stacked Marilyn Monroe portraits--just a few years before Andy himself would be shot by another female intruder. Gobble gobble. Yum yum.

The star of this Mylar melodrama had her own seductive pathology, much of which came from her bloodlines. A bizarre brood, the Sedgwicks. Their money was so "old" it just seemed to grow wild, like weeds on a lawn, or like the manic-depressive strain that led to suicide for several members of the clan. Uncle Minturn, who kept watch over the Sedgwick gravesite in Stockbridge, Mass., insisted on cheap pine coffins for the family and would lie inside them to test their fit. Edie's father Francis, a golden boy at Harvard in the 1920s who turned to sculpting and then brought his wife and children to California, was perhaps the most curious of the lot. To save the expense of hiring a model for his sculpture of a Crucifixion scene, he strapped himself to a large cross and observed himself before a full-length mirror. As children, Edie (born in 1943) and her younger sister Suky had needles of vitamin B injected daily in their bottoms. She recalled, or imagined, attempted rapes by her father and brothers. From the moment of conception into this modern House of Atreus, Edie was tracing a steep trajectory toward her own hell.

In Manhattan, Warhol and his menagerie of proto-punks were waiting to oblige destiny. Edie was the woman of their dreams: good family, silver-tinsel hair, Twiggy shape and a quick wit that could be impish or lacerating. She was a chic slummer in Warhol's 8-mm movies; she boogied through the New York fashion and gossip columns; Vogue dubbed her a "youthquaker," and LIFE photographed her as a baby-faced mannequin dressed up in Momma's cast-off clothes. It was a high life for the renegade deb, and she lived it high on speed, cocaine, heroin and a mountain of pills. She lost track, lost control, absentmindedly setting fire to two of her bedrooms and half a dozen mattresses, then spiraling into psychosis. A drug bust; a few asylums; shock therapy; a fatal overdose of barbiturates. And in the midst of all this, over the last five years of her life, she starred in John Palmer and David Weisman's Ciao! Manhattan. Edie Sedgwick, This Is Your Death.

From the first shot of Edie--bloated and staggering, her open jacket revealing scarred siliconed breasts, as she thumbs a ride on a California highway--it is clear that Ciao! Manhattan serves as a rancid little document of the sensibility that the Edie book furtively celebrates. No matter that Edie is called Susan in the film. This is Sunset Boulevard for real, an Acid Age Snake Pit. The film covers two historic periods: Edie Past (New York, 1965-67) and Edie Present (Los Angeles, 1970-71). In the earlier black-and-white footage, she is Queen of the Underground, flirting with her Andy, imperiously ignoring the camera. In the California color sections, she is living in a huge pastel tent at the bottom of a swimming pool, surrounded by dazzling photos of the Edie that was. She parades topless, falling over as she attempts to dance. She spins tales of her brutal father, her horny brothers, her shooting-star fame, her drug addiction, her endless days and nights in mental hospitals. So enveloping is her stupor, she can neither perform nor be herself. She can only put on pathetic display the corpse she is about to become.

The ghoulish entrepreneurial flair that characterizes much of the entertainment business may earn big money for Ciao! Manhattan, as it has done for Edie. But can the Edie phenomenon stop here? On the 20th anniversary of her death, Marilyn Monroe earned tabloid headlines. In life, Edie Sedgwick was no Marilyn; but in death she rates, at the very least, a lugubrious Hollywood biopic. Nastassia Kinski for the title role? Kristy McNichol? Brooke Shields? My dear, it's just too delicious.

-- By Richard Corliss

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