Alice Sedgwick Wohl didn’t think much of her little sister Edie Sedgwick — the incandescent Warhol superstar and pop art icon who set 1960s New York ablaze with her gamine beauty, silver-haired mane and reckless extravagance.
“Oh, I thought that she was impossible,” Wohl told The Post.
While Edie gallivanted around Manhattan in her signature black tights and chandelier earrings, burning through her $80,000 inheritance in six months, Wohl — 12 years her senior — was dealing with a brand new baby and grieving two brothers, who had recently died within ten months of each other.
By comparison, Edie seemed like a “silly, spoiled child,” the now-91-year-old Wohl recalled. (She said as much in Jean Stein’s and George Plimpton’s monumental oral history, “Edie: An American Biography,” published in 1982.) “I’d been working in East Harlem, I was extremely upset and worried about the Civil Rights Movement, and then there was the Vietnam War coming up. … I just couldn’t see the point,” she added. “I didn’t understand who she was or what she represented.”
Then, in 2017 — 46 years after Edie’s death of a drug overdose at the age of 28 — Wohl happened upon a 1966 Andy Warhol film, “Outer and Inner Space.” The experimental short features Edie, expressive and wide-eyed, reacting to footage of herself playing on a TV screen behind her. Wohl was riveted.
“When I saw her, I saw what she had, because Warhol made it absolutely evident how alive and vital and fascinating she was,” Wohl said. “I became fascinated by both of them.”
Now, she hopes to “set the record straight.” Her new book, “As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, out now), reconsiders Edie’s life and partnership with the artist Andy Warhol, who crowned her the princess of his silver Factory and leading lady of underground film, and was later blamed for her drug-fueled descent.
“I had said things in public that I realized were not only wrong, they were stupid,” Wohl said.
“I [now] can see how she was important and how she remains extraordinarily relevant to this society.”
Edie’s troubles began long before she hooked up with Warhol and his amphetamine-fueled scene at the Factory. By that time she had already developed an eating disorder, done time at two mental institutions, had an abortion, crashed her father’s car, lost two of her brothers (Bobby, in a motorcycle accident, and Minty, from suicide) and endured the manipulations of “Fuzzy,” her cruel, narcissistic father.
“I do think that if Edie was doomed, it was because [our father] had declared her mentally ill and [had her] drugged,” after she had walked in on him having sex with the neighbor’s wife, Wohl said. “That’s the tragedy.”
Edith “Minturn” Sedgwick was born 1943, the seventh of eight children, in Santa Barbara, Calif. Their WASP family boasted politicians, editors and millionaires — Edie’s namesake, great-aunt Edith Minturn Stokes, posed for society painter John Singer Sargent. But Edie’s father, “Fuzzy,” and his long-suffering wife Alice ditched the East Coast and decided to raise their brood on a succession of ranches in California.
There, “Fuzzy” took up cattle ranching and bullied his family. Wohl, the eldest child, said he named her “Saucie” because he said she resembled a “sausage.” He called his son Minty “an old woman and a sissy,” regularly cheated on his wife and, per Edie, made her and her sister Suky “sit in a sphinxlike position with bared breasts on the top of columns flanking the entrance to the driveway.” (Edie also told friends that she endured his sexual advances from the age of 7.)
“He could really be cruel,” Wohl, the eldest, told The Post. “But he was not cruel to Edie in that way [he was with the other children].” Perhaps because the dark-haired, saucer-eyed Edie was so beautiful.
“I don’t remember her ever doing cattle work,” Wohl added. “She was different from all the rest of us from the time she was born. She was the prettiest by far, and she was extremely self-assertive . . . Our parents did whatever she wanted and spoiled her.”
Edie, along with sixth child Kate and youngest Suki, had virtually no contact with the outside world. (Wohl and the next four children did go away to school and spent time with their East Coast family.) They lived with their governess in a separate cottage on the ranch and went to school on the property too. Edie was on a saddle at 14 months; her favorite thing was riding bareback at night through storms.
“Edie was like a wild child,” Wohl recalled. “She really was not interested in reading. She had so little education. … She was a marvelous athlete, a beautiful [horseback] rider, and she loved to drive my father’s car fast.”
As she writes in her book: “What Edie wanted, always, was to experience life with the greatest intensity, and she had no regard for danger.”
After two failed attempts at boarding school and two stints in a mental institution for her bulimia, Edie arrived in Cambridge, Mass., (where nearly all her siblings went to school) in 1963 to study sculpture. She fell in with a sophisticated, largely gay Harvard crowd and a year later migrated with them to New York City. She was like a feral creature let loose in this dazzling city. Her lavish shopping sprees, dangerous driving (parking her Mercedes at the bus stop, whizzing through lights and over curbs high on acid) and audacious fashion sense (a fur worn over tights and a leotard — and nothing else). By the time Warhol met her in 1965, she was already a legend.
“She was in the gossip columns every day, and she was so well known and considered so exciting and so amazing that Bob Dylan called her up out of the blue [to ask her on a date],” Wohl said. “That was Edie — it had nothing to do with Warhol. She just was really exciting and thrilling to be around.”
’Society changed after Edie and Andy — and society was ready for it.’
Alice Sedgwick Wohl, author of a new memoir on her little sister’s scene
But Warhol saw something else in Edie: a creative partner who could bolster his glamour quotient and get him into movies. Within weeks, they made their debut as a “couple” — Warhol was gay, they were more like BFFs — at a Metropolitan Museum of Art opening, both with sprayed-silver hair. She soon was starring in his movies, too.
Edie was electric on screen and didn’t need a script, which suited Warhol just fine: he liked to just turn the camera on and walk away. He filmed her putting on makeup in “Poor Little Rich Girl”, tussling in bed with a cute boy in “Beauty #2” and just sitting around smoking in “Vinyl.” Somehow, she was always captivating.
“I think Edie didn’t even know what a film was,” Wohl said, adding that the kids never went to the movies while living on the ranch. “When Warhol made these films with her, I think she was just being herself.”
Edie and Andy’s whirlwind romance lasted barely a year. By the end of 1966, their relationship had soured. Edie had started hanging out with Dylan and his crew, who said she was wasting her time with Warhol’s underground flicks when she could be a big Hollywood star. She accused Warhol of ridiculing her and making her look stupid in his movies.
She escaped Warhol, but the Hollywood career never materialized. By that time she was so far out on drugs that her normally reticent parents had to intervene, sending her back to California and to hospitals there. Warhol — hurt by her betrayal but also ruthlessly forward-looking — distanced himself from her, finding other superstars to promote (though none shown quite as brightly). In 1971, she married a fellow hospital patient, Michael Post, but died from a barbiturate overdose just four months later at 28.
Yet, her image endures. There have been numerous Edie biographies, documentaries, tributes and a (very bad) biopic, starring Sienna Miller. Since her death she’s inspired fashion designers (including John Galliano and Anna Sui) and artists. The movies she made with Warhol predicted today’s reality shows and Instagram reels — a celebration of image, being, personality. She was a proto-influencer, and we’re still living in the world that she and Warhol made.
“Other people were living in the past, but they were living in the future,” Wohl said. “I think of what happened after the French Revolution, when there was this sudden rise of the romantic spirit and people living their emotional lives and being wild and looking for mountain landscapes and drastic experiences and sexual liberation. [The 1960s] was a moment like that. … Society changed after Edie and Andy, and society was ready for it.”
