How Edie Sedgwick became Andy Warhol’s muse
Edie Sedgwick lived a short but intense life. In 1971, she overdosed on barbiturates aged 28, yet she is still remembered today as a defining figure of 1960s American celebrity culture.
Born into extreme wealth and privilege, Sedgwick’s home life was marred by a physically and sexually abusive father. From a young age, she exhibited signs of poor mental health and developed bulimia and anorexia before she reached adulthood. However, a stay at a psychiatric hospital seemed to help Sedgwick move onto the right track, and she soon journeyed to Massachusetts to study sculpture. Soon enough, she was bequeathed $80,000 from her grandmother, which she used to relocate to the art-filled bohemian Greenwich Village neighbourhood in New York.
Meanwhile, Andy Warhol was an established artist living in New York since 1949. Famed for his soup cans and Marilyn Monroe prints, the artist decided to try out filmmaking in 1963. Irving Blum, the co-founder of Ferus gallery in Los Angeles, recalled watching Warhol’s early experiments with moving image: “It was two people I knew, Marisol and Robert Indiana. Their lips were touching. And I sat, sat, sat, sat, but there was no movement. I said to myself, ‘It’s a still that he’s calling a movie for some reason.’ And then Marisol blinked. And it was, Ahh!”
Sedgwick and Warhol were introduced to each other in 1965 during a birthday party for playwright Tennessee Williams. The party’s host, Lester Persky, knew that Sedgwick and Warhol would get along, so he set about their meeting. Besides, Warhol needed a new muse, given that he had just moved on from his 1964 ‘Girl of the Year’ Baby Jane Holzer. When Warhol cast his gaze upon Sedgwick, whose leg was in a cast and her hair in a tidy beehive, he was transfixed. According to Persky, “[Andy] sucked in his breath and . . . said, ‘Oh, she’s so bee-you-ti-ful,’ making every single letter sound like a whole syllable.”
Warhol was attracted to Sedgwick for the same reasons he was infatuated with Monroe. Both possessed striking beauty, unforgettable eyes, matching drawn-on beauty marks, and a coquettish sensibility. Both were troubled yet beautiful, which captured the attention of Warhol. Upon first meeting Sedgwick, Warhol believed, “I could see that she had more problems than anybody I’d ever met.” Detailing further, he continued: “So beautiful but so sick. I was really intrigued.”
However, just 21 when she met Warhol, Sedgwick exuded feminity without Marilyn’s curves and glossy hair — she was gamine, akin to Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Her mixture of classic femininity and boyish charm attracted Warhol like no other in 1965. According to Sedgwick’s friend Danny Fields: “Being gay [like Warhol] was never an impediment to being in love with Edie Sedgwick.”
And Sedgwick wasn’t the only one inspired by Marilyn – Warhol, with his blonder-than-blonde hair, was too. He not only saw Marilyn in Edie but himself too. Soon they had matching haircuts, her way of returning the infatuation, and the pair became an indomitable creative pairing. Well, for about a year – until their relationship dramatically soured. Sedgwick was Warhol’s own Marilyn, and he placed her in countless movie projects over the year, beginning with Vinyl, his bizarre and condensed adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. Sedgwick appeared in the background, smoking and dancing, yet everyone who saw the picture asked the same question, “Who’s the blonde?”
Warhol “saw her as his ticket to Hollywood,” according to Ronald Tavel. He subsequently cast her in his film Poor Little Rich Girl, a moniker that followed Sedgwick around. Tavel explained: “Edie was incredible on camera—just the way she moved. The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it’s just a movement inside their eye.” To Warhol, Sedgwick represented everything he was fascinated with – the dichotomy between beauty and suffering – she was both glamorous and messy. According to the artist, “To play the poor little rich girl, Edie didn’t need a script—if she’d needed a script, she wouldn’t have been right for the part.”
Over the year, the pair collaborated on several films, such as Chelsea Girls, Outer and Inner Space, and Prison; however, the pair’s relationship began to fizzle out shortly after the initial fuse had been lit. Sedgwick was disillusioned by Warhol’s films, which were only shown in underground venues. She exclaimed: “These movies are making a complete fool out of me!” Sedgwick had also fallen hard for Bob Dylan, who was not a fan of the Factory or Warhol.
Warhol and Sedgwick’s final collaboration, Lupe, was shot in December 1965, with the filmmaker stating: “I want something where Edie commits suicide at the end.” Their relationship was dwindling. “I try to get close to him, but I can’t,” she told Robert Heide, who saw Sedgwick in a Greenwich Village bar where Warhol was also present. That same night, Dylan showed up, and the pair left together. Warhol turned to Heide and said, “Do you think Edie will let us film her when she commits suicide?”
Their relationship as one of the art world’s most iconic pairings was officially over. Sedgwick died just a few years later, but Warhol managed to live another 16 years before passing, despite an assassination attempt waged on him by Valerie Solanas in 1968. Warhol and Sedgwick’s short-lived yet fruitful relationship cemented the latter as an ‘It Girl’, still admired today for her pixie hair and heavy eye makeup. Although the pair were collaborators and friends for just over a year, their relationship represented an era of fast living and innovative creation, one that redefined pop culture and art as we know it today.