“When I was with Andy Warhol, I was dancing jazz ballet twice a day, so I just wore my leotards and I knew I wasn’t going to turn anybody on . . . . When I went out on the street I’d put on a coat. But Vogue photographed me in leotards and a T-shirt as a new costume,” Edie Sedgwick once recalled, seemingly stunned at the elevation of her style from accidental to iconic.
Born Edith Minturn Sedgwick, the actor-model, who would have been 72 today, is remembered as a magical It girl, a winsome superstar, a big-eyed Keene painting come to life. But as has been proven time and time again, being worshipped for your youth and beauty is hardly a prerequisite for a happy life. Sedgwick’s wealthy family had deep roots in colonial America, and she had an eccentric upbringing. She was raised with seven siblings on a ranch in California; her father was reportedly by turns charismatic and terrifying. She studied art in Boston; in 1964, she moved to New York City, where she fell in with Warhol’s Factory set. She was literally painfully thin (she suffered repeated bouts of anorexia); her trademark style was achieved, she said, when she chopped off her long brown hair and dyed what was left silvery-white. An original Chelsea girl, she lived in that hotel. Warhol put her in movies with names like Vinyl and Horse.
A YouTube clip from a 1965 episode of The Merv Griffin Show, where she and Warhol were unlikely guests, offers a glimpse of Sedgwick’s seductive charm. Her dress is little more than a bodysuit with a collar; her trademark triangular earrings descend to her shoulders. Warhol refuses to speak, and Sedgwick, almost too bright-eyed, does her best to wring some amusement out of the silent artist on her right and the smarmy talk-show host on her left.
Trying to make sense of her life and the strange turns it had taken, Sedgwick once said, “It s not that I m rebelling. It s that I m just trying to find another way.” Alas, this other way eluded her; she died before she saw 30. The coroner ruled her death “undetermined/accident/suicide.” Forty-four years later, her gamine vulnerability still haunts. One thing is certain—she has been famous for far longer than fifteen minutes.
