She believed that to sit around was to rot. As musician (and Edie's former lover) Bob Neuwirth says in the book, 'Edie was fantastic. And by the photos in the book's center, depicting her famous look: t-shirts with black tights ( Life reported she was doing more for black tights 'than anybody since Hamlet') and long earrings dangling from her silver-dyed pixie hair and what Vogue would dub her 'anthracite black eyes.'įor me, my days spent between the mall and the 7-11, this seemed like truly living. I was riveted by the tales of Edie's adventures, the trail of intrigue and wonder she seemed to leave behind her wherever she went. She was even rumored to be the woman for whom the Velvet Underground wrote their song 'Femme Fatale.' In a passage I remember distinctly, no less than Patti Smith describes being thunderstruck as she watched Edie come down a long staircase at one of Warhol's museum openings, an ermine wrapped around her, leading two white afghan hounds on black leashes with diamond collars. And, as famous as everyone was, it seems at every party, every club, every impromptu Factory gathering, at the mad, swirling center of it was Edie. It was a world that seemed too glamorous for words: Bob Dylan and Lou Reed brushed shoulders with Truman Capote and William Burroughs.

A socialite and heiress turned model and actress, Edie gained her greatest fame as one of Andy Warhol's Superstars, appearing in several of his films and proving a central figure in his legendary Factory scene, the place he made his art, shot his movies, held his infamous parties. The cover blurb from The Atlantic tantalized me: 'Everyone knew Edie, from the bedraggled addicts on East Fifth Street to the social register.'įor hours, I would sit on my window seat and read it obsessively: all the reminiscences, tales, and gossip from dozens of artists, fashion-world denizens, hustlers and dreamers who had known Edie. The book was Edie: An American Biography, the best-selling oral biography written by Jean Stein and edited with George Plimpton. But no book fascinated me more than one about an artist of a different sort, an artist of her own life: Edie Sedgwick, the premiere mid-1960s It Girl. The figures I read about - the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol - seemed to lead glittering lives.

I became a compulsive reader of biographies as a way of imagining myself into lives more dramatic than my own. Growing up in Grosse Pointe, a sleepy suburb of Detroit, a place for which the word 'serene' seems coined, I was a perpetual yearner. How?Īt 13, I was a girl frantically itching to get out of her own skin.

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