Alice Sedgwick Wohl - As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy

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I have outlived my brother Bobby by more than fifty years now, and ever since he died I have been talking to him and making notes in my mind. Im told that happens when you lose a sibling to whom youre close: youre left with a phantom presence, like an amputee with a phantom limb. Its not that I keep track of anything systematically, I just find myself stopping from time to time to fix particular perceptions and ideas, trying to imagine what he would think, because things here have been going in a direction that neither he nor I would ever have anticipated. In the sixties, it was clear that a big shift was taking place, and from our different vantage points we were both hopeful, but as it turned out, it was not the radical social and political change that either of us was looking for. Instead, it turned out to be a shift in an entirely new direction, one that had to do with what Andy Warhol and our sister Edie Sedgwick represented when they got together in 1965. But Bobby didnt live to see that, and I wasnt paying attention.

And then, a couple of years ago, I happened to be visiting the Addison Gallery at Andover with my husband, and there on the top floor I suddenly came upon two very large images of Edie. Twoclose-ups of her head and face side by side on a film screenone bright, one dark, in velvety blacks and chalky whites against a flat black ground.

I knew it had to be a clip from a Warhol film Id read about called Outer and Inner Space, because what I was seeing was the image of a real Edie at the right responding to a video image of herself on a television monitor at the left and relaying her reactions to someone outside the frame. The monitor screen is large, and Edies face occupies it completely. She appears in profile, with her head tilted upward and fully illuminated so that her skin is pure white and her silvered hair shines. She looks up steadily with wide-open eyes and an inquiring, almost visionary, expression, while her lips seem to be forming words in slow motion, although I dont remember any sound. The real Edies face is darker, and its also smaller, so at first I didnt understand that this Edie is not behind or even beside the video image; instead, shes in front of ityou can see her shoulder. So shes not actually seeing her image, shes listening to it and responding to what she hears Her face is partly in shadow and further darkened by the sooty makeup around her eyes, and its framed by a pair of very long, dangly earrings that cast complex shadows on her neck as she moves. Shes never still. She reacts to every least nuance. Shes smoking, and a lot of the time shes talking, but again, I dont remember the sound. At first I was startled just to see Edie so alive and vital, when shed been dead for nearly half a century, but what astonished me was the presence she had on camera. I couldnt take my eyes off her. At the same time, I thought I was seeing a very complex play upon the figure of Narcissus, the beautiful Greek boy who fell fatally in love with his own image. But what I was really seeing, and seeing for the first time, was what Andy Warhol made of Edie Sedgwick.

I was completely stunned: stunned by Edie, stunned by all the layers and dimensions I was perceiving in the film, and above all stunned to realize what I had missed all these years. I know Bobby recognized something powerful in Edie, and I know he would have understood at the time what Warhol was up to. But in all honesty I dont think I would have, even if I hadnt been so badly shaken by our brother Mintys death and then his.

Because this is how I found out. The telephone rang in the middle of the night in the apartment on West Ninetieth Street. I picked up the receiver and it was our fathers voice saying, Minty hanged himself today. Just like that. I had been sound asleep when he called, and I had a six-week-old baby sleeping in the next room. I began to tremble all over. An abyss opened and there it was, the absolute, black finality of death. Twist and turn as I might in the next hours and days, nothing more was possible. It was March 4, 1964; the next day he would have been twenty-seven years old. Then on New Years Day, some ten months later, I came home and there was an unsigned telegram under the door. (It was a long time before I realized it could only have come from our parents, and it meant they didnt want to have to talk to me.) It said Bobby had had an accident, that he was in Saint Vincents in intensive care. When I got down there, I found him lying very still with a bandage covering his head. I took his big heavy hand, and from under the bandage tears leaked down his cheeks. Then the doctor came along and said it was the tubes irritating his nose. Some days later, on the phone, that same doctor said they were going to take him off life support. I had not understood, and I wanted to know what would happen. He said, Well, hell just poop out. Those were his exact words. So Bobby died too, and because he had crashed his motorcycle into a city bus, I had to go to the New York City morgue to identify him.I was shown into a dark chamber, a light flashed on, and there he was, handsome as ever, lying on a shelf in the wall. I gasped, the light flashed off, and the attendant let me out. Afterward, for a long time, I saw in my mind a bare branch sticking out of a swiftly flowing river. The branch was unmoving, but I was moving away from it, upstream against the current.

Edie had come to New York in the summer of 64, and she was already exploding like a firework in the sky. Bobby had seen her in Cambridge in the spring, and it was as if hed never known her before, he was so taken with her. Im not sure if he was still an active Communist at that point, but if so he certainly forgot about it when he was with Edie. He was ten years older and so intensely political, and as far as I could see she was just a silly, spoiled child full of problems. When Christmas came round, he wanted her to stay in New York and spend it with him, but Edie listened to our parents and went home to the ranch. Then when she came back he was dead. A couple of months passed, and one night she went to a party given by a producer of commercials called Lester Persky, who thought she might appeal to his friend Andy Warhol.

That was the beginning of everything that Im trying to think about now. Im trying to figure out exactly what happened when Edie got together with Andy. I want to know what she had that I so totally failed to see, but that he saw and put to such effective use. I want to understand what he was up to, because right now it seems to me that when the two of them got together something was set in motion that led to the present that we are all living out. Edie is absolutely part of the present: to my surprise kids in high school know about her, and her image is everywhere. Open a glossy magazine, theres a piece on the American ambassadors residence in Paris, and whats hanging on the wall? The photograph of Andy in the