Edie (25 page)

Fishers Island people are marginal swimmers, staying between the break of the surf and the paddling of the small children. Once in a while somebody wI’ll briskly swim ten strokes out and ten strokes in. But Edie was way out . . . a little dark head . . . such a distance
that she was beyond where I could swim if she were in trouble. Was she in trouble? She seemed to be going under and then surfacing again. I could see the shine of her legs as she dove. It was like her dancing the night before. She was playing . . . totally natural and involved in the element of water; she was like a porpoise. First there was fear for Edie: “She’s in trouble.” Then it was: “Why, she’s playing ! Edie’s having fun.” She seemed only to exist freely in atmospheres that were removed or enchanted . . . in a particular space that she liked. Most people are happy swimming by the shore; she was happy out there.

JOEL SCHUMACHER
 The first time I ever saw her was at a New York party. She was with about six boys and she was in the middle of the floor dancing. The boys were a little Oscar Wilde bunch with big, floppy neckties and their handkerchiefs always flipped out a lot . . . a fey group of guys who were trying to get into society and were riding along with her because she was the new girl in town, and that was very evident. That was the time of new girls in town in New York; every once in a while somebody would arrive and make quite a stir. Edie was certainly one of them, but she went a different way than anyone else ever had. Other girls went through the usual bunch of guys at the club and would maybe marry one of them, or go out and marry somebody else. But Edie went through that immediately. She was in strange places faster than anybody else.

Up until the early Sixties social life in New York was extremely predictable. There was a form to the whole thing: if someone had a black tie dinner, everyone there was in black tie. If people were invited to a brunch they were attired in a certain way. Everyone held on to the values of the Fifties, those standards that had been created by life in and around El Morocco, the Stork Club, by polo players and debutantes—patterns that were followed by the
nouveaux riches,
the Jews, or whatever. No one told the truth. People lied. Society was a group of liars. People pretended that they weren’t unfaithful. They pretended that they weren’t homosexual. They pretended that they weren’t horrible. If you wanted to social climb or socialize in New York City, you had to follow these rules.

Edie came in at the destruction of all those rules. The Robert Sculls were just about to move out of their suburban life in Great Neck and buy the kind of apartment and things to put in it that people from Great Neck had never thought of before. Showing up late to someone’s dinner, or never showing up at all, became a way of life. People were
going to start shooting up in the bathroom. Freaks were going to become sought after. Overnight you could become famous for having big hair or short skirts or a neon bra. There was such a desperate hunger. Suddenly all these women in little black dresses and men in pinstripe suits from Meledandri and Sills and Saville Row would be rushing down to Trade Heller’s on the corner of Ninth Street and Sixth right across from the Women’s House of Detention. There they would see Monte Rock. Or they would rush down to the Dom in St. Mark’s Place where only the black people used to dance.

The wild stuff began coming out of the woodwork. People showing off. “Look at me! I’ve got something to say! I am something!” And the more freakish you could be about it, so much the better. Look at Edie. Or Tiger Morse, who was a society girl from a good family wearing very straight clothes, and all of a sudden the next day she was a speed freak with her hair wired, wearing electric dresses and green glasses. And then dead. These insane people wallowed in self-destruction . . . almost as if they were trying to punish their parents and the world of rigid systems that had been so painful to them in their formative years. Edie came into the world of people getting ready to come out and make that kind of statement.

DANNY FIELDS
 Edie moved from her grandmother’s late that fall of 1964 to an apartment in the East Sixties between Fifth and Madison. Her mother came to town and took Edie shopping to furnish the apartment. Suddenly this empty room was full of the sort of ornaments prosperous people have who’ve been living in the same place for years and years . . . solid crystal paperweights, great fur scatter rugs, fabulous embroidered pillows, one of those enormous leather rhinoceros from where? . . . Abercrombie and Fitch, wasn’t it? Elaborate cigarette lighters, really heavy and solid. Most of them never worked; Edie never bothered to fI’ll them. She didn’t have affection for any of these things: a lot of them she didn’t even understand. None of this was collected with any love or preference, but just provided with a snap of the fingers. She was always sending to Reuben’s restaurant . . . Minis and caviar, always caviar. It was almost a game . . . everything had to be the ultimate. I guess she was extremely spoiled, because she was given whatever she wanted . . . a leopard-skin coat that must have come from her parents unless it was from an unknown admirer. A real leopard-skin coat! About the only thing that was her own was a huge horse above her bed that she’d drawn on the wall with pencil.

It was a tiny apartment. Sometimes the garbage was pretty messy in the kitchenette. She would let it go pretty far before she took emergency measures . . . someone would volunteer to reach into the sink and unclog it.

There was a lot of acid around then . . . LSD . . . the first days of it, and most of those people down from Cambridge knew Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. In the refrigerator they used to keep little brown vials of liquid to drop on a sugar cube. Edie would drive her Mercedes on acid !1 thought that was the most daredevil thing she’d ever been into . . . I mean, she’d go up on curbs sometimes, and she’d never pay much attention to traffic lights. It was like everything else: her own rules applied.

CHUCK WEIN
 We liked bizarre people because we didn’t really take ourselves that seriously, and we were amused about how seriously everybody else seemed to take themselves. That was our approach at that point.

We rode around in that gray Mercedes, staying up all night after the discotheques closed at four. Sometimes I’d drive, but Edie loved to drive herself . . . it was like riding a horse. She told me all about her family. She seemed to love her mother . . . it was almost “the poor dear . . . the poor thing is going to be so worried.”

TOM GOODWIN
 Edie got into spending her inheritance. It was a time when the first discotheques were opening—like Ondine—and people were beginning to live it up in places like that. We often went stoned drunk to a place called L’Avventura to have these gigantic dinners. Edie loved salmon. And extra lemons for her Bloody Marys. All that extra this and that. She ate vast quantities of shrimp. Shrimp and salad, stuff you would think was healthy. But she had four of whatever it was.

I quit my job at the Bight Bank restaurant to be her chauffeur. She paid me one hundred dollars a week. We had first met in Cambridge when she was studying sculpture and had gotten to be friends in a curious non-lover way. It was a bit of a strange arrangement to be her chauffeur, but it seemed okay to me. Then I went
paw
into a taxi in front of the Seagram building and cracked up her Mercedes. I felt so bad, because she loved that car. But it didn’t faze her in the least. She didn’t get angry. We began traveling in limousines.

John Anthony Walker

Bob Dylan and Bob Neuwirth

BOB NEUWIRTH
 Bob Dylan and I occasionally ventured out into the poppy nightlife world. I think somebody who had met Edie said, “You have to meet this terrific girl.” Dylan called her, and she chartered a limousine and came to see us. We spent an hour or two, all laughing and giggling, having a terrific time. I think we met in the bar upstairs at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street, which was one of the great places of the Sixties. It was just before the Christmas holidays; it was snowing, and I remember we went to look at the display on Houston Street in front of the Catholic church. I don’t remember how the evening ended. I’m sure it ended logically, or maybe it didn’t. Who knows? Edie was fantastic. She was always fantastic. She believed that to sit around was to rot, an extension of the Sixties pop culture from a Bob Dylan song “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Edie went through limousine companies the way people go through cigarettes. She never paid her bills, so the limousine people would shut off her credit, and she’d shift to another company. The drivers loved her madly, because she’d dole out these twenty-five-and thirty-five-dollar tips. This one shiny black Cadillac limousine with a terrified driver would wait maybe three or four hours for Edie to come out of some sleazy artist’s loft on the Bowery down beneath a bridge by the Fulton Fish Market with nothing around but trucks and derelict cars.

She had the ability to relate on all levels . . . with chauffeurs or ranch hands . . . understanding the human condition, yet at the same time because of that upbringing of hers, rejecting anything less than
numero uno.
She would order fish and invariably ask the waiter, “Is this fish fresh?” Of course, in New York there’s hardly any fresh fish, but whether it was a sleazy little restaurant downtown or Le Pavilion, she would invariably ask that question, “Is this fish fresh?” And invariably the waiter would say, “Of course it is, Mademoiselle.” When the fish arrived from the kitchen, Edie would test it with her fork and say, “I’m sorry, this fish is not fresh. Please take it back.” But it was so crazy because she’d do this in these pop places where the junior-grade discotheque society went to eat . . . where the fish was obviously fish cakes. She would stI’ll send them back. She could do this sort of thing without really pushing it. It’s something you learn very early to be able to get away with—a real patrician royalty trip. She could do it without offending. People would knock themselves out to do what she’d asked. Being really ungracious, but she could be graceful about it. Waiters would see to it about the fish. Chauffeurs would stay up with her all night rather than taking shifts.

And yet she was very adept at appearing absolutely helpless, unable
to fasten bracelets, earrings; unable to zip skirts, get boots off, whatever. But it turned out she was an exceptional swimmer . . . terrific athlete, you know, for a girl of such a slight build. Totally strong. If there was anybody around with a bottle of pickles or raspberry jam to be opened, she could do it. But she could certainly be helpless, too.

DANNY FIELDS
 When the bills would mount up, she’d stuff them all in a big envelope and she’d take a dozen people to the Ginger Man for drinks. The bills would get spread out—the Acme bills in one pile, the Weinbaum’s bills here. Thousands of dollars’ worth of cosmetics ! A lot of giggling: “Oh, dear, how did that happen? I don’t remember that drugstore. Oh, let me see, that’s the nice Mister So-and-so. Hell let me come back. Oh, I
had
to have all the new colors of the Rubinstein line.” By the time the dessert came, the bills were all in disarray and she’d shove them back into her black bag.

It was the gravy train. She didn’t know half the people she took to those dinners of hers. Fifteen to twenty people. Friends. Friends of friends. Edie would sit closest to the ones she wished to consult or console, giggle or get drunk with that night. I felt we were taking advantage of her. But people would say, “Don’t worry. You don’t know how rich she is. Her grandfather built a railroad.”

I’d say, “But even if they’re rich, don’t her parents get hysterical?”