Edie (43 page)

VIVA
 I always used to feel so sorry for Ingrid when she was being groomed to be a superstar because she was afraid she wouldn’t succeed and she’d have to go back to new jersey and work selling refrigerators.

DANNY FIELDS
 You had to love Ingrid. She loved her name, Ingrid superstar. She got it the first day when she walked in, dressed in aqua satin. And you had to feel sorry for her because she didn’t really know that they were making fun of her all the time. Then after a while she became so acceptable that they weren’t making fun of her; they really started to consider her as a human being and someone they liked.
It was nice. She got carried away with everything. It was wonderful to see it happen. It was like through a child’s eyes. “Oh, I made the columns today.” To be elevated to any sense of ritziness was just wonderful for her. She was such a good-natured person that it was sort of nice having her around, because all the other girls were socialites or actresses or something, and she was a natural. But I can’t believe that Edie took her seriously or felt threatened by Ingrid Superstar. Edie was on to better things, so she hoped—like the movie she wanted to make with Bob Dylan.

JONATHAN TAPLITR
 Dylan liked Edie because she was one of the few people who could stand up against his weird little numbers: she was much stronger than the sycophants who were hanging around him at the time. He was always in an adversary relationship with women. He tested people . . . perhaps to find out about himself. His transition from folk purity to the rock insanity was overwhelming him. He needed to know: who was he? Dylan respected Edie’s spirit, and her strength in being able to deal with him, and that she didn’t wither. You know that song of his, “Just Like a Woman”? They say he wrote it about Edie.

BOB NEPWIRTH
 I know that Bob Dylan expressed an interest in doing a film with Edie—a non-Warholian film. At that time there was a lot of interest in Bob starring in a movie—the great directors were after him. But Dylan has always had a need for the mystique of privacy—the Garbo Trick.

PAUL MORRISSEY
 The Dylan relationship came up one night when we saw Edie at the Ginger Man. It was early in 1966. She told us that she didn’t want Andy to show any of her films any more. By that time she’d made about eleven films with Andy in only four months. Then things started to go sour, and her last film before
Chelsea Girls
was called
Lupe,
about the actress Lupe Velez, who drowned with her head in a toilet after taking a huge dose of Seconal. Edie had a small role in
Chelsea Girls,
but she came in later to ask us to take out the section of the film she was in. She told us that she had signed a contract with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman.

It was a very peculiar period. Andy was going through a transition. He was always trying to make more money to support his
filmmaking, and be had gotten involved with a new discotheque and was managing a new band, the Velvet Underground. We let them rehearse at the Factory. Suddenly they were taking up more and more time. We started to make little movies with them. They needed a singer, and by accident we ran into this girl named Nico, who had known Dylan in Europe and had been brought over from London by Grossman. He used to come around to the Factory with his assistants, supposedly to listen to Nico practice, but for some reason he had lost interest in her. It was Edie Sedgwick he wanted to put under contract. So he’d ask, “Do you have any of those old movies of Edie Sedgwick we’ve heard about? We’d love to see them.” They wanted to see what she looked like on the screen, but doing it very sneaky and behind our backs. Actually, Edie was all part of it, which we didn’t know then. Dylan was calling her up and inviting her out and telling her not to tell Andy or anyone that she was seeing him. He invited her up to Woodstock and he told her that Grossman hoped to put her together with him. She could be his leading lady. So she said to herself, “Ah, this is my break.”

She signed with Grossman at Dylan’s urging. Apparently Grossman had said that he didn’t think she should see Andy so much any more because the publicity that came out of it wasn’t good. She said, “They’re going to make a film, and I’m supposed to star in it with Bobby.” Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and we realized that she had a crush on him. We thought he’d been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in Sy Litvinoff’s office—our lawyer—that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months—he married Sara in November, 1965. Everything was secret in those days for some reason . . . all phony secrecy. So Andy couldn’t resist asking, “Did you know, Edie, that Bob Dylan has gotten married?”

She just went pale. “What? I don’t believe it! What?” She was trembling. We realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan . . . that maybe he hadn’t been very truthful. Probably none of it was true—Dylan never had any intention of making a movie with Edie, or starring her.

So off she went, and we never really saw very much of her after that. Andy never showed her films any more. He took out her piece of
Chelsea Girls
and we substituted a little thing with Nico with colored lights going across her face—an abstract kind of totally minimal film of Nico looking for a half-hour into the camera. It’s got some Velvet Underground music with it. If s the last thing in
Chelsea Girls,
a very beautiful ending.

VIVA
 It must have had an effect on Andy—Edie leaving him for Dylan, or whoever. He was probably in love with Edie, with all of us—a sexless kind of love, but he would take up your whole life so that you had no time for any other man. When Edie left with grossman and Dylan, that was betrayal, and he was furious . . . a lover betrayed by his mistress.

BOB NEUWIRTH
 She never made a film with Dylan. After Edie left Warhol, I was actually the first one to make a film with her. We made it on Easter Sunday in Eric Dolphy’s old loft near the Fulton Fish Market—a chaplinesque, satirical movie of Edie making breakfast, and ending up with her wearing a nine-thousand-dollar leopard-skin coat and walking her huge rhinoceros, that big footstool of hers outfitted with four roller skates, up fifth avenue in the Easter parade, pulling the rhino along behind her on a leash. It was very early in the morning. We’d been shooting since daylight. At one point on park avenue she tied her rhino to a fire hydrant, and the police, as a joke, gave it a ticket. I have footage of them giving her a ticket for parking her four-wheeled rhino, or actually her sixteen-wheeled rhino.

RENÉ RICARD
 I made a film with Edie about nine months after she left the factory. Andy suggested, “Let’s do a movie with you as me in it.
The Andy Warhol story.”
I really hated Andy by then. I realized his was a passive exploitation—that it could be humiliating and horrible. He had been asking me to do this for a long time and I had refused. But one night I took an Obetrol—a very powerful twenty-five-milligram amphetamine pill, the best. They were very hard to get, rare and very good. It’s a good high, very gay, very lovely speed. That night we were making this Tiger Morse movie, part of a twenty-four-hour, four-star movie in which I was supposed to be an extra. “Don’t do too much talking,” I was told. Well, the pI’ll got me hysterical and I was amazingly good at it. Andy fell in love with me for it. Once again he said, “Oh, you’re so good tonight; let’s do that movie I’ve wanted you to do.”

So I finally said okay. The only reason I agreed to do his film was to get even with him.

I said, “Okay, let’s go to my place and do it.” I was living in a very beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue with Avery Dunphy, who was being kept in this luxurious place by a doctor who was mad for
prissy Wasps. Mirrored coffee tables, a huge white silk-satin couch. Beautiful, right? What Avery wanted to be was chic—which was all anybody wanted at that time. Having Andy Warhol make a movie in that apartment, even though it wasn’t his, was very chic. I called Avery and told him what was happening—that we were on the way. I told him, 1 want orchids. I want the place filled with orchids.”

He asked, “Well, where am I going to get orchids at this time of night?”

I told him about a place in the East Sixties that’s open until midnight. I figured I’d do it right. Right? I didn’t have any money, but at least I could have orchids. Besides, I was trying to get even with Andy. So Avery went out and bought the most exquisite orchids you’ve ever seen. He bought orchids to
die
over. I know the difference between good orchids and vulgar ones, and these were expensive and good—from Hawaii or Vietnam, which is where Paris gets its orchids.

When we all got to the apartment, Andy asked, “Who do you want in the film with you?”

I said, “I only want Edie Sedgwick. Who else is there in your life but Edie Sedgwick?”

Andy said, “I don’t know if we can get her.”

I said, “I won’t do it without her.”

I took another pI’ll and I got
wired. Wired!
There’s a point when you take speed when you talk a lot, and yet there’s also a point where you take too much and you don’t talk. That’s the point that second pI’ll got me to.

So Andy got Edie on the telephone and offered to pay for her taxi, and about three hours later Edie turned up. I didn’t want to make the movie when I saw her. She was wearing a dirty blond fall. She looked like the cheapest piece of filth. Here was my Edie,
my
Edie, and I was making a movie with her—
co-stars!
No longer was I an extra, and she looked like hell! She was wearing a kind of Marimekko-type dress, and meant She, too, hated Andy at that point: she had been eighty-sixed.

When she was with the fairies, she was on speed and she was Edie, she was “on.” When she was with Bobby Neuwirth, who was a hetero, she was on downs, and Edie on downs was not pretty.

Well, when she arrived at the apartment, the cameras started rolling. I had my own personal vendetta against Warhol, and so did she. And I was
playing
Warhol. So I played him the way he behaved to the people under him. She played herself according to how she felt about him then. The things she said to me were horrible. I don’t
remember them. I don’t even remember what
I
said. I was awful. I have nightmares about what I did in that movie . . . saying things about Andy that were true, how he disposed of people. Paul Morrissey, who was behind the camera, was white with rage. I went through the paintings . . . how Andy doesn’t actually do the paintings himself. Stupid things like: “Gerard, get me an egg. Do you want to know how I paint my pictures, you people out there?” I’d crack the egg in a glass and then I’d say to Gerard: “Cook it! That’s how I paint my pictures.”

We did one reel and stopped. Then Andy in his sick, masochistic, dreadful way—after all, here were these two people on camera saying the most ghastly things about him—said, “Let’s do another reel.” He had been standing holding his fingers in his mouth, which he does when he’s anxious, and he was
loving
it . . . getting the truth.

So we did another reel, and in this one it got violent. Edie started it. At some point I gave her some orchids. I said, “You’re not dressed up enough for this movie. So do something. Take these flowers.”

She took them and crushed them. I got very upset. And I—me, René Ricard, not the Andy Warhol me—was just made demented by that. I love orchids. It was a personal thing from me to her. I said, “You really need to fix yourself up, my dear. Put them on you somewhere.”

She cried out, “I hate them! I don’t want to be beautiful!” She wrecked the flowers. Edie was hating me. We were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing . . . I loved Edie, but I couldn’t
stand
being in the movie with her the way she looked. She was horrible in the movie, and mean. The things
I
was saying were so horrible.

Paul Morrissey suddenly reached out from behind the camera and ripped my clothes off me—a new white silk shirt and new pair of white linen pants. He ripped them. The camera was turning. Paul was out of the frame. I guess he was livid because of the things I was saying about Andy.

So we finished the film—two reels. Edie rushed home. I didn’t care about her at that point. My clothes were a ruin. I was a mess. I was wiped out by the pills. Dazed.

You’ll never guess what happened then. Andy Warhol at that point was close to a guy called Rod La Rod. He was handling the sound on this film. They asked me to see the rushes in the Factory. I sat there watching it—Paul, Andy, Rod, and a few of the other serfs were there—and I saw what they had done to it. Edie’s voice is there, but when I speak, you can’t hear it. They were in glee.

PAUL MORRISSEY
 At the Factory we got an eviction notice. The building was going to be torn down. Actually, it was a good thing. The silver spray paint kept crumbling off and deteriorating into silver dust. It got sort of bad to breathe after a bit, and it was hard to clean. I lived downtown on the East Side, and I went shopping around for a loft. I found one which Andy liked at 33 Union Square.

When we moved, the couch was the last thing carried down and put in the truck. It was a famous couch. It appeared in Andy’s earliest films. He used it in photographs and paintings. The people who rented the truck were going to move it the next day. During the night the truck was stolen. So the people who stole the truck got it. It was a great couch.