Edie (58 page)

SANDEE TALLEY
 We mostly kept Edie at home. You couldn’t take her out in public because she’d walk around with a spaced-out look in her face.

PREACHER EWING
 After a couple of weeks T and Sandee were just righteously blowing: “God, get her out of here.”

I’d say, “We’re going . . . but shell be cool. Give her a few days more.”

One night Edie and I were staying with friends and I went out on a bicycle they had there at the house looking for something to score and I couldn’t find nothing. So I came back to the house to tell her. She was gone . . . and I remember the radio was playing “Just like a Woman.” Right? I was completely blown out to find she’d split. I rode that bike all over town looking for her and I couldn’t find her anywhere.

The next morning I went up to Hank’s apartment out in Isla Vista. On impulse. We weren’t on good terms at all. I had kicked him out of the Crank Shop. Then we got in a fight a few weeks later and he had broken a pool cue over my head. He had always been saying that he was going to get Edie, that they were going to get married, right? Hank was going to be rich. He was always rapping about that. So when I went up to this apartment of Hank’s, I asked him if Edie was there. I don’t remember what he answered. But I looked in the door and she was laying out on his bed, junked out. I jammed. I just decided to leave the scene.

DAVID WEISMAN
 Edie was back in Cottage Hospital the summer of 1970 when I made my first attempt to recontact her and finish
Ciao! Manhattan
. Actually, at this point she seemed like she had really gotten a new grip on her life. That was one of her tricks: “I’ve really been to the depths, but now I want to start a new life. A normal, simple life.” That was the image that Edie was projecting at that time, and I got very caught up in it. “Okay, Edie, we’re going to finish
Ciao! Manhattan
; we’re all going to do it together; it’s our project; we believe in it.”

What had happened with
Ciao! Manhattan
was that there were too many parts undone to make it cohesive: some were agonizingly interesting; a lot of it was just drivel. A labyrinth. So we had to start afresh and shoot some more material into which to fit the original.

We decided to shoot the rest of the film in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles in color. We wanted to create a whole different dimension—more garish, cartoonish, plastic—to contrast with the New York part.

The plan for the film was to concentrate on Edie. We were going to focus very strongly on the relationship between her and the kids in California . . . that’s what
Ciao! Manhattan
was going to be all about. There’s a long-haired kid who’s rejected his sense of helplessness and is looking for a new route . . . and hitchhiking down Old Malibu Road at four in the morning he meets this girl with her jacket open who tells
him who she is. But he has
no
idea that his own life-style, his independence, his self-awareness, his whole generation has been created by her, by Edie Sedgwick . . . that the freak-out she did in the Sixties helped create the life-style that this boy now lives. He has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about; he cannot relate to it in the least.

She finally got authorization from Dr. Mercer to finish
Ciao!
She was very anxious to complete it. So she got a little apartment on West Padre Street, a block from the hospital and a block from Dr. Mercer. Two professional nurses, Sherry and Maxie, were lined up by the Sedgwick family to keep an eye on her, along with John and Janet Palmer, while we got everything ready to start on her film.

EDUARDO LOPEZ DE ROMAÑA
 The two nurses used to drive this big Cadillac. When Edie would begin crying, having an emotional breakdown, one of the nurses would pick her up and throw her against the other nurse, who would catch her and embrace her. “What are you doing, Edie?”
BOOM
 . . . back to the other nurse! Some pair!

DAVID WEISMAN
 Sherry was a fat lady. She was tiny but enormous. She used to eat and eat and go to the Roller Derby all the time. Maxie was thin and hyperthyroid. An amusing pair.

MICHAEL POST
 There was always total anxiety about the film. That was Edie’s life; it was film, film, film, film, film, and how she was to look in the film. She even got her breasts done. Edie saw an ad in the Bikini Factory . . . a little shop in Santa Barbara—a flyer eight and a half by eleven inches taped in the window. She asked the nurses whether they thought she should get the silicone operation for her breasts, and one of them said, “Why not?”

I went over to her apartment one day and I could see that she couldn’t bend over because of a brace. “What’s all that about?” She said, “Oh, I’ve had an operation. Surprise! Surprise!”

PREACHER EWING
 They looked like somebody had pumped her up . . . like softballs, with scars under them. her father had always made fun of her flat chest. She was so happy when she got those silicone breasts because now her father was wrong; she’d made a liar out of him.

JOHN PALMER
 She’d tell people she’d had the breasts done and then she’d pull up her shirt and show them to everybody. In
Ciao! Manhattan
we had to explain those breasts. In the black-and-white footage she had these small breasts. Since Edie didn’t want the public to know she’d had the silicone injections, we had one of the actors say this line: “Goddam, your tits sure did get bigger since then.” And Edie says, “Yeah, I eat better now and I do my exercises.”

MICHAEL POST
 Dr. Mercer was in charge overall. Edie went to him once a day. She called him “the egg-and-walrus man.” That’s from a song by the Beatles that she thought fitted Dr. Mercer. He was a kind of a round man with a little bristly mustache—a kind of Humpty Dumpty figure with a walrus head. She called him Big Daddy.

JOHN PALMER
 I always felt Dr. Mercer was an obstacle to the film. He would say, “Well, I don’t think Edie should do the filming. She’s not well enough.”

One of the climactic scenes of the film was Edie having shock therapy. It was a completely fictionalized idea. Edie felt very strongly that it should be used in the movie because it was real. Dr. Mercer was against it.

JANET PALMER
 Mrs. Grace let us use her clinic for the shock-treatment scene. They tried to keep the poor old loons who were the patients out of the way. There was one girl wandering around saying that she was going home; apparently she’d been doing that for three months; she was all dressed up, carrying her suitcase. She said her aunt was coming to collect her. It was awfully sad—these poor old ladies strapped down to their beds, singing to their dolls.

MARLENA GRACE
 Edie did a beautiful job telling the crew how these electric shock treatments worked. I told Dr. Mercer, “Doctor, you would have thought she’d been jumping for years, the way she’s got it down what happened.” She showed them how the airway goes in—that’s the little round rubber thing that goes in the patients’ throats after they’re asleep from the pentothal. She did the convulsions over and over again.

Edie on the
Ciao! Manhattan
set, at the bottom of a swimming pool, Los Angeles

Edie with David Weisman

JOHN PALMER
 She got completely into it—the authenticity of the shock treatment. “No, no,” she’d say. “The gag doesn’t go in the mouth until after that’s been done.” When it came time for the injection of sodium pentothal, she would say, “Oh, can’t it be real pentothal?” A steady stream of advice.

It was a funny sight to see Edie with her rainbow dress, the gag in her mouth, and those electrodes attached to her head, sort of half asleep, waiting maybe forty-five minutes on the table while we set everything up. She wore that dress because she thought it had dramatic value, and another thing, she had to have this cross. And she had to have her mirror there. She hid it tucked in underneath her bottom so, between convulsions, she could check her make-up. Just as we’d be ready to go, Edie would say that she had to check, so Janet would come in with the lip gloss and the eyeliner and the mascara, and she’d glue her lashes down and comb the fall out. Edie adored it. It was like mainlining for her. She’d suddenly say the cross should be somewhere else and she’d move it; we’d get into this big argument with her. There’d be hundreds of little games like that to prolong things. We had a big hassle with Dr. Mercer and Mrs. Grace over the twitching. We dramatized the twitching just a shade. Edie was all for that. She ate it up.

At the coffee breaks she’d go out into the corridors and talk to the patients. She knew half of them. She’d giggle with them and put that big smile on, flash those pearly whites and seduce some mad, insane freak, you know. The patients liked her. Everybody liked Edie the first time.

We thought it was only going to take four hours to do the whole thing; we stayed there for two days. There was always the pressure of getting out of this mental institution with everyone drugged to the gills . . . with a sort of cloud descending on everything . . . a night-hospital kind of tranquility which we had to escape. We got Michael Post to play a mad person in the corridor, standing there painting the wall.

After the shock-treatment scene we moved to Los Angeles and shot the rest of the picture around there. One of the main locations was in the bottom of an empty swimming pool where we built the set for Edie’s place. It was the coldest winter they’d had in years in California. Edie was playing her role—especially down there in the swimming pool—without any top on, to show off those new silicone breasts of hers. She used to put a heating pad on them to warm the silicone, which, you know, gets cold.

WESLEY HAYES
 David Weisman had me working on the script of
Ciao! Manhattan
—because I was nineteen and off the streets and he felt I could help with the accuracy of the dialogue. He’d be typing away. He’d ask me: “Wes, look, like, there’s this scene when a boy meets a girl. What would you say? How do you think it would go?” I’d say, “Well, it’d be like this . . .” and I’d tell him. He’d go, “Fantastic!” and write it down.

I met Edie at night—the whole scene with the lights, and she came in all dressed in white . . . long hair, and a fan. Everyone was buzzing around her . . . and when you got close to her, there was this warmth you could feel, like a heat. She was sparkling. When she arrived, it was, like, the hum. “The one” is coming. There she was. She was so fine and clean and pure. I never saw anything like her. I was excited. Dave said, “Now, if you play your cards right, Wes, you’ll get a date with her.” So I said, “Okay,” and I went and took a shower.

She came to me that night. In a cubicle, a little bitty closet where I slept with this other guy that worked with me. There she was. The queen comes down to the stable . . . to the stable boy. It was bizarre. I was experiencing something very beautiful because she could have had . . . whatever. We had a little night. She knew a lot of things, but not like jaded: very gentle and young. I mean, she was, like, tops. Little crummy mattress. Everything was perfect . . . just like it should be in a storybook. You just say: “Wow, that was fine.” You’re just there for a moment. And then she goes away and you don’t feel lost.

But after that, any time I’d see her, she was like a monster. I would hear Dave and John Palmer whispering: “She’s too much; she’s too demanding. She’s just outrageous.” All this time they were taping her . . . so they could use the stuff in
Ciao! Manhattan . . .
fantastic stories. She would go out and get pissed: she was on Seconal and vodka. She became totally different. She didn’t know where she was. “Is Paul America here?” she’d say. “Let’s go somewhere” . . . and we’d have to tell her, “Edie, we’re in California, not New York.”