BOOK REVIEW: Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol were America's 'it couple' for 15 minutes. What caused their relationship to fizzle?
Alice Sedgwick Wohl examines her sister's fame and more in her memoir, 'As It Turns Out'

Edie Sedgwick was many things: actress, model, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob
Dylan.

In 1965, she would inspire Warhol and capture the attention of a nation as the
pair became an overnight sensation. The “it couple” of the year, the two were
inseparable — Warhol with his pallid skin and silver wig; Sedgwick, thin and
beautiful, hair styled in a silver pixie cut — often in matching outfits, at every
event.

Their relationship was platonic, yet symbiotic. Sedgwick was able to get
Warhol into the right society parties; introduce him to people in high places.
Warhol in return, brought fame and notoriety, the promise of a film career. But
their fairytale courtship fizzled out sooner than history remembers, after a
short 10 months, a relationship complicated by Sedgwick’s drug use and a
growing distrust in Warhol’s ability to help her career. She would soon storm
out on him, moving on to Dylan and his entourage, signing with his agent and
forged ahead with a film career that was interrupted by drug addiction and
declining mental health issues. She died in 1971, at 28, from an accidental
overdose.


Alice Sedgwick Wohl, a West Stockbridge resident and Edie’s eldest sister, has
been trying to figure her out since she was born. Edie was an enigma that
puzzled Alice, not only when she was alive, but for decades after her death.
The eldest of eight, Alice sensed there was something different about the
golden-haired Edie, but couldn’t quite grasp what it was that made their
parents indulge her every whim; and others give her exactly what she wanted.
Alice was already 13 and away at boarding school when Edie was born. She
caught the first glimpse of her younger sibling that summer, when she arrived
home from school. It would be decades later, in April 2015, that Alice would
finally learn from a Vogue magazine cover that: No. 1, Edie’s actual birth date
was April 20 and No. 2, that some 40 years after her death, Edie was famous.
But it would take several more years, the summer of 2019, for Alice to begin
seeking what she had missed; a journey started by accident, prompted by visit
to the Addison Gallery in Andover, where, on an upper floor, she encountered
a clip from Warhol’s film, “Outer and Inner Space.” There, two large projections
of Edie, closeups of her face and a profile shot, played in unison. On one side,
is the “real” Edie, responding to images, of herself, on the other screen.
“At first I was startled just to see Edie so alive and vital, when she’d been dead
for nearly half a century, but what astonished me was the presence she had on
camera. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. At the same time, I thought I was
seeing a very complex play upon the figure 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,” Alice,
soon to be 91, writes in the beginning of “As It Turns Out,” her newly released
memoir, which began as a series of letters written to their brother, Bobby, who
died in an motorcycle accident just months before Edie met Andy.
Prior to this point, Alice’s view of Edie had been that of an older sister, who,
because of their age difference had little if any interaction with Edie besides
family events and holidays. The distance between the younger and older
Sedgwick siblings is clear in Alice’s memory; she recalls returning home, at 30,
to the family’s ranch in California for Christmas. As she arrives, Edie, then 17,
and their younger sister, Susanna, enter the room and stop, unsure how to
react to her presence. She is a stranger amongst her own siblings.
STARTING AT THE BEGINNING
While its not unusual for siblings, especially those separated by large time
intervals, to be raised differently by their parents, Alice’s quest to understand
her sister begins at the beginning, with their parents — Alice Delano de Forest
and and Francis “Duke” Minturn Sedgwick. Born into a family of classic East
Coast WASPs, Alice grew up in the shadow of wealth.
Her father, a descendent of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks, had followed the
family’s formula for success, attending the right schools, including graduating
from Groton School and Harvard University, before attending Trinity College
in England and later Harvard Business School. He would try his hand at
finance, twice, both times failing due to a “mental breakdown.” He became a
sculptor and settled with his wife, in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. Alice, Robert,
Pamela, Francis Jr. (Minty) and Katherine would be born between 1931 and 1941.
Edith (Edie) and Susanna would follow in 1943 and 1945, after the family had
moved to California, to a ranch purchased “to aid in the war effort.” (Alice
would later learn that her father was not able to enlist in the war effort; his
prior mental health issues playing a part in his rejection. It is also here, she
notes, that prior to being married, her parents were advised never to have
children because of his condition.)
Alice describes Fuzzy, the name they called their father, as a gentleman
rancher, who had an overseer that took care of the day-to-day work. Her
mother, she remembers ran a household without lifting a finger; she made lists
for others — menus for the family and ranch hands, detailed lists for the
nannies. The year they moved to California, she remembers being told they
were now poor; a fact that didn’t sit well with her mother, whose family money
sent the children off to boarding schools. Later, oil would be discovered on the
ranch and the family would move to a larger ranch in Laguna, Calif. There, her
father would find the notoriety he craved, as an artist and as a civic leader.
Growing up, Alice was taught, like other children of WASPs of her era, that
there were certain things you didn’t talk about — money and sex among them.
(She’d learn about her family history when reading her grandfather’s
autobiography at a borrowed house in Europe. He didn’t talk about growing up
in Stockbridge with his grandchildren during the time he lived with them, in
his own wing of the ranch.) Alice, too, followed the family formula, boarding
school and later, Radcliffe, all the while, the younger Edie was tossed out of
boarding schools and remained at home, a free spirit indulged by their parents
it seemed. But then, Alice recalls, beyond the estranged relationship with their
parents (the older children lived in bunks outside the main house), there was
Edie’s eating disorder, an outrightly ignored full-blown case of bulimia, and a
nine-month period that Edie was ill. Alice writes that someone told her it was
leukemia, but later, she learned, that Edie had walked in on her father having
sex with a woman who wasn’t their mother. Edie said when she threatened to
tell people, Fuzzy slapped her and called the family doctor, saying she was
having a breakdown. Edie was given tranquilizers and kept that way for close
to a year.
ANDY AND EDIE
“Edie arrived in New York in the summer of ‘64 and she was already exploding
like a firework in the sky,” Alice writes. “Bobby had seen her in Cambridge in
the spring, and it was as if he’d never known her before, he was so taken
with her. I’m not sure if he was an active communist at that point, but if so he
certainly forgot about it when 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.”

A few months later, around Christmas, Edie and Bobby were both in accidents.
Edie survived, Bobby did not. When Edie returned to New York, she was
mourning a second brother (Minty had committed suicide about 18 months
earlier). Edie, who was already using drugs (despite claims that Warhol
introduced her), would soon meet Andy and begin making movies. She would
make 10 films with Warhol, before parting ways.
In examining Warhol’s films, their joint television appearances and more, Alice
realizes that Warhol was not just filming her sister, he was doing what others
could not, capturing the real Edie on film. And that, she concludes is what Edie
wanted in the end. “... Edie had no interest whatsoever in make-believe. It was
herself she wanted to display, herself she was desperate to communicate, and
the truth is, she simply was a narcissist ... She didn’t just didn’t want people to
see her, she want them to listen and to listen up. She wasn’t trying to create an
image — quite the opposite, she never pretended to be anything but herself.”
WHAT WAS IT?
In her search for answers, Alice comes upon the realization that Edie, in her
efforts to just be herself, was a symbol for others. When she was with Warhol,
the pair, were more than an “it couple,” they were a “fantasy of upper-class
glamour.” Edie was described as a debutante, an heiress and a Boston
blueblood. She was none of those things.
But in the minds of others, she was. Case in point, Patti Smith remembers,
according to Alice, Edie arriving at a Philadelphia art opening draped in
ermine, wearing a little black dress and led by two white afghan hounds on
black leashes with diamond collars. “It could be a fantasy,” Smith says, and it
was. Edie, photographed at the opening, arrived in a floor-length pink jersey
Rudi Gernreich dress. But it was what she symbolized that mattered to the
public.

For others, Alice writes, Edie was a symbol of freedom; she gave some young
women the license to do what they wanted, as she appeared to do. Although,
in reality, Edie, she says, lived in constant fear that at any moment her parents
would whisk her away to California and lock her away.
Alice still has questions that she acknowledges will go unanswered, but she has
learned about the sister she barely knew, a distance caused by age and family,
tumultuous circumstances and physical distance. But it is with empathy that
she now views her sister, and in researching the book, she has forgiven
Warhol, whom she naively blamed for her sister’s troubles in the past.
In the end, she is left with the memory of her sister and the image of Edie, an
an image that has transcended the woman she was and has come to represent
something different for everyone who encounters it.

Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s muse and collaborator, and to a large extent his mirror image, was the poster-girl of her time, a party girl who lived life in the fast lane and burnt out all too soon. She had a strange childhood amongst a troubled family, and when at 21 she inherited a lot of money from her grandmother, she liberated herself from her father’s control and moved to New York. Always mentally fragile, spending time in mental hospitals, and increasingly addicted to drugs, she eventually died from a barbiturate overdose at just 28. Even her marriage failed to save her and her mental state deteriorated instead of improving. She met Warhol in 1965 at a birthday party for Tennessee Williams and the attraction was instant, although they were never romantically involved. The relationship eventually soured and her addiction worsened. Her sister, 12 years older, has written an interesting and illuminating biography but she doesn’t seem to have liked Edie very much, and certainly wasn't close to her, so much of the narrative is hearsay or has been gleaned from previously published sources. Nevertheless, I found the book a compelling read and very much enjoyed it, particularly the first part when Alice talks about her family and upbringing. Many photographs accompany the text, which is a bonus.

I have never understood the fascination with Andy Warhol. Woh,’s younger sister, Edie, was the muse of Warhol for a few fleeting months.
I found the first part of the book interesting because the author is revealing her dysfunctional upbringing.
It’s after that she lost me. She tries to dissect and Analyze Edie’s life, but she does this from a distance and it’s mostly supposition.
Is the author paying a late homage to her sister? I guess I don’t understand the reason for writing the book aside from sharing family history and losses.

A thought provoking look at the life of Edie Sedgwick by her sister Alice Sedgwick Wohl.
Raised one of eight children by controlling, parents on a Santa Barbara ranch, Edie’s family was one of wealth and social status whose environs were the polar opposite of what was to come.
As a teenager, she caught her father in an extramarital affair which led to her father labeling her as crazy. Placing a call to a doctor, he arrived at the home, placed her in bed and administered tranquilizers beginning her lifelong troubled path and extreme vulnerability.
Alice’s reconstruction of Edie’s life is one of wonderment, research and thoughtful commenting. She desires to understand the who, why and what that captivated Andy Warhol to bring Edie into his orbit. What made them a celebrity pairing? As a model and actress of Warhol films, she became an icon with her meteoric rise that unfortunately ended in her untimely death at the age of 28 from a drug overdose.
Alice unveils her sister with accounts from Factory members that provides the depth and breadth of her life in New York City and her post-Warhol world following her estrangement from Andy, his circle and her downward spiral.
This is a highly recommended read.
My thanks to NetGalley, the author and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

I am really interested in anything related to Andy Warhol and the Factory Scene (including recent documentaries). I also read the Jean Stein book on Edie Sedgwick so was very intrigued when I saw this book written by Edie's older sister, Alice. At first I was surprised because I was many pages in before Edie is even mentioned (when she is born) - however, Alice's story is fascinating in its own right so I was not at all disappointed. Alice had extensive access to others in the Factory who knew Edie and so we get a wider perspective on Edie's life. She even sets the record straight on some of the assertions raised by Jean Stein (who she knew when she was younger). I enjoyed reading this book and learning about Alice and Edie and their family. I recommend this book.

Alice Sedgwick Wohl’s book is a kind of revelation for those of us who don’t know anyone who was alive during the 1960s and stayed Artsy Enuff to be here in the 2020s and confused by Instagram. Wohl doesn’t think Edie Sedgwick would have one?! This is why it’s important to listen to yr elders! Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC - we will purchase this title at my library and it will have a good time on its ILL journey from all the burnt-out glamour grrl geniuses it gets to visit.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. The author, Edie’s older sister, was one of the first to speak to Jean Stein, who wrote the oral biography of Edie that became such a sensation and was a good friend of the author’s. She also got family friend George Plimpton to help Jean edit all her material into cohesive book. All these years later, the author is not so sure how she feels about that book or even how she feels about Edie or Andy Warhol. This book is a chance to revisit these two with the help of time passing and better appreciate what these two did together for the brief time they were together and were the center of so many world’s in NYC.

There have been many books written about the lives of both Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol. This one is written by Edie's sister Alice, 12 years her senior. It seems as if it is written by an observer, from an outsider's perspective. I read many of the same stories that have been written before by others not in the Sedgwick family. It never seems as though Alice and Edie had much of a relationship. There are descriptions of the Sedgwick history, with a lineage of mental illness and abuse. Alice's exploration of Edie's adult life seem perplexing to her, and much of the book is based on her writings of her experience watching films Warhol made of her sister. It is inferred that she was not present in Edie's life, or vice- versa, during the Warhol years.

I had hoped that a book written by Edie's sister would seem more personal and provide new insight into what made her tick. To me, the fact that the author does not include intimate family information from a first person perspective is the most revealing.

For me, this book doesn't provide additional enlightenment into the lives of Edie Sedgwick or Andy Warhol.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.