Edie (48 page)

SCKY SEDGWFCK
 My sisters Kate and Pamela left me alone with Edie at the Chelsea . . . I was supposed to keep her away from her
pills. She was having DTs, or whatever the hell they’re called. So she put something in her mouth. I tried to fish it out, and she bit the hell out of my finger. It was agony. My sisters had good reason for leaving, but somebody should have been with me. If Edie’d been younger than me, it would’ve been different. Oh, God! I don’t know how long they were gone, but it was no joke. I didn’t know what to do. When Kate and Pamela came back, I just hightailed it. I was scared to death.

JOHN PALMER
 We had no one to play the lead in a film we were planning called
Ciao!Manhattan.
I was talking with Chuck Wein in Bob Margouleff’s office—Bob was to be the producer—and Chuck said, “Well, what about Edie?” I said, “Sure, she’d be terrific.” He said, “Oh, my God, do you think she could do it? These days she’s so spaced and stoned and wiped out.” I said, “Yeah, that’s true, but we don’t have anybody else, so we might as well get her.” So we got Edie and, sure enough, she was spaced.

ROBERT MARGOULEFF
 I originally wanted to make a little $47,500 movie. I had the money for it. I could have done it without too much of an economic strain. I had run into Chuck Wein one night in this East Village coffee shop and we had sat and rapped. Chuck could really talk a line. He said, “Well, let’s make some films together.” He Told me he had done all this work with Andy. The Factory used to fawn on Chuck: he was their god, their guide to the underworld, the spinner of tales, the manipulator of rhetoric, the grand astrologer, the seer of the white light, and, generally speaking, the leader of one of Andy’s competing subcultural groups.

So we decided we were going to make this skin flick called
Ciao!Manhattan.
Chuck was going to write the script, right? It was conceived
as a sort of
vérité
underground movie. I knew that everyone came from the underground, but I decided we were going to do a professional job.

DAVID WEISMAN
 Edie was living down in the Chelsea then. We all went down there to see her. It was important because we wanted to film her in the Be-In—the big anti-war demonstration—the next day, when there’d be thousands of kids in Central Park. It was a state visit to the Chelsea. That toothless poet, what’s his name? Gregory Corso. He was there asserting himself with Edie as the momentary agent-guru, advisor, decision-maker. “Well, now, what do you want Edie to do? What’s she supposed to do in this film? What’s this film about?”

We were trying to tell her what a great part it was . . . what a great star she was . . . that sort of thing. It was very babyish. I don’t think she had read the script. I don’t think she
ever
read the script.

So we left some little nymph, some gay kid, up there to make sure Edie got dressed and came to the Park at the right time for the Be-In. The Be-In was in the Sheep Meadow—just jammed. It was April 15, 1967, with the whole hippie thing, just wonderful. Edie was so
wrecked
when she got there. Chuck said to me, “Okay, Dave, your responsibility’s going to be to keep your eye on Edie.”

I said, “Bullshit. Come on!”

In ten minutes she’d got away from me! Lost her for the whole day. That was my first hint of what it was going to be like trying to deal with Edie and the loonies.

Still, we got the movie under way. I don’t believe anyone, at least out of that crowd, ever believed there was going to be a movie until they actually saw the camera. But once we began shooting
Ciaol
and we had a dolly in the Park—everything very professional, a big thirty-five-millimeter camera instead of that silly little camera Andy used to have—it all seemed very official. So we had the movie going and all of a sudden we got pompous. We actually had this contract-signing number in Margouleff’s office. Edie came dressed right up to the hilt, a splendid chinchilla fur, just the image of what she thought it was all about:
PABHHHH
! Hollywood premiere time, klieg lights, the works. We all lined up, and pictures were taken. It was all part of the indulgence.

ROBERT MARGOULEFF
 It started out such a worthwhile project. In a way, the film was a very accurate representation of what the whole period was about: it all comes through—the madness, the alienation, the rage, the shock, everything these people were going through. But it got crazier and crazier. Everybody on the set needed a poke, first once a day, then twice. We actually set up a charge account at Dr. Roberts’ office.

DAVID WEISMAN
 Dr. Roberts used to shoot up the entire cast. He was the official astrologer-doctor; he had a horoscope in one hand and a syringe in the other. Probably the biggest day of his career was when he shot up part of the cast for the big orgy scene in the health club.

RICHIE BERLIN
 The vitamin doctors were the Jesus Christs of the city. I never had so much junk in my life. They wanted somebody to do the sex scene in the movie with this boy.

I had never gone before the cameras. I was very nervous. I had thirty cc.’s of amphetamine through my Lederhosen, and I was perishing with so much rouge. It took me sixteen hours to get out of my room and to the health club. We did the scene in a rubber raft. I was streaming with sweat, and they kept handing me more grass, more hash. I said, “I’m so stoned.” I said, “My mother is going to perish.” They threw me into this raft.

So they said, “Just carry on and give yourself up to total abandon.” I decided I didn’t really care, because my reputation was beyond repair and reproach. All I had to lose was twenty-five dollars allowance a week, and I’d already lost that. I didn’t figure on running
Harper’s Bazaar,
which my father published. So I did it. I can tell you, I’m nearly the
last
person in the world who would ever consider doing a sex scene for a movie in a rubber raft in the middle of an indoor swimming pool at the health club. But that’s the way we wound up with it.

I said to Edie, “What do we do in this scene? You’re the star, I’m going to follow you.” Then Carter Manson gave me a large injection. Edie took more right before she went into the raft . . . pure amphetamine, pure. We were wearing all the chains, all the jewelry. I had on my evening pumps, and when they put us in the raft, it was, you know, “Come on, Richie, make it with Edie.” I asked Edie, “Do they want us to sleep together on a raft in Chuck Wein’s movie?” She said, “I think so.” I said, “Wait a minute. I just so happen to have . . .” and I reached for a Batman capsule on the end of a gold chain with some Seconals or Tuinals in it, and I handed her one, saying, “My dear,
quel
hoot that we should sleep together in Chuck Wein’s film.”

Then Edie was going to do it with him, the star, in the raft, you see, but instead she dropped off the raft and did the most
fabulous
backstrokes the length of the pool, and then breaststrokes, and I called to her, “My dear, what else do you do?” She wanted out of it. She was like pixie-dust lust. She was doing what she did best—swimming. “Edie, my dear,
quel
hoot!” So I ended up with the boy making love to
me
on the raft. It was all too much. I was dehydrated.

I remember screaming at Genevieve. She called out, “Do you want me to turn the camera off?” and I said, 1 couldn’t care
less.
I intend to die in Chuck Wein’s film.” I began to sink to the bottom of
the
pool . . . all those drugs, the sex on the raft, all the gold jewelry that Edie put on me when she went swimming.

MARY BETH HOFFMANN
 My sister, Viva, had said to me, “Look, why don’t you come to the health center when we’re filming this scene in a swimming pool?” So I went along. I didn’t get out of there for forty-eight hours. It was like being a prisoner. All during these bizarre goings-on, the father of the producer—Mr. Margouleff, I think his name was—appeared from time to time with these
haute bourgeoisie
plates of hors d’oeuvres—smoked salmon and caviar. Great quantities of them—the sort of hors d’oeuvres that professional caterers supply. He also provided great bowls of fruit punch. So it was like a very formal cocktail party he was putting on. Every time he would come in, someone would call out, “Hush, he’s coming. C’mon now, everybody.” He’d appear with his wife and a big dog and all this strange, funny food. Everybody’d shape up and carry on like everyone knew exactly what the film was about. The dog was
enormous.
I heard years later that the dog ate up all the takes and that was why the film never materialized.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (from tapes for the movie
Ciao! Manhattan) Oh, wow, what a scene that place was
—
that heavenly drug-down-sexual-perversion-get-their-rocks-off health spa. I was already so bombed 1 don’t know how I got there. I got down to the pool, where all the freaks were. I met Paul America at the pool and I told him we were probably in danger if we stayed, but we were so blasted we forgot what was good for us and what wasn’t, and the whole place turned into a giant orgy . . . every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs . . . oh, everybody eating each other on the raft, and drinking, guzzling
tequila and vodka and Scotch and bourbon and shooting up every other second . . . losing syringes down the pool drains, the needles of the mainline scene, blocking the water-infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night. . . just going on an incredible sexual tails-pin. Gobble, gobble, gobble. Couldn’t get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I’ve ever been in or ever hope to be in. I should be ashamed of myself. Fm not, but I should be.

Sex and speed, wow! Like, oh, God. A twenty-four-hour climax that can go on for days. And there’s no way to explain it unless you’ve been through it; there’s no way to tell anyone who hasn’t tasted it. I’d
like
to turn on the whole world for just a moment
. . .
just for a moment. Tm greedy; I’d like to keep most of it for myself and a few others, a few of my friends
. . . to
keep that superlative high, just on the cusp of each day . . . so that I’d radiate sunshine.

ROBERT MARGOULEFF
 Shooting got so unpredictable. There was one scene in which Paul America was supposed to drop off Jane Holzer at the helioport at the Pan Am Building. We filmed him driving up and letting her out and then driving off. He was supposed to drive around the block and be available for more footage to the scene. But he just kept on going. We didn’t hear from Paul again for about
eight
months until finally David tracked him down in Allegan, Michigan, where he was in jail. We had to get permission from the Governor to film him in jail and try to integrate that into the footage.

PAUL AMERICA
 I was high on some weed, I guess. There was a road map in the car. I figured they were taking advantage of me, so I was ready to leave the scene. I drove to my brother’s farm in Indiana. I knocked it out in fifteen hours.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (from tapes for the movie
Ciao!Manhattan) Paul is such a strange, zombielike guru. I hate him, but I have this strange fascination, this kind of love and sexual addiction for him. I remember on the way to the
Cloisters . . .
poking up speed in the car.
I saw him as
like some vision of a Martian . . . somebody from outer space. Maybe it was because he took so much acid that he had this strange alienation from the human race. Fm not sure what attracted me to him unless it was a kind of admiration brought about by the drugs which I was so heavily inundated by. But that morning at the Cloisters was truly beautiful. It was great.