Dylan, Warhol & Edie Sedgwick: Three on a Tinderbox

Shortly before Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan’s brief, tense encounter at Warhol’s Factory (see previous post), they had a briefer, tenser encounter at Dylan's favorite watering hole

Early in 1965, the year that Andy Warhol’s art studio “turned into the exploding Factory,” as Warhol’s chief factotum, Billy Linich, put it, Edie Sedgwick, 22, entered Andy Warhol’s life. “Beautiful, pixieish, and aristocratic, Edie gave off an indefinable glow,” I wrote in POP, my 2009 Warhol biography.¹ Another Factory habitué, the playwright and scenarist Robert Heide, described Edie similarly: “She gave off this eerie light and energy. It’s as if Edie was illuminated from within.”²

Warhol, the immigrants’ son raised in near-poverty, was as enchanted by Edith Minturn Sedgwick’s lineage as he was by her mercurial charm. Edie’s great-great-great-grandfather Theodore represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1796 to 1799; her great-great-uncle Robert Shaw commanded the all-Black Civil War regiment memorialized in the movie Glory, and another great-great-uncle, Endicott, founded the exclusive prep school Groton.

Andy Warhol, besotted with the 22-year-old Edie Sedgwick. His infatuation didn’t last.

Raised on a three-thousand-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, California, Edie was intimate with high society on both coasts. Less alluringly, she had been committed, twice, to mental hospitals. Edie alternately worhsipped and loathed her preening, domineering father. Francis Sedgwick, “Duke” to some; to others, “Fuzzy,” terrorized his children emotionally. Edie’s older brother Minty, whom she adored, was in his third mental hospital when he acknowledged his homosexuality to his father, whose response was, “I’ll never speak to you again; you’re no son of mine!” Minty hanged himself. “The whole family story is not to be believed,” Edie told Nora Ephron in “Edie Sedgwick, Superstar,” a New York Post Sunday Magazine feature. “Very grim. It teaches you a great deal, really tremendous amounts of things about human nature and all the terrible things that people do to each other. I’m going to find my own way, free of my parents.”³ Not likely: shortly before her arrival in New York, she inherited $80,000 from her grandmother ($800,000 in today’s dollars). She spent it in six months,⁴ according to her friend Tommy Goodwin, whom she hired as her chauffeur. “It was the gravy train,” said another friend, the future rock impresario Danny Fields. “She didn’t know half the people she took to those dinners of hers.”

Edie attracted the press like flies. Apart from Ephron’s piece, there was a New York Times profile; a Life magazine photo spread (“The Girl With the Black Tights”—Edie evidently pioneered the so-called “no-pants” look, which, given the ubiquity of leggings, makes her a cultural, or at least sartorial, trailblazer); a famous full-page Vogue snap of Edie performing an arabesque on a leather rhinoceros in her apartment, a guest spot (with Warhol) on The Merv Griffin Show, and countless other appearances in the public eye. She made a good beard for Andy. “His constant companion,” as Time reported, she helped neutralize the homophobia that hounded him. “It was a whole new paparazzi scene,” said Billy Linich, “more like Vadim with Brigitte Bardot than just Andy, the fag artist. That’s what happened when Edie came.”⁵

Above: Vogue, August 1965: Edie cuts an arabesque on her leather rhino

Below: With Factory hanger-on Gino Piserchio in Beauty #2, filmed in June 1965. Unlike the previous year’s notorious Couch, Beauty #2 was all foreplay, no out-and-out sex.

Evie definitely had cinema stardom in mind, but of the mainstream sort, not the underground buzz that Andy’s films generated. For her part, Edie was incapable of even the minimal technique that Andy asked of his actors. Edie was barely capable of day-to-day functioning, let alone memorizing lines (when there was a script) or showing up on time, if at all, for the rare rehearsals Warhol called. Edie and Andy were destined for a brief relationship. All but a few of her films were shot between April and July, 1965. Between August and December, she appeared in only two. Nineteen-sixty-five ended in thorough, mutual, disillusionment.

Meanwhile, opportunity beckoned, in Edie’s imagination at least, from another corner. An old friend of Tommy Goodwin’s, Bob Dylan’s charge d’affaires Bob Neuwirth, had a hunch that Edie might fascinate Dylan. Goodwin gave Neuwirth her telephone number, and Dylan called her.