by Mara Jebsen
–Edie Sedgwick
This summer I had a crush on Edie Sedgwick. Recently, I tried to “be” both Edie and Andy Warhol for Halloween. It was easy, because he used to dress like her. The source of her ability to fascinate is hard to explain, even now that she's dead–and I imagine it was even harder for her devotees to explain back then. Over the summer, I read several books about Edie, all of which were half-dominated by glossy photos. In a short time, I developed the sort of crush good girls get on bad girls in Junior High. It just seemed sort of fascinating and marvelous that a person could be almost nothing at all but will and whimsy, and could empty themselves of anything but surface. By this I mean to to say that a young woman, very pained and twisted by the forces of childhood, could become a sort of Peter Pan and fly through New York as if there was no future.
She can hardly have been the first person to turn partying and the wearing of odd clothing into a primary form of expression, but she seems to have had a real gift (a curse-gift, of course, the kind of gift that kills you) for just that. A few writers attribute our whole fascination with androgyny (particularly, slim little boy-women) to Edie, which is maybe not the best legacy to have left on the world, but from what I've read, I can't imagine she intended for generations to copy her. And while its clear that her life in New York, and at the Factory, made her into a sort of combustible, dancing, fairy-machine that ran off of attention, I don't think that fame (at least, as we understand it now) can have held real attraction for her. I sometimes think I can understand what made her go, but have only been able to access that through poetry.
Before my crush on Edie, I had a fascination with Judy Garland. It wasn't the same thing at all. The thing about Judy Garland that got me going was that I saw footage of her from before she did “The Wizard of Oz,” in blackface, performing as part of a minstrel show. It got me thinking about how we could potentially track shifts in American history through the lives of our favourite performers. If I were a historian, that's what I'd do. Little Judy in blackface in 1938 is pretty disturbing and can make your brain want to shut, but the part of you that pays attention to everything will notice that she has something. Its not clear where she got it from, or what she should be doing with it, but she has It.
Of course, the It of an “It Girl” and the It of a professional performer who “has It” are not the same thing. But in the case of these two very different women, we can think about how they absorbed and radiated back the aesthetic energy, the zeitgeist, around them.
I was fascinated to learn that had actually met, although 'met' is not the right word. It was in New York, at what sounds like a really awful party thrown by Lester Persky. Edie was blowing through her inheritance then, and Judy was no longer a young woman, but very accustomed to holding a crowd. I'm tempted to call Persky's party an important moment in the history of performance. But lately, I've only been able to think through poetry:
The Kind of Gift That Kills You
Then at that famous, vicious, fete
down in the village, a SnakeThing happened–
the esprit that animated
Judy, slithered from her lips & dropped to the floor
to Edie–across the room. The place
was black & starred; junked up
& glam like everybody
in it. Truman Capote,
skilled in the calibrations of psychic
loss, shuddered at the feel of a mystic
passing, and in a fit
of kindness, hoisted
and paraded Judy
across the room, to beckon the silver snake
of her queendom
back. It was a spectacular
mistake–every eye was already
on Edie, a narrow, baby-skinned bolt
of breath; furiously sexy in a paper-doll
dress; receiving the mercury
of the SnakeThing down
at her toe-nails where it mixed
with amphetamine, flared & made
short work of her tiny, leaflike
frame; she was
sparkler then; radio tower, skull
crackling with powerful circles
of white white light; an upright
wedding of eyes &
narcotics; her head an electric
dandelion– god, they said, the girl's
on fire!
(Judy, in the corner, felt at once
her human flesh, sinking,
with Capote
the fourth Martini)
Ultimately, female American performers, whether they had talent or glamour or both, became part of a destructive machine, but were also, I imagine, helplessly themselves, because of the It, which feeds off of attention and throws it back to the audience with great, invisible, waves of energy. I can't define It, of course, but it has something to do with a sort of vibrant, wistful optimism.
Judy's famous for telling her audience:”'I've always taken 'The Wizard of Oz' very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I've spent my entire life trying to get over it.” Edie said: “There's magic that's there to believe in.” Both were often astonished that they were alive.
“I've spent my entire life trying to get over it?” I want to ask Judy Garland: the rainbow, or the idea? Many of us spend our lives trying to get over the idea of the rainbow–as if heaven on earth were a child's notion. Its definitely a dangerous one. But I think these performers thought of the other side as an actual, accessible place. They used the energy of our love to get there. It begins to strike me as important that there are dozens of accounts of Edie, in which her contemporaries (many as on and off drugs as she) describe her as “otherworldly”, even when sober.
I'm still not sure I can define the “It” of the “It-Girl”, but I suspect that this “otherworldly” business has something to do with it. They are charismatic because they desperately believe. They believe in purely good places you can get to before death–and when we catch them believing it, we get a glimpse of the rainbow's other side.
