But Did She Wear a Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat?
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Track:Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat
Its still November 16 in my time zone as I write this.
Sometimes for inspiration or to find yet another new way to present vintage material on my blog (Punk Turns 30, which you can read on the MMN that people seem to be really annoyed by... but its there; take it or leave it), I look at all the "this date in history" lists.
On this date in 1971, Edie Sedgwick died. She was born and died in the city where I lived during my childhood & teenage years (Santa Barbara; I was born in LA)... there was definitely some weird Andy Warhol attraction in my town... Edie, my friend Lance Loud... even me... all ended up in the Warhol fold somehow, though Edie, of course, had the real relationship with Andy. Lance and I merely met him and Andy asked each of us (separately, completely different situations) for our autograph... my other degrees of separation is that Factory photographer Billy Name and I have the same agent and I did collaborate as a writer/editor on an unfinished memoir by a former Factory Girl who passed away before our work was done.
Rumours and urban legend has it that Edie Sedgwick was the inspiration for songs on Blonde on Blonde - Dylan's phenomenal album from 1966 (in my opinion, the greatest record ever recorded, containing the greatest song ever written - "Visions of Johanna" - but that's just my opinion)... "Just Like a Woman," "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," and a song I enjoy tremendously - "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat." Patti Smith even memorialized this conjecture in one of her poems entitled "Edie Sedgwick," which is from Patti's 1972 collection Seventh Heaven.
Edie Sedgewick
(1943 - 1971)
I don't know how she did it. Fire She was shaking all over. It took
her hours to put her make up on. But she did it. Even the false
eyelashes. She ordered gin with triple limes. Then a limosine.
Everyone knew she was the real heroine of 'Blonde on Blonde.'
-patti smith, seventh heaven
Edie's personal style and her tragic poor little rich girl life and circumstances have contributed to her immortality. How many gamine (good), anorexic (bad) girls wore black tights with everything? What about that cute haircut? That outrageous makeup completely with silver eye shadow, heavy black eyeliner and false eyelashes? How did she manage to wear that face without looking like a drag queen wannabe?
Despite the microscope that is always hovering over socialites and their public lives, we can never really know why Edie was sucked into a life of drug addiction and early death... clearly there was a lot of pain - and whether it was Warhol or Dylan or Bob Neuwirth who loved her, left her, disappointed her or .... whether she interpreted it all wrong.
Hers was a life that inspires scores of songs, to be sure.
Here's a clip from her Warhol movie Poor Little Rich Girl.
Comments (5)
That's a good headline - one of my favourite Dylan songs, not because of the lyrics (which I like for the humour) but because of the rolling groove - especially the 'Albert Hall' bootleg version. There was a really interesting film out in mid 72 called 'Ciao Manhattan' about her, mixing her final years with the Manhattan heyday. At the end she was living in a large tent erected in an empty swimming pool in the grounds of a mansion, like an exotic Bedouin. I've never seen it surface since then, but remember the Factory footage being very exciting and desirable- that 65-66 period was really a forward looking, futurustic, anything-is-possible time.
Speak of the devil! I was scanning through the library of clips that came up at the end of the YouTube clip and there's footage from the film.
Ciao Manhattan made a brief appearance on the art house/museum circuit in 1982 - at least in Los Angeles, which is when I saw it. Its kind of a train wreck... a movie that apes the Warhol style and (lack of) structure and also features a handful of Warholites (Brigid Berlin, Jane Holzer, for example)... that tent in the swimming pool thing is an image that stuck with me ever since.
What is rather disturbing about Ciao Manhattan is that the line between the fiction and the reality of Edie's life is so blurred, I think that many people believe that's how she really lived. In the movie, she plays "Susan Superstar," a total acknowledgement to the Factory naming convention of starlets... and I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable number of viewers thought this film was a documentary.
When I read Edie, the 1984 oral history edited by George Plimpton and Jean Stein, I realized that the ranch where she had grown up was the same Sedgwick Ranch over the hills from where I had gone to high school, a tiny isolated rustic rural all-boys boarding school in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara. As a student there, I had learned about the ranch only because a classmate, the son of our English teacher, used to mention it. According to the book, our teacher had earlier been the tutor to the Sedgwick kids. His son, according to another classmate I mentioned all this to after reading this, often used to hike over the hills to visit her. An experience like discovering that one now has only two degrees of separation from a Warhol superstar, or only three from Bob Dylan, happens to everyone at some point, means a lot less to anyone else, but is still a thrill of sorts.
spike-- where did you go to high school? i grew up in Santa Barbara and we have a ranch in Santa Ynez....
Midland, class of '64.