Edie moved from her grandmother's late that fall of 1964 to an apartment in the East Sixties between Fifth and Madison. Her mother came to town and took Edie shopping to furnish the apartment. Suddenly this empty room was full of the sort of ornaments prosperous people have who've been living in the same place for years and years... solid crystal paperweights, great fur scatter rugs, fabulous embroided pillows, one of those enormous leather rhinoceros from where?... Abercrombie and Fitch, wasn't it? Elaborate cigarette lighters, really heavy and solid. Most of them never worked; Edie never bothered to fill them. She didn't have affection for any of these things: a lot of them she didn't even understand. None of this was collected with any love or preference, but just provided with a snap of fingers. She was always sending to Reuben's restaurant... blinis and caviar, always caviar. It was almost a game... everything had to be the ultimate. I guess she was extremely spoiled, because she was given whatever she wanted... a leopard-skin coat that must have come from her parents unless it was from an unkown admirer. A real leopard-skin coat! About the only thing that was her own was a huge horse above her bed that she'd drawn on the wall with pencil.
It was a tiny apartment. Sometimes the garbage was pretty messy in the kitchenette. She would let it go pretty far before she took emergency measures... someone would volunteer to reach into the sink and unclog it.
There was a lot of acid around then... LSD... the first days of it, and most of those people down from Cambridge knew Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. In the refrigerator they used to keep little brown vials of liquid to drop on a sugar cube. Edie would drive her Mercedes on acid! I thought that was the most daredevil thing she'd ever been to... I mean, she'd go up on curbs sometimes, and she'd never pay much attention to traffic lights. It was like everything else: her own rules applied. DANNY FIELDS
EDIE: AN AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY
Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982
