Kitchen

Tough love

Extra lemons.

We liked bizarre people because we didn't really take ourselves that seriously, and we were amused about how seriously everybody else seemed to take themselves. That was our approach at that point.
We rode around in that gray Mercedes, staying up all night after the discotheques closed at four. Sometimes I'd drive, but Edie loved to drive herself... it was like riding a horse. She told me all about her family. She seemed to love her mother... it was almost "the poor dear... the poor thing is going to be so worried." CHUCK WEIN

*

Edie got into spending her inheritance. It was a time when the discotheques were opening - like Ondine - and people were beginning to live up in places like that. We often went stoned drunk to a place called L'Avventura to have these gigantic diners. Edie loved salmon. And extra lemons on her Bloody Marys. All that extra this and extra that. She ate vast quantities of shrimp. Shrimp and salad, stuff you would think was healthy. But she had four of whatever it was.

I quit my job at the Right Bank restaurant to be her chauffeur. She paid me one hundred dollars a week. We had first met in Cambridge when she was studying sculpture and had gotten to be friends in a curious non-lover way. It was a bit of a strange arrangement to be her chauffeur, but it seemed okay to me. Then I went pow into a taxi in front of the Seagram building and cracked up her Mercedes. I felt so sad, because she loved that car. But it didn't faze her in the least. She didn't get angry. We began travelling in limousines. TOM GOODWIN

EDIE: AN AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY

Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982

Tiny apartment

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

I remember when I lost my mind

Edie was living at our grandmother's apartment at Seventy-first and Park. She saw uptown people. But she felt awkward being at our grandmother's and her bizarre habits were a great strain on the household - the servants were going bananas. Edie would take off on these enormous spending sprees: her closets and drawers were crammed full. I've never seen so many clothes in my life! Just incredible- Edie udes the place rather the way we all did... staying there the way you stay at a club... but it got out of hand. SAUCIE SEDGWICK

*

Edie had always dressed to conform to my mother's taste - little Peck and Peck costumes with navy blue sweaters - but in New York one day I suddenly saw her in this little red fox fur waistcoat with a matching hat and huge peacock-feather earrings, some kind of outlandish bag, black stockings, and high-heeled boots, none of which was in fashion then at all. Iwas very shocked. I said to her, "Is this the way you want to go around?" She said, "I think it's fun." SAUCIE SEDGWICK

EDIE: AN AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY

Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982

Sometimes life doesn't come fast enough

DIANA VREELAND She had a little dance step in her walk; she was so happy with the world. She was charming. She suggested springtime and freshness. She was very clean and clear, and her hair was pulled back, almost Alice in Wonderland. Freshness and proportion and a sense of rollick of life, you know, the fun of life. She was a Youthquaker, wasn't she? - one of the true personalities of the Sixties. Youth came through; the language changed; the music; the humor. The writters and painters produced something totally different from the years before. The two eras have a lot in common. In the Fitzgerald era, Prohibition was on; everybody was as wild as a March hare; everybody had a great Stutz Bearcats, and Mercedes - great enormous cars roaring through the night; youth was wild, rich, extravagant, and marvelous... though, unfortunately, it added up to very little... I think the Sixties will add up to much more.

I don't it a violently sex period. You might say, "Well, everybody slept with everybody like kittens." It was just possible. Don't forget, the Pill changed the world. Certainly, though, it was a very intensive moment of the beauty of the body. No question. Every girl thought every other girl was beautiful; every boy thought every girl was beautiful; every girl tought every boy was beautiful.

But if you're an honest-to-God model, you go to the gym before you come to work; you have one boyfreind who buys you your dinner. You go to bed good and early. No nonsense. You'd never see one in a night club.

That wasn't Edie, tough Edie had a wonderful look about her. Lovely skin, but then I've never seen anyone on drugs that didn't have wonderful skin. There must have been some frustration. She was after life, and sometimes life doesn't come fast enough.

EDIE An American Biography

Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982

Take a walk on the wild side

Cambridge was too suffocating for Edie. She had some oppotunities in New York- that's the way I understood it. Bright lights! Hit the big town there and pick up your heels and have fun! She wanted to kick out and do some things. She wanted to be in a bigger space, and New York offered a bigger space for her. Everybody knew Edie. That was mortifying for me. "You're Edie's sister? You're Edie's sister?" Edie's sister... Edie this, Edie that, Edie everywhere. She was famous. Cambridge was too small for her. SUKY SEDGWICK

*****

She felt that Cambridge were "not enough". New York had a real night life. It was a natural migration.

I helped her pack and drove har to New York in her Mercedes-Benz. The car was completely filled with mismatched luggage, boxes. parcels, and such miscellaneous objects as stuffed animals, straw baskets, and a large collection of unpacked hats. Her visibility may have been bad with all that lugage, but that was typical of Edie's kind of vagueness.

I think her idea was to model in New York . Much of that summer of 1964 she went to a salon where they literally pounded her legs into shape. Her legs were not good in those days -piano legs- but by the time the course was over she ended up with those legs that were so famously beautiful. GORDON BALDWIN

EDIE An American Biography

Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982