Evan's Reviews > Edie: Girl on Fire

I remember Roger Ebert once saying that today's actors, for all their superior skills, cannot for the life of them hold a cigarette convincingly on screen. Cigarettes were from another era. I only bring this up because there are a lot of pictures in this book of Edie Sedgwick smoking, and she holds the cigarette like a boss. Even when she posed, it never looked forced. Same with the way she dangled a smoke.

Same with the way she did everything, really -- even if what she did did not appear to be a whole hell of a lot. I'm reminded of an episode of Seinfeld where George tries to get at the enigma of Kramer by remarking, "So how about that Kramer, the way he just ... says stuff?" That was the essence of Edie Segwick's stardom. She just did stuff. She just said stuff. She just smiled, or danced off the cuff. She showed up (sometimes). And she disappeared. And the crowds ate it up.

Ironically, though, Segwick sometimes didn't hold her cigarettes at all well. During one of her drug-addled hazes, she dropped one and burned up her Chelsea Hotel room and a good part of an arm. The title of this book does not literally mean Edie burned by fire, but means figuratively, a girl on fire, as in a flame who burned brightly and flashed out at 28, just eking it out past the 27 Club.

Before I write anything more about her, I want to provide a very basic critique of the book, because the book is not really very good (mainly pictures and a large number of banal and repetitive quotes in lieu of proper captions). And yet, like Edie, the book is hard not to look at or put down. The book is not thick enough to qualify as a coffee table book, at less than 200 pages, but its dimensions are. The ample photos of Edie, including some of the famous ones taken by Jerry Schatzberg, are mesmerizing. The camera loved Edie, and she it, and apparently she was just as stunning in real life. Edie never had to "strike" a pose. She was almost the Platonic ideal; the forms were there and she just occupied them. They were meant to be.

Edie was a Zuleika Dobson without the malice; every man at Harvard wanted her, and she couldn't have cared less. She wanted love, but was in no hurry for it. She had no plan except for living in the moment. She had artistic talent as a sculptor and illustrator -- especially in depicting the horses she loved so much and had ridden all her privileged life -- but she was unfocused, and once the party set found her, and she it, the rest of her short life was fated. She found that she could go anywhere, and anywhere would welcome her. It was her world and everyone else was just living in it.

That led her to New York and into the Andy Warhol Factory scene. She had freedom, a rich papa, a trust fund, and ready access to drugs and fair-weather friends. It was, in short, a recipe for disaster.

It didn't help that she had confusions about her parents, especially her megalomaniacal father, several bouts of forced institutionalization, massive insecurities, and episodes of bulimia. When she hit the streets, the clubs, the galleries, the dives and the world in general, very few saw any of that. They just saw a star. A star of a new and different variety. A star who had never really been in anything -- except little-seen underground movies. When Edie entered the room, everything in the margins, that is, everything else, receded.

Edie became Andy Warhol's greatest "star," a mockery of old Hollywood glamor, and for a time trotted about as his female androgynous twin. Observers of the scene were captivated by it all.

I've never been shy of stating my skepticism about Andy Warhol and his clique, which I refer to as Warhol's Factory Fonies, but that cadre's effect on art and culture and its habitation of the zeigeist cannot be ignored and is undeniably fascinating, as is anything having to do with New York bohemianism, especially in the 1960s when so many other sub-cultural movements and commercial imperatives were intersecting it.

Edie seemed like a perfect match for that scene, a make-believe star, with no vitae. Some might call her a cipher upon which people projected their own stories, wishes, desires, fantasies; she was a make-it-yourself star. A paper doll you dressed yourself. She's whatever you want her to be, regardless of who she really was. As one of the testifiers in this book points out, "Edie was a facilitator." And she grabbed the female gaze as much or more than the male's. By looking at her, we are looking at what we think we want to be. But then, we have to consider the reality.

It's interesting to ponder how Edie would fare in today's social media world. Her way of living and being portended it. She was, in essence, famous for being attractive and doing nothing, but unlike, say, Kim Kardashian, Sedgwick did not force herself onto the world or use the media self-consciously. Edie didn't have to.

As much as I am inclined to write Edie off as a mere pretty airhead, with nothing to show for her minimal exertions, I find myself drawn to her humanity. Edie was a rebel, in her way, and I love this quote by her, as printed in the book: "It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way."

In a world where all the avenues are so proscribed, I respect anyone who yearns for "another way."

There are other, more substantial and analytical books on Edie out there, and I intend to try them at some point. If you want to be dazzled by her animated spirit in pictorial form, though, this book does the trick.

(KevinR@Ky 2016)