Edie (19 page)

BARTLE BULL
 She could be quite a different person from hour to hour. What sort of creature am I today? Am I like this? Am I like that? Very mercurial: she could be immensely difficult or very sweet; she could be creative and sculpt and have an organized week; or she could retreat and be chaotic and not do anything. That was part of her charm—that she was so unpredictable.

Sex was a nervous, uneven thing for her. If she talked about it, it was only very lightly: offhand, frivolous. She’d say something like, “I’d better not let So-and-so sleep with me because then hell love me for the rest of his life” . . . just kidding around.

She was a fantastic dancer. We danced in New York in Shepheard’s, and I remember Huntington Hartford coming out of the shadows and trying to pick her up with some of that “Baby, I can put you in lights” treatment. To my annoyance, she found that quite interesting.

Edie at her twenty-first birthday party with Ed Hennessy, April, 1964

We went to Bermuda together. They’d never seen anything like Edie. Most of my friends there were fairly conventional—Bermuda shorts and sun tans. Edie was fantastically pale; she would never go in the sun. She was very exotic for Bermuda.

Have you seen those passport pictures of Edie and me? We were at Logan Airport in Boston. We had some time to kI’ll and we got into one of those booths where your picture is taken four times, about a second apart. You can see her sort of schizy quality in the pictures. She said, “We’ll do four completely different pictures,” and she did just that, bang, bang, bang, bang.

I knew she was going out with different groups. There were periods when, for a time, I wouldn’t see her. She would stumble around in some slightly dim Cambridge world.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 Edie didn’t want anybody too close to her. As soon as there were men who were interested, she would wriggle away. It was physical protection. In the beginning, both Edie and I went to some coming-out parties, but by the end of the year they were all-night orgy things. She ended up at breakfast in long evening dresses. It became kind of a feat. Hers was a non-stop zoom, zoom, zoom. I do remember moments of desperation, but she was consuming different experiences . . . spinning faster and faster.

JOHN ANTHONY WALKER
 The really interesting people weren’t going to Harvard, but they were hanging around. Edie had the capacity to create instantly the world around her. You entered Edie’s world and nothing tangential made any difference: everything else fell away and there Edie was in the middle of a pirouette. I’ll give you a scene of Edie. One day I was in the Widener Library Reading Room at Harvard. It was just essential that I study my notes for an hour exam. Edie was with me. I don’t know why. To get out of the rain. She started to draw in my notebook. It was almost as if you’d given a child a crayon and a piece of paper to keep her quiet because she had no one to play with. She did this perspective of the Reading Room which was phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. She did the whole length of Widener with its ceilings and vaultings, a special rendering of that sort of cavernous place it is.

It was a particular period in Cambridge when there were a lot of fairly bright and beautiful people—as beautiful as Edie—going downhI’ll as fast as they could and not stopping because they’d fall down if they stopped; they tried to take as many people with them as they
could. So you had people like Cloke Dosset, who sat there already frustrated and failed by Cambridge standards, and somewhat bitter.

Cloke Dosset was from the South—all those cottonfields stretching as far as the eye can see, which he would inherit if he straightened up and married. He came up to Boston dragging the tendrils of the South like Spanish moss, out of a Carson McCullers scene. There he was, a sensitive Southern boy in what would be considered an effeminate world by that red-necked aristocracy.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN
 The fabled Cloke Dosset! I think he was already out of Harvard by then. A very brilliant man, very promising scholar who had come to Harvard to do graduate work . . . older, balding, but with a kind of ageless quality . . . and as a graduate student teaching a section. His morality and seduction of beautiful boys had reached the point at which the University could not tolerate it, and he was, I’m told, not allowed to enter Harvard Yard. They had a sort of contract out on him. So he was part of the shadowy world that lived on the fringes of Harvard University.

I remember sitting with him in his little apartment at a very small table for dinner. The first course—I remember them as being so elegant—was half an avocado with the hollow filled with sherry or maybe salad dressing. That may not seem all that dazzling, but I grew up in a good, strict Boston household where the first course was always consommé with a soggy cracker in it. So it somehow seemed so wild, so elegant, so recherché to serve an avocado. His mind and his conversation were very original and, I thought, amusing. Tremendous repartee. Probably now I would think it sounded like a rejected act by Noel Coward.

Cloke picked on young men at a particularly vulnerable stage in life. You can imagine the crop of exquisitely beautiful young men who’d arrive in Cambridge every fall out of those small, coddled schools, suddenly in a class with twelve hundred people. It was not like Groton or St. Paul’s. They were not protected. So they’d run into somebody who was everything intellectual superiority was supposed to be like—someone who talked about God and Freud and Shakespeare, with a fair number of literary allusions tucked into every sentence. Cloke Dosset did have a fine mind. He’d draw these men in . . . a whole circle around him.

The walls of his apartment were decorated with something like black satin. Strange cocktail parties consisting largely of men who wouldn’t speak to women. Many of them had these wonderful names
which Cloke would give them: Columbine Streetwalker, Halloween Pederast, Gardenia Boredom, and Gloriana, which is the name of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Appassionata von Climax. The girls did not get nicknames.

In the early days of this group there weren’t any superstar ladies like Edie; they hadn’t yet moved into high gear. A few strange, rather flamboyant women hung around in big hats, but they were more along the lines of a Bette Midler. I remember one who was grossly fat who took off with the Shah’s nephew, something Pahlavi, and they had a wild night of passion. “I was Empress for a night!”

Up to that point Cloke had not hit upon the idea of the more effective decoy—the sort of thing that a beautiful woman like Edie would provide: I mean, they were bait in the trap. Other women were certainly much more intellectual than Edie, and had a more substantial seductive quality. But Edie had an ephemeral charm that nonetheless becomes implanted in your memory. It was vulnerability and a way of reaching out to the person with whom she was talking that was utterly charming.

What did Edie find in that scene? Well, adoration certainly, and a great deal of safety, and of course there was the feeling of being totally needed and useful to someone without having to make any commitment. Awful, though, to be used as a fly in a spider’s web . . . sort of luring people in. You move aside and they fly on into the arms of Cloke Dosset.

Like any fag community, it was tremendously amusing, intelligent, energetic, interesting, and a refreshing change from Saturday afternoon football games—not really, but at the time it seemed that way.

So it gave one a sense of belonging. And it was heightened by the scene being decadent and probably dangerous . . . it was exciting. This is the big world. This is the wicked world.

RENÉ RICARD
 Edie loved the very nitroglycerine queens, the really smart ones who knew everything. She wanted high, very sophisticated, brilliant faggot friends who posed no threat to her body. That was a golden period, that year in Cambridge. All those amazing faggots and Edie. She had them all—the prettiest girl in town and the most degenerate men I Most of them stunning.

Ed Hennessy was an astonishing number. I mean, the
things
he would say! The expressions he would invent. One of them was: “You have a flair for the obvious.”
He
certainly didn’t. When he was an undergraduate, he would go to parties dressed as Bea Lillie, with the
pearls and the cloche. Edie loved all that. In the photographs you can see her just
dying
of laughter . . . you know, that smile with the dimples. That smile melted everyone’s heart.

WILLIAM ALFEED
 Ed Hennessy was a great character of that time. He’d turn up at class smoking black cigarettes and saying things like, “Let’s swear a lot tonight.” A Kind of deliberately outrageous dandy at a time Harvard was not producing many dandies.

ED HENNESSY
 You wonder how the girls fit in? I hardly knew myself. Indeed, at the time I didn’t realize what I was up to. years later I realized that what I was really doing was trying to impress boys into thinking that either I was one of them—“You see, I’m straight: I’m going out with edie sedgwick”—or that, much more likely, I was out with a girl in order to meet boys. I can tell you one case in particular. There was a freshman—oh, this is embarrassing—Robert Raft Hollingsworth the third, who’d been to St. Mark’s. I was in the Lamont Library in the reading room pretending to study, and this incredibly attractive boy walked through. I
just
about fell apart. I
try
not to get involved in things like this, or even
think
these things. But this boy was too beautiful I anyway, I could not find his pictures in the yearbooks. Chuck wein helped me. He had graduated a year or two before, but he had come back to bum around. we were walking together along mass avenue when I saw this incredible boy again. I said, “chuck, that’s the
person
—that’s the boy I was talking about . . . Chuck!” Chuck and I did our famous pirouette move there on the street. He had taught it to me: as you’re walking along and you see somebody very attractive pass you, you do a complete circle as you continue walking and you take another look. We didn’t care how odd it seemed. we
wanted
another look. Chuck said, “since you’ve got a thesis to worry about, I’11 do some spying for you.”

So Chuck did a little spying. He followed him into the Harvard Yard to Grays Hall, one of the freshman dormitories. We looked in the freshman yearbook, which I hadn’t thought of doing before. There he was I Robert Taft Hollingsworth the Third. Virginia. St. Mark’s. So we knew where we were. We found out that Robert Taft Hollingsworth the Third occasionally went to the Casablanca bar. I can’t remember how the introductions were finally arranged, but they were, and very quickly things started flying: invitations to things, cocktail parties. He never knew my feelings. And then I introduced him, my love object, to Edie. He fell in love with her I
Aggghhh!
Started calling her up every
five seconds and wanting to go out with her. She was furious! I don’t think she really understood what was happening. He would call me up, saying: “I like Edie so much. Do you think you could arrange a date?” He had money and a little Jaguar. So then I’d call up Edie, or if he’d tried to reach her directly, she’d call me to complain, “Oh, God, that little goose is calling me again I” I remember that vividly. Even if you’re very fond of the girl who calls him that, when you’re infatuated with someone, you don’t like them being called “a little goose”!

The irony of this is like an eighteenth-century comedy. Edie couldn’t bear him. I was in love with him. She wanted to be with me. I wanted to be with him. He would put up with me just to be near her, and vice versa.

Edie didn’t want to be harassed by men. She didn’t want to be pawed. She didn’t want to “have dates.” She’d say, “Eddie, get me out of this. Do something.” She knew she was safe with me, because we weren’t going to go: “C’mon, honey, take your bra off.” None of mat. We never spoke about this; it was implicit. That’s one of the reasons, perhaps, that we loved her. She understood that we were men but we were not going to play sexual games and bore her or annoy her.

JACK REILLY
 Edie was always pleading with me to let her into the Casablanca when I was the bartender. She wanted to be there with her crowd, but she was under twenty-one. “Jack, I don’t have to leave, do I? Can’t I just stay? I love it here so much!” It was like her home away from home. “It’s only two more months before I’m twenty-one.” She pleaded as if it was everything in life to her. It was very disturbing that anybody would put that much importance on a bar.

ED HENNESSY
 At the Casablanca they wouldn’t even give her a Coca-Cola. They wouldn’t let her sit with us. It seemed a vendetta on the Casablanca’s part. One afternoon we went to a dumpy clothes store in Cambridge and bought her a housedress with rhinestone buttons, and a dreadful wig. We put wrinkles on her face. We wanted to disguise her and make her look very old. We worked all afternoon on her. But when we walked into the Casablanca, Jack Reilly took one look and said, “Out!”