Edie (60 page)

I thought, “God I This is driving me insane.” I thought I could turn her into a person who could function in society without the use of drugs and alcohol, but I always had the feeling that once I did that, then I would lose her. I was so mad about her that I had to take the chance. We’d been together on practically a twenty-four-hour daily basis. I asked, “Would you like to get engaged?” She just looked at me. I said, “Well, you know, I’ve never asked anyone else.” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well . . . you know I have no income right now. It’s going to be a while before I can finish school and afford to support us.” She said, “Screw the support thing.”

After we’d been engaged for two weeks, she said, “I don’t want to wait any longer. Either we get married or just forget it.” I was really wondering about getting married. I had fantasies right up until the last moment that exactly as the minister would say, “And do you, Michael, take Edith . . .” I would say, “No, I’m going to leave,” and I
would
. . . leave her standing there at the altar. I always told myself, “You can always get out and retain your freedom right up until the very last instant.” All those things I’d heard for twenty years: “Get me to the church on time.” I always felt I could turn around and keep on walking, just walk until I was just completely dead exhausted tired. But I couldn’t do it. I mean, I was
so
in love with her.

Edie and Michael on their wedding day, Rancho La Laguna, July 24, 1971

Then we went for lunch to the Sedgwick ranch. Coming from a middle-class home, it was impressive to me. The living room seemed very weighty, and for someone to have all these books and to have done as many things as Mr. and Mrs. Sedgwick had done. . . . I thought, “Oh, boy, this is going to be a real challenge.” I was a bit long-haired and whiskered at the time, and I thought that was probably not something Mrs. Sedgwick was going to enjoy, but she was very polite. We had been down there a number of times. Edie would put me on a big white horse. Really a spirited horse. Crazy. Edie was always for running flat out. She was born on a horse. Well, this time we came in for lunch—Edie, my brother Jeff, Suky, and myself. All of a sudden Edie said out of the blue, “One moment, Mummy,” saying it in such a way that I looked at her and felt, “Oh-oh, this is going to be pretty interesting . . . whatever she’s going to say.” She announced, “Michael and I want to get married.” I flushed, and I looked at Mrs. Sedgwick. She said, “Well, that’s very good news. I couldn’t be more happy.” She sounded really sincere.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 Mummy was very generous to Edie when she offered the ranch for that clowning that went on at the wedding. Mummy provided the background . . . and that’s beautiful that Edie was married at the ranch,
against
the ranch. There is a unity, and her life with Michael was like going back to the beginning. Except that she didn’t have much left.

MICHAEL POST
 Our wedding was on the 24th of July, 1971. The ranch gets scorching hot in the summertime, but on that day there was a nice, cool breeze. Edie wanted a formal wedding. I objected to a certain degree, but I thought, “Well, might as well go through with it.”

JEFFREY POST
 We had morning coats and cutaways. Edie’s wedding dress was white satin, and the bridesmaids wore yellow picture hats. The ceremony was held in the back of the house—an aisle made
of agapanthus and white ribbon up to an altar, and all around it there were cattle eating in the Sudan grass, grazing there. You’d hear them. The grass was maybe four or five feet high.

MICHAEL POST
 They played Mendelssohn on the phonograph from Mrs. Sedgwick’s bedroom or bathroom when it was time.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I wasn’t invited to the wedding. In fact, I was told not to come. I represented a life-style that they didn’t want to see. Then Edie called me up and begged me to come. I said my wife, Krista, and I would sneak in at the last moment. We did, and we blew everybody out. Everybody was
shocked!
My sister Pamela and her husband, Jerry, and Mummy were all thinking how awful it was that I was there with my long hair and the way I was dressed. But others came up and they told Mummy, “God! Doesn’t Jonathan look good” . . . they were saying I was so beautiful and fine and Krista was lovely . . . and my mother didn’t know what to say, it was blowing her out.

I was wearing a velvet top with a series of buttons down the front, a Robin Hood tie . . . a leather jerkin is what it looked like, with big full sleeves, blue jeans, and these boots. That was it. And long hair. I wore an earring then, but it was out, I think, for the wedding.

They didn’t want Edie and me together. There’s one picture of us kneeling down, telling each other how happy we are for each other, but I’ve never been able to get it.

I brought a man with me called Paco—an English Yogi. Edie loved him. He was reading this girl’s hand in the hallway just before Edie came through to be married. Paco grabbed Edie’s hand, looked at it, and then looked at her. And Edie said, “Yes, I know.”

Still, the feeling at the wedding was radiance. Afterwards we all went swimming naked in the pool. A lot of older wedding guests came down and watched, and they really dug it; the wedding photographer came down, too, and he started taking pictures. Then my mother found out about it and she sent word to the pool via one of the older people that she wanted us to get out. She was ordering us. But we didn’t get out. We got out when we felt like it . . . which was when Edie and Michael were getting ready to leave, late in the afternoon. We went up to the front of the house and threw the rice. Someone in the family picked up gravel and threw it over everyone, Edie, too, and it didn’t feel too nice. That woman was laughing . . . just this weird laugh. It was like a vengeance or something. Really weird.

Edie and Michael’s apartment, Santa Barbara

WESLEY HAYES
 The
Ciao!Manhattan
people wanted to film it. The Sedgwick family—who all looked like Kennedys—didn’t want us to. It was bizarre. Everybody there was separate, scattered. It was like a bunch of people invading a ghost town. What was anybody doing? Nobody knew and nobody cared. “Hey, Edie’s married! Maybe she’s making a recovery of some sort. She’s not going to embarrass us any more.” One sensed: “What am I doing here? Why bother? Let her go. Who needs it?” They were solemn. They didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was dressed in a purple outfit, with a little goatee. I had a hat and everything. Everybody went through the motions. Once again I saw Edie totally sane. Fine. Little bouquet. “Let’s throw flowers.” What a beautiful area she was brought up in—that Sedgwick ranch. I’m thinking, “God, she’s got all this! She’s got all this beautiful land. She could have had such fun. She could have gone out there and done something. But no.”

It came time to throw flowers: “Okay, everybody, let’s throw the flowers . . . and send them off.” Edie and her new husband drove down the road a bit and they almost ran into a pole. The car spun around a couple of times. Edie got out of the car. She was pissed off. Her veil fell off. She’s cussing, “Shit!”—everybody went down there. “Okay, let’s throw the flowers again I” They started pushing the car. So here it was again—it wasn’t smooth sailing.

MICHAEL POST
 After we got married she wanted to get pregnant. She had tests. But she found out she wasn’t. I got her to stop drinking, and off the pills, and things were just beautiful. We spent August on the beach, a nude beach in Santa Barbara, where we just lay around in the sun. We’d go out and rock ‘n’ roll dance. To the Yankee Clipper. It’s got big aquariums with these Day-Glo painted fish that show up under black lights. Little clipper-ship models. Small discotheque. Bit too dark. Edie was just a fabulous dancer. Always on air . . . except when there was too much booze in her, and then I’d have to sort of hold her up. But she’d always insist on it . . . even if she couldn’t dance under her own power. It was always dance, dance, dance. She’d say, “Well, I’ve got to dance some things out.” But then it was time for me to go back into school. She got a bad ear infection in October and they gave her antibiotics to cure it. She turned out to be allergic and came down with serum sickness, which is in your bones and makes you ache twenty-four hours a day. So she was on pain medication for that. . . and then the pills started coming back. She stayed in bed a lot of the time and I read children’s books to her—
Winnie-the-Pooh.

JOHN PALMER
 Edie stI’ll had fantasies about making more films. Michael was going to be her agent. She was waiting to see what was going to happen to
Ciao!Manhattan.

MAUDE CARO
 She also talked about going to art school. She went with Michael and sat in on his classes. I was reminded of Charles Dickens, about how when he first got married, his little bride would sit there and hold the pencils for him. Dickens’ bride finally falls asleep. She thinks she’s being such a help.

MICHAEL POST
 She continued to be really dependent on Dr. Mercer. Once a day on weekdays, and then on weekends Mrs. Sedgwick was on the phone to him. He controlled the pills, and also the strings to the purse. So he was checks, pills, and Mummy. He didn’t like that much authority. But he took it. He’d get a phone call from Edie saying, “Well, Michael lost the pills,” or “They were in my pocket and got soaked in the washing machine.” She’d go into deep thought as to how she was going to get a couple of pills out of him. She’d pace back and forth in the apartment. “Hmmmmmm, no, that won’t work, I’ve used that one too many times.” If he said no (and he would once or twice), it was pretty miserable there for the night. She’d drink herself to sleep with vodka, or she’d get a couple of bottles of wine and just blast out.

After a while I found myself in charge of giving her medication. I wasn’t officially put in charge. I mean, I didn’t have a title or a badge that announced “Mr. Post—the Doler-Outer.” But at nighttime I’d dole them out. She told me she was ready to marry anyone as long as he could keep her in enough sleeping pills so that she could sleep. Let me see . . . I think it was two tablets of three-hundred-milligram Quaalude and also two capsules of three pain Tuinal—really a lethal kind of dose—and that, given to her at ten or eleven, would, after an hour or so, put her out. But often at three a.m. she’d be up again, just buzzing, just
ZOOM.
 Sometimes I’d wake up and find the lights on and she’d be in bed writing letters. She had dreams—one that someone was shooting broken glass into her hands. She said, “My dreams are really trippy.” Her sisters were conspiring against her in many of them.