Seedy Edie In anticipation of the much-buzzed-about Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl, David Thomson contemplates the dark side of the '60s poster girl and Warhol muse that perhaps no film can ever truly capture. By David Thomson It had to be a movie, but still you wonder how they are going to do some scenes. Take the visits to see Dr. Charles Roberts, for instance. He had a nice office on the East Side, around 48th Street, with pretty nurses dressed in white. That's easy. And there was a waiting room, full of the new people, or the under-privileged people--this is going to be a story about the class system. These people had to stay in the waiting room until it was their turn, while the "in" people, the regulars, came in and went to the head of the line and sometimes were hardly out of the waiting room and into the corridor before they were shuffling their pants down and asking the nurse to give them the super shot--the $25 shot--wherever they had skin enough to get the needle in. The shot was vitamins and methedrine, and Joel Schumacher tells in George Plimpton and Jean Stein's book Edie: An American Biography how in just a week or two you went from one shot a week to four a day. He would see Edie at Dr. Roberts' office, "so thin that she cannot be given her shot standing up; she has to lie down on her stomach. It was a big shot--all those vitamins, niacin, methedrine. God knows what else--for a little girl, so she had to take it lying down." Schumacher is the film director. He was a designer then, part of the crowd, and he saw Edie once at Dr. Roberts' office with her mother--this is a good scene--"She looked like Betty Crocker--gray hair with a little hairnet, a blue print dress and little glasses. She looked like a librarian from the Midwest standing next to Edie with her cut-off blond hair with the dark roots, thigh-high boots, a miniskirt and a kind of chubby fur jacket that looked like it was made out of old cocker spaniels. There they were--the two of them. Mrs. Sedgwick had come to see if Dr. Roberts was taking good care of her little girl...and I guess he must have conned her, because Edie kept going there. I guess the parents paid for her treatment: It cost a lot for those shots." I mean, I can see it--can't you?--but I wonder how they are going to get Sienna Miller so thin and with her eyes falling out of her head. And are they going to show the needle going into an ass that is about the size of one of her breasts? Can they do that? And even if they can, just tell me how on film they are going to get the rush, the four-times-a-day hit as the white train goes into you. Are they going to say to Sienna Miller, "Just close your eyes and tremble and look as if you are having a really sensational time?" Suppose she says her eyes are so far out she can't close them? Or are they going to give us shots in the theater? I am talking about Edith Minturn Sedgwick (1943 to 1971--that is 28 years), who was simply "Edie" for a few years in Manhattan, who was rich and half-ruined before she quit Boston, but who then made a career out of fucking (when fucking was the new drug) and then went on to the others, and took it all the way. She got people into bed the way she let her photograph be taken--with utter promiscuity. She wasn't really beautiful in any lasting way. But when she cut off her dark hair and let it go silver, gray, ermine, blonde, taupe, or just rat, and all of those at once, and when she got so thin that her eyes were like the pearls round her neck, well, then she was something past beautiful--she was cute, she was sexy, she was now, she was the '60s. And she became, for a couple of seasons, Andy's girl. As in Andy Warhol. Not that Andy had her, fucked her or even touched her. Andy wasn't much into those things, let alone caring. But he took her photograph and said they were twins and he used her to start his line of one-name superstars who were the moving objects in his movies. And then he dropped her, just as everyone watching had said he would. Not that being dropped wasn't her thing. She was from a good family, the kind of family where two of her brothers were dead before she was 25. And she had come to New York with a trust fund of $80,000 and spent it in six months. And Diana Vreeland had said she had the most fantastic skin--Vreeland knew that anyone doing that many drugs had great skin for a season--that it's really a wonder you couldn't get a strip of Edie, rare, at the new restaurants. After all, she was for sale. And here comes a film, Factory Girl, based on the selling line that Norman Mailer pronounced--"Edie Sedgwick was the spirit of the '60s." Except how much spirit are they going to have time for in the film, when they're having to get Sienna so thin, and having her fuck everyone so that her eyes stand out, and still make it absolutely clear that any cute kid is liable to kill herself for four of the super-shots a day, even if that is $100 a day that some old lady is having to decide whether to pay? So they had to make a movie about her, even if the book of interviews by Jean Stein and George Plimpton is already the scariest novel about the '60s, because it has all these scenes and more and the endless pics of Edie with her eyes out of her head so she can see herself being fucked and getting the rush. And all I wonder about is the chance that all of this could carry one shattered atom of anything like charm or desire, so some idiot kid--it could be you--is going to soak it all up and say that looks like fun. Looking like fun is just another kind of hell. Excerpted from the January/February 2007 issue of Hollywood Life.

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