AS IT TURNS OUT
Thinking of Edie and Andy
By Alice Sedgwick Wohl
Illustrated. 259 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28.
Alice Sedgwick Wohl grew up in the first half of the last century and learned, among many other draconian rules of WASP etiquette, that “it was wrong to start a letter or even a paragraph with the pronoun ‘I'” . Though letters and even paragraphs may now be as endangered as the Arctic ice sheets, Wohl has defiantly written an entire book in the first person singular. Her later memoir, “As It Turns Out” — published just before the author’s 91st birthday — is beautiful, if not exactly joyous.
Wohl was the first child of eight in a family of genteel birth and unequal mental health, the Sedgwicks, who moved from Cold Spring Harbor, NY, to a succession of California ranches. They struck oil on one of those properties, strengthening their weakened fortunes. Their wealthy lineage included Theodore Sedgwick, a Speaker of the House under Thomas Jefferson; Ellery Sedgwick, the longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly; and Ellery’s brother Henry Dwight Sedgwick, a prolific popular historian who “knew and didn’t particularly like” Henry James. Growing up “not to talk about anything personal,” Wohl writes, “I’m uncomfortably aware that merely reciting facts like this can amount to bragging.”
The seventh child, Edie, would become Andy Warhol’s famous—and doomed—muse when the ’60s turned sour (she died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, aged 28). Wohl’s book is welded around the couple’s double star, but touchingly harks back to the second child, Bobby, with whom Alice had a close bond and who in 1965, at the age of 31, was fatally collided with a city bus while on the road. his motorcycle was riding. Another younger brother, known as Minty after his middle name, Minturn, had committed suicide last year.
Dumb nicknames were another use of WASP (Henry Dwight’s name was Babbo), and often they would strike. Minty hated his nickname, according to “Edie: An American Biography” (1982), the oral history published by the Sedgwick, tells Jean Stein and George Plimpton, of which “As It Turns Out” serves as a sort of sidecar- volume. (There are several other books, documentaries, and a feature film about Edie, but none have the weight of the Stein-Plimpton collaboration.) Alice herself was called Saucie because her father, Francis Sedgwick, thought she was born on a sausage. seemed; Francis, a sculptor with a meticulously maintained Charles Atlas corpse, was constantly concerned about Alice’s weight. To his friends, he was known as Duke, which gives a sense of his smoothing self-esteem, a facade after nervous breakdowns that set banking and military careers on fire. Before his marriage to the long-suffering Alice Delano de Forest, he had been advised by a psychiatrist not to procreate.
To the Von Trapp-esque brood he stubbornly fathered anyway, christened “in a party on the patio,” Francis was not Papa but Fuzzy, a nickname borrowed from his well-born father-in-law’s nickname. He “wasn’t fuzzy, was he,” as the old nursery rhyme goes, but cruel and insulting, beating with a hairbrush, calling Minty “an old woman and a sissy” and writing a painful roman à clef, “The Rim about his own flirting. Edie said she not only walked in on Fuzzy in blatant delinquency, slapping her and shooting her full of sedatives, but was herself subject to his sexual advances when she was only 7 years old. hard to believe doesn’t mean some of it can’t be true,” writes Wohl, who himself witnessed Fuzzy’s jealous, seductive behavior and his shocking racism.
An art book translator, an understandable career choice given the strange codes she had to interpret growing up, Wohl adds delicate shades and texture to the group portrait of the Sedgwicks that emerged in “Edie” — and a spray of light. She describes laying on haystacks staring at meteors in the night sky, carrying a trout she and Bobby caught back home in her moccasin for her father’s delight, and riding a much-loved gray gelding named Grenadier. “Only music, only a Brahms symphony, comes close,” she writes.
With its primitive and sometimes barbaric rituals (cattle fires, etc.), the isolated ranch was the carefully constructed duchy of Duke—opposite and yet in some ways parallel to the cutting edge tinfoil kingdom of Warhol’s Factory: “Each of the two worlds was dominated by a powerful male figure, one gregarious and priapic, the other shy and deliberately ‘swish,'” notes Wohl. Each was fixated on appearances; each was drug-drenched. Warhol, the Byzantine Catholic from working-class Pittsburgh, also shared funny nicknames out.
“As It Turns Out” provides Wohl with an opportunity, with decades of perspective, to reverse some of the comments she made to Stein about the artist, to acknowledge his creative and emotional breadth and his foresight. “I’m ashamed to see the superficial things I’ve said,” she writes. “I just didn’t get it.” She finds his trick of dismissing personal issues with a simple “whatever” particularly useful.
Wohl is also determined to refine the popular impression that her sister was an innocent through Warhol’s Svengali. “She wasn’t Miranda in ‘The Tempest’,” Wohl writes, “she looked more like a feral creature springing up from captivity,” carrying a copy of “A Tale of Two Cities” for the show and initially mistaking her. silver-haired doppelganger project as “Pop Tart.” In this narrative, blessed or cursed by exceptional beauty, Edie is spoiled by her parents and develops a domineering personality, becoming a reckless shopaholic with few skills other than ordering things over the phone, a “scamp, and totally kinetic” (or “everything zoom zoom zoom”, as the eighth child, Suky, liked to put it) – a real kind of pain, whose enduring mystique is due to nothing more than the rise of visual culture.
Wohl has preserved what seems like a cool take away from this fussy sister, learning her exact date of birth from a 2015 Vogue article and expressing her surprise that the magazine is still celebrating Edie. A few of her passages land equally stubborn, perhaps self-protective, naive. “I knew about the drugs, but I had no idea she was drinking,” she says of Edie after seeing her order vodka in a Warhol movie. Wohl wonders in one breath why no one thought Edie’s binge-eating and purging in fancy restaurants was disgusting; in the following she notes – bingo – that her sister always collected the bill.
The grandmother of the Sedgwick children, a Colony Club member so stratospherically snobbish that she found the Social Register vulgar and the Vanderbilts the trop, once boasted that her bare feet had never touched the ground. Lucky for Wohl, and for her readers, that she managed to dig deep in the dirt, wiggle her toes — and then run the full distance.
