N.Y. Años 60´s. Edie Sedgwick.

Movies

The Poor Little Rich Girl in Leopard Skin Who Was Warhol's Muse By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: March 31, 2007

Museum of Modern Art Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol's 1965 film, "Outer and Inner Space." (Detail)

"Edie was a beauty, gee!" said Andy Warhol. She still is. More than three decades after her death from acute barbiturate intoxication, the former Warhol superstar and New York It Girl Edie Sedgwick seems more beautiful and more super than ever. There are several new books from various intimates and the embarrassing film "Factory Girl." She makes a starring appearance with Warhol on the cover of the latest edition of "POPism," his hilariously observed (with Pat Hackett) chronicle of the 1960s. And there she is, too, on the front and back covers of "Andy Warhol Screen Tests," the first volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of his cinematic work. Starting today, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a weeklong series titled "The Real Edie Sedgwick" that further burnishes her legend and her importance as a muse. The major Warhol-Sedgwick collaborations are all here, including those in which she is the star attraction, like "Poor Little Rich Girl," and those in which she appears as one guest among many, like"Vinyl." Also on view are Warhol's western parody, "Horse"; a fragment from Richard Leacock's "Lulu," made for the Alban Berg opera; Andrew Meyer's "Match Girl" (narrated by Warhol); and Edie's excised footage from "The Chelsea Girls." Less happily, there is John Palmer and David Weisman's"Ciao! Manhattan," a portrait of her in terrible free fall.

Museum of Modern Art Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol's 1965 film, "Outer and Inner Space."

Ms. Sedgwick's beauty, fame, bad habits, bed partners, early death and continuing postmortem notoriety have helped turn her into the representative face of Warhol's film work, his ultimate superstar. But what often gets left out of the discussion about her proverbial 15 minutes is that she was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence. One of the pleasures of this series is that it allows you to look, really look, at the Edie that Warhol fell for, to watch that astonishingly animated face, pale as milk, flutter and fluctuate with seemingly millions of micro-movements. She is at once Jean Harlow and Jean Seberg, as beautiful and nervous as a hummingbird, and just as alive.

Multimedia Slide Show Factory on Film

Like some of the greatest movie stars, Edie wasn't much of an actress; like them, she didn't need to be. On his Web site, Ronald Tavel, who wrote a number of Warhol films, including "Kitchen" and "Vinyl," calls her "mollusk-memoried." (You can download some of his screenplays at ronald-tavel.com.) Watching "Kitchen," which finds Edie centrally positioned in a white kitchen surrounded by buzzing men, her legs stretched across the frame (the girl knew how to work it), you can scarcely believe they rehearsed for a week. At one point, someone in Warhol's camp had figured out a clever system for their mollusk-memoried superstar: if she needed to be fed a line she was to sneeze. In "Kitchen," Edie sneezes a lot.

Andy Warhol Museum Edie Sedgwick in a scene from "Poor Little Rich Girl," part of the film series "The Real Edie Sedgwick," screening at the Museum of the Moving Image March 31 through April 8, 2007.

Ms. Sedgwick met Warhol in January 1965, the same month one of her brothers died after crashing his motorcycle. She had landed in New York the summer before, arriving from Cambridge, Mass., where she had studied art, partied heavily with herds of witty young men and driven her Mercedes while tripping on acid. Once in New York, she moved in with her grandmother, gave modeling a whirl and started burning through her inheritance (80 grand in six months). She rode around in limousines and wore a leopard-skin coat. In some of the films she made with Warhol you can see the jagged scar between the dramatically dark and heavy eyebrows that slash across her face, a memento from roaring through a red light. In 1965, the year she appeared in every sound film Warhol made between late March and early September, the year they were known as Andy & Edie or Edie & Andy, when they were ubiquitous in the society pages and glossy magazine layouts, Ms. Sedgwick was the girl with the most ice cream. Well, at least the most speed. A onetime bulimic, the sliver-thin, silver-haired, around-the-town debutante probably didn't actually eat all that much ice cream, but she did consume drugs, lots and lots and lots and lots. For "Ciao! Manhattan," she recalls a period when, camped out at a hotel in the late 1960s, she was shooting speed every half-hour. The surprise isn't that she died at 28; it's that she lived as long as she did.

Photofest/Museum of Moving Image Ms. Sedgwick as Susan Superstar in the 1972 film "Ciao! Manhattan."

Warhol originally hoped to make a 24-hour-long day-in-the-life film about Edie titled "The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga," which would register her fabulous ordinariness. Some portions were made, including the film "Poor Little Rich Girl," which opens with out-of-focus images of the equally blurry Edie waking up, and the mesmerizing "Beauty #2," which shows she wasn't as dumb as she seemed or wanted to appear. The director and star eventually broke off, with her angrily confronting him. "Everybody in New York is laughing at me," Warhol quotes her as saying. "These movies are making a complete fool out of me! Everybody knows I just stand around in them doing nothing and you film it and what kind of talent is that?"

Photofest/Museum of the Moving Image Ms. Sedgwick in 1967.

Ms. Sedgwick's unhappiness is palpable, and it shows that she had no idea what she was part of. (She was also running out of money and now running with Bob Dylan's crowd.) Warhol yelled back at her: "But don't you understand? These movies are art!" And so they are. His exploration of time in film, the way he arranges all those lovely bodies he collects inside the frame, his attention to documentary and dramatic nuance are revelatory. "Warhol seems to have incorporated all the transitoriness of things into his very aesthetics," the filmmaker Jonas Mekas once wrote. "And that's why it seems to me that his cinema is really about the transitoriness of the medium and the transitory state of all things. About the transitoriness of all existence and all art."

Whitney Museum of American Art The film "Lupe" is presented in a double-screen format.

The artist Robert Rauschenberg once said of Ms. Sedgwick: "I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created." The ultimate self-made woman, Edie turned herself into a thing of beauty, a creature of frightening excesses, a legend, a muse. Bob Dylan is said to have written the song "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" about her.

Museum of the Moving Image "Beauty #2" shows a more playful side of Ms. Sedgwick.

In 1965, Andy Warhol turned his stone-cold gaze on this 22-year-old and fired up his camera, shooting one film after another, capturing a quicksilver beauty who glistened and gleamed and then, just like that, faded from view but not from history. "The Real Edie Sedgwick" runs through April 8 at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens; (718) 784-4520, movingimage.us.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007