1960s style icon, Andy Warhol's muse and Bob Dylan's inspiration. "Girl in Black Tights", "Poor Rich Girl", "Superstar".

Edith Mintern Sedgwick was born on April 20, 1943 in Santa Barbara. The girl spent her childhood on the luxurious ranch of her parents, who belonged to the very top of American society: among her ancestors there were many famous politicians, lawyers and entrepreneurs.



William Elleray, Edie's great-great-great-grandfather, was one of the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence. Edie's parents, Francis Mintern Sedgwick and Alice Delano De Forest, had everything one could only dream of. For their children, they even built their own school and hospital right on the territory of the family ranch.

However, not everything was so rosy. In addition to material goods, Francis and Alice had a very shattered psyche. At one time, doctors even advised them not to have children, but the Sedgwicks did not heed the advice and gave birth to eight! As you might expect, some children have inherited mental problems.



One of their sons even committed suicide at a young age. Eddie also showed some strange behavior from childhood. It seemed that she had absolutely no instinct for self-preservation. She loved to ride a horse in the pouring rain, hated her own body, and at the age of nineteen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with anorexia.



In 1963-1964, Edie Sedgwick studied at the University of Cambridge at the Faculty of Arts as a sculptor. True, she spent most of the time hanging out, as did her newfound friend Chuck Wayne.

When Eddie turned twenty-one, she received the right to dispose of the inheritance that her grandmother left her: in addition to a substantial sum of money, she got a huge apartment on Park Avenue. Eddie left Cambridge without hesitation and moved to New York, taking with her her entire wardrobe, which consisted mainly of couture dresses and ballet leggings.

Edie loved clothes. At a party in Cambridge in honor of her majority, she changed three dresses in a few hours, one of which was from Dior. Edie craved fun, parties, and popularity. In New York, she decided to start a new life. She once told Chuck that she wanted to become a model and that "only New York has a real nightlife."

Soon Eddie went all out: spending huge sums on outfits from luxury boutiques, booze, drugs and endless parties. Faithful Chuck was there: not without his participation Eddie quickly won the love of the creative bohemia. In January 1965, at a party with one of her friends, Edie met Andy Warhol, a famous artist, director and pop art icon.



When he saw Edie for the first time, Warhol said with delight: "She is soooo Bee-you-ti-full !!!" And then he invited her to his workshop - the legendary "Factory", which at the same time was the place of the most noisy parties, a hotbed of cultural life and a symbol of modern art.

Once, having come to the "Factory", Eddie found herself on the set of Warhol's interpretation of the novel "A Clockwork Orange" - "Vinyl". Despite the fact that all the roles in "Vinyl" were male, Warhol decided to remove Eddie as well. Then she got a role in another Warhol film - "The Horse", where she appeared only at the very end of the tape. Although the roles of Sedgwick were small, she was able to win the love of the audience and even attract the attention of the press.



Just a month after they met, Warhol invited Edie and Chuck to Paris for the opening of his Flowers exhibition. Eddie took two of her grandmother's coats on the road. In one of the Parisian restaurants, she showed up in a fur coat, under which there was nothing but underwear.Then Eddie cut off her wonderful hair and dyed it with a silver spray, the same one with which Warhol made himself fake gray hair and painted the walls in the "Factory".

Returning from Paris, Warhol announced that he wanted to make Edie the queen of the "Factory". He called her a superstar and planned to make a whole cycle of films with Edie in the title role. In the first part, with the telling title Poor Little Rich Girl, you can see Eddie waking up, smoking, painting, dressing and talking about himself.



It was originally planned to shoot the whole Poor Rich Saga, which will include four parts: Poor Poor Rich, Restaurant, The Face and The Day, but for unknown reasons the saga remained unfinished.

In total, Edie starred in 17 Warhol films. This is the famous Kitchen, where she had the lead role, Beauty # 2, The Chelsea Girls. Although Warhol's cinematic work was rarely shown outside The Factory, Sedgwick's popularity grew rapidly, and serious reputable publications began to publish articles about her and her unusual style.

Eddie's photographs began to appear in popular fashion magazines. The editor-in-chief of American Vogue, the legendary Diana Vreeland, adored Edie Sedgwick. After meeting her, Diana even launched a new column in the magazine called "youthquaker", in which she talked about young and fashionable it girl. One of her first heroines, of course, was Eddie.



In 1965, Life magazine named Edie the Girl of the Year and put her photo on the cover.




Fashionable New York dubbed Edie "the girl in black pantyhose." Life wrote that Miss Sedgwick has done more to advertise these tights than anyone else since Hamlet. She really adored wearing tights with mini dresses, sweaters, and plain tank tops. Even the cheapest things looked gorgeous on her.

There were no rules for her, she did not think if this or that thing was fashionable, she created fashion herself. A fur coat on a naked body, a leopard coat with a taxi driver's cap, ballet leggings instead of jeans. Evening dresses, short tops, trouser suits, hippie-style sundresses - she gave new life to things. Short hair, brightly drawn eyes, thickly painted eyelashes and earrings - long earrings hanging down to the shoulders. Eddie once said that by looking at the earrings you can tell what kind of mood she is in.



Thousands of New York girls wanted to be like her. Warhol's ward The Velvet Underground dedicated the song Femme Fatale to Edie, and New York poets and artists glorified Edie's image. She was at the peak of her popularity. But the glory knocked her down. Sedgwick began to abuse drugs, and this did not in the best way affect their relationship with Andy Warhol.

Getting to know Bob Dylan further alienated her from Andy. Dylan hated Warhol. And he is not alone, many have tried to convince Sedgwick that he is using her, stealing her ideas and mindlessly spending her money on the "Factory". Edie and Andy's union fell apart. By the end of 1965, Edie asked Warhol not to show films with her participation, and even to remove her scenes from several paintings. In early 1966, Sedgwick left the Factory for good. As Warhol's friend and associate Gerard Malanga said, “It was a momentous event. Edie has disappeared. It was the end. She never came back. "



Meanwhile, Edie's romance with Bob Dylan was gaining momentum. Sedgwick inspired Dylan on the album "Blonde on Blonde", he dedicated her famous songs "Just Like a Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat". Edie, meanwhile, dreamed of "serious" fame and believed that Dylan would help her soar even higher. “He promised me a real movie, I will act in a real movie,” she said.

According to Eddie's acquaintances, she was completely fascinated by Dylan and made plans for their future together. But, alas, these dreams were not destined to come true. Dylan secretly married his longtime girlfriend Sarah Lowndes, which Sedgwick learned from Warhol. From that moment on, Eddie began to "sink" rapidly. Drugs have completely replaced reality for her. Newspapers vied with each other about her deteriorated moral character, as a result of which she lost contracts with fashion magazines.

The money inherited from her grandmother ran out, and she began to sell antiques that were in her apartment. Once Eddie fell asleep with an unstuffed cigarette in her hand and burned down her own apartment, while receiving numerous burns and a place in a hospital bed.



After leaving the hospital, Edie settled in the Chelsea Hotel with her lover Bob Neuwirth, Bob Dylan's best friend. It was said that she depended on Newwirth like on drugs.

She confessed: “He drove me crazy. I was like his sex slave. I could make love to him for forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours without getting tired. But the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I started to put pills in my mouth. "

In the winter of 1966, Edie decided to visit her family and went to Santa Barbara. The Sedgwick family was faced with an exhausted, poorly thinking Edie with a ton of makeup on her haggard face. The parents immediately understood what was the matter and sent their daughter to the clinic. A couple of months later, Edie returned to the Chelsea Hotel and took up her old job. Soon, Bob Neuwirth broke up with her, as he could no longer stand her inappropriate behavior and manic addiction to drugs.

In April 1967, Edie Sedgwick begins work on the film Chao! Manhattan ”with director David Weyman and John Glider. She had to play herself, talking to the camera about her life. But her health was rapidly deteriorating, and because of this, the shooting was often postponed.



Eddie went to the hospital again. Tests have shown that the blood does not reach certain parts of the brain. She could hardly walk, spoke with difficulty, did not understand well where she was and what was wrong with her. Over the next two years, Eddie underwent treatment in various clinics, periodically returning to filming in Chao! Manhattan ". She also recorded several audio cassettes for the film, on which she reflected on her life.

In one of the clinics, she met Michael Brest Post, whom she married in July 1971. For a while, Edie stopped drinking and abusing drugs. But her abstinence did not last long. In October she was prescribed pain relievers.

Her body was so exhausted by drugs that she had to constantly experience pain. Sedgwick swallowed pills in packs, often washing them down with alcohol. On the night of November 15, 1971, Edie went to a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum. After the screening, she went to a party, where, according to eyewitnesses, she behaved rather strangely. She constantly confused people and all the time was looking for someone in the crowd. As a result, one of the guests called her a drug addict, which caused a scandal, and Eddie was forced to leave.

At home, she took her prescribed medicine and went to bed. And in the morning she did not wake up.

The investigator overseeing Sedgwick's death called it "an unspecified accident or suicide." The cause of death is poisoning with barbiturates against the background of alcohol intoxication.

Eddie was 28 years old.



Her grave is in the small Oak Hill cemetery in California. On the headstone is the modest inscription: "Edith Sedgwick Post - Wife of Michael Brett Post, 1943-1971".