Edie Sedgwick was a bright social butterfly whose candle of fame burned brightly at both ends. Born into a wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family of impressive lineage, Edie became a "celebutante" for her beauty, style, wealth and her associations with figures of the 1960s counterculture.

Edie was born in Santa Barbara into a prominent family plagued by mental illness. Her father, Francis Minturn Sedgwick (1904-1967), was a local rancher who had experienced three nervous breakdowns prior to his 1929 marriage to Alice Delano De Forest, Edie`s mother. Francis also suffered from bipolar disorder, and his doctors told Alice`s father, the Wall Street financier Henry Wheeler De Forest, that the couple should not have any children. They eventually had eight: Edie was the fourth of five daughters and the second-to-last of the Sedgwick children born from 1931 to 1945. Edie later told fellow Warhol superstar Ultra Violet that both her father and a brother had tried to seduce her when she was a child. She once found her father in flagrante delicto with another woman, and after she tried to tell her mother about his offense, her father denounced her as insane and called the doctor. In Edie`s confession to Ultra Violet, she claimed, "They gave me so many tranquillizers I lost all my feelings."

The Sedgwicks were an old line of WASPs whose lineage included Judge Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813), who had served as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and later Speaker of the House of Representatives in the time of George Washington. The Judge`s wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick (1753-1807), had lost her sanity during mid-life. The roots of the mental illness that plagued the Sedgwick family likely extend as far back as Pamela Dwight Sedgwick.

Edie was raised on a 3,000-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, bought with money inherited from Alice`s father. The family fortunes improved even further in the early 1950s, when oil was discovered on the ranch. The Sedgwick children were educated in a private school constructed on the ranch, and given daily vitamin B shots by a local physician.

Despite their prosperous, Edie`s upbringing was plagued with trauma. Her brother Minty was an alcoholic by age fifteen and eventually committed suicide at the Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1964, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday. Her other brother, Bobby, also was troubled by psychiatric problems and was institutionalized after suffering a nervous breakdown in the early 1950s while attending Harvard. He crashed his motorcycle into a bus on New Year`s Eve 1964 and died two weeks later.

Edie suffered from anorexia in school, which continued into her adult life. Edie was first institutionalized in the fall of 1962 at the Silver Hill mental hospital (where her brother Minty later died). After wasting away to ninety pounds, she was transferred to the far stricter Bloomingdale, New York Hospital`s Westchester County facility. On a furlough from Bloomindale, she became pregnant and had an abortion.

In the early 1960s, Edie lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while attending Radcliffe College. Edie studied sculpture and spent her time partying and driving her Mercedes. At her therapist`s office, she met recent Harvard graduate Chuck Wein, who was living a bohemian existence and styled himself as an Edwardian dandy. After she turned 21 in 1964, Eddie left Cambridge for New York, moving i

Post a Comment | View All Comments (5)