It's probably a sign of your mental health whether you find Warhol superstar /debauched debutante extraordinaire Edie Sedgwick's continued toplessness in Ciao! Manhattan (1972) sexy or just tragic. If sexy then you're either a swine or just so enamored of the Edie mythos that you'd follow her off a cliff. And I who have followed three different gorgeous drug-damaged [anorexic] rich New England free spirits off cliffs know what I'm talking about. But if like me, you see her in this film and wonder if her destruction is somehow your fault, a side-effect of your rubbernecking hot mess icon-worship, it's hard to feel anything but the need to pray for the still sick and suffering outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. But she, long dead, cannot hear those prayers. We can only save ourselves... the trouble... of enduring Ciao! Manhattan.
But we can't, can we? So come back with me then... a ways. Know that I too, like Edie, am a descendant of a daughter of the American Revolution, the Puritan stock, though not quite as pure or land-rich as some, we are perhaps just as insane and prone to addiction and depression. I came to the Edie myth via the Velvet Underground, which I came to via Lou Reed, who alone on MTV seemed cool, so I fell under his sway. In college (I only later learned Reed and I had the same birthday and I was going to his same college), I quickly found psychedelics, crazy shiksas with Ritalin prescriptions, alcohol, and anorexic lost girls whose hot mess sadness I swayed before like a hypnotized cobra. I was in with the in-crowd because my Velvet Underground and Nico expertise (and Lou Reed T-shirt) made me 'factory-ready', though in truth I knew nothing about Edie. That picture on the cover of the Plimpton book (below left) intrigued me as a kid, but I thought she was an androgynous kid in military school watching a fireworks display.
And these sad girls I followed off cliffs dropped me cold for any boy with cocaine no matter the brutalizing they received in the tail end, when the powder ran out. And every last one of them had a thing for Edie Sedgwick. They had Edie books, that black and white striped shirt (below), the posters. There was yet no internet so any scrap of information had to come through print. And there just wasn't anything except OOP copies of Plimpton's book, which was less a glorification of druggie artsy excess and more a Grey Gardens monument to fallen pilgrim aristocracy. As someone from her old pre-fall circle, Plimpton's book had the same kind of higher ground shock many of us have when watching someone we knew as relatively normal disappear down the druggie rabbit hole... in other words, not the roundhouse kick of advocative justification behind the front door damning found in Burroughs, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.Alas, only one semi-mainstream movie, a botched mess to run alongside the book with the same name, really holds Edie in motion (as opposed to Warhol's film portraits and glorified home movies). It's a dreary, ennui-soaked mix of old weird footage from some 1967 unfinished black and white film without any synced sound, coupled to a foggy color framing of a dumb long-haired cut hick named Butch (Wesley Hayes) hitch-hiking his way into the frame like he was booted off Haight Street for refusing the come-ons of Bob Weir, all while his voiceover drones on with the most musically-challenged of hick accents and he winds up taking a job as Edie's keeper (at this point she's living in an Arabian tent in the bottom of an empty swimming pool).
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| Butch |
It would all still be art by virtue of its Warholian association, and all the songs written about her (Dylan's "Just like a Woman,""Like a Rolling Stone," VU's "Femme Fatale" and more later by artists who didn't know her personally) if not for the dumb cut hick narrator "Butch" (Wesley Hayes) whose bad cornfed voiceover and big curly shock of hair, pale skin and slack jaw makes one think he snuck across the broken down Isle of White festival fences, one too many times. Know what I mean, Mr. Verdecchio? And he's got no respect for leather interiors. A fine sophisticated pilgrim stock royalty speed freak burnout ex-model is too good for him. He's clearly a signifier that this film, for all its toplessness, is meant for an older gay male audience, So we amble back to a question: why Butch? The cut rentboy rube from the sticks, as naive and dopey as traffic will allow is a favorite subject for aging gay filmmakers. They like to watch these guys traipse around in their towels or less post-shower after a long day indulging in Fire Island volleyball and windsurfing, or doing odd jobs around the condo. Said filmmaker (or designer) shoots sly glances while hunched over their brunch table Times (see also Gods and Monsters). I hope that's why we're subjected to Wesley Hayes' super pale naked chest and dopey voice as he walks around in tight shorts and a dazed hick expression so charismatically challenged from a straight perspective he makes you wonder why Joe Dellesandro wasn't playing the part. Was he so unreliable by then? Or could he just not, by then, play a rube, having shot too much, in both senses of the word?
As an Edieophile (Edie-ott?) by association, and--no matter how trunkenshtoned I got--relentless in my gallantry when it came to protecting incapacitated hotties from leering gropers, watching Butch take charge of Little Miss Can't Be Right in these color pool scenes makes me feel like I was leaving my brand new Bentley with Jethro Bodine for the summer. No offense against Wesley Hayes, the actor who played Butch - I'm sure he's smarter than his character and that's part of the problem - if he was a lot smarter he could have brought out a crafty Jeeter Lester savvy, a kind of Elmore Leonard-esque criminal aspect, like Butch starts robbing Edie on the side, just as she robbed Paul America in the earlier footage (aiding justice, partner). And if Butch was dumber, then his scenes would feel more natural, like a good actor would play the hick as trying to come off more sophisticated than he is, instead of vice versa. Instead he's right in between... The only long hair with any smarts is the previous Edie-wrangler, who steers him to the job on his way out of town. He's smart enough, perhaps, to get out before a certain someone gives him hep-C, unless she already has.
In short she's like the sad ghost of her former self, who by today's standards, knowing what we know about eating disorders (and knowing she was kicked out of two boarding schools for being anorexic) makes it hard to revel in her alien beauty in the Alphaville-esque city wandering scenes, and/or the Warhol factory and YMCA pool party footage. She passed mere weeks after her color footage was shot, and you can feel it. Hers is not the knowing sadness, the glimmer of a gorgeous new type of maturer beauty that we find in Marilyn's footage in the unfinished Something's Got to Give. Edie doesn't even to fathom where she is, and watching her is like watching a psychic interacting with ghosts, half in this world and half in the past, but was there ever even another half? Andy Warhol supplied some of that other half, but he supplied it with a vacuum. And who knows how many times the Andy she interacted with was only Andy's double, and Andy's relationship with Edie itself a double, a bizarro mirror to the gay artist-female muse/proxy/twins bond between Waldo Lydecker and Laura... or Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond.
In the end, maybe, we all get our Joe Gillis, some half-in-the-pool-face-down floater of a narrator who only in death finds his poetic voice, and then only to describe us, our grandeur, our lost pilgrim decadent flower, like a hack Baudrillard drowning in a nepenthes stamen.
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| Is that the real Andy though? |
With the post-synced sound, especially of the mysterious millionaire in the limo, seemingly recorded on a cheap basement microphone propped up next to the telephone receiver while he reads his lines, and later shows up and gabs with the rentboy about how great the leather interior of his Rolls Royce is. I can never watch the whole thing without wanting to commit suicide, and feeling like somehow watching the movie and Edie's Grey Gardens crackpot repose but isn't that the point? My friend Monika had to watch it every time she came over. I remember her lifting the drink to my lips when my nerves were too jangled, or was that Amy? Either way, both were thrilled to know I'd gotten sober, and left my Edie annihilation fantasia far behind. Nowadays Ciao! Manhattan only shows up to haunt me once in awhile, like a ghost swimming in an empty pool and talking to people who aren't there yet are more interesting, alas, than most of those who are. Perhaps it's no wonder that the only coherent and 'sane' person in the film is Brigitte Polk sharing secrets for skin popping amphetamine. Best to listen. Or of course, to run back to your Hawks and Ford like one of those errant lovers who gets a close look at the empty speed-addled despair awaiting him once he's bedded down with the facile cold blonde Connecticut WASP hottie and goes racing back to the comfortable warm familiarity of his old Putnam County Italian-American girlfriend like bedraggled storm tossed sailor into a dry towel. Comfortable, warm, familiar: three words no one could e'er apply to Ciao! Manhattan. Alas, no matter what the rich NYC pop art history, watching someone else's burnt-out shell stagger around their one room memory lane only reminds me that my own 'lost in the past, in dreams, in cinema' self doesn't radiate well from outside looking in. My isolation, like Dietrich's is warranted, to preserve my self image as perennially young, but the farther we aging hipsters withdraw from life, the smaller it looks as it chugs along without us and the more we need superstars to feign aliveness, to be our onscreen proxy, to fill the gap left by life's absence. We don't need to see them lurch vacantly around the room burnt out Phenobarbital Barbies dreaming of some broken Ken. Only Andy's camera was ever satisfied with less. For the rest of us, there's Liquid Sky.
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