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 you've taken those cliff falls and they have made you sore, damaged, and wise in ways you wish you weren't, then you might see Ciao! Manhattan and wonder if her destruction is somehow your fault, a side-effect of your rubbernecking hot mess lemming diving icon-worship. And the next phase after that is the film does nothing for you at all, except encourage you to pray for the still sick and suffering outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But Edie, Princess long dead, cannot hear those prayers. We can only save ourselves... the trouble... of enduring Ciao! Manhattan.
But we can't avoid it, 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 as land-rich (1), 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 Fourth of July fireworks display.
And these sad girls I followed off cliffs eventually 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 poster/s and the enthusiasm for getting loaded. There was yet no internet so any scrap of information about her had to come through print. And there just wasn't anything except paperback copies of Plimpton's book, if you could find it, 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-decadent 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 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--then unavailable). Turns out 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) 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). And it's his dopey narration of genuinely intelligent observances that try to structure the film.
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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 Butch's 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? At least he's got respect for leather interiors, unlike most kids todayzz.z.
Anyway, that Butch gets my goat. A fine sophisticated pathologically narcissistic 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 post-shower after a long day indulging in Fire Island volleyball and windsurfing, or doing odd jobs around the condo. It's a very reciprocal relationship, even if you're straight. Said filmmaker (or designer) shoots sly glances while hunched over their brunch table Times and in the evening over cosmos and cocaine, and you get a free place to crash, right on the beach. 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 only slightly damaged 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, 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, smart enough, perhaps, to get out before a certain someone gives him hep-C, unless she already has, or buries him in a chimp coffin.
In short, Edie's like the sad ghost of her former self. 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 died 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, by which I mean, their relationship was composed of celluloid, light, and shadow... and without a projector, it was just a spool. Swoop swoop, oh baby rock rock.
In the end, maybe, we all get the Joe Gillis we deserve, some half-in-the-pool-face-down floater of a biographer, who only in death finds his poetic voice, and then uses it only to describe us, who killed him, like a hack Baudrillard drowning in a nepenthes stamen.
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| NOTES: 1. Two drunk brothers in the 1700s took care of that, they sold everything to spend on whiskey and women; if women could have owned property then, maybe I would be rich as she was. |