as it turned out
think of eddie and andy
Alice Sedgwick Wall
Illustrated. 259 pages. Farrar, Strauss, Giroud. $28.
Growing up in the first half of the last century, Alice Sedgwick Wohl was taught, among many other rigid rules of WASP etiquette, that it is wrong to begin a letter or paragraph with the pronoun ‘I’. Wall defiantly wrote the entire book in the first person singular, though even a paragraph might be as threatening as an Arctic ice cap. Her author’s late memoir, As It Turns Out, published just before her 91st birthday, is beautiful, if not downright delightful.
Wohl was the first child of eight siblings from the Sedgwicks, a family of gracious births and uneven mental health who moved from Cold Spring Harbor, New York to a series of ranches in California. On his one of those assets they drilled for oil and strengthened a declining fortune. Their rich ancestry included Theodore Sedgwick, who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives under Thomas Jefferson. Ellery Sedgwick, longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly. and Ellery’s brother, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, a prolific and popular historian who “knew and didn’t particularly like” Henry James. Wall writes that he was raised “not to talk about personal matters.”
Eddie, the seventh child, became Andy Warhol’s famous and destined muse just as the ’60s took a turn for the worse (she died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971 at age 28). was). Wall’s book is lassoed around the pair’s double stars, but Alice is close, and in 1965, at the age of 31, she was fatally injured in a collision with a city bus while riding her motorcycle. It makes an emotional return to its second child, Bobby. Another younger brother, known as Minty after his middle name Minturn, committed suicide the previous year.
Ridiculous nicknames were also a WASP habit (Henry Dwight was called Babbo) and were often stabbed. According to Edie: An American Biography (1982), Minty hated his sobriquet. This is Sedgwick’s intimate oral history edited by Jean Stein and George Plimpton of him, and “As It Turns Out” acts as a sort of sidecar his volume. (There have been several other Eddie-centric books, documentaries, and feature films, but none of the significance of the Stein-Plimpton collaboration.) Alice herself resembled a sausage when her father, Francis Sedgwick, was born. I was called Saucy because I thought I was Carefully maintained Charles Francis, a sculptor with her Atlas physique, was constantly worried about Alice’s weight. To his friends he was known as Duke. This presents the idea of repairing self-esteem, a façade after a nervous breakdown has burned through banks and military careers. Before marrying her long-suffering Alice Delano de Forest, he had been advised by a psychiatrist not to give birth.
To a brood like von Trapp who stubbornly gave birth anyway, Francis was Fuzzy, not daddy. This is a nickname borrowed from his birth father-in-law’s nickname. As an old nursery rhyme puts it, he was “not dazed”, but he was cruel and abusive, spanking him with a hairbrush, calling Minty an “old woman and a wimp” and wounding him with the bruised romanization “rim , ”about his own mercy. Eddie approached Fuzzy in her red-handed act that he not only slapped her and shot her full of tranquilizers, but was subjected to his sexual seduction when she was seven years old. Told. So wrote Wall, who witnessed Fuzzy’s jealous, seductive behavior and shocking racism.
An artbook translator, an understandable vocational choice given the strange codes she was forced to interpret growing up, Wall is sensitive to Sedgwick’s group portrait that appeared in “Edie.” She lays on a haystack, staring at the meteors in the night sky, and brings home the trout she and Bobby have caught in moccasins, much to her father’s delight. Feeling, describes riding a beloved gray gelding called Grenadier. “Only music, only Brahms’ symphonies approach,” she wrote.
The isolated ranch, with its primitive and sometimes barbaric rituals (such as the branding of cattle), was Duke’s carefully constructed principality, diametrically opposed to the hypermodern tinfoil kingdom of Warhol’s factory, but with some were parallel in terms of It’s a powerful male figure, one sociable and pliant, the other shy and deliberately ‘swish’,” Wall points out. Each stuck to their appearance. Each clouded by drugs. A Byzantine from working-class Pittsburgh, Warhol, his Catholic, also had an amusing nickname.
In a decades-long perspective, “As It Turns Out” looks back at some of the comments Wall made to Stein about the artist, giving us an opportunity to acknowledge his creative and emotional breadth and his foresight. Give to Wall. “I’m embarrassed by the shallowness of what I said,” she writes. “I didn’t get it.” I find the trick especially useful.
Wall is also determined to ameliorate the popular impression that her sister was innocent made by Warhol’s Svengal. increase. “Pop Tart”, a project by a silver-haired doppelganger. In this story, Eddie, blessed or cursed with extraordinary beauty, is spoiled by her parents, develops a domineering personality, and becomes a reckless shopaholic with few skills other than ordering over the phone, Fraudulent and completely kinetic” (or “all zoom zoom zoom, as Suky, the eighth child, liked to say) — really kind of agonizing, and its enduring mystique is a reflection of the rise of image culture. Nothing but.
Wohl learned her exact date of birth from a 2015 Vogue article and expressed surprise that the magazine still celebrated Edie, keeping things looking cool from this difficult sister. Some of her passages land stubbornly, perhaps defensively, naively. “I knew about drugs, but I didn’t know she drank,” she said of Edie after seeing the vodka she ordered in a Warhol movie. I wonder why I hated bingeing and purging at a fancy restaurant. Then she found out at bingo that her sister always got the bill.
The colony club members, grandmothers of the Sedgwick children, strutted like stratosphere, social registers were vulgar, and the Vanderbilts boasted that their bare feet never touched the ground. rice field. Luckily for Wohl and her readers, she was able to dig deep into the dirt, wiggle her toes, and then run her full distance.
