Targeting the Female Consumer

by

Jackie Simon

 

   As women, Brigid Berlin and Edie Sedgwick were turncoats, interlopers from the other side who went “from one heart of darkness to another.” They left the rigid female roles they would play as socialites; they left behind white gloves and society dances to experiment with sex and drugs, mixing with the mad, the extreme, the bazaar in Andy Warhol’s Factory. In other words, Edie Sedgwick and Brigid Berlin preferred to slum it. As Superstars, the duo is strangely symmetrical. Brigid is fat to Edie’s thin, nonstop sound to Edie’s very visual blacked-out eyes and bat-wing eyelashes, independent to Edie’s dependence, a survivor to Edie’s “expensive martyrdom of the entertainer.” (Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights).

   Their similarities are striking as well. They could have dwelled as comfortably in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as they did in Warhol’s Factory. Edie and Brigid are not women but circus performers with titles, actresses whose amphetamine-scented flesh exude, not the natural fungi smell of Robin Vote, but the chemical whiff of amphetamines. As with Vote, you can inhale these women. And if you do, you will get high.

   They are signifiers of wealth, excess and opulent decay. Just as grotesque features like the abnormal eyes of cartoon characters and the oversized paws of puppies become cute, the exaggerated female in terms of body, background, wealth and lineage causes a feeling of awe. When a woman goes from the gold extreme to the silver of the factory, they became Superstars.

   Ingested and emitted by Warhol, Berlin and Sedgwick are women who consume and who are consumed. Literally. Berlin is a compulsive overeater and Sedgwick is anorexic and bulimic. Edie vomits food, Berlin vomits information. At times she is Warhol’s voice . Edie dances, Brigid speaks, Candy Darling sings. All divas make loud noises and at some point, quit worrying about bothering the neighbors. Their consummation by Warhol is well documented, and is probably best summed up here in verse from Bob Dylan’s anti-tribute to Sedgwick, “Like a Rolling Stone”:

 

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

   Warhol withdraws from Edie and she has withdrawals from the Factory. Malfunctioning at the most basic level of self survival, Sedgwick is incapable of feeding herself. In Ciao! Manhattan, Sedgwick repeatedly asks to be served lunch then forgets it as she becomes increasingly intoxicated. In Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Story, friends remember Sedgwick surviving off shrimp cocktail (and chocolate milkshakes which she promptly rids herself of). A caretaking friend attempts to get Sedgwick to eat a common omelette with no success. Berlin, on the other hand, is recorded bingeing before the non-judgmental eye of the camera, as she devours key lime pie, depositing whipped cream directly into her mouth and moaning slightly. She is egged on by Warhol to consume, and refuses, in Pie in the Sky, to talk about her amphetamine-driven days at the Chelsea Hotel.

   In an attempt to have nourishment without properly eating, Berlin and Sedgwick shoot methamphetamine and ingest a smorgasbord of complimentary pharmaceuticals. In their chemically altered states, fantasy collides with the corporal. The users experience an exegesis from the body while dwelling securely within that realm. Sedgwick recalls her glory days as “1965 Girl of the Year” as her foot bleeds profusely, thinned by vodka. Seated in a bathroom stall, Brigid Berlin pontificates on how she is going to put on a bathing suit, right now, and join the skinny girls at the pool party but she never quite gets off the john.