Plimpton and Stein concocted rare magic, re-animating the dead and engaging the barely alive. Edie was the product of more than 250 interviews (Norman Mailer, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Warhol, et al.): whittling it down and separating the wheat from the chaff was nothing short of heroic. To reduce Edie – or oral history in general – to a case of inspired eavesdropping would be short-sighted. Besides, isn’t a large portion of history a form of gossip by another name? Oral history – that strange, hard-to-categorize thing – offers up its own truth. But, of course they were! This sort of history works precisely because every last (unlettered) talking head is equally unreliable.

Others, including Greil Marcus, pointed out that the book’s narrators were ‘unreliable’. Writing in The New York Review of Books, James Wolcott observed that it was rich in ‘idle chat – wow, fabulous, fantastic – and slim on critical insight’. When Edie first came out, not everyone was hip to its oddly fangled style. Along the way, the book offers up vivid encounters with the Vietnam War, art, literature and politics. The polyphony – operatic, pyrotechnic – was an unparalleled portrait of a time (the 1960s) and a place (Manhattan). At its best, you felt like you were there, watching Edie light up a room or a cigarette, shoot up or pass out.

The pair dispensed with sober third-person narration and enlisted scores of interested parties to conjure memories of the gamine beauty, from members of her estranged WASP family to lovers to hangers-on and the occasional bystander. It’s apt, then, that Plimpton and Stein’s portrait of a lady is anything but conventional. Robert Rauschenberg called her ‘art itself’. It was said she was the inspiration for Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ (1966). Famous in the way that people in Life magazine used to be famous. Edie, all 600-plus pages of it, was unputdownable.Įdie – muse, mascot, heroine – was famous. I’m not sure what it was that inspired me to finally pick it up – boredom? – but, once I did, there was no turning back. From its cover, which I propped up like an ornament, Edie’s raccoony, amphetamine-laced, half-moon eyes stared back at me. For many years, George Plimpton and Jean Stein’s Edie lay on my shelf unloved, untouched.

Whether Patti Smith actually laid eyes on a pair of diamond-collared Afghans making their way down that staircase or, in fact, hallucinated them, this image – and so many other phantasmagoric recollections of Edie Sedgwick, the Boston Brahmin who became a Warhol superstar – is seared into my mind. I think she had ermine wrapped around her her hair was white and her eyebrows black She had these two big white Afghan hounds on a black leash with diamond collars, but that could be fantasy.’ – Patti Smith in Edie: American Girl (1982). ‘Edie was coming down this long staircase.

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