Sad rich girls can live forever

In 1852 in the Bloomsbury district of London, a young woman was laying around the studio of a famous artist.

This was Elizabeth Siddall, known muse and model to The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an avant-garde collective of painters and thinkers who defied the rules of the established culture. They created revolutionary pieces, printed their own magazine, and scandalized the stuffy Victorians. Elizabeth Siddall was the face and body who posed for some of their greatest works, and in 1852 she was laying on her back, as if floating dead in the water, for John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.”

It was a divisive piece upon its premiere. The Times (UK) wrote, “there must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty.” Today, however, it is inescapably famous, an image whose influence has spread across fashion and film. Millais’ Ophelia is the prototypical mad girl, the out-of-control daughter, the surrender to sadness, the toxically idealized youth in the arms of death, who never had to grow up.

“There are still people obsessed with her tragedy, her narcissism, her inability to engage, to connect,” Alice Sedgwick Wohl, an art scholar and translator told me over the phone from her home in Stockbridge, Mass. "All of that negativity. I always thought people tended to grow towards the light, so to speak. It’s hard for me to imagine the idea that people are obsessed with such a fatal image.”

Wohl wasn’t speaking about Ophelia, or Elizabeth Siddall the artist’s muse — whose anorexia and tuberculosis ended her life at 32. She was talking about her younger sister, Edie Sedgwick.

At 91 years old, Wohl’s new book is very different from her previous work translating historic treatises on art theory. “As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy” is a kind of double memoir. It details both the privileged but troubled childhood she and her sister shared and the journey of the present-day Wohl, coming to terms with Edie’s fame for the first time. 50 years after The Swinging Sixties, Alice Sedgwick Wohl is finally reckoning with the art made her sister an icon.

Edie and Alice grew up as members of the storied Sedgwick family, a Brahmin clan of upper-class Anglicans whose American origins trace back to the 17th-century Colony of Massachusetts Bay, arriving as part of the Puritan migration to New England. “The Sedgwick Pie” as their well-known cemetery plot in Stockbridge is called, contains Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Sedgwick, former owner of The Atlantic Ellery Sedgwick and early American feminist author Catherine Sedgwick. The girls were raised on a Californian ranch, a secluded "paradise" that kept them cloistered away and disciplined.

“If you had seen my family, there were eight children. I’m quite ordinary looking — but the others were quite handsome, and Edie was beautiful,” Wohl told me. “My family looked like a hundred million dollars. The ranch was the most beautiful place, the life we led was the most wonderful life possible.” She paused to add, “But underneath it was something else.”

Underneath was the private psychological horror the children endured, and what Wohl described to me as “a powerful code of silence” that kept them maintaining the facade that they were a happy family. Days after their brother Francis “Minty” Sedgwick hanged himself the day before his 27th birthday, another brother, Bobby, 31, died crashing his motorcycle into a New York City bus. Edie had her own demons, sent to a series of increasingly restrictive stays at psychiatric care facilities for her disordered eating.

But in 1964, with an inheritance in her bag and thick painted liner around her Sphinx eyes, Edie moved to Manhattan and within the year had caught the attention of Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, as well as the leader of Pop Art himself, Andy Warhol.

As if it were her own downtown cotillion, Edie captured attention from all factions of the media upon making her New York debut, from the glossy print establishment to the counterculture scene of Warhol’s Factory. She was “the beautiful young blue-blooded heiress who was said to have blown through a six-figure inheritance in a matter of months,” Wohl writes.

Speaking to Wohl however, the exact nature of Edie’s appeal still eludes her. “I don’t know how to express what she had, but she had it,”

“It,” some would say, is exactly the word to express. Edie Sedgwick was perhaps the ultimate It Girl, famous for no inherent talent except possessing an indefinable, enviable quality. The moniker originally stems from Clara Bow and her 1927 film based on the Elinor Glyn novel. In the collection “It and Other Stories,” Glyn writes, “To have ‘It,’ the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.”

There is some poetry to the sister’s paths. Despite their differences — Wohl describes herself reading Tolstoy as a teenager, while Edie never read a book — one went on to study art, the other became art herself.

“She was an object,” Wohl said, agreeing with the assessment. “She simply existed very powerfully and vigorously in herself. She really wasn’t interested in anything else. Her mind was completely unfurnished.”

At the height of her glamorous New York days, Warhol filmed Edie in the underground short, “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a sometimes-in-focus black-and-white look at the life of a socialite; smoking cigarettes in her apartment, drinking coffee, putting on her makeup. Following the experimental film’s premiere, Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas wrote that Andy Warhol’s “Poor Little Rich Girl”, “surpasses everything that cinéma vérité has done till now.”

Seven years later, her connections to elite publications like Vogue diminished and her artistic relationship with Warhol in the past, Edie was found in her final pose, laying still one winter morning, having died at age 28 of an overdose.

In her own memoir, “Just Kids,” Patti Smith writes about hearing of Edie Sedgwick’s death. “When I was a teenager I found a copy of Vogue with a photograph of her pirouetting on a bed in front of a drawing of a horse. She seemed entirely self-possessed, as if nobody in the world existed but her.”

With the release of “As It Turns Out,” what has surprised Alice Sedgwick Wohl is how many young women like Patti Smith, with photos of Edie on the walls of their girlhood bedrooms — or more likely, on Instagram accounts acting as digital mood boards — still exist. At a recent talk at the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York, Wohl speculated that two-thirds of the audience must have been young women, no older than Edie’s age when she starred in “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

What’s more surprising is that she would be surprised, but perhaps Wohl is simply too well-read. If you have relaxed your mind a little and let the internet worm its way between your brain’s crevices, then our 21st-century fetishistic obsession with doomed girls — conventionally beautiful, young, and cruelly disposable — is readily apparent. Their destructive burn out is as equally captivating to our vulture-like consumption of content as their rise. The dawn of the millennium saw many heirs to Edie, from the famous-for-being-famous Paris Hilton, to the darker, drug-fueled death of Amy Winehouse, to Lindsay Lohan — who exists somewhere in between them. Pop singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey has crafted her musical persona as a retrograde victim, a word-weary coquette humming sad idylls to the loss of old money glamor, her bad past, her character’s sure-to-be short life.

The dictum often mis-attributed to Andy Warhol goes, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But in 2022 fame is more ephemeral and indefinable (Addison Rae has 88 million followers on TikTok, but you've never heard of her). We are awash in a sea of poor little rich girls, on our phones, across our feeds — cast off gaze, lobotomized soft focus in the eyes, open parted lips, a vacant pout. Social media as it stands is an ode to these girls, an ode, not without harm, to youth, to thinness, to whiteness. They are muse without artist, or perhaps the artist as Narcissus. This year i-D magazine published a piece about the “dissociative stare," the expression du jour of the online girl, in which negativity and coolness, sadness and vanity collide. Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote, “Selfie poses are self-conscious in the most literal sense: they necessitate an awareness of the self and a sense of purpose in controlling how it’s perceived.”

But that’s the opposite of “it” as Elinor Glyn described, isn’t it?

When everyone’s an it-girl, is there any “it” left?

Alice Sedgwick Wohl will discuss her book at Cornwall Library in Cornwall, Conn. on Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. live and on Zoom. In-person guests must register at www.cornwalllibrary.org.

A new book remembers the life of Edie Sedgwick, the original rich girl influencer. Photo courtesy of FSG

'Ophelia' by John Everett Millais Digital Collage by Alexander Wilburn

A new book remembers the life of Edie Sedgwick, the original rich girl influencer. Photo courtesy of FSG