‘Taxi’: Andy Warhol’s cruel eulogy for Edie Sedgwick
Edie Sedgwick is remembered as Andy Warhol’s ultimate Superstar. With her distinctive eye makeup, her pixie cut and her supreme beauty, she’s one of those faces that defined an era. But her story was a tragic one as the scene that she symbolised was also the scene that killed her. As she fell deep into addiction and became hooked on the drugs that circled Warhol’s Factory, you would have thought that her creator and friend would have been there. But really, Warhol watched Sedgwick’s death with cruel wonder.
When Warhol met Sedgwick, their friendship burned bright and fast as a kind of mutual obsession. Sedgwick was looking to escape her abusive, well-to-do roots and connect with the art scene. Warhol, as always, was looking for money and fame. It’s no secret that the artist was a social climber. That was a fact that he’d happily admit. So when he met the troubled child of a wealthy family, he stuck tight to the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’.
For a few years, Sedgwick was his muse, appearing in several of his films, joining him for interviews and ruling as the Queen over his Factory kingdom. But as Sedgwick began to stretch out her wings when she met Bob Dylan, and when her addiction was starting to take hold of her head, health and bank account, the artist didn’t just abandon her but seemed to kick her to the curb with incredible cruelty. “Do you think Edie will let us film her when she commits suicide?” Warhol said.
In 1971, Sedgwick did die but Warhol was nowhere to be seen. After being pushed out of his circle and replaced by a new blonde fascination in the form of Nico, the superstar succumbed to her addictions. The world still mourns her, but it seems that Warhol never did, as even his written memorial for his supposed muse is callous.
In his book, The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol, one cryptic chapter is described as “The Fall And Rise Of My Favourite Sixties Girl”. Even that feels odd. Either Warhol is deeming Sedgwick’s entire life as a ‘fall’, and merely her death as her ‘rise’, or he’s purposefully ignoring her fall into and struggles with addiction.
“Favourite Sixties Girl” also doesn’t seem to fit, considering the tone of the chapter. Telling the story of “Taxi”, “a confused, beautiful debutante”, with a “poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody’s private fantasies.” From the first paragraph, Warhol seems to make it clear that his fascination with Sedgwick wasn’t based on who she was but on who he could mould her to be. He presents her as a void or a canvas, writing, “Taxi could be anything you wanted her to be – a little girl, a woman, intelligent, dumb, rich, poor – anything. She was a wonderful, beautiful blank. The mystique to end all mystiques.”
However, perhaps the very issue with Sedgwick was that she wasn’t a void or a blank. Instead, she was very clearly a troubled product of a hard life. While Warhol seemed determined to simply see her as a rich girl, Sedgwick’s childhood was horrific despite her wealth. She was routinely abused by her father, institutionalised when she tried to speak out about it and trapped in a cycle of mistreatment no matter what. While refusing to acknowledge his muse’s pain in any real or helpful way, Warhol saw it and wanted to use it. “I could see that she had more problems than anyone I’d ever met. So beautiful but so sick,” he wrote, adding, “I was really intrigued.”
That twisted intrigue would lead to Warhol perpetuating the mistreatment of Sedgwick. In his film Beauty No.2, the actor is visibly intoxicated while Warhol instructs a man to touch her as he asks prying questions about her trauma. In Poor Little Rich Girl, he spends hours filming her routine, mocking her and watching her descend deeper into addiction. By the time he made the comment about wanting to film Sedgwick’s suicide, his track record would suggest that he genuinely would have jumped at the chance, seemingly keen to capture her worsening state on film while contributing to it.
You would have thought that somewhere within all of this, or at least after his old friend and star had died, there would be a moment of grief or remorse, or at least a kind thought towards her. The closest he ever gets to a loving sentiment is, “I missed having her around.” Instead, in the ‘Taxi’ chapter, Warhol’s eulogy for Sedgwick is simply more of the careless trauma porn he’d been making of her when she was alive. “I just couldn’t stop looking at her because I was so fascinated but horrified,” he wrote, perfectly summing up his entire attitude towards her.
