Candle magic, Leonard Cohen and crashing out: When Edie Sedgwick nearly burnt down the Chelsea Hotel
In the hallowed halls of the Chelsea Hotel, a million stories were written in real-time. As a home to countless artists and a hub for their goings-on and creations, the West 23rd Street haunt has seen it all. But that was almost cut short by one of its most renowned and reckless inhabitants, Edie Sedgwick.
Before Nancy Spungeon would meet her end in room 100, Madonna could shoot her infamous Erotica photos in 822, or the place could be immortalised in a lengthy playlist of songs or a reading list of poems and novels; it nearly ceased to exist. The story on the surface is a simple one: Andy Warhol’s superstar Edie Sedgwick, in the hazy of a drug-fuelled daze, fell unconscious with her candles still burning. Soothed to sleep by their dim, warm light, everyone knows that’s a surefire way to cause a blaze.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened with Sedgwick. It was another fire that had landed her in the Chelsea. After doing a speedball, the name for a double whammy shot of heroin in one arm and amphetamine in the other, she was knocked out on her bed when her cigarette fell out of her mouth and caught the sheets. As she was swiftly burning through her money and burning through her brain at the whim of her addictions and socialite lifestyle, the burning of her home was the final straw for her circle. They thought moving her into the hotel, into room 105, would at least make her a little safer as the various residents would be there to look out for her.
That’s how the Chelsea always operated. Rent could be paid late or not paid at all, with the manager, Stanley Bard, regularly accepting art or holding portfolios as a form of payment. The place ran on a kind of cultural and care exchange as the guests shared ideas and drafts and helped each other creatively but also generally gave one another food, support, and labour, either physical or emotional. Everyone seemed willing to lend a hand or some choice advice and wisdom.
Leonard Cohen certainly was. It’s his involvement that makes this a typical Chelsea Hotel tale, always a little strange with some sort of fated intervention or odd goings on. Across the oral history of the place, several people have pointed towards a spiritual feeling in the hall. Whether it was the air of a creative god blessing the place and the legends that lived there or a haunted, paranormal energy that brought tragedy to the building again and again, we’ll never know. But as Cohen was a prophet on this one night, the power of the place was proved again.
“Edie Sedgwick was living a few doors down,” he said in a live Q&A, recounting his time at the Chelsea in the mid-1960s. “Through her door came all the most attractive men and women of the period. I was not among them, but I longed to be among them.” Despite his ladies’ man reputation, Cohen’s mind was elsewhere at the time as he was beginning to get really into spirituality.
“There was, on the corner of 7th Avenue and 24th Street, there was a Mexican magic store, with potions, candles and powders, which could be used to draw influences into your life — to secure love affairs or to guarantee successes,” he remembered. “My situation was such at the time that I believed in them, so I bought a couple of candles and a book about candles — I just read that, and the I Ching, though I couldn’t follow anything from one paragraph to another.”
It just happened that this new interest coincided with his long-awaited introduction to Sedgwick. “At a certain point, through some graceful accident, I was invited into Edie Sedgwick‘s room. It was filled with very beautiful young people. It was dark, and illuminated by candles, 30 to 40 candles, burning everywhere, on plates, on the stove,” he continued. Imposter syndrome hit the young up-starter hard at a time before any notable success and before his name had been made, as he added, “I had no credentials at the time, there was nothing I could say.”
But something caught his eye: the layout of Sedgwick’s candles. Drawing on his research into magic, and mostly just racking his brain for something to say to this new, glitzy crowd, he got up the courage to share a warning, “‘This display of candles is extremely dangerous.’”
“I presented myself as … an Expert in The Candle. And this did not go over well. So I left at an appropriate time,” he joked. But he’d read it right. While some would say that magic doesn’t exist and the layout of the candles made no difference to whether recklessness would have consequences, Cohen’s prophesy came true. “The next day, her apartment burned down, and my prestige soared,” he said.
There’s a now infamous photo of Sedgwick, curled up and still dazed, laid in the foyer of the hotel with a bandage around her burnt hand. Luckily, the blaze was caught and stopped before it could spread and before the world missed out on that photo, this story and all the hundreds of others that came from the place in the years following. But if Cohen’s warning had been headed, the potential for history-altering disaster could have been avoided.
