ON POLITICAL BOOKS
Fallows, James
James Fallows ON POLITICAL BOOKS Early in the Carter administration, when I was working on the president's staff, I encountered the strangest of many strange apparitions in the White House...
...not really talent...
...Yet the contents of the book—and its wild popularity—say something about the taste for aristocratic glamour in many of our democratic souls...
...Warhol had his eye on bigger things...
...He left his children with psychological burdens that give the book its air of melodrama...
...Her background could hardly be more different from that of Andy Warhol, who had been raised in an immigrant family outside Pittsburgh and had gone to Carnegie Tech...
...She had looks and money...
...and "Atari liberals" as they watch George Plimpton selling computer games on TV...
...When Edie entered the Factory scene, I thought it was nice that the Cambridge boys had imported their own private princess...
...This reminiscence of a burned-out case from the Sixties, with its side view of Andy Warhol and the Pop culture he personified, has been this fall's publishing phenomenon, as Diana Trilling's Mrs...
...One group, of course, is exempt...
...She went slumming on the one subway trip of her life, wearing a velvet evening gown cut to mini length and an ostrich-plume coat...
...James Fallows is Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributingeditor of The Washington Monthly...
...She met a group of outlaw bikers and greeted them with fluttery cheek kisses, Hollywood style...
...Edie's renegade branch of the family broke off from Massachusetts to live in California, where her father engaged in leisured deviance and discussed whether or not certain members of the local society were "out of the top drawer...
...He also seems to have given them a dash of the aristocratic anti-Semitism that was a traditional staple of high WASP culture...
...In Mrs...
...Edie was always brilliantly late," one Rene Ricard says...
...Although Warhol's celebrity took the form of startling the bourgeoisie, Edie makes clear that he and others were seduced by the respectability that a tarnished aristocrat like Edie could confer...
...What had happened to the rules...
...he'd never say a word...
...I was so confused by the incongruity of the moment—to my eyes, even the Coptic Pope had looked more natural in the White House—that I overlooked a semi-logical explanation...
...Edie's rivals for Warhol's attention included "a group of boys from the Cuban aristocracy...
...I think, looking back, that ata very early age [Warhol] had decided what it was he wanted: fame—that is, to be a famous person," says Truman Capote, from whom such judgments carry weight...
...Edie Sedgwick became a momentary celebrity by becoming the mascot of the drugged / artistic/ homosexual/ outre culture of Warhol's Factory...
...The very recipes in Dr...
...It meant being an interesting person who was doing interesting things to which people paid attention, and not being who I was at the time— someone living in a little town in South Carolina...
...One said, "You can't go around kissing bikers on both cheeks like she was kissing them...
...The policyminded worthies of Washington can console themselves that they are free of the status hungers that drive artistic degenerates like Warhol...
...He trusted her aristocratic instincts...
...but these same glitter stars seemed to take Edie's family-name/ old-money brand of status as seriously as she took theirs...
...Out of cash, she paid a New York cabbie with a pearl-and-diamond ring...
...Edie: An American Biography...
...Harris, the principal tension was between the author and her subjects, whose social pretensions she found unseemly...
...Edie to a friend in New York: "Cheap kike...
...One of the themes of Edie is the way two apparently opposite kinds of status managed to feed on and fool each other...
...Harris was last year's...
...His drive was simply that: fame was the name of the game...
...Or, Jasper Johns expressed an equivalent yearning: "When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to bean artist...
...When the figure turned, I could see that it was not Miss Lillian Carter, as I had initially supposed, but Andy Warhol...
...Andy would wait for her...
...Conservatives can say that as they pick up William F. Buckley's magazine...
...Andy Warhol...
...old-style liberals as they dress for the next Progressive PAC discussion group at Pamela Harriman's house...
...Amid the Filipino stewards, who moved silently with deferential smiles, there stood one dwarfish figure, its head draped with white flaxen hair...
...Had Edie* existed then, I might have guessed at another explanation, and I might have avoided a later moment of confusion when I learned that Warhol now was dining with the Reagan family in the White House...
...She was from that John Marquand world in which money had not been earned in any identifiable way, but simply was in the family...
...Her family had its own cemetery, the famous Sedgwick Pie, in which descendants were laid out like slices around the patriarch in the center, so on judgment day they could rise and see no one but kin...
...The first hundred-odd pages of the book are dedicated to establishing that Edie Sedgwick did in fact come from what most people understand as the "upper class...
...His friends were shocked "because he took up with a young married woman...
...Edie played her assigned role of princess for all it was worth...
...Jean Stein with George Plimpton...
...Warhol had recently produced a popular poster of Jimmy Carter...
...more important, she had a good family name...
...Tarnower's Scarsdale Diet cookbook reeked of the parvenu...
...The subtext of both books concerns the tensions and delineations of class...
...Ordinarily they'd 'turn her out' [rape her] right on the spot...
...He always said, 'She knows what she's doing.' " "Andy wanted to be in her immediate past, her rich, powerful, Waspy past," says another Factory figure...
...from a first-generation Catholic background...
...Knopf, $16.95...
...Edie figured, I guess, it couldn't happen to her because she was different...
...You rotten kike, you cheap bastard, Jew mother-fucker, small-time entrepreneur...
...By the end, it was far from glamorous, and Edie describes enough unsavory behavior to embarrass all sides...
...Wasn't the White House the pinnacle of the staid institutions Warhol had been satirizing all along...
...She wowed the commoners by wearing the same outfit to Coney Island...
...Told that Edie was dead, Warhol asked a question or two and then "continued with something like, Well, what have you been doing...
...The Duchess of Rothschild would come trotting through with all these fabulous people, the rich, the beautiful...
...James Fallows ON POLITICAL BOOKS Early in the Carter administration, when I was working on the president's staff, I encountered the strangest of many strange apparitions in the White House Mess...
...What did he need with mere princesses, when he had presidents in his future...
...perhaps he merely was being honored as a loyal Democrat...
Vol. 14 • December 1982 • No. 10
