Edie

Jean Stein’s Edie enters the diary as a book whose influence extends well beyond its pages. It draws Factory photographs into a dispute over who should control and benefit from them, makes Warhol apprehensive about his own portrayal, and brings Edie Sedgwick back into conversation as a possible cult figure. The book’s reception is recorded through Warhol’s immediate, sometimes self-contradictory reactions: he resists helping it, fears a particular judgment in it, and nevertheless imagines ways it might create an opportunity for Billy Name.

Photographs and access

On March 15, 1982, Warhol received a letter from Billy Name asking him to provide photographs from the original Factory on 47th Street for Stein’s Edie. Warhol said he hated the idea of giving them to her and did not want to do it. The request made the book’s connection to the Factory tangible: its account of Sedgwick could draw on a visual archive made by someone who had been there, but access to that archive depended on Warhol’s cooperation.

The photographs were not simply a group of images to be handed over. Two days later, Warhol explained that finding them would take a couple of afternoons and that he was willing to spend that time, yet he still did not want to send them. His resistance centered on what he had heard about the book’s portrayal of him. Stein told him the material was based on taped interviews; when he asked to see a galley, she said she had given them all out. The exchange left him unwilling to supply the photographs without first knowing how he appeared in the book.

The point that hurt

Warhol’s strongest objection was not to everything he expected Stein’s book to contain. He said he was sure the other material would be fascinating, whether true or not. What troubled him was the report, passed to him by Isabel Eberstadt, that Stein called him a “social climber.” He insisted the description was untrue and rejected the idea that meeting wealthy young people or being invited to their parties had mattered to him. His repeated return to the accusation, followed by his admission that he did not know why it bothered him so much, makes this label the clearest measure of the book’s personal stakes for him.

The dispute also circulated through Warhol’s circle before he had read the book. On March 16, Paul Morrissey reported that Stein had read him a remark René Ricard had made about him for Edie; Morrissey had threatened to sue if it appeared, and Stein said she intended to print it. Warhol’s own concern about how he might be characterized thus belonged to a wider unease among people whose remarks or reputations could become part of the biography. His irritation did not mean he dismissed the book: the prospect of being represented unfairly coexisted with his curiosity about what it contained.

From refusal to a possible alternative

After learning that Edie had received a six-figure deal from the Book-of-the-Month Club, Warhol reconsidered what Billy Name might do with the photographs. If the book became a major success and Sedgwick became a cult figure again, he thought, Billy might do better by publishing his own portfolio of Edie photographs. The idea changed the terms of the original request: instead of supplying the images to Stein, Name might retain control of a separate project and share in the value created by renewed interest in Sedgwick. Warhol said he needed to write Billy a letter, but the diary records the proposal, not whether he sent it or whether the portfolio appeared.

The book continued to shape Warhol’s conversations. At dinner with Henry Geldzahler, the two discussed stories about Stein and came up with the idea that Geldzahler should tell her Warhol was writing a book about her. In July, Warhol noted that Stein was likely to go on the talk-show circuit with Viva and considered warning Viva that Stein was using her. These entries show the biography operating not only as a finished text but as a set of negotiations, publicity plans, and suspicions among people connected to its subject.

Readers and the book’s afterlife

At Montauk, on July 24, Warhol observed that everybody was reading Edie. He noticed Jon Gould reading it and felt that, as Jon progressed, Jon was beginning to turn against him. That was Warhol’s impression of a change in Jon, not a confirmed account of Jon’s judgment. Ian Schrager, meanwhile, kept asking about Paraphernalia—who owned it, who designed it, and who really owned it—even though Warhol regarded that subject as the least important thing in the book. The contrasting reactions suggest how the biography could send readers toward different parts of the past, and how its meaning in Warhol’s social world was made in conversation as much as in reading.

Warhol’s response to Edie therefore moves between withdrawal and participation. He declines to give Stein the Factory photographs, worries over a single description of himself, and suspects the author’s intentions toward Viva; yet he also considers an alternative photographic project for Billy and tracks the book’s readers and publicity. Edie matters in the diary as a biography capable of reopening Sedgwick’s public image while putting the surviving Factory circle under renewed scrutiny. Its importance is registered in the very friction it produces: who controls the archive, who gets represented, and which part of a complicated past readers decide to carry forward.