Edie book (Jean Stein's biography)

Edie book (Jean Stein's biography) is a biography of Edie Sedgwick whose account of her connection to Andy Warhol became a point of dispute among people who had known them. In the diary, the book appears not only as a published interpretation of Edie’s life but as a source of personal friction: Warhol challenged what it said about him, while the paperback campaign turned Edie’s image into advertising on city buses.

Production and the diary record

Jean Stein worked on the biography with help from George Plimpton. The surviving diary passages record reactions to the book rather than offering a full account of its research or composition. Their own route into print was mediated: Pat Hackett describes how, after an earlier Factory log assembled from office visitors and other people’s accounts, the daily record became Warhol’s personal narrative in 1976. Hackett and Warhol established weekday morning calls to record the previous day’s activities and expenses; weekend events were recounted together on Monday, and trips away were covered through calls, notes, or occasional tapes.

Hackett later edited the diary from an original 20,000 pages, cutting whole days and weeks as well as names and portions of entries. She also removed much of the private exchange between herself and Warhol, recasting the few retained personal references in the third person. These editorial conditions matter when reading the diary’s record of the biography: it preserves pointed reactions and a few concrete disagreements, not a comprehensive debate over every claim in the book.

Dispute over its account of Edie and Warhol

In September 1982, Warhol encountered Freddy, George Plimpton’s wife, at a gathering hosted by Diane von Furstenberg. She seemed guilty because George had helped Jean Stein with the biography, and Warhol told her he did not care about the book. He then privately wished he had asked her to send him a check as a way of making amends. The casual exchange reveals that his professed indifference did not erase the personal sting: he could dismiss the book aloud and still imagine compensation for its effect on him.

Jon Gould later told Warhol that he had challenged George Plimpton about passages concerning Warhol that he considered untrue, particularly because George knew Warhol personally. Jon also disputed the book’s account of Edie’s relation to The Factory, saying that she had been away from it for years before her death. The diary reports these objections as the men’s view; it does not independently establish which passages were inaccurate. The disagreement nevertheless shows that the biography’s portrayal of Edie’s Factory years was contested by people close to Warhol.

Editing, reception, and public circulation

At a Keith Haring opening in February 1983, René Ricard greeted Warhol with amazement at still seeing him everywhere, and Warhol raised the hurtful things Ricard had said about him in the biography. Ricard replied that Warhol should have seen the book before it was cut. His comment suggests that material had been removed during editing, but the diary does not identify what was cut or what the earlier version contained. The exchange makes the book’s editorial shaping part of the dispute, without resolving the disagreement over its portrayal.

By May, paperback advertisements featuring Edie were appearing on the sides of buses. Warhol contrasted that public display with the costly privacy he associated with her life: when she went out, he recalled, she would not even take a cab but required a limousine. His lament for “Poor Edie” registers the reversal in scale and setting—from a woman whose outings, in his recollection, called for a limousine to her image riding through the city as mass advertising. The biography’s afterlife was thus visible not only in arguments over what it said, but in the ordinary streets where its paperback promotion circulated Edie’s likeness.