Edie Sedgwick - Family Background and Early Life

Family Background and Early Life

Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California, to Alice Delano de Forest (1908–1988) and Francis Minturn Sedgwick, (1904–1967, known as either "Duke" or "Fuzzy"), a philanthropist, rancher and sculptor. She was named after her father's aunt, Edith Minturn, famously painted with her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, by John Singer Sargent.

Sedgwick's family was long established in Massachusetts history. Her seventh-great grandfather, English-born Robert Sedgwick, was the first Major General of the Massachusetts Bay Colony settling in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1635. Edie's family later originated from Stockbridge, Massachusetts where her great-great-great grandfather Judge Theodore Sedgwick had settled after the American Revolution. Theodore married Pamela Dwight of the New England Dwight family who was the daughter of Abigail (Williams) Dwight, which means that Ephraim Williams, the founder of Williams College, was her fifth-great grandfather. Theodore Sedgwick was the first to plead and win a case for the freedom of a black woman, Elizabeth Freeman, under the Massachusetts Bill of Rights that declared all men to be born free and equal. Sedgwick's mother was the daughter of Henry Wheeler de Forest (President and Chairman of the Board of the Southern Pacific Railroad and a direct descendant of Jessé de Forest whose Dutch West India Company helped to settle New Amsterdam). Jessé de Forest was also Edie's seventh-great grandfather. Her paternal grandfather was the historian and acclaimed author Henry Dwight Sedgwick III; her great grandmother, Susanna Shaw, was the sister of Robert Gould Shaw, the American Civil War Colonel; and her great-great grandfather, Robert Bowne Minturn, was a part owner of the Flying Cloud clipper ship and is credited with creating and promoting Central Park in New York City. And her great-great-great grandfather, William Ellery, was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence.

She was the first cousin, once removed, of actress Kyra Sedgwick. Kyra is the daughter of Henry Dwight Sedgwick V (Edie's first cousin), the son of Robert Minturn Sedgwick, who was the older brother of Francis Minturn Sedgwick.

Despite her family's wealth and high social status, Edie's early life was troubled. All the Sedgwick children had deeply conflicted relationships with their father Fuzzy—they adored him, but by most accounts he was narcissistic, emotionally remote, controlling and frequently abusive. Her eldest sister Alice ("Saucie") eventually broke with the family and her two older brothers died prematurely. Francis (known as "Minty"), who had a particularly unhappy relationship with Fuzzy, suffered several breakdowns, eventually committing suicide in 1964 while in a psychiatric hospital. Her oldest brother Robert ("Bobby"), who also suffered from mental health problems, died in a motorcycle accident in 1965. Edie had a very difficult relationship with her father, who openly carried on affairs with other women. On one occasion she walked in on him while he was having sex with one of his paramours. She flew into a rage, but Fuzzy claimed that Edie imagined the whole event. As a result of her emotional problems, Edie developed anorexia by her early teens and settled into a lifelong pattern of binging and purging.

The Sedgwick children were raised on their family's California ranches. Initially schooled at home and cared for by nannies, their lives were rigidly controlled by their parents; they were largely isolated from the outside world and it was instilled into them that they were superior to most of their peers. At age 13, (the year her grandfather Babbo died) Edie began boarding at the Branson School near San Francisco, but, according to Saucie, she was soon taken out of the school because of her anorexia. In 1958, she was enrolled at St. Timothy's School in Maryland. She was eventually taken out of the school due to her anorexia.

In the fall of 1962, at Fuzzy's insistence, Sedgwick was committed to the Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. According to fellow patient Virginia Davis, the regime was very lax there, and Edie and her friends often left the hospital after lunch and went into town on shopping sprees, charging up thousands of dollars worth of goods on credit at local stores. Edie easily manipulated the situation at Silver Hill, but her weight kept dropping to just ninety pounds. Consequently, her family had her transferred to a "closed" facility at Bloomingdale, the Westchester County, New York division of the New York Hospital. There, thanks to the strict treatment program, Edie's condition improved markedly. Around the time she left the hospital she had a brief relationship with a Harvard student, became pregnant and procured an abortion with her mother's help.

In the fall of 1963, Sedgwick moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began studying art with her cousin Lily Saarinen. During this period she partied with members of the bohemian fringe of the Harvard social scene, which included many gay men.

Sedgwick was deeply affected by the loss of her brothers, who died within 18 months of each other. Francis (nicknamed "Minty") also had a troubled life; he became an alcoholic in his early teens, triggering a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse, and in late 1963 he suffered a serious breakdown and was admitted to Bellevue Hospital before being transferred to Silver Hill. According to her friend Ed Hennessy, Sedgwick told him that Minty had finally admitted to his father that he was homosexual, and that this had enraged Fuzzy, who said that he would never speak to him again. Shortly after this, in May 1963, on the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, Minty hanged himself with a tie from the door of his bathroom at Silver Hill.

By the time of Minty's death, Sedgwick had moved to New York City. She lived at first with her senile grandmother, who had an apartment on 75th Street, but in late fall 1964 she took an apartment in the East Sixties between Fifth and Madison, which her mother decorated lavishly. Edie embarked on a constant round of partying and spent her trust fund at an astonishing rate; according to friend Tom Goodwin she went through eighty thousand dollars in just six months and bought huge amounts of clothing, jewellery and cosmetics. After her 'chauffeur' crashed the gray Mercedes she had been given by her father, she began using limousine services constantly, moving from company to company each time she had exhausted her credit. She also began experimenting with drugs and was reportedly introduced to LSD by friends from Cambridge who knew Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.

Sedgwick's eldest brother Bobby was also experiencing serious mental health problems, and in late 1963, a few months before Minty's breakdown, Bobby too suffered a breakdown and his sister Saucie had to have him admitted to Bellevue. He became increasingly self-destructive, crashing a sports car and habitually riding his powerful Harley Davidson motorcycle without a helmet. Bobby was asked not to attend the Sedgwick Christmas gathering in California (according to Saucie, his father told Bobby he was a "bad influence" on the other children) and on December 31, 1964 Bobby suffered critical head injuries when his bike slammed into the side of a bus on Eighth Avenue in New York City; he never regained consciousness and died in hospital twelve days later, aged 31. Edie told her friend Gillian Walker that she knew that Bobby was going to die and that he had killed himself. In Walker's view, Sedgwick dealt with these tragedies by suppressing her feelings and throwing herself back into the New York party world.

Shortly after Bobby's death, Sedgwick was herself injured in a car accident in California, in which she suffered a broken knee. She was afraid that her father might use this as a reason to have her sent back into psychiatric care, so with her mother's help she surreptitiously left California and returned to New York.