As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy by Alice Sedgwick Wohl

Author:Alice Sedgwick Wohl [Wohl, Alice Sedgwick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Rich & Famous, Family & Relationships, Siblings
ISBN: 9780374604691
Google: Kak9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: FarrarStraus
Published: 2022-08-16T20:29:36+00:00

Edie and Donald Lyons dancing in the Factory; Dorothy Dean, Chuck Wein, and others in the background (Photograph by Stephen Shore)

“Joy” is the word that Edie’s Cambridge friend Donald Lyons used to describe the life he knew in the Factory; he said it was “a perpetual dance party…, a perpetual party in one place or another…, so that there was an opportunity to endlessly experience the sense of life as a joy.” It’s also the word he used to describe what Edie was looking for: “It’s not that she wanted the next party, she wanted the next joy.” However, there’s no mention of joy in the interview that Lyons did with Lynne Tillman. There he talks about the dandyism, all the extravagance, the tremendous energy put into style rather than sex, and the interpenetration of high and low and gay and straight. To my surprise he says he found the Factory tawdry, but a good place to hang out in the afternoon until the parties began. On the subject of drugs he says amphetamines were the main thing, that Factory regulars like Ondine and Brigid Polk were going off in the bathroom all the time, but that the Cambridge group was not involved; all they would take was a little pop of speed or hashish before setting forth on their evening rounds … He says the Cambridge years in the Factory were not driven by drugs, although, he says, Edie’s story was different and he doesn’t want to go into it.

In time the Cambridge people vanished from the Silver Factory, but Brigid Polk and Ondine were at the center of it as long as it lasted. Brigid was a big, hefty girl with bushy hair, and I think she was probably Andy’s best friend throughout his life; they spoke on the phone for hours every day, and she was the “B” to his “A” in his Philosophy from A to B. However, she didn’t start out as part of his circle; she came into the Factory pursuing the dealer they called Rotten Rita, who she had a big crush on even though he was most definitely gay, and she went straight through to the back, where Ondine and the other Mole People were sitting around, high on amphetamines, listening to Billy Name’s opera LPs and commenting on the performances. Brigid’s real surname was Berlin (her father was Richard Berlin, the president and CEO of the Hearst Corporation), but she called herself Brigid Polk because she would give absolutely anybody—including herself—a poke in the fanny right through the pants. In the Factory she was known as the Duchess because of her social position and her society-lady accent, inherited from what sounds like a monster of a society-lady mother. As for Ondine, his real name was Robert Oliva, and he had entered the Factory with Billy Name, along with some of Billy’s other friends, the so-called amphetamine rapture group, who kept Billy company during the many months it took him to turn the dingy old space silver, and simply stayed on.

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