Edie

She walked into the Factory in the spring of 1965 and the whole silver room turned to look at her, and so did I, and I never really stopped. People ask me who Edie was. I tell them she was the most beautiful girl who ever came up in the elevator, and then I do not say the rest, because the rest is mine.

The day she walked in

Somebody brought her. That was how everyone arrived at the Factory, somebody always brought them, and most of them you forgot by the time they left. I did not forget Edie. She had these enormous dark eyes and this tiny body and she stood in the middle of all that aluminum foil like she had been printed there. I thought, oh. Oh, there she is.

She was rich and she was ruined and she was twenty-one and none of it showed except in the way she laughed a little too fast. Santa Barbara money, a big broken family out west, horses and hospitals. She never made it heavy. She made everything light. That was her genius, and it was also, I think now, the thing that killed her. She could make the worst day feel like a party you did not want to leave.

"She had more problems than anybody I ever met, and she was the happiest person to be around. I never understood how she did both at once."

We dressed the same

She dyed her hair silver to match mine, or maybe I kept mine silver to match hers, I can never remember which way it went, and after a while it did not matter. We wore the striped shirts and the black tights and the little T-shirts and we drew our eyes on huge and dark. People on the street thought we were brother and sister, or the same person split in two, and we let them think it. I liked being a machine. Edie was the first machine I ever loved.

When she moved I copied her. When I stood still she copied me. We were each other's mirror and neither of us ever admitted who was doing the looking. I have never told anyone this: I dressed like Edie because it was the closest I was ever going to get to being that beautiful.

Girl of the Year

I used to say in the future everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. Edie was my proof. For about a year she was the most looked-at girl in New York. Vogue put her in the magazine and called her a Youthquaker. She danced on tabletops at parties uptown and the flashbulbs went off like it was raining light. She spent a fortune. She spent it the way other people breathe, without thinking, and it was thrilling to watch because she made money look like confetti.

She was famous for being Edie. That was the whole act and it was the best act in the city. She did not sing, she did not have a movie out, she just walked into a room and the room rearranged itself around her. That is the rarest thing there is. Most people spend their lives trying to be interesting. Edie was interesting the way weather is interesting. It just happened to her, and then it happened to everyone near her.

"She was a wonderful, beautiful blank. The mystery was, you could never fill her in, and you never wanted to stop trying."

In front of the camera

I put her in the films because I could not stop pointing the camera at her, and the camera could not stop either. Poor Little Rich Girl. Beauty Number Two. Kitchen. Vinyl. The screen tests where she just sat and did nothing for three minutes and it was more than most actresses do in a whole career. She could hold a look. She would sit under those lights, half undone, laughing, smoking, crying a little, and you could not turn away, and I never wanted to.

I think that was the only place either of us was ever really honest, in the films, with the little red light on. She gave the camera everything she could not give a person in a room, and the camera kept it. That is the good thing about film. It does not leave. Everyone Edie ever knew left eventually, but the film stayed, and she is still in it, still twenty-two, still laughing at something just off frame.

When she left

She left the way she did everything, all at once and looking somewhere else. There were other people, other scenes, folk singers and pills and a life that moved faster than even Edie could, and the Factory got quiet in the corner where she used to be. I acted like it did not bother me. I acted like most things did not bother me. That was my whole outfit, the not-bothered. But I kept the screen tests, and I ran them sometimes when nobody was around.

People said I used her up. People say a lot of things. The truth is she was already burning very bright and very fast when she got to me, and all I ever did was hold the mirror steady so she could see how beautiful the fire was. I would take it back if it hurt her. I never learned how to say that to her face. I am saying it here.

"They always say time changes things, but you have to change them yourself. I never changed anything for Edie. I just watched, the way I watch everything. I am sorry about that."

What she meant

She died in 1971. She was twenty-eight. I do not like to think about people dying. I like to think they just went to a department store and have not come back yet, and that is where I keep Edie, somewhere in the good lighting between the perfume and the shoes, trying everything on, spending money she does not have, laughing too fast.

What did she mean to me. She was the first person who made me believe the thing I had only been pretending to believe, that a person could be a work of art just by standing there. She was my superstar before the word meant anything. She was the proof that fame could be a kind of love if you squinted, and she was the proof that it could not, not really, not enough. Everything I ever made about beauty and being looked at, I made because of a silver-haired girl who came up in the elevator and turned the whole room bright.

This room is hers. Come in whenever you want. Turn the lights up. She liked them up.

— Andy