WORK 3

So one evening in the middle of January everybody at the Factory went over to the Delmonico Hotel… The second the main course was served the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room….

While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, Gerard noticed (he told me this later) that Edie was trying to sing, too, but that even in the incredible din, it was obvious she didn’t have a voice. He always looked back on that night as the last time she ever went out with us in public, except for a party here and there. He thought that she’d felt upstaged that night, that she’d realized Nico was the new girl in town.

Nico and Edie were so different, there was no good reason to compare them, really. Nico was so cool, and Edie was so bubbly. But the sad thing was, Edie was taking a lot of heavy drugs, and she was getting vaguer and vaguer. Her Society lady attitude toward pills had changed to an addict attitude. Some of her good friends tried to help her, but she wouldn’t listen to them. She said she wanted a “career” and that she’d get one since [Bob Dylan’s manager Al] Grossman was managing her. But how can you have a career when you don’t have the discipline to work at anything?

from POPism - Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett (italics mine)