Persky told writer Jean Stein, co-author with George Plimpton of Edie: American Girl, “ sucked in his breath and. When Andy saw Edie, leg in a cast (months before, she’d run a red and totaled her father’s Porsche, “How did two people step out of this car alive?” gasped the caption running under the newspaper photo of the wreck), hair in a beehive, he was like a cartoon character who’d had a safe dropped on him, little stars and tweeting birds dancing around his head. “Baby Jane” Holzer had been 1964’s Girl of the Year, but the year had changed, which meant so should the girl. The encounter was arranged rather than by chance, a setup by the host, movie producer Lester Persky. Andy and Edie met on March 26, 1965, at a birthday party for Tennessee Williams. Or it would be if there hadn’t been heat beneath the frost, a passion that smoldered before it burned, turned fatal. (Andy couldn’t bring himself to be organized enough for a filmography un-rife with holes and question marks.) Their final official movie, Lupe, released more than half a century ago, in 1966, began when Andy offered writer Robert Heide a sole directive: “I want something where Edie commits suicide at the end.” This line, delivered in his usual uninflected, unemphatic tone, is chilling, something that the villain in a Hitchcock thriller, one of those immaculately amoral gentleman-monsters, might have said. In 1965 she was his leading lady in 10 movies, give or take. Andy and Edie’s mutual platinum obsession lasted not quite one calendar year. At long last-oh, rapture! oh, ecstasy!-his self-love was requited. In other words, to turn herself into the reflection of his dreams. Edie’s method of seduction was to take her shoulder-length dark hair, chop it off, bleach it a metallic shade of blond so that it matched his wig, and dress herself in the striped boatnecked shirts that had become his uniform. He was the boy who didn’t like what he saw when he gazed into the pool, and thus was doomed, in a permanent state of unfulfilled desire. No, fundamental was Andy’s frustrated narcissism. Edie got around it, though, no problem because she intuited that Andy’s gayness was incidental. As impediments to heterosexual unions go, homosexual impulse is a biggie. They were also, of course, opposite sexes, which should have made their pairing all the more inevitable, only it did, well, the opposite since he preferred the same. So how could the attraction between them have been other than irresistible? She was the beauty to his beast, the princess to his pauper, the exhibitionist to his voyeur. Were, in fact, radically, diametrically, almost violently opposed. Pop art’s golden couple, even if silver was their signature color.
They were one of the great romances of the 1960s.
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