The Kaleidoscopic Flicker
On Jean Stein’s greatest legacy, the narrative oral history.
From the first-edition jacket of Edie.
Edie Sedgwick was home for the holidays in California, behind the wheel of a fast car, when she barreled through a flashing red light on New Year’s Eve, 1964. G. J. Barker-Benfield, a friend, was sitting in the passenger seat; his head went through the windshield. He remembers the dumbfounded TV reports of the wreck that totaled Edie’s car: “How did two people step out of this car alive?” Others weren’t so lucky. Eerily, Edie’s brother Bobby had crashed his motorcycle around the same time that night, and he died twelve days later. Barker-Benfield had to get twenty-two stitches, while Edie emerged from the crash with only a broken knee.
Not long afterward, Geoffrey Gates ran into Edie at the former midtown Manhattan nightclub Ondine. It was early January. Edie flitted through the party, doing the twist and wearing a cast stretching from her hip to
