dandelion46: sandy

when i read about the social scene around andy warhol's factory, i pay attention to who made it out and who didn't. i'm fascinated by it. i think that edie is seen as the purest embodiment of that world -- a common conception of stars who die young -- because she, not having any particular designs on life, threw hers at it, let it dissolve into it, and had fun, for a while, watching it fizzle, seep in.

Jim Morrison was another colossal madman pursued by his own demons. ... He took Nico up in a tower, both naked, and Jim, stoned out of his mind, walked along the edge of the parapet. Hundreds of feet down. Here's this rockstar at the peak of his career risking his life to prove to this girl that life is nothing. ... He asked Nico to walk the same line and she backed down. Edie would have walked it. -Paul Rothchild in Edie: American Girl

gerard malanga was one of the people who made it out. rene ricard, too. (two of the poets ~ because they were crazy enough to adapt, i think. their lives and souls moved at the speed of that world. fluid, flexible.) in the velvet years: warhol's factory, gerard tells lynne tillman that "the people who were involved with andy who didn't survive made what i call undisciplined mistakes. not having a sense of themselves within the context of their own creative pursuits, therefore in a kind of unconscious way they become self-destructive and the victim of their own habits."

paul america was a member of that class. he seemed to loom large in the factory's imagination for a period of time -- the star of my hustler, a principal character in ciao! manhattan, a "strange cup of tea"¹ who seemed like he "had just landed from another planet"² -- but ended up drifting away, living for a time on a commune in indiana, doing things like sending a former new york lover a used cast from his broken leg, and ultimately dying in florida at the age of 38, hit by a car while walking to a dentist's appointment. he has no name recognition outside of factory devotees. (i don't consider andy warhol responsible for what happened to the superstars, but paul's story sickens me enough to wish there was a simple place to put the blame.)

of the forgotten factory burnouts, paul isn't the one who interests me, though. sandy kirkland is. such a minor character that she's rarely mentioned in factory literature, i discovered her through photos in the velvet years. she's a striking presence, melancholy and ghostlike. she first appears in a photo that is primarily of edie, the rare image in which edie looks awkward, while sandy, soft and lithe in the background, eyes averted, listening to someone on the telephone, looks like she possesses some kind of supernatural quiescence. this aura is enhanced in the photos that follow, in which she's never seen speaking or outside the company of a man. in half, the men are amusing themselves with her -- danny field plays with her hair, she lies facedown on chuck wein's lap. (this image parallels an eerie 1974 photo in which she's lying facedown on her terrible husband's lap.)

i was captivated by her, wondering why i'd never heard of her and what role she played in the factory. i researched her but wasn't able to find much until stumbling upon a new york magazine cover story from 1987 about her suicide. her name was sandy marsh by then. she jumped out the window of the park belvedere after her husband's attorney painted her as an unfit mother during divorce proceedings.

i devoured the article, eager to learn all i could about her. like many of the factory girls, she came from
money and had a contentious relationship with her family. she was blonde, elegant, and adventurous, living in rome for a time, exploring europe and asia, going to glamorous parties thrown by expats. "she was always up for anything," her friend said. "i told her, 'there's a crowd in rome that you really shouldn't get involved with, because they're much older and really wild.' and of course, she started immediately hanging out with them."

in america, she hung out at the factory at night while finishing her high school degree at a girls' school on the upper east side during the day. she appeared in a few warhol films, like restaurant and prison, and dated a few of the men: gerard, stephen shore, gordon baldwin. there's a picture at the end of the velvet years of john ashbery and gerard at a party at sandy's father's apartment. later, she was interviewed by jean stein for edie: american girl. the book's turning point comes at chapter 27, following chapters depicting "the high point of edie's career," and begins with the quote "there were problems." sandy delivered this line. it's aligned with the tone of a few of her comments, in which she makes note of edie's messy room and the fact edie would retreat to the back of the factory when she wasn't getting the attention she needed, "alone, abandoned, and she'd be dancing around, spaced out, weird." an ex-boyfriend of sandy's told new york mag that sandy admired edie, though: "she liked the fact that she was very mercurial, and she was impressed by her ability to light up and create this powerful aura." sandy was also a member of edie's circle, hanging out at her apartment. (seems a classic frenemy relationship, i fear.)

from what i can tell, the velvet years photos and sandy's appearances in warhol films constitute the only direct documentation of her time at the factory. the rest of it is backward-looking, like her 1974 interview in edie, in which she describes herself as such: "i was edie's friend. in the sixties. i was going to school. now i am a housewife." "there's something tragically brief about the description, as though marsh's real life had somehow ended in the sixties and she was now starring in a kind of psychedelic version of the stepford wives," wrote the author of the new york mag piece, patricia morrisroe.

did sandy feel trapped as a housewife? the piece depicts her as artistically unfulfilled, never securing a truly satisfying outlet for the aesthetic gifts that outwardly manifested themselves in her clothing and home decor. "sandy had absolutely flawless taste," the artist jane millett told morrisroe. "she was so sensitive to objects, and she'd mix them together in such interesting ways. she'd place her ostrich eggs next to a priceless russian icon." she once gave madonna a set of "beautiful antique sterling silver berry spoons." upon opening them, madonna asked, "so what is this?"

but she also seems to have felt at home in her relationship. "sandy only felt secure when she was deeply in love," an anonymous woman told morrisroe. they were together for 12 years, sandy and her ne'er-do-well husband, a college dropout from a texas oil family who eventually got sober, convinced himself sandy was an alcoholic, too, and divorced her when she wouldn't go to rehab. (her friends say she "certainly" wasn't an alcoholic, and she didn't use drugs, as he did.) he played so dirty in the divorce, using tactics that his attorney admitted were probably "overkill" in order to secure a better deal, that she tried to kill herself the night she read the court paperwork. the detective her husband hired to follow her found her the next morning, alive, but only in the technical sense. she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for the next six months, until she jumped out of the window of her central park-facing apartment and didn't survive that time. when she and her husband were together, they'd been high society people, attending galas, investing their families' hard-earned funds, donating to the right causes, seeing their apartment featured in the new york times style magazine. "i was surprised and a little saddened," a former high school classmate said of sandy's trajectory. "she was the first one in our class to embrace the sixties. and she was certainly the last person you'd ever expect on the alumnae association." after all, the quote she chose for her high school yearbook was live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.

in some ways, gerard's analysis of the personality type that doesn't make it out of the factory applies to sandy. her friends say she was a gifted writer, a longtime diarist with exquisite handwriting who wrote beautiful, lengthy letters, but she wasn't confident in her craft, demurring when they offered to show her work to publishers. she lacked the fortification of an art practice; instead she "collected ostrich eggs and preserved her old clothes in tissue paper and never put her gloves away without matching their fingertips." she "never really had anything of her own," morrisroe wrote. "of course, she had money and wonderful clothes and an apartment filled with treasures from her travels around the world. but for an intelligent, restlessly creative woman, that wasn't enough."

unlike the other factory victims, though, sandy didn't self-destruct -- the world destroyed her. the only "habit" one could say she fell victim to, far from the prototypical vice of drugs, was her permeability in relation to men. you see it in the photos; you get the sense of it from the way men talk about her. she let them in with no questions asked. i'm sympathetic to this quality, one my grandmother had. both women were delicate blondes who seemed one step removed from the world: dreamy, slight, pliable. they closed their eyes and wished that the men who adored them would be good to them; they didn't seem to possess the will to make it so.

i'm grateful my grandmother found my grandfather, her second husband, who she was with for 50 years until she died in 2022. she was comfortable in her life with him -- he was good to her. he describes them as best friends -- they did everything together -- and they were sweet and romantic til the last. i wish sandy had had a man like that -- one who would say her hair "glowed like filament," as an unidentified man told new york mag, and also treat her with sensitive care. maybe then she would've survived. maybe then she would've published her diaries, written about her factory days like viva and mary woronov and candy darling did.

my friend riley recently lent me one of gerard's poetry books, incarnations, which contains a topless, shadowed portrait of 21-year-old sandy, arms raised, eyes downcast. the book also contains his poem transcribing a vision of her eventually killing herself, written when sandy was seventeen. i'll close with that. i hope one of sandy's children publishes her diaries one day.

the tranquil tub

It is day. I am awake, and the atmosphere
Is electric. The window is left open
Because of some simple contradiction.
But the choice of colors and sophistication
For social events is unlimited.
Activities will include friends' debuts,
Dinner parties, charity balls. Outside
A white tree in silhouette, far off,
Behind, the window which tries
To frame it; a jet glides silently
Across the sky. There is only
The truth of a two o'clock sun,
Only blood and hair floating on the hot water's surface.

circa 1964, nyc