Edie Sedgwick was born in
Santa Barbara, California, the seventh of eight children of Alice Delano de Forest (1908–1988) and Francis Minturn Sedgwick (1904–1967), a rancher, sculptor and member of the historical
Sedgwick family of
Massachusetts. Sedgwick's mother was the daughter of
Henry Wheeler de Forest, the president and chairman of the board of the
Southern Pacific Railroad. Her maternal great-grandfather, Reverend
Endicott Peabody, founded the
Groton School in
Groton, Massachusetts. She was named after her father's aunt,
Edith Minturn Stokes, who was
painted with her husband,
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, by
John Singer Sargent. She was of English and
French Huguenot ancestry. Despite the family's wealth and high social status, Sedgwick's early life was troubled. Initially
homeschooled and cared for by nannies, Sedgwick and her siblings were rigidly controlled by their parents. Being raised on their father's California ranches, they were largely isolated from the outside world and were instilled with the idea that they were superior to most of their peers. It was within these familial and social conditions that Sedgwick, by her early teens, developed an
eating disorder, settling into an early pattern of
binging and purging. At age 13, her grandfather
Henry Dwight Sedgwick died, and she began boarding at
the Branson School near San Francisco. According to her older sister Alice "Saucie" Sedgwick, she was soon taken out of school because she had
anorexia. Her father severely restricted her freedom when she returned home. All the Sedgwick children had conflicted relationships with their father whom they called "Fuzzy." By most accounts, he was
narcissistic, emotionally remote, controlling, and frequently
abusive. He also openly carried on extramarital affairs with other women. On one occasion, Sedgwick walked in on her father while he was having sex with one of his mistresses. She reacted with great surprise, but he claimed that she had imagined it, slapped her, and called a doctor to administer
tranquilizers to her. As an adult, Sedgwick told people that he had attempted to
molest her several times, beginning when she was aged 7. In the autumn of 1962, at her father's insistence, Sedgwick was
committed to the private
Silver Hill Hospital in
New Canaan, Connecticut. As the regime was very lax, she easily manipulated her situation at Silver Hill and her weight kept dropping. She was later sent to Bloomingdale, the behavioral health wing in the
Westchester County division of
New York Hospital, where her anorexia improved markedly. Around the time she left the hospital, she had a brief relationship with a
Harvard student, became pregnant and procured an abortion, citing her present psychological issues. In the autumn of 1963, Sedgwick moved to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began studying sculpture with her cousin, artist
Lily Saarinen. According to Saarinen, Sedgwick "was very insecure about men, though all the men loved her". During this period, she partied with members of an elite
bohemian fringe of the Harvard social scene. Sedgwick was deeply affected by the loss of her older brothers, Francis Jr. (known as "Minty") and Robert (known as "Bobby"), who died within eighteen months of each other. Francis, who had a particularly unhappy relationship with their father, suffered several
mental breakdowns, eventually committing suicide in 1964 while at Silver Hill Hospital. Robert, her second oldest brother, also suffered from mental health problems and died after falling into a coma when his motorcycle crashed into the side of a New York City bus on New Year's Eve 1965. On her twenty-first birthday in April 1964, Sedgwick received an $80,000
trust fund from her maternal grandmother. In September 1964, she relocated to New York to pursue a career in modeling. In December 1964, she was injured in an automobile accident. == The Factory (1965–1966) ==