In a churchyard in Stockbridge Massachusetts, there is a burial plot unlike any other in America. The Sedgwick family is interred there in concentric circles, radiating outward from a single grave at the center, that of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, who served in the Continental Congress and on the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

 Every Sedgwick who follows is buried facing inward in rings, generation after generation. The family calls it the Sedgwick pie. The reason for the arrangement, according to family tradition, is that on the day of resurrection, when the dead rise, the Sedgwicks will stand up and see only Sedgwicks.

 It is the most complete statement of what that name meant to the people who carried it, not a family, a formation. Everything about that arrangement assumes something, that being a Sedgwick is the most important fact about a person, that it outlasts death, and that the correct posture, even in the ground, even at the end of the world, is facing inward, toward the center, toward the name.

 Now, hold that image, because this is a story about eight children raised by a man who believed it completely. Edie Sedgwick is not buried there. She is in a small cemetery in Ballard, California, 3,000 mi from the circle, under a headstone that reads Edith Sedgwick Post. She was 28 years old. Two of her brothers were already dead, one at 25, one at 31, within 18 months of each other.

 A third of the eight Sedgwick children of that generation would not reach 40, and all of it traces back to a warning that a doctor delivered in 1929, before a single one of them existed. This is the story of the eight Sedgwick children, the American aristocracy they were born into, the father who built a kingdom in California and ruled it absolutely, and what happened to a family that was told, in writing, what was coming, and went ahead anyway.

 If you are enjoying this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories. To understand what happened on that ranch, you have to understand what the name Sedgwick meant to the man who carried it. It was not ordinary American wealth. The Sedgwicks were among the oldest and most self-conscious families in New England, a lineage that ran back through Judge Theodore Sedgwick to the founding of the Republic and forward through generals, editors, and writers.

Edie’s paternal grandfather, Henry Dwight Sedgwick III, was a respected historian and author. Her great uncle Ellery Sedgwick edited the Atlantic Monthly for 30 years. Her great-great-grandfather, Robert Bowne Minturn, was a shipping magnate credited with helping create and promote Central Park.

 Her great-grandmother’s brother was Robert Gould Shaw, the Union Colonel who led the 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment raised in the north, and died at Fort Wagner. That is the kind of family it was. A family with a burial plot arranged as a monument to itself. Their mother’s side was, if anything, wealthier. Alice DeLano de Forest was the daughter of Henry Wheeler de Forest, a Wall Street financier who served as president and chairman of the board of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

 Her maternal grandfather was Endicott Peabody, the clergyman who founded the Groton School, the institution that educated Franklin Roosevelt and generations of the American establishment, including the Sedgwick men. Alice herself studied piano at Juilliard. She was, by every account, shy, cultured, and entirely devoted to her husband.

 And her husband was Francis Minturn Sedgwick, born in New York City on the 13th of March, 1904. Everyone called him Duke. He was, on paper, everything the name required. Groton, then Harvard, which he finished in 3 years and graduated from in 1926. Then Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard Business School.

 He was a gifted sculptor. He was physically striking, obsessively athletic, and by every account in the historical record, magnetic a man who could hold a dinner table for an entire evening. He also had a medical history that his family understood perfectly well and did not discuss. Duke Sedgwick suffered three nervous breakdowns before his marriage.

He was, in the language of the period, diagnosed as manic-depressive, what would today be called bipolar disorder, and he was institutionalized at least once. His brother Minturn describing him years later, remembered a young man who had been fiercely, almost violently competitive, who had wanted a physique he did not naturally possess, and had built one by force of will, who once knocked his own brother to the floor of their mother’s apartment in New York and beat his head against it, demanding that he get up and fight over the question of

whether his brother was a man. In 1929, Duke Sedgwick became engaged to Alice de Forest. And his doctors went to her father. The advice given to Henry Wheeler de Forest was as direct as medicine of that era could make it. Given Francis Sedgwick’s psychiatric history, the couple should not have children.

 Consider the position of the men involved. De Forest was a Wall Street financier and a railroad chairman, a man with as much information and as much power as any private citizen in America. He was told by physicians that the marriage his daughter was entering carried a hereditary risk. Duke Sedgwick himself was told. Alice was told.

 They married on the 8th of May, 1929. Between 1931 and 1945, they had eight children. Alice’s eldest daughter, Alice, the family called her Saucy, would put the question plainly decades later in an oral history that has become the definitive account of this family. Her mother, she said, had nearly died giving birth to Edie.

 Saucy added that she had no idea why her mother went on having children when it was so dangerous to her. There are two things sitting inside that sentence and they run through the whole of this story. The first is the physical danger to Alice, which was real and repeated. The second is the thing nobody in that generation could say out loud, that the risk was not only to the mother.

By the accounts of the family, Duke wanted more children and particularly more sons. He got three. All three would spend time in psychiatric institutions. Two would be dead before their father. It is worth being careful here because it would be easy to turn a 1929 medical opinion into a prophecy.

 And it was not one. Doctors of that era understood far less about heredity than they believed they did. And the advice they gave families was frequently wrong and frequently cruel. The same decade produced forced sterilizations justified by exactly this kind of reasoning. A warning is not a diagnosis of children who do not yet exist.

 But something was said. Someone in a position to know looked at Francis Sedgwick’s history and told the most powerful man in that family in plain terms what the risk was. And the response of every adult involved was to proceed as though it had not been said, which is the same response the family would give 35 years later when a hospital and a police department recorded how one of those children had died.

 That is the pattern. Not a curse in the blood, a habit of hearing something true and deciding it was not. The Sedgwicks moved west and the move is the second decisive fact of this story. Duke had been rejected for military service before the Second World War on grounds of health. Rather than remain in the East inside the family structure that had defined and constrained him and in which he had always been by the standards of that formation something of a black sheep, he bought land in California.

 First a small lemon ranch in the Goleta Valley, then in 1942 the Corral de Quati, roughly 3,000 acres in northern Santa Barbara County, part of an original Mexican land grant, and in 1952, Rancho La Laguna, 6,000 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley. The purchase money came substantially from Alice’s inheritance.

 In the early 1950s, oil was discovered on the land, and the family’s fortunes rose again. What Duke Sedgwick built there was not a home. It was a self-contained world with one authority in it. The children were educated on the property in a private school constructed on the ranch itself. They were raised largely by nannies and governesses. They rode. They worked.

They were subject to a set of rules about conduct, appearance, and bearing that the surviving accounts describe as absolute. They had almost no contact with children outside the family. A local physician came to the ranch and administered vitamin B injections to the children as a matter of routine. Read that arrangement carefully because it should sound familiar.

A closed compound, a single figure at the center with total authority, children raised without external friendships or outside reference points, educated on site, watched by staff, and permitted no independent standard by which to judge what was normal. The Sedgwick children grew up inside a system with no exits and no comparisons.

Whatever their father was, he was the only weather they had ever known. And the standards inside that system were not ordinary parental expectations. The children were required to be beautiful, athletic, accomplished, and composed. Appearance was not vanity in that household. It was compliance. Duke Sedgwick was a sculptor, and there is something in the accounts of how he regarded his own children that is difficult to separate from how a sculptor regards material as something with a correct form which can be worked

toward and which can fail. The physical culture of the place was relentless. They rode, they swam, they worked the land. Duke himself, well into middle age, was famous locally for his physique, and would exercise in front of the household. His sons were measured against him constantly and openly. There is a detail from those years that seems minor and is not.

 The local doctor who came to the ranch to give the children routine vitamin injections. Nothing sinister in itself, but it tells you the shape of the world that medicine came to them. On the property, arranged by their father, on his schedule. Even the doctor was inside the compound. Nobody who saw those children saw them alone.

And their father, by the accounts of nearly every one of them, was two men. To the outside world, he was Duke, brilliant, charming, athletic, a sculptor and a rancher, one of the most admired figures in Santa Barbara society. His obituary describes a man who held court at his own table, who loved to put his young friends on the spot with a teasing quip, who had a story for every occasion drawn from a lifetime among eminent men.

To his children, he was Fuzzy. And what the children of Fuzzy Sedgwick describe is narcissism, emotional coldness, control, and cruelty. A man who demanded that his children be exceptional and punished them for the ways they were not. They adored him. Nearly every account says that, too. They adored him, and they were frightened of him.

Which is the specific arrangement that does the most damage to a child, because it makes the source of the danger and the source of the love the same person, and gives a child nowhere to put either feeling. A child in that position cannot simply decide the parent is bad and protect themselves accordingly.

 The love is real, the charm is real, the good days are real. So, the child concludes instead that the problem must be located somewhere else, and the only other place available is themselves. He conducted affairs openly once the family had moved west. On one occasion, Edie walked in on her father with one of his women.

 She was enraged. His response was to insist that she had imagined it, that what she had seen with her own eyes had not happened. That is not merely infidelity. That is a father telling a daughter that her perception of reality is unreliable at an age when she has no one else to check it against. Within two decades, three of his children would be in psychiatric hospitals.

 Robert Sedgwick was the eldest son, born in the early 1930s, the boy who carried, by the arithmetic of that kind of family, the largest share of his father’s expectations. He went to Harvard, as Sedgwick men did, the same university his father had finished in 3 years. The same institution the family had been sending its sons to for generations.

 That is the weight Bobby Sedgwick carried onto campus. Not simply the ordinary pressure of a demanding school, but the specific requirement to be a Sedgwick at the place where Sedgwicks were made. And there, in his sophomore year in the early 1950s, he had a breakdown. He was removed from Eliot House, his residential college, in restraints.

 Think about what that meant in 1953, in that world. A young man from one of New England’s oldest families carried out of a Harvard residential house in front of everyone who knew him. There was no vocabulary for it then that did not humiliate the family. And the Sedgwicks were a family organized around not being humiliated.

 He returned to Harvard in the autumn of 1953 and continued treatment with a psychiatrist in Boston. For a decade, he functioned. Then, on the 20th of August, 1963, he was committed to Bellevue Hospital in New York. After 10 days, he was transferred to Manhattan State Hospital. On New Year’s Eve, 1964, Bobby Sedgwick was riding a Harley-Davidson through New York City without a helmet.

 He crashed into the side of a bus. He did not die immediately. He lingered for nearly 2 weeks and died on the 12th of January, 1965. He was 31 years old. The family has never agreed on what that crash was. It has been recorded as an accident. It has been read by people who knew his condition as something else. The historical record does not resolve it.

And this account will not pretend to. What can be said is that Bobby Sedgwick had been in of psychiatric care for more than a decade, that he had been institutionalized 4 months earlier, and that he was on a motorcycle in traffic without a helmet on New Year’s Eve. And by the time he died, his younger brother was already gone.

 Francis Minton Sedgwick Jr. was born in 1938. The family called him Minty. He carried his father’s name. That was the whole problem, and everyone in the family seems to have understood it. Minty was, by the accounts collected in Jean Stein’s oral history of this family, drinking heavily by the age of 15. He suffered a series of breakdowns through his late teens and early 20s.

And he had a relationship with his father that the surviving accounts describe as the worst of the eight, because Minty was the son who bore the name and could not be the thing the name required. What that thing was, precisely, has been described by people who knew both of them. Duke Sedgwick had spent his own youth in a competition with his older brother over whether he was sufficiently a man, a competition that had ended with him beating his brother’s head against the floor.

 He had built his body by force of will because he believed his natural physique was insufficient. Masculinity for Fuzzy Sedgwick was not a trait. It was a test administered daily that his sons could fail. There is a particular cruelty in the arithmetic of that name. Francis Minton Sedgwick Jr.

 was the son designated to be his father again, to carry the name forward, to be the next iteration of the thing. And he was, by every account, gentle, sensitive, and unwell from an early age. By the early 1960s, Minty was in psychiatric treatment at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. And according to accounts given by friends of the family, the reason he was there, the thing he had finally been unable to keep contained, was that he had fallen in love with another young man.

 His father had been pressing him, “What is wrong with you? Stop being depressed. You’re a Sedgwick.” And eventually, in tears, Minty told him the truth. By the account passed down through those who knew them, Duke Sedgwick’s response was not sympathy or confusion, or even anger that resolved into something. It was a sentence that he would never speak to his son again, and that Minty was no son of his.

In 1964, at Silver Hill Hospital, Minty Sedgwick took his own life. It was the day before his 26th birthday. He telephoned his sister Edie before he did it. He told her, by her own account, that she was the only Sedgwick he could ever hope for. He listed the others. Then, he said goodbye without saying it. Edie was in Cambridge at the time.

 When her younger brother Jonathan found her, she beat her fists against his chest, sobbing, demanding that he cry, too. And their mother Alice, the Juilliard pianist, the devoted wife, refused for the rest of her life to accept what had happened. Edie said so directly. Her mother denied to the end that her brother’s death was a suicide, though it was recorded as one in both hospital and police records.

That refusal is the family in one gesture. Death certificate said one thing, the Sedgwicks said another. And what the Sedgwicks said was, “Inside that house, the truth.” Within 18 months, two sons were dead. And the seventh child, the daughter who had taken Minty’s last phone call, was about to become the most photographed young woman in America.

 Edith Minturn Sedgwick was born at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara on the 20th of April 1943, the 7th of the 8th. Her mother nearly died delivering her. She was raised on the ranch under the same rules as the others, the isolation, the horses, the school on the property, the rigid standards of appearance and conduct. She was a tomboy who rode hard and rebelled in the small ways available to a child with nowhere to go.

 By her teens, she had developed an eating disorder which followed her into adulthood. In the autumn of 1962, at her father’s insistence, Edie was admitted to She was 19. As her condition worsened, she was transferred to the Westchester division of New York Hospital, an institution then known as Bloomingdale. Two years later, her brother Minty would die in the first of those two hospitals.

 In the autumn of 1963, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began studying sculpture with her cousin, the artist Lily Saarinen. She had, by every account from that period, the quality that would define the rest of her short life. People could not stop looking at her. Saarinen said she was deeply insecure about men, though every man loved her.

Then, Minty died. Then, Bobby died. And in 1964, with an $80,000 trust fund from her maternal grandmother, Edie Sedgwick moved to New York City. In March 1965, at a dinner party, she met Andy Warhol. What followed was one of the most concentrated bursts of fame in American cultural history, and it lasted less than a year.

 She appeared in his experimental films. She became the central figure of the factory, the silver-walled studio that was the engine room of American pop art. Vogue named her a youthquaker in 1965, and the look she invented, the dark eyes and the cropped platinum hair and the black tights was copied by a generation. She was, for a season, the most visible young woman in New York.

 And she was, in the arrangement she had entered, unpaid. That combination is worth stopping on because it is the exact structure she had grown up inside. A charismatic older figure at the center of a closed world. A small group of people orbiting him, competing for his attention. Total visibility and no independent standing.

Edie Sedgwick left a compound in California run by a magnetic man who decided what was real. And within 18 months she had joined a silver walled room in Manhattan run by a magnetic man who decided what was real. She had been trained for the factory since childhood. That is the part of her story that the glamour photographs cannot show.

 She never received financial remuneration for the films she appeared in. By 1965 the relationship with Warhol had soured and she asked him to stop screening them publicly. She left the factory in early 1966, drawn away by promises of a legitimate film career from the circle around Bob Dylan. Those promises did not materialize.

 In their place came something crueler. Edie had developed feelings for Dylan. The people around her understood that she believed something was possible. Warhol was in his lawyer’s office when he learned that Dylan had quietly married in November 1965. He could not resist telling her. Paul Morrissey, who was present, described what happened when Warhol asked Edie whether she knew. She began to tremble.

That is the whole of the factory in one moment. A young woman told a fact that would hurt her in front of an audience by a man who wanted to see what she would do. Her trust fund emptied. The drug use, which had begun in Cambridge and accelerated in New York, escalated. She spent time in hospitals.

 The years between 1966 and 1970 are a long descent, documented in fragments of actions, a fire, admissions and discharges. Her father died in October 1967 without any reconciliation with the daughter he had committed at 19. In the summer of 1970, while making the film Ciao, Manhattan, Edie was admitted to the psychiatric facility at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, the same hospital where she had been born 27 years earlier.

 She had come back to the beginning. There she met another patient. His name was Michael Post. They married on the 24th of July 1971. By every account, he loved her. And for a period, she was better than she had been in years. On the 15th of November, 1971, Edie attended a fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum and a party afterwards, where she drank.

 Her husband collected her. On the drive home, she talked about her uncertainty over their marriage. At home, she took her prescribed medication and went to sleep. Michael Post woke at half past 7:00 the next morning and turned to his wife. She had died in the night. The coroner’s finding was probable acute barbiturate intoxication.

 The manner of death was recorded as undetermined. She was 28. Duke Sedgwick had died 4 years before her, on the 24th of October 1967 at 63. His obituary in the local press is a remarkable document to read against everything above. It describes a Harvard man, a sculptor, a philanthropist, the donor with his wife of a 51% interest in the 6,000 acre Rancho La Laguna to the University of California, a gift described at the time as the most significant event in the recent history of the Santa Barbara campus.

It describes a man of wit and hospitality who loved to tease his young friends, and it lists his survivors, five daughters and one son. He had fathered three sons. Two of them were already in the ground in the 18-months before he died, and the obituary does not mention them. The formation closed over the gap.

 Alice Sedgwick lived another 21 years at the ranch, dying in August 1988. Duke’s ashes were scattered on a ridge on the property. That land is now the Sedgwick Reserve, administered by the University of California, 6,000 acres of California hill country, used for ecological research, named for the family, open to scientists and students.

It is, in the end, the most enduring thing the Sedgwicks of that generation produced, a nature reserve. The kingdom outlived the king, and it outlived most of his children. Of the eight, three did not reach 40. The eldest daughter, Saucie, broke with the family and spent much of her life at a distance from it.

The surviving siblings scattered, and the family that had been arranged into a formation for two centuries stopped standing in ranks. When Alice died in 1988, she left the remaining acreage of the ranch to five children. Five out of eight. That number is the plainest accounting of what had happened to this family that exists anywhere in the record, not in a biography or an interview, but in the distribution of an estate.

 The surviving Sedgwicks did not, on the whole, spend the following decades talking publicly about their childhoods. When Jean Stein and George Plimpton assembled their oral history in the early 1980s, several family members did speak, and what they said forms the backbone of everything we now know about that house. That it was a book about Edie.

 The family’s own account of itself, given by one of its own on her own terms, would not appear for another 40 years. And Edie was buried 3,000 miles from the circle. There is a fact about the Sedgwick pie that ought to be stated plainly here, because it is the closing image of this entire story. Edie Sedgwick, the most famous member of the family in the 20th century, the one whose face is still on posters and book covers and gallery walls 60 years later, the one people can still recognize instantly, is not in it.

She lies in Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, California, under her married name, in ground that has nothing to do with Stockbridge, Massachusetts. On the day the Sedgwicks rise and see only Sedgwicks, she will not be among them. There is a version of this story in which Edie Sedgwick is a casualty of Andy Warhol and the factory, the innocent aristocrat consumed by New York, chewed through by a scene that used her and discarded her.

 That version has been told many times. It contains real truth. She was used. She was unpaid. And the people around her did not protect her. But it has the sequence wrong. And the sequence is the whole point. By the time Edie Sedgwick walked into that dinner party in March 1965, she had already been institutionalized twice.

She had already lost two brothers in 18 months. She had already grown up in a closed compound under a father who told her that what she had seen with her own eyes had not happened. The damage was not done at the factory. The damage was done on 6,000 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley by a man who was told before any of his children existed that this might happen and who had eight anyway.

Andy Warhol did not break Edie Sedgwick. He found her already broken and pointed a camera at it, which is its own kind of crime, but it is a different one. And this is where the Sedgwick story earns its place beside the other families this channel has covered. Because what happened in that house was not, primarily, a genetic event.

 Bipolar disorder does carry hereditary risk. The doctors who warned Henry de Forest in 1929 were not speaking nonsense. But look at what actually reached the children. A son who was told he was no son. A daughter who was told her own eyes were lying. Three sons raised by a father for whom manhood was a daily examination they could fail.

Eight children raised in a compound with no external friendships, no outside standard, and one man’s judgment functioning as the entire moral weather of their world. You do not need a gene to explain that. You need a household. And it is worth saying clearly, because this channel has now told several of these stories, a hereditary vulnerability is not a verdict.

 It is a loaded set of odds that the environment either presses down on or lifts. The Sedgwick children inherited a real risk. What determined the outcome was what was done with them afterwards, the isolation, the impossible standard, the father who could not tolerate a son who was different or a daughter who saw too much.

 Three of the eight did not survive it. Five did. The difference between those two groups was not written in anyone’s chromosomes. The grandeur and the grief, as always, lived side by side, and in this family they were the same object. The name that produced historians, editors, a Union colonel, and the man who helped build Central Park was the same name that made a young man’s homosexuality an unbearable defect and a young woman’s testimony inadmissible.

The formation that promised its children they would rise together and see only Sedgwicks was the formation that could not bend far enough to keep three of them alive. In 2024, more than half a century after her sister’s death, Alice Sedgwick Wohl Saucy, the eldest daughter, the one who had left published a book of her own about Edie and Andy and what had actually happened to their family. She was in her 90s.

It took the Sedgwicks 60 years to produce an account from inside the circle. And when it came, it came from the child who had walked out of it. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.