Poor Little Rich Boy

There's a fun article about actor and meat-loving vegan ice cream shop owner Rob Sedgwick in this week's Observer. How you could grow up to be a heterosexual while having Edie as your cousin and Kyra as your sister is beyond me, but with a life like this (see lowlights below), his forthcoming memoir is definitely something I will be checking out. A Jewish WASP(?) who fanatically works out before going on vodka binges? Where do I pre-order?

Via The Observer:

When Sedgwick was in grammar school, his mother married Ben Heller, a wealthy art collector:

“We went from middle-middle normal people to, like, butlers and maid and a giant apartment.” The living room was the size of a basketball court. Then they upgraded again. “We moved to the East Side,” said Rob, “to one of the greatest townhouses in New York City: 121 East 73rd Street. I remember saying to my mom, ‘What do we need all this space for? You could house 30 black families in this place, this is stupid.’ Look, I’m a Jewish, WASP kid who grew up in New York in the ’60s …. If you’re from New York, from that era, you want to help people out. So we lived in this house that was five floors, double the size of any normal townhouse. And it’s crazy. Then we started getting fucked up.”

“It was the most amazing apartment you’ve ever seen, and there were Pollocks and Rothkos all over the walls,” said his friend Jordan. “There’d be drinking and cocaine and smoking weed, as we could afford it.”

College life and the ladies: “[Bennington] was 400 women and 200 guys -- and 100 of those guys were gay. You had to really be an idiot if you didn’t do really well,” he said. “And they were all dancers, so I developed this huge dancer fetish.”

Post-college life: After Bennington he got a gig on the soap "Another World," playing an obnoxious rich kid. A few years later, in 1988, he was having trouble making ends meet, and ended up going in the marijuana trade with Jordan.

After getting busted by the D.E.A. in a family apartment on West 84th Street, Rob turned to alcohol: “Oh, yeah, the drunk years?” said Jordan. “He’d do his ritual, which had to be meticulous. He’d work out like a horse, eat a great dinner, and then he’d start to drink and he’d shut off all communication. I’d call him and he’d say, ‘No, I gotta go.’ He’d started using these 900 sex jerk-off lines, and what he’d end up doing—because he’d get horrified by seeing these $1,200 bills—is right when he’d begin drinking, when he was still his normal self, he’d take a role of duct tape, and duct tape the phone together, to try and prevent himself from picking it up and actually using it. And then he’d wake up in the morning, and he see that the duct tape had been ripped open and he’d be horrified."