Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (2 page)

And then one day her cover was blown. She never did find out how; it was probably one of her gangmates’ mothers. But that was it for her life as a Cool Cat. She was kicked out of her own gang.

The rejection did not blunt Patti’s intrepid spirit. One day, when she was seven or eight, she found herself walking through an area that the locals called Jericho, an accumulation of truly makeshift homes constructed from shopping trolleys, planks of wood and strips of tarpaulin, and old refrigerator boxes. Just like her old club house. She stopped to look, mindless of the cries of “white cracker” that the predominantly black residents were hurling her way, or the stones and handfuls of dirt that followed the oaths. She just dodged out of the way and continued looking, returning day after day until finally people started to acknowledge her with a wave or a smile. Soon, she laughed years later, she was happily hanging out with them.

Not all of Patti’s adventures were so courageous, and many more took place in her mind alone. She was a vivid dreamer, with imaginings that bordered on the hallucinatory, and as time passed, she trained her mind to recall them when she woke, to be written down in one of the pads she was constantly scribbling in. She once boasted that she’d never had a dream that she didn’t remember, and she shared many of them with her two siblings, entertaining them with stories of her nocturnal activities. Later, the same training would become a part of her creative process: “Most of my writing and a lot of my songs, or sometimes a melody, comes from a dream,” Patti revealed to British journalist Sandy Robertson in 1978.

She credited her mother with teaching her that. “[Mother] was always great in weaving a fantasy world, telling us fairy stories, or getting us involved in stories,” Patti told
Mademoiselle’s
Amy Gross in 1975. Her mother’s fantasies would even inspire her future writing. Destined for Patti’s debut album, the poem “Free Money” was rooted in Beverly’s weekly dream of striking it rich. Her mom “always dreamed about winning the lottery,” she laughed during an interview with Simon Reynolds of the
Observer
in 2005. “But she never bought a lottery ticket! She would just imagine if she won, make lists of things she would do with the money—a house by the sea for us kids, then all kinds of charitable things.”

I’ll buy you a jet plane, baby … And take you through the stratosphere.

Other times, Patti would draw Linda and Todd into the worlds that unfolded from her reading. Both of their parents were very well read—later Patti described them as liberal-minded and sophisticated readers— and she grew up with the same voracious appetite for books. Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
was a particular favorite, and as soon as Patti was old enough to formulate the notion of hero worship, Jo—the so-capable elder sister who binds the March family together—became her first role model. It was Jo whose example first led her to write; it was Jo who showed her the magic of performance.

Patti began writing her own stage plays, which she would later disparage as the childish constructs that they surely were. But she acted them out with and for her family all the same. Not because she actually enjoyed doing it, but because it was what Jo did. She told writer Scott Cohen in a 1976 interview in
Oui,
“I studied her to see what it takes to be a girl who keeps her family together—who writes, creates, inspires people, likes to teach and to entertain.”

“I wasn’t a disturbed child. I actually had a happy childhood. I loved my brother and sister. We were inseparable. They thought the world of me,” Patti told Terry Gross. She recalled going through some of Todd’s possessions following his death in 1994 and discovering some of the childhood memories that he’d written down, “about how I was like King Arthur, and they were like the knights in my court, and they always believed in me, and I invented endless games and plays and stories for us to be involved in.”

Jo March was not her sole literary influence. Onstage in Oxford, England, in 2007, she told the audience how, as a child, “I cherish[ed] my
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
books, and I learned about the dodo bird in these books, and I couldn’t wait till I got older and got to meet one.” She also combed the parental bookshelves for copies of Plato and Aristotle, and devoured the Bible as vociferously as she plowed through her father’s books and magazines on the UFO phenomenon.

The possibility that our skies were filled with flying saucers was common currency after the end of World War II. Hollywood studios were already churning out their B-movie sci-fi epics; pulp paperbacks and magazines were expounding theory and thoughts. Little green men were everywhere, even if nobody reliable had actually seen one, and it would be decades before the scientific community finally announced its own belief that the whole UFO business was an illusion, a manifestation of the Cold War paranoia that likewise gripped the land.

For it was the age, too, of “reds beneath the bed” and Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts, of irregular classroom rehearsals for the day the bomb was dropped and nifty public information films that told you what to do when it did. “Duck and cover!” That way, you’d be lying down when you were blown into smoldering atoms. Reality, Patti decided very early on, could be as unbelievable as fantasy.

She grew up to be grateful, then, that her parents were firmly aware of that fact. To writer Dave Marsh in
Rolling Stone
in 1976, she described her mother as “a real hip Scheherazade,” and she told Jeff Baker of
OregonLive.com
, “My mother was creative and my father was a very compassionate man…. There were people who were anti-Semitic and, of course, if you were homosexual, that was a taboo subject. My mother opened the door to anybody it was closed to elsewhere. I lived in a very poor but energetic household that was filled with religious dialogue and civil rights, all kinds of things.”

“Just like I say I’m equal parts Balenciaga and Brando,” she told Dave Marsh, “well, my dad was equal parts God and Hagar the Spaceman for Mega City.”
I recognize him as the true outcast,
she wrote in a prose piece titled “Grant”;
he is lucifer the unguided light, judas the translator and barabbas the misused…. there is no one closer to God than my father.

Young Patti never did meet a gay Jewish alien, but she would not have been shocked if she had—just as she believed that she would one day meet a dodo. Because it was belief that sustained her, even as a child. Belief that she would wake up every morning, belief that she would grow up and marry, have children and grandchildren, and live a long life. And, because there has to be a negative emotion for every positive one, the belief that she was going to drop dead right now, before she had even reached double figures.

Patti was seven when she had her first encounter with mortality, and it was her own. Scarlet fever did more than turn your tongue red and your skin harsh and bumpy, while you roasted in the arms of virulent fever. In those days, it was a killer.

There were plenty of cures available. The first vaccine for scarlet fever had been created back in 1924. But vaccines came from doctors, and doctors charged money. Money that the Smith family could ill afford to spend. There were occasions, Patti recalled, when things were so tight that even their mother’s creativity was stretched to the limit. Patti told NPR’s
Fresh Air,
“If my dad was on strike, and we had no food or very little food, [our mother would] make this, like, Wonder Bread with butter and sugar and she’d tell a story and this would become a great delicacy. We’d pretend we were all hiding out from, like, the Nazis or something, and we hadn’t eaten in three days and this was our food, and it was so wonderful. She made everything into a game.” Even hunger.

Brother Todd and sister Linda had their own medical crises to weather; both of them wound up in the hospital once, struggling with mild malnutrition. But when Patti contracted scarlet fever, by the time the medics finally got a good look at her, any number of complications were on the verge of setting in. Pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis—all can develop from a simple case of scarlet fever, and whether Patti had one, none, or all of them was really immaterial at the time. For a short while there were genuine doubts as to whether she would even survive.

She rallied, but she remained a sickly kid. Reminiscing about her childhood ailments with Jeff Baker in 2010, she catalogued her calamitous health record: “I had TB as a kid and scarlet fever and mononucleosis and the Asiatic flu and the mumps and the measles and the chicken pox…. I personally had all those things before I was sixteen, and I was just one child.” She also had a wandering eye that rolled upward in its socket. To correct it, she was given “a creepy-looking eyepatch and glasses,” Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley’s
Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography
quoted her as saying, and the other kids would run from her because they thought she had the Evil Eye.

Illness kept her out of full-time education and kept her from developing the so-called social skills that public school deems so important. “I was very unattractive when I was younger,” she mourned to
Mademoiselle.
“I had bad skin and I was very skinny and totally awkward. And that is when I was
six.
But I was never depressed about it because I had a real ugly duckling sense. The tragedy about the ugly duckling was that no one ever took him aside and said, ‘Look. You’re ugly now, but it’s going to pay off later.’ And that was my view of myself. I figured I’d just bide my time. I’m a real optimistic person.” When she was a child, she recalled in
Crawdaddy
magazine in 1975, “I always had this absolute swagger about the future…. I wasn’t born to be a spectator.”

She made friends, she said, by doing Tex Ritter imitations. She would do anything to make people laugh.

In 1955, shortly before Patti’s ninth birthday, the family moved house again, across the state line to Woodbury Gardens, New Jersey. Later, she would call it the biggest turning point in her life, relocating to a singlestory ranch house whose closest neighbor was a pig farm. Her father still worked at Honeywell, while her mother found work as a counter waitress at a nearby drugstore.

Around that same time came another great turning point: a neighbor boy asked Patti back to his house to hear a new record, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” The way Patti remembered the story, her mouth fell open and she was instantly enthralled. She would also remember being six years old at the time, sitting in her Newell Street clubhouse when the boy stopped by with his invitation. In fact, she would have been at least nine years old and living in New Jersey when that record became a hit, but her point was clear: she discovered rock ‘n’ roll when it was still young, and she never let go of it.

Little Richard changed everything, first as he assaulted her ears, and then as she read everything she could about him. And before she truly understood what she was discovering, her mind filled in the gaps around the facts that 1950s America could not bring itself to mention, the secret life and times of the flamboyant black man who valued jewelry and fine clothing so highly that his every song shrieked defiance at the mores of normalcy that she was beginning to decipher around her.

“In another decade,” she explained to Steve Simels in
Stereo Review
magazine in 1978, “rock ‘n’ roll would be Art. But when I say a decade, I mean for
other
people. For me, since 1954 or something, it
has
been Art. Since Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix. I mean, these guys are masters….

“Being great is no accident,” she continued. “Little Richard wasn’t an accidental phenomenon; he knew what he was after. He might not define it with intellectual terminology, but he was defined by what he did. I don’t think Jackson Pollock wrote a manifesto first and then did all his painting according to it.”

She started building a record collection of her own. The drugstore where her mother worked stocked a bargain bin full of used and exjukebox records. Over the years, she recalled to Thurston Moore in
Bomb
magazine, she received a copy of Harry Belafonte’s 1956 “Banana Boat Song” (which Patti confused with Jo Stafford’s 1951 song “Shrimp Boats”), Patience and Prudence’s 1957 classic “The Money Tree,” and, “embarrassingly enough,” Neil Sedaka’s 1960 hit “Stairway to Heaven” (which her memory retitled “Climb Up”). One time when she was sick, her mother bought her an LP set of
Madame Butterfly.
And then she would shut herself away and listen.
Music,
as she would write years later,
permeated the room like an odor like the essence of a flower.

Her mother would also take her back into Philly, stop by Leary’s Book Store, and buy her a bag of books for a dollar. “Stuff like
Uncle Wiggily
and
The Wizard of Oz,”
she told A. D. Amorosi in the
Philadelphia City Paper.
Then they’d go for a meal to Bookbinders, or Pat’s, with the best steak hoagies in town.

She was a happy child, then, nurtured in a loving household. And she looked toward religion, not necessarily for solace, but because she wascurious about the source of the strength that it offered people. Beverly Smith was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and that was always a part of her daughter’s spiritual landscape. It was her mother who taught Patti to pray, and Patti accompanied her on trips around the neighborhood, distributing literature and canvassing for souls.

It was a sobering experience. Not everybody enjoyed having their weekday evenings or weekend mornings disturbed by the rat-a-tat-tat of a visiting Witness, and not even the presence of a young daughter could shield Mrs. Smith from the anger, scorn, and abuse of those people. Patti was fascinated, not only by the vehemence of the neighbors who chased her mother away, but also by the faith that kept her going back.

But there was something amiss with that faith as well, an inconsistency that Patti could not place her finger on until one day, while talking with a fellow Witness about life in the aftermath of Armageddon, Patti was mortified to be informed that the Museum of Modern Art wouldn’t be around any longer.