Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (6 page)

They met by chance, one day during Patti’s first week at Brentano’s, where they discovered that they’d already run into one another once before, on her first day in the city, while she was looking for somebody else. Mapplethorpe was the silent young man who had escorted her to her absent friend’s door.

This time, he came into the bookstore with a credit slip from another Brentano’s branch, where he worked, and bought a Persian necklace that she’d fallen in love with. They swapped smiles and words but didn’t exchange names. That happened a few days later in Greenwich Village, while Patti was enduring the attentions of an unwanted dinner date, a customer from the bookstore whom, in her mind, she was beginning to equate with a potential serial killer. Then she spotted Mapplethorpe walking toward her through crowded Tompkins Square. She rushed over, greeted him as though they were longtime lovers, and waved away her original date.

They began to talk, and at first it may have seemed that they had little in common. They were both artists, Patti later explained to Ed Vulliamy of the
Guardian,
but she was into abstract impression, while Mapplethorpe was working in tantric art. One of the few things they found they shared was their love of poet William Blake (1757–1827).

As a child, Patti had devoured Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience,
and for a long time she viewed him as a children’s writer. Which “in a way he was—making me aware of the life of a chimney sweep,” she told the
Guardian.
“But then I grew with Blake, with his sense of spirituality, of social activism, his visionary experience, his compassion for the flaws in human nature and his own nature.” Now, it was Blake who first bound her to Mapplethorpe. “We would spend whatever money we had on books, even if we had nothing to eat, and spent a lot of time together with our Blake books. Both of us had what I’d call a Blakean palette.”

And soon she was telling Robert her life story. He enjoyed listening to her tell him stories, so she did. Every night—or almost every night, because on some evenings they were too tired to even try to stay awake, and on others they didn’t close their eyes at all—Patti would talk Mapplethorpe to sleep. Sometimes he would request particular tales; othertimes he would simply tell her to begin and then drift to the cadence of her rhythm and tone. Other times he would ask her to draw what she saw when she looked back into her past, and the sound of her pencil would lull him away. And slowly, over time, she recalled in
Just Kids,
her most precious childhood memories became his.

But Patti’s stories could be infuriating as well as comforting. Even attempting to have a simple conversation could wrap you up in her word games; you never knew what she was talking about. “She was on the edge of being psychotic in a schizophrenic way,” Mapplethorpe admitted to his future biographer Patricia Morrisroe. “She told me stories, and I didn’t know whether they were fiction or nonfiction. If she hadn’t discovered art, she would have wound up in a mental institution.”

Instead, she wound up crashing with Mapplethorpe at an apartment on Waverley Avenue in Brooklyn that he was already sharing with a college friend, Patrick Kennedy, and Margaret, his wife-to-be. It was not the happiest of domestic arrangements. Apparently, Margaret found Patti to be judgmental, manipulative, angry, and thoughtless; Patti thought nothing of marching naked through the apartment, no matter who else might be visiting—Pat Kennedy’s midwestern parents on one memorable occasion.

Patti and Robert spent what little money they had cautiously. Food or a book? A book or a record? Whenever they could, they would bypass such decisions by visiting their parents for a free meal. The elder Map-plethorpes were never taken with Patti, even after Robert told them that they were secretly married; Patti’s mother and father liked Mapplethorpe, but they didn’t see him much. It was so much cheaper for Patti to make the long hike into Jersey on her own, especially since she could bring the loot back in her bag. And the money they saved, on the fare and the food and anything else she returned with, could be put toward more important things.

Milk or a magazine? Sustenance or a subway token? The Village or Midtown?

It was Mapplethorpe’s dream to visit Andy Warhol’s Factory, so they did. Located on East Forty-Seventh Street, on the fourth floor of a warehouse buried in the shadow of the Empire State Building, the Factory glittered beneath the artist’s fame and notoriety. Warhol’s own art and works aside, in late 1967 the Factory was home to the Velvet Underground, the musical experience that remained a tightly guarded secret among the city’s artiest cognoscenti. Their debut album was in the stores, its distinctive Warhol cover art of a peelable banana a vivid contrast to the traditional teenybop-friendly mugshots with which most artists bedecked their LPs, but visitors to the Factory could hear it for free, because there was always a copy spinning on the gramophone there.

“The first time I ever saw Patti was at Andy’s,” the Velvets’ golden-haired chanteuse, the German-born Nico, recalled. “She was skinny, like a rat, but she was from New Jersey and so was Lou [Reed, the Velvets’ front man], so that was all right. She didn’t speak much; she just stood and watched the people. I don’t know if we even knew her name.”

Patti and Nico would grow to know one another slowly, and Nico would always speak kindly of her. (“She was a female Leonard Cohen when she moved from writing to singing, and I liked her because she was thin and strong.”) For now, however, Nico was as perplexed by Patti and Robert as everybody else. Were they siblings? Were they lovers, and if they were, who was the boy and who was the girl? Were they strangers who had connected? Or connections who liked one another’s strangeness? Either way, Nico made up her mind to keep a watchful eye on the Jersey girl and her leonine consort as they hovered uncertainly around the edges of the circus.

For it was a circus, a vast room glazed in aluminum cooking foil, a Silver Factory filled with freaks, and Smith looked as out of place there as she felt. “I was a very naive person … and there were so many weird things in New York,” she told Amy Gross. “A lot of sexual stuff—not just happening to me, just
happening
—that I had to realize was part of life. I had lived such a sheltered childhood, so family oriented, and all of a sudden I was on my own. And that’s when I learned that anything is possible.”

Another occasional hangout was the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the East Village. And then it was over to St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, just north of the street that bears itsname, where Paul Blackburn’s recently launched Poetry Project was the already booming center for the city’s poetic community.

Loose and unfunded since its official opening on September 22, 1966, said historian Jerome Rothenberg, “the project developed … into the closest thing we have to an ongoing, venerable center for poetry, run by poets and open foremost to the full range of visionary, revolutionary, language-centered, spirit-centered arts that poets have both invented and discovered in the newest and oldest possibilities of our human (and animal) natures…. It is what Ezra Pound called a vortex—the Poetry Project vortex.”

Rothenberg unwrapped his own memories of the Project’s first performances: “Beat poets, New York School poets, San Francisco poets, Black Mountain poets, Deep Image poets, Midwest and Southwest regionals, Fluxus poets, Umbra poets, and so on. And from then on: African American poets, Latino poets, feminist poets, Indian poets, Language poets, anti-Language poets, sound poets, silent poets, mumbling poets; even … academic poets.” Patti was none of these things—not then—and Mapplethorpe had no desire to become any of them. There, as every place else they visited, they were simply observers, hanging on the periphery of the action.

The center of their universe, however, was what Manhattan then regarded as the hippest joint in town: Max’s Kansas City. For that was where everybody went. Opened by club owner Mickey Ruskin in fall 1965, off Union Square on Seventeenth Street and Park Avenue, Max’s prospered immediately from Ruskin’s own long-standing relationship with the city’s artistic underbelly, particularly once word got around that Warhol was a regular visitor and the Factory crowd were nightly denizens.

Sex and drugs were commonplace. But it could also be a brutally exclusive enclave. The first time Patti and Mapplethorpe turned up at Max’s entrance, Mickey Ruskin refused her entry, she looked so drab and dirty. She was in good company—he once barred Janis Joplin for much the same reasons—and he soon relented. It would take time for the pair to be accepted as even peripheral members of Max’s glittering inner sanctum of self-styled superstars, Warholian freaks, and all-purpose artistic weirdoes, but even from the fringe of this exciting new society, they knew, and became known to, the characters that dominated this particular aspect of New York City culture.

The pair would hang out at Max’s every night they could, often remaining there until three in the morning. She and Mapplethorpe justified the time by telling each other that they were waiting for “a big break,” but she admitted that she wasn’t certain what they were even trying to get a break for. It was six months, she later reflected, before anybody even said hello to them.

Today, writers look back on that scene and describe it as one long, calculated hustle. It wasn’t. Patti told A. D. Amorosi in the
Philadelphia City Paper,
“Writers focus on the hustling or the trampling over each other for success. Perhaps some is true, but one can’t discount youth and idealism. The lifestyles may have been morally questionable but a lot of people were very idealistic.”

In November 1967, Patti and Robert found their first home together, an eighty-dollar-a-month apartment that devoured the entire second floor of an old brownstone on Hall Street. Its last tenants, apparently, had been a nest of junkies; the stove was filled with old, used syringes, the fridge was overflowing with mold, and the walls were smeared with blood and graffiti. The young couple took one look at the place and grabbed it with both hands, while the landlord was so happy not to have to refurbish it himself that he gave them half off the required deposit if they would clean and repaint it themselves.

So Mapplethorpe set to work.

They relished their newfound privacy. There in their own apartment, their respective talents stretched out: Mapplethorpe as the chrysalis that would burst open to reveal one of the most gifted photographers of his generation, Smith as a would-be wielder of words who composed her poetry from beneath a photograph of Rimbaud, while their tiny record player pumped out an endless soundtrack of whatever felt right: jazz and rock, Coltrane and the Stones, the Beatles and Motown when Patti took control of it; Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and the baroque bombast of the Vanilla Fudge when Mapplethorpe made the decision.

The room was sparse, furnished with the pickings garnered from walking the local streets and carting home anything that looked remotelyserviceable or repairable. Old lamps, a battered bookcase, a stained mattress, a ratty rug. Those regular trips back to South Jersey allowed Patti to add some of her old books and records to the ambience.

Mapplethorpe decorated the walls with his art. Patti littered the floor with hers. She had no sense of permanence; whether it was a drawing that her boyfriend adored, or a poem that he admired, sooner or later it would be on the ground, jumbled up with the unwashed laundry, newspapers and magazines, discarded books, and more street scrapings. They ate as well as they could afford to, which generally meant not much, and if there was no money for food, there was certainly none for anything else. So they stayed in nights and listened to music, or drew or read or talked or whatever.

Shortly before Christmas 1967, the pair lost their jobs at Brentano’s. Mapplethorpe was laid off; Patti was fired. It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t. Just doors away from the bookstore, the world-famous FAO Schwarz toy store was advertising for staff. But while Mapplethorpe dressed windows and won the applause of his employers, Patti worked the cash register for the Christmas rush only and hated every moment of it.

So she moved on, back to the world of books at Scribner’s, a glassfronted beauty at 597 Fifth Avenue, where one of her few allies from Glassboro College, Janet Hamill, was now working.

Destined to become one of Patti’s closest friends, and still a regular guest at her readings and performances, Hamill was another Jersey girl, born in Jersey City and raised in New Milford. She moved to New York City, BA in hand, around the same time as Patti. And like Patti, she hoped to carve herself a niche in the poetic trade by taking a job that brought her closer to her ideal. It was she who had encouraged Patti to apply for the job, and her intervention came just in time. Mapplethorpe quit the toy store shortly after Patti started at Scribner’s, complaining that it sapped his appetite for his own work, and Patti became the household’s sole breadwinner.

She adored the job. Not only was Scribner’s one of the most beautiful bookstores in America, but it also respected its customers and demanded that the staff do likewise. Every weekend, the sales staff wereexpected to hunker down with the
New York Times Book Review
and read it from cover to cover. Then, when customers came in and asked for recommendations, the person they spoke to would know exactly what they were talking about. It was the kind of work that Patti excelled at. A title moved onto the bestseller list. The staff were told to read it. A new release was creating a buzz. Read it. An old classic was back in fashion. Read it. Read, read, read. And then talk, talk, talk.

Mapplethorpe, meanwhile, dipped in and out of odd jobs. He worked for a time as an usher at the Fillmore East, newly reopened by Bill Graham in March 1968, and came home raving about the first band he saw there: Janis Joplin fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company. Later that month, he scored Patti and Janet Hamill a pass apiece to see the Doors.

But outings like that were a rarity. “We were totally isolated,” Patti told Lisa Robinson in 1996. “We were twenty years old, we lived in Brooklyn…. I worked in the bookstore. I came to the apartment and we spent most of our time drawing, looking at books, and spending all our time together, hardly ever seeing other people.”