Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (8 page)

Once he was back on his feet, they began to explore their new playground, inside and out.

Max’s was opening to them as well. After so many nights by themselves in the corner, their persistence had finally paid off. Danny Fields, a hardwired hustler who had crammed an incredible life into his twenty-seven years—journalist, A&R man, manager, and even, for a time, Edie Sedgwick’s loft-mate—was the first to acknowledge them, inviting them to join him at his table one night and putting into words the questions that, unbeknownst to Patti and Mapplethorpe, had been exercising a lot of other people’s minds over the past months: Nobody cared who this couple were, really. What fascinated them, just as it had fascinated Nico, was,
What
were they? In an environment where everybody’s business was everyone else’s, and a person’s sexual proclivities could be as grand an introduction as their professional or personal abilities, the quiet couple who sat in a corner, sipping Coke and sharing a salad, attracted a lot more attention that they ever realized.

“People didn’t know what to make of them,” Nico confirmed. “Robert was so beautiful, he had to be gay, and Patti was so dark, she had to be beautiful. But nobody knew, because they were shy, so shy. We would watch them watching us, and everyone would look away if they thought they’d been seen. But they were fascinating, and finally Danny started talking to them, and that meant that other people could as well.”

The couple accepted Fields’ invitation, and they opened up to him. Patti spoke of her poetry and drawings, Mapplethorpe of his photography, and both confirmed the energies that they derived from each other.

Other people started to notice them. Filmmaker Sandy Daley lived a few doors down on the tenth floor of the Chelsea, in an apartment thathad once been occupied by Jackson Pollock. Ten years Patti’s senior but as free a spirit as the era demanded, Daley was the first person to capture the couple’s gaunt, haunted beauty on celluloid. She filmed Robert, cradled in the arms of a male friend, having his nipple pierced while a largely unseen Patti maintained a constant dialogue of random observations and thoughts, for her film titled, fittingly enough,
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced.

Daley was constantly encouraging Mapplethorpe’s work too. While Patti was at the bookstore by day, the filmmaker would sit and enjoy long conversations with him, on art, photography, film. Then, when Patti came home, the discussions would broaden to include her aspirations, too.

Patti was still pursuing her part-time dream of painting, although the harder she tried, the more she seemed to realize that it was pen not brushstrokes that inspired her, and that an image she might struggle to capture in many hours bent over the easel came a lot easier to her if she just wrote it down.
for a while i drew,
she later wrote in the prose piece “Doctor Love,”
but some found out about it and i feared i’d be classified as an artist. i was afraid they’d find a place for me in their society.

The poetry that she had picked up, abandoned, resumed, and then replaced so many times over the years since childhood was pushing back into her heart. The difference was, this time the voice it used was her own. No more convoluted Spanish dramas; no more following in the footsteps of her foreign-language masters. No more Communism! She wrote as she thought, and having determined that her thought processes themselves were worth preserving, she made her decision: “I had gone to Paris to find myself as an artist,” she was quoted as saying in
Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography,
“but I came back to New York filled with words and rhythms.”

She was writing furiously now, squirreling away her poetry for a time when she felt comfortable enough to publicize it. In the meantime, however, as the doors to recognition began to open, she went to work unlocking more. A meeting with Bobby Neuwirth, one of Bob Dylan’s closest friends during the mid-1960s, one of Edie Sedgwick’s many lovers, and still a fixture on the New York City music scene, sparked friendship, and he became one of the privileged few to be permitted a glimpse inside her notebooks.

They met at the Chelsea Hotel, of course. One day as she stood in the lobby, clutching her notebook, a voice behind her called, “Hey, poet!” She turned, and the look on her face must have said something, because Neuwirth immediately carried on: “Well, you look like a poet. Do you write like one?” Patti recognized him instantly—she had watched the Dylan documentary
Dont Look Back
often enough, with Neuwirth the dark-humored presence that forever lurks at the master’s side—and was promptly flattered.

They talked; they became friends, Neuwirth nurturing the unschooled talent, the talent accepting his advice and criticism unflinchingly. He rewarded her devotion with barely qualified admiration, talking about her work in ways that nobody ever had and recognizing, Patti realized, qualities that she had not even sensed herself. “He was the one who really pushed me into writing poetry and kept inspiring me to keep the music in the poetry,” she told Lisa Robinson in 1976. “He said we needed a poet.” Neuwirth drew her into the circles that he now habitually moved in, as a friend and occasional confidant to the likes of Kris Kristofferson and the Winter brothers, Edgar and Johnny, as they passed through New York City and invariably wound up rooming at the Chelsea.

But it was Janis Joplin who fascinated her the most. Joplin was in town for a show at the Wollman ice skating rink in Central Park. The gig was canceled when the heavens opened up, and it was rescheduled for August. But while she was in New York, Patti laughed later, it was Joplin who showed her how to drink. How to
really
drink.

The two women’s conversations, however, rarely revolved around either drink or music. Patti was in full cry now, chasing down that most elusive of themes that had always fascinated her: the moment where private self becomes public image, without the person even being aware of it. Joplin’s greatest regret, Patti said, was that she could not reveal herself as a fragile person, that she needed to keep up the appearance of the hard-bitten boozer.

Other guests passed through the Chelsea, and Patti seemed to meet them all. “Sometimes people say to me, ‘oh, you knew all these famouspeople.’ Well, none of us were famous,” Patti reminded
Interview’s
Christopher Bollen. “And even the people who were supposedly famous and had some money didn’t seem much different from the rest of us. I mean, if you sat in a room with people like Janis Joplin, they had arrogance, but they didn’t have bodyguards or paparazzi around them or tons of money. What I’m saying is, that line between us and them was easy to walk across. It was just that the greatness in their work was undeniable, and their arrogance or indulgences were more palatable. Still, they were human beings.”

Harry Smith, the great folklorist, filmmaker, and occultist whose painstakingly collected archive of traditional American music influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and a host of other folkies, was living just a few floors below. Patti met him for the first time on her first day at the hotel, and soon she was spending evenings in his room, crushed in among the heaps of papers, boxes, and general clutter that constituted Smith’s manifold collections (and through which he had carved narrow corridors of living space), and singing to him in that strange, reedy whisper that put so many other people in mind of the ghosts that crackled from forgotten 78s. He repaid her, as he did so many of his other friends and benefactors, with a brief cameo in his latest movie,
#18 (Mahagonny),
an eleven-hour-plus collage of imagery, portraits, and street scenes that he spent two years shooting (1970–1972), and another eight editing down to its final running time of 141 minutes.

She met the Allman Brothers, deep southerners riding the first phase of their eventual superstardom, and closing her eyes decades later as she wrote the liner notes to her album
Twelve,
she could still picture them, “a group of gangly boys gawking at the freaks populating the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel,” while she looked on, a midtwenties girl in a straw hat and polka-dot dress.

James Hamilton photographed her, looking every inch a rock star in her own right, with Rod Stewart at a press reception for Stewart’s band the Faces. With a wine bottle clutched in her needle-thin hand, and the other hand folded thoughtfully to her mouth, she watched as Stewart held forth from the seat next to hers. “She was crazy about the Faces,” Hamilton recalled for his photo book
You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen.

She ran into Allen Ginsberg, who thought she was a boy. (She would later recount the story to fellow poet Ed Friedman, who would share it with Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.)
Ginsberg, it seems, was using all his wiles to induce her to join him in his bed, and Patti was exhausting all of hers trying to discourage him. Until finally, she snapped, exasperated. “Look at the tits, Allen. Notice the tits.” Patti would always love Ginsberg, not only because he was a great poet but also because he was a New Jerseyite.

William Burroughs was still there, filling the hotel with his peculiar presence and his habitual uniform of hat and black cashmere overcoat. Soon, every impressionable youngster who passed through the Chelsea was affecting the same distinctive look, with Patti at the head of the line. “He was so neat,” she said in Robinson’s 1976 interview. “Burroughs showed me whole new tunnels to fall through…. He was never too crazy about women, but I guess he liked me because I looked like a boy.”

While Burroughs’s influence at the Chelsea remained strong, in recent years Andy Warhol’s presence had begun to shift elsewhere. The artist himself had faded from his old visibility after the disgruntled feminist Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968. Now he was happier remaining back at the Factory. The fragile beauty of Edie Sedgwick was long gone; the curve of Warhol’s movie career now enveloped some of the most glamorous drag queens the city had ever seen: Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis. His women now were the kind that few other men would knowingly fantasize over, although Warhol himself loved to slyly remind people that when Candy was at her best, it was impossible to believe she was a man.

These remarkable characters formed the core of another exclusive group, Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, nominally based at the Sewer, a gay club on West Eighteenth. It was for this company that Curtis, in particular, would fashion bizarre little plays around the mores and immoralities of her own lifestyle. Wayne County, a Georgia native destined to become one of the most provocative rock performers of the age, spoke for many a starstruck ingenue when he admitted that the Ridiculous crew’s
The Life of Lady Godiva,
with Jackie Curtis in the title role, completely realigned his life. “I was never the same afterseeing [that]. When I first came to New York, I was just a little hippie queen.”

Patti was never going to make such a vibrant transition. But Curtis noticed her regardless, hanging around at Max’s nightly, and as the playwright put together her next production,
Femme Fatale: The Three Faces of Gloria
(partially titled for the Lou Reed composition “Femme Fatale,” which was in turn written about Edie Sedgwick), she earmarked the scrawny poetess for a role.

A tangled masterpiece of improvisation,
Femme Fatale
developed out of Curtis’s relationship with the underground actors John Christian and Penny Arcade, both of whom were originally scheduled to appear in the play. Christian, however, was forced to drop out after he was afflicted, he claimed, with such severe agoraphobia that he could no longer leave his apartment. Curtis shrugged and offered Patti his role, without even stopping to ask if the newcomer could act; nor, according to another of the team, actor Leee Black Childers, caring that Curtis and Patti had never particularly hit it off.

Patti won the playwright’s heart, however, by throwing herself into the latest game to intrigue the cast of the back room at Max’s, another Curtis invention called the Outrageous Lie. The rules were simple. You told the most outrageous lie that you could, on the premise that little lies are easily caught, bigger ones can sometimes survive, but a truly outrageous one will become a part of your personal mythos forever. That was the thing about the outrageous lie: not even the other contestants should be certain whether or not it was actually a lie.

Maybe Joan Crawford really did give Wayne County that brown silk jacket that he wore whenever he could.

Maybe Cyrinda Foxe really did carry the scars from a run-in with the Hell’s Angels.

Maybe Nico really did study with Lee Strasberg and hang out with Marilyn Monroe.

And maybe Patti Smith, laboring through her teenage pregnancy, really did get kicked so hard by her unborn child that a tiny leg burst out of her stomach and hung there still kicking till the doctor could jam it back in again.

Any girl who could live through an experience like that, reasoned Curtis, had to have something going for her, and he recommended that Tony Ingrassia,
Femme Fatale’s
director, cast his own eye over her. Ingrassia, too, felt she had a part to play in the production.

Patti had never set foot onstage before—not since that childhood opera, anyway. But you’d never have guessed it. Already most comfortable in the trademark black-urban-guerrilla chic of her later public fame, she was majestic and magnetic, cool, mean and hard-bitten, radiating an intensity that could not have been further from the burlesque grind and exaggerated sexuality of her costars.

With another Warhol associate, Mary Woronov, adding further star power to what was already a spellbinding underground bill,
Femme Fatale: The Three Faces of Gloria
opened at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on East Seventy-Fourth Street on May 6, 1970. The following month, shortly before the play transferred to the upstairs room at Max’s,
Gay
magazine’s Everett Henderson described it as “an uneven, amusing, boring, hilarious, weird, simplistic study of lots of old movies, gangster riffs and the Sharon Tate murder…. I do not dare judge the performances or the direction. Anthony Ingrassia … successfully got the actors on stage and whipped them through a suitable number of convulsions … energetically play[ing] projections of themselves as stars…. If you are fed up with the slick, stainless steel emptiness of Uptown garbage like
Company,
… it may amuse or irritate you, thrill you or bore you, but it is robust and it is alive.”