Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  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 l
andscape. 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.

  Neither would her beloved books. Neither would her records, nor most of the people who made them—and that included Little Richard, who gave up rock ‘n’ roll in 1957 after a vision warned him of his own damnation. He took Voice of Prophecy courses (Seventh-Day Adventist) and was ordained a minister in the Church of God of the Ten Commandments. And even that wouldn’t save him.

  Patti quit the Witnesses.

  At age twelve, she discovered Buddhism, after accidentally bringing divine wrath (or so she believed) on the innocent people of Tibet. She had selected the Chinese-occupied state as the subject of a school project, which asked her class to write regular news reports on the foreign country of their choice throughout the course of a year. She prayed that Tibet would provide newsworthy material for her assignments. Soon after, Tibetans in the capital rose up against their occupiers, Chinese troops violently put down the rebellion, and the Dalai Lama was forced into exile.

  “I felt tremendously guilty,” she confessed to Stephen Foehr in the Shambhala Sun. “I felt that somehow my prayers had interfered with Tibetan history. I worried about the Dalai Lama. It was rumored thathis family had been killed by the Chinese. I was quite relieved when he reached India safely. I vowed to always say prayers for his safe-keeping, which I have done.” Her flirtation with Buddhism provided her with a spiritual center that her disillusionment with Christianity had temporarily robbed her of.

  The previous year, 1958, had seen the birth of Patti’s second sister, Kimberly Ann, the fourth and last of the Smith kids. No matter how much she loved the newcomer, Patti was painfully aware of the further strain that she placed on the family finances, especially after the baby developed serious asthma, adding further weight to the already barely manageable medical bills.

  One of Patti’s most profound memories of the period was of the day a Household Finance debt collector was banging on the front door, trying to pick up the money her parents owed. Her mother told Patti to tell them she was out, then hid herself in another part of the house. “My mommy’s in the bathroom,” Patti told the visitor. “But she’s not home.”

  Another memory preserves the night that a barn across the road burst into flames following a lightning strike. Patti’s youngest sister, Kimberly, had just been born, and “I went outside and I was holding her, watching this barn in flames. Hundreds of bats lived in it, and you could hear them screeching, and see bats and owls and buzzards flying out,” she told the Observer in 2005. She elaborated in a note published in her collected lyrics book Patti Smith Complete: “And Kimberly was shining in my hands like a phosphorescent living doll.” The images of that night would become the poem “Kimberly.”

  But Patti was not yet a poet herself. As she approached her teens, her imagination turned toward the visual arts. It was not a purely aesthetic love; art taught her new ways to confront the challenges of her looming adolescence. “With a lower class upbringing, it was real desirable to have big tits and big ass,” she told Hit Parader’s Lisa Robinson in 1976. Patti, on the other hand, was so thin—“skinny” and “creepy” as she put it—that her body tormented her. When it was time for her class to be weighed before gym class, she would load her pockets down with heavy metal locks—anything to add a few pounds to her scrawny frame. Until a teacher took Patti to the school library and hauled a few art books out, opening them to the Modiglianis and the El Grecos, giving the insecure young woman for the very first time something physical to which she could relate her appearance. Patti had just one difficulty, as she confessed to Oui magazine: “It wasn’t easy for a girl who fancied herself the cosmic mistress of Modigliani to sing Tex Ritter songs.”

  Not all her pursuits were artistic, however. Interviewed by Penny Green for Andy Warhol’s Interview in 1973, she laughed, “Yes, I’m just a Jersey girl. I really loved that I was from South Jersey because it was a real spade area. I learned to dance real good … there was a lot of colloquial stuff I picked up, that’s where I get my bad speech from. Even though my father was an intellectual, I wanted to be like the kids I went to school with, so I intentionally never learned to speak good…. I thought I couldn’t use it on the dance floor, so what good was it?”

  She practiced dancing, teaching herself in her bedroom by loading a stack of singles onto her record player and dancing till they’d all played through. Then she’d pile on another batch and dance them away as well.

  She enrolled in Deptford Township High School, and although she was perhaps a little disingenuous when she told Blast magazine’s Michael Gross that “the school I went to was a real experimental school,” in her own mind that may have been the case. “It’s like a weird school because it was one of these new kind of experimental schools where they sent special children, geniuses. High-strung geniuses whose fathers were head of MIT or something. Retarded kids and lots of Spanish-speaking people. There were a lot of epileptics. It was one of the schools that accepted epileptic children and had a regular program for them.

  “My school nobody was weird. Everybody was special in their own way. So I never got a sense of myself being any different than anybody else. I was sort of like a beatnik kid, but so what?”

  It was at Deptford that Patti found herself plunging, not necessarily consciously, into the increasingly muddy waters of the nascent civil rights movement. Buoyed by the Buddhist belief system that she was slowly acquiring, she found herself cultivating ever sharper instincts not for the political aims of the upcoming struggles but for their humanitarian goals. She may well have been the first girl in her class to date a black boy following Deptford High’s integration, andshe was certainly the only one whose parents did not raise hell when they found out.

  The fact that she was dating, however, did not mean that she was sexually active. “My one regret in life,” she told Penthouse’s Nick Tosches in 1976, “is that I didn’t know about masturbating. Think of all that fun I could’ve had!” As a teenager, she said, “I was horny, but I was innocent ‘cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive…. Nobody told me that girls got horny. It was tragic, ‘cause I had all these feelings inside me…. I never touched myself or anything…. I did it all in my mind.”

  All of her report cards, she recalled, complained that “Patti Lee daydreams too much.” They did not have a clue what she was daydreaming about.

  Not all of her passions were conventional. Later in her teens, Patti relaxed into writing a series of lengthy poems in which she was arrested, for crimes unknown, by a beautifully blond Nazi sadist, and then tortured to death or orgasm, whichever came first. The notion that the two were not mutually incompatible, however, had its genesis in a most unexpected place: in the journals of Anne Frank. Since the 1959 release of a movie based on the young Jewish girl’s diary of the years she spent hiding from the Nazis, the media had taken a fresh look at the atrocities that were the backdrop to Frank’s tale. “I’d read that stuff and I’d get really cracklin’ down there,” Patti told Penthouse.

  By sixteen, Patti had decided it was time to put a stop to her yearning. She was reading Peyton Place, Grace Metalious’s then-shocking novel of the secret lives of small-town America, and one scene stuck in her mind: the
one where heroine Allison McKenzie is told that you can tell if a woman is a virgin by the way she walks. It was a horrifying revelation for Patti, because it meant that everybody would know the same thing about her. So she set about cultivating what she described to Nick Tosches as “a fucked walk,” by watching actress Jeanne Moreau. “You watch her walk across the street on the screen,” she decided, “and you know she’s had at least a hundred men.”

  Patti, on the other hand, had not had one, and she sometimes doubted that she ever would. Journalist Richard Meltzer later reflectedon the stories she told him during the years when she was best known as a poetess, and he was still laughing about them five years later. Like how she didn’t have a birth certificate any more, because the rats ate it, how her father was a gangster and her aunt once spent a hot night with Hank Williams, but best of all, how her father explained the facts of life by telling her, “The erect male penis is put into the female vagina, and you only do that when you’re in love.” And so, she told Meltzer, the first time a guy asked to fuck her, she said no, because she didn’t love him. So he asked if he could eat her instead, and what did Patti reply? She said she’d have to ask her father. Who told her, “Forget it.”

  When American female teendom became obsessed with having eyes made up like Cleopatra, as played by Elizabeth Taylor; or, later, when the Ronettes sent their distinctive hairstyles soaring into vogue, Patti just shrugged and went back to her books. She once remarked that she read her entire childhood away—that she was far more intrigued by her interior world than the outside. When she did seek out idols, they were the ones her peers may not even have acknowledged: Edith Piaf. Folk singer Joan Baez. Actresses Moreau, Ava Gardner, and Anouk Aimée.

  Aimée was the rising star who exploded out of Fellini’s La dolce vita in 1960 (alongside another of Patti’s later icons, Nico), shrouded in black dress and dark glasses, to disguise the black eye that she would soon be revealing. “Anouk Aimée with that black eye,” Patti marveled in a 1976 Circus interview with Scott Cohen. “It made me always want to have a black eye forever. It made me want to get a guy to knock me around. I’d always look great.”