Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  Still, she remained an incorrigible tomboy. “I was always jealous because I wasn’t homosexual,” she declared at a poetry reading in New York in 1975. “I’d have these dreams that I could steal boys’ skins at night, and put them on and pee and stuff like that.” In the poem “Piss Factory,” she mused on the way boys smell … that odor rising roses and ammonia, and noted the way their schoolboy legs flap under the desk in study hall and the way their dicks droop like lilacs.

  She tried to remain romantic, to convince herself that her first love would be her forever love. But it didn’t work out like that. She was the girl who did the guys’ homework for them but was never rewarded withanything more than a thank-you. She was crazy about boys, but she was one of the boys, great to hang with, but not to date. She recalled one in particular, the splendidly named Butchie Magic. He allowed her to carry his switchblade. But that was as far as their relationship went. No matter whom she fell for, he was always the most inaccessible, not to mention inappropriate, guy around.

  But she was a survivor. She would tell Rolling Stone, “I grew up in a tougher part of Jersey than Bruce Springsteen”—raising herself above the last Jersey native to make it big in the mid-1970s. “Every high school dance I went to, somebody was stabbed.” Talking to Penthouse, she ran through a mental checklist of the “cool people” whom she hung out with in her teens. Most, she declared, were either dead or in jail. “A couple are pimps in Philly.”

  And at the same time as she struggled to be accepted as something more than the class clown—an appellation that would pursue her into the pages of her high school yearbook—she delighted in her outsider status. In fact, she worked to cultivate it.

  “The worst wallflower weirdo” joined the jazz club and fell under the spell of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. She demonstrated her precocity by trying to get into some of Philadelphia’s most legendary nightspots: “I tried to hang at jazz clubs like the Showboat, just to see the musicians,” she told the Philadelphia City Paper, “but I was way too young.” She owned her own copy of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and when Coltrane played the local nightclub Pep’s, she made her way in and was able to stick around for one complete song, the opening “Nature Boy,” before she was carded and evicted.

  Patti graduated high school in June 1964 and promptly sought out a place at Glassboro State Teachers College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, New Jersey. The two-year program would ostensibly equip her for a career as an art teacher. She loathed it, and hated even more the fact that she had to work through her vacations to pay her way through its classes, in minimum-wage factory jobs that devoured the only free time she had to look forward to.

  “I was really a good girl,” she told Blast magazine. “I didn’t curse and I was a virgin and I didn’t drink or nothing when I went to college.” And to Amy Gross, she added, “I was in my Greta Garbo period…. I was so innocent. I didn’t even know there was a war on…. All I knew in South Jersey was black culture.”

  Her horizons expanded. She would take the bus up Broad Street from her Woodbury home and get out in Camden, New Jersey. She would buy an orange juice and some donuts, then stand and stare at the Walt Whitman Hotel. In her imagination, the great man himself had stayed there. Patti was also in Philly a lot now, taking the bus across the river and spending her Saturdays in morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  She also plunged into Philly’s Jewish culture—for its aesthetic rather than its religious value. “They were so hip,” she told Amy Gross. “They wore black leotards, they had sports cars and all these art supplies. So I went back to Glassboro dressed like a Jewish art student.

  “I failed everything—I was so undisciplined.”

  2

  ANNA OF THE HARBOR

  AS PATTI TRIED on different personas, she also cultivated an array of life ambitions. She would listen to Coltrane and then write poetry, trusting the freedom of one to unlock the doors to the other. She dreamed of being an actress like Jeanne Moreau or Anouk Aimée. And she looked forward to the day when she would become an artist’s mistress, the power behind the throne of creation. One day, she imagined, she would subsume herself behind the requirements of a man who would answer all of her questions, who could tell her what to say and what to think, when to laugh and when to cry. One day. But until then, she would dream—of Coltrane, of Bob Dylan, of William Burroughs. And Rimbaud. Especially Rimbaud.

  To Patti, Rimbaud was everything, and had been ever since she first saw his face, one day as she was passing the bookstall that used to stand across the road from the main Philadelphia bus station. A portrait on a book cover caught her eye. She may or may not have heard of the poet at that time, but it didn’t matter. It was the photograph that drew her in. He looked a little like her father, a little like Dylan, and a lot like the boyfriend she wished she’d meet. The book was called Illuminations.

  She picked up the same bilingual French and English reprint that every other budding romantic of the era owned, and once she’d finished devouring it, she devoured the rest of its author’s life.

  Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, France, on October 20, 1854, the son of a veteran of France’s conquest of Algeria. The boy’s early gift for poetry was rewarded when the Revue pour tous published his” Les etrennes des orphelines” (“The Orphans’ New Year Gifts”) in January 1870.

  He was unruly from the outset. Despondent when his favorite tutor, Georges Izambard, quit to fight in the Franco-Prussian War later in 1870, the teenager turned his literary talents to the most antisocial ends he could imagine. He drank and stole, and dedicated his pen to vileness and scatology. He grew his hair and abandoned his earlier manners and morals. He moved to Paris and joined the Commune, that short-lived experiment in communism that erupted on the streets of the city following the war’s humiliating cessation, and he openly embraced homosexuality, launching into a torrid relationship with an older man, poet Paul Verlaine, that ended only when Verlaine was jailed for two years for shooting at his lover. A bullet hit Rimbaud in the wrist.

  Rimbaud blazed with creative rage for just five years, a short span in which he wrote some of the most moving and meaningful of all the poetry now collected beneath the banner of Symbolism. Illuminations, published in 1874, was his final major work; two years later, he enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army and used that as the bridgehead to the world travels that would consume the last years of his life.

  He deserted the army in Java, returned to France, and then moved to Cyprus, where he worked in a stone quarry. The following year, 1880, he was in Aden; by 1884, he was in Harar, Ethiopia, running his own export company. There, with a circle of friends that included Ras Makonnen—the father of future emperor Haile Selassie—he seemed to find happiness. But in 1891, returning to France in search of treatment for what he thought was rheumatism, he discovered instead that he was suffering from cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseille on November 10, 1891. His death, Patti mused to herself, was infinitely more interesting than her life.

  “I really didn’t fall in love with writing as writing,” Patti told Victor Bockris. “I fell in love with writers’ lifestyles. Rimbaud’s lifestyle. I was in love with Rimbaud for being a mad angel and all that shit.” She thought of Rimbaud as a boyfriend, she joked to Thurston Moore, laughinglydemanding, “If you can’t get the boy you want, and you have to daydream about him all the time, what’s the difference if he’s a dead poet?”

  Young minds often associate poetry with death. Perhaps this is because many of the now so-called classic poets—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats—succumbed to tragically early and romantic deaths. Byron died of fever at age thirty-six while fighting for Greek independence; Shelley was thirty when he drowned while on a boating expedition; Keats was just twenty-six when he was snuffed out by consumption. Add to these sad statistics their heroically tragic lives and the long shadows that such events cast over their work, and an active imagination can easily connect t
he dots between torture and art.

  Patti also fell for the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalists in 1936 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Under the spell of his floridly avant garde writing, and entranced, too, by his professional associations with the painter Salvador Dalí (which bled, with poetically misbegotten passion, into a wholly unrequited love), Patti began composing her own lengthy romances. Most of them, she confessed to Nick Tosches in Penthouse, involved “men in love with their dead wives … kneeling in the dirt, trying to get their dead wives to show them some warmth.”

  Only in death, she believed, could true love be revealed.

  She was seduced by the ways of life of her poets and performers— and of her artists too. She remained the “cosmic mistress” of Amedeo Modigliani, another tragic victim of the tyrannical hold that a calling to art, no matter how poorly paid, can hold over its victims—the penniless Italian artist died from tubercular meningitis in Paris in 1920. She was fascinated, too, by painter Chaim Soutine, an Eastern European Jewish emigrant who, living in Paris when the Nazis invaded France, somehow evaded the attentions of the Gestapo for three years, only to die from a perforated ulcer in 1943.

  But there were exceptions. For Patti, while there was Rimbaud, there was also Bob Dylan. “It was a relief,” she confessed to Thurston Moore, “to daydream about somebody who was alive.”

  When she looked back at her late teens, Patti never seemed certain of when she had first encountered Dylan. It might have been an afternoonin late 1964 when her mother returned home from work and handed her an LP called Another Side of Bob Dylan. “I never heard of the fellow,” her mom said, “but he looks like somebody you’d like.” Or maybe it was at a Joan Baez show a year or so earlier, when Baez introduced a special guest. “She had this fellow with her, Bobby Dylan,” Patti told Moore. “His voice was like a motorcycle through a cornfield.” Or maybe it was an afternoon when, on a day trip to Manhattan for kicks, and sitting in a cafe in the Village, Patti looked over toward a red door a few houses down and Dylan stepped out.

  Maybe it didn’t matter where or when she first discovered him. All that matters is that she did. Barreling after the Rolling Stones into her private pantheon of cultural touchstones, Dylan’s 1965 hit “Like a Rolling Stone” became one of the first white rock records that ever made her feel alive. But only one of them.

  Patti’s musical tastes had been rooted almost exclusively in black music, because that, she believed, was where music kept its soul. Now she was discovering otherwise, although it wasn’t Dylan who had changed her mind. It was the Stones.

  She was at home with her parents on the evening of October 25, 1964, when her father called her into the front room with the incredulous insistence that she had to “look at these guys!” Grant Smith always watched The Ed Sullivan Show, and always found something else to comment upon, some performer who caught his eye for good or bad. But this week it was destiny.

  they put the touch on me, Patti wrote in a 1973 essay in Creem magazine. I was blushing jelly. this was no mamas boy music. it was alchemical. I couldn’t fathom the recipe but I was ready.

  No more than a year into their career, and still coming to terms with the English media’s insistence on demonizing them (“Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?” was one of the year’s most memorable British headlines), the Stones were miming to two songs, “Around and Around” and “Time Is on My Side.” But it was the visuals that Patti found so vivid, not the music: Mick Jagger, white turtleneck and tight black trousers, still looking like the slightly hip economics student that he used to be, but all the more alluring for the snatches ofshyness that hung around those deep-set eyes. Keith Richards and Brian Jones, besuited and suave, one skinny-legs and moddish, the other haloed blond, and all but ignored by the Sullivan cameras, so you hung on the edge of your seat in the hope of anything more than a long-distance glimpse.

  That was my introduction to the Rolling Stones … my brain froze. Watching that performance today, with the mind’s eye stripping away the baggage that the succeeding decades have piled upon both our perception of the Stones and the liberation of television, it is still possible to see how these five unknown young Englishmen created such a stir, in her loins and in several million others’.

  Later, as she heard and saw more, my pussy dripped my pants were wet and the Rolling Stones redeemed the white man forever.

  The Stones and Bob Dylan may seem a poor fit for Patti’s grim collection of idols. But we should remember that at the time Dylan was widely regarded as an imminent casualty and would indeed come within a hair’s breadth of fulfilling that prophecy when he crashed his motorbike in 1966 and was forced into seclusion. And every time the rock press compiled its latest list of rock’s most likely next fatality, Keith Richards was usually at the top of the pile, even if it was Brian Jones who ended up dead first. Long before Patti had formulated the ambition that would snatch her out of academia, her eye for icons was already trained upon those artists who were, for want of a less cliched expression, too fast to live. Unfortunately, you are never too young to die.

  In 1965, Patti was seduced again by a living tragedy: Edie Sedgwick, the superstar consort to artist Andy Warhol, captured in Vogue magazine.

  Sedgwick, scion of one of New England’s wealthiest families, struck Smith immediately. “It was like seeing a black and white movie in person,” she recalled to Scott Cohen in Circus. Elfin and boyish, wide-eyed and bubbling with innocent beauty, Edie was irresistible. “Twenty-two, white-haired with anthracite-black eyes and legs to swoon over,” mooned Vogue magazine; “she didn’t mess around,” Patti echoed. “She was really something…. She really got me. It was something weird.”

  After death took Edie, too, just six years later, Patti would eulogize her in the pages of author Jean Stein’s book-length obituary: “Living in South Jersey, you get connected with the pulse beat of what’s going on through what you read in magazines. Not even through records. Vogue magazine was my whole consciousness. I never saw people. I never went to a concert. It was all image. In one issue of Vogue, it was Youthquaker people they were talking about. It had a picture of Edie on a bed in a ballet pose. She was like a thin man in black leotards and a sort of boat-necked sweater, white hair and, behind her a little white horse drawn on the wall. She was such a strong image that I thought, ‘That’s it.’ It represented everything to me … radiating intelligence, speed, being connected with the moment.” A decade after she discovered la Sedgwick, Patti and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would draw from those same visual energies to shoot the jacket photograph for Patti’s debut LP.

  Patti saw Edie in the flesh for the first time in the fall of 1965, when Andy Warhol and his entourage, Edie at the helm, descended upon Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art for Warhol’s first-ever retrospective. “Edie was coming down this long staircase,” she told Jean Stein. “I think she had ermine wrapped around her; her hair was white and her eyebrows black. She had on this real little dress [and] two big white afghan hounds on black leashes with diamond collars, but that could be fantasy…. She had so much life in her. Her movement was fluid, and she was like little queenie…. I wasn’t into girls or anything, but I had a real crush on her.”

  Patti encountered her again on a rare visit to New York City; the city was like Oz to her then, a beckoning presence at the end of the bus ride, far enough away to be fabulous, close enough not to be out of reach, and magic enough that she refused to despoil it by visiting it all the time. Neither would she try to gain entrance to the palaces where her idols congregated. It was enough to make her way to places like Arthur’s, or the Scene, stand outside on the sidewalk, and just watch the comings and goings.

  One night, however, knowing Sedgwick was in the building, Patti cajoled the doorman to let her run inside for a moment; “I think I said I had to use the bathroom.” She was, she thought, looking pretty hot that night, in a green woolen miniskirt that would have blown the d
oors off any South Jersey nightclub. “I didn’t look so hot there.” But she watched Edie and her friends as they danced, and that “was the big moment of my life”—even though she wasn’t especially impressed by the way in which they danced.

  They looked like weird chickens, she thought, all angles and elbows and long, dangling earrings. Nobody danced like that in South Jersey; nobody would have even dreamed of dancing like that in South Jersey. Patti knew there and then that she didn’t ever want to be like the people she so admired. “I just liked that they existed, so I could look at them.”

  Back in Philadelphia, the Museum of Art continued to exercise her imagination, and daydreams of her own future in the art world further clouded her work at Glassboro. Her dreams of becoming the power behind an artistic throne, of winning the heart of a struggling genius, coaxing and inspiring him to attain his potential, became an even more vivid lure.

  Spinning out fantasies of Edie’s relationship with Warhol—for few then would have asserted that his best work was created with her by his side—she dreamed of discovering a Dylan or a Jackson Pollock, or even a Harry Houdini (for what is escapology if not an art form in action that stands in for words), of standing alongside him as he worked for acceptance, and molding his talent to meet it. She had yet to meet that special person, of course. But she floated through life, through her studies, with the growing conviction that someday soon she would.

  And then her dreams were shattered, not once but twice.

  Patti has never been good at keeping her stories straight. “I was holding a temporary minimum-wage job in a textbook factory in Philadelphia,” she recalled in her memoir Just Kids. At other times, she described herself as laboring at a baby buggy factory, turning out pushchairs for the glowing moms of the day. Other biographers have named her employer as the Dennis Mitchell Toy Factory in Woodbury, where her duties apparently included assembling the boxes into which baby mattresses were packed.