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.”
Yet their idyll was doomed. Robert was becoming troubled and possessive. She found another lover. Howie Michaels was the painter friend she’d been looking for on her very first day in the city. Now they had reconnected, and when that relationship had blossomed far enough, she announced she was moving out of the Hall Street apartment.
She moved in with Janet Hamill, and Mapplethorpe was devastated. But he also sensed an escape route out of his private dilemma. If you leave me, he told Patti, I’ll turn gay.
Her reaction, she confessed in Just Kids, was “less than compassionate.” She felt she had failed him. And the next time she saw him, dropping by the apartment to pick up some of her stuff, he had wallpapered it with pin-ups cut from gay porn magazines.
Howie Michaels did not stick around long. He knew that in her heart of hearts, Patti still possessed a bond with Mapplethorpe that he and the girl could never share. He moved on just a short time after Patti moved out. But when Patti went to look in on Mapplethorpe next, she learned that he had moved to San Francisco. He came back shortly after, but now he had a boyfriend.
4
DEATH BY WATER
IN MAY 1969, Patti and sister Linda up and flew to Paris. It was a trip they had long dreamed of taking, but the time had never felt right. Now it did. Patti’s need to escape her multiple romantic crises was the impetus they’d been waiting for.
For Patti, the trip was very much one of literary discovery. It was her idea to book a room at the Hôtel des Etrangers on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and she who asked the concierge if they could be given one specific room: the attic where Rimbaud had shared his passion with the poet and inventor Charles Cros. In many people’s eyes, Cros was the French Edison, whose achievements were clouded only by his widely publicized (and widely ridiculed) belief that the planets Mars and Venus were both inhabited and that all mankind needed to do to make contact was to erect a giant mirror capable of burning messages into the two planets’ surfaces. Such is the historical legacy of a man who almost invented the gramophone—that, and a few lines of lust in the average biography of the poet he adored.
Patti was besotted regardless, all the more so after she learned that few people ever stayed in the attic room, simply because it was in the attic. Eighty years had elapsed since Rimbaud stayed there, and that was not very long in the life of a Parisian hotel. “I’m sure I slept in the same bed,” she told writer Scott Cohen in Circus. “It was like in the movies when they go into the haunted house and they hit everything andthere’s tons of dust and spiders and the bed is shaped like bodies. It was a tiny bed on a metal ramp. You could see the outline of bodies where the people had slept.”
Patti and Linda pounded the Paris streets, seeking out the tiniest references to the poet’s visits to the capital, and unearthing other treasures too. Paris in spring 1969 had had a year to recover from the headline-making riots of the previous summer. It remained, however, a hotbed of political dissension and agitation, as worldwide opposition to the American war in Vietnam continued to grow against a backdrop of increasingly horrific news images.
The Smith sisters steered clear of the areas where the students gathered more volubly; Patti has since confessed that even on campus in New Jersey and Philadelphia, she had nothing to say about the war, and no real awareness of it beyond the occasional glance at the headlines. Years later, with her political activism a burning passion, she would revise her memories somewhat, but at the time, neither apathy nor complacency explained her disinterest. She simply had not paid attention. But attempting to explain that to an overexcited audience of hyper-tense French students—for that was the fate of every American who wandered onto the south bank at that time and made the mistake of speaking aloud—was not a task that either woman relished.
Instead, they spent their time drifting through historic Paris: the graveyards, the boulevards, the sites and scenes that they had only read about back home. At l’Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they visited Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar in the garden. Patti was, she said later, too shy to enter the church itself. “Paris to me is completely a city of images,” she told Penny Green in 1973. “I always felt that I was in a black-and-white 16 mm film.”
The pair paid their way by taking part-time jobs in cafes and restaurants; for a time, they worked as street entertainers, joining a ragged posse of musicians, jugglers, fire-eaters, and mimes and collecting whatever coppers were thrown their way. Linda sang and danced; Patti beat out rudimentary melodies on a toy piano.
She also started to write.
Inspiration struck on the morning of July 4, 1969, when Patti and the rest of France awoke to the news that guitarist Brian Jones had diedthe previous evening, drowned in his swimming pool while, apparently, a party full of friends looked on. Patti had, she later said, just emerged from a five-day immersion in French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary One Plus One, a revolutionary tract that included some fabulous footage of the Rolling Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil”—five days during which the faces of the five Stones were seared even deeper into her mind than they already had been. Now those Stones were four.
She remembered the first and only time she’d ever seen Jones in the flesh, when the Rolling Stones played Philadelphia on November 6, 1965. The band was off and running by then; “Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud” had proved Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to be as capable songwriters as Lennon and McCartney, only with better-sounding records. Fans of the two bands, the Beatles and the Stones, had already divided themselves down fiercely antagonistic lines: clean or dirty, sweet or savage, “Yesterday” or right now. And the only common ground was the screaming little girls.
Patti had not intended screaming, and when she took her seat in the auditorium with the rest of the audience, all had seemed calm and orderly. Then the Stones came out and pandemonium erupted, the entire room pushing toward the stage, and Patti was pushed into the stage, crushed against its hard wooden lip and feeling herself being dragged down by the weight.
Desperately she reached out for something to hold onto, to pull herse
lf back to the surface. Her hand connected with Brian Jones’s ankle. “I was grabbing him to save myself,” she told Thurston Moore. “And he just looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me.”
If she had had any doubt as to who her favorite Rolling Stone was before that night, there was no question any longer. And now Brian Jones was dead, and as if that was not nightmarish enough, there was the sense that somehow she might have saved him. For in a vision, or a dream, or a premonition, call it what you will, she had sensed that Brian Jones was in danger, that Brian Jones was hurt, that Brian Jones was about to sink beneath the surface, just as she herself was going under at that concert.
And just like her, his hand was outstretched for something to grab on to. She had grasped his ankle and pulled herself to safety. He had reached out and she wasn’t there.
The night after Brian Jones died, the day that she learned he was gone, Patti set to work on what would become the first poem she wrote in her own true voice, a rock ‘n’ roll mass set to a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm. It wasn’t anything she’d ever heard of anybody else having done. Maybe Dylan and Van Morrison had come close occasionally, and the Doors’ Jim Morrison—at that moment, probably the biggest star in American rock—might have strayed even closer. But she wouldn’t have cared if the whole world had pulled it off before. “I wasn’t trying to be ‘innovative,’” she told Lisa Robinson in 1976. “I was just doing what I thought was right, and being true to Brian.”
And she was being true, whether she would have seen it this way or not, to the nature of the hall of fame that still hung in her mind: the idols who died before their time, the artists for whom the weight of art was far too grand to bear. Two years ago, in her first days in New York City, John Coltrane had died. Next year, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would join him; the year after that, Jim Morrison. Patti would eulogize them all, and then add them to the arsenal of imagery that she was slowly, and only half-consciously, constructing around herself.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 5