The world of Island, with its colorful cast of freaks, was far from the universe in which Patti was now more accustomed to circulate. Jim Carroll, for one, thought she was wasted in theater, even in a production as loosely choreographed as Island. “Even though there were no real lines, and she was free to improvise as much as she wanted, she was still restricted by the outline of the play and that wasn’t what Patti was about.”
Patti agreed with him. At the same time that Island was winning plaudits from across the off-off-Broadway crowd (and was even being considered for a Broadway slot, to be directed by Jack Hofsiss), she knew that she was approaching the end of her career as a theatrical performer. “Everybody was asking me to do stuff,” she recalled in her 1976 interview with Lisa Robinson. “I was dispersing myself all over New York.”
Spring 1972 brought another reading at St. Mark’s, and in August, one more return to the stage, playing the role of Jane in the New York Theater Ensemble’s production of playwright Hal Craven’s Thunderstorms New York Style. It was a short-lived venture, just an end-of-month six nights at the East Second Street venue, but it capped a remarkably hectic few weeks, in which she also caught the Rolling Stones when they played at Madison Square Garden and sat down for her first-ever full interview (with Victor Bockris) for publication in a Philadelphia arts magazine.
She could disperse herself no more. “I went into hiding,” she told Robinson. “It was the right thing for me to just sit down and find out what was going on inside me—I’d been working on the surface for so long. I was never phony, it’s just that I was moving more on an image basis than on a heart or soul basis.”
Nevertheless, her first instinct was to remake her image once again. She decided to teach herself how to become a girl. She went shopping for dresses and jewelry; she learned to walk in high heels, and she modeled in front of the mirror wearing silk stockings and garter belts. Hours, she told Amy Gross, were devoted to “sitting around completely self-conscious with all this stuff … trying to figure out what all this girl stuff meant.”
But to truly figure out what it all meant, she’d need help from an unlikely source. For the next step in her self-examination, Patti would return to Paris with sister Linda—to commune, she said, with the spirit of Jim Morrison.
6
PICASSO LAUGHING
PATTI NEVER REALLY believed that Jim Morrison was dead, a lack of conviction she shared with a surprisingly large number of people. As soon as the first reports of his demise came in from Paris, where he had moved in spring 1971, mystery had surrounded his passing. How it happened, who saw it happen, who saw the body—all of these questions were up in the air, and Morrison’s friends back in Los Angeles could not help but remember all the occasions when he had mused aloud about the possibility of simply vanishing, of placing his entire life and career behind him and simply disappearing into anonymity.
“How do you even know he was in the coffin?” asked bandmate Ray Manzarek when he heard about the sealed box and the unannounced funeral that laid the Lizard King to rest. “How do you know it wasn’t 150 lbs of fucking sand? We’ll never know the real truth now. It’s all gonna be rumors and stories from here on out.”
Morrison was the third rock ‘n’ roll star to die in less than nine months, following Jimi Hendrix in September and Janis Joplin in October. Joplin had died less than a year after she and Patti met for the first time, overdosing on heroin and alcohol at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood—one of the boys to the day she died. It was like a biblical plague, or at least the end of an era, and along with everyone else, Patti struggled to make sense of the cull. But when Jimi and Janis died, theystayed dead. Morrison, on the other hand, was out of his box and running around before the soil had even settled on his all-but-unmarked grave.
The first sightings were reported within days, although most were certainly mere misidentification. American singer-songwriter Elliott Murphy relocated to Paris that same summer, busking around the Metro, “and there were so many guys who looked just like Morrison in his later bearded stage.”
Morrison appeared in San Francisco, and gave Bank of America teller Walt Fleischer the thrill of his life by cashing some checks there. He spent some time in L.A., hanging around the gay bars in full black leather. He was spotted in Tibet, living the life of a monk. He was in Australia, limping around on a recently broken leg.
He was in Africa, he was in Israel, and he was definitely in the American Midwest, where he developed a taste for dropping in on local radio stations in the early hours of the morning, secure in the knowledge that the only people listening would be a handful of insomniac truckers and the local hippie acid case who’d been having fantasies like this ever since another round of rumors insisted that Paul McCartney had perished in an automobile accident.
So Jim Morrison was not dead, he had simply disappeared, and Patti’s latest trip to Paris was timed deliberately to catch the first anniversary of Morrison’s disappearance: July 3, 1972. But she would still make her way to his graveside first. She dreamed, she said, that he would rise from the ground, or wherever else he might be hiding, to sing a duet with her. She thought “What’s Wrong with Me” would be a suitable selection.
Patti and the Doors went way back. After Robert Mapplethorpe scored her tickets to their 1968 appearance at the Fillmore East, she had bought all their albums and listened to them ceaselessly, knowing that the words that Morrison wove were reflected in the rhythms that drove her own creative beat. She read his lyrics and learned from his style; she built on his vision and saw her own taking shape. And when she arrived in Paris and found Morrison’s grave, there was nothing. a dirt site in section 6, she wrote in Creem in June 1975; no headstone no vibration no flowers no feeling. just a little plastic plaque with the word AMI friend the only thing Jim Morrison ever wanted.
Morrison did not show up, but a rainstorm did, a pounding Parisian downpour that turned the soil of the cemetery into clinging mud and blanked out even the most hopeful of imaginings. Patti stood for two hours, drenched to the skin and growing increasingly miserable before she arrived at perhaps the one conclusion that Morrison would have offered her, had he been able—or willing—to do so: Stop looking to the heroes of your past for approval. Look to yourself and your future. As she left, she said, she passed Rimbaud’s grave. She barely gave it a second glance.
Patti returned from Paris reborn, shaking off the ashes of her past personae. Not one of them, she now knew, was more than a cloak that could disguise her; it was time to delve deep into her own psyche in search of the spirit that she shared with Jim Morrison.
There could be no more excuses. There could be no more heroes. She was the only idol she would ever need.
The reinvention began immediately. Her latest quest to understand “girl stuff” didn’t matter anymore. She no longer needed the accoutrements. She had no need for overt femininity. It was not the reality of womanhood that was opening up in her mind, but the options that it opened to her. Not as a hard-faced peasant woman, not as a mystic gypsy princess, and certainly not as a pouting pussycat creation who would devour the attention of the outside world through looks and demeanor alone—heaven knew there were enough of those around already, including many of the women who would later take it upon themselves to criticize Patti’s appearance and behavior—but as a woman in herself.
A century earlier, Patti took to reminding people, Rimbaud had predicted that the next wave of great writers would be women, and speaking at a time when female authors tended to occupy themselves with feminine pursuits, he was certainly stepping out onto a limb. But the intervening hundred years had proved him correct. “He was the first guy who ever made a big women’s liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men, they’re really gonna gush,” Patti declared in one of her poetry performances. “New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely.”
Patti’s second collection of poems, kodak
, published toward the end of 1972 by the Middle Earth Press of Philadelphia, would emphasize this conviction. The nine poems, spread across seventeen pages, are dominated by Patti’s vision of womanhood triumphant, including a reprise of “Renee Falconetti” alongside another piece in honor of artist Georgia O’Keeffe: great lady painter / what she do now / she goes out with a stick / and kills snakes.
Even the title piece, a plea from a killer to French documentarian Georges Franju (director of Le sang des bêtes—“The Blood of Beasts”—shot in a Paris slaughterhouse), leaves the reader in no doubt as to the nature of the stalking horror that mercilessly eyes its victim. Quotes the murderer, my initials are PLS and I’d be pleased to leave my monogram. PLS—Patti Lee Smith.
Patti left behind her own mark—“PATTI SMITH 1946”—stenciled on the wall of her West Twenty-Third Street loft, when she and Robert Mapplethorpe moved out in late 1972. The time had come for the two to part company, at least as roommates. “Separate ways together,” was how she described it in Just Kids; “we went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.” Mapplethorpe moved across the road from one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s properties on Bond Street; Patti moved into an apartment on East Tenth with boyfriend Allen Lanier. Being apart from Mapplethorpe would be difficult at times, especially with Lanier out of town so much as the Blue Öyster Cult’s career picked up speed, but they both had their own lives to build around their careers, and now they could watch each other grow.
To coincide with the publication of kodak, Patti booked three public performances at the Mercer Arts Center, a club/hangout that backed onto the old Broadway Central Hotel and was establishing itself as an alternative to the now gruelingly fashionable Max’s. Patti’s friend Jane Friedman was acting as her manager by this point, and it was Friedman who was in charge of booking the Mercer’s acts.
The Arts Center was a magnificent environment. Built around three stories’ worth of rooms, it offered rehearsal space, crash pads, and anything else an aspiring artist might require. It also featured a boutique stacked with bizarre plastic miniskirts and the distinctly left-field couture that would soon inspire a visiting Malcolm McLaren to open his Sex boutique in London; a kitchen kitted out with video machines, on which all comers were invited to show their latest creations; and so much more. At the Mercer, the likes of the New York Dolls and Wayne County’s Queen Elizabeth cut their performing chops, and Friedman was swift to offer Patti a berth on its stage, in the club-like surroundings of the Oscar Wilde Room.
It was a bold move on Friedman’s part, and an even more courageous one for Patti to accept. Despite the Arts Center’s all-encompassing mission statement, audiences expecting an evening of degenerate rock ‘n’ roll, a la the Dolls’ most excessive press reports, were ill prepared for the lone woman who emerged with nothing more musical than a toy piano, a trumpet, and a megaphone. As her performances became more regular, her ten minutes were as likely to be devoted to shooting down hecklers as reciting her verse.
Sometimes she would laugh and either win or shame the heckler into silence. Sometimes she would curse and hope that the audience would curse with her. Sometimes she would ignore it, and “sometimes I’ll seduce him to do it more.” She told English journalist Charles Shaar Murray in 1976, “I’m just reacting. I don’t have a stage act—I don’t have a stage persona. I don’t turn on a separate set of reflexes when I get on the stage. I’m the same person I am here. In fact, often I’m better here than I am up there…. Sometimes I really dig people who give me a hard time, because it’s friction, but it’s reaction.”
She would execute dances and tell jokes. There were times when she felt more like a stand-up comedian or a late-night TV host than a poet, but that suited her. She had never wanted to be a simple poet anyway—a point that Allen Ginsberg would make in 1973, when he characterized her work as a hybrid, conscious or otherwise, of “the Russian style of declaimed poetry, which is memorized, and the American development of oral poetry that was from the coffee houses…. Then there’s an element that goes along with borrowing from the pop stars and that spotlight, too, and that glitter.”
It was Ginsberg, too, who first predicted that Patti could become a national figure; maybe not a superstar, and probably not even a household name, “but it would be interesting if that did develop into a national style. IF the national style could organically integrate that sort of arty personality—the arty Rimbaud—in its spotlight with makeup and T-shirt.”
Right now, however, she was bottom of the bill at the Mercer, her ten-minute recitals prefacing performances by the likes of Ruby and the Rednecks, Moogy and the Rhythm Kings, and Teenage Lust, with Patti often feeling fortunate if she could complete a poem or two. But that would change. By early 1973, Patti was more or less a fixture on the weekly bill, and would even be facing down the Dolls’ most partisan audience, as that band set about shoving themselves into a limelight that really didn’t seem that keen on acknowledging them. In New York City, David Johansson, Johnny Thunders, and company were widely regarded as the city’s next big export. To the rest of the world, they were a joke.
Patti continued to flit across the Manhattan arts scene. January 1973 saw her undertake another of her sporadic theatrical ventures, when she appeared at St. Mark’s Theatre Genesis, playing the part of Dixie in Sam Shepard’s new play Blue Bitch. She also appeared in lingerie designer Fernando Sánchez’s latest fashion show, modeling furs on the runway.
On April 2, 1973, Patti reunited with guitarist Lenny Kaye for five nights opening for drag queen Holly Woodlawn at Reno Sweeney. A cabaret launched the previous year by songwriter Lewis Friedman and Eliot Hubbard, Reno Sweeney was what writer Vito Russo called “the center of the universe during the now-legendary cabaret revival of the early ‘70s. Everybody who was anybody either played its famous Paradise Room or sat in the audience to watch.” This list included Jim Steinman, Nona Hendryx, Phoebe Snow, Quentin Crisp, Jackie Curtis, the Manhattan Transfer, and many more.
Holly Woodlawn’s performance slipped exquisitely into the cabaret milieu; for Patti and Kaye, on the other hand, playing to an audience of self-conscious sophisticates was one more challenge to meet. It was one at which they succeeded. The first time the future Joey Ramone saw Patti perform was at Reno Sweeney, and he was entranced.
Days later, the duo were at Kenny’s Castaways, a Village club where they shared the bill with Gunhill Road (a New York City three-piece recently signed to Mercury Records) and the wild folky-jazz hybrid of Cathy Chamberlain’s Rag’n Roll Revue. Patti had her act down now. She would read a poem, then when it was finished, she would screw up the piece of paper she’d written on and toss it onto the floor. Or she’d pick up a chair and smash it against a wall. Anything to grab the audience’s attention, anything to provoke a reaction.
And it worked. After two years of pushing ever harder at what she perceived were the barriers that separated poetry from rock ‘n’ roll, at Kenny’s Castaways she finally achieved the breakthrough she demanded, in the form of a shocked review from the Village Voice. Patti was, the reviewer insisted, “in the vanguard of cultural mutation; a cryptic androgynous Keith Richards look-alike poetess-appliqué.”
Yet it was not her appearance that shocked so much as her repertoire: “You Don’t Want to Play with Me Blues,” “Anita Pallenberg in a South American Bar,” the death-laden “A Fire of Unknown Origin” and the Dylan-littered “Dog Dream”—have you seen / dylan’s dog … the only / thing allowed / to look Dylan in the eye—all were machine-gunned into an audience that was uncertain whether to applaud or excrete. She introduced “Redondo Beach,” written in one sitting after a row with sister Linda: “Needing time to think, I took an F train to Coney Island and sat on the littered beach until the sun rose,” she remembered in Patti Smith Complete. “I came back, wrote the draft and fell asleep.”
But it was the concluding “Rape” that caught the most attention, just as Patti and Kaye knew it would when they selected it to cr
own their collection of garage-hewn verses. “Rape,” peeping inside bo’s bodice. lay down darling don’t be modest let me slip my hand in. ohhh that’s soft.
“Rape,” glamorizing, humorizing, humanizing that most brutal crime.
“Rape,” then and probably now as well, the most discomforting poem Patti Smith ever wrote. And she knew it.
But she was unrepentant. She would compare herself to a novelist, slipping in and out of the characters she was writing about. Depicting a rapist required her to become, in her mind, a rapist; “Rape” itself, she explained to Amy Gross in Mademoiselle, was the end result of reading everything she could lay her hands on about Richard Speck, the killer who raped, tortured, and murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, in one night in July 1966. Writing the poem six years later, Patti “just lurked about the room for a while, letting the saliva come out of my mouth, till I felt like Speck.”
I’ll never forget how you smelled that night. like cheddar cheese melting under fluorescent light.
But people should not take it so seriously, she said. Her verse was filled with jokes and wordplay. I’m a wolf in a lamb skin trojan, for example. Or her descriptions of her victim as a pretty shepherdess, and beep beep sheep I’m moving in.
Not for the first time, Patti shrugged. “I think of myself not as male or female or rapist but as a comedian.”
On July 3, 1973, Patti marked the second anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death with a reading at friend and filmmaker Jack Smith’s loft, at Greene Street and Canal. Back in the early days of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous (sire of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company), Jack Smith had designed many of that ensemble’s most dramatic costumes, and his influence remained a tangible slice of the underground arts scene. Most of the summer, however, was spent preparing her third poetry collection for publication, this time under the aegis of Andreas Brown, owner of the legendary Gotham Book Mart.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 9