Sitting in a corner of the lobby, curled up with her drawing pad, Patti had access to old-timers willing to bring her up to speed on all the old Chelsea Hotel stories about Wolfe, Dylan, and Mark Twain. She could listen in on the “family” gossip—Edie Sedgwick’s latest drug bust in California, where she now lived; the acid someone slipped into the drinks at Claude and Mary’s party last night; how funny it was last week when Kleinsinger’s new girlfriend, a gorgeous black model named Bani, broke the string of her necklace in the lobby and everyone dove after the tiny diamonds skittering across the floor. That summer of 1969, the talk was all about the riot following a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street, where a cross-dressing lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie had been beaten so badly for decking a cop that she had to have fourteen stitches in her face. And in the wake of the Charles Manson murders in August, every gruesome detail of Sharon Tate’s demise was reviewed and analyzed. By September, though, the topic had turned to the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial and the Days of Rage that Abbie Hoffman had helped plan for Chicago.
For Patti, who had had to drop out of teachers’ college in New Jersey when she became pregnant at age nineteen, these lobby exchanges served as a substitute education: Peggy told stories of her days as a civil rights activist down south; Harry explained the anthropological significance of cat’s-cradle games as he deftly twisted a length of string into the shape of a star, a female spirit, or a fisherman spearing a fish; and Barry Miles, the visiting cofounder of London’s Indica bookstore, described his current work recording Ginsberg performing William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, backed by Don Cherry and Elvin Jones.
Famous as some of these new acquaintances were, Patti was not intimidated, and neither was Robert, once he began to recover and could spend more time out of their room. Hanging out with poets and rock stars “was just life to us,” Smith later recalled. Since early adolescence, she’d been committed to the idea of living an artistic life, and she had come to New York specifically to become, if not an artist herself, then at least an artist’s muse. Living with Robert, who’d been a student when they’d met, she learned not only how to look at art but how to appreciate the hard work and discipline it took to produce something worthwhile. When they arrived at the Chelsea, the pair had not yet produced much that would be of interest to others, but they felt like artists, fully entitled to chat about poetry with Gregory Corso in front of the lobby fireplace as Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick glided past in a tie-dyed gown, and to occupy a booth at El Quijote when it was packed full of rock stars en route to Woodstock.
The Chelsea inspired Patti and Robert to take the next step: to make a place for themselves and be recognized as equals. But trying to produce art in their cramped quarters with supplies stored under the bed and laundry drying on the headboard made them feel like “inmates in a hospital prison,” Patti wrote. Wandering the halls, she caught glimpses through half-open doors of Virgil Thomson’s elegant foyer, with its built-in bookcases and photographs of Four Saints in Three Acts, and the light-flooded, impeccably restored four-room suite where the poet Isabella Gardner, the Chelsea’s own Edith Sitwell, presided over a weekly writing workshop.
To live in luxury as Gardner did cost a steep $325 per month, though that price included maid service, switchboard, utilities, and linens, as Gardner boasted elatedly to a friend. Patti and Robert couldn’t possibly afford that, but they could aspire to something better than what they currently had—they wanted a base camp closer to the lobby from which to expand their network of connections. The subject of how to most efficiently subsidize such aims often came up in conversation with Harry over shrimp and green sauce appetizers at El Quijote. After commiserating over the tragic fact that they lived in a social system that demanded payment for food and shelter, he suggested that they try ducking the responsibility by just becoming drunks, as he had done in the past—although, admittedly, that choice often led pretty quickly to death. Certainly, he didn’t recommended that the two apply for grants, since in his experience, the time and labor spent putting together applications wasn’t worth the few thousand dollars one might receive. These days, Harry was content to survive on small donations from Ginsberg, Biderman, Shirley Clarke, and other friends. But overall, he considered private patrons the best source for a steady income. Sadly, only psychopaths funded the kind of work that interested him now, he said, but Robert, with his exotic Egyptian eyes, could surely find a generous protector.
Robert found the idea of a patron intoxicating both professionally and sexually. In the past year or so he had begun to explore his homosexuality more or less openly: escaping to San Francisco to sample the gay scene there and, in New York, immersing himself increasingly in the world of Times Square pimps and hustlers. Patti had always supported his efforts to pursue the truth however he saw it. At first, she had naïvely viewed his sexual urges as a “poetic curse,” one he shared with her poet hero Rimbaud, which made the predilections admirable in a sense. Still, she’d had to take a break from him in Paris after his first visit to a gay bar, and she found it difficult to countenance the sadomasochistic imagery that he had begun using in his art. For Robert, the idea of a male patron’s appreciation, as well as a connection to others like himself, became increasingly attractive.
The lobby of the Chelsea seemed a good place to begin looking for someone to fill this role, and that made a move downstairs all the more important. In November, the two were able to claim a larger room on the second floor—Dylan Thomas’s floor (not to mention Bob Dylan’s)—that overlooked the same quiet gardens that Edgar Lee Masters had loved three decades before. Bursting onto the lobby scene in thrift-shop costumes—sexy sailor outfits for Robert; vintage lace dresses for Patti in her role as dutiful muse—they trolled for connections. But Robert felt the Chelsea environment was too shabby and egalitarian to produce the type of connoisseur he had in mind. Setting his sights instead on the more exclusive back room at Max’s Kansas City, still dominated by Warhol’s superstars, he insisted that Patti accompany him to petition for access, which she did, night after night, until Danny Fields, who had introduced Leonard Cohen to Edie Sedgwick the year before, finally took pity on the ragged young couple and invited them into the inner sanctum.
Here, Robert found all he’d hoped for: a free zone for “stars, freaks, druggies, and creatures of the avant-garde” that felt as natural and welcoming to him as the Chelsea’s lobby did to Patti. At a time when homosexuality was yet to be acknowledged in the mainstream media, it was a revelation to come across this surreal circus where the fabled drag queens Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn bragged about their roles in Warhol’s films and gossiped about the flimmaker’s plan to rent them out to collectors as “living works of art,” while Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, David Bowie, and Dennis Hopper smoked, chatted, and looked on.
Now Robert could begin his own postgraduate education. He picked up the story of how the half–Puerto Rican teenager Harold Ajzenberg was tossed into a Miami correctional facility after he told his parents he was gay and then escaped to New York, where he survived as a street hustler. Tired of being harassed by men as “a misfit” and “a thing,” he became the fabulous Holly Woodlawn and caught Warhol’s eye. Recalling the hustling, Holly declared, “Honey, in those days, I brushed death more times than Jackie Curtis brushed her hair!” It was on the Village streets that Holly met a shy, dark-haired, movie-obsessed Long Island boy named James Slattery. Longing for stardom, James transformed himself, too, applying white powder and blood-red lipstick and dying his hair platinum blond to become Candy Darling. “If anyone can make you a star,” Candy promised Robert in her carefully constructed British accent, “Andy can.”
As a transvestite, twenty-four-year-old playwright Jackie Curtis (born John Holder) was not in Candy’s and Holly’s league, but he, too, had managed to catch Warhol’s attention by creating his own Lucy Ricardo–inspired “madcap-redhead” style of drag. Shortly after he saw Holly and Candy
in Jackie’s outrageous play Glamour, Glory, and Gold at Bastiano’s Playwrights Workshop (with a local artist’s son, twenty-three-year-old Robert De Niro Jr., playing all the male roles—one of which required him to feel up Holly), Warhol cast Jackie in his film-in-progress, Flesh.
Intrigued by Robert’s good looks, the glittery backroom crowd made space at their tables for this odd pair, despite the unpromising appearance of Robert’s unkempt string bean of a female companion. As for Patti, she found the drag queens’ outlandish performances brave but a little pathetic, she claimed, considering the heroin addictions and welfare checks lurking behind their façades. Still, she was sufficiently stung by Factory denizen Fred Hughes’s condescending praise for her longhaired “Joan Baez” look and his question “Are you a folksinger?” that she headed back to the Chelsea and hacked at her hair with scissors until she achieved a jagged, shoulder-length Keith Richards style.
Ironically, Patti’s new and even more androgynous appearance made such an impression at Max’s that Jackie Curtis cast her as a boy in his new play Femme Fatale, where she appeared alongside veterans Mary Woronov, Penny Arcade, and Jackie himself in drag. Patti liked playing a hard-boiled guy in a suit. At rehearsals, she found she could outplay the others at a game Curtis had invented called the Outrageous Lie, based on the concept that an absolutely outrageous story told with conviction could inflate one’s reputation to almost mythic proportions. Wayne County might claim that his fabulous jacket was a gift from Joan Crawford; Cyrinda Foxe might insist that she’d once been shot off the back of a motorcycle; but Patti’s terse boast that during her pregnancy her baby was so impatient to be born that it kicked right through her stomach generated gasps of horror, especially when she lifted her shirt and displayed the scars (really stretch marks) to prove it.
Outrageousness of this caliber not only won Patti acceptance but also encouraged her natural sense of bravado. At the same time, though, it was becoming clear that after several years of being lovers and the closest of friends, she and Robert were moving in different directions. In January 1970, Robert sublet the front half of a second-floor loft over the old Oasis Bar, just east of the Chelsea on Twenty-Third Street, saying he needed more room in which to create larger constructions. But it was clear that he needed the personal space as well.
Watching Robert transform the raw material around him into art, Patti felt the urge to do the same, not with images but with words. She had already tested the waters by reviewing records for the rock magazine Creem—though, admittedly, she earned more money by selling the records afterward than by reviewing them. Rock criticism was easy when you lived in a hotel whose walls throbbed with the presence of as many as twenty bands at a time, from the Allman Brothers to Fleetwood Mac, and whose fans clogged the lobby at all hours of the day and night, lying like corpses on the red-and-black-vinyl-covered benches installed for them by Stanley.
Patti found that she loved writing, loved struggling to find the perfect phrase, and she loved seeing her name in print. With Corso’s encouragement, she began to experiment with poetry, working on bits of verse in the lobby while Shirley Clarke supervised the delivery of state-of-the-art video equipment paid for by a grant from the Museum of Modern Art, Diane Arbus rushed upstairs to photograph one of the actresses in Warhol’s Trash, and Jonas Mekas slipped past, camera in hand. One day in January, she fell into a conversation with Bobby Neuwirth, former close companion of Dylan himself. He invited her to join him at El Quijote, where, over shots of tequila, they chatted about music and art. Neuwirth insisted on looking through Patti’s notebook, and after reading such shreds of verse as “stocking feet or barefoot / immensely proud or bent like love,” he asked if Smith had ever thought of writing songs. “Next time I see you I want a song out of you,” he told her as they said goodbye.
This encouragement was enough to kick Smith into high gear. There was so much happening that needed to be written about. With Nixon in charge, the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer, social services were being cut, and the unions were under attack. The antiwar movement had splintered and grown more violent, with confrontations between protesters and police coming fast and furious. The names of political fugitives began to outnumber those of criminals on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and that spring the Weathermen had accidentally blown up a townhouse in the Village while assembling bombs.
Harry agreed with Patti: the signs were not good. For a few years in the 1960s, he had dared to hope that cultural game-changers like the levitation of the Pentagon, the Chicago uprising, and the image of planet Earth as seen from space might pave the way for the development of a more highly evolved worldview. It seemed clear now, though, that the situation was probably going to keep getting worse “until the whole thing blows up.” This was why Harry remained fascinated by the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which had been created in an environment, late-1920s Berlin, that in many ways paralleled the beleaguered atmosphere of 1970s New York. Immersed in a social stew of disillusionment and alienation, Brecht had invented a story of three fugitives who settle in an isolated part of an imaginary America and create a city dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. “You may do everything” in Mahagonny, they proclaim—“provided you can pay for it.”
In New York, as in Berlin, paying for it had proved to be the problem. What New Yorker could fail to sympathize with Mahagonny resident Jim Mahoney’s dismay when his penniless state earns him a death sentence, even as the city’s beleaguered citizens long for a dream city “where the sun is shining,” people are united, and money isn’t needed? But to Harry, it made sense that the same desires and dreams that had inspired the rise of Mahagonny would inevitably lead to its demise. This was not just a reflection of life in Berlin or New York—it was the story of every human endeavor, from love affairs to creative enterprises to civilizations—and it was this universal quality that gave the story a specific kind of cultural power. In fact, when Mahagonny premiered in Leipzig in 1930, its audience, plagued beyond endurance by inflation and unemployment, responded with an actual riot.
Recently, Harry had been delighted to learn of another Chelsea resident’s interest in the piece. Isabella Gardner’s former lover Arnold Weinstein—playwright, professor, and legendary bon vivant—couldn’t have presented more of a contrast to scruffy Harry Smith. But a populist sensibility informed the brilliant intellect that had earned Weinstein his Harvard classics degree, his Rhodes scholarship, and his double Fulbright. To Harry’s great excitement, the playwright had recently completed the first American translation of the Mahagonny libretto and was preparing for an off-Broadway production that April with his close friend Larry Rivers designing the sets. Like Smith, the entire cast, including Barbara Harris and Estelle Parsons, had been struck by the opera’s uncanny ability to touch on New Yorkers’ growing sense of their own city’s incipient collapse. As Parsons had told reporters, “If Mahagonny isn’t right for this city at this time, I see very little point in going on.” Now that a translation existed, Harry was determined to go on as well; he would transmute Mahagonny into a socially relevant, universal cinematic experience with special significance for New York.
That spring, the loft next door to Robert’s above the Oasis became vacant, and Robert and Patti arranged to rent the entire floor, although they’d be living as neighbors now, rather than lovers. Close as they remained as friends, they knew that adjusting to this new arrangement wouldn’t be easy. In his pristine rear loft, Robert was creating a new identity for himself in tune with such recent events as the gay liberation front emerging in San Francisco and a New York march commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Patti felt uncomfortable in his milieu, particularly after she learned that Robert’s new friend David Croland was actually his lover. But she could console herself with the knowledge that her own life was moving forward. Recently, Gregory Corso had paid a visit to her own astoundingly messy loft (remarking, “Yeah, my kind of place,” as he settled into a br
oken armchair) and had praised her new poem “Fire of Unknown Origin,” in which she transformed a memory of Sandy Daley gliding down the Chelsea’s staircase in a long black gown into an archetypal story of Death snatching an infant from its mother’s arms.
At the Chelsea, where Patti still dropped in daily, Neuwirth offered encouragement as well, introducing her as a poet to his friends Johnny Winter, Kris Kristofferson, Eric Anderson, Janis Joplin, and the artist Brice Marden. It was exciting to share the energy of this intense community of artists. But it was the Velvet Underground, temporarily reunited and performing a nine-week engagement upstairs at Max’s, who inspired her most that summer. Even with half the audience slipping out to shoot up in the bathroom, Patti was riveted by the cool disdain and cutting truth of Lou Reed’s performance of “Heroin.” This was her music—music for the city’s castoffs, who might be poor and unrecognized but, unlike some of the rock musicians at the Chelsea enslaved by their record-company contracts and soul-killing tours, who were also free, because they needed nobody. This was an anthem for the future—her future.
The Chelsea seemed to simmer as the dog days of summer 1970 set in. Alice Cooper wandered the corridors with his python around his shoulders. The Rolling Stones threw a party so wild that two of the hotel’s bellmen wound up in Bellevue Hospital. The lobby was filled with so many teenagers lugging beat-up suitcases that it resembled the Port Authority bus station more than the first floor of a New York hotel. Those residents who could afford to do so left town, a number of them joining Ginsberg and friends on his upstate farm in Cherry Valley, New York. Mapplethorpe, too poor to leave, chose to spend what little money he had on getting his left nipple pierced by the Chelsea’s Dr. Herb Krohn. Sandy Daley offered her studio as surgical theater and turned the event into a happening, inviting a few friends and recording the procedure on film. But Robert, tripping on acid, transformed the performance into a sensual, artful coming-out ritual, lying bare-chested in Croland’s arms like the Pietà while Dr. Krohn swabbed his chest with disinfectant and then compelling David to give him a deep, romantic kiss as the needle went in. Once the bandage was affixed, the two young men stood and embraced; the camera lingered on their slim, beautiful bodies as Robert squeezed his lover’s buttocks and tugged downward on his black leather pants.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 33