Patti had refused to attend the ceremony, citing her pathological fear of needles, but she benefited indirectly, as the ceremony seemed to free Robert up creatively in interesting new ways. Before, he had ignored Sandy’s offer to lend him her photography equipment, but now he began experimenting with her Polaroid camera and found that he liked the immediacy and the physicality of the quick snap- and-pull of the camera and film and the sixty seconds of anticipation that followed. He became obsessed with the desire to capture on film what he saw in his mind’s eye and began ordering his friends about like servants in his attempts to create images that he considered beautiful and true.
With Patti, however, Robert encountered resistance. Now in the process of formulating her own identity, she wanted to be photographed surrounded by iconic objects from her life and work, the way Dylan, her greatest idol, had been photographed for the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Eventually, Robert managed to overrule her, but in the classically elegant portraits he made, her stubborn independence shone through.
Robert facilitated Patti’s growth in another way that summer by persuading her to attempt her first public poetry reading at a Tuesday-night open mike at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. The series was emceed by the outlaw poet Jim Carroll: a lean, strawberry-blond, twenty-year-old son of a Lower East Side Irish-Catholic bar owner and the man Patti considered “the best poet of his generation.” As a student at Manhattan’s prestigious Trinity high school, courtesy of a basketball scholarship, Carroll had fallen under the spell of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” In his midteens, he’d begun hanging around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and publishing chapbooks of his own. Anne Waldman, director of the Poetry Project, hired him as her assistant, calling him “a born star . . . so tall and beautiful, and I love the way he walks.” The poet Ted Berrigan, prevailed upon to read Carroll’s chapbook Organic Trains, described it as the work of the first “truly new poet” he had read in at least a decade. In the fall, the Paris Review’s publication of excerpts from Carroll’s Basketball Diaries—detailing his years as a teenage hustler, heroin addict, and basketball star—would make his literary career. For now, though, Carroll hung around the Chelsea Hotel scoring and shooting smack and drifting in and out of his “Tijuana suite,” as he called it, depending on whether he had rent money.
The reading itself was largely forgettable, aside from the fact that Robert attended in gold-lamé chaps of his own design. But Patti saw in Carroll the modern-day Rimbaud that she had been looking for—gifted, beautiful, casually self-destructive, operating on the belief that “the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it.” In fact, that was what she herself wanted to become. After spotting Carroll in front of the Chelsea one night, she invited him for a coffee and found him to be a good storyteller. Two nights later, Smith and Carroll began an affair. “It had been a long time since I really felt something for someone other than Robert,” she later wrote. She fell into the habit of stopping by Carroll’s room at the Chelsea each morning on her way to work to deliver his favorite breakfast of coffee and doughnuts with a pint of chocolate Italian ice. While they ate, the two read poetry together. They talked about his “modest heroin habit,” which Carroll said was necessary to keep the horrors at bay while he was writing. Patti didn’t object, thinking of Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses. Steeling herself, she even accompanied Carroll downtown to score, and she watched him inject the drug into his freckled hand “like the darker side of Huckleberry Finn.”
Carroll was grateful. Women always assured him at first that his addiction wasn’t a problem, but within a week or two, they started complaining. There was none of that with Patti, though, he wrote. “She is as clear with her destiny as I with mine.” Unlike Carroll, she possessed unlimited energy, and no matter what happened, it seemed to him, “she lands feet first, upright, like a cat.” Time, he wrote, was all that was needed for a woman like that to realize her destiny. It certainly seemed so that summer as Patti bought a cheap guitar and began teaching herself a few chords, trying to figure out how to turn “Fire of Unknown Origin” into a song. In August, when Janis Joplin arrived back at the Chelsea, exhausted from her grueling performance schedule and increasingly despondent over her inability to control her addictive habits and find happiness in love, Patti was moved to write a song about her. When she played “Work Song,” with its “I work hard” lament, in Joplin’s room one despairing night, the singer nodded sadly and said, “That’s my song.”
That same month, Smith dropped by the opening celebration for Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios and ran into Hendrix himself while she was loitering alone outside the entrance. Asked why she didn’t join the party, Smith admitted she was kind of shy. He told her he was that way too, but to Patti, he looked more exhausted than anything else. Standing out in the New York street that summer night, she could never have imagined that he would die in London in less than a month and that Joplin would follow him—dead of a heroin overdose—just weeks later.
The world was changing. Patti and Robert and Jim were ready to claim it. The decomposing city, half abandoned in summer and redolent with the odor of garbage rotting on the curbs, suited their mood in that Nixonian year as prices rose, jobs vanished, and psychedelic acid trips were replaced by cocaine’s abrupt ups and Quaaludes’ numbing downs. Sex clubs proliferated, powered by an emerging gay culture ravenous for release. Artists staged performances on factory rooftops, created installations from urban compost, spray-painted flaking walls. At the Chelsea, Maurice Girodias, bankrupt once again, shut down Olympia Press and returned to France. Holly Woodlawn was caught forging checks, tossed into jail, and left there by her so-called friends at the Factory until Larry Rivers learned of her incarceration and made her bail. Violence was up: beautiful Bani was strangled in a friend’s empty apartment; poor George Kleinsinger went down to identify the body and returned to the Chelsea destroyed. In the East Village, Barry Miles and his new girlfriend Ann Buchanan were tied up and robbed at gunpoint while staying in Ginsberg’s apartment. Afterward, when they informed the neighbors, they were told that there was no point in calling the police.
There was poetry hidden within this gritty new reality; Patti and Jim could feel it. New York had become one enormous found object, its sidewalks the “sump canals of Babylon.” It could get ugly sometimes, as the “viper-lipped suits” hanging around Forty-Second Street checked them out for anonymous sex. But already, Johnny Winter’s manager, Steve Paul, was passing Patti’s poetry around to influential people. Most were more interested in her uncanny resemblance to Keith Richards than in her poems, but never mind. She was no longer just “a vision in another eye.” She herself was a visionary. She was going somewhere. She needed nobody. And it was beautiful.
PROFOUNDLY SHAKEN BY the robbery at Ginsberg’s apartment, Barry Miles rented a fourth-floor room for himself and Ann at the Chelsea that November of 1970. “Seeing Big John behind the desk and Josie [Brickman] at the switchboard was like coming home,” he later wrote. Delighted with their rear-facing room with its two-ring hot plate and new refrigerator, he and Ann prepared for a winter of assembling and recording Ginsberg’s complete catalog of spoken poetry, past and present.
But it soon became clear that the hotel had changed in the year and a half since Miles had stayed there. The building seemed shabbier, and its elevators reeked so strongly of marijuana smoke that one could get high just going up to one’s floor. Miles soon discovered that since the shrinking economy had led to the closing of a number of single-room-occupancy welfare hotels, survivors like the Chelsea had been forced to take up the slack. He was made aware of these new neighbors shortly after moving in, when he was awakened early one morning by a pair of policemen asking what he could tell them about the corpse lying in front of his door. The body turned out to be that of a junkie who’d recently relocated from a skid-row hotel to the east end of Miles’s floor and who had
tried to rob another junkie transferee at the corridor’s west end. The robber was shot and had died trying to crawl back to his room.
It was an interesting time at the Chelsea for other reasons as well. A year and a half before, Shirley Clarke had used her Museum of Modern Art grant money to kit out her pyramid with the latest Sony and Panasonic video hardware, and since then she had immersed herself in exploring this exciting new medium, so empowering due to its low cost, immediacy of viewing, and visual-feedback qualities that had never been possible before. Granted, video images were too murky to compete with film’s, and editing was difficult, but with videotape so cheap and reusable, users could record everything and see the results in real time. For someone like Shirley, frustrated by years of trying to raise money to make films, the instant gratification was exhilarating.
She was even more delighted when her friend Viva returned to the Chelsea to write her semiautobiographical first novel, Superstar, and brought along her new husband, Michel Auder, a young experimental filmmaker from France. As frustrated as Shirley had been by fundraising for her films, Michel was more so. In fact, he was currently fending off a threatened lawsuit from the outraged backers of his most recent film, a Warhol-style parody of the movie Cleopatra that featured Viva and other Factory regulars in Egyptian costumes wandering among the statues in Italy’s Monsters of Bomarzo park and splashing in the pool at Cinecittá. Thus, Michel and Viva were thrilled to spend time upstairs in Shirley’s Pyramid figuring out what her Portapaks, edit decks, monitors, and other video hardware could do. Clarke encouraged them to simply play with the equipment and watch the results unfold. As she said later, “We don’t really know yet all the possibilities,” but “it’s in that enjoyment that the significance of the thing is finally revealed.”
Auder and Viva took that ball and ran with it, making the Portapak their constant companion and their partnership with the technology “a magnificent love affair.” They developed a compulsion to record, study, and contemplate every moment of their lives and of all the lives around them. For the first time, they could extend almost infinitely Shirley’s experiment with Portrait of Jason, not only allowing subjects to speak for themselves for as long as they liked but also letting both the cameraperson and the subject watch the results instantaneously on monitors and to respond accordingly.
Shirley agreed: once one got used to video’s ability to penetrate the surface and probe the complexities of life in real time, film seemed as antiquated and cumbersome as a tintype. The hierarchical relationship between movies and audiences was out of date, she told her friends. She made her contempt for traditional moviemaking clear when the pleasant-seeming Los Angeles filmmaker Les Blank visited the Chelsea to screen his new documentary The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins for Shirley, Harry Smith, and a few other colleagues in his friend Florence Turner’s apartment. As Blank had expected, Florence was charmed by the documentary, but after the lights were turned on, Shirley and Harry expressed their opinion by tossing the reel back and forth like a ball as its owner watched in horror. In fact, Shirley felt so inspired by video that she swore never to use film again and handed her trusty Bolex camera over to Harry Smith. Harry could not have been happier. He had been ready to start filming Mahagonny for months but lacked the money and equipment to begin.
Barry Miles considered Harry perhaps the only real genius he’d ever met. (He wasn’t alone in this; Miles had heard that when the celebrated French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard first came to New York, Harry was the only person he asked to meet.) So Miles listened with interest to Smith’s plan to transmute the Weimar-era opera into an occult cinematic experience sufficiently paradigm-shattering to spur the progress of humanity. The key to doing this, Harry said, lay in an idea he had expressed as far back as 1950: The way to a viewer’s unconscious—his “soul”—lay in the interstices between his inner rhythms (spiritual, emotional, and physiological) and the rhythms of the outer world. Change the relation between these two sets of patterns, and you could create the neurological and physiological conditions that made evolutionary change possible.
Film was the perfect medium for this particular experiment, Smith believed, due to its reliably rhythmic mechanism and because, as Arthur Miller wrote, “The movie springs from the way we dream.” Sitting in a dark theater, audience members were exposed to the power of flashing images on the screen, a physiological process that opened their brains to change. Harry’s plan, then, as Miles understood it, was to marry Mahagonny’s galvanizing narrative and music to a kaleidoscopic pattern of projected “glyphs,” or archetypal images, that would create the proper rhythmic contrasts and excite the correct responses.
With Shirley’s Bolex and the help of a variety of friends and young assistants, Smith got to work filming city storefronts, crowd scenes, billboards, clouds, tourists, traffic jams, and street fairs, images that would serve as the raw material from which he’d assemble his collage. Everyone at the Chelsea became fair game for the camera: Patti and Robert, Mekas and Corso, Harry’s long-suffering physician and patron Dr. Gross, and Ginsberg, who was filmed reciting William Blake’s “The Lamb” while hugging a woolly toy lamb. While some images amounted to little more than fragments of everyday life, others seemed deliberately chosen for their archetypal value: innocent Rosebud dancing evocatively on the rooftop, Harry’s assistant Patrick Hulsey’s sister-in-law posing with her baby; a young woman applying makeup; another dancing in a robe of Virgin Mary blue; and yet another dancing nude, advertising pleasure for sale.
Work proceeded erratically, commencing when Harry managed to cadge enough donations to pay for film and ceasing when the money ran out. Drugs and alcohol played their part, too, as Harry insisted that his assistant always pack beer and marijuana along with the Bolex and tripod (once owned by Admiral Byrd, Harry claimed, and used on his trip to the Antarctic). Even after the equipment was assembled, Harry invariably had to return to his room several times to retrieve things he’d forgotten—sometimes falling into arguments with friends while upstairs and once even locking a fellow filmmaker in the bathroom for a while—so the sun was often beginning to go down by the time they set up the camera. Still, by December, his room had begun to fill with piles of film canisters. Smith sometimes invited people in to smoke a joint and see bits of the film and then, once they were stoned, demanded money, just as he had done with Ginsberg a decade before.
But the strain of trying to find funds to keep the production going was clearly telling on Smith, even though Stanley Bard allowed him to rack up month after month of unpaid rent. When Miles dropped in to visit—usually in midafternoon, before Harry’s evening pills and vodka transformed him into an “ill-behaved gnome”—he was treated to an unceasing recitation of Harry’s hopeless finances, bleak future, and inability to travel now that he was responsible for a pet goldfish, Fishy, whom he claimed had once communicated to him the true value of pi. Inevitably, however, Harry would soon transition to one of his favorite topics, Aleister Crowley—the English mystic and magician whom Smith sometimes claimed as his biological father and to whom his mother had introduced him when he was four years old.
And there may have been something to that, for word had spread through the city’s occult circles that Harry Smith was now in possession of one of Crowley’s notebooks. That, perhaps, was what drew so many devotees of magic to the hotel that year. Some dropped in to borrow or rent a particular treatise; others, including Marty Balin, lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane, lingered for hours discussing such esoteric topics as Crowley’s reliance on the sixteenth-century Enochian system of spiritual knowledge (and were surprised later with a bill). Still others hired Harry outright for lessons in the occult. One such student was Isabella Gardner’s wayward daughter, Rose—a thorn in her mother’s side, as her neighbors at the Chelsea liked to say. Rose kept a permanent room at the Chelsea where she could drink, take drugs, and have sex with whomever she could lure into an empty corridor. Recently, she had given birth to a son, Raoul, who
se father may or may not have been one of El Quijote’s waiters. But to her mother’s distress, while the rest of the hotel’s female population fawned over the beautiful child, Rose virtually abandoned him in favor of her apprenticeship to Harry Smith.
Full-fledged alchemists and magicians arrived at the hotel as well. Recently, the British occultist Stanley Amos had taken a room on the fifth floor, where he soon became known for throwing parties enhanced by record-breaking doses of LSD as well as for staging art exhibitions in his room. That fall, Amos hosted a group show to which Mapplethorpe contributed some Coney Island freak-show collages and a large installation resembling an altarpiece that was adorned with such magically resonant objects as Patti’s French crucifix, an embroidered velvet scarf, and a wolf skin. The invitations, fashioned by Mapplethorpe from soft-porn playing cards bought in Times Square, drew a packed crowd that included Sandy Daley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Donald Lyons, Gerome Ragni, and the collector Charles Coles. Harry was so taken by the altarpiece that he filmed it for Mahagonny.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 34