Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (11 page)

I’d like to see / her rise again / her white white bones / with baby Brian Jones.

Patti refused to rest while she awaited publication.

Christmas Day 1971 saw her return to the Poetry Project, to run through a dozen verses, including several (“Mary Jane,” “Renee Falconetti,” “Death by Water,” “Seventh Heaven,” and “Amelia Earhart”) that were scheduled for inclusion in
Seventh Heaven.
Again it was a well-received performance—less immediately incendiary than her debut, ofcourse, because people now had some notion of what to expect, but better attended.

Just days after that, she began packing her bags for her next trip to Europe. John Calder, one half of the London poetry press Calder and Boyars, was about to publish the first-ever British anthology of Telegraph Books writers, and arranged for Patti, Bockris, Wylie, and Malanga to visit London in the new year, to perform a reading for Better Books, the city’s premier underground bookstore.

It was an evocative collaboration. Calder was the first publisher to make William Burroughs available in the UK; Better Books was the first British venue ever to host a reading by Allen Ginsberg, in 1965. The store’s address of 94 Charing Cross Road was as familiar as any in the world of modern poetry, and seven years after writer and musician Tom McGrath predicted that Ginsberg’s debut would be remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of English poetry, and perhaps even England itself, so another turning point arrived as Patti Smith prepared to take the stage.

Or so Patti’s admirers would later say.

Calder booked a small but well-appointed Soho theater for the occasion; decked out in bright red plush, the venue was, as its address suggests, more familiar with the screening of porn films at that time, but its intimacy lent itself well to both the reading and the audience. Bockris would recall 125 people turning up for the event, including the English poet Michael Horovitz
(not,
as is often claimed, the American Michael Horo
w
itz) and Eric Mottram, the editor of the British magazine
Poetry Review.
On the other hand, the possibly more objective British rock critic Nick Kent, who also attended the event, recalled there being no more than fifteen people in the room for Patti’s recital.

Either way, one suspects that Malanga’s association with Warhol was a greater draw for the audience than the unknown Patti Smith. Indeed, the greatest impact she had yet made on the country was the previous October, when a decidedly uncomplimentary topless still from
Robert Having His Nipple Pierced
appeared on the cover of the local listings magazine
Time Out.
In later years, similar images—the fruits of her early photographic sessions with Robert Mapplethorpe—would come tohaunt Patti, as would-be critics seized upon them as evidence of a less-than-salubrious past. At the time, however, the uncaptioned photograph of a heavily-made-up Smith, clad in a beret and wielding a hammer, barely even offered titillation to whoever picked up a copy.

But Bockris would proclaim her short (ten or so minutes) performance a triumph. He’d recall the lost-little-girl act with which Patti first seduced and then cajoled the crowd, and laughingly reflect upon the moment of panic that apparently racked her as she took the stage and announced that she’d forgotten to pack the one piece that she intended reading that night and would have to rely on her memory alone.

As Bockris remembered in
Please Kill Me,
“she told this poemlike story, and she said, ‘I haven’t finished writing this yet, but it goes like this. ‘The boy looked at Jesus as he came down the steps.’” Then, as if she recalled the effect that a similar confession had at her first St. Mark’s reading, she paused after six minutes to declare, “Gee, uh, I forgot it.”

By which time, Bockris reported in
Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography,
“she had the audience completely mesmerized. Afterward, some of the awed poets who stayed afterward told [us] that the Telegraph Poets, as we were billing ourselves, had changed the London poetry scene overnight.”

Reading through the British poetry press from the weeks and months that followed, one deems it highly unlikely that they had. British and, in particular, London poetry was a highly insular creature at that time, conscious of the impact that the likes of Ginsburg had had in the 1960s but anxious if not desperate to draw away from that influence, too—to establish itself as a separate creation that owed nothing to its American cousins. The idea that even the collective weight of Malanga, Smith, Bockris, and Wylie could redirect thought processes that were already so entrenched was one that only the most naive mind would entertain.

Nevertheless, the visit was victorious, and before it wrapped up, the crew indulged themselves with a photo shoot outside the home of poet Ezra Pound in Kensington. Patti also found time for an unscheduled reunion with Sam Shepard. Then it was back to New York City and Patti’s third assault on theater-land, at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in March 1972.

The play
Island
was written and directed by Patti’s
Femme Fatale
director, Tony Ingrassia, and stage-managed by Leee Black Childers, and it essentially served as a large-scale reunion for one of the most controversial theatrical troupes of the day, the cast of
Andy Warhol’s Pork.
That play’s six-week run in London had granted the crew transatlantic notoriety, and now Geri Miller, Cherry Vanilla, Tony Zanetta, Wayne County, and Jamie Di Carlo were back on home soil to present
Island,
which Zanetta would later describe as “probably Ingrassia’s best play.” It was the story of a bunch of freaks having a picnic on the deck of a Fire Island beach house, at the same time that a US naval destroyer is making its way toward the island, apparently to arrest all the weirdoes besmirching that particular socialite paradise.

“As the play progressed,” recalled Cherry Vanilla in her memoir
Lick Me,
“the destroyer got closer and closer to shore, and the action got more and more chaotic. A luncheon scene with all fourteen of the play’s characters seated around a huge picnic table, ferociously eating, drinking, passing dishes, and delivering scripted lines amid a cacophony of improvised ones, though a bitch to enact, was a prime example of Ingrassia’s genius—or madness.”

Vanilla’s role was that of a sex-crazed hippie who fucked everyone in sight. County played a transvestite revolutionary (“a few of us were really typecast in
Island,”
Vanilla quipped), and Patti was cast as a wired and wiry speed freak whose lines revolved primarily around the fact that Brian Jones was dead.

It was a dry, brittle role, and somehow it seemed to fit her personality. Certainly Patti made little impression on her costars. “Maybe it was shyness,” Vanilla remembered on another occasion, “but she didn’t mingle with the rest of us at all, which was unusual for actors in a production.” There was, she continued, “no big negativity or nastiness, no big deal, no drama.” She just didn’t say much, so nobody said much to her. “I always gave her the benefit of the doubt, that she was just shy around us,” she concluded.

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

P
ATTI 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.