Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (7 page)

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

I
N M
AY
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 herself 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.

It was late July 1969 before the Smith sisters returned to the United States from their Parisian sojourn—pulled home, said Patti, by a series of increasingly portentous dreams about their father. The pair had scarcely communicated with their family all the while they were in Paris, the occasional letter or postcard drifting leisurely across the ocean to wash up at the American Express office, maybe a collect phone call or two. Patti had written and received far more letters from Robert Mapplethorpe than from her family, but that did not mean they were out of her mind completely. She had ignored the visions she’d had of Brian Jones; she was not going to make the same mistake again.

The women returned home just days after Grant Smith was taken into the hospital, the victim of an unexpected heart attack, and just as the doctors delivered the news that he would survive.

So, Patti had decided, would she. The broken heart that Mapplethorpe had sent her away with was repaired by now, and he, too, was back in New York and regretting the precipitous manner in which their relationship had shattered. The day Patti turned up on his Delancey Street doorstep was the day he broke up with his latest boyfriend—and the day, too, that the pair decided that they had wasted too much of their lives already, struggling along amidst decay and indecision.

They quit Delancey Street after a neighbor was murdered just across the hallway from them, and moved on to the Allerton Hotel on West Twenty-Second. Down among the druggies and the derelicts, it was about as low as any hotel could go, but Patti and Mapplethorpe had somehow sunk even lower.

Never too careful about his health, and especially disdainful of his dental requirements, particularly his ulcerated gums, Mapplethorpe had developed a serious infection while Patti was in Paris. He was now in terrific pain, spinning between unconsciousness and delirium. Patti recalled these weeks in the poem “Sister Morphine,” titled for a song that Marianne Faithfull wrote with the Rolling Stones (in mid-1969, it was the B-side of her latest single) but inspired wholly by Mapplethorpe’s suffering:
i checked into the alton house with my friend, in pain. his nerve was exposed and he laid for several days on the bumpy rusting cot draining and weeping.

They couldn’t afford a doctor, and they couldn’t afford their rent, either. Just weeks into their tenure, they made a midnight getaway, Patti all but carrying the still-sickly Mapplethorpe down the fire escape and across town.

It was time, Patti decided, to go for broke. If they were to be artists, they needed to live like artists. They’d still be starving, but at least they’d have style. And there was only one address in Manhattan where starvation and style went hand in hand. The Chelsea Hotel.

Quite possibly the most famous hotel in America, and certainly the most famous in the American art scene, the Chelsea was built in 1883, when for a short time its twelve floors established it as the tallest building in New York City. Planted on West Twenty-Third Street between Seventh and Eighth, it was originally designed as luxury cooperative beforebecoming a residential hotel in 1905. In the decades that followed, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Sarah Bernhardt, and Thomas Wolfe numbered among its residents, and it was their patronage that gave the Chelsea its reputation.

By the early 1950s, the Chelsea had degenerated into a virtual flophouse, its doors open to anybody who could afford a room for a night— and with its prices kept deliberately low, that was a lot of people. It was in a dangerous neighborhood as well, one where even a not-so-innocent passerby was as likely to get mugged as mug someone else.

But the hotel’s aura lingered on. Poet Dylan Thomas stayed there during one of his New York City visits, and the Chelsea was a magnet for the Beats as well: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso all lived there for a time; William Burroughs wrote
Naked Lunch
there. And by the time manager David Bard handed the running of the hotel over to his son, Stanley, in 1957, the Chelsea was on the up-and-up again, at least as far as its best-known clientele was concerned.

During the mid-1960s, Warhol’s Factory regarded the Chelsea as a second home, with Gerard Malanga, Brigid Polk, Ondine, and Nico all resident there. Warhol’s movie
Chelsea Girls
was partially filmed there, at least until Stanley Bard kicked the crew and their cameras out and the movie had to be finished on a lookalike film set. Lou Reed wrote the movie’s title theme, a haunting ode to the hotel’s most colorful denizens.

Leonard Cohen lived there for a time, and wrote one of his best-loved songs, “Chelsea Hotel #2,” about the night he spent there with Janis Joplin. Joni Mitchell was a resident, and she emerged with “Chelsea Morning.” If any simple pile of brick and mortar was capable of inspiring the arts, it was the Chelsea.

And Stanley Bard knew it. He listened while Patti outlined the dreams of glory that awaited Robert and her, smiled as she handed him her art portfolio as collateral for the rent they would not be able to pay, and allowed her to barter the promise of future fame for a room key.

It was a tiny key for the tiniest room in the hotel, a pale-blue tenth-floor shoebox with just enough room for a twin bed, a sink and a mirror, a chest of drawers, and a portable television. For now, though, that was all they needed. With Reed’s musical tribute echoing in their ears, and the ghosts of so many other past residents flitting through their consciousness, the couple knew they had found their niche. They had found their workplace.

Patti’s first order of business, however, was somewhat more mundane: to nurse Mapplethorpe back to health, borrowing antibiotics from any friend who might have some lying around his or her medicine cabinet, mixing and matching whatever remedies she could find, until his fever broke and his temperature dipped and he was capable of consuming more than chicken soup.