by Patti Smith
Opportunities suddenly arose. Jackie Curtis asked me to be in her play Femme Fatale. I had no problem replacing a boy who played the male counterpart of Penny Arcade, shotgunning lines like: He could take her or leave her / And he took her and then he left her.
La MaMa was one of the earliest experimental theaters, off-Broadway with a few more offs. I had been in a few plays in college, Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Madame Dubonnet in The Boyfriend. I liked performing, but I dreaded the memorizing, and all the pancake makeup they have you wear onstage. I really didn’t understand the avant-garde, though I thought it might be fun working with Jackie and her company. Jackie gave me the part without auditioning, so I had no real idea what I was getting into.
I was sitting in the lobby trying to appear that I wasn’t waiting for Robert. I worried when he disappeared into the labyrinth of his hustling world. Unable to concentrate, I sat in my usual spot, bent over my orange composition book containing my cycle of poems for Brian Jones. I was dressed in my Song of the South getup—straw hat, Brer Rabbit jacket, work boots, and pegged pants—and was hammering away at the same set of phrases when I was interrupted by an oddly familiar voice.
“Whatcha doin’, darlin’?”
I looked up into the face of a stranger sporting the perfect pair of dark glasses.
“Writing.”
“Are you a poet?”
“Maybe.”
I shifted in my seat, acting disinterested, pretending like I didn’t recognize him, but there was no mistaking the drawl in his voice, nor his shady smile. I knew exactly who I was facing; he was the guy in Dont Look Back. The other one. Bobby Neuwirth, the peacemaker-provocateur. Bob Dylan’s alter ego.
He was a painter, singer-songwriter, and risk taker. He was a trusted confidant to many of the great minds and musicians of his generation, which was just a beat before mine.
To hide how impressed I was, I got up, nodded, and headed toward the door without saying goodbye. He called out to me.
“Hey, where did you learn to walk like that?”
I turned. “From Dont Look Back.”
He just laughed and asked me to join him in the El Quixote for a shot of tequila. I wasn’t a drinker but I downed a shot, without the lemon and salt, just to seem cool. He was easy to talk to and we covered everything from Hank Williams to abstract expressionism. He seemed to take a liking to me. He took the notebook out of my hands and checked it out. I guess he saw potential, for he said, “Did you ever think of writing songs?” I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Next time I see you I want a song out of you,” he said as we exited the bar.
That was all he had to say. When he left, I pledged to write him a song. I had fooled with lyrics for Matthew, made up a few Appalachian-style songs for Harry, but didn’t think much of it. Now I had a real mission and someone worthy of having a mission for.
Robert came home late, sullen and a little angry that I had drinks with a strange guy. But the next morning he agreed it was inspiring that someone like Bob Neuwirth was interested in my work. “Maybe he’ll be the one to get you to sing,” he said, “but always remember who wanted you to sing first.”
Robert had always liked my voice. When we lived in Brooklyn he would ask me to sing him to sleep, and I would sing him the songs of Piaf and Child ballads.
“I don’t want to sing. I just want to write songs for him. I want to be a poet, not a singer.”
“You can be both,” he said.
Robert seemed conflicted much of the day, alternating between affection and moodiness. I could feel something brewing, but Robert didn’t want to talk about it.
The following days were unnervingly quiet. He slept a lot, and when he’d awake, he would ask me to read him my poems, especially ones I wrote for him. At first I worried that he might have been harmed. Between his long silences I considered the possibility that he had met someone.
I recognized the silences as signs. We had been through this before. Though we didn’t speak about it, I slowly prepared myself for the changes that would surely come. Robert and I were still intimate and I think it was hard for both of us to bring everything out into the open. Paradoxically, he seemed to want to draw me closer. Perhaps it was the closeness before the end, like a gentleman buying his mistress jewels before telling her it’s over.
Sunday full moon. Robert was edgy and abruptly needed to go out. He looked at me for a long time. I asked if he was okay. He said he didn’t know. I walked him to the corner. I stood there on the street looking at the moon. Later, feeling anxious, I went and got coffee. The moon had turned blood red.
When he finally returned he put his head on my shoulder and fell asleep. I didn’t confront him. Later he would reveal he had crossed a line. He had been with a fellow and not for money. I was able to give him some measure of acceptance. My armor still had its vulnerable points, and Robert, my knight, had pierced a few, though without desiring to do so.
He and I began to give each other more gifts. Small things we made or found in a dusty corner of a pawnshop window. Things no one else wanted. Crosses of braided hair, tarnished charms, and haiku valentines made with bits of ribbon and leather. We left notes, little cakes. Things. As if we could plug up the hole, rebuild the crumbling wall. Fill the wound we had opened to let other experiences in.
We hadn’t seen Pigman for a few days, but had heard his dog wailing. Robert called the police and they pried the door open. Pigman had died. Robert went in to identify the body, and they took Pigman and the dog away. The loft space at the back was twice as big. Though he felt terrible, Robert couldn’t help but covet it.
We were sure we would be kicked out of the studio, as we had no lease. Robert went to see the landlord and came clean about our presence there. The owner felt it would be difficult to rent because of the lingering smell of death and dog piss, and instead offered us the entire floor for thirty dollars less than our room at the Chelsea, and two months’ grace to clean and paint it. To appease the Pigman gods, I did a drawing called I saw a man, he was walking his dog, and when I finished it Robert seemed at peace with Pigman’s sad departure.
It was clear we could not afford to live at the Chelsea and also take the whole floor above the Oasis Bar. I didn’t really want to leave the Chelsea, its identification with poets and writers, Harry, and our bathroom in the hall. We talked about it a lot. I would have the smaller space in the front, and he would have the back. The money we saved would pay for the utilities. I knew it was a more practical thing to do, even an exciting prospect. We would both have the space to do our work and be close to one another. But it was also very sad, especially for me. I loved living in the hotel, and I knew when we left everything would change.
“What will happen to us?” I asked.
“There will always be us,” he answered.
Robert and I had not forgotten the vow that we had exchanged in the taxi from the Allerton to the Chelsea. It was clear we were not ready to go out on our own. “I will only be a door away,” he said.
We had to scrape together every cent. We needed to raise four hundred fifty dollars, a month’s rent and a month’s deposit. Robert disappeared more than usual, making twenty dollars here and there. I had written some record reviews and was now receiving stacks of free records. After reviewing the ones I liked, I took them all down to a place in the East Village called Freebeing. They paid a dollar a record, so if I had ten records it was a good score. I actually made more selling records than writing reviews. I was hardly prolific and usually wrote pieces centered on obscure artists like Patty Waters, Clifton Chenier, or Albert Ayler. I wasn’t interested in criticizing so much as alerting people to artists they may have overlooked. Between us both we came up with the money.
I loathed packing and cleaning. Robert willingly took on this burden himself, clearing out debris, scrubbing and painting just as he had done in Brooklyn. Meanwhile my time was divided between Scribner’s and La MaMa. At night, we’d meet up at Max’s after
my rehearsals. We now had the self-assurance to just plop down at the round table like veterans.
Femme Fatale previewed on May 4, the day the Kent State students were killed. No one talked much about politics at Max’s except the politics of the Factory. It was generally accepted the government was corrupt and that Vietnam was wrong, but the pall of Kent State hung over the production anyway and it wasn’t a very good night.
Things got better as the play officially opened, and Robert attended all the performances, often bringing his new friends. Among them was a girl named Tinkerbelle. She lived along Twenty-third Street at the London Terrace apartments, and she was a Factory girl. Robert was attracted to her lively wit, but despite her impish appearance she also possessed an extremely sharp tongue. I tolerated her barbs good-naturedly, figuring she was his version of Matthew.
It was Tinkerbelle who introduced us to David Croland. Physically David was a match for Robert, tall and slender with dark curly hair, pale skin, and deep brown eyes. He was from a good family, and had studied design at Pratt. In 1965 Andy Warhol and Susan Bottomly spotted him on the street and recruited him for films. Susan, who was known as International Velvet, was being groomed as the next Superstar, succeeding Edie Sedgwick. David had an intense affair with Susan, and when she left him in 1969 he fled to London, landing in a hotbed of film, fashion, and rock and roll.
The Scottish film director Donald Cammel took him under his wing. Cammel was at the center of this confluence of the London demimonde; he and Nicolas Roeg had just collaborated on the film Performance with Mick Jagger. As a top model at Boys Inc., David was confident and not easily intimidated. When he was chided for using his looks, he retorted, “I’m not using my looks. Other people are using my looks.”
He shifted from London to Paris and arrived back in New York in early May. He stayed with Tinkerbelle at London Terrace and she was eager to introduce us all. David was likable and respected us as a couple. He loved visiting our space, calling it our art factory, and showed genuine admiration when looking at our work.
Our life seemed easier with David in it. Robert enjoyed his company and liked that David appreciated his work. It was David who got him an early, important commission, a double-page spread in Esquire of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, their eyes masked in spray paint. Robert received three hundred dollars, more than he’d ever made at one time.
David drove a white Corvair with red interior and took us for spins around Central Park. It was the first time we had been in a car other than a taxi or my dad picking us up at the bus stop in New Jersey. David wasn’t rich but he was better off than Robert and was discreetly generous. He would take Robert out to eat and pick up the tab. Robert in turn gave him necklaces and small drawings. Theirs was a perfectly natural gravitation. David brought Robert into his world, a society he swiftly embraced.
They started spending more and more time together. I watched Robert get ready to go out as if he were a gentleman preparing for a hunt. He chose everything carefully. The colored handkerchief he would fold and tuck in his back pocket. His bracelet. His vest. And the long, slow method of combing his hair. He knew that I liked his hair a bit wild, and I knew he was not taming his curls for me.
Robert was blossoming socially. He was meeting people who crisscrossed the Factory lines, and he befriended the poet Gerard Malanga. Gerard had wielded a whip, dancing with the Velvet Underground, and exposed Robert to such places as the Pleasure Chest, a store that sold sex accessories. He also invited him to one of the most sophisticated literary salons in the city. Robert insisted that I go to one at the Dakota, at the apartment of Charles Henri Ford, who edited the highly influential magazine View, which introduced Surrealism to America.
I felt like I was at a relative’s for Sunday dinner. As various poets read interminable poems, I wondered if Ford wasn’t secretly wishing he were back in the salons of his youth, lorded over by Gertrude Stein and attended by the likes of Breton, Man Ray, and Djuna Barnes.
At one point in the evening he leaned over to Robert and said, “Your eyes are incredibly blue.” I thought that was pretty funny considering Robert’s eyes were famously green.
Robert’s adaptability in these social situations continued to amaze me. He had been so shy when we first met, and as he negotiated the challenging waters of Max’s, the Chelsea, the Factory, I watched him come into his own.
Our time at the Chelsea was ending. Though we would only be a few doors away from the hotel, I knew things would be different. I believed we would do more work but would lose a certain intimacy as well as our proximity to Dylan Thomas’s room. Someone else would take my station in the Chelsea lobby.
One of the last things I did at the Chelsea was to finish a present for Harry’s birthday. Alchemical Roll Call was an illustrated poem encoding the things that Harry and I had discussed about alchemy. The elevator was under repair so I climbed the stairs to room 705. Harry opened the door before I knocked, wearing a ski sweater in May. He was holding a carton of milk, as if he were about to pour it in the saucers of his eyes.
He examined my gift with great interest, then immediately filed it. This being an honor and a curse, for doubtless it would disappear forever into the immense labyrinth of his archive.
He decided to play something special, a rare peyote ritual he had taped years before. He tried to thread the tape, but was having trouble with his recorder, a Wollensak reel-to-reel. “This tape is more tangled than your hair,” he said impatiently. He stared at me for a moment and went rummaging through his drawers and boxes until he unearthed a silver-and-ivory hairbrush with long pale bristles. I immediately went for it. “Don’t touch that!” he scolded. Without a word he sat in his chair and I sat at his feet. In complete silence Harry proceeded to brush all of the knots out of my hair. I wondered if the brush had belonged to his mother.
Afterward he asked me if I had any money. “No,” I said, and he pretended to be mad. But I knew Harry. He just wanted to diffuse the intimacy of the moment. Whenever you had a beautiful moment with Harry he just had to turn it upside down.
On the last day of May, Robert had a gathering of his new friends in his side of the loft. He played Motown songs on our record player and seemed so happy. The loft was several times larger than our room. We even had room to dance.
After a while I left and went back to our old room at the Chelsea. I sat there and cried, then washed my face using our little sink. It was the first and only time that I felt I had sacrificed something of myself for Robert.
We fell into the pattern of our new life quickly. I stepped from square to square of the chessboard floor of our hallway just as I had in the Chelsea. At first we both slept in the small space as Robert got the larger space situated. The first night I finally slept alone, everything started out fine. Robert let me have the record player and I listened to Piaf and wrote, but I found I could not sleep. No matter what happened, we were used to sleeping in one another’s arms. About three in the morning I gathered my muslin sheet around me and lightly tapped on Robert’s door. He opened it immediately.
“Patti,” he said, “what took you so long?”
I strolled in, trying to appear nonchalant. He had obviously been working all night. I noticed a new drawing, the components for a new construction. A picture of me by his bed.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
“I had a nightmare, I couldn’t sleep. And I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Did you go to the Chelsea?”
“No,” I said, “I peed in an empty takeout cup.”
“Patti, no.”
It was a long walk to the Chelsea in the middle of the night if you really had to go.
“Come on, China,” he said, “get in here.”
Everything distracted me, but most of all myself. Robert would come over to my side of our loft and scold me. Without his arranging hand, I lived in a state of heightened chaos. I set the typewriter on an orange crate. The floor was littered with pages of onionskin filled with
half-written songs, meditations on the death of Mayakovsky, and ruminations about Bob Dylan. The room was strewn with records to review. The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic. I sat on the floor and tried to write and chopped my hair instead. The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.
I went home to visit my family. I had a lot of thinking to do about what direction I should be taking. I wondered if I was doing the right work. Was it all frivolity? It was the nagging sense of guilt I experienced performing on the night the Kent State students were shot. I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter.
My family sat around the table. My father read us Plato. My mother made meatball sandwiches. As always there was a sense of camaraderie at the family table. In the midst of it I received an unexpected call from Tinkerbelle. She told me abruptly that Robert and David were having an affair. “They’re together right now,” she said, somewhat triumphantly. I simply told her the call was unnecessary, and that I already knew.
I felt stunned as I hung up the phone, yet I had to wonder if she’d merely put into words what I had myself divined. I wasn’t sure why she called me. It wasn’t as if she was doing me a favor. We weren’t that close. I wondered if she was being mean-spirited, or merely a tattletale. There was also the possibility that she wasn’t telling the truth. On the bus ride home, I made the decision to say nothing and give Robert the opportunity to tell me on his own terms.
He had that flustered look, like when he flushed the Blake down the toilet at Brentano’s. He had been to Forty-second Street and saw an interesting new male magazine, but it cost fifteen dollars. He had the money but wanted to be sure it was worth it. As he slipped it out of the cellophane, the owner came back and caught him. He started yelling, demanding Robert pay for it. Robert got upset and threw it at him, and the guy went after him. He ran from the store into the subway and all the way home.
