by Patti Smith
I manically busied myself with small tasks, thinking of what to say, when, instead of calling him at home to speak of working together again, I had to phone him at a hospital. To pull myself together, I decided to first call Sam Wagstaff. Though I hadn’t talked to Sam in some years, it was as if no time had passed, and he was happy to hear from me. I asked after Robert. “He’s very sick, poor baby,” Sam said, “but he’s not as bad off as me.” This was another shock, especially because Sam, though older than us, was always the more virile one, immune to physical insult. In his typical Sam way, he said he found the disease that was mercilessly attacking him on all fronts “most annoying.”
Though I was heartbroken that Sam too was suffering, just hearing his voice gave me the courage to make the second call. When Robert answered the phone he sounded weak, but his voice strengthened as he heard the sound of mine. Even though so much time had passed, we were as we had always been, breathlessly finishing one another’s sentences. “I’m going to beat this thing,” he told me. I believed him with all my heart.
“I will see you soon,” I promised.
“You made my day, Patti,” he said as he hung up the phone. I can hear him saying that. I can hear it now.
As soon as Robert was well enough to leave the hospital, we made plans to meet. Fred packed up his guitars and we drove with our son, Jackson, from Detroit to New York City. We checked into the Mayflower Hotel and Robert came to greet us. He was wearing his long leather coat, and he looked extremely handsome though a bit flushed. He pulled my long braids, calling me Pocahontas. The energy between us was so intense that it seemed to atomize the room, manifesting an incandescence that was our own.
Robert and I went to see Sam, who was in the AIDS ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Sam of the hyperalert mind, glowing skin, and hard body lay there more or less helpless, slipping in and out of consciousness. He was suffering with carcinoma and his body was covered with sores. Robert reached to hold his hand and Sam drew it away. “Don’t be silly,” Robert admonished him, and gently took it in his. I sang Sam the lullaby that Fred and I had written for our son.
I walked with Robert to his new loft. He was no longer on Bond Street but lived in a spacious studio in an Art Deco building on Twenty-third Street, only two blocks from the Chelsea. He was optimistic and certain that he would survive, satisfied with his work, his success, and his possessions. “I did all right, didn’t I?” he said with pride. I panned the room with my eyes: an ivory Christ, a white marble figure of the sleeping Cupid; Stickley armchairs and cabinet; a collection of rare Gustavsberg vases. His desk, for me, was the crown of his possessions. Designed by Gio Ponti, it was crafted of blond burl walnut with a cantilevered writing surface. Compartments lined in zebra wood were outfitted like an altar with small talismans and fountain pens.
Above the desk was a gold-and-silver triptych with the photograph he had taken of me in 1973 for the cover of Wītt. He had chosen the one with the purest expression, reversing the negative and creating a mirror image, with a violet panel in the center. Violet had been our color, the color of the Persian necklace.
“Yes, “I said. “You did well.”
In the weeks to come, Robert photographed me several times. In one of our last sessions I wore my favorite black dress. He handed me a blue morpho butterfly mounted on a glass-headed dressmaker’s pin. He took a color Polaroid. Everything read black and white offset by the iridescent blue butterfly, a symbol of immortality.
As he always had been, Robert was excited to show me his new work. Large platinum prints on canvas, color dye transfers of spiking lilies. The image of Thomas and Dovanna, a nude black man in a dance-embrace with a woman in a white gown flanked by panels of white moiré satin. We stood before a work that had just arrived, in the frame he had designed: Thomas in an Olympic bend within a black circle, above a leopard skin panel. “It’s genius, isn’t it?” he said. The tone of his voice, the familiarity of the words of that particular exchange, took my breath away. “Yes, it’s genius.”
As I resumed the pattern of my daily life in Michigan, I found myself yearning for Robert’s presence; I missed us. The phone, which I normally shunned, became our lifeline and we spoke often, though at times the calls were dominated by Robert’s mounting cough. On my birthday he expressed concern for Sam.
On New Year’s Day, I called Sam. He had just received a blood transfusion and seemed remarkably self-assured. He said he felt transformed into a man who was going to make it. Ever the collector, he wished to return to Japan, where he and Robert had traveled, as there was a tea set in a cerulean lacquer box that he greatly coveted. He asked me to sing the lullaby to him again and I obliged.
Just as we were about to say goodbye, Sam gave me the gift of one more of his infamous stories. Knowing my affection for the great sculptor, he said, “Peggy Guggenheim once told me that when you made love with Brancusi, you absolutely were not allowed to touch his beard.”
“I’ll remember that,” I replied, “when I bump into him in heaven.”
On the fourteenth of January, I received a distraught call from Robert. Sam, his sturdy love and patron, had died. They had weathered painful shifts in their relationship, and also the critical tongues and envy of others, but they could not stem the tide of the terrible fortune that befell them. Robert was devastated by the loss of Sam, the bulwark of his life.
Sam’s death also cast a shadow on Robert’s hopes for his own recovery. To comfort him I wrote the lyrics and Fred the music to “Paths That Cross,” a sort of Sufi song in memory of Sam. Though Robert was grateful for the song, I knew one day I might seek out these same words for myself. Paths that cross will cross again.
We returned to New York on Valentine’s Day. Robert was occasionally feverish and experiencing recurring stomach disorders, yet he was extremely active.
I spent much of the following days recording with Fred at the Hit Factory. We were on a tight schedule as my pregnancy was becoming more pronounced, and it was getting difficult to sing. I was due at the studio when Robert called in great distress to tell me that Andy Warhol was dead.
“He wasn’t supposed to die,” he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.
Neither are you.
Neither am I.
We didn’t say anything. We hung up reluctantly.
It was snowing as I passed a churchyard closed with an iron gate. I noticed I was praying to the beat of my feet. I hurried on. It was a beautiful evening. The snow, which had been falling lightly, now fell with great force. I wrapped my coat about me. I was in my fifth month and the baby moved inside me.
It was warm and glowing in the studio. Richard Sohl, my beloved pianist, left his post to make me coffee. The musicians assembled. It was our last night in New York until the baby came. Fred spoke a few words concerning Warhol’s passing. We recorded “Up There Down There.” In the center of the performance I held the image of a trumpeter swan, the swan of my childhood.
I slipped outside into the night. The snow had ceased falling and it seemed like the whole of the city, in remembrance of Andy, had been covered in an undisturbed layer of snow—white and fleeting as Warhol’s hair.
We were all reunited in Los Angeles. Robert, who was visiting his youngest brother, Edward, decided to shoot the cover there, while Fred and I worked to complete the album with our co-producer, Jimmy Iovine.
Robert was pale and his hands shook as he set up to take the portrait before a cluster of drying palms in the full sun. When he dropped his light meter, Edward knelt to pick it up. Robert was not feeling well, but somehow he marshaled his energies and took the picture. Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.
It was a simple photograph. My hair is braided like Frida Kahlo’s. The sun is in my eyes. And I am looking at Robert and he is alive.
Later
that evening, Robert attended the recording of the lullaby Fred and I had written for our son, Jackson. It was the song I had sung to Sam Wagstaff. There was a nod to Robert in the second verse: Little blue star that offers light. He sat on a couch in the control room. I would always remember the date. It was the nineteenth of March, the birthday of my mother.
Richard Sohl was at the piano. I was facing him. We were recording it live. The baby moved within me. Richard asked Fred if he had any special orders. “Make them cry, Richard,” was all he said. We had one false start, then put everything we had into the second take. As I finished, Richard repeated the final chords. I looked through the glass window into the control room. Robert had fallen asleep on the couch and Fred was standing alone, weeping.
On June 27, 1987, our daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, was born in Detroit. A double rainbow appeared in the sky and I felt optimistic. On All Souls’ Day, ready to finish our postponed album, we once again packed up the car and with our two children drove to New York. On the long drive, I thought of seeing Robert and pictured him holding my daughter.
Robert was celebrating his forty-first birthday in his loft with champagne, caviar, and white orchids. That morning I sat at the desk in the Mayflower Hotel and wrote him the song “Wild Leaves,” but I did not give it to him. Though I was trying to write him an immortal lyric, it seemed all too mortal.
Some days later, Robert photographed me wearing Fred’s flight jacket for the cover of our projected single, “People Have the Power.” When Fred looked at the photograph, he said, “I don’t know how he does it, but all his photographs of you look like him.”
Robert was eager to take our family portrait. On the afternoon we arrived, he was well dressed and gracious, though he often left the room, overtaken by a wave of nausea. I watched helplessly as he, always stoic, minimized his suffering.
He only took a handful of photographs, but then again, that’s all he ever needed. Animated portraits of Jackson, Fred, and me together, the four of us, and then, right before we left, he stopped us. “Wait a minute. Let me take one of you and Jesse.”
I held Jesse in my arms, and she reached out to him, smiling. “Patti,” he said, pressing the shutter. “She’s perfect.”
It was our last photograph.
On the surface, Robert seemed to have everything he had wished for. One afternoon we sat in his loft, surrounded by the proofs of his burgeoning success. The perfect studio, exquisite possessions, and the resources to realize anything he envisioned. He was now a man; yet in his presence I still felt like a girl. He gave me a length of Indian linen, a notebook, and a papier-mâché crow. The small things he had gathered during our long separation. We tried to fill in the spaces: “I played Tim Hardin songs for my lovers and told them of you. I took photographs for a translation of Season in Hell for you.” I told him he had always been with me, part of who I am, just as he is at this moment.
Ever the protector, he promised, as he once did in our own portion of Twenty-third Street, that if need be we could share a real home. “If anything happens to Fred, please don’t worry. I’m getting a town house, a brownstone like Warhol had. You can come live with me. I’ll help you raise the kids.”
“Nothing will happen to Fred,” I assured him. He just looked away.
“We never had any children,” he said ruefully.
“Our work was our children.”
I no longer remember the exact chronology of those last months. I stopped keeping a diary, perhaps losing heart. Fred and I drove back and forth from Detroit to New York, for our work and for Robert. He was rallying. He was working. He was in the hospital again. And eventually his loft became his sick bay.
Parting was always wrenching. I felt haunted by the idea that if I stayed with him he would live. Yet I also struggled with a mounting sense of resignation. I was ashamed of that, for Robert had fought as if he could be cured by his will alone. He had tried everything from science to voodoo, everything but prayer. That, at least, I could give him in abundance. I prayed ceaselessly for him, a desperate human prayer. Not for his life, no one could take that cup from him, but for the strength to endure the unendurable.
In mid-February, driven by a sense of urgency, we flew to New York. I went to see Robert by myself. It seemed so quiet. I realized it was the absence of his terrible cough. I lingered by his empty wheelchair. Lynn Davis’s image of an iceberg, rising like a torso turned by nature, dominated the wall. He had a white cat, a white snake, and there was a brochure of white stereo systems lying on the white table he had designed. I noticed he had added a white square in the blackness surrounding his image of a sleeping Cupid.
There was no one present save his nurse and she left us to ourselves. I stood by his bed and took his hand. We stayed like that for a long time, not saying anything. Suddenly he looked up and said, “Patti, did art get us?”
I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.”
Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint. Robert beckoned me to help him stand, and he faltered. “Patti,” he said, “I’m dying. It’s so painful.”
He looked at me, his look of love and reproach. My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die. He was suffering physical torment no man should endure. He looked at me with such deep apology that it was unbearable and I burst into tears. He admonished me for that, but he put his arms around me. I tried to brighten, but it was too late. I had nothing more to give him but love. I helped him to the couch. Mercifully, he did not cough, and he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder.
The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.
Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let go.
The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.
Patti
HE WOULD BE A SMOTHERING CLOAK, A VELVET PETAL. It was not the thought but the shape of the thought that tormented him. It entered him like a horrific spirit and caused his heart to pound so hard, so irregularly, that his skin vibrated and he felt as if he were beneath a lurid mask, sensual yet suffocating.
I thought I would be with him when he died, but I was not. I followed the stages of his passage until close to eleven, when I heard him for the last time, breathing with such force that it obscured the voice of his brother on the phone. For some reason, this sound filled me with a strange happiness as I climbed the stairs to go to sleep. He is still alive, I was thinking. He is still alive.
Robert died on March 9, 1989. When his brother called me in the morning, I was calm, for I knew it was coming, almost to the hour. I sat and listened to the aria from Tosca with an open book on my knees. Suddenly I realized I was shuddering. I was overwhelmed by a sense of excitement, acceleration, as if, because of the closeness I experienced with Robert, I was to be privy to his new adventure, the miracle of his death.
This wild sensation stayed with me for some days. I was certain it couldn’t be detected. But perhaps my grief was more apparent than I knew, f
or my husband packed us all up and we drove south. We found a motel by the sea and camped there for the Easter holiday. Up and down the deserted beach I walked in my black wind coat. I felt within its asymmetrical roomy folds like a princess or a monk. I know Robert would have appreciated this picture: a white sky, a gray sea, and this singular black coat.
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert’s hand.
Words came and then a melody. I carried my moccasins and waded the water’s edge. I had transfigured the twisted aspects of my grief and spread them out as a shining cloth, a memorial song for Robert.
Little emerald bird wants to fly away.
If I cup my hand, could I make him stay?
Little emerald soul, little emerald eye.
Little emerald bird, must we say goodbye?
In the distance I heard a call, the voices of my children. They ran toward me. In this stretch of timelessness, I stopped. I suddenly saw him, his green eyes, his dark locks. I heard his voice above the gulls, the childish laughter, and the roar of the waves.
Smile for me, Patti, as I am smiling for you.
After Robert died, I agonized over his belongings, some of which had once been ours. I dreamed of his slippers. He wore them at the end of his life, black Belgian slippers with his initials stitched in burnished gold. I agonized over his desk and chair. They would be auctioned off with his other valuables at Christie’s. I lay awake thinking of them, so obsessed I became ill. I could have bid on them but I couldn’t bear to; his desk and chair passed to strange hands. I kept thinking of something Robert would say when he was obsessed with something he couldn’t have. “I’m a selfish bastard. If I can’t have it I don’t want anyone else to.”
