The drugs that had dissolved both social and neuronal barriers seemed to have dissolved traditional value structures as well. The line blurred between the free-love ideals promoted by the East Village filmmakers and the pornography produced in and around Times Square. Warhol himself—never the same after the Solanas shooting—decided to call his next film Fuck; it would involve “pure fucking, nothing else, the way Eat had been just eating and Sleep had been just sleeping.” As it turned out, Viva, his irrepressible star, spent much more of her time onscreen talking, cooking, and taking showers than simulating sex in the film, which Warhol had to call Blue Movie for advertising purposes—but even so, it was seized as pornography when it debuted, and the Factory regulars who screened it were arrested.
And in the summer of 1969, Shaun Costello, a twenty-five-year-old from Queens with a day job at an ad agency and a nightlife as a Times Square sex performer, took a room at the Chelsea and began subletting it to pornography filmmakers for twenty-five dollars per shoot plus payment for his own participation, eventually inviting visitors such as Burroughs, Warhol, and Gerome Ragni to watch. The artists accepted his invitations, Costello claimed, and calmly applauded the performances, leaving with such comments as “Groovy,” “Thanks for the invite, man,” “Call if there’s a repeat performance,” and “Welcome to the Chelsea, Shaun. You’ll fit right in around here.”
Harry Smith summed up the mood with typical economy that year when, photographed for a piece in Life magazine, he looked directly into the camera and made devil’s horns with his fingers, indicating that the bill had arrived. Some, like Dylan before them, managed to slip out of the toxic atmosphere and move to relative safety: Leonard Cohen relocated to Nashville with nineteen-year-old Suzanne Elrod, a businessman’s mistress whom he’d met at a Scientology meeting; the Steinbergs quietly moved Chelsea House Publishers to the more respectable Fortieth Street; Arthur C. Clarke returned to Ceylon following the premiere of 2001; and the painter Brett Whiteley fled to Fiji in despair after his gallery refused to show the dystopian eighteen-panel triptych The American Dream on which he’d labored at the Chelsea for an entire year, convinced that the mere sight of it would compel Americans to withdraw from the Vietnam War.
As for Janis Joplin, the innocent years of making music for the joy of it had ended the day she signed with Grossman, who, following the completion of Cheap Thrills, convinced her to drop Big Brother. Undoubtedly, the musicians in her new band, Kozmic Blues, were more professional performers, but Joplin’s guilt over abandoning her former colleagues and the atmosphere of the superstar bubble in which she now lived prevented her from bonding with the group. The musicians felt demoralized by the business nature of the relationship. “The guys just didn’t feel they were part of anything,” one of them said. “There was too much of a money trip.”
Meanwhile, the pressure of having to satisfy the expectations of a major label led to more drinking. Joplin consumed so much Southern Comfort that the distiller presented her with a lynx coat in appreciation for her support. “Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years!” she said, hooting in delight. But the alcohol wore down her health, and as she began a series of grueling tours to support her album sales, she gave in to the temptation to self-medicate with Librium, tranquilizers, and smack. As Country Joe said, it was all part of what Joplin had once called the “Saturday night burn”—the realization that the high life you once dreamed of wasn’t as fun and exciting as you’d expected it to be. “She was always just a little Texas home girl in her heart,” McDonald recalled. Maybe being a star “just made her mad.”
In any case, the quality of Joplin’s performances grew unpredictable as she began to live the blues, not just sing them. When Rolling Stone dubbed her the Judy Garland of Rock and Roll, she half agreed, saying, “Maybe my audiences can enjoy my music more if they think I’m destroying myself.” At the Chelsea, she could generally be found causing a scene at El Quijote when she wasn’t hosting loud parties in her hotel room. Bob Neuwirth, who had gone to work for Grossman, became her sidekick in self-destruction just as he had been for Sedgwick a few years before. As Joplin’s physical appearance deteriorated from the effects of the drugs, she became increasingly desperate for affirmation from men—any man, many noted, as ghastly-looking junkies started hanging around her room along with the rest of her entourage.
As Arthur Miller wrote later, “It was thrilling to know that Virgil Thomson was writing his nasty music reviews on the top floor” and that the canvases hanging in the lobby were by Larry Rivers, most likely given as rent, but the Chelsea of 1969 was not the Chelsea he had first known. The year before, his gentle, self-effacing friend, the novelist Charles Jackson—one of Miller’s favorites at the hotel, with his shy smile and neat-as-a-pin suite—had taken a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. Another neighbor, the genteel Charles James, was sinking into severe dementia and had started wandering, a lost soul, through halls now frequented by strangers, many of whom, Miller suspected, were armed. It was no place for his daughter, that much was certain. And having resigned as president of PEN International, he no longer needed to be at the Chelsea to greet international guests. Years later, the actor Kevin O’Connor would describe the day he was riding the elevator down to the ground floor of the Chelsea when, typically, the elevator got stuck, and O’Connor realized that the man in the elevator with him was Arthur Miller. “And I said, ‘Ah, Mr. Miller, I’m in the theater too, Kevin O’Connor, an actor, director.’ And he said, ‘Ah, yes, I’ve heard of you.’ And I said, ‘I’m just moving in.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m just moving out. Good luck.’”
Something had changed—something fundamental. As the ad copy for Easy Rider said, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.” At the Chelsea, Florence Turner looked out her westward-facing window at the Leonardo da Vinci moving silently up the Hudson and thought of Ondine, who worked now as a mail carrier in Brooklyn, having left the Factory and stopped using amphetamines, and Valerie Solanas, sentenced to three years in prison, who told an interviewer regarding Warhol, “I just wanted him to pay attention to me; talking to him was like talking to a chair.” Turner thought of a story Gerard Malanga had told of the evening he was drinking an egg cream at the Gem Spa at St. Mark’s Place and spotted Edie Sedgwick standing on the corner, bathed in the neon glow of a sign out front. He ran out to say hello to her, and all the memories from the Factory came rushing over him, and the two felt an immediate rapport. “It seemed destined we would hang out the rest of the night,” Malanga wrote. “Together; alone, in some sense, with no particular place to go.” They hailed a cab, shot over to the Chelsea, and ascended to a room Edie had recently rented on the fifth floor. Clothes were strewn everywhere; the only light came from one small lamp. They smoked a joint and ended up in each other’s arms. The next morning, Malanga awoke, slipped quietly out of bed, dressed quickly, and took a last look at Edie, her face illuminated by the morning light sifting through the cracks in the window shade. It was the last time he would see her, he wrote, and the last time he would stay the night at the Chelsea Hotel.
Some might say that the Chelsea had ruined all of them. As Harry Smith had indicated, evil as well as good resided there. But “Where else could we go?” the residents asked one another. The answer was, as it had been for so many of the American Fourierist communitarians a century before, “Nowhere.” Too many of them felt in too many ways that there was “no life outside the Hotel.”
Arthur C. Clarke had long expressed the hope that the day man walked on the moon, enabling all of humanity to look on Earth from space and see that beautiful, blue undivided orb spinning around the sun, a feeling of global unity would finally prevail. Now, in July of 1969, Clarke returned to New York to join his friend Walter Cronkite in covering those first steps on the moon for his six hundred million fellow earthbound viewers.
At the Chelsea, the sex performer Shaun Costello served a tasty white-wine lunch for friends in his suite as they g
athered around the television. When it was mentioned onscreen that Armstrong had brought along a recording of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, no one in this mixed crowd of twentieth-century New Yorkers knew the significance the composition had had for the earlier generations who had inhabited the hotel’s rooms. Three-quarters of a century before, when the Czech composer exhorted Laura Sedgwick Collins to take her inspiration from the music of former field slaves, neither she nor her neighbors could have imagined that their immature nation would explode into a global power that not only reached around the planet but also established dominance in space. Nor could they have imagined that the descendants of those freed slaves would be burning down cities to draw attention to the tragedies of their lives. Landing on the moon? As Willem de Kooning remarked of the landing, “We haven’t landed on earth yet.”
The next day, July 21, a plane from Paris touched down at JFK International Airport, carrying among its passengers a twenty-two-year-old drifter named Patti Smith on her way home from a trip to Europe. A refugee from working-class New Jersey—where she had worked in a tricycle factory, given birth to a child she gave up for adoption—and finally fled to New York, the city of Dylan, Warhol, and, philosophically at least, Arthur Rimbaud—Smith had already spent two years in New York City and now looked forward to reuniting with her closest friend and sometime lover, the impoverished artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
“Everybody was talking about the moon,” she later wrote of her return to the garbage-strewn reality of New York City in 1969. “A man had walked upon it, but I hardly noticed.” She arrived at the borrowed loft on Delancey Street where Mapplethorpe was staying and found him in bad shape, with a high fever and a severe infection in his mouth. On that very first night as a reunited couple, the two were awakened before dawn by a series of gunshots and screams. Someone had been murdered outside their door, and when they ventured out later that day, they found the chalk outline of the victim’s body on the floor. Gathering up their artwork and clothes, they fled to the Hotel Allerton on Eighth Avenue—a rundown single-room-occupancy hotel populated by dying junkies. It was “the lowest point in our life together,” Smith wrote. The rooms reeked of urine, the pillows crawled with lice, and Mapplethorpe’s fever was so high that Smith feared he might die.
Salvation came in the form of a kind of angel, Smith continued: their neighbor across the hall—a former ballet dancer and now a toothless morphine addict wrapped in ragged chiffon—urged them to get out of the Allerton while they still could. He told Smith about the Chelsea Hotel, where people could sometimes get a room in exchange for art. To the lanky, dark-haired, frightened girl, the Chelsea sounded like a road to salvation. With no money to pay the bill at the Allerton, she had to sneak Mapplethorpe down the fire escape at dawn.
Patti Smith had never seen a place like the Chelsea Hotel lobby, where she deposited her friend in a chair against the wall beneath Larry Rivers’s Dutch Masters Cigars. With its carved fireplace and stained-glass transoms, the lobby exuded an aura of Victorian romance. Yet an extraordinarily ragtag parade of modern-day human beings of all varieties marched through on their way in and out of the hotel: longhaired musicians in vintage military jackets, elderly women in flowered hats, well-dressed stockbrokers, and pimps sporting enormous Afros, purple satin shirts, and bell-bottom pants.
The art on the walls, she noted snobbishly, looked like it came from a garage sale: a clear plastic disk covered with dust, a display of varnished breakfast leavings on a tabletop, an enormous canvas covered with gaudy tulips, and, hanging in the corner, a plexiglass shadowbox containing pieces of a shattered cello. If this was all it took to get a room, Smith reassured herself, surely Robert’s collages and the drawings she’d made in Paris would save them.
As she waited to be ushered into the manager’s office beyond the giant arched doors in the lobby’s west wall, a hunchbacked little man in a ragged jacket and black-framed spectacles suddenly materialized and began firing questions at her in a high, nasal twang, all the while exuding a not-unpleasant odor of tobacco, incense, marijuana, and Miller High Life beer. Did she have any money? Why did she wear that ribbon around her wrist? She and the boy with her looked like male and female versions of the same person. Were they twins? Would they like to come up and visit him later? At the moment, he was waiting for his friend Peggy Biderman to take him to lunch. Peggy was helping with his film, he told Patti. It was based on the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
Brecht? Patti knew that name. She had become obsessed with the composer when Robert Mapplethorpe introduced her to his work early in their friendship, two years before. She recited some lines from “Pirate Jenny,” her favorite number in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Smith stared at her in disbelief.
“That sealed things between us,” Patti Smith later wrote, “though he was a little disappointed we had no money. He followed me around the lobby saying, ‘Are you sure you’re not rich?’ ‘We Smiths are never rich,’ I said. He seemed taken aback. ‘Are you sure your name is really Smith?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and even surer that we’re related.’”
Years later, Stanley Bard would confess that he was nearly out of patience with this city full of young petitioners when Patti Smith entered his office, bravely announced that she and Robert would be famous one day, and insisted that it was in his best interest to accept some of Robert’s work as payment for a room. “He’s not very sick,” she insisted defensively. “Just trench mouth. He’ll be fine.” Smith noted that “Bard was skeptical,” but he gave her the benefit of the doubt. He looked through the portfolio and seemed unimpressed by Robert’s artwork. But as it turned out, Patti had something that was worth more than art in 1969—she had a job at Scribner’s Bookstore on Fifth Avenue that paid seventy dollars a week. “We shook hands,” Smith wrote, “and I palmed the key to Room 1017.” For fifty-five dollars a week, she had a room at the Chelsea Hotel. And here, unlike Paula, the nineteenth-century “wanderer of many names” whom she resembled closely, Patti Smith would find a home.
8
Naked Lunch
Jesus died for somebody’s sins
but not mine.
—PATTI SMITH, “Oath”
TO THE BELEAGUERED COUPLE who unlocked its door, the tiny chamber assigned to them wasn’t just a room. It was sanctuary, its interior as charged with possibility as Rimbaud’s Parisian atelier. Taking their first steps into the high-ceilinged space, sparsely furnished with a narrow bed, a chipped sink, and a brown bureau topped by an old TV, they sensed the lingering energy—the thought-forms, as Harry Smith would soon explain—of others who had washed up there and launched their own new lives in decades past. Patti and Robert dropped their belongings near the door, curled up together beneath the bed’s thin chenille bedspread, and slept.
In the days that followed, the two twenty-two-year-olds discovered how lucky they were to have found the Chelsea, as, intrigued by this oddly androgynous pair, some of the hotel’s senior members drew them under their collective wing. Harry Smith turned up early to prescribe saltwater rinses for Mapplethorpe’s infected mouth, launching into a discussion of salt’s alchemical significance as he demonstrated how to clear the brown water spewing into their sink. Peggy Biderman put Robert in touch with a resident doctor who treated him for the clap despite Patti’s confession that they couldn’t pay right away. Sandy Daley, the stately blond photographer-filmmaker who lived next door, invited the hungry couple for breakfast in her enormous studio. Robert was entranced by the sun-filled space, painted white and minimally furnished with a Japanese-style mattress on the floor and a few of Warhol’s helium-filled silver pillows floating in the air. Breakfast at Sandy’s became a daily ritual, with Robert and Sandy paging through photography books while Patti borrowed the shower to get ready for work.
It sometimes seemed to Patti that, aside from Biderman, who had a part-time job at the Museum of Modern Art’s bookshop, she was the only officially employed person in the entire hotel. But she liked he
r job at Scribner’s, which was housed in an exquisite Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue—an offspring of the Chelsea building, one might say, since it had been designed by Philip Hubert’s former apprentice Ernest Flagg. Walking to work, Smith got to know the used-record stores, thrift shops, and faded cafés along Twenty-Third Street. When she returned home, she lingered in the lobby to watch the parade of rock musicians, publicists, visiting Brits with their dogs off leash, and weekend dads with their kids in tow. Soon she was able to identify not only famous guests, such as members of the rock bands Canned Heat, Santana, and Three Dog Night, but also some of the nonfamous residents: plump, hearty Helen Johnson, an expert on the history of African-American theater, frequently seen with pianist Eubie Blake; Elizabeth Hawes, a Depression-era fashion designer who had given her gowns names like The Revolt of the Masses and Five-Year Plan; the moody, theatrical, Russian-born papier-mâché sculptress Eugenie Gershoy; and Eliot the junkie, known for running naked through the corridors upstairs.
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