Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel

by Sherill Tippins

Yet another new neighbor was Jacques Stern, a highly eccentric patron of the Beats since that group’s Paris years; Stern considered Smith and Burroughs “the great geniuses” of their age and had plans to promote their work. Unfortunately, though, the would-be benefactor was heavily addicted to both alcohol and cocaine, which caused almost daily fits of rage that ended with his smashing up his seventh-floor room. Stern’s worst tantrum occurred the day he discovered that a fifteenth-century alchemical manuscript in his possession had been stolen, presumably by one of the magicians in the hotel. This led to an all-out war. Miles was amazed to see rival wizards conducting magical battles in the lobby, “frantically twisting their fingers into obscure mudras and snarling at each other,” oblivious to the tourists trying to check in.

  Many of the more proper Chelsea Hotel residents were appalled by these goings-on, and some complained directly to Stanley. But Patti Smith was among those energized by them. In early 1971, she paid close attention when Ginsberg (whom she had first met at the nearby Automat when he tried to pick her up, thinking she was a boy) lost his composure over the National Book Award committee’s decision to give its poetry prize to Mona Van Duyn, whose work he condescendingly called “well groomed,” instead of to one of America’s underappreciated “geniuses,” like his friends Corso, Philip Lamantia, or Michael McClure. Ginsberg fired off a letter of outrage to the committee’s members, subsequently published in the New York Times, expressing his profound grief for the next generation of “revolutionarily sensitive-minded youthful readers” who would never be inspired by such “packaged” verse and might never discover the poetry of ecstasy, the “prophetic” poetry needed more desperately now than ever.

  Ginsberg’s pleas were ignored by the committee. But his call for a living poetry reached the ears of many young poets—several of them female, including Patti Smith—and gave them the courage to work toward expressing their own truths. Rimbaud had written, “When the endless servitude of woman is finally shattered, when she comes to live by and for herself . . . she too will be a poet!” And delving into her own mind, drawing on her own ideas, “she will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things.” Smith and her peers were embarking on just such a life.

  The previous October, Patti’s new friend Todd Rundgren had taken her to see the Holy Modal Rounders perform at the Village Gate. She had fallen hard for the band’s good-looking drummer, with his strong jaw and a “cowboy mouth” like the one Dylan mentioned in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” After the show, she asked him for an interview. The drummer told her his name was Slim Shadow, and they started hanging out together, taking walks in the Chelsea neighborhood. His tales were even taller than hers, and, amused rather than shocked the day he caught her with a couple of steaks stolen from Gristedes, he encouraged her outlaw tendencies.

  It was only after they’d become a couple that Patti learned that Slim’s real name was Sam Shepard—a well-regarded downtown playwright, a former student of Arnold Weinstein’s at Yale, and the winner of multiple Obies, with a wife and a newborn child at home. In the spirit of the times, however, Shepard felt free to invite Patti into the seventh-floor room with a balcony that he rented at the Chelsea, where she sometimes slept over, grateful for the chance to use his shower, as well as his typewriter, whenever she liked.

  With Sam, Patti felt empowered; she felt like herself. They passed long evenings in bed together, reading books and talking about their lives, and his empathy gave her the added confidence she needed to experiment with her writing. This confidence also allowed her to accept Sandy’s offer to create a voice-over commentary for the silent film of Robert’s piercing ritual, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, to further the filmmaker’s hope that she could wrangle a screening for it somewhere.

  After borrowing Miles’s high-quality tape recorder, Sandy again assembled a few friends for the occasion. As the group watched the moving images of Robert kissing his male lover, Patti launched into a goofy stream-of-consciousness rant on the topics of homosexuality, the clap, her love life, the beatings her mother used to give her, her father’s kindness in saving the pubic hair that was shaved off when she gave birth, and so on—all rattled off in a high-pitched, girlish, South Jersey accent that she claimed to have lost once she was “sophisticated . . . ’cause I’m livin’ in New York.” Watching the footage of Dr. Krohn setting out his surgical gauze and tweezers while Robert smoked and David languidly examined his nails, Patti commented, “I knew that as soon as Robert got those black leather pants, he’d be down on Christopher Street. Look what it got me,” which made the others laugh. As the doctor pierced Robert’s skin and David kissed him deeply, she told of the time Jim Carroll gave her crabs. As David languidly studied his reflection in a hand mirror, a rose dangling from his hand, Patti chattered about the day she cut her hair and shaved off her eyebrows, concluding, “I ain’t no fashion queen . . . I liked it ’cause I looked like a rabbit.”

  The more Patti performed, the more she enjoyed it. Inspired by Shepard, she wrote a poem for him— “Ballad of a Bad Boy,” full of the swagger and rhythm of rock—and when Mapplethorpe heard it, he arranged with Gerard Malanga for Patti to open for him at St. Mark’s Church in February. Smith agreed to the plan: it would be her first “official” public reading, and she was determined to make her mark—to “be aggressive,” as Rundgren advised. Sam suggested she add music, so she tracked down Lenny Kaye, a rock critic and guitar player she’d recently met at a record store downtown.

  The night of the reading, Patti was excited to find a full audience, thanks to Malanga. Lou Reed, Rene Ricard, Brigid Berlin, and Warhol and his entourage were all present, as were Lenny Kaye’s friends, many denizens of the Chelsea, Ginsberg, Corso, Mapplethorpe, and of course Sam Shepard, hanging over the balcony rail. By the time Anne Waldman introduced her and Lenny Kaye, Patti later wrote, “I was totally wired.” When she first took the stage, it looked to many as though some amateur, a nobody, had wandered in off the street and dared to put herself on the stage. But then she let loose, first dedicating the evening to “criminals from Cain to Genet” and then calling out, “Christ died for somebody’s sins / But not mine,” lines she’d written “as a declaration of existence, a vow to take responsibility for my own actions,” she later explained. As she continued through “Fire of Unknown Origin,” “The Devil Has a Hangnail,” and other poems, moving her body to Kaye’s strong rhythmic chords—the first time an electric guitar had ever been played in St. Mark’s—she brought forth in the audience “something primal yet ancient beyond comprehension,” one observer recalled. “She wasn’t male, she wasn’t female, she wasn’t writer and she wasn’t musician . . . She was her, and what we were hearing was a voice like none other . . . I don’t remember a thing she said, but it didn’t matter.”

  The performance served as an exhilarating breakthrough for Patti Smith, revealing a part of herself that even she hadn’t known was there and confirming her belief that eliciting a response from an audience was something she had been born to do. Soon, she was besieged with offers to perform readings in London and Philadelphia and to publish her poems in Creem magazine and in a chapbook to be produced by Philadelphia’s Middle Earth Press. Johnny Winter’s manager, Steve Paul, even talked about a record contract, though she didn’t feel ready to pursue that yet.

  Patti’s was just one of the new voices in a rising female chorus in New York that year. At an April 30 Town Hall panel discussion on women’s liberation, Germaine Greer, the “glamorous and razor-tongued” author of the newly published Female Eunuch, sparred with the Prisoner of Sex author Norman Mailer, with backup from the literary critic Diana Trilling and the Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston. The debate, performed in front of a standing-room-only audience of New York literati, feminists, intellectuals, lesbians, and liberals, and filmed by D. A. Pennebaker, devolved into a knockdown fracas that ended with Johnston proclaiming, “Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolutions,” and making out
with several women onstage as audience members roared their approval or disdain.

  Throughout that year, 1971, a wave of female artists, schoolteachers, filmmakers, political activists, and feminists arrived to join Florence Turner, Belle Gardner, Mildred Baker, Helen Johnson, Judith Childs, Eugenie Gershoy, and the rest of the phalanx of queenly women whose presence had begun to dominate the hotel. Stella Waitzkin, a part-time abstract expressionist and housewife from Riverdale, divorced her salesman husband to live the bohemian life at the Chelsea, inviting such creative friends as de Kooning, Corso, Ginsberg, Larry Rivers, and even Arthur Miller to share drinks and conversation in her spacious fourth-floor suite. Waitzkin, wiry-haired, wildly imaginative, and deeply feminine, turned her Chelsea home into an artwork in progress, covering the walls with shelves full of faux books made of resin cooked up in the hotel basement. The mysterious glasslike shapes, some transparent, others opaque, transformed her apartment into a glistening dream. It was the perfect environment for pot-fueled, poetry-and-art-filled evenings, such as the one in which she dreamily informed Ginsberg that “words are no longer sufficient to say what needs to be said,” that “only images will work now,” just as one of the young guests suddenly looked ill, and Ginsberg, wanting to spare Stella’s floor, held out his backpack full of handwritten poems for the girl to throw up into.

  Waitzkin, haunting the corridors with her gentle smile and trailing gowns, shared an interest in witchcraft with another new arrival to the hotel: Juliette Hamelcourt, a former lady in waiting to Belgium’s Queen Astrid who had fled Nazi-occupied France for New York in 1941. Well-born and convent-educated, Hamelcourt had been trained in the art of tapestry weaving. For the past decade, she had lived in Haiti as a representative of the World Craft Council, teaching needlework and helping the local craftswomen sell their work. In the process, she had become immersed in the voodoo tradition, which influenced her work as well as her conversation when she returned to the States. Now divorced but still close to the three grown children she had raised in suburban Purchase, New York, Hamelcourt added an element of elegance and charm to the Chelsea, entertaining her friends with haute cuisine dinners, flirting with the men, taking lovers as the mood struck her, confiding to her female friends in the tone of someone setting the proper example, “I put perfume under my buttocks,” and churning out one stunning tapestry after another at the long table in her studio when not repairing the medieval tapestries from the city’s Cloisters museum.

  At 5:30, the cocktail hour, one saw these women surfacing like butterflies and flitting through the corridors in their flowing gowns. Gathering together, the older women consulted the I Ching and astrological charts, while the younger women met at El Quijote to talk politics with such newcomers as Angela Davis’s sister Fania and Iris Owens, one of Girodias’s intellectual “dirty book” authors from back in the Paris days, and to laugh at the shocked look on the waiters’ faces when Viva, who had just given birth to her daughter Alexandra, casually nursed the infant at the table, exclaiming as she positioned her breast, “Look at that beautiful, white blue-veined globe!”

  The Chelsea’s reputation as a haven for women prompted Tennessee Williams to include it that year in his short story “Happy August the Tenth,” in which one member of a female couple engaged in a miserable spat threatens to relocate to the Chelsea Hotel. Coincidentally, a woman whose “odd, fugitive beauty” had partially inspired another of Williams’s fictional characters—Carol Cutrere in Orpheus Descending—had actually moved into the Chelsea that spring.

  Patti Smith could hardly believe her eyes the day she saw Vali Myers in the lobby of the hotel. This woman, with her orange-red hair, her blazing, blue-green, heavily kohl-rimmed eyes, her body draped in layers of vivid fabrics and colored beads, nearly always a pet rabbit or fox in her arms or on her shoulder, could never be mistaken for anyone but herself. As the woman came closer, Patti recognized her as the girl on the cover of Love on the Left Bank, a book of mid-1950s photographs of Paris nightlife that Patti had first discovered years before at a bookstall in Philadelphia. Smith had never forgotten those black-and-white images of a beautiful teenage girl dancing on the streets of the Latin Quarter. George Plimpton, of the Paris Review, was fascinated by her too, in those days, and it was in Paris that Vali had met Tennessee Williams.

  Vali, now forty, had led a hermit’s existence in recent years in a beautiful hidden valley near Positano, Italy, in a home so tiny it was more like a burrow than a house. There, she tended the animals she loved and worked by gaslight on highly detailed ink drawings, their complex designs almost Aboriginal in style, calling to mind the artist’s childhood in Australia. Over time, she had turned her own body into a work of art, etching lacelike tattoos on the backs of her hands and later, with the help of a new Italian lover, adding swirls and dots around her mouth, eyes, and cheeks so that her face resembled that of a fox, the creature with which she most closely identified.

  Even in Positano, money was required to keep the animals fed, so Vali had traveled to New York the previous year to try to sell enough artwork to support her household. Staying with friends, she had quickly connected with an avant-garde crowd. Through the poet and filmmaker Ira Cohen, she’d met a number of art collectors, and it was Andy Warhol who taught her to hold on to her original work and make and sell reproductions instead. At a star-studded cocktail party at George Plimpton’s Upper East Side home, she met Julie Christie and Warren Beatty. More exciting, though, was the contretemps at Elaine’s restaurant later that night when Vali’s new friend Holly Woodlawn decked a man for calling Vali a “freak” and got the two of them tossed out on their ears.

  Vali had enjoyed her stay in New York so much that she returned in the spring of 1971, this time moving into the Chelsea with a friend who was willing to pay the rent. Soon after her arrival, she was sitting in El Quijote with Gregory Corso when Abbie Hoffman wandered in and stopped in his tracks at the sight of her.

  It made sense that these two wild spirits would be attracted to each other. Abbie soon learned that this woman who preferred to eat with her fingers and whose hair never saw a comb was a mesmerizing storyteller with a gift for laughter and debate that nearly matched his own. Hoffman teased her about her passion for animals (“You should be worried about people!” he admonished), but his kind efforts to promote Vali’s work and his success in getting her an advance from an art-book publisher made them friends for life. Soon, he moved Vali’s friend out of their room at the Chelsea and started paying for it himself, since Vali refused to move into his home with Anita, who was pregnant at the time. They spent many pleasurable evenings at the hotel; it was an honor to live in a place like this, Vali acknowledged. Besides, “Who else would have us now? We don’t have, you know, like normal lives . . . And Stanley’s okay, he puts up with it, you know.”

  Patti was impressed by Vali Myers’s joyful outlook and was inspired by her courage in allowing her pagan spirit to shine through. Plimpton’s 1958 description of her, that she had the ability to express “something torn and loose and deep down primitive in all of us,” remained true. As it happened, Smith had been reading a biography of Crazy Horse at the time she met Vali. She had learned from the book that Indian warriors tattooed lightning bolts on their horses’ ears to remind themselves while riding into battle that they should never pause to take spoils from the battlefield, lest they be defeated. Summoning her own courage, Patti asked Vali to give her a tattoo. Myers, who considered it a kind of spiritual gift to be bestowed only on those people she deemed very special, thought for a moment, and then agreed. Over the next few days, they arranged for her to tattoo Patti’s knee in Sandy Daley’s room and for Sandy to film it, with Sam Shepard present, in a ritual similar to Robert’s piercing. As the camera ran on the appointed day, Vali dipped a sterilized needle into a well of indigo ink and, while Patti sat stoically, stabbed the lightning bolt into her knee. When Sam asked for a tattoo as well, Vali obligingly decorated the skin between his thumb and forefinger with
a crescent moon.

  Before the end of the year, Sandy would manage to persuade the Museum of Modern Art to screen her paired films of Robert’s nipple piercing and Patti’s tattoo. At the MoMA show, an audience packed with critics as well as Chelsea residents and other friends would watch Robert’s coming-out film with Patti’s monologue on the soundtrack, after which Patti narrated the tattoo film live. The audience howled with laughter over Patti’s monologue, which, in its innocent vulgarity, touched a new energy rising in the city: the energy derived from a liberated, empowered life in a diverse environment, the type of life percolating inside the Chelsea Hotel.

  The image of Sam Shepard on film as co-recipient of a tattoo was somewhat poignant, as he and Patti had parted ways in April of that year. Early that spring month, Sam had bought Patti a better guitar—a battered black Depression-era Gibson that she named Bo. With it, she had written her first song for Sam, knowing it was nearly time for him to leave. This understanding between them may also have prompted Sam’s suggestion that they write a play together just for fun. Sam offered to start. He hoisted his typewriter onto the bed and hammered out a description of the set: a re-creation of Patti’s room above the Oasis, with “hubcaps, an old tire, raggedy costumes, a boxful of ribbons, lots of letters, a pink telephone,” and other debris scattered around a “fucked-up bed center stage.” Explaining that this assemblage was a metaphorical setting signifying artistic escape, he identified the male lead as Slim Shadow, “by nature, a cowboy,” who “does not want to be here in this cramped squalor, where only an emblematic representation of cowboy life is possible.” Then he pushed the typewriter over to Patti, who invented a female lead: Cavale, a criminal who kidnaps Slim at gunpoint and imprisons him in her lair.

  Over the next few nights, they built their story, which revolved around the tough-talking Cavale’s efforts to bully Slim into becoming a cultural savior—America’s new “rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth”—and Slim’s ambivalence as he wavers between a desire to please her and a refusal to be confined to a single role. Only at the end of the play does Cavale realize that she herself can become the savior she longs for if she will only open her heart, feel the movement, and sing.