Patti Smith: fragile wild child

Punk legend, free spirit, artist’s muse… but also a romantic, a mother and a wife. Patti Smith has always been hard to define.

The Godmother of Punk Rock

In 1979, American singer-songwriter Patti Smith was at the height of her fame. She was producing successful records with her Patti Smith Group, touring the US and Europe, and had just scored a big hit with ‘Because the Night’, a song she wrote with fellow American musician Bruce Springsteen. She thought of it as too commercial, but still, it paid for her fur coat.

She was also subject to criticism. Had The Godmother of Punk Rock, as Patti was called, sold out? Why was the woman who was always so high-minded about the ‘revolutionary spirit of rock and roll’ now writing sing-along anthems about the night belonging to lovers? The criticism was partly justified: Patti saw herself as an artist, but also enjoyed getting recognition from the public at large.

At a party held for her by her record company three years earlier in 1976, she met American guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. ‘The first night we met, he appeared onstage with us, and I could tell by the way he played what kind of a person he was—better than me, stronger than me,’ she is quoted saying in Mapplethorpe, a biography of her friend American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, written by Patricia Morrisroe. Initially, Patti was in another relationship and they were having a secret affair, but resistance was futile. Fred was the man of her life: ‘She is addicted to thee’.

During a European tour, Patti was clearly unhappy. In front of an audience of 80,000 people in Florence, Italy, she managed to pull herself together, but after that successful concert she announced to the bewilderment of her band that it was finished, she was quitting. In March 1980, Patti married Fred and moved in with him to a suburb of Detroit, in the US.

The childhood of Patti Smith

In Just Kids, her moving memoir about her relationship with Robert and life in the 1970s, Patti describes how it all started: ‘I was born on a Monday, in the North Side of Chicago during the Great Blizzard of 1946. I came along a day too soon, as babies born on New Year’s Eve left the hospital with a new refrigerator.’

She was the eldest of four children in a not very prosperous family; mother Beverly was a waitress, father Grant worked in a factory. They moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, and later settled permanently in a small town in New Jersey.

The Smiths were a somewhat eccentric family. Grant would study books about UFOs for hours, while Beverly raised the children as Jehovah’s Witnesses and sent them to knock on doors.

It all had a considerable effect on Patti’s already overactive imagination. She was a dreamy, sickly child who didn’t feel like a girl, made up stories and was besotted with 19th-century books and authors.

After highschool

After completing high school, Patti went to college to study to become an art teacher. She worked in a factory to pay for her studies, but that ended when she became pregnant at the age of nineteen. After a difficult labor, she gave birth to a girl, who she immediately gave up for adoption. ‘My child was born on the anniversary of the bombing of Guernica,’ she writes in Just Kids. ‘I remember thinking of the painting, a weeping mother holding her dead child. Although my arms would be empty and I wept, my child would live, was healthy and would be well cared for. I trusted and believed that with all my heart.’

This experience fed Patti’s determination. She was not going back to school or to the factory. From now  on she was going to dedicate her life to art. She had just enough money to afford a bus ticket to New York, where she tried to find a job and slept in parking garages and subway stations. It was 1967, the Summer of Love; ‘Everything awaited me,’ she writes.

Patti and Robert

On her first day in New York, Patti ran into her soul mate: Robert Mapplethorpe. After that first chance encounter, they got together for real a few weeks later. Patti had accepted a dinner invitation from an older man because she was hungry, but after dinner they were sitting in a park and she was having second thoughts. At that moment, Robert passed by. She jumped into his arms, waved her date goodbye, and walked off with him. From that moment on, they were inseparable (‘She is connecting with he’).

Robert and Patti were the same age, he was an artist too, and he was also struggling with his sexuality. They shared theatrical clothes and told each other their romantic dreams of fabulous success. They sketched, they wrote poetry, he made installations, they lived from what she earned in a bookstore, and from the air. ‘Robert fretted over not being able to provide for us,’ she writes. ‘I told him not to worry, that committing to great art is its own reward.’ She gave him self-confidence; he confirmed her as an artist. Patti recommended he take photographs; Robert suggested  she sing her poems.

After a year, Patti noticed that Robert was starting to shut himself off from her. She, in turn, started to look around. Robert begged her to stay with him, because, he said, ‘Otherwise I’ll be with a guy. I’ll turn homosexual’. She was totally shocked. ‘There was nothing in our relationship that had prepared me for such a revelation,’ writes Patti. ‘All of the signs that he had obliquely imparted I had interpreted as the evolution of his art. Not of his self.’ In the end they had different needs. ‘I needed to explore beyond myself and Robert needed to search within himself,’ she writes. They lived among the bohemians at the famous Chelsea Hotel, but from that moment on their relationship was platonic. Robert did take up photography and Patti was his first model. And Robert finally embraced his homosexuality (and how) in 1972.

Patti’s first performance: reading poetry

Encouraged by Robert and her new lover, American playwright and actor Sam Shepard, Patti gave her first performance on February 10, 1971, at St. Mark’s Church,  a hotspot for avant-garde performances. She read her poetry, accompanied by a friend on electric guitar, and the art-loving audience hung on her every word.

From that moment, things moved quickly. She started performing more frequently, published a collection of poems and when writing was no longer ‘physical’ enough she started making music, too—her own particular mixture of punk and poetry. Only when she was granted complete artistic freedom did she agree to make a record in 1975: Horses. The album was legendary because of the music—the first song is a cover of Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, with Patti’s adaptation: ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’—as much as for the cover photography by Robert. Patti posed in a white shirt with a black jacket slung over her shoulder, ‘Frank Sinatra style’ as she put it, looking androgynous and sexy.

No more music

In her love life, Patti struggled with the two sides of her romantic soul: the ‘masculine’ active, aggressive, rebellious side and the ‘feminine’ passive side. For the latter, she was inspired by the biographies she read. The lover of Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, for example, was a Frenchwoman who lived entirely for Modigliani and threw herself out of a window two days after his death. She was one of Patti’s biggest role models.

From the moment Fred appeared in Patti’s life, her feminine side was given free rein (‘Could it be he’s taking over me’). She stopped making music. ‘I resumed the life of a citizen.’ Everyone wondered: Why? ‘I had met the person I loved […] and I did not want to be separated from him and he did not want me to be away from him.’ Moreover, she wasn’t growing anymore as a rock star.

In 1982, their son Jackson was born, and in 1987 their daughter, Jesse. It’s not like she wasn’t doing anything in that time either, she observed later. She learned a lot, about the world, about children, about Japanese literature.

She lost her friend Robert, by then also world-famous, when he died of AIDS in 1989. In their last conversation, she promised to take good care of their children, as they used to call their art projects. But making music wasn’t on the cards anymore. Her daughter Jesse remembers that she received an assignment at school where she had to fill in her mother’s profession. “I couldn’t think of anything. So I asked my mother, and she told me I should write down that she was a singer. I thought that was kind of crazy, because I had never heard her sing.”

Sudden changes

In 1994, everything suddenly changed when Fred, a mere 45 years old, died of a heart attack. A month later, Patti’s beloved brother, Todd, died of a stroke. She stayed behind, bereft, with two small children. ‘My husband had died and I had to support my kids. I couldn’t live the way we’d lived for 16 years—on the outskirts of Detroit, on a canal, rather simply,’ she said in an interview. ‘So I came back east to be closer to my family […] I was obliged to get a job. I had to work again.’

Her old friends helped her out. American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan asked her to join him on tour; Michael Stipe, the frontman of American rock band R.E.M, found a house for her in New York; and Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester designed androgynous clothes for her. Patti was back—and she stayed. She began touring with her band, taking Polaroid photos, and speaking up about political issues, the environment and her love for British police series. And she was writing. Her book Just Kids, published in 2010, was awarded the National Book Award for nonfiction in  the US.

However, Patti confesses that the 21st century is not her century. She doesn’t drive a car, in 2012 she still didn’t have a cell phone, and she’s only just managing to deal with a computer. At home, she surrounds herself with her familiar sources of inspiration: the diaries of French poet Charles Baudelaire, a piece of clothing Jackson wore as a baby, the ballet shoes of British ballerina Margot Fonteyn, the goat-hide tambourine that Robert once made for  her birthday. Instead of punk, she is a bit of a hippie nowadays, as can be seen in her appearance during the presentation of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan in 2016, in which nerves made her forget the lyrics. She is just as fragile and as tough as she was in the 1970s. And still, and despite everything: dancing barefoot.