D6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019Year,” she is disappointed by the tepid ap-
plause that greets her dedication of her
song to “the great ranks of the unappreciat-
ed,” including Vincent van Gogh.
“You know what?” she taunts. “If you’re
only going to give him a lame response,
don’t respond at all, because in his lifetime,
he didn’t sell a painting so he doesn’t need a
few accolades. Either he needs all or noth-
ing ’cause that’s all he ever had.”
Wearing her tour uniform of black Ann
Demeulemeester jacket and vest, old black
dungarees, black Jimmy Choo motorcycle
boots, an Electric Lady T-shirt and her St.
Francis tau cross, Ms. Smith reminds her
bewitched fans that the date of her first
sold-out Paris concert, Aug. 26, is the 49th
anniversary of the founding of Jimi Hen-
drix’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich
Village. She tells how she met Hendrix
there once when he was leaving a party.
“All I can say is,” she says with a grin, “he
was really cute.” The crowd goes wild,
screaming “Pah-teee!!!” and sparking
lighters. (Yes, they still have lighters.) She
blows kisses back. The punk poet laureate
is no longer scrawny and her dark hair is
gray, but she is every inch the glam “gothic
crow” Salvador Dalí once described her as.
She is thrilled to be in the land of her liter-
ary heroes Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud.
At 16, working in a nonunion factory in-
specting handlebars for tricycles, an expe-
rience immortalized in her protopunk song
“Piss Factory,” she shoplifted a book about
Rimbaud and made him her imaginary boy-
friend because she felt she wasn’t attractive
enough to get a real one.
When a man yells “Read some poetry,
Pah-tee!” Ms. Smith offers an epic hippie-
chick response: “It’s all poetry, mannn!”
The Men in Her Life
When Ms. Smith strolls with her band down
the Rue des Capucines to her hotel, Pari-
sians tumble out all along the block to ap-
plaud her.
She gazes back at them with a mystical
smile, looking, as Rolling Stone once de-
scribed her, like “a charismatic sect leader
who has convinced her followers that she
alone has the secret of life.”
Jimmy Iovine, who produced her biggest
hit, in 1977, “Because the Night,” a collabo-
ration with Bruce Springsteen, says her fire
still burns bright at 72.
“Patti is a magical, magical, magical
woman,” he says. “What’s missing today in
music is everything that she brought as a
voice to the world since she burst on the
scene as a younger contemporary to Dyl-
an.”
“The real Renaissance woman,” as Mr.
Iovine calls her, also has a book out next
week: “Year of the Monkey,” a picaresque
voyage through her dreams and life as she
faced 70, dealing with flashes of “sorrow’s
vertigo” as she remembers all the loves and
rock contemporaries who are gone, with a
kaleidoscope of references, from “Mr. Ro-
bot” to Marcus Aurelius to Martin Beck
mysteries to Maria Callas’s Medea.
She believes that when people close to
you die, you absorb what you most admire
in them. “It’s like they leave a little gift,” she
says.
Blending fiction and reality, she writes
poignantly about her “sense of everyone
gone,” and her trips to see her old flame
Sam Shepard in Kentucky and California
when he was in a mortal battle with Lou
Gehrig’s disease. She slept on couches and
helped him edit his last two books.
We have a three-hour lunch at a bistro
next to Ms. Smith’s hotel. She has no airs —
she washes her clothes in the hotel sink —
and is polite to everyone, giving our wait-
ress a ticket to her concert. She is wearing
another Electric Lady T-shirt (“I don’t like
the new feeling so I keep recycling them”),
this time with silk butterfly pants and some
men’s black Versace sandals that her
daughter, Jesse, got her.
“I don’t have to look nice for anybody,”
she says. “I feel like at my age I can do what-
ever I want, pretty much, as long as I don’t
hurt anybody and that includes dressing
the way I want, everywhere I go.”
She pulls up her pant leg to show me the
lightning bolt tattoo on her knee that she got
from an Australian artist when she was liv-
ing in the Chelsea Hotel, at the same time
Mr. Shepard got a crescent moon.
“I remember once in 1970 or something, I
was such a scraggly thing, but I was in this
bar waiting for him and he was late,” she
says. “And some guy, and he was a big guy,
kept bugging me, semi-hitting on me. I just
told him to leave me alone. Sam walked in
and he just walked up, took the guy by the
scruff of the neck and the guy went right up
the bar, just like in the movies. And Sam
wasn’t a movie star then. He was just a guy.”
I asked why the two split, after appearing
in a play they wrote about themselves
called “Cowboy Mouth.” “Well, he was mar-
ried and he had a child and it was sad, but it
was just the right thing to do,” she says.
I wonder if she was surprised when Mr.
Shepard made it big as a leading man in
Hollywood. “No, because first of all he was a
really great actor in plays and theater,” she
says. “He had a magnetism. He was one of
the most handsomest guys you would ever
see, more even in person than in film. But
that isn’t even what I liked about him, which
was funny because it was so obvious that he
was so handsome. People were just drawn
to him.’ ”
I noted that Robert Mapplethorpe had
charisma, too.
“Well, Robert was totally different,” she
says. “Robert was very shy. I met Robert
when he was 20 and we were both wallflow-
ers, but he was even more awkward than
me. The beautiful thing about our relation-
ship and what saved it for all the years is, it
was based more on how we believed in each
other when no one else believed in us, our
trust in one another and respect for one an-
other.” She adds that Mr. Mapplethorpe
“mourned that we didn’t have children be-
fore the end of his life.”
Asked about recent criticism that the
photographer’s images, so taboo in the
1970s and ’80s, were no longer shocking and
played into sexual stereotypes about black
men, Ms. Smith offered a passionate de-
fense: “They’re overthinking. They’re over-
analyzing. Robert was not analytical. He
was all visual. And when he was taking a
photograph, it was because that is what he
found beauty in.”
Referring to Mr. Mapplethorpe’s death of
AIDS in 1989, she adds: “Robert only lived
till he was 42 years old, and was a late
bloomer. His work really only spanned less
than two decades and not even that, be-
cause the first years, when we were togeth-
er in semipoverty, was without him having
the tools to do the things he wanted to do.
I’ve done my best work, really, my most im-
portant work, from the ages of maybe 57 to
now.”
I ask why she didn’t participate in the re-
cent film “Mapplethorpe,” starring Matt
Smith, who played Prince Philip in “The
Crown,” even though she was a major char-
acter. “People cannot only portray you,” Ms.
Smith says. “They can make stuff up.”
She was not enamored of the famous
“Saturday Night Live” impersonation, with
Gilda Radner playing Candy Slice, clearly
based on Ms. Smith, as a drunk and drug-
addled screaming banshee with hairy
armpits.
“I liked Gilda Radner,” Ms. Smith says.
“The only difficult thing was, it was very
heavy cocaine oriented, which I didn’t in-
dulge in. I think I had taken acid with Robert
once. It was ’77 or ’78. I had tried coke once
or twice. I don’t deny. I’m just saying that,
one, who had the money for that stuff? And
two, I like being in control of myself. I’m
very happy with who I am.”
Ms. Smith doesn’t have any publicist or
personal assistant or makeup artist with
her. And her rock-star contract rider asks
only for peanut butter, brown bread, ginger,
lemon and honey. She supplements that
with a small plastic container of flaxseeds
that her daughter has packed for her. After
her show, she surfs the adrenaline, ignoring
the bottle of Champagne on ice by the make-
up mirror. She has the occasional tequilashot or sake but says she has never overin-
dulged, in part because she was a sickly kid.‘I Don’t Recant’
Her previous memoirs, both New York
Times best sellers, were “Just Kids,” her lu-
minous reminiscence about her New York
romance with Mr. Mapplethorpe in the
1960s, and “M Train,” about the period after
she moved back to New York from Detroit,
where she dropped out just as she was
breaking out, shocking the music world.
She moved to St. Clair, Mich., north of De-
troit, to marry the musician Fred Smith,
known as “Sonic,” and spent 16 years there,
raising their two children, writing some un-
published novels. She worked with her hus-
band to make her voice less nasal; he
taught her to play the clarinet and they did
one album together, “Dream of Life.” The
couple lived simply and supported them-
selves mostly on the royalties from “Be-
cause the Night.”
“It was 1979, and all I saw in my future
was a series of tours, concerts, interviews,
videos, fancy cars,” she recalls. “I wasn’t do-
ing any art. I wasn’t writing. It’s such a
stressful life and you find yourself getting
more demanding about things that you
never were demanding about, like, ‘Why
isn’t my car here?’ ”
I ask about the feminist criticism about
her semiretirement.
“Yeah, they got really upset with me, like
I broke some kind of bond,” she says. “I left
the world of rock ’n’ roll. I left my so-called
career, you know, fame and fortune. But
what I did do is, I saved myself as a worker,
as a writer and as an evolving human be-
ing.” (She says that even before that, she
had lost out on being featured in a feminist
magazine because the writer was dismayed
to see her doing a boyfriend’s laundry.)
After her husband died, in 1994, she re-
turned to New York, with places in down-
town Manhattan and Rockaway Beach, and
picked up her career. She still wears her
wedding ring and even once bought her
husband a mauve iridescent Valentino shirt
because she missed him so much and knew
he would have loved it.
Ms. Smith did not perform her famous
1978 song with the N-word in the title duringher tour. Can she still sing it?
“No,” she says simply, recalling that when
she wrote it more than four decades ago, “I
was fighting to take a term that was used in
such a defamatory way and to take it as a
badge for outsiders, artists, of any gender,
any color. So, you know, a task that took a lot
of hubris. But an absolutely pure heart. The
real important phrase in the song is ‘outside
of society, that’s where I want to be.’ I’ve
been asked to recant the song and it’s like,
I’m not recanting the song. I don’t recant
anything that I do. I mean, I’ve done it, I be-
lieved in it. It’s still to me an awesome song.
“People want to embrace one as the god-
mother of punk, but her anthem? They
don’t want that. They want you to go far but
not too far.” She says the song has been
“misconstrued” but she knows that also,
“the pain that people feel because of past in-
justice is real.”
“I miss doing it,” she says. “But my son,
he’s opposed to doing it, out of respect to
people. So I look at the younger generation
and I think, O.K. I’m living in their time.
This is not my time. So, in terms of younger
people’s time, it’s not the right song right
now.”
She admits that “there’s a part of me
that’s defiant.”
“I was like that as a child,” she says. “I
can’t help it. I’m a punk rocker who loves
Maria Callas, you know?” But, she adds:
“I’m not going to shove it down anybody’s
throat. It’s on a record, if they want to hear
it.”
She does worry about censorship in the
age of cancellation, though. “We’re moving
more and more back to intense censorship,”
she says, citing the removal of paintings
from museums. “More censorship than peo-
ple like William Burroughs and Allen Gins-
berg and Brancusi were fighting.”
On the subject of #MeToo, she looks at
the big picture: “I find myself more con-
cerned about the terrible atrocities against
women globally. I just think, again, we have
to examine what is an atrocity and what is
an insult and what is somebody being a pain
in the ass.”
She gets emotional when I ask her about
President Trump turning the so-called
Squad into his 2020 foils.
“I felt almost like there was a tape around
my ribs and somebody pulled it off and
some skin went with it,” she says. “All those
girls are good people. We are a democracy,
and it’s all right for them to question how
we’re dealing with the Gaza Strip and how
we’re treating the Palestinians. It’s not anti-
American, it’s not anti-Israel. It’s the Ameri-
can way.”
Weirdly, she says, she encountered Mr.
Trump when they were young. Mr. Mapple-
thorpe took her to a dinner where a young
Mr. Trump pitched Trump Tower.
“I didn’t know who this guy was, he was
with his wife, Ivana, except he was the most
obnoxious person I have ever experienced
in my life,” she says. “All he talked about
was how it was going to be the greatest
thing ever in New York City and anyone
who bought into this was going to be part of
the most important thing. Me and Robert
left and I thought, ‘I wouldn’t live in his
tower for free.’ I can’t believe that fate
would let that guy.... ” She shudders.
I tell her what Mr. Iovine said about his
disillusionment with young musicians for
not being more political. Indeed, the night
before, at the Video Music Awards, Taylor
Swift, whose critics have dinged her for
staying mostly mum in this era of political
outrage, offered some mild, oblique criti-
cism of the president.
“She’s a pop star who’s under tremen-
dous scrutiny all the time, and one can’t
imagine what that’s like,” Ms. Smith says
sympathetically. “It’s unbelievable to not be
able to go anywhere, do anything, have
messy hair. And I’m sure that she’s trying to
do something good. She’s not trying to do
something bad. And if it influences some of
her avid fans to open up their thoughts,
what does it matter? Are we going to start
measuring who’s more authentic than who?
“I don’t agree that artists and musicians
have more responsibility to speak out than
anyone else. I think everybody has to be
more active. Art is inspiring and art can re-
ally bring people together. A song can rally
people, but it’s not going to make change.”
She says she got punished for speaking
out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003: “All
of a sudden, no radio play, couldn’t get into
festivals. People, even cool people — I’m
sorry to say that, but some people that I re-
ally loved and respected and still love and
respect — they were so frightened by this
infusion of patriotism that they weren’t able
to see the whole picture. To me, patriotism
is just a few steps away from nationalism if
you’re not careful.”
She is not rooting for Joe Biden to be the
nominee. “I would rather see a younger per-
son make some mistakes than to have the
petrified forest come in,” she says.
She doesn’t like labels, and she doesn’t
want to feel hemmed in to any movement.
She doesn’t like confinement of any kind;
it’s why she scorns high heels and makeup.
She doesn’t want to be hailed as the god-
mother of younger women in rock or a femi-
nist icon or a political activist.
“If they want to call me a writer, an artist,
I’m really happy with that, or a mother,” she
says. “But I don’t really need more than that
because I don’t really qualify.”
After her last Paris concert, we hang out
in her hotel room at midnight overlooking
the Place Vendôme. Her son, Jackson, a gui-
tarist who often plays with her, calls and she
tells him how much she loves him.
In her new book, and on Instagram, she
has pictures of what she calls her “treas-
ures,” eclectic items that she travels with or
gathers on her trips. I ask her to make a Po-
laroid picture of some now.
We sit on her bed as she spreads out her
T-shirt, cross, her flaxseeds, her tooth-
brush, Weleda Salt toothpaste, stones she
has gathered along the tour, a vintage photo
of Antonin Artaud, a Nicholas Roerich post-
card and a book she is reading, “The Book of
Monelle” by Marcel Schwob.
We talk some more about the men she
loved, all gone, and she suddenly smiled, ra-
diantly, and says, “I’ve had some cool boy-
friends.”ANDRE D. WAGNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE D1
An Epic Life, but to Patti Smith ‘It’s All Poetry’
Patti Smith strolling in Washington Square Park, top, performing in Paris, center, and sitting in a SoHo cafe, above.DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESANDRE D. WAGNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMore of Maureen Dowd’s conversation with
Patti Smith:
nytimes.com/style
ONLINE:CONFIRM OR DENY
‘If they want to
call me a writer,
an artist, I’m
really happy
with that, or a
mother. But I
don’t really need
more than that
because I don’t
really qualify.’