→OCTOBER 2019 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 61
Rock icon
overseer of the family ... She was full of genuine
unconditional love, but she was tough. She had
seen a lot. Someone to strive to be more like, for
sure; someone to look towards when you need
a little edge, a little dose of genuine toughness
to push you through. She loved music. She had a
great memory for lyrics and a cool and beautiful
way of singing songs from her generation. I
think my mom has been deeply influenced by
her in more ways than we can know.”
Patti’s childhood was materially frugal but
rich in ideas. She was born in Chicago during
the Great Blizzard of 1946, “long and skinny”,
she wrote in her memoir Just Kids, “but with
bronchial pneumonia”. Allergies and lung
problems would plague her childhood, leaving
her often in bed with books (Little Women,
A Child’s Garden of Verses) in the spring
and summertime while her brother and sisters
joined the tribes of neighbourhood children
in the gardens and streets.
“I inherited my enthusiasm for life from my
mother,” Patti tells The Australian Women’s
Weekly on a warm afternoon in New York,
where that summer cough still intermittently
interrupts conversation. “My mother had a very
difficult childhood. There was a lot of tragedy in
her life. She lost her own mother as a child. She
was raised by a very austere grandmother. She
lost her brother and then her son. Yet, watching
my mother field tragedy and always accept the
responsibilities awaiting her was a good lesson.
“My mother always found a way to make
things feel like they were going to be all right.
She used to say, ‘When my ship comes in, you
can eat all the steak you want,’ or, ‘When my
ship comes in, I’m going to buy us a house by
the sea.’ It never came in really, but her bright
optimism always made us feel like things were
going to be better. All our struggles were just the struggles of
the day and tomorrow things would be wonderful.”
Beverly also inculcated in Patti a love of books, the lifelong
habit of daily prayer and an inquisitiveness about religion.
As a child Patti worried that her soul might be “mischievous”
and sneak away in the night.
Instead it was her body that caused trouble. At 19, Patti slept
with a boy and conceived a child whom she carried to term and
adopted into a “loving and educated” family. She’s said a prayer
for the child every day of her life. Then, throwing caution to the
wind, she bought a one-way bus ticket to New York to live as
an artist. For a time, Patti lived on the streets, sleeping in parks,
on stoops, in graveyards and (when she finally found a job) in
the back room of the bookshop where she worked.
Then she met the young artist Robert Mapplethorpe. “We
were as innocent and dangerous as children racing across a
minefield,” she wrote. Together they worked devotedly on their
art and explored New York bohemia, moving into the ChelseaClockwise from
above: Patti at the
Sundance Film
Festival in 2008;
Onstage in New
York in 1976 with
fellow punk rock
pioneers John Cale
and Mick Ronson.
Patti in 1977,
recreating the
cover for her
breakout 1975
album, Horses.