Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free Page A

cultivating ever sharper instincts not for the political aims of the upcoming struggles but for their humanitarian goals. She may well have been the first girl in her class to date a black boy following Deptford High’s integration, andshe was certainly the only one whose parents did not raise hell when they found out.
    The fact that she was dating, however, did not mean that she was sexually active. “My one regret in life,” she told Penthouse’s Nick Tosches in 1976, “is that I didn’t know about masturbating. Think of all that fun I could’ve had!” As a teenager, she said, “I was horny, but I was innocent ‘cause I was a real-late bloomer and not particularly attractive…. Nobody told me that girls got horny. It was tragic, ‘cause I had all these feelings inside me…. I never touched myself or anything…. I did it all in my mind.”
    All of her report cards, she recalled, complained that “Patti Lee daydreams too much.” They did not have a clue what she was daydreaming about.
    Not all of her passions were conventional. Later in her teens, Patti relaxed into writing a series of lengthy poems in which she was arrested, for crimes unknown, by a beautifully blond Nazi sadist, and then tortured to death or orgasm, whichever came first. The notion that the two were not mutually incompatible, however, had its genesis in a most unexpected place: in the journals of Anne Frank. Since the 1959 release of a movie based on the young Jewish girl’s diary of the years she spent hiding from the Nazis, the media had taken a fresh look at the atrocities that were the backdrop to Frank’s tale. “I’d read that stuff and I’d get really cracklin’ down there,” Patti told Penthouse.
    By sixteen, Patti had decided it was time to put a stop to her yearning. She was reading Peyton Place, Grace Metalious’s then-shocking novel of the secret lives of small-town America, and one scene stuck in her mind: the one where heroine Allison McKenzie is told that you can tell if a woman is a virgin by the way she walks. It was a horrifying revelation for Patti, because it meant that everybody would know the same thing about her. So she set about cultivating what she described to Nick Tosches as “a fucked walk,” by watching actress Jeanne Moreau. “You watch her walk across the street on the screen,” she decided, “and you know she’s had at least a hundred men.”
    Patti, on the other hand, had not had one, and she sometimes doubted that she ever would. Journalist Richard Meltzer later reflectedon the stories she told him during the years when she was best known as a poetess, and he was still laughing about them five years later. Like how she didn’t have a birth certificate any more, because the rats ate it, how her father was a gangster and her aunt once spent a hot night with Hank Williams, but best of all, how her father explained the facts of life by telling her, “The erect male penis is put into the female vagina, and you only do that when you’re in love.” And so, she told Meltzer, the first time a guy asked to fuck her, she said no, because she didn’t love him. So he asked if he could eat her instead, and what did Patti reply? She said she’d have to ask her father. Who told her, “Forget it.”
    When American female teendom became obsessed with having eyes made up like Cleopatra, as played by Elizabeth Taylor; or, later, when the Ronettes sent their distinctive hairstyles soaring into vogue, Patti just shrugged and went back to her books. She once remarked that she read her entire childhood away—that she was far more intrigued by her interior world than the outside. When she did seek out idols, they were the ones her peers may not even have acknowledged: Edith Piaf. Folk singer Joan Baez. Actresses Moreau, Ava Gardner, and Anouk Aimée.
    Aimée was the rising star who exploded out of Fellini’s La dolce vita in 1960 (alongside another of Patti’s later icons, Nico), shrouded in black dress and