Patti Smith Rocks Paris

Indomitable punk-priestess Patti Smith escaped for a few months to the City of Light where she has been writing a book, curating an art show and talking up Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a documentary 11 years in the making. Here, Ray Rogers chats with the fiery icon about inspiration, immortality and what Smith refers to as the “delight” of fashion.

Adjusting the bellows of her vintage Polaroid camera, Patti Smith squints into the exceptionally bright early evening light of a hot summer night in Paris. A wheelbarrow full of wet cement glistening in the sun has caught her eye. We’re outside the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, where Smith has been ensconced in a fourth floor office for the past three months, overseeing her “Land 250” art show, so named for the make of Polaroid she uses and the number of photos in the multi-media exhibit at the Foundation’s downstairs gallery. She spends a few moments tinkering with the frame, but can’t quite get the angle she wants, so it’s back up to the office. Time is running short. Tomorrow, she will leave the City of Light and embark on a summer tour with her band, so a few hours this afternoon are spent boxing up her belongings.

Smith is relishing her time behind the camera these days, rather than having the lens trained upon her, as it had been for the 11 years that photographer Steven Sebring spent filming her for his sprawling biopic, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, currently in wide release, along with a companion book from Rizzoli. The quietly powerful film, which borrows its title from Smith’s 1988 album, documents an artist at the crossroads, learning to navigate through her world after the deaths of so many loved ones—including her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith in 1994, and her brother, Todd, soon after.

“It’s a very humanistic film,” assesses Smith, seated in her makeshift office at a conference table cluttered with art photography books, notepads and pictures, including prints of a shot Smith took of the River Ouse, where Virginia Woolf disappeared into the current, a stone weighing her down. “People had wanted to make Behind The Music-type films of me, but I wasn’t interested. I don’t have any scandal attached to me; I don’t have any drug problems. My story is personally sad in terms of loss, but it’s not behind the music—it’s life!”

Rather than a standard rock documentary with a succession of talking heads paying tribute to a Rock ’N Roll Hall of Famer, the film captures Smith hanging out with family and friends, old and new. “I didn’t want a documentary. I’m young—I mean, I’m 61, but I still feel vital and alive, and I’m still discovering who I am in terms of being a worker, and doing new work. I don’t wish to be eulogized at this time in my life. And I like the film because it doesn’t have a lot of people talking about me as if I’m dead. Instead of having interviews with Flea [of the Red Hot Chili Peppers] or Sam Shepard, it’s just life with them.”

It was her friend Michael Stipe who suggested Sebring to Smith as a trustworthy soul when she was in need of photos for Gone Again, the 1996 album she made in memory of her husband. For the first time in her career, her close friend and early love Robert Mapplethorpe—who took the iconic shot of Smith that adorns her groundbreaking 1975 debut Horses—wasn’t there to photograph the cover. He had died of complications from AIDS in 1989. “I had also recently lost my brother, and in meeting Steven it was like I was gifted with another brother,” recalls Smith, her eyes alight under a thick mane of grey-streaked hair. “He’s not unlike my brother in that he is a generous spirit, and very protective, a good heart—that’s one of the reasons I let him film us.”

Her instincts paid off. Sebring films Smith with a quiet, almost dream-like sensitivity befitting the film’s name, playing silent witness to her healing process. We see Smith back at her humble home in Michigan, reminiscing about the blissful life she shared there with her late husband, and their two children, son Jackson and daughter Jesse, now in their twenties. “When I left the public eye in ’79, I had depleted myself in terms of giving what information I knew as a human being about anything. I really needed to learn more about myself, about what it means to be a citizen, a human, as well as an artist and mother,” she recalls. “I learned that there is nothing one can’t surmount—from the simplest task of doing laundry to burying one’s husband.” Other highlights include scenes of Smith at her parents’ house in New Jersey, rhapsodizing about the family’s weeping willow tree and eating hamburgers with her mom and dad, both of whom have since passed away, and the concert footage showing her salivating on stage, spitting out her poetic verse in full rock ’n’ roll motherlode mode.

“I’ve watched it now several times, and I find when I watch it that I’m smiling through it, or that certain parts make me cry and a couple of parts are sort of boring,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes I think, you know, too much me—can’t we get rid of some of it?” The images of her son in his endearingly awkward teenage years make her smile every time. “And seeing my parents or Flea—when I’m laughing or happy in the film, I’m still happy. I access that.” Other clips bring tears. “Going through our house, looking at the pictures of Fred, we had so much hope, and so much joy in having our children, and having our little old house. It’s, um, just, still… ” She looks off to one side, her eyes watering up, and pauses for a moment to collect herself. “I have to catch my breath. Looking at the yard, and looking at our deck with the rain falling—that deck that Fred loved to sit on and listen to Tigers games. Just things I know. Little things.”

Yet far from wallowing in the pain of her losses, the film captures Smith, finding her way again as an artist whose need for self-expression has been reignited by life’s hardships. “I wanted it to be a positive film. It has a sense of me, as Allen Ginsberg said to me, continuing my life’s adventure, in one way letting Fred go and in another way carrying him within me.”

Smith’s latest adventure had her decamping to Paris to oversee her ambitious art show. Across the street from the Cartier Foundation lay the remains of many of Smith’s inspirations, at the Montparnasse Cemetery. “I could walk over there and be in the company of Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, Baudelaire, Jean Seberg and Sartre. They’re all buried there. It’s such a beautiful little cemetery.” Meditative graveyard strolls provided respite while Smith produced her exhibit, which culled work from the past 40 years of her artistic output: “Some of it was an homage to Robert, some to the poet René Daumal, a whole selection of Polaroids, drawings, films.”

While holed up in Paris, Smith has also been hard at work on a book about Robert Mapplethorpe, called Just Kids, but she doesn’t want to talk about it much today, as she’s still in the thick of it, a process she describes as draining—“in a positive way.”

“It just makes me sad sometimes to work on it because I never imagined life without Robert. I met him when I was 20, and I thought I would always know him.” The friendship, even after Mapplethorpe’s death, has proved to be a fertile creative instigator, with related projects including The Coral Sea, a two-disc spoken word incantation about Mapplethorpe with atmospheric guitar work from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, released two months ago, the art show’s homage to Mapplethorpe, and now this book. “They’re all ways of continuing to collaborate with Robert,” says Smith, “because we always did.”

Here, at the office, is where Patti has spent the greater part of her days in Paris. Home away from home is a three-star hotel she found just up the road. “It’s just a modest hotel, but I can look out the window and see the graveyard. A lot of time was spent by myself, but I’ve been happy here—I haven’t been lonely,” she says. There were many meals with her curators, whom she now counts as good friends (indeed, a flurry of bear hugs and goodbyes ensues when she leaves her office, as assistants help out with bags). “Paris is a very rewarding city if you like historical architecture and like to visit the graves and cafés of poets.”

Smith has been coming here since the 1960s, sleeping on park benches back in the day, and staying in the lowest of hotels and the most luxurious, from the Meurice to the Crillon. “I’ve experienced quite a gamut of hotel life in Paris, and I love ’em all—the little hotels that sometimes have more charm than most, and the five-star hotels that have Italian linen and the finest pillowcases. It just depends on what my job is and what I need.”

Tonight, she’s couch surfing at her good friend Anne Demeulemeester’s place. The designer is in town for her fashion show the following day, which Smith will attend before heading out to Munich to catch Waltraud Meier in an opera production of Tristan and Isolde, and then reconvening with her band for her own tour. Smith is wearing Demeulemeester today—a white T-shirt and rumpled black suit jacket enlivened with a button made by Demeulemeester’s husband. The button has a graphic “A” composed of glass beads in a tribute to Hermann Hesse. “I look so horrible today, sorry, I’ve been working,” she apologizes. “I’m really a mess—I fell asleep in these clothes and woke up and I’m still in them.” In truth, she looks every bit the androgynous cool rock-poet icon you’d expect. Knowing that she’d worked on her art for two days straight in this outfit only makes the look that much more authentic punk.

Finding a signature style and sticking with it is something she’s done since childhood. In one of the sweetest moments of the film, Smith shows off a beloved keepsake, a dress she wore in her youth. “My mother would just hide it, but I would find it. I wore it every day,” she laughs. “I’m like that onstage. I have my favorite T-shirt. Anne Demeulemeester makes me a T-shirt and I wear it untillw it wears out, and then she makes me another one. I don’t have 40 T-shirts, I’ve got one. And then I get another. Or Anne makes me a jacket and when it gets threadbare, she gives me another jacket.” Smith is in jeans, sporting shiny handmade Italian leather cowboy boots that are so new you can still smell the leather. “These will last a good five, six years, then I’ll get another pair.” Her last pair is pretty shot, she says, pointing to a bag in the corner of the office containing them. 

Fashion, says Smith, is “a delight. For the performer or artist, personal style is important—think of Bob Dylan record covers, or the image of Maria Callas with her headscarf and pearls. I’m a uniform type of person, but I enjoy fashion, especially high fashion. Even though I don’t wear it, I’ve always loved looking at the gowns, at couture. I’ve always loved Balenciaga, and seeing what Ava Gardner was wearing. I don’t really dress up, I don’t wear makeup, I can’t be bothered with that, but I find it fascinating to see what other people do.”

Thumbing through Vogue as a child living in an area where there wasn’t much culture happening in the 1950s and 1960s, she recalls, was a revelation: “Oh, there’s a Matisse show somewhere or there’s a new Limoges china, a new pattern is out.”

The most striking thing on her ensemble today is her medal from the French Republic. “It’s a Commandeur, the highest medal you can get from the French Republic for arts and letters,” she says, pulling her jacket lapel out for me to touch the fleurette. “I’m very proud of that. I got it a couple years ago on Marcel Proust’s birthday. When I was younger, William Burroughs got a Commandeur and he let me look at the medal. I was playing with it and he said [aping Burroughs’s burly voice], ‘One day, you’ll have one of these, my dear.’ And I said, I’ll never have one. He said, ‘Just build your name.’”