Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson

The Three Faces of Gloria (partially titled for the Lou Reed composition “Femme Fatale,” which was in turn written about Edie Sedgwick), she earmarked the scrawny poetess for a role.
    A tangled masterpiece of improvisation, Femme Fatale developed out of Curtis’s relationship with the underground actors John Christian and Penny Arcade, both of whom were originally scheduled to appear in the play. Christian, however, was forced to drop out after he was afflicted, he claimed, with such severe agoraphobia that he could no longer leave his apartment. Curtis shrugged and offered Patti his role, without even stopping to ask if the newcomer could act; nor, according to another of the team, actor Leee Black Childers, caring that Curtis and Patti had never particularly hit it off.
    Patti won the playwright’s heart, however, by throwing herself into the latest game to intrigue the cast of the back room at Max’s, another Curtis invention called the Outrageous Lie. The rules were simple. You told the most outrageous lie that you could, on the premise that little lies are easily caught, bigger ones can sometimes survive, but a truly outrageous one will become a part of your personal mythos forever. That was the thing about the outrageous lie: not even the other contestants should be certain whether or not it was actually a lie.
    Maybe Joan Crawford really did give Wayne County that brown silk jacket that he wore whenever he could.
    Maybe Cyrinda Foxe really did carry the scars from a run-in with the Hell’s Angels.
    Maybe Nico really did study with Lee Strasberg and hang out with Marilyn Monroe.
    And maybe Patti Smith, laboring through her teenage pregnancy, really did get kicked so hard by her unborn child that a tiny leg burst out of her stomach and hung there still kicking till the doctor could jam it back in again.
    Any girl who could live through an experience like that, reasoned Curtis, had to have something going for her, and he recommended that Tony Ingrassia, Femme Fatale’s director, cast his own eye over her. Ingrassia, too, felt she had a part to play in the production.
    Patti had never set foot onstage before—not since that childhood opera, anyway. But you’d never have guessed it. Already most comfortable in the trademark black-urban-guerrilla chic of her later public fame, she was majestic and magnetic, cool, mean and hard-bitten, radiating an intensity that could not have been further from the burlesque grind and exaggerated sexuality of her costars.
    With another Warhol associate, Mary Woronov, adding further star power to what was already a spellbinding underground bill, Femme Fatale: The Three Faces of Gloria opened at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on East Seventy-Fourth Street on May 6, 1970. The following month, shortly before the play transferred to the upstairs room at Max’s, Gay magazine’s Everett Henderson described it as “an uneven, amusing, boring, hilarious, weird, simplistic study of lots of old movies, gangster riffs and the Sharon Tate murder…. I do not dare judge the performances or the direction. Anthony Ingrassia … successfully got the actors on stage and whipped them through a suitable number of convulsions … energetically play[ing] projections of themselves as stars…. If you are fed up with the slick, stainless steel emptiness of Uptown garbage like Company, … it may amuse or irritate you, thrill you or bore you, but it is robust and it is alive.”
    The success of Femme Fatale, and her part in that success, did not close Patti’s eyes to her main pursuit, however. Nor to her continuing ability to magnetize the people she most needed to have around her.
    Her own adopted family had expanded by one after she and Mapplethorpe befriended a teenaged junkie named Jim Carroll. He was twenty years old, but, Patti assured him, he possessed an infinitely older soul.
    The young man was already establishing a reputation as a poet, and in just a few months the Paris Review would