"That's why we weren't eating much," Smith said. She pulled a handful of cash from her jeans. "I'm still amazed after all these years that I got cash in my pocket. I still look at it in wonder."
She moved down the hallway, past the room where Bob Dylan lived and wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," a song she had listened to hundreds of times and which contained the phrase "cowboy mouth," the name of the play she wrote with Sam Shepard in his own Chelsea room about their combustible love affair in 1970.
Smith stopped in the middle of the hallway near the hotel's gothic staircase, its marble steps and floral black iron balustrade seemingly rising into the sky. "It's upsetting, truthfully, to be here," she said. "It's like going back to your childhood home and seeing your younger self. It's both beautiful and painful. Almost everyone I knew here and loved is gone."
She mentioned maverick folklorist Harry Smith, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs "and most importantly, Robert."
In "Just Kids," Smith writes that the "Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone," and apparently it still is. On the 10th floor, as Smith tried to locate the entirely white room that once belonged to artist Sandy Daley, who had made short films of Mapplethorpe getting his nipple pierced and Smith getting a lightning bolt tattooed on her knee, current hotel residents materialized from their suites to help.
After minutes of commotion in the corridor, it was determined a suite that had a sign on the door, "Take your shoes off," had to be it, if only for cosmic reasons, as Daley "always made us take our shoes off before entering," Smith said with a laugh.
After the Chelsea
In 1970, Mapplethorpe met a slovenly man walking his bulldog on the street outside the Chelsea. The man rented him part of his loft, a few doors from the hotel, as a studio. Soon after, the man, whom Mapplethorpe and Smith dubbed "Pigman" -- the place was a mess -- died, and so they rented the entire loft for $240 a month, and moved out of the Chelsea.
Smith wanted to visit the loft. Walking up the dingy stairs in the nondescript building, she recalled that she and Mapplethorpe worked for days to clean and paint the place. "Nobody wanted to live here because it was so creepy because he had died in there and the whole place smelled and had dog poop in it," Smith said.
The loft represented an artistic flowering for Mapplethorpe and Smith. With rooms of their own, each set the course for works that would, respectively, influence music and photography for generations.
Unfortunately, the doors to the loft were now locked. It was a business office of a brand design firm, which fashioned logos for Pepsi.
Smith was now due at the Robert Miller Gallery, located a few blocks away, and so said goodbye to the loft and Chelsea. She was mounting an art show of her paintings and photographs, along with memorabilia seen in the recent documentary about her, "Dream of Life," made over 12 years by photographer Steven Sebring.
Smith was thrilled with the documentary because in a youth-obsessed culture it focused on a woman between the ages of 50 and 60. "Not that 60 is so old," she said. "But it was bold of Steven to spend so much time, money and energy on this period of my life."
New projects
With "Just Kids" finally headed to bookstores -- Smith is set to do local readings Jan. 29 at Book Soup in West Hollywood and Jan. 30 at Skylight Books in Los Feliz -- Smith is happily back to the drawing board in her 19th century town house in Manhattan's Soho district, her two Abyssinian cats roaming through piles of books.
She said rock is part of her life only when she walks around the house humming new melodies and imagining lyrics for them. Otherwise, she listens to opera all day on satellite radio, with an occasional break for Glenn Gould's luminous piano music.
She knows her early albums have been codified in rock history, but to her, songs like "Birdland" and "Because the Night" are not clouded in nostalgia but are as alive as the day she first performed them. On stage, she said, "We enter our songs with the same spirit and fierceness and devotion as we did 30 years ago."
Above all, Smith said, this is a time of celebration, as her son, Jackson (who last year married White Stripes drummer Meg White) and daughter, Jesse, have grown into fine musicians themselves.
"I'm determined that no matter what happens in the world this year, I'm going to be happy and appreciative," Smith said. "I feel inspired. I'm writing detective stories and poems. I'm cutting a new record. I have a million ideas."
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