necklace.
“Yes, “I said. “You did well.”
In the weeks to come, Robert photographed me several times. In one of our last sessions I wore my favorite black dress. He handed me a blue morpho butterfly mounted on a glass-headed dressmaker’s pin. He took a color Polaroid. Everything read black and white offset by the iridescent blue butterfly, a symbol of immortality.
As he always had been, Robert was excited to show me his new work. Large platinum prints on canvas, color dye transfers of spiking lilies. The image of Thomas and Dovanna, a nude black man in a dance-embrace with a woman in a white gown flanked by panels of white moire satin. We stood before a work that had just arrived, in the frame he had designed: Thomas in an Olympic bend within a black circle, above a leopard skin panel. “It’s genius, isn’t it?” he said. The tone of his voice, the familiarity of the words of that particular exchange, took my breath away. “Yes, it’s genius.”
As I resumed the pattern of my daily life in Michigan, I found myself yearning for Robert’s presence; I missed us. The phone, which I normally shunned, became our lifeline and we spoke often, though at times the calls were dominated by Robert’s mounting cough. On my birthday he expressed concern for Sam.
On New Year’s Day, I called Sam. He had just received a blood transfusion and seemed remarkably self- assured. He said he felt transformed into a man who was going to make it. Ever the collector, he wished to return to Japan, where he and Robert had traveled, as there was a tea set in a cerulean lacquer box that he greatly coveted. He asked me to sing the lullaby to him again and I obliged.
Just as we were about to say goodbye, Sam gave me the gift of one more of his infamous stories. Knowing my affection for the great sculptor, he said, “Peggy Guggenheim once told me that when you made love with Brancusi, you absolutely were not allowed to touch his beard.”
“I’ll remember that,” I replied, “when I bump into him in heaven.”
On the fourteenth of January, I received a distraught call from Robert. Sam, his sturdy love and patron, had died. They had weathered painful shifts in their relationship, and also the critical tongues and envy of others, but they could not stem the tide of the terrible fortune that befell them. Robert was devastated by the loss of Sam, the bulwark of his life.
Sam’s death also cast a shadow on Robert’s hopes for his own recovery. To comfort him I wrote the lyrics and Fred the music to “Paths That Cross,” a sort of Sufi song in memory of Sam. Though Robert was grateful for the song, I knew one day I might seek out these same words for myself.
We returned to New York on Valentine’s Day. Robert was occasionally feverish and experiencing recurring stomach disorders, yet he was extremely active.
I spent much of the following days recording with Fred at the Hit Factory. We were on a tight schedule as my pregnancy was becoming more pronounced, and it was getting difficult to sing. I was due at the studio when Robert called in great distress to tell me that Andy Warhol was dead.
“He wasn’t supposed to die,” he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.
Neither are you.
Neither am I.
We didn’t say anything. We hung up reluctantly.
It was snowing as I passed a churchyard closed with an iron gate. I noticed I was praying to the beat of my feet. I hurried on. It was a beautiful evening. The snow, which had been falling lightly, now fell with great force. I wrapped my coat about me. I was in my fifth month and the baby moved inside me.
It was warm and glowing in the studio. Richard Sohl, my beloved pianist, left his post to make me coffee. The musicians assembled. It was our last night in New York until the baby came. Fred spoke a few words concerning Warhol’s passing. We recorded “Up There Down There.” In the center of the performance I held the image of a trumpeter swan, the swan of my childhood.
I slipped outside into the night. The snow had ceased falling and it seemed like the whole of the city, in remembrance of Andy, had been covered in an undisturbed layer of snow—white and fleeting as Warhol’s hair.
We were all reunited in Los Angeles. Robert, who was visiting his youngest brother, Edward, decided to shoot the cover there, while Fred and I worked to complete the album with our co-producer, Jimmy Iovine.
Robert was pale and his hands shook as he set up to take the portrait before a cluster of drying palms in the full sun. When he dropped his light meter, Edward knelt to pick it up. Robert was not feeling well, but somehow he marshaled his energies and took the picture. Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.
It was a simple photograph. My hair is braided like Frida Kahlo’s. The sun is in my eyes. And I am looking at Robert and he is alive.
Later that evening, Robert attended the recording of the lullaby Fred and I had written for our son, Jackson. It was the song I had sung to Sam Wagstaff. There was a nod to Robert in the second verse:
Richard Sohl was at the piano. I was facing him. We were recording it live. The baby moved within me. Richard asked Fred if he had any special orders. “Make them cry, Richard,” was all he said. We had one false start, then put everything we had into the second take. As I finished, Richard repeated the final chords. I looked through the glass window into the control room. Robert had fallen asleep on the couch and Fred was standing alone, weeping.
On June 27, 1987, our daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, was born in Detroit. A double rainbow appeared in the sky and I felt optimistic. On All Souls’ Day, ready to finish our postponed album, we once again packed up the car and with our two children drove to New York. On the long drive, I thought of seeing Robert and pictured him holding my daughter.
Robert was celebrating his forty-first birthday in his loft with champagne, caviar, and white orchids. That morning I sat at the desk in the Mayflower Hotel and wrote him the song “Wild Leaves,” but I did not give it to him. Though I was trying to write him an immortal lyric, it seemed all too mortal.
Some days later, Robert photographed me wearing Fred’s flight jacket for the cover of our projected single, “People Have the Power.” When Fred looked at the photograph, he said, “I don’t know how he does it, but all his photographs of you look like him.”
Robert was eager to take our family portrait. On the afternoon we arrived, he was well dressed and gracious, though he often left the room, overtaken by a wave of nausea. I watched helplessly as he, always stoic, minimized his suffering.
He only took a handful of photographs, but then again, that’s all he ever needed. Animated portraits of Jackson, Fred, and me together, the four of us, and then, right before we left, he stopped us. “Wait a minute. Let me take one of you and Jesse.”
I held Jesse in my arms, and she reached out to him, smiling. “Patti,” he said, pressing the shutter. “She’s perfect.”
It was our last photograph.
On the surface, Robert seemed to have everything he had wished for. One afternoon we sat in his loft, surrounded by the proofs of his burgeoning success. The perfect studio, exquisite possessions, and the resources to realize anything he envisioned. He was now a man; yet in his presence I still felt like a girl. He gave me a length of Indian linen, a notebook, and a papier-mache crow. The small things he had gathered during our long separation. We tried to fill in the spaces: “I played Tim Hardin songs for my lovers and told them of you. I took photographs for a translation of
Ever the protector, he promised, as he once did in our own portion of Twenty-third Street, that if need be we could share a real home. “If anything happens to Fred, please don’t worry. I’m getting a town house, a brownstone like Warhol had. You can come live with me. I’ll help you raise the kids.”
