MOTHER OF ALL PUNK

Spotlight

Even at 52, punk legend Patti Smith has a lot about her, including her tousled hair and lean body, that suggests "boy"—no surprise if you've seen the famous Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of her that graced the cover of her seminal 1975 album, Horses. She wears aging T-shirts, men's black blazers, and Malcolm X-style glasses. The rock writer and Sonic Youth band member Thurston Moore once described her posing "as if she were the coolest boy in the city."

"I don't deny my femaleness," says Smith, who grew up the eldest daughter of four children in a blue-collar family in Deptford, New Jersey. "If I don't really comb my hair, or if I like to wear more boyish clothing, it's not a statement, it's just what I like. When I was a kid, I didn't gravitate toward dolls. I had a coonskin cap. I liked dressing like Davy Crockett."

Smith counts as major influences Jackson Pollock, Johnny Carson, and Jo March, the boyish heroine of Little Women. Inspiration for Gung Ho, her eighth album, due out in January, is typically wide-ranging. She collaborated with her current boyfriend, 26year-old Oliver Ray, a guitarist in her band, studied the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, paid attention to momentary visions, and riffed on Ho Chi Minh ("one small man/a beard the color of rice / a face the color of tea").

Smith is doing her best to ignore the recent release of the unauthorized biography Patti Smith, by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley, which she sees as a deeply upsetting invasion of her privacy. She is working on her own book, Picturing Robert, a memoir of her friend Mapplethorpe. The two books couldn't be more different. The first recounts Smith's life over the last 20 years, when she was emerging as an artist and musician in New York City—a time of considerably more abandon, before she had children (Jackson, now 17, and Jesse, 12). Smith's own book, on the other hand, is about filling a void. "It will be about Robert as an artist," she says.

BETSEY OSBORNE