Playgirl Love
By Georgia Mills
“Patti Smith wasn’t really a party girl, was she?”
This is something that a bartender I used to know said to me once. I had passed him off my copy of Just Kids, and we were discussing it at the host stand, in the restaurant where I worked.
“Sort of,” I said, shuffling menus. “She was more of a playgirl, but she was always out on the town. Everyone knew her, and she name drops a lot in the book. She clearly cared about that. She seems like sort of an asshole — she used to go to the bar with Andy Warhol, for example, and she’s friends with Bob Dylan. She was very about New York.”
Patti Smith is among a league of women who I would consider playgirls, based on the way they reach out into the night in pursuit of pleasure and creative inspiration, flirty banter and eye contact held during conversation. Through sex, art, poetry. Telling stories from memory of parties gone by. Along with Patti: Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, Edie Sedgwick, Anjelica Huston, Pamela de Barres, Marianne Faithful (to name a few). The Studio 54 crowd and 90s supermodels. Writers, artists, poets, models, actresses. Some with famous fathers, some without. Some rich, some poor. In my mind’s eye interpretation of the term, playgirls live as artists (or in close proximity to them), painting and writing their way through the time they’re living in.
Sex can be a way to peek behind the curtain into this world: think of Anjelica Huston’s essay, detailing her relationship with Jack Nicholson — the parties and people she describes, everyone under the sun in LA in the 70s. And Eve, casually talking about Jim Morrison, who she saw as a deeply insecure friend above a rock star sex symbol. And Miss Pamela, who wrote about Mick Jagger with feverish wonder, who, like Penny Lane, lived for the lot of it, the music and the girls and the devotion to the moment. Reading these stories, you’re right there with them, in the throes of passion that the druggy, sweaty, hot, loud times evoked — from rock n roll shows to packed New York dive bars, sounds of pool games played under the clinking of sweating glasses, skin touches shared under covers and messy bedrooms in early morning light.
In this sense, I know many playgirls in the city today, dreamers and artists and Lovers who seek the sex of life with passionate fervor, who know the importance of Getting Dressed Up and Going to Dinner. Who you know is who you love in the whirlwind blur of this time of life, Just Kids in our 20s, when friendships are forged at parties and in dark bars. Hearts on our sleeves, playgirls congregate in the bathroom and apply lip liner, we flit down the strip in peals of laughter with flushed cheeks. Playgirls know that the electricity of these connective moments in these particular spaces is both fleeting and ever present. Hold it on a Tuesday, to be so young and alive.
