“I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime.”

-Ingrid Bergman

Jeanne Moreau in La Notte (1961, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Patti Smith: I’m still pretty dumb about girl stuff. For a while I said, “Ah, girls are stupid.” But after seeing all these Jeanne Moreau movies, I think being a girl is where it’s at. Like when I’m about thirty-five I’m gonna start wearing black cocktail dresses and become a real cunt.

Penthouse: Do you get a kick out of being sexy?

Smith: I guess I like it. Actually, the only time I ever tried to cultivate being sexy was when I read Peyton Place. I was about sixteen and I read that this guy’s watching this woman walk and he can tell she’s a good fuck by the way she walks. It’s a whole passage. He’s telling Allison McKenzie, “I know you’re a virgin.” And she says, “Well, how?” And he says, “I can tell by the way you walk.” And I thought, Uh-oh, everybody knows! I was ashamed to be a virgin, so I tried to cultivate a fucked walk. I tried to figure out what it looked like. I figured I’d watch any hot woman I could. I mean, look at Jeanne Moreau. You watch her walk across the street on the screen and you know she’s had at least a hundred men.

-excerpted from 1976 Penthouse interview by Nick Tosches