Style

The mystery of Connie Gripp Ramone

by Mish Way

It doesn’t make sense that someone my age thinks Connie (Gripp) Ramone was cool. In fact, I’m sure if anyone involved in the ‘70s CBGB punk scene was reading this they’d tell me what a horrible woman Connie Ramone was. I don’t know shit about her personality (except what I’ve read in Legs McNeil’s oral history, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk), but I think Connie had amazing style.

There isn’t a lot of information around about Connie; she was a junkie, a groupie, and a hellraiser who most people avoided. She became ‘a Ramone’ when she started dating the famous punk group’s bassist, Dee Dee. Before that she was with Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls and apparently tried to cut his fingers off. She’s that kind of girl. Knife-in-the-purse, fuck-you-up-and-break-a-plate-on-your-head psycho shit. But the woman had serious style.

“One night, as I was leaving CBGB at four in the morning, I walked outside and saw Connie sitting on the hood of a car, filing her nails,” describes Dee Dee in Please Kill Me. “She was wearing a black evening dress and spiked, high-heel shoes and she had a bottle of blackberry brandy in her purse. She looked like an ancient vampire countess who was definitely on a mission to capture my soul.”

The best photo of Connie Ramone is one of only a few public ones. Her hair is cut into an asymmetrical, layered bowl, and she has brushed her cheeks pink to look like a painted china doll. She’s wearing a business suit with a jean jacket underneath and a big gold chain. She looks awesome. Like a freaky editorial model. For a prostitute junkie who only cared about dope and hunting down Dee Dee, she looked amazing.

One of the few search results for Connie is this.

The thing about being a rock groupie was that you had to be pretty and young. You had to have that star-model quality on the outside, even if you were totally fucked up on the inside. Sable Starr, Bebe Buell, even someone like Nancy Spungen, although notoriously irritating and insane, had youth, but Connie has been portrayed as an old, crazy, violent junkie. I argue that it kind of made her the best one. Plus, she was ahead of her time when it came to fashion. I mean, that whole vampire thing wouldn’t really blow up until 2010.

After Connie and Dee Dee finally broke up, she started prostituting. Eventually she overdosed on valium and methadone in some doorway but nobody claimed her. Apparently, she is buried in Potter’s Field Staten Island.

I’m kind of obsessed with Connie and I wish there had been more documentation of her. I’m on a one-woman crusade to have people acknowledge Connie’s uniqueness. She wasn’t the traditional groupie—or even really one at all. I wish she had been the girl the camera was drawn to. Then I could Tumblr search her. But she was one of the bad ones. And she looked incredible doing it.

This article originally appeared in the December 2012/January 2013 issue of AUX Magazine. Download and subscribe for free in the App Store.