On July 3, 1967, 20-year-old Patricia Lee Smith arrived in New York wearing overalls, a black turtleneck, an old gray trench coat, and a small red-and-yellow plaid suitcase containing several notebooks, drawing pencils, and a copy of Illuminationsby Rimbaud, which was changing her already hectic life: pregnant at 19, she had left her baby with an adoptive family. Months after that, in New York, she went to the address they had given her and there, in a room, she found a boy sleeping on an iron bed. “He was pale and thin with a dark shock of curly hair. He had a bare torso and beaded necklaces around his neck (…). He jumped up, put on his sandals and a white T-shirt and indicated that I should follow him (…). I had never seen anyone like him,” she wrote 43 years later. The young man helped her to her room, and they said goodbye.
Days later, after getting her first job at one of Brentano’s bookstores, that boy appeared at the door. White shirt and tie, this time. “He looked like a Catholic schoolboy.” He bought a Persian necklace, Patti Smith’s favorite. As he wrapped it up, she blurted out, “Don’t give this to any girl but me.” He smiled and said, “Don’t worry.” A week went by and Patti Smith, hungry and with no place to sleep (she did it secretly in the store, on her coat, when everyone else left; she waited locked in the bathroom), accepted an invitation to dinner from a writer who had been hanging around the bookstore for days and watching her. She forgot her mother’s advice (with a stranger, nowhere) driven by hunger. They had an expensive and big dinner, and once outside he invited her up for a drink. Desperate, she looked everywhere looking for a way out. Out of nowhere appeared the boy with the iron bed, the boy with the Persian necklace. She went to him: “Pretend you’re my boyfriend,” she asked. They spent the night together, going back and forth and talking non-stop (“I was surprised by how comfortable and open I felt with him; later, he told me he had taken acid”). They slept in each other’s arms and were never apart again.
He told Patti his name that night, Bob, but she decided that Bob didn’t suit her, so she called him Robert. Robert Mapplethorpe, that was his real name. His stage name, too, because this is a story of absolute love between two 20-year-old boys who, in time, would become two legends of the 20th century. But that last bit doesn’t matter.
She said in We were children (Lumen, 2011), a major book in which she breaks down their abrasive and unusual relationship—she was a bad girl obsessed with behaving well; he, a good boy with a great desire to misbehave. They depended on the generosity of Robert’s friends to sleep under a roof, to save money Patti skipped meals (a coworker saw her so thin that she began to leave a lunch box with soup in the closet) and although, she writes, she never questioned the decision to give her son up for adoption, “I learned that giving life and ignoring it was not so easy.” She cried so much that Robert called her Soaked. She had, she says, such narrow hips that pregnancy had literally opened the skin of her belly. The first time they slept together, Robert could see the stretch marks that crossed her abdomen.
What happened between them and around them, under them and above them, is a story so astonishing and dazzling that this page can only bear poor testimony to its beginning and its end. In between, Patti Smith would become a composer, singer, writer, and Robert Mapplethorpe, who was painting when he met Patti, would become famous as a photographer. They lived together at the Chelsea Hotel at a time, 1969, when Andrea Feldman, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg. Also Jim Carroll, the poet (junkie, hustler, everything) who wrote his life in Diary of a rebelthen a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. “How do you know you’re not gay?” Robert once asked her. “Because I always ask for money,” Carroll replied. When Patti and Robert began to have a more intimate, friendly, less sexual relationship, she began dating Sam Shepard.
Robert confronted her one day. He wanted to take her with him to San Francisco. “I have to find out who I am,” he said. She refused. He insisted: “If you don’t come with me, I’ll be with a guy. I’ll become homosexual.” And Patti didn’t understand: “There was nothing in our relationship that had prepared me for such a revelation. All the signals he had indirectly transmitted, I had interpreted as the evolution of his art. Not of his personality.” “I have been accused of dressing like a faggot, of having the mind of a faggot and the body of a faggot,” he wrote to her months later, still shocked by his actions. Midnight Cowboy“He introduced the concept of faggot into his work and later into his life,” Patti said. “Faggot, faggot, faggot. I guess that’s what I’m into,” he summed up. (Years earlier, he had turned to prostitution to pay their rent.)
They were still together, they always stayed together in their own way, even making love. “Each one on their own, together,” Patti summed up. Robert took an iconic photograph of her: the cover of HorsesPatti Smith’s first album. “This is the one that has the magic,” he said, choosing one from the selection. “When I look at it now, I never see myself. I see both of us,” she said.
In February 1989, many, many years later, Robert Mapplethorpe, who was HIV positive, met Patti Smith with his nurse. There he asked her a devastating question: “Patti, has art played us?” “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.” “Patti, I’m dying. It hurts so much.” And she knew, for the first time, that the 20-year-old boy she had known, poor and ragged, happy with acid on his back, and who had been with her all her life, was going to die.
A month later, she called the hospital as she did every night to wish him good night. But the morphine had put him to sleep and Patti stayed on the phone listening to his labored breathing, suspecting that she would never hear his voice again. She put her things away on the desk, which had also been Robert’s, tucked her children in, went to bed with her husband, to whom she said, “He’s still alive,” and then prayed. When she woke up and went downstairs, in the silence of the house, she learned that Robert Mapplethorpe had died. Minutes later, the phone rang. Patti Smith remembers that the opera was on. Tosca on television: “I have lived for love, I have lived for art.”
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