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Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Both Became Art-World Legends and ’70S Icons of Radical Downtown Bohemia

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Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe Both Became Art-World Legends and ’70S Icons of Radical Downtown Bohemia They WERE NEW YORK BEFORE NEW YORK KNEW what to do WITH THEM. They WERE LOVERS, BEST FRIENDS, FELLOW SURVIVORS. PATTI SMITH & ROBERT MAppLETHORPE BOTH BECAME ART-WORLD LEGENDS and ’70S ICONS OF RADICAL DOWNTOWN BOHEMIA. Now SMITH FINALLY OPENS UP about THEIR DAYS together, LIVING at the CHELSEA HOTEL, BUYING ART SUppLIES BEFORE FOOD, MIXING with WARHOL SUPERSTARS and FUTURE ROCK GODS, and DOING WHATEVER they HAD to DO JUST to STAY TOGETHER By CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN THIS SPREAD: PATTI SMITH AND ROBERT MAppLETHOrpE IN NEW YORK, 1970. PHOTOS: NORMAN SEEFF. In 1967, Patti Smith moved to New York City from and a pot of water and I keep diluting it, because it’s certainly hasn’t changed. When I was a kid, I South Jersey, and the rest is epic history. There are not even the coffee, it’s the habit. wore dungarees and little boatneck shirts and the photographs, the iconic made-for-record-cover BOLLEN: That’s my problem. I really don’t braids. I dressed like that throughout the ’50s, to black-and-whites shot by Smith’s lover, soul mate, and smoke cigarettes that much except when I write. the horror of my parents and teachers. co-conspirator in survival, Robert Mapplethorpe. But when I write, I smoke. It’s bad, but I’m scared BOLLEN: Most people take a long time to find Then there are the photographs taken of them that if I break the habit, I won’t be able to write. themselves—if they ever do. How did you catch together, both with wild hair and cloaked in home- SMITH: It’s part of your process. It’s what you on so early? made amulets, hanging out in the glamorous poverty have to do. I’ll tell you how to break it. You don’t SMITH: Because even as a kid, I wanted to be an art- of the Chelsea Hotel. It is nearly impossible to navi- have to. Like, coffee was part of my process. Now, ist. I also did not want to be trapped in the ’50s idea of gate the social and artistic history of late ’60s and ’70s if I want to go to a café and write and drink cof- gender. I grew up in the ’50s, when the girls wore really New York without coming across Smith. She was, as fee for two hours, I just order them. I don’t drink bright red lipstick and nail polish, and they smelled she still is, a poet, an artist, a rock star, and a bit of a them. A lot is just aesthetic. So you light your cig- like Eau de Paris. Their world just didn’t attract me. shaman. But it is her friendship with Mapplethorpe arette and let it sit there and don’t smoke it. I hid in the world of the artist—first the 19th-century where her legend begins—and like most beginnings, BOLLEN: Do you think that would work? artists, then the Beats. And Peter Pan. this one has been romanticized to the point of SMITH: If you attach anything harmful to the BOLLEN: Were you always attracted to New fantasy. How is it that two such beautifully feral- creative process, you have to do that. If you learn York City? looking young people with no money or connections, SMITH: No. As a kid I didn’t really know about who later would go on to achieve such extreme New York City. I’m from the Philadelphia area. I success—Smith with her music and Mapplethorpe came to New York through art, really. I went to the with his photography—found each other? It is a myth Museum of Modern Art to see the Guernica. And I of New York City as it once was, a place where mis- wanted to see Nina Simone, so I saved my money fits magically gravitated toward one another at the and went to see her at the Village Gate. For me, it chance crossroads of a creative revolution. That’s was a lot of money even if it was just a few dollars. I one way to look at it. But Smith’s new memoir, Just was making $22 a week working at a factory. So a day Kids (Ecco)—which traces her relationship with “I REALLY BELIEVE THAT in New York was half my week’s pay. I always wanted Mapplethorpe from their first meetings (there were to be an artist, but I never doubted that I would have two of them before one fateful night in Tompkins ROBERT SOUGHT NOT TO to work. Having a job was part of my upbringing. Square Park) to their days in and out of hotels, love DESTROY ORDER, BUT TO BOLLEN: That’s what I like about the book. Even affairs, creative collaborations, nightclubs, and gritty REORDER, TO REINVENT, with all of the youthful idealism and craziness, so neighborhoods—paints a radically different picture. AND TO CREATE A NEW many of the chapters deal with struggling to survive. In this account, the two struggle to pay for food and ORDER. I KNOW THAT HE You basically showed up in New York with no money shelter, looking out for each other and sacrificing ALWAys WANTED TO DO and had to get a job so you could eat. everything they have for the purpose of making art. SMITH: Yeah. I came from a family that had no Just Kids portrays their mythic status as the product SOMETHING THAT NO ONE money. I didn’t have any idea that I would ever of willful determination as much as destiny. Smith’s ELSE HAD DONE. THAT WAS get anything for nothing. So my first thought immensely personal storytelling also rectifies certain VEry IMPORTANT TO HIM.” stepping out on New York soil was to find a job. mistaken notions about the pair, revealing specifically It took a while, but I got one. I got a few. I lucked that they were not wild-child drug addicts but dream- out at Scribner Book Store, because it turned out ers, more human and loving than their cold, isolated to be the longest-running job of my life. stares and sharp, skinny bodies in early photos lead BOLLEN: People see pictures of you and Robert one to believe. Smith left New York for Detroit in Mapplethorpe in those early days and romanti- 1979 to live with the man she would eventually marry, cize that kind of poverty and struggling. And it the late former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, just is beautiful, no question. But hunger is hunger, as Mapplethorpe’s career as one of the most shock- no matter what decade you live in. You say in the ing and potent art photographers was reaching its nothing else from me, this is a really important les- prologue to the book that Mapplethorpe’s life has apogee (his black-and-whites of gay hustlers, S&M son. I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they been romanticized and damned, but in the end, acts, flowers, and children were headed to museum attach a substance to their creative process. A lot of it the real Mapplethorpe lies in his art. collections and a court trial for obscenity charges). is purely habitual. They don’t need it, but they think SMITH: Exactly. By then Smith had already produced Horses and they do, so it becomes entrenched. Like, I can’t go BOLLEN: So if we have his art, why did you feel had risen to international fame. Her book follows without my coffee. I can go without drinking it, but I like you had to write a memoir about him? Mapplethorpe all the way to his death in 1989 can’t go without it nearby. It’s the feeling of how cool SMITH: Well, because I finally finished it. I prom- from complications due to AIDS, but it’s mostly I feel with my coffee. Because I don’t feel cool with ised Robert on his deathbed that I would write it. I about two kids who held on to each other. this tea. [Bollen laughs] You know, there are pictures kept notes for it and wrote other pieces for him, like As I began reading Just Kids, Smith hadn’t yet of me with cigarettes in the ’70s, and everybody The Coral Sea [W.W. Norton, 1996]. But it took a “ROBERT and I WERE officially agreed to an interview, but I continued to thought I smoked. I can’t smoke because I had TB while, because the idea of writing a memoir about ALWAYS OURSELVES— move through it, spending an entire Sunday in my when I was a kid. But I loved the look of smoking— a departed friend while also having to navigate wid- apartment unable to let go of the book. I finally had like Bette Davis and Jeanne Moreau. So I would have owhood was too painful. For a while I had to sort of ’TIL the DAY he DIED, to put it down to attend a cocktail party at a friend’s cigarettes and just light ’em and take a couple puffs, shelve the promise I made to Robert. In the last 10 WE WERE JUST house, and when I got there, I saw Patti Smith across but mostly hold them. Some people said that was years, I finally got back on my feet and got the house EXACTLY as we WERE the room. I went up to her, and we made a date for the hypocritical.
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