The Mansions of Limbo (38 page)

August 1987

N
o one expected him to live for the opening, and there he was, on a high,” said Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Whether the artist would or would not be present was the question that occupied the minds of all the people involved, in the days preceding the highly publicized and eagerly anticipated vernissage of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who took his art to the outer limits of his own experience, at the Whitney last July.

For nearly two years the rumors of Robert Mapplethorpe’s illness had been whispered in the New York art and social circles in which he moved as a celebrated and somewhat notorious figure. The death in January 1987 of the New York aristocrat and collector Sam Wagstaff from AIDS had brought the matter of Mapplethorpe’s illness with the same disease out into the open. Mapplethorpe, the principal inheritor of Sam Wagstaff’s fortune, had once been Wagstaff’s lover and later, for years, his great and good friend. The inheritance, believed to be in the neighborhood of $7 million—some say more, depending on the
value of his art and silver collection—made the already much-talked-about Mapplethorpe, a famed figure of the night in the netherworld of New York, even more talked about, especially when the will was contested by the sister of Sam Wagstaff, Mrs. Thomas Jefferson IV of New York. Mapplethorpe has never avoided publicity; indeed, he has carefully nurtured his celebrity since his work first came to public notice in the mid-seventies.

That summer night at the Whitney Museum, there were sighs of relief when he did arrive for the opening, having been released from St. Vincent’s Hospital only days before. He was in a wheelchair, surrounded by members of his entourage, carrying a cane with a death’s-head top and wearing a stylish dinner jacket and black velvet slippers with his initials embroidered in gold on them—a vastly different uniform from the black leather gear that had been his trademark. For those who had not seen the once-handsome figure in some time, the deterioration of his health and physical appearance was apparent and quite shocking. His hair looked wispy. His thin neck protruded from the wing collar of his dinner shirt like a tortoise’s from his shell. But even ill, he was a man who commanded attention, and who expected it. A grouping of furniture had been placed in the center of the second of the four galleries where the exhibition was hung, and there he sat, with his inner circle in attendance, receiving the homage of his friends and admirers, a complex olio of swells and freaks, famous and unknown, that makes up the world of Robert Mapplethorpe. His eyes, darting about, missed nothing. He nodded his head and smiled, speaking in a voice barely above a whisper. “It’s a wonderful night,” person after person said to him, and he agreed. He was enjoying himself immensely. On the wall facing him hung
Jim and Tom, Sausalito
, his 1977–1978 triptych of two men in black
leather, adorned with the accoutrements of sadomasochistic bondage and torture. In the photographs, Jim, the master, is urinating into the willing, even eager, mouth of Tom, the tied-up slave. “Marvelous,” said one after another of the fashionable crowd as they surveyed the work. “Surreal” was the word that came to my mind.

However much you may have heard that this exhibition was not a shocker, believe me, it was a shocker. Robert Mapplethorpe was described by everyone I interviewed as the man who had taken the sexual experience to the limits in his work, a documentarian of the homoerotic life in the 1970s at its most excessive. Even his floral photographs are erotic; as critics have pointed out, he makes it quite clear that flowers are the sexual organs of plants. But the crowds that poured in that night, and kept pouring in for the following three months that the exhibition remained up, had not come just to see the still lifes of stark flowers, or the portraits of bejeweled and elegant ladies of society, like Carolina Herrera and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Paloma Picasso, and of artist friends, like David Hockney and Louise Nevelson and Willem de Kooning, which are also very much a part of Mapplethorpe’s
oeuvre
. They had come to see the sexually loaded pictures, freed of all inhibitions, that were hanging side by side with the above in the galleries of the Whitney, like the startling
Man in Polyester Suit
, in which an elephantine-size black penis simply hangs out of the unzipped fly of a man whose head is cropped, or the even more startling
Marty and Veronica
, in which Marty makes oral love to a stockinged and girdled Veronica, whose upper body is cropped off at her bare breasts. Mapplethorpe was a participant in the dark world he photographed, not a voyeur, a point he made clear by allowing a self-portrait showing his rectum—rarely considered to be one of the body’s beauty spots—to be hung on
the wall of the museum, with a bullwhip up it. The Mapplethorpe sexual influence is so great that in the otherwise scholarly introduction to the catalog of the show, Richard Marshall, an associate curator of the Whitney, made reference to this same photograph as the “
Self Portrait
with a whip inserted in his ass.” That night, and on two subsequent visits to the exhibition, I watched the reactions of the viewers to the more graphically sexual pictures. They went from I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing-on-the-walls-of-the-Whitney-Museum looks to nudges and titters, to nervous, furtive glances to the left and right to see if it was safe to really move in and peer, and, finally, to a subdued sadness, a wondering, perhaps, of how many of the men whose genitalia they were looking at were still alive.

“On the opening night this amazing strength came to Robert,” said Flora Biddle, the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who is the chairman of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum, which her grandmother started. “At the end of the evening he got up and walked out, after he had come in a wheelchair.”

Later, Mapplethorpe told me his feelings about the opening. “It was pretty good. I kept thinking what it would have been like if I’d been feeling better.”

“You’ve become really famous, Robert,” I said. “How does that feel?”

“Great,” he said quietly, but shook his head at the same time. “I’m quite frustrated I’m not going to be around to enjoy it. The money’s coming in, though. I’m making more money now than I’ve ever made before.”

Today Mapplethorpe charges $10,000 for a sitting. His one-of-a-kind pictures sell for an average of $20,000 each. A Mapplethorpe print from the Robert Miller Gallery, his dealer in New York, starts at $5,000.

“I seem to read something about you every day in the press,” I said.

“I do love publicity,” he replied. “Good publicity.”

In a sense, Sam Wagstaff created Robert Mapplethorpe, but anyone who knows Robert Mapplethorpe will tell you that he was ready and waiting to be created. They met over the telephone when Mapplethorpe was twenty-five and Sam was fifty. “Are you the shy pornographer?” Wagstaff asked when he telephoned him. Robert had heard of Sam before the call. “Everyone said there was a person in the art world I should meet. So Sam came over to look at my etchings, so to speak.”

At the time the totally unknown Mapplethorpe was sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with the then totally unknown poet and later rock ’n’ roll star Patti Smith, who has remained one of his closest friends. Although he was, in his own words, “doing photographs of sexuality” with a Polaroid camera back then, he did not yet consider himself a photographer. The Polaroid camera had been purchased for him by John McKendry, the curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. Mapplethorpe had become a sort of adopted son to McKendry and his wife, Maxine de la Falaise, the daughter of the English portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, and was taken about by them into the smart circles of people who later became his friends and patrons. Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe became positive influences on each other’s lives. The handsome and patrician Wagstaff, who graduated from Yale and once worked in advertising, had long since moved away from the Upper East Side and New York society world of his birth into the bohemian world downtown. A former museum curator, he had become more and more of a reclusive
figure, involved with a group devoted to self-fulfillment called Arica, and sometimes, according to Mapplethorpe, observing whole days of silence. Wagstaff encouraged Mapplethorpe in his photography, and Mapplethorpe persuaded Wagstaff to start collecting photographs. “He became obsessed with photography,” said Mapplethorpe. “He bought with a vengeance. It went beyond anything I imagined. Through him, I started looking at photographs in a much more serious way. I got to know dealers. I went with him when he was buying things. It was a great education, although I had my own vision right from the beginning. If you look at my early Polaroids, the style was then what I have now.”

Richard Marshall states in his introduction in the catalog that Mapplethorpe “did not feel a strong ideological commitment to photography; rather it simply became the medium that could best convey his statement.” Explaining this, Marshall said, “He wasn’t a photographer who found his subject. The camera became the best way for him to express himself. Before that he was into collage, drawings, et cetera. He took up the camera to play with, and found that it was what he was looking for.”

Barbara Jakobson, who was one of Mapplethorpe’s first avid supporters as well as an old friend of Wagstaff’s, said, “When I become enthusiastic about an artist, I do not keep my mouth shut. Within five minutes the jungle drums are beating. I like to see people I admire succeed. That was when our friendship started. Robert really saved Sam Wagstaff’s life. At the beginning of the seventies, anyone who knew Sam said that he was virtually a recluse. Robert is the one who got him interested in collecting photography. Sam revolutionized the way we look at photographs. When he
sold his collection to the Getty Museum, his position in photography was forever assured.”

Mapplethorpe does not stint in his acknowledgment of his late friend’s patronage. “I was a real hippie. Sam was a real hippie too. Financially he certainly helped me. He was very generous. We never actually lived together. I had a loft on Bond Street, which he bought for me. He had a loft on Bond Street too. We were lovers as well. I think if you’re going to do a story, you should get all the facts. It lasted a couple of years. Then we became best friends. I even introduced him to James Nelson, who became his boyfriend after me.” He paused before he added, “He’s sick at this point too.”

“With AIDS?”

“Yes. He’s going through all his money. He’s spending like crazy. He rents an apartment at Number One Fifth Avenue, where he and Sam lived, but Sam’s apartment in that building has been sold.”

Shortly after we talked, Jim Nelson died. Nelson, a former hairstylist for the television soap opera “All My Children,” inherited 25 percent of Wagstaff’s residuary estate, and Mapplethorpe inherited 75 percent. Nelson, aware that he was dying, wanted his money immediately, so Mapplethorpe, through their lawyers, bought out Nelson’s share. As Nelson’s life neared its end, he fulfilled a long-held dream and rented two suites on the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, one for himself and one for a companion, and sailed to England, where he stayed in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, and then took the Concorde back to New York. He spent the last day of his life making up a list of people he wanted to be notified of his death and another list of people he did not want to be notified, one of these being the person who told me this story.

Barbara Jakobson said, “It was great to observe Robert
and Sam together. Sam got such a kick out of Robert, and Robert allowed Sam to be indulgent. Sam was a Yankee with cement in his pocket, but he was very generous with Robert. Sam always meant for Robert to have his money. I was very unhappy over the publicity about the will after Sam died.”

Another close woman friend of both men, who did not want to be named, said, “Robert was looking for a patron, and along came Sam. Sam made Robert’s career. He showed Robert this other way of life. Robert was into learning more than anyone I ever knew. When Robert met Sam, all the doors opened for him. Sam was his sugar daddy in a way.”

Most of Wagstaff’s money came from his stepfather, Donald Newhall, who left him and his sister shares of the Newhall Land and Farming Company in California, which later went public. Over the years, Wagstaff sold off some of his shares to buy his art, photography, and silver collections. In his will he left bequests of $100,000 each to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the New York Public Library, as well as $10,000 and the family silver to his sister, Mrs. Jefferson, and $10,000 to each of her three children.

“She’s enormously rich,” said Mapplethorpe about Mrs. Jefferson. “She didn’t need the money.”

“Then why did she contest the will?”

Mapplethorpe shrugged. “She needed entertainment,” he said. In the long run, the litigation never went to trial; Wagstaff’s sister decided against proceeding with the suit on the day of jury selection. Several subsequent lawsuits over Wagstaff’s million-dollar silver collection, in which Mapplethorpe charged the New York Historical Society with “fraudulent conduct” in obtaining a five-year loan of Wagstaff’s silver as he lay dying, were settled out of court.