The Mansions of Limbo (39 page)

Mapplethorpe’s lawyer, Michael Stout, who handles many prominent people in the creative arts, said about him, “Robert is the most astute businessman of any of my clients. If there is a decision to be made, he understands the issues and votes the right way.”

Although I had known Sam Wagstaff for years, my contact with Robert Mapplethorpe was minimal, no more than an acquaintanceship, so I was surprised when he asked me to write this article, and more surprised when he asked to photograph me. Two years ago, right after Sam Wagstaff died, when the rumors of litigation between his family and his heir over his will were rampant, I had thought of writing an article on the subject for this magazine. Mapplethorpe, however, let it be known through his great friend Suzie Frankfurt, the socialite interior decorator, that he did not wish me to write such a piece, and I immediately desisted. Later I saw him at the memorial service for Sam that was held at the Metropolitan Museum. Already ill himself, he made a point of thanking me for not writing the article.

I had met Mapplethorpe for the first time several years earlier, at a dinner given by the Earl of Warwick at his New York apartment. Although Mapplethorpe was then famous as a photographer, the celebrity that was so much a part of his persona was due equally to his reputation as a leading figure in the sadomasochistic subculture of New York. Indeed, he was the subject of endless stories involving dark bars and black men and bizarre behavior of the bondage and domination variety. He arrived late for the dinner, dressed for the post-dinner-party part of his night in black leather, and became in no time the focus of attention and unquestionably the star of Lord Warwick’s party.
He was at ease in his surroundings and, surprising to me, up on the latest gossip of the English smart set, telling stories in which Guinness and Tennant names abounded. When coffee was served, he took some marijuana and a package of papers out of his pocket, rolled a joint, lit it, inhaled deeply, all the time continuing a story he was telling, and passed the joint to the person on his right. It was not a marijuana-smoking group, and the joint was declined and passed on by each person to the next, except for one guest who, gamely, took a few tokes and then passed out at the table, after saying, “Strong stuff.” Unperturbed, Mapplethorpe continued talking until it was time for his exit. After he was gone, those who remained talked about him.

Like everything else about Robert Mapplethorpe, the studio where he now lives and works on a major crosstown street in the Chelsea section of New York, which was also purchased for him by Wagstaff, is enormously stylish and handsomely done. In 1988 it was photographed by
HG
magazine, and Martin Filler wrote in the accompanying text, “Mapplethorpe’s rooms revel in the pleasures of art for art’s sake and reconfirm his aesthetic genealogy in a direct line of descent from Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau.” There are things to look at in every direction, a mélange of objects and pictures, but everything has its place. Order and restraint prevail. “You create your own world,” said Mapplethorpe. “The one that I want to live in is very precise, very controlled.” It fits in with his personality that he pays his bills instantly on receiving them.

Each time we met, we sat in a different area. In the back sitting room of the floor-through loft space, the windows have elegant brown-black taffeta tieback curtains designed
by Suzie Frankfurt, which seem both incongruous and not at all incongruous. Frankfurt, who maintains a complicated friendship with him, said, “Robert lives in the middle of a contradiction—part altar boy and part leather bar.” That day he was wearing a black dressing gown from Gianni Versace, the Italian designer, and his black velvet slippers.

At one point he went into a paroxysm of coughing, and from the look he gave me I realized he didn’t want me to see him like that. “Would you excuse me for a minute,” he said. I got up and went to another part of the apartment until he called me back.

“Oh, I’m so sick,” he said. “I’ve been throwing up all night. The nights are awful.”

“When did you first know you had AIDS?” I asked.

“It was diagnosed as AIDS two years ago in October.”

“Did you suspect beforehand that you had it?”

“Every faggot suspects beforehand.”

He said that he had two nurses on twelve-hour shifts that cost him a thousand dollars a day. “But I’m lucky. I have insurance.” He has been on AZT almost from the beginning. He worries constantly about friends who are less fortunate, specifically his black friends. In a conversation with Marlies Black, who assembled the Rivendell Collection of modern art and photography, which contains the largest selection of Mapplethorpe’s work in the world, he once said, “At some point I started photographing black men. It was an area that hadn’t been explored extensively. If you went through the history of nude male photography, there were very few black subjects. I found that I could take pictures of black men that were so subtle, and the form was so photographical.” Now, musing on that, he said, “Most of the blacks don’t have insurance and therefore
can’t afford AZT. They all die quickly, the blacks. If I go through my
Black Book
, half of them are dead.”

When I sat for him to be photographed, I was nervous, even though he had asked me to sit. It was on a day that he was not feeling well. He had not slept the night before. He coughed a great deal. His skin was very pale. We sat on the sofa and talked while Brian English, his assistant, set up the camera and chair where I would sit for the picture. Although ill, Mapplethorpe kept working most days. He showed me pictures he had taken a day or two before of the three-year-old daughter of the actress Susan Sarandon, and he had arranged to photograph Carolina Herrera, the dress designer, as soon as he was finished with me. I was talking about anything I could think of, mostly about people we both knew, to postpone the inevitable. Finally, I told him I was nervous. “Why?” he asked. “I just am,” I said. “Don’t be,” he said quietly. I was struck as always by his grace and manners, which seemed such a contradiction to the image most people have of Robert Mapplethorpe. Finally Brian placed me in the chair, and Robert got up and walked very slowly over to where the Hasselblad camera was set up. He looked in the viewfinder. He asked Brian to move a light. He made an adjustment on a lens opening. “Look to the left,” he said. “Keep your head there. Look back toward me with your eyes.” He was in charge.

Another time, I remarked that he was looking better. He told me that he was finally able to eat something called TPN, a totally nutritious substance which gave him 2,400 calories a day. “I don’t actually eat. I’m fed mostly by tube. If I hadn’t found this, I’d be dead by now. I couldn’t keep any food down.” And then he said a line I heard him say over and over. “This disease is hideous.”

“My biggest problem now is walking. I have neuropathy, like when your foot’s asleep. It’s constant. It’s in my hands too. If it weren’t for that, I’d go out.” His eyes moved toward the window. “I’d like to go to Central Park to see the new zoo. And I’d like to go back to the Whitney to see the show. I hear there are lines of people to see it.”

He was born in a middle-class suburban neighborhood called Floral Park, which is on the edge of Queens, New York, the third of six children in a Catholic family of English, German, and Irish extraction. His mother is a housewife. His father does electrical work. He went to a public school in Floral Park, but he would have preferred to go to the Catholic school, which his younger brothers went to. Although he now says that Floral Park was a perfect place for his parents to raise a family, early yearnings in nonconformist directions brought his family life to a halt. “I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. The only way to do that was to break away. I didn’t want to have to worry about what my parents thought. When I was sixteen, I went to college at the Pratt Institute. That was when I began to live elsewhere.”

Except for his brother Edward, the youngest of the six, who was at the studio each time I was there, he has not been close to his family for years, although he said that they are “closer since I told them I was sick, which was not too long ago.”

“Did your parents come to see your show at the Whitney?” I asked him.

He shook his head no. “They intend to,” he said. Then he added, “But they have come to see me here.”

While still in school, he began living with Patti Smith, whom he met in Brooklyn. Maxine de la Falaise McKendry
remembered that when Robert first met Smith he kicked a hole through from his apartment to hers so that they could communicate better. “Patti and I built on each other’s confidence. We were never jealous of each other’s work. We inspired each other. She became recognized first. Then she had a record contract. She pushed ahead. There was a parallel happening to each career.” Patti Smith, who is now married with two children, lives in Detroit. “We talk to each other all the time,” he said.

“S&M is a certain percentage of Robert’s work, and necessary to show, to give a representation of his work,” said Richard Marshall. He told me that when they put the exhibition together there had never been any idea of censorship, or any reservation about including offensive material, although, he added, “there are some stronger pictures which do exist, some more explicitly graphic pictures, the uh, penetration of the arm.” What Marshall was referring to was what Mapplethorpe calls his fist-fucking file. “Call Suzanne,” he said to me, speaking of his lovely young secretary, Suzanne Donaldson, “and ask her, if you want to see the fist-fucking file, or the video of me having my tit pierced.” When certain of these photographs were shown at an art gallery in Madrid, the gallery owner, who has since died of AIDS, was sent to jail.

“There were some letters of protest about the show, but not in great numbers at all,” said Marshall. “We put up signs in three or four locations, warning parents that the show might not be applicable for children.”

Flora Biddle concurs. “I went on a tour of the show the night before it opened with the Whitney Circle, which is the highest category of membership. Richard Marshall talked about the pictures to the group, dealing with the
pictures you could call the most sexual, and spoke beautifully about them. The people in the Circle were attentive and open to them. Afterward, people came up and said they thought it was so wonderful the Whitney was hanging this show.”

Barbara Jakobson said, “Sometimes I’d drive downtown in my yellow Volkswagen to have dinner with Robert. Then, later, I’d drop him off at the Mineshaft, or one of those places. God forbid he be seen having a woman drop him off, so I’d leave him a block away. I had no desire to see inside, but I once asked Robert to describe what it was like, in an architectural way. He said there were places of ritual. He told me how the rooms were divided, without telling me what actually went on. Once he showed me a sadomasochistic photograph. I said to him, ‘I can’t believe that a human being would allow this to be done.’ He replied, ‘The person who had it done wanted it to be done. Besides, he heals quickly.’ Robert would find these people who enjoyed this. The interesting part is that they posed for him.”

When I discussed this conversation with Mapplethorpe, he said, “I went to the Eagles Nest and the Spike to find models. Or I’d meet people from referrals. They’d hear you were good at such and such a thing, and call. I was more into the experience than the photography. The ones I thought were extraordinary enough, or the ones I related to, I’d eventually photograph.”

“Were drugs involved?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve certainly had my share of drug experiences, but I don’t need drugs to take pictures. They get in the way. However, drugs certainly played a big factor in
sex at that time. MDA was a big drug in all this. It’s somewhere between cocaine and acid.

“Most of the people in S&M were proud of what they were doing. It was giving pleasure to one another. It was not about hurting. It was sort of an art. Certainly there were people who were into brutality, but that wasn’t my take. For me, it was about two people having a simultaneous orgasm. It was pleasure, even though it looked painful.

“Doing things to people who don’t want it done to them is not sexy to me. The people in my pictures were doing it because they wanted to. No one was forced into it.

“For me, S&M means sex and magic, not sadomasochism. It was all about trust.”

“If his S&M work were heterosexual, it wouldn’t be acceptable,” I was told by a world-famous photographer, who, because of Mapplethorpe’s illness, did not wish to be quoted by name making critical remarks about him. “The smart society that has accepted his work has done so because it is so far removed from their own lives.”

Even before the AIDS crisis, though, Mapplethorpe had begun to move away from the S&M scene as subject matter for his photography. One of his closest associates said to me, “Robert had gotten more and more away from being a downtown personality. He had been observing the uptown life for some time, and I think he wanted to become a society photographer. Once, leaving someone’s town house on the Upper East Side, he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind living like that.’ ”

Carolina Herrera, the subject of one of Mapplethorpe’s earliest and most celebrated society portraits, has known him for years, “long before he was famous.” They met on the island of Mustique in the Caribbean in the early 1970s, when Herrera and her husband were guests of Princess Margaret, and Mapplethorpe, along with his English friend
Catherine Tennant, was a guest of Tennant’s brother Colin, who is now Lord Glenconner. Tennant remembers Mapplethorpe at the time wearing more ivory bracelets up his arms than the rebellious Nancy Cunard wore in the famous portrait Cecil Beaton took of her in 1927. When Mapplethorpe took Herrera’s picture in a hotel room in New York, he had only a minimum of photographic equipment and no assistant. Herrera’s husband, Reinaldo, had to hold the silver umbrella reflector for him. Mapplethorpe photographed Herrera wearing a hat and pearls, against a blank ground, and since then his style in social portraiture has remained as stark as in his nude figures, mirroring the sculptural influence of Man Ray more than the ethereal settings of Cecil Beaton.