Mapplethorpe Robert - Mapplethorpe: a biography

I first met Robert Mapplethorpe in 1983, when I received an unexpected call from photography dealer James Danziger, who was then picture editor of the London Sunday Times Magazine. Danziger was editing a special issue on photography and wanted someone to write a profile of Mapplethorpe to coincide with the opening of the photographers retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. I confessed Id never heard of Robert Mapplethorpe, but Danziger was on a tight deadline and persuaded me to write the piece.

The following day I took a cab to Mapplethorpes loft at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan, where a junkie was sprawled on the sidewalk, a needle dangling from his arm. I had to step over the man to reach the front door of Mapplethorpes building, as if crossing a boundary to a place I wasnt sure I wanted to go. A creaking freight elevator took me up to the photographers loft, which was decorated with Arts and Crafts pottery and devil statues. In the center of the living room was a huge chicken-wire cage that contained a mattress covered in black satin sheets. Opposite the cage, Mapplethorpe was sitting in a black-leather-upholstered chair, his legs drawn up around him. He was handsome in a dissolute way, with piercing green eyes and white skin tinged with blue. He spoke in a soft voice and seemed intent on creating an aura of mystery that precluded any discussion of his early family life in Floral Park, Queens. His relationship with the poet-performer Patti Smith was off-limits, too. Instead, he handed me a portfolio of graphic sex pictures, and watched as I flipped through them.

I knew Mapplethorpe was waiting for a reaction, but what was the appropriate response? The situations were so alien to me that the images barely registered on my brain. Yet something about the photographs triggered memories of crucifixion scenes, and I asked him, Did you grow up Catholic? Mapplethorpe warmed up immediately and showed me one of his latest pictures, of a black man wearing a metal crown of thorns. I guess you could say I have a certain Catholic aesthetic, he explained. I was relieved to discover some common ground, although I realized it would take more than two hours to understand how a middle-class Catholic boy from the borough of Queens became the documentarian of the gay S&M scene. My life, he promised, is even more interesting than my photographs.

Mapplethorpe was then only thirty-sixtoo young, in some ways, for a biographyand I didnt think much about him for the next several years. Then AIDS wreaked havoc with the notion of the average life span; people were dying at the peak of their careers, and the illness tragically mimicked the deterioration of old age. Id heard rumors that Mapplethorpe had AIDS, but I didnt approach him about writing his biography until August 1988. By then he had been acclaimed as the greatest studio photographer of his generation, and a pivotal figure in elevating photographys status in the art world. A controversial retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art had opened two months earlier, and the exhibit would become one of the most highly attended events in the museums history.

Sadly, Mapplethorpe faced the painful realization that he was finally achieving everything he had ever wanted at a time when he was most likely going to die. He had already set up the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to ensure his posthumous fame, and he was eager for someone to start working on a book about him while he still had the energy to tell his story.

Mapplethorpe had moved to a more elegant loft since our first encounter, and despite his illness he usually dressed up for our meetings, in black velvet pants and matching cashmere sweater. His green eyes were still vibrant, but he looked like a man in his eighties, and he punctuated his sentences with an agonizing cough. I interviewed him a total of sixteen times until a month before his death on March 9, 1989; I never knew from one interview to the next whether Id see him again. Mapplethorpe didnt enjoy talking about himself, yet he was extremely candid about things most people keep secret. One afternoon, after smoking a joint, he began outlining his sexual life in vivid detail; he didnt stop even after his nurse placed him in bed and hooked him up to an intravenous tube. The situation reminded me of Anne Rices Interview with the Vampire, for Mapplethorpe painted himself as a creature of the nighta sex demonwho had no control over his voracious appetite.

The photographer wasnt apologetic about his sexual obsessions; in fact, his biggest regret was that he wouldnt reap the benefits of his celebrity. Ironically, he would become even more famous after his death, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., abruptly canceled a retrospective of his work. Mapplethorpes The Perfect Moment exhibit had been partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corcorans decision to cancel the show in June 1989 ignited a fierce debate over federal financing of sexually explicit art. U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina accused him of promoting homosexuality and described his wifes reaction at seeing The Perfect Moment catalogue as Lord have mercy, Jesse, Im not believing this. A year later, when the exhibit arrived at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, director Dennis Barrie was charged with pandering obscenity and misuse of a minor in pornography. The Cincinnati trial became a test case for current standards of obscenity, and Mapplethorpe would go down in history as a symbol of artistic freedom or, depending upon ones viewpoint, deviant art.