About a boy

Patti Smith on her early life and her symbiotic
relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe

by JULIET WATERS

Patti Smith never had any dream of becoming a rock star, according to her recent memoir Just Kids, and certainly no vision of becoming the godmother of punk. She loved rock, like any teenager from South Jersey. But her deepest ambition was to become an artist. In 1967 she moved to Brooklyn, and on the first day there met Robert Mapplethorpe, the man who would influence her career and life more than any of her very famous mentors (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs) or lovers (Sam Shepard, Jim Carroll).

Over the next decade she would be girlfriend, best friend, muse and ultimately soulmate to the notoriously gorgeous Mapplethorpe, best known for his glamorous and often beautiful (though controversial) S&M photography, and his tragic death of AIDS in 1989. Just Kids is mostly the story of their relationship. But of course it’s also the story of their era and an amazing peephole into late-’60s and early–’70s New York bohemia.

The couple spent years literally starving for their art (there were days when they had barely enough money to eat more than a shared hot dog), until they managed to scrape together enough of a mutual portfolio to talk their way into a shabby room at the Chelsea Hotel.

Some of the scenes of life in the early New York underground are squalid to the point of horror. But Mapplethorpe and Smith were never Sid and Nancy, or anything close. What emerges from this memoir is how mature, driven and mostly sober these two artists were. Mapplethorpe enjoyed his LSD, but didn’t drink. Smith hated needles, and only much later in her poetry career began to smoke hash. Obviously they partied and experimented, but they made a vow to each other that one would always remain sober to keep the other one safe.

They had a fascinating symbiotic relationship that allowed them to push the limits while always managing to stay relatively grounded. “You’re a bad girl trying to be good. And I’m a good boy trying to be bad,” Mapplethorpe insisted. And somehow their yin and yang dynamic kept them sturdy through a time that many of the people they met would not survive.

Before she became a rock star herself, Smith would find herself in a room comforting a broken hearted Janis Joplin and sitting on the stairs working out social anxiety with Jimi Hendrix. But no matter how close she was to that scene, she was never really in it. Even then there seemed to be an unconscious drive to somewhat subvert the grandiosity and self-important excesses of rock ’n’ roll.

Smith touches on this when she recounts the first time she saw Jim Morrison in concert. “Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.”

And of course she could, almost without trying. Mapplethorpe supplied the social ambition, and through him she met the Warhol entourage, who also left her cold. “I hated the soup, and felt little for the can.”

But in time the scene was obviously less indifferent to her. The audience at the first show at which she ever performed her poetry to music included Lou Reed, Warhol, Rene Ricard, Brigid Berlin and rock journalists Lisa Robinson and Richard Meltzer. She was immediately offered a record contract, which she just as immediately turned down in favour of a job working for Steve Paul’s Blue Sky Records. She wasn’t ready, she knew. She wanted to earn that recording contract.

She did, a few years later, signing with Clive Davis on Arista. And the rest is, of course, history. But in our own era, with so many artists struggling to find the right balance of survival and soul, it’s hard to imagine a better-timed memoir.

JUST KIDS BY PATTI SMITH, HARPERCOLLINS,
HC, 278 PP., $31.99