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.
On Friday evening, November 4, 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe gave a large cocktail party at his studio to celebrate his forty-second birthday. Incidentally, November 4 was also the birthday of Sam Wagstaff. Birthday celebrations have always been important to Mapplethorpe, according to Barbara Jakobson. She remembered other birthday parties in the past that Sam had given for Robert. “ ‘Sam is going to give me a party,’ Robert would say way in advance.”
At the peak of the birthday party, nearly two hundred people milled through the vast studio, among them the film stars Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines, all of whom had been photographed by Mapplethorpe. In the crowd were Prince and Princess Michael of Greece, the Earl of Warwick, Tom Armstrong of the Whitney Museum, gallery owner Mary Boone, Bruce Mailman, who was a managerial partner in the St. Marks Baths until it was closed down in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, and Dimitri Levas, the art director and principal stylist on Mapplethorpe’s fashion shoots, who is said to be one of his heirs, as well as well-known figures from the magazine, gallery, auction, and museum worlds. And collectors. And people who were just friends. Inevitably, there were men in black leather, some wearing master caps, standing on the sidelines, watching. Everyone mixed.
Everybody brought gifts, wonderfully wrapped, and soon there was a mountain of them on a bench by the front door. Bouquets of flowers kept arriving throughout the party, including one of three dozen white roses in a perfect crystal vase. Waiters in black jackets moved through the crowd, carrying trays of fluted glasses of champagne. On several tables were large tins of beluga caviar, and Robert kept leaning over and helping himself.
Although there was certainly a sense that this was Robert Mapplethorpe’s farewell party for his friends, there were no feelings of sadness in the studio that night. Robert, continually indomitable, provided his guests with an upbeat and optimistic celebration. He looked better than he had looked in weeks. He sat in his favorite chair, missing nothing, receiving guest after guest who came and knelt by his side to chat with him. Toward the end of the evening, he stood up and walked.
“This is Robert. This is his life. Everybody beautiful. Everybody successful,” said one of the guests whom I did not know.
“Robert has style,” said Prince Michael of Greece, surveying the event. “Personal style is not something you learn. It’s something you have.”
One of the most frequently asked questions these days is where Robert Mapplethorpe will leave his money when he dies. His lawyer, Michael Stout, refused to answer the question. But it is known that the photographer has recently set up the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, with a board of directors. Besides specific bequests to friends, the foundation will probably give money to the arts as well as to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), an organization with which Mapplethorpe had been associated since Sam Wagstaff’s death. In a letter he sent out asking friends and acquaintances to pay $100 each to attend a private viewing of Sam Wagstaff’s silver collection prior to its sale at Christie’s in January, he wrote, “I have asked AmFAR to use the funds raised from this benefit to support community-based trials of promising AIDS drugs, a pilot program which will greatly increase patient access to treatments that may help extend their lives.”
February 1989
THE LIGHT OF HUSSEIN
People came because she was beautiful, and were then awed by her brilliance. She had dispelled the fairy-tale image. “This is no fairy tale. This is not a fairy tale at all,” said Sarah Pillsbury, the Hollywood film producer, about her Concord Academy classmate Queen Noor al Hussein after the queen had spoken in the United States in October, defending the controversial role of her husband, King Hussein of Jordan, in the Middle East crisis. The Arab kingdom is precariously situated, bordered by Iraq, Israel, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Should a war erupt, Jordan could become a battlefield. But in Amman, the capital, there was no overt sense of turbulence, or of a country close to war, during my visit two weeks later.
Foreign correspondents, on their way to and from Baghdad or Riyadh, talked in the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel of atrocities and war, but taxi drivers and shopkeepers did not. Over dinner, the minister of information, speaking for the king, told a group of American journalists, “We don’t want war. We are extremely nervous about military action in the area. We cannot afford to have a war. Jordan will be destroyed.” But life seemed to go on as usual. In Petra, “the rose-red city half as old as time,” I asked a Bedouin guide, “Don’t you worry about the crisis?” “No,” he replied, “we live our life in crisis. We have our faith. We’re not afraid of death.”
I had come hoping to see the American queen, whom I had heard speak several weeks earlier at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., but my visit began inauspiciously. Checking into the Inter-Continental Hotel, I was confronted by a figure from the palace, Fouad Ayoub, who informed me that there were obstacles. The appointment for an interview with Her Majesty, he said, was unfixed, uncertain, and unpromised. There was a reluctance to let me meet with her until certain guidelines had been agreed upon, guidelines that were never going to be agreed upon. The best I was able to muster up was an evening visit with the only f
emale member of the Jordanian senate, Laila Sharaf. An unpromising interview, of real interest to neither Mrs. Sharaf nor me.
The taxi driver who took me from the Inter-Continental to Mrs. Sharaf’s house, high up on a hill on the outskirts of the city, spoke English but resisted all my attempts at conversation. There was, I was soon to discover, an underlying dislike of Americans in the country. In the taxi was a photograph of King Hussein next to one of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, the man described by President Bush as worse than Hitler. King Hussein, who for many years positioned Jordan as a “moderate” Arab monarchy—who, indeed, has long been one of Washington’s staunchest allies in the region—refused to join the anti-Saddam coalition. The surface reasons were apparent: Palestinians, who have sided with Iraq, account for more than half of Jordan’s population, and the king could ill afford to ignore their interests. Even those Jordanians opposed to the brutal policies of Saddam Hussein are more opposed to the presence of American troops in the area. Although Jordan has abided by the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, the king’s position severely strained his relations with the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia, which reacted by cutting off oil shipments to Jordan, leaving Iraq as its only supplier, and deepening the economic crisis.
At Mrs. Sharaf’s large and handsome villa, the scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. The flower garden was in full bloom, and birds in great profusion sang on the roof. It was a setting of Middle Eastern luxe, marred only by the presence of an armed guard in a sentry box. I asked the taxi driver to wait for me in the courtyard. He was reluctant until I assured him that I would pay for his waiting time.
Laila Sharaf, the widow of a prime minister, is a distinguished woman in her own right, involved in cultural affairs. With the queen, she was active in starting the Jerash Festival of Culture and Arts, an annual program of dance, poetry, and music held in an ancient Roman amphitheater. The festival brought thousands of tourists to the country and was a boon to the economy, but with the beginning of the Gulf crisis, tourism became nonexistent overnight. Her butler brought a tray with glasses of lemonade, orange juice, cola, and water. We settled on comfortable sofas, and she began to describe to me the duties and accomplishments of the American queen.
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