Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe: Bohemian Rhapsody

To see Patti Smith at her most indispensable, go to YouTube and watch her perform “Horses/Hey Joe,” a medley that peaks with the immortal directive “Go, Rimbaud! Do the Watusi!” Rimbaud? Watusi? Yes! Anybody who sees the link between the most delirious of French poets and the dumbest of ’60s dance crazes is onto something.

Smith is 63 now and ready for her memoir. But the story she’s chosen to tell isn’t about the rock-star years. It’s a coming-of-age tale about a shy Jersey girl who falls in love with a lapsed altar boy from Long Island with “tousled shepherd’s curls.” He’s Robert Mapplethorpe, future famed photographer and shrewd reprobate who would die of AIDS in 1989. As Smith tells us, “I would someday hold his ashes in my hand.” After his death, his matter-of-fact pictures of leather S&M, with their strange composure, would set off one of the most heated episodes of the culture wars. But the Mapplethorpe whom Smith remembers is still just a provocateur-in-training, a Botticelli imp who loves chocolate milk and makes her a tambourine. She calls her book Just Kids (Ecco; 304 pages). She could have called it Mad About the Boy.

They met cute. In 1967, Smith was a dreamy 20-year-old from a blue collar family. She was obsessed with art, film and books, and her taste in decadent demigods was impeccable, from Charles Baudelaire to William Burroughs. But she was drifting into a prosaic life. The previous year she had gotten pregnant, dropped out of a teachers’ college, placed the baby with an adoptive family and started punching a clock in a textbook factory. In desperation she lunged for New York City with her drawing pencils and a copy of Rimbaud. Straight off the bus she headed to look up friends in Brooklyn and stumbled upon Mapplethorpe, sound asleep. “He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled.” Instant bliss–she’d given up one baby and found another.

Almost at once they moved in together in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, where they worked on their art in penniless contentment. “We hadn’t much money but we were happy,” she writes. (Reader, beware–Smith has a weakness for mannered prose.) But poverty is easier to bear when you see everything through the lens of art, when a blue rayon dress is your “East of Eden outfit” and you go to your job in a bookstore dressed all in black like Anna Karina in a Godard movie.

When Mapplethorpe starts acting on his desire for men, he and Smith wind down as a couple but continue as soul mates. They move to the Chelsea Hotel, the boho hangout where Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls. To Smith it’s ideal, “a dolls house in The Twilight Zone.” Does her absorption in her dream of art help to explain why she seems a bit naive about men? It’s not just that she never fathoms Mapplethorpe’s deepening fascination with S&M. She lives for a while with a member of the ’70s arena band Blue Öyster Cult, until she discovers–surprise!–that he messes around on the road. She has an affair with the playwright Sam Shepard, who handles her with care but neglects at first to mention his wife and kid.

Soon the wider world is coming to call. Mapplethorpe is taken up by the older men who will school him in art history and seat him at tables with Bianca Jagger. Smith starts giving poetry readings that lead to a record contract. For these kids, it’s childhood’s end. The Rimbaud-Watusi years are just beginning. But the chocolate milk has run out for good.