A tall, gentle woman with long dark hair opens the door of the house on a quiet street in Greenwich Village. She is pale and slim and dressed in a man’s black jacket, white shirt and jeans. No shoes. You would never pick her out in a crowd, but if you ever met her, you wouldn’t easily forget her. This is Patti Smith, the legendary rock’n’roll artist, poet and political radical, now 60 years old and undimmed in her creative energies.
Smith is calm and soft-spoken. She has been playing guitar and singing to her daughter Jesse, who is feeling low, curled up under a duvet on the sofa. Upstairs the rooms are large and light and all the doors are open which is very relaxing. The place is painted white and simply furnished, stacked with books. She guides me towards a glass display case in which sit various treasures — old photographs, bits of ivory, carved wood and a pair of black velvet slippers.
“These were Robert’s,” she says. On the toes “RM” is embroidered in gold thread: Robert Mapplethorpe. She stands in silence looking at them, smoothing the velvet. It is the instinctive, almost unconscious, movement of a woman recalling the comforts and pleasures of a man who has gone. Mapplethorpe died in 1989. She still loves him.
Their relationship is celebrated in an exhibition of his photographs and a video of her at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London, opening on Friday, together with Smith’s own tributes to Mapplethorpe at Tate Modern and Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Upstairs in her bedroom she guides me to a photograph of the two of them grinning carelessly together at Coney Island in 1969. They look young and happy, very much together. Hanging underneath is a tambourine streaming with ribbons, the bright colours now faded. “Robert made this for me. I’ve had it since 1968. He stretched the goatskin. He decorated it. He was so talented.” She moves on and shows me other treasures — Mapplethorpe’s camera, an etching from Pilgrim’s Progress, an Ed Steichen photograph of a Brancusi sculpture. Eventually we both sit down on the floor at the end of her bed and she brings me things, like a game of show and tell.
Advertisement
“Robert and I used to play show and tell. It was one of our main entertainments. We had no radio or TV and we used to look at art books together, talking about the pictures, what we liked or found interesting about them. Robert was a painter first. He loved doing collage. He loved the Surrealists and Duchamp, the merging of Dadaist ideas and Pop Art. He majored in sculpture and he loved Michelangelo. He was a modern artist with classical taste. Photography was great for him because he could apply his love of sculpture. You can see that in his nudes. When I look at his nudes I don’t think of sex. I think of classical sculpture.”
Smith and Mapplethorpe met in Brooklyn in 1967. Both were 20, both wanted to be artists. “We had nothing much to live on but we instantly became inseparable. We made art all the time together, out of anything, the cheapest materials. He was trained and very gifted and he shared many things with me and taught me things. He had the ability and I had the guts. We lived and worked side by side for years. We inspired each other, but his vision was fully formed. There was nothing I could teach him about his art. I read the books and he learned from me that way. We used to boost each other’s egos in those early days. He’d say, ‘Patti, that’s genius. But you wanna see something really genius?’ We loved to laugh. We used to compare ourselves to Braque and Picasso. The only reason Robert would be Braque was because Braque was a great dancer and Robert fancied himself as a dancer.”
They lived together, first in Brooklyn, later in the Chelsea Hotel and then in a loft near by. “People forget. We were so young then and inexperienced. He was my boyfriend. He was not evolved at all. We went through a lot of growing pains together, and that’s why our friendship lasted. We were always friends. We always knew where each other was and what the other was thinking. At a dinner party we might be at opposite ends of the table but if someone said some corky thing we both knew we couldn’t look at each other or we’d crack up.”
By the mid-Seventies the two were going their own ways. Mapplethorpe’s sexuality was evolving and he moved into the New York gay scene. Smith headed towards marriage, to the guitarist Fred Smith, and a decade spent away from music to bring up two children. “But we were so attached that we needed to stay close for a long time until it was time for us actually to part. It was so painful. It took us a long time to part. We couldn’t just wrench ourselves apart. We lived close to each other for years.”
It was when they were still living around the corner from each other in 1978 that Smith was offered a show for her drawings at Robert Miller’s gallery on Fifth Avenue. “I was completely amazed. It was such a beautiful gallery. I knew I couldn’t have a show there before Robert. I said I’d do it if I could do it with Robert. It was one of the greatest achievements of our friendship. Most of his photographs were of me, and some of my drawings were of him.” And seeking another aspect of their collaboration, the two of them decided to make a film. The result was Still Moving, which will be shown at the Jacques Gallery, along with many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs from this period.
Advertisement
“This film, I love it. It was so like us. He just said: ‘Let’s make a film. Come round tomorrow, about two.’ That was it. So I threw some stuff in a bag, an old white dress he’d given me, a Bible, a few other things. We never talked about what the film would be. He’d put up a bit of mosquito netting in his loft and a couple of his statues. He knew I would know what to do. I just started talking about Blake and all kinds of stuff and he shot it. We did it for about 20 minutes, and I later made a soundtrack.”
Unlike other large personalities, Smith is not loud or arrogant or uncommonly charming. I can sense her asceticism, her desire for purity and her resistance to compromise. But she also has an unexpectedly warm and enveloping spirit. She has been through great sorrow since first her brother, then her husband and then Robert all died, followed by the death of her pianist. As we sit there on her bedroom floor, she allows me to enter the secret room of her longing.
“I sometimes think I could be the saddest person in the world. Or the luckiest. Every one of them has magnified me. I’ve got better and better as a person with each loss. I try not to go too far into being sad. It can be a dark place. But most of the time I’m filled with energy and love. When Robert died, the energy I had was from all the things I knew of him and his life. Everything in my body was so accessible through him.”
Smith has been been doing her own photography since the Sixties. “It’s very nice for me because I think a lot about Robert when I’m taking photographs. I know what he would like. The act of taking them brings me close to him, to the same pleasure we shared of investing our hopes and dreams and knowledge in something. Who we were when we were together is still there, unfettered by anything.”
She takes her photographs, gentle black and white still-lifes, when she is on tour, stealing away from the Patti Smith bandwagon to find a museum or cemetery. Her images, in the manner of Eugène Atget, are about capturing the light on monuments to the past: Victor Hugo’s bed, Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Tolstoy’s grave, Nureyev’s shoes, Virginia Woolf’s desk.
Advertisement
She is also writing a book about Mapplethorpe, but she has missed her deadline. “There are things I know which no one else knows about him. I know right now he’s really annoyed with me because the book’s not finished. But however long it takes, it’s up to me to tell the story. And I must tell it with clarity and joy.”
Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving and Lady, Alison Jacques Gallery, London W1 (www.alisonjacquesgallery.com), Fri-Oct 7.
On Fri at 7pm, Tate Modern, in collaboration with Alison Jacques Gallery, presents an evening of poetry and song by Patti Smith. Tickets: 020-7887 8888 www.tate.org.uk/modern.
Advertisement
On Sept 11 and 12, Patti Smith and Kevin Shields present The Coral Sea Sessions, an evening of poetry and music in memory of Robert Mapplethorpe, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre (08703 800400, www.rfh.org.uk)