Reviews

JUST US KIDS
BY PATTI SMITH
ECCO

Just Kids is Patti Smith’s beautifully written memoir of her friendship with the late artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of an AIDs related illness in 1989. They met by chance in Brooklyn in 1967, after Smith, at age 19, had fled her family to live in New York. She was looking to begin life over, having just given up a child for adoption. Robert was from a strict Catholic family, an ex-altar boy with a taste for LSD. From the moment they met, they became inseparable, first as lovers, later as friends. They lived together – she wrote poetry and he sketched and made collages. They shared everything, most of all their dreams of becoming famous artists.

Smith’s memoir recounts the life they led in New York from the late ‘60s to the mid-‘70s, when Smith first found success with the release of her debut album Horses. During these years she immersed her- self in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the music of Dylan and Jim Morrison, worked in bookstores like Brentano’s and Scribner’s. She and Mapplethorpe lived in the East Village, hanging out in St Mark’s Place, at a time when Andy Warhol and William Burroughs were local fixtures. America was in turmoil, leaders and politicians being shot, students massacred at Kent State.

The centrepiece of her memoir is the time they spent living in the Hotel Chelsea, a place full of the famous and eccentric, where manager Stanley Bard would rent rooms in exchange for art. On her first day she met Harry Smith, revered for his Anthology Of American Folk Music. She and Robert started hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, home to Warhol and the Factory crowd, meeting drag queens like Candy Darling, later immortalized in Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’. Smith is almost picked up in a diner by poet Allen Ginsberg, who mistakes her for a boy. The Hotel Chelsea was a magnet for rock stars, with Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Hendrix, passing through.

Bit by bit, Smith and Mapplethorpe begin to enter this world. Smith was befriended by Beat poet Gregory Corso, guitarist Johnny Winter and by Bob Neuwirth, who had previously appeared in DA Pennebaker’s film on Dylan Don’t Look Back. Neuwirth took her to Woodstock, to see The Band recording Stage Fright, and through him she met Todd Rundgren, Tom Paxton, Roger McGuinn, Kris Kristofferson. She was still writing poems, but also starting to write songs, purchasing her first guitar, a “little Martin acoustic”. Around the same time, Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera, gravitating toward photography, the art form that would bring him eventual fame. Smith would be his first model.

By the early ‘70s, Smith and Robert’s romantic relationship was over. Mapplethorpe’s acceptance of his homosexuality meant they began to drift into different scenes. Smith began an affair with playwright Sam Shepherd, who first suggested she add music to her poetry readings. In February 1971, she performed her poem ‘Oath’ at St Mark’s Church with guitarist Lenny Kaye, opening with the words: “Christ died for somebody’s sin / but not mine.” Mapplethorpe, meanwhile, began a relationship with the influential photographic curator John McKendry, and later with the wealthy collector and patron Sam Wagstaff. These relationships would gain him entry into the world of high society he’d always desired, where a typical dinner party guest-list might include Bianca Jagger, Marisa Berenson, Tony Perkins, George Plimpton, and Prince Egon von Furstenberg.

Even as they went their separate ways, Smith and Robert continued to live just a few streets apart. As always, he photographed her, and his portraits embellished her earliest books of poetry and her album covers. Eventually, Smith left New York, and their intense years together became a memory, always punctuated by phone calls and a shared intimacy. She was the first to find fame, with Horses, and he would follow with successful and scandalous exhibitions of his photography.

Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDs in 1986, at a time when Smith was carrying her second child. He continued to photograph Smith, the last Polaroid being a moving image of her holding her child Jesse, in 1988. They would continue to speak, even until the time he was hospitalised and could no longer do so. The night before he died, she “held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.” He died on March 9, 1989, when Smith was asleep, providence, as she would say, determining how she would say goodbye.

Smith’s book is impressionistic in style, yet full of little nuances, discrete detail. As a book by a musician, it stands comparison with Dylan’s Chronicles. Like Dylan, she is that most literary of songsters, a poet at heart. There is an honesty and candour in her portrayal of her life with Mapplethorpe, a relationship that allowed Smith a first glimpse of the artist she might become. Rather than being a book about music, it is instead a book that commits to memory the events that allowed her to become a musician.

Before he died, Smith promised Robert that she would one day write their story. It’s taken her many years to do so, but she has proved true to her word. With Just Kids, Smith has written a hauntingly moving memoir of their early life together, a paean to the New York of the late 1960s, when they were just ‘kids’, still trying to find out who they were, in love with life, and art, and dreaming of eventual fame. It came to them both, in different ways, yet fate would take Robert all too early. Smith asks of herself, “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead?” With Just Kids, it feels like Smith has come as close as humanly possible to doing so.