Robert Mapplethorpe,
a known homosexual who died of AIDS
and who spent the last years of his life promoting homosexuality.
Now, if any senator doesn't know what I'm talking about
in terms of the art that I have protested,
look at the pictures!
Now, any senator who thinks
that I'm attacking aesthetic art--
I don't know whether the television cameras can see it or not,
I'm gonna be fast enough with it that they can't.
But I want senators to come over here, if they have any doubt,
and look at the pictures.
In Cincinnati, police closed down the Mapplethorpe exhibit.
We are sending the Mapplethorpe exhibit to trial.
Come over here. Look at the pictures.
One of two artists whose works led to a dispute...
Look at the pictures. Look at the pictures.
Who is Mapplethorpe?
The art gallery and its director
are charged with obscenity for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
Look at the pictures.
Mapplethorpe's work is highly controversial.
Can I show it to you? I don't want to look at it.
I don't even acknowledge that it's art.
Keep your hands off!
I don't even acknowledge
that the fellow who did it was an artist.
I think he was a jerk...
...jerk, jerk.
This is one of five vaults
in which Mapplethorpe's archive resides.
Audiovisual material is in here
along with more ephemeral paperwork from his studio and personal correspondence.
Photographs are in a cooler environment,
and Polaroids are in an even colder environment.
One of our big challenges is to really make a case
for why we're doing two concurrent exhibitions...
Right. ...about one artist.
This is two sides of one coin.
Yeah.
There is a duality that runs through Mapplethorpe's work and life
and we hope to be able to divide the material
in a way that would highlight that duality.
This is a box of self-portraits. Right.
Oh. Oh.
Yeah, biker jacket from the back.
Yeah.
I really like this white piping
and how it leads up to this other shape. Yeah.
That's one of the great ones.
When you say Mapplethorpe, people immediately think
of the controversies that happened during the '90s.
"Guerrilla Rebel."
Yeah.
Mapplethorpe was being demonized
by conservative politicians,
so one of our goals was to humanize Mapplethorpe,
to bring him back into people's consciousness as a human being.
It's quite convincing.
Ah. Oh.
Mapplethorpe and bullwhip.
I remember it being a slightly higher contrast.
It's a different paper. Right.
This is a lot warmer and softer.
Mm-hmm.
The way his hand is,
it's so great, it almost looks like he's releasing a shadow.
Yes. Because that cord comes just to the edge of the frame.
The cord kind of connects the viewer with Mapplethorpe.
Yeah.
Because it's coming out of the picture.
As well as the eye contact.
Right. Obviously,
it's very defiant.
He's not hiding his face. He's not hiding his identity.
He's not hiding what he's doing.
Robert was just... my younger brother.
I'm the oldest.
That's myself, my brother Richard,
Robert, Edward, Sue, and James.
That's the six of us.
When we were young, we did a lot of coloring.
Robert always had weird things.
He'd have a green face,
or... just not the norm.
Purple hair, or something.
And I'd say, "Why are you doing that for?
"That's not the way it's supposed to be."
As far as, like, photographs,
he never took photographs.
My dad took a lot of photographs.
Robert, he had no interest in that at all.
My wife and I and the children moved here in 1949.
I was always interested in photography,
but none of my kids were until Eddie.
I had all the equipment downstairs, a darkroom,
enlarger and printer and dryer and everything else.
This is the block we lived on.
See, all the houses were the same?
This is during the snow.
This is Robert here with two of his friends.
You know, we had to be home a certain time for dinner,
and you had to sit at the table until you finished your dinner.
Robert was this regular kid.
One thing was, his endurance on a pogo stick.
He was having competitions with people.
He would go all the way around the block on a pogo stick.
Robert was the pogo stick champ of 259th Street, of the neighborhood.
He just could go on forever, and he was so proud of that.
You know, there's something about black and white pictures that are so much better
because they last.
I took this of Robert in front of our house, right?
The rest of them, all these, he took of me,
and, I believe, is probably the first pictures he took.
"Sense and Nonsense!"
There was this television program in the early '50s.
Someone would give them something to taste with their blindfolds on
and you would have to guess what it is.
That's how we play the game, identifying items by means of our five senses.
Well, we Mapplethorpe kids made our own
"Sense and Nonsense" game.
Robert, little devil that he was,
went to one of the many ashtrays around the house,
which were always full,
and put ashes in my brother's mouth,
and they were fuming.
That's the kind of stuff he did, that kind of needling stuff.
So he was a devilish guy.
We never missed Mass on Sunday.
We always went to church.
And I still do.
I first met Robert Mapplethorpe
when I was assigned to Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park.
They were active in the parish, you know,
so I got to know the whole family.
So Robert just kind of took to me,
and I, you know, took to him.
And... he used to paint me pictures.
He drew me a couple of paintings of the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary,
and I thought to myself, "He's been too influenced by Picasso."
You know?
But anyway, I have to say that, first,
he was the only person I knew
who could sit on a couch and chew his toenails.
The other thing was, you'd look at Robert
and I think the first thing you'd notice is his eyes.
They were huge,
and as if he was always looking,
always penetrating, always...
you know, trying to get through.
I come from this, you know, suburban America.
It was a very safe environment,
and it was a good place to come from
in that it was a good place to leave.
He never quite really fit in
with all these other teenage boys, you know?
There was something very fragile about Robert.
Robert was mom's favorite. I don't know why though.
I can't put my finger on specific things,
but I always say, "Oh, Robert was her favorite."
Somehow that just wasn't enough for me.
Robert was smart. Everything came easy to him.
I worked like a dog for my marks,
but he graduated at 16.
As soon as I could, I started art school training,
and I moved to Brooklyn.
My dad was basically against it.
My father thought, you can do it as a hobby,
but what are you ever gonna do with art?
Did you know that photography
and homosexuality share something in common?
Growing respect for photography in the art world
occurred simultaneously
with the growing visibility of the gay rights movement.
Each suffered a gauntlet of prejudice during their coming of age.
Just as Mapplethorpe was starting out,
to be openly gay was still very much a cultural taboo.
And photography was considered not much more than a utilitarian medium,
an applied art, a bastard of the arts.
He was very young when he started Pratt.
He just looked like a little boy and people made fun of him.
At that time his name was Bob Mapplethorpe,
and to further diminish him,
they called him "Maypo,"
because that was a children's cereal back in those days.
♪ I want my Maypo, I want my Maypo ♪
He was not macho.
It makes you strong.
He told me he would take his father's negatives to class
and present them as his own work.
He was a fuckup.
So I was interested in his experience at Pratt
and how he found himself as an artist there.
Is that a self-portrait?
Yes. This one's actually ink,
so I'm imagining he, like, rolled an oil-based ink onto his face.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Which is kind of hard to comprehend.
The psychedelia of it too.
He was really into acid at the time.
We both had a similar background.
Right off the bat, I think we kind of hit it off.
He started taking drugs and smoked marijuana. LSD.
We both were living on
candy bars and cigarettes, basically,
and he was getting really skinny and we were both really pale-looking...
But we smoked, and so he put LSD in the cigarette.
I completely lost my memory.
And so... I, uh...
I don't know, I'm losing track now.
I'm kind of like, having a...
I'm going back there too much, I guess.
When I was in art school, I'd stay up all night, stoned,
trying to think what hasn't been done,
and I was obsessed with trying to come up with a new approach to art
and to be unique somehow.
Bob and I realized you have to get a little name recognition
and sometimes the weird thing works-- can work well for you.
So, somewhere along the way there, he had purchased this little monkey
and he named it Scratch,
and I did some really nice drawings of Scratch.
The monkey had some bad habits.
The monkey masturbated a lot,
and the monkey threw crap at you sometimes.
He would walk around with the monkey on his shoulder
and he was wearing a black cape.
Robert and I graduated Pratt in '67,
the Summer of Love and blah, blah, blah.
And here is Robert standing all by himself
in a corner, hanging, you know, hiding his face.
He's extremely mysterious.
And that's who he was.
McCue: The final project for both of us
was to make a musical instrument out of a bone.
Then I remember, I got a call from Bob
and he was all kind of weepy and he said,
"I don't know what to do. Scratch has died."
It was maybe two o'clock in the morning.
He came in and he was really shook.
He said, "I boiled Scratch's head,
"and I've got my bone,
"but, you know, it was terrible.
"It smelled terrible. I hated doing it, I had to cut his head off."
So he aced the project.
Yeah.
There was a lot of negativity,
even at Pratt, toward what I did.
You know, people would say,
"That isn't art, that isn't the way you make art,"
and I just did it the way I wanted to do it.
Robert set himself apart from his classmates.
It's a beast and this is his backside.
It's a pose that he uses himself
later on in self-portraits. Hmm.
If you compare it to "Bullwhip," that backward pose,
he already has it in his mind.
The last time I saw Bob, he had no clothes on.
He was afraid. He had all the furniture stacked up against the door,
and he was really beside himself and he said,
"I'm afraid. I'm afraid. Someone's coming. Someone's coming.
Could you give me $20?"
I met Robert accidentally
and he was just a boy. I mean, we were both 20.
He was... He was a kid going to Pratt,
and we fell in love and he was my boyfriend.
It was the first time I had ever been in love with anybody,
so the fact that it was-- it was somebody as unique as Patti,
I mean, she was-- she was a magical kind of person.
So like, you know, and she was--
she was supportive of what I was doing, or my magic,
and I was supportive of her magic.
Neither one of us were ever jealous,
so it was like, you know, it was like a storybook relationship.
He helped me to build confidence in my work
and to think of myself as artist,
to have a concept of oneself as an artist.
That was always really important to Robert,
not as an apprentice, not as a student,
but as an artist.
I loved photographing my friends,
and Robert called me and said, "Can you do some naked pictures of Patti and me?
I want to make a little film called 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'"
So then we set up lights on the back of a chair,
and I just took the pictures that he asked for.
Robert and Patti were so beautiful in such an interesting way
and in an unconventional way, I think.
He exuded this kind of androgynous sexuality,
and so did Patti.
Patti was drawing all the time,
and Robert was drawing all the time and making things.
You know, it was messy.
There was stuff hanging around, tacked up on the walls.
It looked like a scene from a Godard movie.
We sat for hours and hours, night after night, drawing
and, you know, drawing from each other as well as drawing.
I'm a thief and I dig it.
A good thief never hesitates.
A good thief steals clean.
And I'm stealing now. And I'm stealing now.
The Chelsea has been home
for more than a century to a colony of artists
who have also celebrated it in books,
poems, plays, dance, and painting.
I kept on saying to Patti...
I loved them. We were like a family.
He kept telling me I was like a sister.
Patti was working like crazy to let us live.
I mean, she was very generous,
and she wasn't jealous of me at all, which is wonderful.
She trusted me with Robert, totally.
I never was in love with him
or had any sexual feelings for him,
but we were very close.
We would sit in my totally white, empty room at the Chelsea,
which supposedly had had Oscar Wilde stay in it,
and had had Jackson Pollock stay in it.
And I had Warhol's clouds floating, the helium clouds.
That's all I had in the room,
and a mattress.
We lived on the floor and it was clean enough to eat off of them.
That's exactly what we did.
It was a 25-hour art show all the time,
or movie set or whatever you would wanna call the life.
It was just the life being recorded.
In a stark, sun-drenched studio,
lives filmmaker Sandra Daley.
I called him up, I said,
"Could you bring over some of the things
"and put them up on the walls?
Because there's nothing here, you know, it's all white."
And he came over with the stuff,
and I looked, I thought, "God, leather pants with a cock sticking out."
I thought, "Why not?" It looked fabulous.
I was working with articles of clothing.
They were kind of like fetish sculpture.
You know, if I had a jacket that I wore all the time, I'd put it in a piece
and, you know. So it was like assemblage.
What's made you live in the Chelsea for the past seven years?
Um, my friends, I guess, live here,
and my teachers.
It's my home.
Robert didn't say much.
He didn't talk at all, did he, in that clip?
Robert could sit in silence
a lot more comfortably than I could.
I'm Edward Mapplethorpe.
Robert Mapplethorpe's brother.
I was three years of age when he left the house.
I remember just waiting anxiously on my stoop
and knowing Robert and Patti were coming.
And then I'd be like, "Wow." Like, "Wow, look at these guys."
I mean, they didn't look like anybody else.
They didn't talk like anybody else.
I would say, creature. They were like creatures.
Just the way he dressed, the way he carried himself.
The way his hair was, the way, uh...
It was just...
It encompassed him.
The art, the artist encompassed him.
There was no separation.
Wow.
I see them as exquisite.
Most porn looks amateurish
and lower class.
Just make it look like,
I think I said a Louis Quinze chair,
so that it just takes your breath away.
It doesn't matter what the subject matter is.
It's like a love story... to porn, maybe.
There was a feeling I could get
through looking at pornographic imagery,
and I thought if I could somehow retain that feeling, you know,
it was like, maybe it was the forbidden because I was young, you know.
That if I could get that across and make an art statement,
make it do it in a way that just kind of, like,
reached a certain kind of perfection
that I would be doing something that was uniquely my own.
Oh, and that one even includes a camera.
Right. And that-- He highlighted it.
And this was before he was even making photographs. I think.
But this is when he started thinking, "It may be cheaper for me..."
Yeah. Yeah. ...to take photographs than buy all this porn.
Same great film...
I wanted raw material that originated with myself.
I felt that I was stealing them from other people,
and so that's how I started with the Polaroids.
You know, it was not because I wanted to be a photographer.
We had a Polaroid camera
and Polaroid film was really expensive,
so my focus was always that Robert got what he needed first.
And we had so little money for film.
We concentrated on getting him the film.
It was all there from the start.
And when I first started taking Polaroids,
I was working with photographs that dealt with sexuality,
portraits, flowers, and still lives
because I used the still lives to experiment with lighting.
These are the first times that Robert took emulsion.
He washed it off of the Polaroid till it floated above the base
and stretched them out.
That's me, ugly as ever.
Here's Patti.
And that's David Croland.
I'm really not a model anymore.
I'm just a... you know, an object.
If you want an explanation of why I'm wearing this robe,
it's for Robert, and Robert liked robes,
and he liked black silk.
And I thought twice about it, and then I thought,
"You're not gonna think three times."
Patti is the first girl he photographed for Polaroid
and I was the first boy.
I met Robert in 1970 on Memorial Day,
on a steamy hot day.
As soon as he got his camera,
the film was loaded and my clothes were off.
Starting with a robe
and then the robe was, like, here, et cetera, et cetera.
He photographed me a lot in that.
And in those days, I just thought, "Who cares? Polaroid film?"
I was used to being photographed by the big format,
you know, by... Should we drop some names?
Someone said, "Stop dropping names."
I said, "I can't help it if everyone I know is fantastic."
So I thought these Polaroids were like, "What the hell are these?"
I saw very quickly that he wasn't just stacking up a bunch of Polaroids.
He was making stuff out of them.
He was incorporating them into a new type of art,
which no one was doing.
No one.
Uh-uh.
And then someone called Patti to say they are boyfriends.
So that was... We were busted.
Patti knew that I was helping Robert,
so there was no animosity, not at all.
At least, I don't think so.
When you're young, you don't have much of a conscience.
I mean, when you're young, I don't even know if you think.
I don't even think it's a good idea to think, to this day.
It's just better to do stuff.
I had this small amount of money.
I could make a movie.
I said, "Robert, you can pick out anything you want to do."
I just thought it would be interesting to have
a ring through your tit
because I maybe seen it in a movie or something,
but it wasn't something anybody had at that moment.
And all of a sudden, there was a whole situation where I was...
to get my nipple pierced.
I had done a number of films for Andy Warhol,
so I was used--
and as a model I was used to having the camera trained on me.
Yes.
But I had no idea where that film was going.
Where that film went was to the Museum of Modern Art,
and it showed there at a big screening.
MoMA was very crowded,
and I was writing film reviews then for the "Village Voice,"
and I remember Robert was standing against the wall
and he had this sort of angelic kind of hair,
and I guess I had a crush on him and whatever.
Right way, in my mind, I saw him as an angel and a devil.
Then Patti has this brilliant monologue
that she did as the soundtrack.
I read this book, Robert had this book in his--
he had this book in his drawer called "Leather Boys,"
and, like, I picked it up the other night because he went out.
Once he got his leather pants, he would be down on Christopher Street.
Like, it was like my boyfriend or nothing.
I guess the reason-- the only reason I don't like it
is because, like, they got secrets.
"In sharp counterpoint to the delicacy of the visuals
"is the harsh and hilarious soundtrack by Patti Smith,
"poet, Robert's ex-girlfriend..."
"...who, it seems, dislikes homosexuals because,
"A, she feels left out,
and B, they use their assholes."
He called me after the review came out and said that he really liked it
and could we, like, meet for a cup of coffee or something.
Robert and I would, you know, meet up, like, at 4:00 in the afternoon,
go into some deserted restaurant and sit--
you know, just order coffee,
and he only had a Polaroid then.
He didn't even have a camera.
But he was already, you know, planning on his first exhibition,
and who he was going to invite and who he hoped would come.
This is Robert Mapplethorpe's announcement
for his first solo exhibition.
The envelope is embossed by Tiffany and Company.
It was a show of Polaroids.
He encased his announcement in the "don't touch here" safety cover
from the Polaroid film pack.
Terpak: Mapplethorpe says in several interviews,
"An exhibition doesn't begin when you go to the opening.
It begins when you get the invitation."
It's a small dot sticker...
that's really not opaque.
But what do you want the viewer to feel
when they open that invitation?
I want them to remember it, that's all.
You're thinking of, like,
standing out from this huge mass--
Why can't it be in terms of one's whole lifestyle?
You know what I'm saying?
The whole point of being an artist or making a statement
is to learn about yourself.
I think that's the most important part.
The photographs, I think, are less important
than the life that one is leading.
I would just run around and give people their food.
And it really was a comprehensive scene of downtown artists.
Not a closed world, but it was, you know, almost like a clubhouse in a way.
I probably saw Robert almost every night of my life.
You know, most people that I knew lived in such horrible places
that you really only knew where they lived if you had sex with them.
Lots of times in Max's, he would come and sit with me, you know.
It was probably the time I enjoyed Robert the most
because he was an incredibly amusing gossip.
He was extremely good-looking in a very particular way, you know.
No one that saw Robert
did not have a crush on him immediately.
No one. Everyone. Dogs liked him.
He looked kind of like, you know, a kind of ruined Cupid.
And he was very reliant on his charm, you know.
I mean, in other words, he made great use of it,
by which I mean, productive to Robert.
Robert was not a hustler. Robert didn't have to hustle.
People hustled Robert...
mainly out of his pants if they could.
Me too, by the way.
Robert didn't think anything was wrong with his ambition.
He didn't think of it as selling out.
He didn't think-- He just, you know, pursued it the way that people now do.
Was Robert ambitious?
There is no word for it.
For either of them.
That is an understatement.
For both of them.
Yeah.
Unbelievably.
I went away for a summer,
and when I got back, Robert was suddenly into S&M.
One day, I showed up at his place
and he was wearing leather pants
and it looked like a radio attached to his crotch.
I said, "What the hell is that?"
He said, "Oh, it's a codpiece. Isn't it great?"
I said, "This is like the beginning of the end if you keep dressing like this."
He started to trick me out in leather jackets and handcuffs.
He started to get not me, at all,
and more him,
and he wanted me to go-- always to go further.
And I thought, "That's not gonna happen. I'm a model."
Sam Wagstaff, I only knew that he was eccentric, handsome,
and then when he took me to this loft later that day, rich.
But right before we went to his loft on Bond Street,
he spied a little, tiny picture of Robert
taken in a photo booth with a little sailor cap on.
It looked like a Jean Genet drawing.
And he said, "Who is this?"
I said, "That's my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend."
So I called Robert up and I said, "Listen.
"Your ship's come in, it's in my harbor.
"You're gonna jump on this boat.
You're gonna love him, he's gonna love you, I can tell."
They had a date that week,
and they fell in love very quickly.
Sam was his protector, in every way.
You know, in the way that girls are protected by men.
It was a beautiful match.
Beautiful. Really beautiful.
I knew other people who had older guys who supported them and stuff like that,
but Sam devoted himself.
The career Robert had,
I don't believe would've existed without Sam.
I met him when he moved next to us on Bond Street,
so he was literally the boy next door,
and we just instantly became friends.
It's this little Cobblestone Street in New York.
Robert lived at 24 Bond Street,
and Brice and Helen Marden lived at 26 Bond Street,
and I lived at 42 Bond Street.
And the '70s in New York was very different than now.
New York was bankrupt,
things were pretty corrupt and violent.
There was a lot of crime,
and, you know, Bond and Bowery was in the middle of,
you know, people sleeping in the doorways
and lying on the streets,
but it was the art world.
When we first moved here, I was hysterical.
I said, "We've just spent 40,000 bucks on this dump.
"And look at this area. Look at this."
I mean, it's, like, miles before you can get
to a restaurant, a grocery store,
you know, a light at night, the place is dark.
You had this beautiful, free-flowing stream,
then there'd be all the soapsuds and garbage.
Junkies. You see, that's the way Bond Street was.
And now, of course, the last time I tracked it,
the penthouse in that building, I think, sold for 19 million.
I never thought we'd have any money. Did you?
No, it wasn't-- it wasn't the intention.
I mean, it wasn't as though it was just a band of innocents, you know.
You came to New York because you felt you had to be in New York,
you know, or else you would have just gone to some place that was nice to live.
He loved coming over
and taking photographs of my bats.
You know, he wasn't Robert Mapplethorpe in the beginning.
You know, there was no thought that this was Robert Mapplethorpe, right?
Right, Brice? Right, yeah.
Nothing, you know. We were just all doing our work and chatting about it.
We'd go to these funny little used book stores
and they'd have, like, cardboard boxes filled with old postcards
and filled with old photo prints,
and Robert would go through them and he'd find, you know,
a Weston or a Steichen or something.
And it was like no one knew what it was, and it was like $5 or $10,
and he would do that much more once he got together with Sam.
See, what happened is I started collecting photography,
so I studied it through holding these pictures in my hand,
which is probably the best way to study photography.
Robert and I liked to lie on his bed and look at all the photographs Sam bought,
and then he would tell me how much they were worth and we would laugh.
Never having really looked at photographs as art,
it really took Robert to bring me to photography.
What are you up to?
I've been working.
You should see some of Robert's works.
I'll be getting down after the sale.
There was something about the quality
of even the Polaroids, which startled me.
Something very knife-sharp about his work.
I think this is the most intimate thing we have in the archive
between Sam and Robert. Mm-hmm.
Robert doesn't write,
so in a way, this linen album is his love letter to Sam.
You can see the dialogue that's going on between them
about photography, and love and all that sexuality.
Yeah.
I used to be slightly embarrassed
by certain photographs that Robert took.
He helped me get over that.
Robert, has always liked to play on the edge of pornography.
I always was fascinated with the idea
of taking a loaded subject like sexuality
and somehow bringing it to a level that it hadn't been to before.
He's absolutely wedded to truth
and opens it up in front of his camera in an almost surgical way.
And I remember somebody saying,
"You know, you really shouldn't do that because it's gonna fuck up your career."
And I said I thought it was stupid for him to even think that way.
I was convinced that what I was doing was the right thing to be doing.
I met Robert in the early '70s on Fire Island,
where his friend, Wagstaff, was renting a beautiful house
and they invited me to stay.
The '70s was a sexual time,
and Fire Island, we went for sex,
for that beautiful availability of sexual encounters.
I mean, the drugs were floating around.
It was heaven.
Whenever we went out, I was recognized, right?
And people stopped me and Robert liked that,
and he was craving for fame and he enjoyed to be seen with me,
but he was sort of feeling he should be the one who should be recognized.
And so I agreed, as a friend, to pose for him.
Then when the weekend was over,
Robert went back to New York City to work on his career.
For me, the ambition was to get laid.
Robert's ambition was to be a great photographer and that's why he is,
because in order to be a Mapplethorpe, you had to work hard.
He walked into my office at "Drummer,"
a major gay magazine where I was the editor,
wearing leather chaps and a leather jacket,
carrying a black leather portfolio,
and said, "Hello, I'm Robert Mapplethorpe,
the pornographic photographer."
Well, everybody that came to my desk
was a pornographic photographer.
The problem in the '70s was everybody was having sex.
Photographers weren't shooting,
painters weren't painting, writers weren't writing,
but Robert was functioning.
And we ended up in bed, then we became
bicoastal lovers for the next three years.
He knew that he needed to be written about,
which is one of the reasons he came to "Drummer."
I was just one of many writers that he approached.
I mean, nearly all of his friends were writers.
He wanted to be a legend.
He told me he wanted to be a story told in beds at night around the world.
He had that kind of drive,
and in a way, that's part of what makes geniuses,
this self-centeredness and this ability to use people.
So I was someone who could help Robert.
I had that power of being editor of "Interview,"
but I don't think we used him that much
because I was aware that Andy didn't like him.
He always just said, "Oh, he's so dirty-looking,"
and, you know, "He's so creepy,"
and Andy didn't like anybody who took Polaroids.
He thought he sort of was the only person who should be taking Polaroids.
But once Andy realized that Robert was with Sam Wagstaff, he started to like him.
So it was okay for me to then use him for "Interview,"
and we sent him to Mustique.
We met Robert, my husband and I, on our way to Mustique,
in a private little plane.
I haven't heard of him at all,
but I was fascinated by his mind,
and on top of that, he was so good-looking.
He said, at one point, "I want to photograph you."
And I said, "No way."
And he said, "You know what?
"You might regret it later,
"because I'm going to be a fantastic and great photographer,
and you're not going to have a photograph taken by me."
He was a big hit with the aristocracy,
and he loved Mustique and then Mustique loved him.
He was living this double kind of life
where he would be uptown at a fancy dinner... Mm-hmm.
...and then he would go to the Mine Shaft.
It looks well-worn.
Can you imagine it? It's not just a souvenir. Back pocket.
Well, that was one of the key places he went to find his models, The Mine Shaft.
What went on in the Mine Shaft for all those years
was two floors of the most outrageous sex
had this side of Ancient Rome.
All kinds of S&M sex,
scatological sex, fetish sex,
from the sling, to the stocks, to the whipping post.
People talked of a famous bathtub, I mean, there was always somebody in it,
and a ring of men around it, one, two, three layers deep,
everybody jerking off, touching each other, moving.
It's just like a scrum around that bathtub.
And then the ones in the first line would piss all over whoever was in the bathtub.
The work dealing with sexuality
is very directly related to my own experiences.
It was an area that hadn't been explored in contemporary art,
and so it was an area that interested me in terms of making my statement.
I was in the perfect situation in that most of the people in those photographs
were friends of mine, and they trusted me.
And I felt like it was an obligation to record those things.
Robert and I first met... at The Mine Shaft.
He comes over and I'm like, "Oh, here it goes.
"We're gonna have an orgy
or go down in the basement."
He was very good-looking,
you know, all in black leather. It was like-- it was hot.
He said, "Let's get out of here,"
and we went home, did a bit of coke, had some sex.
Very, very, vanilla sex.
He looked bored out of his mind.
And we were up in to two hours.
Just as I was nodding off, get up to do the first shoot.
We did it like 6:30, 7:00 in the morning.
He said he liked the light coming in the window.
It becomes a documentary in a sense,
though, I'd like to see it more as an autobiography.
You know, it's what I'm involved with at any given moment.
Leave that open.
I did this in a shop window.
This is Hockney, and this is a young film directress from LA.
I remember this one time we were at his studio
and he said, "Do you wanna see my private stuff?"
At that point, all of his stuff was very taboo.
None of this stuff was out in public when he was showing it to us.
It wasn't. It wasn't. Yeah.
Robert lived not too far east of my apartment,
so I just walked there.
I remember, as I got closer and closer,
that I felt increasingly more frightened.
I was a bit anxious, and I look up
and there's Robert up on the fire escape, smoking a cigarette,
and I was like, "Okay, here we go."
A hand-operated elevator.
Five flights.
Very low lit. Devil figures.
Mysterious. It's creepy.
The first thing that struck me about him,
he was not at all, you know, the kind of person
that one might think might make these kind of photographs.
Yeah. Well, this... This will pick up?
Yeah, this will pick up better.
Okay. Now...
He said, "oh, is that a Sony?"
And I said, "No, it's not," and he said,
"Oh, Panasonic. Well, Sony is better."
And, you know, teased me about having the wrong tape recorder.
In his early work, Mapplethorpe signed with an X,
so there's a kind of double entendre here.
Each portfolio, there's 13 gelatin sliver prints mounted on black board
and signed in graphite.
Sex is, for me,
probably the most important thing in life.
You know, it's the one area that offers a bit of magic,
a bit of something we don't know about.
Just seeing how his little brother reacted,
he just-- he dug it.
He loved to get a jolt out of people and a reaction
because it was power. They were powerful.
I think sexuality, like I portray it,
is very much today, but people, you know,
it would take a few years before people realize that.
And you don't think that you're just existing
in a specialized kind of subculture?
New York is specialized.
but what happens in New York is indicative of America finally.
If I was gonna pick an image that I thought was humorous,
I would pick the man in the rubber suit with a hose coming out of his mouth.
That's really disgusting.
I had grown up with abstract art, and conceptualism,
and, you know, nude men in rubber suits
were not part of my art education.
So it was hard to know how to talk about them.
Yeah, I was always amazed that it shocked.
I mean, because once I had a photograph and I had taken it,
it didn't-- it wasn't shocking to me anymore.
I'd been through the experience.
Just watching me.
Even though I was perhaps being tested that day,
I wasn't going to fail.
And then I was, like, "You know, this is cool.
This is cool."
Maybe they're the best
or the most important pictures I've taken.
When one sees something you've never seen before, it's rather important.
I mean, still, I can show those to people
and they will have never seen that image before.
So it opens something up,
and I think that's what art is about, is opening something up.
A couple of times, he's like, "So what do you think Dad would say about that one?"
There are two that particularly,
you know, took my breath away.
One was the pinky inserted into a penis.
That was like, "Oh, my God."
And the other one was the fist.
Okay, Robert.
I guess you've definitely found your voice.
I wanted to do a great fist fucking photograph,
so I did that picture,
and then he said, "Now, it's your turn."
So he sort of pinned me against the wall and says, "Listen..."
Anyway, once I had the picture taken,
I thought it was a really good picture of me.
But most people would say that that image was horrible.
Image of yourself. But once they--
It's a good one.
Robert, he said "I can't have you go home without giving Mom and Dad something."
So he just went...
and signed it, "For Mom and Dad."
It was certainly better than anything else they he had up on the wall. Sorry.
It was an "Easter Lilies" print.
Are you proud of your son?
For the artwork he did, yes.
But for some of the photographs that he took,
I just could not accept them either.
He's done a beautiful job on flowers.
There was tension. There was no doubt about it.
One time in particular being very, very uncomfortable
because my father wouldn't look at Robert.
My father was an electrical engineer.
He wore one of those penholders.
Robert would make his attempts.
He came with a Polaroid camera one time
and gave the camera to my father to-- he did a Polaroid of Robert.
After he left, my father making mention
of how Robert shook people's hands.
It wasn't a manly handshake.
It was a soft-set handshake.
Let me say this,
that I thought he was, for quite a length of time,
but I would never even mention it to my wife.
Because as far as my wife is concerned,
he was her favorite.
He and Patti told my parents they were married.
I remember sending her birthday cards.
Patti, whatever, Mrs. Robert Mapplethorpe.
You know?
I think my father always had suspicions though.
He said, "There's no pictures, there's no, you know, there's no certificate."
Did you resent the fact that he was gay?
I did, yes.
I guess I did, yeah.
He never spoke to me about it.
Because I guess he knew I would never accept it.
Admitting that he was gay or telling me that he's gay,
that wouldn't have helped matters at all.
Because I probably would've had more resentment
to that fact if he had told me.
So he was really not part of the family,
you know, and it's sad.
It's sad. I so wish,
I could talk to him now about it all, you know?
But Robert did-- Robert always wanted to be famous
and he became famous.
"Dear Lloyd, I finally have a gallery in New York.
"It's run by a woman named Holly Solomon,
"You probably have never heard of it,
but it doesn't seem to be a bad place to be for the moment."
I said, "Before I show your work,
I would like you to do my portrait."
And when he took my portrait,
I was convinced that he was an artist,
convinced that he could manipulate people extremely well.
And I use the word manipulate.
And so I said "Okay, let's do a show."
"Sam Wagstaff was a great photography collector." Holly Solomon said,
"I wouldn't have touched Robert without Sam.
"And there were others like me who felt the same way."
He had two shows in one day.
One was the S&M pictures,
and then one where the pictures, for, you know, the uptown trade.
And then there was a dinner that Sam gave, a black-tie dinner at One Fifth Avenue.
It was very carefully thought out. It was like an ad campaign,
and it worked.
Sometimes, I think it's better
for the public to be able to separate things
because when you mix them all up, the sex thing overpowers it,
and what happens is they just pick the sex pictures out and that becomes the show.
What will you say to those people
who accuse you of having a dirty mind?
Well, I don't know what-- I don't know what that means exactly.
I mean, I think everybody is, in one way or another, involved in sexuality.
So, if you believe that sex is dirty,
everybody has a dirty mind, I suppose.
But I never consider sex being dirty.
The image that particularly riveted me,
was Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2),
with his penis and balls laid out on the pedestal
as if they were a work of art, which, in his case, they were.
So...
Artistic photography is controlled
by very civilized people in New York City.
And in essence, he was glamorizing the penis,
which is a very uncivilized thing to do.
We sold one, only.
So, I bought the whole show from Robert
figuring "Okay, stuck is stuck."
He said, "I want to go uptown,"
and he brought me a present.
The present was a self-portrait with the whip up his... tush.
And my husband, he was quite insulted,
and he said, "I'm gonna rip it up," and I said, "No, you're not.
Someday, I'm gonna get handsomely paid for that photograph."
Is that making a statement about myself?
You know, it's one aspect of everybody, I suppose,
you know, sort of the demon within.
There's a sense of humor in what I'm doing,
which I hope people pick up on,
and sometimes they do, and I'm always pleased when people see that.
I don't think he could've produced the work he produced
if he hadn't been raised Catholic.
I think the way I arrange things is very Catholic,
even though I was never a religious person.
I think it's rather important as an influence on my life.
The imagery was what was important to him,
not the dogma.
There's something very ritualistic about sadomasochism.
It's, kind of, the Black Mass basically, right?
His S&M work is based on the Catholic martyrology.
As grade-school children, we hear tales
of St. Agatha tied to a stake and her tits torn off with a red hot pincher.
If you're a little kid and hear that, and twisted in a certain way,
all of a sudden, you're excited and not horrified.
I'm really not, you know, into sadomasochism, you know?
I don't encourage it with other people either.
But I really felt as though there was a struggle in Robert
between crucifixes and devil images.
Good, evil, there is a great conflict there.
He liked the fact that I had been in the seminary for many years
and was an ordained exorcist in the Catholic Church.
And because I was trained to be a priest, he was very confessional to me.
"Dear Jack, it's midnight.
"MDA ingested, only the first signs now visible.
"I've been out nearly every night. Tonight is no different.
"The Mine Shaft is beckoning.
"Come, go, come, go, come with me.
"Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,
"I let some creep stick his hand up my ass.
"I've been fisted, even came.
"But I think I prefer being the giver.
"In fact, I can't help but give preferential treatment to the feeding process.
"I want to see the devil in us all.
"That's my real turn-on.
Love, Robert."
I have to say that because nobody will say it.
I have to say it and it's not to put him down,
but it's simply to reveal.
Robert--
Satan to him was not this evil monster.
Satan was, like, a convivial playmate,
having a jolly good time seducing the maidens.
To me, it was a bridge too far.
Go away.
Can we close the doors? I'm getting awfully cold in here.
Yeah. There's a draft-- Marc?
San Francisco, 1978.
Robert was having a show, it was a sex show.
It was unusual. I mean, you didn't see sex as art in galleries.
And then someone said, "Well, you know,
"he did the album cover for 'Horses.'"
And it was the only black and white album cover.
And to see an androgynous-looking woman
with a jacket over her shoulder,
I just love, love, love that photograph.
Robert was holding court and he said,
"Well, let's have dinner the following night,"
and that's how I met him.
And then I guess you wanna know what happened the following night, right?
He reminded me of the satyr.
He really looked like a mythological creature,
like half goat, half man.
To be in Robert's world,
you either had to be rich, famous, or sex.
I wasn't rich, I wasn't famous,
so, it left that.
As he certainly wasn't monogamous,
he could have multiple relationships on a weekend.
But with me, there was no S&M.
It was about being close
and spooning and, you know,
just the normal, the normal kind of intimate stuff
that he didn't have from picking up strangers.
He said, "I want to do a nude."
So I said, "Why don't we do something, like, you know, this--"
those pictures of the hunt, you know,
where you have, like, the harvest with the dead rabbit
and the fruit and everything all and about.
So, I thought it was gonna be more like that,
and then it turned up with-- just this dead rabbit.
And I said, "What am I gonna do with this? Like a mink stole or something."
I'm surprised you even know that picture,
because you'll never see a picture of me in any book by Mapplethorpe.
You really won't.
The fact that I started getting a reputation
aside from just being "Robert's cute with," from San Francisco,
how dare I become a photographer that was well known?
This infuriated him.
He couldn't deal with that.
"I've had a houseguest here for much too long,
"a very cute boy that I met in San Francisco.
"He's sweet, intelligent, has a nice cock,
"but that ain't enough.
I wish he'd find an apartment as he's cramping my style."
That was probably me.
I mean-- but I don't-- never heard that.
I mean, I don't know who else he met in San Francisco.
That was-- that's the first time I'm hearing that.
Hmm.
Well, it finally isn't enough, is it? I mean, what he wanted.
It's never enough.
Everything was a means to an end to his career.
Everything.
Oh, my God. You guys are old school. I love that.
The Bond Street loft never changed.
In the front, it was sort of no man's land,
and that was where he used to photograph a lot.
Then you move back and it's this little sitting area
which-- where he would always hold court,
but across from that was the bedroom.
Painted black. Black.
Hot gloss.
With the handcuff holds above the bed.
I never went in there. Oh, I did.
First thing he said to me is, "All you have to know is where the darkroom is."
You know? Okay, dude, whatever, you know.
Do your thing, I'll do mine.
And I remember the first image I printed,
which was just a nasty, dirty picture.
It's a guy laying on his back, pulling on his nipples.
It's not a well-known picture, but it's a classic.
And that was where we went to work every day.
That's where we went. You know, "Off to work, here we go."
Little WASPy blondes going to the den iniquity.
Going to the fist-fucking file.
Wasn't it funny how soon we became anesthetized
to all the sex pictures? To the word penis?
Yeah, you really... 'Cause it was just daily.
There would always be film in the morning
from the night before,
so the first thing I'd do is process film.
He'd come in in his robe,
"How are the films, Tom?"
When he saw the image for the very first time,
he'd tease me, "What do you think of that cock, Tom?"
I'm like, "Get the fuck out of here." You know?
I was just out of school, looking for work,
and Robert was, like, "I don't know how I really feel about this,
"but I am looking for an assistant."
And I started the next day.
Because he didn't have a real photo background,
he was always insecure about "Technically did I get the picture?"
You know, "Did it come out? Did it come out?"
If it had light on it, and he could get an exposure, he was happy,
'cause, you know, they were all fucked up in the middle of the night.
I'm not a technician. I never studied photography.
I don't particularly care to know it.
I know what a fine print is.
I would probably have less than half the number of photographs
if I did my own developing and printing.
But he always had coke. I was the only guy he gave coke to
'cause he wanted me to keep going.
He wasn't generous, but, you know,
"If I gave Tom a little coke, he'll print faster," you know.
"Here, Tom. Go in the darkroom," he'd give me a bump.
You know, my father said to me,
"How can Robert call himself a photographer
if he doesn't even know how to process a roll of film?"
But Robert had a vision,
he always had a certain way of seeing things,
so how you got there didn't really concern him so much.
He wanted everything to just be flawless.
You know, "Let's make this guy's arm meet this corner,"
and, you know, "Let's straighten it out a little bit."
But it's a guy pissing in another guy's mouth. What's the fucking difference?
He wanted things as, you know, unrealistically perfect
and smooth and take all the flaws out of the skin.
Some days we'd sit and just retouch for a day
until all the blemishes were gone.
I talked to Patti about doing a book
and having her transform herself
into all these different characters that would have been Patti.
I mean, she would be this character one day
and that character another.
And I think, you know, she had a certain range
that could've probably carried a whole book,
but I never did a book with her.
When I met Lisa, I realized that she, in fact, had this range within her,
a very different range, but it was still worthy of a book.
I thought she was unique.
She had this form that I had never seen before.
It was like a complete new animal.
Martineau: She was particularly important to Mapplethorpe
because he was trying to balance out his sex pictures
with pictures of women. Mm-hmm.
It's so interesting to think about
how the female body building idea then was really radical
and, kind of, challenging.
That kind of physique to us doesn't seem so shocking. Right.
She's such a prominent subject.
Very '80s, the make-up, the hair. Oh, yeah.
The ruffle blouse. Mm-hmm.
The shoulder pads.
Lyon: It was prototype for a new species.
Sort of an animal perfection, and I felt in him
a kind of male version of the same thing.
My ambition that I discussed with him
was to explore the range of possibilities
of ways of viewing a woman.
Historical ways, contemporary ways,
cliché ways, unheard of ways,
tribal ways, the high fashion type,
the sex goddess type, the lingerie type,
the bondage type, the virgin type,
the bridal type, the statue type.
What had seemed very daring
when he did it with men...
...looked very retrograde when he did it with a woman
who was dressing up in different hats and garments.
And so I wrote about that and he was furious.
I think he called me and yelled at me.
I feel, like, it may have been a bad idea to write that review.
I mean, that is sculpture to me,
you know, and that's, sort of, one of the points that I'm making in photography
is being a sculptor without actually having to spend all the time,
sort of, modeling with your hands.
You know, that's much too archaic for me.
It's like inventing sculpture myself with a camera.
It really is like bronze.
I'd often say that photographing black men is like photographing bronzes.
I was the last white intimate person in his life.
After that, he was only sleeping with black people,
photographing black people.
He became obsessed with black people.
All I know is that it's physically attractive to me.
Visually, it's also attractive
and so, you know, it became an obsession with me taking these pictures of blacks.
People had accused him of exploiting these people.
And, um... he told me
he photographed what he loved to do
and the people he loved to be with,
and to me, that's not exploitation.
That's just living your life
and using a camera to document it.
For the most part, when whites have photographed blacks,
they have, sort of, shown them from a certain social point of view.
I'm photographing them as form in the same way that I'm reading the flowers
or anything else that I photograph.
I'm not attempting to make a social statement about their plight.
Robert was looking for God in a black man,
and he found him in Milton Moore
and fell in love with him.
Now, I think he fell in love,
and this sounds ridiculous, with Milton's penis.
Robert was looking for the absolute perfect black penis.
And he had it,
I mean, the exact measurements down.
I mean, it had to be just so and he'd discuss it with others,
and, you know, the ratio to this and that.
The thing the world is most afraid of is penis.
And Robert dared show penis,
but he dared show black penis,
and there's nothing more scary because behind all of sexual prejudice
is the sex envy, this penis envy
that drives people insane
either with lust or with fear.
Milton did say to him
as one condition of taking the pictures
that he could not show his head in the frame.
"Picture of Man in Polyester Suit"
was really one of his most famous.
Milton had picked up that suit in Hong Kong and was very proud of it,
and Robert purposely lined up his thumb
so that it would show off the cheap seams.
I'd never seen it, and then we went to the framers
and I saw it laying on the floor as it was gonna be put into the frame,
and I said,
"Robert, this is a show that the whole world will see."
He said to me, "Will anyone write about it?"
That was his comment. And they did.
"Main picture here is a big black dude
"seen in an expensive vested gabardine suit
"with his fly open and his elephant cock sticking out.
"This picture's ugly, degrading, obscene,
"typical of the artist's work,
"which appeal largely to drooling lascivious collectors
"who buy them and return to their furnished rooms to jerk off."
We actually did sell that picture during the exhibition
to a collector in New York for $2,500, and it was a reach.
It was a big price for a photograph,
and especially by a living photographer.
There were 20 works in the show
and we placed all of them with very strong collectors,
which was very important for Robert.
This was the first show that that had ever happened to him.
And it was a kind of lightning rod
and it was notorious.
Auctioneer: Lot 144, Robert Mapplethorpe's "Man in Polyester Suit."
And I'm gonna start the bidding here at $180,000.
It's possibly one of the top 10 most recognizable images in photographic history.
210, 220.
It's an iconic image.
You know, it's, like, Andy's "Marilyn."
360, 380...
$390,000.
None of us realized that photography
at its-- the beginning was just considered
commercial reproduction, commercial reproduction.
Many collectors would never dream of collecting.
And I think Mapplethorpe is one of the artists responsible
for photography being considered on an equal basis with sculpture and painting.
I never for a second doubted that photography was a very real art.
And there's just something about his photography that immediately attracted me.
I was shocked by his absolute brutal honesty about everything,
from sexual organs to relationships between people.
You know, the people that have influenced me the most
are the relationships I've had, you know,
the lovers I've had in my life.
And of course I've photographed every one of them.
The only time Robert ever cried was talking about how much he loved Milton.
Not Patti, Milton. Milton.
He had just did that show called "Black Males" at Robert Miller Gallery.
So I went to go see that show.
I said, "That's gonna be my boyfriend."
We lived together for the better part of a decade.
We rarely fought, you know,
because he was too self-absorbed to really care.
It was so easy to be around him
because he was so busy being Robert Mapplethorpe.
When we started seeing each other, he started taking pictures, right?
And I was, kind of, shy, so I didn't wanna take nude pictures.
And Robert goes, "Just don't look at your dick."
He goes, "It's just a picture."
There is no picture of Ken Moody's dick.
There just isn't, and I'm sorry.
As soon as I stood in front of the seamless,
it was magic.
It was absolute magic.
There's no way you can describe it other than making love.
And as soon as we stepped away from that backdrop, nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
We had nothing in common, We had nothing to say to each other.
There was a ghetto element to men that he had the strongest attraction to.
I had none of that.
He was quoted in an article as saying I was too "white" for him.
Too white.
I brought them together.
It was interesting 'cause they had never met and never had a conversation
with somebody else that they had lost all their hair as a child.
And it was interesting to watch them
react and relate to each other.
The more time goes by,
the bigger that photograph gets.
When it was in Times Square on the NASDAQ billboard,
that was, like, "Wow. Where's my mother?"
I've read several things on the shot of Ken and I.
It's like they tried to read all of this philosophy into it.
Black Ken, eyes closed, meaning the subconscious.
White Robert, eyes open, afraid of the unconscious.
I'm, like, "What?"
The black man was in the background
because the black man's neck wasn't long enough
to reach over the white man's shoulder.
We tried it and my neck wasn't long enough.
I think that's why he did every position.
Exactly. To find out what worked best.
There was no philosophical anything to--
Robert was so not like that.
No. Totally not.
Take your shirt off.
It sounds silly. I guess, you know, using the word, magic.
And fold your arms.
Stay right there. Lift your head up a little bit.
I was able to pick up the magic of the moment and work with it,
you know, that's my rush in doing photography.
Ken, hold that! Hold that!
Tilt a little right and turn a little right.
Turn your head to the right, now bring your eyes back to me.
Look back here.
Lean right, turn right.
Put your head down, now bring your eyes up.
Click, click, click, click, click, eyes to me.
Click. Chin up.
Turn this way.
Turn your head this way. Yeah, more.
More. More.
And instead of looking to the side, look straight out.
Often I'm dealing with fractions of inches.
Here, you can even-- Now turn.
Just-- Yeah, from the neck. Stay there.
I'm looking for that perfect position
where the head sort of, somehow makes sense to me.
Actually, I should take it with all these things coming in at you.
A little-- Look this way towards-- yeah.
That's rather good, actually.
I'm gonna start showing a series of portraits.
I'll stop at any point, but I don't want to comment too much about the pictures
'cause I wanna get-- I want my vision to come across,
the way I see things.
That's William Burroughs.
Philip Glass on the left, Robert Wilson on the right.
And Donald Sutherland, one of the best subjects I've ever photographed.
Annie Leibovitz, one of the most difficult subjects I've ever photographed.
That's Debbie Harry.
I sat for him a couple of times,
which was pretty scary for me the first time.
Smiling wasn't his thing, you know.
The way that he saw people was like he was seeing into them
or something, or through them.
I don't think it's necessary to tell you
who is in each photograph because if the pictures are good,
then they'll transcend who they are and it doesn't matter.
He became known for the elegance of his portraits.
And any photographer who takes pictures of celebrities
is making a smart business move
because those people and their friends have lots of money.
And they buy pictures. Yeah.
Well, and his social life was a part of his artistic life.
That's right. You know,
it was all very interconnected.
Ideally, you get the subject to a point
where they direct themselves.
You know, they say, "Well, this is really kind of what I want to be photographed in."
I thought it was going to be a catastrophe,
and I prepared for it.
So I did take a piece of mine.
It was a good collaboration, right?
Because he's famous not for his flower pictures.
He's famous for his objectionable sexual representation.
You know taking pictures of sex is no different
than photographing a flower really.
I mean, it's the same thing. It's just submitting to whatever's going on
and trying to get the best possible view of it.
And nobody else can photograph flowers the way I do.
It's just the way I see.
Even Robert said it, that the pictures started getting very, very, slick.
That was the word. So slick, so perfect.
But perfection, that's a Mapplethorpe characteristic. Perfection.
Anybody who was involved in that studio will agree with me
that you just got sucked into Robert's world.
You wanted to. It wasn't-- I mean, you just did,
I mean, it was an interesting world.
It was a lot of excitement, it was a lot of fun,
but I wanted to do something else.
Can't just be Robert's assistant for the rest of my life.
So then the invitation gets sent out.
Nice group of artists. All alphabetical.
And lo and behold, Edward Mapplethorpe comes before Robert Mapplethorpe.
And he was... ruthless.
He was nasty.
And said,
"I'm not gonna have any kid brother--
"I've worked really hard to get where I've gotten,
"and if you think you're gonna come and ride on my coattails..."
And I was like, "Fuck, man," I was like...
"Wow."
And Robert asked him to change his name,
which he struggled with, I think, for a while,
but then he did. He changed it to Maxey.
Right. But...
It was all about Robert. It was all about Robert.
You know, they were brothers.
Can't imagine what all that was like.
You know, it was a futile attempt because...
"Oh, this is Edward Maxey. He's Robert Mapplethorpe's brother."
I was, like, "Well, what good is this doing?
"This is ridiculous."
But yeah, it sucked.
That day sucked.
Just like the day that he got angry at me for deciding that I was gonna leave the studio.
This is somebody that two years earlier
didn't know whether he wanted me in the studio with him.
Two years later, I guess, he learned to rely on me quite a bit.
And was angry, very angry. 1470
The lifestyle of some male homosexuals
has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.
He would go to the bar in the afternoon,
pick up someone, have sex with them,
then go back later that night,
maybe and then pick up somebody else,
and then towards the end of the night, like, a nightcap.
Last weekend, Mayor Koch predicted
that The Mine Shaft would close.
They are selling death.
Places where death can be distributed.
They're making love in the street on top of cars and everything.
This is men. Grown men. I mean, that's not normal.
Most of these people, they're not fit, they're not human beings.
That have emotional problems.
'Cause I was sleeping with him for all those years,
I thought that I was gonna die.
I came back from an appointment to get my results.
He was laying in the bed when I walked in,
and then he looked at me and then he said,
"You got it, right?"
And I said, "No, no, no, no." I said, "I'm negative."
And I remember, he got really upset and he goes,
"Then why do I have it? Why do I have it?"
And he started, like, pounding the bed.
AIDS at the time was pretty much a death sentence, right?
And he, on the one hand was upset,
but on the other hand, he was fascinated by the demand for his work.
Like, his market took off
when people heard that he was about to die.
It really took off.
We were very busy.
We didn't stop working, and he didn't stop shooting
until he physically couldn't get out of bed.
He's like, "What am I shooting next?
"Get me some flowers. Let's do that."
You know, and it-- the flowers got done, the statues got done,
the commissioned portraits got done.
One day I'll photograph flowers,
the next day I'll do some fashion work,
the next day I'll do some pornography, and the next day, I'll do a portrait.
You know, I don't really care.
I sort of thought I should be keeping a journal.
"I did watch him shoot today.
"It's so amazing to see how he musters the energy to do the pictures.
"It absolutely keeps him going.
"And the money. Funny money."
Natrele Plus. Long-lasting Natrele protection.
He was never interested in talking about his health.
All he wanted to talk about was sales and who was looking at his work,
and when are we gonna have a million-dollar a month.
He was interested in making as much money as possible.
And he resented the fact that his contemporaries', like Brice Marden,
works started selling for several hundred thousand dollars.
And Robert's works were selling for $1,100.
Mapplethorpe, had a sort of jealous or competitive relationship with Warhol.
He would say to me weekly,
"If I die, will I have died with as much money as Andy Warhol had?"
And I'd say, "No. Not nearly, not nearly."
I remember him saying to me once, how frustrated he was about being ill
because he was getting all this money now,
and he actually said,
"I won't be able to enjoy it."
He was not very interested in leaving money to people.
So the foundation idea really began to appeal to him
because his money, his assets, his real estate, his art collection
would support his foundation.
So, it would automatically promote him.
Robert sent for me for his birthday,
his 40th birthday party,
That's when I was like, "Whoa. This is not good."
Robert Mapplethorpe's way to interpret me
was totally different than any other photographer.
He wanted my hair back, so that was unusual to me.
Everybody has always wanted me to do a hairdo.
He wanted a very, very natural feel.
I look like an angel on that picture.
So, how can I not be pleased?
He was the first photographer to photograph me completely in profile.
It's never-- He was the only one.
The profile was just so much more soul-baring.
I got to sort of study him.
He didn't seem happy. Everything seemed precious,
and I think there was no sense of wanting to waste time or be frivolous.
In German, you say-- there is this word, getrieben,
which means as if something is chasing you constantly.
I used to go and visit him. We both sense that he was dying,
but we didn't talk about it.
And he had that very sad expression,
because he didn't want to leave.
He wanted to stay, you know?
And one day he said,
"I need to take a photograph of you
"and you need this one because this is going to be the last one,"
is what he say. I say, "Don't be silly."
And it was.
It was just sort of
business as usual until things progressed,
and he was having a harder and harder time getting out of his seat and...
And he had a horrible, horrible cough,
which I guess was typical.
Six o'clock would roll around and then he'd sort of be like,
"Can you come keep me company?"
It was this little boy. "Don't leave. Stay with me."
Yeah, little baby voice.
Robert was in his bedroom, not feeling particularly well,
and he's like, you know, he's like, "I'd like to do a picture
"with my hand holding the skull cane."
And I said to Brian, I said, "Listen, this has got to be a self-portrait."
And it wasn't often that he'd want to take his own picture,
but he had been trying.
I took the skull cane and I held it like this,
and I said, "Do a Polaroid."
I brought it to Robert, he was like, "Wow. That's good."
His knee started to hurt,
so we put a chair in for him to sit on.
That's the classic masterpiece picture.
It's a tremendous photograph,
one of the greatest self-portraits of all time.
It's 2:38 here in the WNBC.
cloudy, breezy, chance of showers
and thunderstorms right through the evening.
The low tonight in the low 60s, right now, 74 degrees.
There was something electric that day.
It wasn't just an opening.
It was a...
a memorial with a living corpse.
Your heart just went out to him
because here he was having the success that he dreamed of
from those days in coffee shops in the Village,
and, you know, you could tell he was dying.
Not too much.
This is-- someone took this picture of me
taking a picture of him.
He knew what I was doing there.
I think he understood the whole thing.
He didn't like it, but he understood it.
I think that was his proudest day, I really do.
He looked like the king sitting there.
It had everything from flowers to fist-fucking.
And I had to go around the room with my mother in a wheelchair.
Wow, yeah.
When I saw the one with the whip,
I said, "Oh, my God."
And I ran and go to my kids and--
"That's him? It was a self-portrait?"
He loved attention,
even though it had to do with the fact that he was a dying man,
it didn't matter.
It was one picture. I mean it stunned people.
We all sort of were under the impression it was gonna be this glorious article,
when in fact, that was sad. Yeah.
I'm sure he saw his own mortality... Yeah.
...very clearly at that moment.
His image out there, this handsome, vain, elegant creature,
and people really were shocked.
I mean, come on, it was like, he was alive.
Working with Robert Mapplethorpe has been
my most enlightening
and rewarding curatorial experience.
I felt that Robert Mapplethorpe's work was so important.
So I went to New York and visited him at his studio.
We started to talk. He was very easy to talk to.
I felt after five minutes that I had known him a long time.
Have you ever seen the X, Y, Z portfolios?
There's an X portfolio which is sex pictures, there's 13 of them,
and then there's Y which is flowers,
and the Z which is blacks.
He was particularly interested in showing the X, Y, Z series,
which had not been shown before in its entirety.
It may be interesting to have a wall
where you have a row of X, Y, and Z
on one mass, sort of, in three rows of something.
We devised a way of displaying them
in a case that would be so high that a child could not see into it,
but an adult could look down upon it.
I remember showing my husband some of the pictures
before the exhibition opened.
He said, "Janet, do you know what you're doing?"
But I didn't listen to him. Maybe I was crazy.
Hi, Robert!
Here we are. You're with us.
You're with us and we're with you.
I think you can tell whether a show is successful by the sound in the gallery.
If people are talking a lot, you know, somehow the show just doesn't have it.
In the Mapplethorpe show, there was silence.
You could hear a pin drop.
This one time, it was a terrible night for Robert
and he was almost hallucinating a bit
and he ended up pulling out some of the IVs,
so I had blood dripping out of his arm, and IVs,
and I had to-- he-- I know I had to clean him up.
He'd shat in the bed, and I'm like, "Oh, my God."
That night, Robert looked at me teary-eyed, crying,
and said, "Oh, my God." He's like, "I'm dying.
"I'm dying." And I had to say, "Yeah."
What could you-- I couldn't-- I mean, "Yes."
Robert gave a going-away party for himself,
a lavish cocktail party at his loft.
Waiters walking around with silver trays
with a little tiny Bellini and caviar and champagne.
It was very elegant.
And Robert was sitting in the middle of the room.
I walked up to him and kneeled down at his feet
and came face-to-face with him.
He said, "You still look so beautiful."
And I said, "Thank you."
I said, "What do you want me to do?"
He said, "I want you to tell her everything.
Keep me alive."
"March 8th. Well, this is it.
"The last two days have been hell.
"The funny part is not knowing how to say goodbye.
"Letting go. Are words enough?"
I was just like, "Come on, Robert."
Just like have a conversation with me
and just say, "You know what, I'm proud of you,
and just keep it going, and just do good work."
And... never got it.
Never got it.
Some days, yes, and some days, no.
You know, on a daily basis,
I would say in any given day, I'm happy part of the time
and not the rest, you know.
I think I'm a perfectionist and I think it's hard to be happy
if you like things to be perfect
because things are not perfect.
I don't know whether the television cameras can see it or not.
I'm gonna be fast enough with it that they can't.
But I want senators to come over here, if they have any doubt
and look at the pictures.
Keep your hands off!
I don't even acknowledge that it's art.
Keep your hands off! Get your hands off!
I don't even acknowledge
that the fellow who did it was an artist.
I think he was a jerk.
Keep your hands off! Get your hands off!
Keep your hands off! Keep your hands off!
This line is for two o'clock only.
You need a pass to get in to see the exhibition.
It happened.
What you're watching now is the Cincinnati Police as they made their move today
against The Contemporary Arts Center.
They temporarily closed
the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit
that resulted in charges today against The Contemporary Arts Center and its director.
It's an important exhibition. It's important for this city
that it be seen here.
It was suggested that I wear a bulletproof vest.
There would be calls to the home or calls to my office
saying, "We're gonna kill your children."
The art gallery and its director
are charged with obscenity for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
The jury took about two hours to come up with its decision.
We, the jury in this case, find the defendant not guilty
of pandering obscenity.
Order! Order!
Next up is the Robert Mapplethorpe Flag,
the great "Star-Spangled Banner," gelatin silver print,
for $48,000. Now goes to 48,000,
48,000, 50, 55,000, 60, 65,000. Thank you, ma'am.
He was always giving me his work.
$70,000 with Caroline.
I had, at least, half a dozen photographs and a collage.
$70,000.
Don't ask me what I did with this, please,
because if I kept it, I wouldn't be here. I'd be in my villa in Tuscany.
I can't discuss, too upsetting.
Sold!
I threw it away.
Sold!
When I moved.
Sold!
I told this once to an art dealer.
And he said, "I can't believe you didn't know
"that someone as ambitious as Robert-- as clearly ambitious, wouldn't become famous."
And I said, "No one could have imagined
"that photographs would be so valuable financially."
Because they weren't. No photographs were.
It wasn't just that I couldn't imagine it. No one could imagine it.
Whatever it took to become Robert Mapplethorpe
is what it was gonna take
and it took his life to do it...
Literally.
Mapplethorpe by himself, the name is really great.
It's like Titian or Piranesi.
Just the name, that's all you need
is the last name to recognize the artist.
It's so clear and simple.
What if you stacked three images into the...
We can't have nudity on the street banners 'cause the city regulations.
So that's one point of discussion, second is the color.
This is a mock-up of the invitation for our opening reception.
His self-portrait on the front, then inside message.
Then the RSVP card.
It's just an innocuous flower, not anything that the Post Office would object to.
I'm not planning to put a curtain, but I'm sure
there'll be some kind of warning on the gallery as people go in.
Well, and with her holding her sculpture.
-Oh, that was purposeful. -Yeah, it's so great.
I wanted to put Louise Bourgeois holding her sculpture, Lafayette,
which looks like a phallus, next to the picture of "Man in the Polyester Suit."
-Yes, with his actual phallus. -It's a curatorial pun.