![]() "Everybody went to Max's and everything got homogenized. They frequent Max's Kansas City, "the place where Pop art met Pop life," wrote Warhol. Robert and Patti blend in with the outre crowd - he in a sailor suit from the thrift shop, she in bright green tights, antique lace and purple French can-can skirt like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Warhol's movie "Chelsea Girls" was partly shot there Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix occasionally hang out. She shares his digs, hopes and dreams in the summer of 1969, they move into the Chelsea Hotel, "a psychedelic Coney Island for creative geniuses and freaks." Located on West 23rd in Manhattan, the seedy hotel which once sparkled with Victorian opulence now attracts pimps, junkies, transvestites, counterculture celebrities and struggling artists. But their influences on him are mere blips after Patti Smith walks into his life and turns out to be "someone whose love and intuitive understanding made him feel complete for the first time in his life." She is an aspiring artist, poet and singer who exudes a certain sexual ambiguity which appeals to Mapplethorpe. ," Morrisroe writes "they became an integral part of his sexual experimentation, for they helped blur the distinction between pleasure and pain and allowed him to silence his internal censors." Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Reader becomes his bible and Andy Warhol his role model. "For the next twenty years Mapplethorpe would use drugs almost daily. There are drugs galore: LSD, Quaaludes, cocaine, amyl nitrite, etc., etc. It's one of the few times Mapplethorpe gets an A. Mapplethorpe shares an apartment with Scratch, a pet monkey who is prone to perverse acts and whose skull finishes up as an art project. His attempt to end his virginity with a female prostitute at age 18 ends in failure. "One day he was in an ROTC uniform, the next day he was walking around campus in a sheepskin vest and love beads," a former classmate remarks. 191 he fails at team sports and excels at pogo stick jumping in high school he takes Spanish and not French as a second language because he considers the latter "only for faggots." He attends his engineer father's alma mater, Pratt Institute, where he studies art, much to his dad's chagrin. you will never get out." ' " Piece by piece, the biographer carefully assembles her jigsaw puzzle: a mundane fact here, a startling image there, a jolting quote followed by revealing explanations. He seemed to believe in all that devil stuff, and once he told me, There's this clock in Hell that chimes every hour, "You will never get out. One of his neighbors remembers how seriously Catholic he was: "Robert didn't take his religion lightly. ![]() The story begins in Floral Park, a blue-collar neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., where Robert Mapplethorpe was born - on Nov. Morrisroe's descriptions, though often sympathetic, expose Mapplethorpe as a libertine who exploited friends, lovers, models and patrons in Manhattan's art world with slick impunity. And she has succeeded in re-creating the photographer's world of light and dark, where stark beauty coexisted with beastly images. She interviewed several hundred of his friends and acquaintances, pursued leads on former models and lovers - many with AIDS - that too often halted abruptly in the obituary pages. The situation reminded me of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire," writes Morrisroe, "for Mapplethorpe painted himself as a creature of the night - a sex demon' - who had no control over his voracious appetite." Morrisroe's thoroughly engrossing biography of Mapplethorpe may strike readers in a similar vein - all the more fascinating because it often reads like a horror story. "One afternoon, after smoking a joint, he began outlining his sexual life in vivid detail he didn't stop even after his nurse placed him in bed and hooked him up to an intravenous tube. But by 1988 he had already established a foundation in his name and was eager to have a book written about him - before it would be too late for interviews. Mapplethorpe had not yet reached the pinnacle of notoriety which was to come posthumously with the uproar over funding by the National Endowment for the Arts and the cancellation of his show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. $27.50 SEVEN MONTHS before Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS complications on March 9, 1989, Patricia Morrisroe approached the photographer and asked if she could document his life. MAPPLETHORPE A Biography By Patricia Morrisroe Random House.
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