ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE & PATTI SMITH

Although "Just Kids" is (Patti) Smith's tribute to Mapplethorpe, she's the more arresting character of the pair. The child of aspiring middle-class Catholics, Mapplethorpe was an understandable tangle of ambivalence and self-doubt, craving wealth and entree into "high society" but equally driven to violate propriety with his sexually explicit and homoerotic photographs. He dragged Smith to in-spots like Max's Kansas City, hoping to encounter his own idol, Andy Warhol, and, once he began to make a name for himself as an artist, to tony dinner parties where they rubbed elbows with the likes of Bianca Jagger. Smith had no interest in Warhol ("His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid") and embarrassed Mapplethorpe with her table manners, but she went along for his sake, and often made friends in the unlikeliest places.Sex remains something of a mystery in this story; Smith and Mapplethorpe were lovers and lived together off and on for several years even as he came to accept his attraction to men. Smith mostly skirts the topic of their physical relationship, making fleeting references to "intimacy" and "passion." She admits that at first she "knew nothing of the reality of homosexuality" and thought that she had failed to "save him" from it.

Laura Miller
Salon
Jan 11 2009