Patti Smith was on the phone with Robert Mapplethorpe just hours before he died, and she cut straight through. She asked him what she could do, since she was the one who would live on. He gave her a few requests, and then: ‘Will you write our story?’ She said yes without knowing how, and he died hours later. For anyone who has ever shelved a creative project out of doubt or grief or responsibility, what happened next across the following decade is worth sitting with.
A promise that took ten years to keep
Smith had always written poetry and fiction, but a memoir of this kind was something different entirely. She had no roadmap, and almost immediately after Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, her own losses compounded. Her husband died. Her brother died. She had two small children. The book kept getting shelved, not out of indifference but out of the crushing weight of it. ‘I didn’t think I was good enough, or it would make me too sad,’ she told Dua Lipa during their conversation for Service95. ‘I had so many responsibilities and children.’
What finally unlocked the book’s shape was a decision about how to write it. Mapplethorpe had not been a reader. He was entirely visual, and he liked Smith to read poetry aloud to him. So she wrote cinematically, closing her eyes and seeing every scene before committing it to the page. If she could not picture it, she did not write it. The technique was deliberate: she wanted someone who had never picked up a book to be able to feel the story unfolding in front of them.
Lipa, who has gifted ‘Just Kids’ to friends who describe themselves as non-readers, told Smith this instinct had worked exactly as intended. ‘For some of my friends that maybe don’t like to read as much, it felt so visual,’ she said. ‘It’s my number one go-to.’
The last word Smith changed before the book went to print was a single word. She was in France, on the phone with New York, deep in final edits, and she spotted one sentence that used the word ‘relationship’ twice. She looked at it, kept looking, and swapped it for the word ‘love.’ That was the last edit. The book then sold over a million copies in the United States.
What Mapplethorpe’s mother saw in the flowers
Smith offered one story about Mapplethorpe’s work that cuts to the center of everything he made. Before a major New York show, his mother, a devout Catholic who had never seen his work, called to say she was coming. Mapplethorpe quietly replaced the more explicit photographs with flowers, covering almost the entire show. A colleague accused him of compromising. He disagreed. ‘All my work is the same,’ he said. ‘It’s all about the same thing.’ His mother walked from flower to flower, increasingly uneasy, and finally turned to him and said: ‘Robert, your flowers are weird. I don’t know, but they make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I know they are flowers, but they are weird.’ He was delighted. As Smith put it to Lipa, Mapplethorpe believed you did not have to encounter his most confrontational images to understand him. ‘Look at a flower and you will understand.’
A tulip, somewhere in that story
Smith left it there: a bending tulip, offered as a starting point for anyone coming to Mapplethorpe’s work for the first time. No further explanation. Just the flower.
Smith told Lipa she would not have written the book at all without the request, and that Mapplethorpe had always worried she was not practical enough, not financially careful enough, too drawn to the controversial. He fretted over her. And then he handed her the one project that became, by every measure, her biggest success. ‘You did that,’ she says to him, in her mind, when she thinks about it. ‘Since I didn’t make my own hit records, you gave me a hit book anyway.’
