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Overview
“Eventually I found several hundred people who knew Robert Mapplethorpe in all his various incarnations—Catholic schoolboy; ROTC cadet; hippie; sexual explorer; celebrated artist; and famous AIDS victim. Their stories helped animate his pictures and bring his visual diary to life. What I discovered wasn’t one “Perfect Moment” but a series of moments—some pure, some blemished, but all emblematic of the paradoxical times in which he lived.”—Patricia Morrisroe, from the Introduction
NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780399589447 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2016 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 934 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
“I got that feeling in my stomach, it’s not a directly sexual one, it’s something more potent than that. I thought that if I could somehow bring that element into art, if I could somehow retain that feeling, I would be doing something that was uniquely my own.”
—Robert Mapplethorpe
Harry Mapplethorpe craved the ordinary the way others lust for the strange and exotic. He wanted a life without any emotional highs or lows and never imagined that his biography would warrant more than a line or two on the obituary page of the local newspaper. “Nothing much happened,” Harry said, without a trace of regret. “It was perfectly normal.” He grew up in Hollis, Queens, the only child of a middle-level bank executive whose name was also Harry, and whose parents came to New York from England. The elder Harry hated his job at National City Bank, but nevertheless stayed there for fifty years because he cherished the routine—he worked from nine to five Mondays through Fridays, then spent every weekend attending to his coin and stamp collections.
The younger Harry remembered his German mother, Adelphine Zang, as someone who never read a newspaper without donning gloves and draping a tea towel over her lap. “She was an immaculate housekeeper,” he said. There were no other Mapplethorpe children, so Harry, taking a cue from his father, devoted his free time to his own hobbies—target shooting and photography. The description under Harry’s picture in the 1937 Jamaica High School yearbook provides a concise summary of his personality: “A straight shooter.” His son Robert would turn out to be a straight shooter, too; perhaps not as sexually straight as Harry would have liked, but rigorous in his photographic technique. He was his father’s boy in more ways than either of them cared to admit, but where Robert would transgress boundaries, Harry derived comfort from them.
By the time Harry was sixteen he had already met his future bride at a neighbor’s graduation party. Joan Maxey was perfect for him: she lived only a few blocks away; she, too, was Catholic, of Irish and English descent; and her father, an engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories, had raised her solidly middle-class. The young couple even looked alike: they both had brown wavy hair, fair skin, light eyes, and slight builds, and people sometimes mistook them for brother and sister.
In 1937 Harry enrolled in the engineering school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he commuted from home every day and saw Joan nearly every night. They were married on June 20, 1942, six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and moved from their parents’ homes into a three-room apartment in nearby Jamaica Estates. Harry was deferred from active duty because of his job as a field engineer for a naval architecture firm, and unlike many of their young married friends, they weren’t separated during the early years of the war. They had two children in quick succession: first Nancy in April 1943, then Richard in March 1945, after which Harry was transferred to Washington, D.C.—a situation he described as a living nightmare. Without Joan to anchor him, he felt lost in Washington, and every day after work he returned to his rooming house lonely and depressed. The minute the war was officially declared over—VJ Day, August 25, 1945—Harry submitted his resignation to the Defense Department and packed his bags for Queens. He considered it the most reckless move of his life, for he didn’t have another job lined up and had little savings. But within days of his homecoming he had procured a position at Underwriters Laboratories. He knew with the certainty of a man who valued continuity over change that it was truly the job of a lifetime.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was born on November 4, 1946, at Irwin Sanitarium in Hollis. Harry had few memories of his son’s birth and toddler years, but Joan felt an immediate attraction to her third child, who, from the moment he came into the world, expressed his dissatisfaction with it by screaming louder than any baby she had ever heard. He soon developed a reputation as “the fussy Mapplethorpe.” Joan understood that mothers weren’t supposed to prefer one child over the others, but Robert was her favorite. What she remembered about him, however, was colored with an Addams Family ghoulishness, such as the time he killed his turtle, Greenie, by impaling the pet on his index finger. She didn’t know what it meant, nor did she know why, among the hundreds of other possible stories, she chose to define her son’s early years by that one. But whenever she thought about two-year-old Robert, she thought about Greenie.
Joan’s fourth child, Susan, was delivered in August 1949, and several months later the Mapplethorpes purchased their first and only home, at 83-12 259th Street in Floral Park, Queens. The World War II community had been built almost overnight to accommodate the housing demands of returning veterans, and acres of potato fields began sprouting nearly identical Cape Cod bungalows. The Mapplethorpes’ white house looked like every other white house on the street; it had four small bedrooms and a bay window overlooking a single tree. Harry and Joan didn’t have to worry about the grass being greener on somebody else’s lawn, because everyone on the block moved in at the same time and watched the grass grow together; they shared lawn equipment and garden tools; warned one another’s children to keep off the virgin turf; and later celebrated the greening of 259th Street with barbecues and plastic-pool parties. The neighborhood was so saturated in 1950s conformity that when one family painted the cupola of their house green instead of the standard white, they were chastised for breaking protocol.
There was one aspect of Floral Park, however, that made it truly unique; it was a place that didn’t exist—at least in the eyes of New York City officials, whose vision turned myopic when it came to confronting the problems of a neighborhood on the city’s eastern border. Residents nicknamed Floral Park the “Lost Community,” and banded together to petition the appropriate city agencies for better sanitation services, police protection, and storm sewers; but for years no one paid attention to them. Garbage piled up in towering heaps; sewers overflowed when it rained; the poorly paved roads grew more pitted and bumpy. In addition to the abuse it received from the city, the area had to endure the humiliation of being constantly compared to its more affluent next-door neighbor—Floral Park, Long Island. That Floral Park didn’t have to rely on the city for its services, so it had all the amenities the other one lacked, and since it was established in 1920, it was considered the legitimate one as opposed to its lost relative on the other side of the “tracks.”
Robert’s parents were oblivious to the implications of living in the “Lost Community,” for, having paid $11,490 for their house, they were more concerned with meeting the mortgage. Harry was one of the few white-collar professionals in a blue-collar neighborhood and the only person among their clique of local friends to have an advanced degree. Yet even as a “college man” he didn’t earn substantially more than the other husbands, and after putting the down payment on the house, he couldn’t afford a car and commuted an hour and twenty minutes each way by bus and subway to Underwriters Laboratories in Manhattan. When Harry got home at night he wanted to eat dinner, maybe watch Dragnet or The Jackie Gleason Show, and retire to bed. Weekends were reserved for hobbies, and Harry had a wide variety of them, from collecting stamps and coins to building cuckoo clocks and raising tropical fish. The unifying thread that ran through all of Harry’s endeavors was that he could do them alone and maintain complete control. Even when he took pictures of his family he derived the greatest pleasure not from interacting with his subjects, but from developing the prints himself. It was the technical challenge he enjoyed, not the so-called “creative” part.
People in the neighborhood admired Harry for his ability to fix broken vacuum cleaners and Mix-Masters, but they adored Joan for her warm, outgoing personality. She loved to play cards, to go bowling with her Tuesday night league, and to get together for “club meetings” with several female friends. The meetings were the 1950s version of consciousness-raising sessions, and over coffee and pastries the women would make little jokes about their husbands’ annoying habits, or complain about the mess the children had created. No one ever delved too deeply, but it was a congenial way for them to air their domestic frustrations. Joan always seemed perfectly content, however, and while she had a biting sense of humor, it was rarely aimed at her husband. Pat Farre, who lived two doors away from the Mapplethorpes and was a member of the “club,” never heard Joan utter a bad word about Harry in forty years.
“The first time I went over to Joan’s house,” Farre said, “I was so impressed. She had these four little tots, and they were all washed, their faces scrubbed shiny clean, and they were sitting nicely on the couch. She had an apron on, and she was preparing dinner, and it was just so perfect. Joan was the heart of that family. Harry was very reliable, but Joan was the creative one; she’d write little poems and always had clever things to say. People really loved her.”