Review by New York Times Review
Apart from a certain shared apprehension of immortality - complacent in one case, but endearingly gingerly in the other - the skinny 28-year-old on the cover of Patti Smith's seismic 1975 album, "Horses," doesn't look much at all like Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. But because the shutterbug was Robert Mapplethorpe, who was soon to become fairly legendary himself, that exquisite photograph of Smith on the brink of fame is as close as New York's 1970s avantgarde ever came to a comparable twofer. The myth-making bonus is that the latter-day duo were much more genuinely kindred spirits. Born weeks apart in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe played Mutt and Jeff from their first meeting in 1967 through his death from AIDS more than 20 years later. They were lovers as well until he came out of the closet with more anguish than anyone familiar with his bold later career as gay sexuality's answer to Mathew Brady (and Jesse Helms's N.E.A. nemesis) is likely to find credible. Yet his Catholic upbringing had been conservative enough that he and Smith had to fake being married for his parents' sake during their liaison. Though Smith moved on to other partners, including the playwright Sam Shepard and the Blue Oyster Cult keyboardist-guitarist Allen Lanier, her attachment to Mapplethorpe didn't wane. After years of mimicking her betters at poetry, she found her calling - "Three chords merged with the power of the word," to quote the memorable slogan she came up with - at around the same time he quit mimicking his betters at bricolage to turn photographer full time. "Patti, you got famous before me," he half-moped and half-teased when "Because the Night," her only genuine hit single, went Top 20 in 1978. Even so, his "before" turned out to be prescient. All this is the subject of "Just Kids," Smith's terrifically evocative and splendidly titled new memoir. At one level, the book's interest is a given; to devotees of downtown Manhattan's last momentous period of 20th-century artistic ferment, Patti Smith on Robert Mapplethorpe is like Molly Pitcher on Paul Revere, The surprise is that it's never cryptic or scattershot. In her rocker incarnation, Smith's genius for ecstatic racket has generally defined coherence as the rhythm section's job. The revelation that she might have made an ace journalist had she felt so inclined isn't much different from the way the lucidity of "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" upended everything Stein was renowned for. Nonetheless, she can't help being the Patti Smith her fans know and love. If a given event occurs within hailing distance of Arthur Rimbaud's or some other demigod's birthday, she won't fail to alert us. Just as predictably, her reverential visit to Rimbaud's grave on a 1973 trip to France is only a warm-up for the main event: visiting Jim Morrison's. For that matter, anyone willing to buy her claim that she learned of Mapplethorpe's death as "Tosca" played on early-morning TV - and not just any old bit of "Tosca," but the heroine declaiming "her passion for the painter Cavaradossi" - lives in a happier, sweeter world than mine. The reason nobody will care about Smith's occasional fatuities - except to decide they add period flavor, which by my lights they do - is that "Just Kids" is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late '60s and early '70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she's always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What's sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed. No nostalgist about her formative years, Smith makes us feel the pinched prospects that led her to ditch New Jersey for a vagabond life in Manhattan. Her mother's parting gift was a waitress's uniform: "You'll never make it as a waitress, but I'll stake you anyway." That prediction came true, but Smith did better - dressed as "Anna Karina in 'Bande à Part,'" a uniform of another sort - clerking at Scribner's bookstore. That job left Mapplethorpe free to doodle while she earned their keep, which she didn't mind. "My temperament was sturdier," she explains, something her descriptions of his moues confirm. Even when they were poor and unknown, he spent more time deciding which outfit to wear than some of us do on our taxes. Soon they were ensconced at "a doll's house in the Twilight Zone": the Chelsea Hotel, home to a now fabled gallery of eccentrics and luminaries that included Harry Smith, the compiler of "The Anthology of American Folk Music" and the subject of some of her most affectionately exasperated reminiscences. For respite, there was Coney island, where a coffee shack gives Smith one of her best time-capsule moments: "Pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register." That "and the astronauts" is so perfect you wouldn't be sure whether to give her more credit for remembering it or inventing it. Valhalla for them both was the back room at Max's Kansas City, where Andy Warhol, Mapplethorpe's idol, once held court. By the time they reached the sanctum, though, Warhol was in seclusion after his shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968, leaving would-be courtiers and Factory hopefuls "auditioning for a phantom." Smith also wasn't as smitten as Mapplethorpe with Warhol's sensibility: "I hated the soup and felt little for the can," she says flatly, leaving us not only chortling at her terseness but marveling at the distinction. Yet Pop Art's Wizard of Oz looms over "Just Kids" even in absentia, culminating in a lovely image of a Manhattan snowfall - as "white and fleeting as Warhol's hair" - on the night of his death. Inevitably, celebrity cameos abound. They range from Smith's brief encounter with Salvador Dalí - "Just another day at the Chelsea," she sighs - to her vivid sketch of the young Sam Shepard, with whom she collaborated on the play "Cowboy Mouth." Among the most charming vignettes is her attempted pickup in an automat ("a real Tex Avery eatery") by Allen Ginsberg, who buys the impoverished Smith a sandwich under the impression she's an unusually striking boy. The androgynous and bony look she was to make so charismatic with Mapplethorpe's help down the road apparently confused others as well: "You don't shoot up and you're not a lesbian," one wit complains. "What do you actually do?" EVEN when Smith tempts a skeptical reader to say "Uh-huh" to anecdotes like the one implying she was the first to call Janis Joplin "Pearl," her forthright presentation of herself as the minor hanger-on she then was restores our trust. "I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments," she writes. Most often, you're simply struck by her intelligence, whether she's figuring out why an acting career doesn't interest her - actors are soldiers, and she's a born general - or sizing up the ultra-New York interplay between the city's fringe art scenes and the high-society sponsorship to which Mapplethorpe was drawn. "Like Michelangelo," she sweetly but not unshrewdly comments, "Robert just needed his own version of a pope" - which he found, more or less, in the form of the art collector Samuel Wagstaff, who became his lover and patron. Peculiarly or not, the one limitation of "Just Kids" is that Mapplethorpe himself, despite Smith's valiant efforts, doesn't come off as appealingly as she hopes he will. When he isn't candidly on the make - "Hustler-hustler-hustler. I guess that's what I'm about," he tells her - his pretension and self-romanticizing can be tiresome. Then again, the same description could apply to the young Smith, and we wouldn't have the older one if she'd been more abashed in her yearnings. This enchanting book is a reminder that not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it's preparation. Few artists ever proved it like these two. 'Patti, you got famous before me,' Mapplethorpe halfteased Smith when 'Because the Night' became a hit. Tom Carson is the movie critic for GQ and the author of "Gilligan's Wake," a novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 29, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Patti Smith devotees know that she writes electrifying songs and spirited and spiritual poems, yet her first narrative book, a portrait of the artist as a young searcher times two, is a revelation. In a spellbinding memoir as notable for its restraint as for its lucidity, its wit as well as its grace, Smith tells the story of how she and Robert Mapplethorpe found each other, a true and abiding love that survived his coming out as gay, and the path to art in New York City during the heady late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith promised the controversial photographer that she would tell their story as he faced death in 1989 and then weathered more tragedies as she lost her husband and brother. Consequently, Smith brings the piercing clarity born of pain and renewal to this at once matter-of-fact and fairy tale-like chronicle of two romantics living hand-to-mouth as disciples to art. As much as she succeeds in revealing little-known aspects of Mapplethorpe's temperament, it is Smith herself who fascinates, from her earliest childhood memories of entering into the radiance of imagination ; to her stints as a factory worker; to the loneliness of being 19, unmarried, poor, and pregnant; to her fortitude during her penniless and homeless days and nights on the streets of New York in 1967. A lifelong book lover, Smith works in Scribner's bookstore as she and Mapplethorpe seek their true callings while living in the now legendary Chelsea Hotel, a crazy laboratory for experimentation artistic and otherwise. With appearances by Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Johnny Winter, and many other intriguing and influential figures, Smith covers a remarkable swath of cultural and personal history in this beautifully crafted, vivid, and indelible look back. Readers can only hope that Smith will continue to tell her stories and share her visions.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1967, 21-year-old singer-song writer Smith, determined to make art her life and dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in Philadelphia to live this life, left her family behind for a new life in Brooklyn. When she discovered that the friends with whom she was to have lived had moved, she soon found herself homeless, jobless, and hungry. Through a series of events, she met a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe who changed her life-and in her typically lyrical and poignant manner Smith describes the start of a romance and lifelong friendship with this man: "It was the summer Coltrane died. Flower children raised their arms... and Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, and the summer of love...." This beautifully crafted love letter to her friend (who died in 1989) functions as a memento mori of a relationship fueled by a passion for art and writing. Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's, and Strand bookstores. In the lobby of the Chelsea, where she and Mapplethorpe lived for many years, she got to know William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Johnny Winter. Most affecting in this tender and tough memoir, however, is her deep love for Mapplethorpe and her abiding belief in his genius. Smith's elegant eulogy helps to explain the chaos and the creativity so embedded in that earlier time and in Mapplethorpe's life and work. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Smith's remarkable musical achievement was finding the common ground between punk rock and beat poetry-the spontaneity and intense, sloppy energy-to create music that was throbbing with life. With that in mind, it's a mystery why her first book of prose-a memoir of her relationship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their struggles to find a place in the New York City of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground-feels so inert. It reads like a first draft, as though Smith strained to achieve clarity in prose without sacrificing the poetry. This story of the misadventures of Smith's youth occasionally sparks interest with an anecdote about one of an endless parade of famed Greenwich Village iconoclasts (Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsberg, and Janis Joplin make cameos), but the renowned poet and lyricist's storytelling is just disappointing. Verdict For Smith or Mapplethorpe completists only. Readers interested in the milieu should consider Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]-Ned Resnikoff, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and '70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York. Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebratedshe for merging poetry with rock 'n' roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max's Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark's Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith's affection for the citythe "gritty innocence" of the couple's beloved Coney Island, the "open atmosphere" and "simple freedom" of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. "Nobody sees as we do, Patti," he once told her. Riveting and exquisitely crafted. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
