A bunch of quotes collated during my reading of Patricia Morrisroe's "Mapplethorpe: A Biography", which I have reviewed here.

Their son had been a complete mystery to them, and the more they knew about him, the more enigmatic he became. For years Joan had mistakenly thought Robert had been married to the punk rock singer and poet Patti Smith; she had only recently learned of his homosexuality. [...] She had wanted to ask her son if the pictures reflected his own sexuality, and why he had felt the need to photograph himself with a whip inserted in a private place; but some things, Joan thought, were perhaps better left unsaid.

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.

"Robert was a little too intense and conservative for me. He was almost the stereotypic 'good boy.' " -Nancy Nemeth, ROTC Military Ball Queen, 1964

At the beginning of the semester Mapplethorpe had moved from the apartment on Willoughby Avenue to a ground-floor studio on DeKalb Avenue, which he shared with a pet monkey named Scratch. Of all the stories connected to the photographer, the monkey saga remains one of the strangest. He had purchased the animal from a Brooklyn pet store, where the owner had given him a discount because the monkey was already an adult. The owner failed to tell Mapplethorpe that Scratch wasn't housebroken, and while Mapplethorpe made a few feeble attempts at training Scratch, he pronounced the monkey "uncontrollable" and gave it the run of the apartment. The studio was soon covered in urine and feces, and when friends first came to visit they were rendered speechless by the squalor and by Scratch's habit of entertaining Mapplethorpe by masturbating in front of him.

Scratch's brief and bizarre history encapsulated many of the major themes of Mapplethorpe's adult life - his preoccupation with images of death and violence; his fascination with the devil; his desire to transform the ugly, or freakish, into works of beauty. It also pointed to a darker side of his nature, which would later emerge in his sexual relationships with other men - a need to break all the rules and transgress taboos.

Mapplethorpe eventually opted to swallow a tab of acid before traveling to the army's induction center on Whitehall Street. By the time he submitted to his physical, he appeared so psychotic the doctor deemed him unfit to serve.

When the weather grew warmer they would often take the subway to Coney Island, where a street photographer snapped their picture on the boardwalk one afternoon. Afterward Smith improved upon the photograph in a drawing, in which Mapplethorpe is wearing bell-bottoms and a mesh shirt and she is nearly naked in the fashion of the "bad seeds." "We were like two children playing together," Smith recalled, "like the brother and sister in Cocteau's 'Enfants Terribles'."

They even referred to their art as "the children." "In a way," Mapplethorpe insisted, "we were married."

He had scavenged a children's phonograph from the garbage outside the hotel and repeatedly played Tim Hardin's "Hang On to a Dream."

More important than the actual ritual, though, was the liberating effect Tinkerbelle's disclosure [that Mapplethorpe was homosexual] had on Mapplethorpe's work. After years of using pictures appropriated from gay porn magazines, he now borrowed Daley's Polaroid camera and began taking his own photographs. "It was," he said, "more honest, somehow."

At the time Mapplethorpe photographed "Ken," he received a call from an art critic who offered to introduce him to someone who derived sexual satisfaction by having someone slash his penis with a razor. Stoned on MDA, Mapplethorpe arrived at the appointed apartment with his camera and met "Richard" - a "mathematician and computer person" - whose penis was strapped into a stocklike device, with a hole in the center and bolts on the side. "Then the scalpel came out," Mapplethorpe told Dolce.

He then asked if she knew how stimulating the word "nigger" was during sexual foreplay. "Let me get this straight," she said, dumbfounded. "You're looking for an intelligent, successful black millionaire who wants you-a white man-to call him 'nigger'?" Mapplethorpe patiently explained that she hadn't grasped the whole concept. "I wouldn't call him 'nigger' all the time," he said, offended. "Only during sex."

He wasn't the only artist who yearned to make a lot of money, but his greed was coupled with social pretension and a hunger for publicity that increasingly made him a figure of ridicule in the art world.

"Robert was like a drug," she said. "After you were with him for three hours, you just couldn't wait to get away, then you went through withdrawal, and wanted to see him again. But there was no give in that relationship, it was all sort of take."

Mapplethorpe was not okay, and no amount of diffusion and bleaching [in pictures of him] could help him. He was waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat; his lymph glands were swollen, and he had stomach pains and diarrhea. Sam Wagstaff had spent the past decade looking after Mapplethorpe's interests, but since the two men had built up a protective wall around the subject of AIDS, he did not insist that the younger man get tested for it. Wagstaff himself was suffering from chest pain and shortness of breath, and Jim Nelson had developed Kaposi's sarcoma, the purplish cancer lesions that are among the most frightening manifestations of the disease.

That Mapplethorpe managed to go about his business as though no one was suffering from anything more serious than a common cold was a testament to his denial and determination.

Robert had begged off the tragic family reunion, blaming too many commitments in New York. Yet on August 8 he flew to L.A. to shoot architect Frank Gehry for House & Garden, and asked Ed to assist him. Ed waited until the end of the photo session to broach the delicate subject of whether Robert intended to visit Richard in the hospital. He was flabbergasted by his brother's response. "I'm not going," Robert declared. "If I were dying, I wouldn't want him to see me like that. Besides, we're not close." Robert made a minor concession to Ed by sending his dying brother a copy of Certain People, which he coldly inscribed, "For Richard, Robert." Richard had the book with him in his hospital room when he died on August 24.

That Mapplethorpe and Smith were now communicating through their lawyers showed how estranged they had become over the years. In fact, Smith's life was so isolated that the only way she kept up with old friends was through the obituary page of the newspaper.

"Sam's dead," Mapplethorpe told Patti Smith in a mournful voice, yet two days later, on January 16, he attended a dinner for the artist David Salle at Mr. Chow's and acted as if nothing had happened. Andy Warhol refused to sit next to him because, as he later recorded in his diary, "he's sick."

"Robert was really running away," Myers explained. "He was so angry I kept waiting for him to explode."

And explode he did, by rampaging through the gay bars to pick up black men. Mapplethorpe had confided to several friends that he blamed a black man for infecting him with the AIDS virus, but given his boast of having had sex with an estimated thousand men, he couldn't possibly know for sure. Still, he approached his task like an avenging angel, picking up one black man after another with offers of cocaine, then baiting them with the word "nigger." One man screamed at him to stop, but when Mapplethorpe still kept repeating the word, the man grabbed his clothes and ran out the door. "You're evil," the man shouted, in parting. "Evil!"

Mapplethorpe's racism intensified with the progression of his disease, and Kelly Edey, who had presumably heard everything, was so startled by Mapplethorpe's venomous comments that he noted one incident in his diary. Mapplethorpe was standing outside Keller's on the evening of August 2 when he suddenly began to shout, "This is the sleaziest corner in New York. How can it be that I'm standing here in the midst of all this human garbage? They're so stupid, every last one of them is so unbelievably stupid." And yet he kept returning to Keller's, hoping his demigod might rise from the debris. "A lot of people yelled at him for continuing to go to the bars," Mark Isaacson explained. "But he looked at it, like, well, that's their problem - if they're not protecting themselves, why should I worry about it? When Robert first got sick, I said to him, 'You've got to stop your old lifestyle,' and he said to me, 'If I have to change my lifestyle, I don't want to live.'"

Ed was the only family member who knew Robert had AIDS, and he had recently returned to New York to help his brother. But Robert was so afraid his parents might suspect something was wrong if they learned Ed had moved from Los Angeles that he convinced Ed to take part in an elaborate charade that involved keeping an answering machine hooked up to his old phone number. Ed regularly called into the machine to get his messages, and whenever he received one from his mother, he had to pretend he was still in L.A. That Ed was willing to play along with the ridiculous game showed how much he still longed for his brother's approval, but he was drawing from the same empty well.

"Everybody," Kennedy noted, "was just dying to work with him."

[...] he stayed for two hours while Tom Peterman wheeled him past Warhol's celebrity icons - the Ten Lizes, the Gold Marilyn, the Silver Marlon, the Red Elvis, the Sixteen Jackies. Peterman found the whole event distasteful, for clearly Mapplethorpe was yesterday's story, and by fame's mercurial standards he had outlived his moment. But to Peterman's surprise, Mapplethorpe didn't seem to notice.