A thousand smartly dressed people piled into the tent to find their ticketed seats, all carrying the glossiest and most gossipy auction catalog ever printed. At fifty dollars a copy, it promptly sold out, and is now a collector's item. Friends met. Men greeted men with kisses on both cheeks, and women did the same. On closed-circuit television sets around the tent a film was shown, but no one watched, because they were all looking at one another. "The world was fascinated by them," intoned a voice on the sound track, "and they were obsessed with each other.... The Prince of Wales's father, George V, had Mrs. Simpson's past investigated and decided she was not a suitable companion for his son.... Queen Mary called her an adventuress." Year after year of newsreels of their glittering and empty life flashed by: weekends at Fort Belvedere when the Duke was still king, their somber wedding at the Chteau de Cande, the two of them arriving here, arriving there, fashion plates both, stepping out of limousines, waving from the decks of ocean liners, sweeping into parties, relentlessly up to the moment, in all the very jewels that were about to be sold, the d.u.c.h.ess leading, the Duke following, she gleaming, he scowling, or smiling sadly. Behind it all, a voice sang, "The party's over. It's all over, my friend." But no one was listening either, because they were all talking to each other. The Princess of Naples, married to Victor Emmanuel, who would have been the king of Italy if history had gone another way, chatted up Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, who works for Sotheby's jewelry department, while his brother, Prince Serge of Yugoslavia, chatted up the Baroness t.i.ta Thyssen-Bornemisza, ablaze in sapphires, who chatted up the Countess of Romanoes, who was wearing the diamond bracelet she had inherited from the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor and who in turn chatted up the Infanta Beatriz of Spain, who chatted up Grace, Countess of Dudley, who chatted up Princess Firyal of Jordan, who chatted up Judy Taubman, while her husband, Alfred Taubman, the grand seigneur, radiating power and importance, carried a huge unlit cigar and smiled and waved and greeted.

Then the auction began.

From the first of the 306 lots, a gold-ruby-and-sapphire clip made by Carrier in Paris in 1946, the air in the tent was charged with excitement. A few moments later, lot 13, a diamond clip lorgnette by Van Cleef & Arpels, circa 1935, which was estimated to bring in $5,000, went to a private bidder for $117,000. The excitement began to build. Two lots later, when a pair of pave diamond cuff links and three b.u.t.tons and a stud, estimated to go for $10,000, went for $440,000 to a mysterious, deeply tanned man who was said to be bidding for the Egyptian who has taken over the Windsors' house outside Paris, the first applause broke out in the tent. People realized they were present at an event, engaged in the heady adventure of watching rich people acting rich, partic.i.p.ating in a rite available only to them, the spending of big money, without a moment's hesitation or consideration. The sable-swathed Ann Getty, who wanted it known that she was there because of the board-of-directors meeting and not to bid, changed her seat from the fifth row to the first in order to be closer to the arena. By lot 91, a pair of yellow-diamond clips by Harry Winston, 1948, that went to the London jeweler Laurence Graff, one of the royal family's jewelers, for over $2 million, financial abandon filled the air with an almost erotic intensity, and it never lessened during the remaining hours of the sale. Powdered bosoms heaved in fiscal excitement at big bucks being spent. Each time the bidding got into the million-dollar range, for one of the ten or so world-cla.s.s stones in the collection, the tension resembled the frenzy at a c.o.c.kfight. Sotheby's employees manning the telephones waved their hands frantically to attract the auctioneer. People rose in their seats to get a better look at the mysterious Mr. Fabri, who bid and bid-money no object-on all the pieces directly linked to the love affair between Edward and Wallis. "The Duke would have hated all this," said a friend of the Duke's, shaking his head. "I'm surprised they're not auctioning off his fly b.u.t.tons."

The auctioneer, like the judge at a trial, has the power to enthrall his audience. At the podium in Geneva was the tall and debonair Nicholas Rayner. It was he who first approached Matre Suzanne Blum, the keeper of the Windsor flame, about the disposition of the d.u.c.h.ess's jewels. A notoriously difficult woman, the octogenarian Matre Blum is said to have been charmed by Rayner, and because of him she entrusted the jewels to Sotheby's. The charm that captivated Matre Blum captivated all the women in the tent as well. "Divine," said one woman about Rayner. "And separated," said another, as if that fact added to his glamour. Although he was criticized by a few purists for several times allowing the bidding to continue after he had dropped the gavel-he said that since the money was going to charity the ordinary rules did not apply-he won over far more people than he alienated. He had a sense of theater, realized that he was in a leading role, and understood exactly how to keep this audience in the palm of his hand. Graceful, witty, he was Cary Grant at forty, giving the kind of performance that turns a good actor into a major star. At the end of the second day, when the total sales had reached $50 million, the audience rose and gave Rayner a standing ovation which rivaled any that Lord Olivier ever received.

It was a sad disappointment to auction voyeurs that they could not turn around and stare at Miss Elizabeth Taylor raising her already jeweled hand to bid $623,000 for a diamond clip known as the Prince of Wales feathers brooch, which Richard Burton had once admired on the d.u.c.h.ess, for the simple reason that Miss Taylor had chosen to make her bid by telephone while suntanning next to her swimming pool in Bel-Air, California. They could not watch the multimillionaire dress designer Calvin Klein either, as he bid by telephone from New York $733,000 for a single-row pearl necklace by Cartier, or $198,000 for another single-row pearl necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels, or a mere $102,600 for a pearl-and-diamond eternity ring by Darde & Fils of Paris, or $300,600 for a pearl-and-diamond pendant by Cartier, for which he outbid the d.u.c.h.ess's friend and frequent New York hostess Estee Lauder, the cosmetics tyc.o.o.n, and all for his beauteous new wife, Kelly. Expensive, yes, but Van Cleef & Arpels had told Calvin Klein it would take ten years to match pearls for the necklace he had in mind and cost several million dollars. He told the press that he was not going to wait for a special day to give them to Kelly. "The best presents just happen," he said.

Under the marquee, only Marvin Mitchelson, the Hollywood divorce lawyer, who built his fortune on the failed marriages of the famous, broke the rules of anonymity and had himself announced as the purchaser of the d.u.c.h.ess's amethyst-and-turquoise necklace for $605,000. He further wanted it announced that he dedicated the purchase to the memory of his mother, who had worked to put him through law school. Mitchelson also purchased a huge sapphire brooch for $374,000 for someone else, a client whom he would not name, although he tantalized the press by hinting that it was Joan Collins, whom he was representing in her latest divorce.

In seats every bit as good as the seats occupied by the Princess of Naples and Princess Firyal of Jordan sat two dark-haired beauties in Chanel suits-real Chanel suits, not knockoffs-who were there to bid, not gape. They scrutinized their catalogs, and they had mink coats folded over their knees. Their stockings had seams, a subtle signal to the cognoscenti of such things that they were wearing garter belts, not panty hose. Ms. X and Ms. Y, two international ladies of the evening, told me they were staying at the Richemond, where they felt as at home as they do at the Plaza Athenee or the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ms. X had her heart set on lot 26, a pave diamond heart with a gold-and-ruby crown and the initials W. and E., for Wallis and Edward, intertwined in emeralds. It had been the twentieth-wedding-anniversary present of the Duke to the d.u.c.h.ess. Ms. Y had her heart set on lot 31, a single-row diamond bracelet with nine gem-set Latin crosses hanging from it. The d.u.c.h.ess had worn it on her wedding day in 1937 and had once remarked that the crosses represented the crosses she had to bear. Ms. X said about Ms. Y, jokingly, that she wanted the bracelet with the crosses to wear on her whipping hand. Used to the best, Ms. Y has a custom-made bag by Hermes to carry her whips in. She didn't get the bracelet with the crosses, which went for $381,000. Ms. X didn't get the pave diamond heart either. It went for $300,000. "The prices just got out of hand. We were a couple of zeros too short," Ms. X told me during a break. "That heart probably belongs to Candy Spelling by now. Come and have tea tomorrow. We're free until ten."

Of course there was the inevitable j.a.panese, with millions at his disposal, who said he would have gone even higher than the $3.15 million he paid for the d.u.c.h.ess's solitary diamond. Hours later, no one could remember his name or his face.

There will be other jewel sales, even better jewel sales, but that night in Geneva, the jewel capital of the world, people wanted, at any price, no holds barred, something about which they could say, "This belonged to the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor," because they knew that they were buying romance and history. Nowhere was this so evident as in lot 68, a pearl-and-diamond choker, which Nicholas Rayner carefully pointed out was imitation. The choker then sold for $51,000. The sale of the d.u.c.h.ess's jewels, coming as it did only a few days after the $39.9 million sale of a Van Gogh sunflowers painting, whose chrome yellow paint had turned brown, made one realize the enormous amount of money there is in the world waiting to be spent, even for the imperfect, if the credentials are OK.

In the back of the tent, unknown to most of the people there, sat Georges Sanegre and his wife, Ofelia, the longtime butler and maid to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess, quietly watching the personal possessions of their former employers make auction history. Not physically present, but prominently there in spirit, was the old and elusive Matre Blum, called Mrs. Blum by her detractors, who are legion. Matre Blum, who had met the Windsors in Portugal during World War II and then been their French lawyer for forty years, followed every moment of the auction by telephone from Paris and knew minute by minute everything that was going on.

Matre Blum's relationship with the former king and his d.u.c.h.ess was strictly a business one. Social contact was limited to two dinners or lunches a year, and those in the context of business courtesy rather than friendship. The Duke was thought to have more regard for her than the d.u.c.h.ess, who, friends say, wanted to fire her after the Duke's death, but whose increasing mental confusion made this impossible.

"She lost her mind, you know," people told me about the d.u.c.h.ess, "during the last decade of her life." Or, "She was gaga." Or, "A veg." The on-dit, as these people say, meaning the gossip, or inside story, is that the d.u.c.h.ess insisted on having a final face-lift even though she was advised not to because of her age. Plastic surgeons in England and France declined to perform the operation, and warned her about the effects of anesthesia on people over seventy. Determined, she persevered. A plastic surgeon from another country performed the operation, in the course of which there was a technical difficulty with the anesthesia and the air to the d.u.c.h.ess's brain was briefly cut off. This is widely said to be the cause of the derangement that came on her after her husband's death. During her stay at Buckingham Palace at the time of the Duke's funeral, she often thought she was in Paris, and she mistook the Queen Victoria fountain, which she could see from the palace windows, for the Place de la Concorde. The Duke, before he died, aware that the d.u.c.h.ess's mind had begun to wander, entrusted her care to Matre Blum.

Shortly after the Duke's death, when the d.u.c.h.ess was in a confused and vulnerable state, all his private papers were confiscated, possibly under the direction of his cousin Lord Mountbatten, acting on behalf of the royal family. These papers now reside in the archives of Windsor Castle, unavailable to the public. Georges, the butler, is said to have hidden the love letters of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess to prevent their being carried off in the same swoop. The letters he rescued were later published under the t.i.tle Wallis and Edward, Letters 19311937: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor.

It was the Duke's wish, so stated in his will, that the d.u.c.h.ess's jewels be removed from their settings after her death so that the pieces could never be worn by any other woman, but such was not the d.u.c.h.ess's wish. People who have had access to the d.u.c.h.ess's private papers tell me that several Americans tried to persuade the d.u.c.h.ess, because she was American, to leave her jewels, in whole or in part, to the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution in Washington. Another suggestion was that she leave her jewels to the White House, as a permanent collection for the First Lady of the United States to wear. Although Matre Blum is most often blamed for nixing these American plans for the disposition of the collection, it was the d.u.c.h.ess herself who decided that France, the country that had given her refuge for fifty years, should be the beneficiary. There are unkind people who will tell you that if the d.u.c.h.ess had had her way, all her money would have been left to a dog hospital. The truth is, Matre Blum prevailed upon the d.u.c.h.ess to leave the money to the Pasteur Inst.i.tute, the leading medical-research inst.i.tution in France.

People familiar with the Windsors noticed, looking at the jewelry, that a great many pieces were missing. "What happened to all the Fulco di Verdura pieces?" they asked, referring to the designs of the Sicilian Duke di Verdura, whose sc.r.a.pbooks show a great number of pieces he made for the d.u.c.h.ess which were not in the auction. Or, one heard in Geneva and later in New York, "All those marvelous things on her tables-her bibelots-what has become of those, we wonder?" The implication, each time the rhetorical question is asked, is that malfeasance was afoot. Michael Bloch, who edited the book of the couple's love letters, is adamant in his defense of Matre Blum. He affirms that she has not profited at all in the disposal of the estate, and his strong feelings are borne out by several other people close to the couple.

The d.u.c.h.ess had, in effect, an almost ten-year death, with nurses around the clock. The family fortune, in terms of hard cold cash, at the time of the Duke's death was around $1 million-not a great deal of money for people with their standard of living. The high cost of a royal death was prohibitive, and, curiously, the d.u.c.h.ess did not have medical insurance. From time to time during the years of the long illness, Matre Blum sold off pieces of jewelry, sets of china, or the odd Bergere chair or ormolu table to pay off the medical costs. Several years ago, for instance, Mrs. So Schlumberger of Paris bought a ruby necklace. A Sotheby's official a.s.sured me that the price she paid was at the top of the market at the time. Nate c.u.mmings, the late American millionaire, collector, and friend of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess, bought, among other things, a set of vermeil plates. Matre Blum also sold some bead necklaces in emeralds, rubies, and sapphires to the London firm of Hennell, who traveled to Beverly Hills with their wares before the auction. Candy Spelling, the wife of the television mogul Aaron Spelling and the possessor of one of the most spectacular jewel collections in the country, bought one of the necklaces. Another was sold to Mrs. Muriel Slatkin, the former owner, with her sister, Seema Boesky, the wife of the Wall Street swindler Ivan Boesky, of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A third was sold to Mrs. Marvin Davis, the wife of one of the country's richest men, who is, incidentally, the new owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Also, the d.u.c.h.ess gave away several pieces of her jewelry before she died. Princess Alexandra, a favorite niece of the Duke, received a piece. Princess Michael of Kent, whose own popularity in the royal family is on a par with the d.u.c.h.ess's, won the heart of her husband's aunt by marriage by calling her in a letter "Dear Aunt Wallis," thereby likening her own marriage to that of the Windsors, and she too was rewarded.

The d.u.c.h.ess in her will mentioned certain people, like the American-born Countess of Romanoes, who received a diamond bracelet with an inscription from the Duke to the d.u.c.h.ess engraved on the back of it. When the item to be inherited was not specified, it was left to the discretion of Matre Blum, and in this role the mighty matre exerted her authority to the fullest. One lady of haughty bearing irritated Matre Blum exceedingly at the time of the d.u.c.h.ess's funeral by a.s.suming too important a position and att.i.tude among the mourners. Months later, her bijou of inheritance still undelivered, the haughty lady is said to have wailed to her friends, "Why does Matre Blum hate me so?" Her inheritance was the last to be distributed and the least important of the lot in both beauty and value.

No one lingers in Geneva. At fifteen minutes before eight the morning after the sale, Alfred Taubman, a huge unlit cigar balanced between his teeth, paced back and forth in front of the Htel Richemond, impatience in his every step. The auction was over, history made, he wanted to be gone. The jacket of his double-breasted gray flannel suit was unb.u.t.toned. A cashmere scarf was wrapped d.i.c.kensian-style around his neck against the brisk lake breezes. By the curb three dark blue Mercedeses were being loaded with first-rate luggage, and he was directing the operation. Nervous minions offered a.s.sistance.

"How much ...?" someone started to ask him, meaning how much had the auction grossed.

"Forty-nine million plus," he answered, interrupting the question before it was finished. It was not the first time he had been asked the question since the night before, and he was proud of the figure.

"Call upstairs to Mrs. Taubman," he told the hall porter, walking back into the lobby of the hotel. "I left my yellow handkerchief behind. Tell her to find it." He walked back out to the street again. "C'mon. Let's get this show on the road." He did not like to be kept waiting. "Between Judy and Princess Firyal ..." he said, shaking his head in exasperation at the delays women cause. Finally all was ready. "We're going to General Aviation, where my plane is," he said to the driver of the lead car.

The party was over, my friend.

In the six weeks that followed, two other notable jewel auctions took place. At Sotheby's in New York, the jewels of Flora Whitney Miller, the daughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, were auctioned along with the jewels of a Romanian princess and the singer-actress Pia Zadora, among others. Back in Geneva, at Christie's, certain jewels of the Hon. Mrs. Reginald Fellowes; known as Daisy Fellowes, were sold in combination with jewelry from what the catalog listed merely as "various sources."

Unlike the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor, both Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Fellowes, her contemporaries, were born to great wealth and great families. Mrs. Fellowes was the daughter of a French duke and a Singer-sewing-machine heiress. It was said that every time Mrs. Fellowes pa.s.sed an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Singer sewing machines she crossed herself. Historically Daisy Fellowes is little more than a footnote in the memoirs and diary entries of social historians, although in fact she was just as relentlessly chic as the d.u.c.h.ess, far richer, and equally witty. She owned one of the largest yachts in the Mediterranean, the Sister Anne, one which the Windsors once sailed. Stories about her are endless. Once, a former footman with exceptional good looks, who had advanced himself from his position behind a dining-room chair to a seat at some of the best tables in the South of France, Palm Beach, and Beverly Hills, asked Daisy Fellowes if she missed her yacht, which she had recently sold. She looked at the fellow and answered, "Yes. Yes, I do. I miss it very much. Do you miss your tray?"

The auction of her jewels and the auction of the jewels of Flora Whitney Miller were dispirited occasions in comparison with the Windsor sale. "This won't be anything like that," a Christie's executive told me shortly before the Fellowes jewelry auction. "In all my years in the auction business," she said wistfully, in remembrance of things past, "I never saw anything like the d.u.c.h.ess's sale."

In the weeks following the sale, the d.u.c.h.ess's jewels began appearing on fashionable necks, wrists, and bosoms. Elizabeth Taylor arrived at Malcolm Forbes's party-of-the-year in Far Hills, New Jersey, wearing her Prince of Wales Plumes, and Mrs. Milton Petrie, who, when she was the Marquesa de Portago, was a great friend of the d.u.c.h.ess, walked into New York hostess Alice Mason's party for former president and Mrs. Jimmy Carter wearing the d.u.c.h.ess's articulated tourmaline-and-quartz necklace.

At another dinner party in New York, I heard Mr. Taubman describing, not immodestly, how he had restructured Sotheby's and made it a profitable company. "I computerized it. I got rid of the advertising department entirely. They were doing inst.i.tutional advertising. I said to them, 'This isn't an inst.i.tution. This is a business.' I didn't do wholesale firing, as everyone said. I kept the best people, but I brought in experts to go over every department. Now we have a working operation. When I took over the company, they were doing 350, 375 million a year. Last year we did 900 million. By the end of this year, I expect we'll do something like a billion two, a billion five, around there."

As far as the auction world is concerned, Mr. Taubman hit a peak with the sale of the d.u.c.h.ess's jewels. He made it the greatest show on earth. He took an estate appraised by his own experts at $7 million tops and, by means of hype and romance and showmanship, made it bring in over $50 million.

No matter how you slice it, though, Matre Blum emerges as the heroine of this tale. The d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor, unlike other ladies of the royal family she married into, was not a patroness of the arts or sciences. No orphanage or hospital ever knew her as a benefactress. Instead, she was the woman who defined the meaning of a life in society for her time. "Chic" and "stylish" were her adjectives of description. Her servants' livery was made by the same uniform maker who made the uniforms of General de Gaulle. Her days were spent preparing for the evening, telephoning friends, being ma.s.saged, being manicured, being coiffed, having fittings for her vast and ever-changing wardrobe, seating her dinners, choosing her china, ordering her flowers, having steamer trunks packed for their endless peregrinations in pursuit of pleasure. But fate stepped in to give a final importance to her life when Matre Blum suggested that the Pasteur Inst.i.tute be the beneficiary of her will. At the time, no one could know that the Pasteur Inst.i.tute would become the leading French medical inst.i.tution involved in finding a cure for AIDS. Today, however, when the whole world is gripped with the fear of AIDS, the $45 million that the Pasteur Inst.i.tute will receive from the sale of the d.u.c.h.ess's jewelry gives a sort of poetic finality to her life. Even, perhaps, the n.o.bility that always eluded her.

August 1987

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE'S PROUD FINALE

No one expected him to live for the opening, and there he was, on a high," said Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Whether the artist would or would not be present was the question that occupied the minds of all the people involved, in the days preceding the highly publicized and eagerly antic.i.p.ated vernissage of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who took his art to the outer limits of his own experience, at the Whitney last July.

For nearly two years the rumors of Robert Mapplethorpe's illness had been whispered in the New York art and social circles in which he moved as a celebrated and somewhat notorious figure. The death in January 1987 of the New York aristocrat and collector Sam Wagstaff from AIDS had brought the matter of Mapplethorpe's illness with the same disease out into the open. Mapplethorpe, the princ.i.p.al inheritor of Sam Wagstaff's fortune, had once been Wagstaff's lover and later, for years, his great and good friend. The inheritance, believed to be in the neighborhood of $7 million-some say more, depending on the value of his art and silver collection-made the already much-talked-about Mapplethorpe, a famed figure of the night in the netherworld of New York, even more talked about, especially when the will was contested by the sister of Sam Wagstaff, Mrs. Thomas Jefferson IV of New York. Mapplethorpe has never avoided publicity; indeed, he has carefully nurtured his celebrity since his work first came to public notice in the mid-seventies.

That summer night at the Whitney Museum, there were sighs of relief when he did arrive for the opening, having been released from St. Vincent's Hospital only days before. He was in a wheelchair, surrounded by members of his entourage, carrying a cane with a death's-head top and wearing a stylish dinner jacket and black velvet slippers with his initials embroidered in gold on them-a vastly different uniform from the black leather gear that had been his trademark. For those who had not seen the once-handsome figure in some time, the deterioration of his health and physical appearance was apparent and quite shocking. His hair looked wispy. His thin neck protruded from the wing collar of his dinner shirt like a tortoise's from his sh.e.l.l. But even ill, he was a man who commanded attention, and who expected it. A grouping of furniture had been placed in the center of the second of the four galleries where the exhibition was hung, and there he sat, with his inner circle in attendance, receiving the homage of his friends and admirers, a complex olio of swells and freaks, famous and unknown, that makes up the world of Robert Mapplethorpe. His eyes, darting about, missed nothing. He nodded his head and smiled, speaking in a voice barely above a whisper. "It's a wonderful night," person after person said to him, and he agreed. He was enjoying himself immensely. On the wall facing him hung Jim and Tom, Sausalito, his 19771978 triptych of two men in black leather, adorned with the accoutrements of sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic bondage and torture. In the photographs, Jim, the master, is urinating into the willing, even eager, mouth of Tom, the tied-up slave. "Marvelous," said one after another of the fashionable crowd as they surveyed the work. "Surreal" was the word that came to my mind.

However much you may have heard that this exhibition was not a shocker, believe me, it was a shocker. Robert Mapplethorpe was described by everyone I interviewed as the man who had taken the s.e.xual experience to the limits in his work, a doc.u.mentarian of the h.o.m.oerotic life in the 1970s at its most excessive. Even his floral photographs are erotic; as critics have pointed out, he makes it quite clear that flowers are the s.e.xual organs of plants. But the crowds that poured in that night, and kept pouring in for the following three months that the exhibition remained up, had not come just to see the still lifes of stark flowers, or the portraits of bejeweled and elegant ladies of society, like Carolina Herrera and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Paloma Pica.s.so, and of artist friends, like David Hockney and Louise Nevelson and Willem de Kooning, which are also very much a part of Mapplethorpe's oeuvre. They had come to see the s.e.xually loaded pictures, freed of all inhibitions, that were hanging side by side with the above in the galleries of the Whitney, like the startling Man in Polyester Suit, in which an elephantine-size black p.e.n.i.s simply hangs out of the unzipped fly of a man whose head is cropped, or the even more startling Marty and Veronica, in which Marty makes oral love to a stockinged and girdled Veronica, whose upper body is cropped off at her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Mapplethorpe was a partic.i.p.ant in the dark world he photographed, not a voyeur, a point he made clear by allowing a self-portrait showing his r.e.c.t.u.m-rarely considered to be one of the body's beauty spots-to be hung on the wall of the museum, with a bullwhip up it. The Mapplethorpe s.e.xual influence is so great that in the otherwise scholarly introduction to the catalog of the show, Richard Marshall, an a.s.sociate curator of the Whitney, made reference to this same photograph as the "Self Portrait with a whip inserted in his a.s.s." That night, and on two subsequent visits to the exhibition, I watched the reactions of the viewers to the more graphically s.e.xual pictures. They went from I-can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing-on-the-walls-of-the-Whitney-Museum looks to nudges and t.i.tters, to nervous, furtive glances to the left and right to see if it was safe to really move in and peer, and, finally, to a subdued sadness, a wondering, perhaps, of how many of the men whose genitalia they were looking at were still alive.

"On the opening night this amazing strength came to Robert," said Flora Biddle, the granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who is the chairman of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum, which her grandmother started. "At the end of the evening he got up and walked out, after he had come in a wheelchair."

Later, Mapplethorpe told me his feelings about the opening. "It was pretty good. I kept thinking what it would have been like if I'd been feeling better."

"You've become really famous, Robert," I said. "How does that feel?"

"Great," he said quietly, but shook his head at the same time. "I'm quite frustrated I'm not going to be around to enjoy it. The money's coming in, though. I'm making more money now than I've ever made before."

Today Mapplethorpe charges $10,000 for a sitting. His one-of-a-kind pictures sell for an average of $20,000 each. A Mapplethorpe print from the Robert Miller Gallery, his dealer in New York, starts at $5,000.

"I seem to read something about you every day in the press," I said.

"I do love publicity," he replied. "Good publicity."

In a sense, Sam Wagstaff created Robert Mapplethorpe, but anyone who knows Robert Mapplethorpe will tell you that he was ready and waiting to be created. They met over the telephone when Mapplethorpe was twenty-five and Sam was fifty. "Are you the shy p.o.r.nographer?" Wagstaff asked when he telephoned him. Robert had heard of Sam before the call. "Everyone said there was a person in the art world I should meet. So Sam came over to look at my etchings, so to speak."

At the time the totally unknown Mapplethorpe was sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with the then totally unknown poet and later rock 'n' roll star Patti Smith, who has remained one of his closest friends. Although he was, in his own words, "doing photographs of s.e.xuality" with a Polaroid camera back then, he did not yet consider himself a photographer. The Polaroid camera had been purchased for him by John McKendry, the curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. Mapplethorpe had become a sort of adopted son to McKendry and his wife, Maxine de la Falaise, the daughter of the English portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, and was taken about by them into the smart circles of people who later became his friends and patrons. Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe became positive influences on each other's lives. The handsome and patrician Wagstaff, who graduated from Yale and once worked in advertising, had long since moved away from the Upper East Side and New York society world of his birth into the bohemian world downtown. A former museum curator, he had become more and more of a reclusive figure, involved with a group devoted to self-fulfillment called Arica, and sometimes, according to Mapplethorpe, observing whole days of silence. Wagstaff encouraged Mapplethorpe in his photography, and Mapplethorpe persuaded Wagstaff to start collecting photographs. "He became obsessed with photography," said Mapplethorpe. "He bought with a vengeance. It went beyond anything I imagined. Through him, I started looking at photographs in a much more serious way. I got to know dealers. I went with him when he was buying things. It was a great education, although I had my own vision right from the beginning. If you look at my early Polaroids, the style was then what I have now."

Richard Marshall states in his introduction in the catalog that Mapplethorpe "did not feel a strong ideological commitment to photography; rather it simply became the medium that could best convey his statement." Explaining this, Marshall said, "He wasn't a photographer who found his subject. The camera became the best way for him to express himself. Before that he was into collage, drawings, et cetera. He took up the camera to play with, and found that it was what he was looking for."

Barbara Jakobson, who was one of Mapplethorpe's first avid supporters as well as an old friend of Wagstaff's, said, "When I become enthusiastic about an artist, I do not keep my mouth shut. Within five minutes the jungle drums are beating. I like to see people I admire succeed. That was when our friendship started. Robert really saved Sam Wagstaff's life. At the beginning of the seventies, anyone who knew Sam said that he was virtually a recluse. Robert is the one who got him interested in collecting photography. Sam revolutionized the way we look at photographs. When he sold his collection to the Getty Museum, his position in photography was forever a.s.sured."

Mapplethorpe does not stint in his acknowledgment of his late friend's patronage. "I was a real hippie. Sam was a real hippie too. Financially he certainly helped me. He was very generous. We never actually lived together. I had a loft on Bond Street, which he bought for me. He had a loft on Bond Street too. We were lovers as well. I think if you're going to do a story, you should get all the facts. It lasted a couple of years. Then we became best friends. I even introduced him to James Nelson, who became his boyfriend after me." He paused before he added, "He's sick at this point too."

"With AIDS?"

"Yes. He's going through all his money. He's spending like crazy. He rents an apartment at Number One Fifth Avenue, where he and Sam lived, but Sam's apartment in that building has been sold."

Shortly after we talked, Jim Nelson died. Nelson, a former hairstylist for the television soap opera "All My Children," inherited 25 percent of Wagstaff's residuary estate, and Mapplethorpe inherited 75 percent. Nelson, aware that he was dying, wanted his money immediately, so Mapplethorpe, through their lawyers, bought out Nelson's share. As Nelson's life neared its end, he fulfilled a long-held dream and rented two suites on the Queen Elizabeth 2, one for himself and one for a companion, and sailed to England, where he stayed in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, and then took the Concorde back to New York. He spent the last day of his life making up a list of people he wanted to be notified of his death and another list of people he did not want to be notified, one of these being the person who told me this story.

Barbara Jakobson said, "It was great to observe Robert and Sam together. Sam got such a kick out of Robert, and Robert allowed Sam to be indulgent. Sam was a Yankee with cement in his pocket, but he was very generous with Robert. Sam always meant for Robert to have his money. I was very unhappy over the publicity about the will after Sam died."

Another close woman friend of both men, who did not want to be named, said, "Robert was looking for a patron, and along came Sam. Sam made Robert's career. He showed Robert this other way of life. Robert was into learning more than anyone I ever knew. When Robert met Sam, all the doors opened for him. Sam was his sugar daddy in a way."

Most of Wagstaff's money came from his stepfather, Donald Newhall, who left him and his sister shares of the Newhall Land and Farming Company in California, which later went public. Over the years, Wagstaff sold off some of his shares to buy his art, photography, and silver collections. In his will he left bequests of $100,000 each to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the New York Public Library, as well as $10,000 and the family silver to his sister, Mrs. Jefferson, and $10,000 to each of her three children.

"She's enormously rich," said Mapplethorpe about Mrs. Jefferson. "She didn't need the money."

"Then why did she contest the will?"

Mapplethorpe shrugged. "She needed entertainment," he said. In the long run, the litigation never went to trial; Wagstaff's sister decided against proceeding with the suit on the day of jury selection. Several subsequent lawsuits over Wagstaff's million-dollar silver collection, in which Mapplethorpe charged the New York Historical Society with "fraudulent conduct" in obtaining a five-year loan of Wagstaff's silver as he lay dying, were settled out of court.

Mapplethorpe's lawyer, Michael Stout, who handles many prominent people in the creative arts, said about him, "Robert is the most astute businessman of any of my clients. If there is a decision to be made, he understands the issues and votes the right way."

Although I had known Sam Wagstaff for years, my contact with Robert Mapplethorpe was minimal, no more than an acquaintanceship, so I was surprised when he asked me to write this article, and more surprised when he asked to photograph me. Two years ago, right after Sam Wagstaff died, when the rumors of litigation between his family and his heir over his will were rampant, I had thought of writing an article on the subject for this magazine. Mapplethorpe, however, let it be known through his great friend Suzie Frankfurt, the socialite interior decorator, that he did not wish me to write such a piece, and I immediately desisted. Later I saw him at the memorial service for Sam that was held at the Metropolitan Museum. Already ill himself, he made a point of thanking me for not writing the article.

I had met Mapplethorpe for the first time several years earlier, at a dinner given by the Earl of Warwick at his New York apartment. Although Mapplethorpe was then famous as a photographer, the celebrity that was so much a part of his persona was due equally to his reputation as a leading figure in the sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic subculture of New York. Indeed, he was the subject of endless stories involving dark bars and black men and bizarre behavior of the bondage and domination variety. He arrived late for the dinner, dressed for the post-dinner-party part of his night in black leather, and became in no time the focus of attention and unquestionably the star of Lord Warwick's party. He was at ease in his surroundings and, surprising to me, up on the latest gossip of the English smart set, telling stories in which Guinness and Tennant names abounded. When coffee was served, he took some marijuana and a package of papers out of his pocket, rolled a joint, lit it, inhaled deeply, all the time continuing a story he was telling, and pa.s.sed the joint to the person on his right. It was not a marijuana-smoking group, and the joint was declined and pa.s.sed on by each person to the next, except for one guest who, gamely, took a few tokes and then pa.s.sed out at the table, after saying, "Strong stuff." Unperturbed, Mapplethorpe continued talking until it was time for his exit. After he was gone, those who remained talked about him.

Like everything else about Robert Mapplethorpe, the studio where he now lives and works on a major crosstown street in the Chelsea section of New York, which was also purchased for him by Wagstaff, is enormously stylish and handsomely done. In 1988 it was photographed by HG magazine, and Martin Filler wrote in the accompanying text, "Mapplethorpe's rooms revel in the pleasures of art for art's sake and reconfirm his aesthetic genealogy in a direct line of descent from Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through Christian Berard and Jean Cocteau." There are things to look at in every direction, a melange of objects and pictures, but everything has its place. Order and restraint prevail. "You create your own world," said Mapplethorpe. "The one that I want to live in is very precise, very controlled." It fits in with his personality that he pays his bills instantly on receiving them.

Each time we met, we sat in a different area. In the back sitting room of the floor-through loft s.p.a.ce, the windows have elegant brown-black taffeta tieback curtains designed by Suzie Frankfurt, which seem both incongruous and not at all incongruous. Frankfurt, who maintains a complicated friendship with him, said, "Robert lives in the middle of a contradiction-part altar boy and part leather bar." That day he was wearing a black dressing gown from Gianni Versace, the Italian designer, and his black velvet slippers.

At one point he went into a paroxysm of coughing, and from the look he gave me I realized he didn't want me to see him like that. "Would you excuse me for a minute," he said. I got up and went to another part of the apartment until he called me back.

"Oh, I'm so sick," he said. "I've been throwing up all night. The nights are awful."

"When did you first know you had AIDS?" I asked.

"It was diagnosed as AIDS two years ago in October."

"Did you suspect beforehand that you had it?"

"Every f.a.ggot suspects beforehand."

He said that he had two nurses on twelve-hour shifts that cost him a thousand dollars a day. "But I'm lucky. I have insurance." He has been on AZT almost from the beginning. He worries constantly about friends who are less fortunate, specifically his black friends. In a conversation with Marlies Black, who a.s.sembled the Rivendell Collection of modern art and photography, which contains the largest selection of Mapplethorpe's work in the world, he once said, "At some point I started photographing black men. It was an area that hadn't been explored extensively. If you went through the history of nude male photography, there were very few black subjects. I found that I could take pictures of black men that were so subtle, and the form was so photographical." Now, musing on that, he said, "Most of the blacks don't have insurance and therefore can't afford AZT. They all die quickly, the blacks. If I go through my Black Book, half of them are dead."

When I sat for him to be photographed, I was nervous, even though he had asked me to sit. It was on a day that he was not feeling well. He had not slept the night before. He coughed a great deal. His skin was very pale. We sat on the sofa and talked while Brian English, his a.s.sistant, set up the camera and chair where I would sit for the picture. Although ill, Mapplethorpe kept working most days. He showed me pictures he had taken a day or two before of the three-year-old daughter of the actress Susan Sarandon, and he had arranged to photograph Carolina Herrera, the dress designer, as soon as he was finished with me. I was talking about anything I could think of, mostly about people we both knew, to postpone the inevitable. Finally, I told him I was nervous. "Why?" he asked. "I just am," I said. "Don't be," he said quietly. I was struck as always by his grace and manners, which seemed such a contradiction to the image most people have of Robert Mapplethorpe. Finally Brian placed me in the chair, and Robert got up and walked very slowly over to where the Ha.s.selblad camera was set up. He looked in the viewfinder. He asked Brian to move a light. He made an adjustment on a lens opening. "Look to the left," he said. "Keep your head there. Look back toward me with your eyes." He was in charge.

Another time, I remarked that he was looking better. He told me that he was finally able to eat something called TPN, a totally nutritious substance which gave him 2,400 calories a day. "I don't actually eat. I'm fed mostly by tube. If I hadn't found this, I'd be dead by now. I couldn't keep any food down." And then he said a line I heard him say over and over. "This disease is hideous."

"My biggest problem now is walking. I have neuropathy, like when your foot's asleep. It's constant. It's in my hands too. If it weren't for that, I'd go out." His eyes moved toward the window. "I'd like to go to Central Park to see the new zoo. And I'd like to go back to the Whitney to see the show. I hear there are lines of people to see it."

He was born in a middle-cla.s.s suburban neighborhood called Floral Park, which is on the edge of Queens, New York, the third of six children in a Catholic family of English, German, and Irish extraction. His mother is a housewife. His father does electrical work. He went to a public school in Floral Park, but he would have preferred to go to the Catholic school, which his younger brothers went to. Although he now says that Floral Park was a perfect place for his parents to raise a family, early yearnings in nonconformist directions brought his family life to a halt. "I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. The only way to do that was to break away. I didn't want to have to worry about what my parents thought. When I was sixteen, I went to college at the Pratt Inst.i.tute. That was when I began to live elsewhere."

Except for his brother Edward, the youngest of the six, who was at the studio each time I was there, he has not been close to his family for years, although he said that they are "closer since I told them I was sick, which was not too long ago."

"Did your parents come to see your show at the Whitney?" I asked him.

He shook his head no. "They intend to," he said. Then he added, "But they have come to see me here."

While still in school, he began living with Patti Smith, whom he met in Brooklyn. Maxine de la Falaise McKendry remembered that when Robert first met Smith he kicked a hole through from his apartment to hers so that they could communicate better. "Patti and I built on each other's confidence. We were never jealous of each other's work. We inspired each other. She became recognized first. Then she had a record contract. She pushed ahead. There was a parallel happening to each career." Patti Smith, who is now married with two children, lives in Detroit. "We talk to each other all the time," he said.

"S&M is a certain percentage of Robert's work, and necessary to show, to give a representation of his work," said Richard Marshall. He told me that when they put the exhibition together there had never been any idea of censorship, or any reservation about including offensive material, although, he added, "there are some stronger pictures which do exist, some more explicitly graphic pictures, the uh, penetration of the arm." What Marshall was referring to was what Mapplethorpe calls his fist-f.u.c.king file. "Call Suzanne," he said to me, speaking of his lovely young secretary, Suzanne Donaldson, "and ask her, if you want to see the fist-f.u.c.king file, or the video of me having my t.i.t pierced." When certain of these photographs were shown at an art gallery in Madrid, the gallery owner, who has since died of AIDS, was sent to jail.

"There were some letters of protest about the show, but not in great numbers at all," said Marshall. "We put up signs in three or four locations, warning parents that the show might not be applicable for children."

Flora Biddle concurs. "I went on a tour of the show the night before it opened with the Whitney Circle, which is the highest category of membership. Richard Marshall talked about the pictures to the group, dealing with the pictures you could call the most s.e.xual, and spoke beautifully about them. The people in the Circle were attentive and open to them. Afterward, people came up and said they thought it was so wonderful the Whitney was hanging this show."

Barbara Jakobson said, "Sometimes I'd drive downtown in my yellow Volkswagen to have dinner with Robert. Then, later, I'd drop him off at the Mineshaft, or one of those places. G.o.d forbid he be seen having a woman drop him off, so I'd leave him a block away. I had no desire to see inside, but I once asked Robert to describe what it was like, in an architectural way. He said there were places of ritual. He told me how the rooms were divided, without telling me what actually went on. Once he showed me a sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic photograph. I said to him, 'I can't believe that a human being would allow this to be done.' He replied, 'The person who had it done wanted it to be done. Besides, he heals quickly.' Robert would find these people who enjoyed this. The interesting part is that they posed for him."

When I discussed this conversation with Mapplethorpe, he said, "I went to the Eagles Nest and the Spike to find models. Or I'd meet people from referrals. They'd hear you were good at such and such a thing, and call. I was more into the experience than the photography. The ones I thought were extraordinary enough, or the ones I related to, I'd eventually photograph."

"Were drugs involved?"

"Oh, yes. I've certainly had my share of drug experiences, but I don't need drugs to take pictures. They get in the way. However, drugs certainly played a big factor in s.e.x at that time. MDA was a big drug in all this. It's somewhere between cocaine and acid.

"Most of the people in S&M were proud of what they were doing. It was giving pleasure to one another. It was not about hurting. It was sort of an art. Certainly there were people who were into brutality, but that wasn't my take. For me, it was about two people having a simultaneous o.r.g.a.s.m. It was pleasure, even though it looked painful.

"Doing things to people who don't want it done to them is not s.e.xy to me. The people in my pictures were doing it because they wanted to. No one was forced into it.

"For me, S&M means s.e.x and magic, not sadomasochism. It was all about trust."

"If his S&M work were heteros.e.xual, it wouldn't be acceptable," I was told by a world-famous photographer, who, because of Mapplethorpe's illness, did not wish to be quoted by name making critical remarks about him. "The smart society that has accepted his work has done so because it is so far removed from their own lives."

Even before the AIDS crisis, though, Mapplethorpe had begun to move away from the S&M scene as subject matter for his photography. One of his closest a.s.sociates said to me, "Robert had gotten more and more away from being a downtown personality. He had been observing the uptown life for some time, and I think he wanted to become a society photographer. Once, leaving someone's town house on the Upper East Side, he said, 'I wouldn't mind living like that.' "

Carolina Herrera, the subject of one of Mapplethorpe's earliest and most celebrated society portraits, has known him for years, "long before he was famous." They met on the island of Mustique in the Caribbean in the early 1970s, when Herrera and her husband were guests of Princess Margaret, and Mapplethorpe, along with his English friend Catherine Tennant, was a guest of Tennant's brother Colin, who is now Lord Glenconner. Tennant remembers Mapplethorpe at the time wearing more ivory bracelets up his arms than the rebellious Nancy Cunard wore in the famous portrait Cecil Beaton took of her in 1927. When Mapplethorpe took Herrera's picture in a hotel room in New York, he had only a minimum of photographic equipment and no a.s.sistant. Herrera's husband, Reinaldo, had to hold the silver umbrella reflector for him. Mapplethorpe photographed Herrera wearing a hat and pearls, against a blank ground, and since then his style in social portraiture has remained as stark as in his nude figures, mirroring the sculptural influence of Man Ray more than the ethereal settings of Cecil Beaton.

On Friday evening, November 4, 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe gave a large c.o.c.ktail party at his studio to celebrate his forty-second birthday. Incidentally, November 4 was also the birthday of Sam Wagstaff. Birthday celebrations have always been important to Mapplethorpe, according to Barbara Jakobson. She remembered other birthday parties in the past that Sam had given for Robert. " 'Sam is going to give me a party,' Robert would say way in advance."

At the peak of the birthday party, nearly two hundred people milled through the vast studio, among them the film stars Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, and Gregory Hines, all of whom had been photographed by Mapplethorpe. In the crowd were Prince and Princess Michael of Greece, the Earl of Warwick, Tom Armstrong of the Whitney Museum, gallery owner Mary Boone, Bruce Mailman, who was a managerial partner in the St. Marks Baths until it was closed down in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, and Dimitri Levas, the art director and princ.i.p.al stylist on Mapplethorpe's fashion shoots, who is said to be one of his heirs, as well as well-known figures from the magazine, gallery, auction, and museum worlds. And collectors. And people who were just friends. Inevitably, there were men in black leather, some wearing master caps, standing on the sidelines, watching. Everyone mixed.

Everybody brought gifts, wonderfully wrapped, and soon there was a mountain of them on a bench by the front door. Bouquets of flowers kept arriving throughout the party, including one of three dozen white roses in a perfect crystal vase. Waiters in black jackets moved through the crowd, carrying trays of fluted gla.s.ses of champagne. On several tables were large tins of beluga caviar, and Robert kept leaning over and helping himself.

Although there was certainly a sense that this was Robert Mapplethorpe's farewell party for his friends, there were no feelings of sadness in the studio that night. Robert, continually indomitable, provided his guests with an upbeat and optimistic celebration. He looked better than he had looked in weeks. He sat in his favorite chair, missing nothing, receiving guest after guest who came and knelt by his side to chat with him. Toward the end of the evening, he stood up and walked.

"This is Robert. This is his life. Everybody beautiful. Everybody successful," said one of the guests whom I did not know.

"Robert has style," said Prince Michael of Greece, surveying the event. "Personal style is not something you learn. It's something you have."

One of the most frequently asked questions these days is where Robert Mapplethorpe will leave his money when he dies. His lawyer, Michael Stout, refused to answer the question. But it is known that the photographer has recently set up the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, with a board of directors. Besides specific bequests to friends, the foundation will probably give money to the arts as well as to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), an organization with which Mapplethorpe had been a.s.sociated since Sam Wagstaff's death. In a letter he sent out asking friends and acquaintances to pay $100 each to attend a private viewing of Sam Wagstaff's silver collection prior to its sale at Christie's in January, he wrote, "I have asked AmFAR to use the funds raised from this benefit to support community-based trials of promising AIDS drugs, a pilot program which will greatly increase patient access to treatments that may help extend their lives."