My friend Robert Mapplethorpe, by Patti Smith ... a star's love story of passion and death

Although their exclusive romance lasted only a couple of years, a close spiritual and artistic bond endured and their hearts are still intertwined, says Patti Smith.

It's been 21 years now, since the morning in 1989 when she picked up the phone to hear of Robert Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS. Hours before that death at the age of 43, he made her promise that she would write their story, the chronicle of how two kids of 20 bumped into each other twice, then on the third occasion decided to live and explore

their art together.

"It's taken a long time to get down to doing it," says Smith, who has travelled to Sheffield to talk about her book, perform her songs to ecstatic fans and see the current exhibition of Mapplethorpe's

arresting photographs at the Graves Gallery.

"It took years to process his death and come to terms with the depth of my loss. Then I was looking after my kids, my husband died, I had to get out and earn a living. But I had given my word, and as Robert said, only I really knew about our story – although others were starting to write about it."

That story is beguiling, a mesmerising raggle-taggle tale of idealism, penury, mutual devotion and support set amid the exploding New York art scene of the late 1960s and early '70s. The narrative is delivered in Patti Smith's distinctively dry and witty voice, and as a memoir of

young love it is an extraordinary read, not least because the young protagonists were so different on so many levels.

He was impossibly beautiful; she was androgynous and in a certain light her angular face could look plain. He explored drugs, she didn't. She was heterosexual, and couple of years into their relationship

Mapplethorpe, who had been raised in a strict and repressive Catholic regime, revealed that he was gay. "Were the two things connected? I've never thought about that, but it's a good point... He did explore the good/evil polarity."

Having explored many different artistic formats from drawing to installation and collage work, the photographs that made Mapplethorpe notorious in the 1980s were challenging images that emerged from the dark, sado-masochistic recesses of a world which Smith did not inhabit. Her drawing, poetry, and later her music sprang from an obsession with William Blake, a seeking of artistic light, energy and rapture.

And yet they could read each other's mind and knew how to galvanise each other. After their domestic bliss was shattered by Mapplethorpe's revelation, they continued to walk in step artistically, even living together while each explored other relationships. It took years for them to learn to live apart.

At 64, in her jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, with long red-brown hair flattened under a woolly hat, Patti Smith doesn't look very different to the skinny, white-faced, bookish girl who dropped out of college to have a baby out of wedlock. After giving the baby up for adoption, she left her close family in South Jersey to realise some vague artistic dream in New York City. It was 1967.

"I had no plan, except to find some friends I knew were students and maybe stay with them and get a job. I believed in fate and adventure, like Rimbaud. I went to the house and the friends no longer lived there. Someone said I should ask a guy in the back room and there was this sleeping young man with a mass of curls and beads around his neck. I'd never seen anyone like him. He smiled and offered to take me to my friends."

To cut a long story short, the friends never materialised and Smith slept in doorways and on benches for three weeks, scavenging food from bins before she got work in a bookstore and lived in the storeroom until pay day. A second encounter with Mapplethorpe happened in the shop, when he bought a Persian necklace Smith coveted (and later

received).

The third occasion was when she had been bought a meal by a customer, but was fearful of what he wanted in return. Spotting Mapplethorpe walking nearby, she ran to him and asked him to pretend to be her angry boyfriend. They ran off together, and set up home the next day with no money but a few pencils, notebooks and a lot of hope between them.

"Robert was really never a stranger," says Smith. "He was very quickly like another part of me. But he was ambitious and in a hurry. I just wanted to write something great one day and learn to draw – a long-term apprentice."

The two lived in a series of flaky rooms and later on moved into a tiny space in the famous Chelsea Hotel, where names including Smith's hero Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Arthur C Clarke, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin and many others had either lived or still passed through. The owner would accept a piece of art in lieu of rent from some of his struggling guests.

"Our room was so small and Robert was often working there, so I took up residence in the lobby a lot of the time and got to know others from the building." It was in the lobby that Patti would receive tutorials from poet Ginsberg.

After a few years of mutual devotion while the world mostly ignored their gifts, the two budding stars found patrons and an audience. Mapplethorpe's career took off thanks to help from his well-connected mentor and future partner Sam Wagstaff, and after a series of successful poetry readings, Patti Smith became a published poet who soon went on to write with musicians and tour with her own rock band, culminating in mainstream validation for the single Because the Night, a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen. Her debut album Horses (with cover photo by Mapplethorpe) was acclaimed, and there have been nine other studio albums since.

Smith's other love affairs included writer Sam Shepard, but in the late 1970s she met, married and settled in Detroit with musician Fred Smith. She worked at her poetry and studied while raising two children. The need to earn a living after Fred's sudden death in 1994 put her back on the road and in the studio. She is known by some as "the grandmother of Punk".

It is still Mapplethorpe whose artistic influence she feels most. "We had a mutual need to validate each other's work. Our physical life was nice, but without it there any more there was still so much more to

save in the relationship. I still feel him in me and hear him laugh. I still collaborate with and learn from him."

n Just Kids by Patti Smith is published by Bloomsbury, 18.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage costs 2.95.

n The exhibition Artist Rooms: Robert Mapplethorpe continues at the Graves Gallery, Surrey Street, Sheffield S1 1XZ until Saturday. Admission free. Information: 0114 278 2600. www.museums-sheffield.org.uk