Wagstaff before and after mapplethorpe a biography

In all honesty, I had little knowledge of Sam Wagstaff coming into this book. My eye stuck on the “Mapplethorpe” in the title, the cover’s photo of the young man so loved in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her hippie soul twin, and immediately wanted to see another side of Robert Mapplethorpe’s life, another person on whom Robert acted as less of a foil than another half of a heart. Anyway, even if Mapplethorpe was the draw, I’m so glad I picked up this book / finally opened my eyes to the major cultural and art-world shifter that was Sam Wagstaff.
Brought up in wealth, luxury and almost ushered straight into the inner circle of suits, maybe nothing’s more impressive about the direction Sam took in life than the fact that, so easily, he could have taken a direction centered on money, summer homes and the typical white male checklist. But instead, bored by the corporate life of advertising he tried out in his younger years– and really, this is the “Mad Men” life in the few years before the “Mad Men” time – Sam studied extensively in art history, preferring the scenes on the street to those lived in the big business skyscrapers.
It’s easy to imagine the man fitting in with the counter- cultures circles at the time, d

•