The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Pat knew just how to deflect a question like that. In 1941, when Mary Sullivan was sending Pat gardenias every day under the name of “Mike Thomas” (the name of the host at their first party together), Pat, living at home on Grove Street with Mary and Stanley, put the flowers in her parents’ refrigerator with the card still attached, amusing herself by allowing Mother Mary to think that a man named Mike Thomas was courting her.48 Perhaps she also amused herself with the idea that her first “real lesbian lover” had her own and her mother’s first name.*

  Pat’s meeting with Mary Sullivan was her entrée into the big-city world of casual and not-so-casual sexual encounters. With extraordinary confidence for a college girl, Pat was soon going through women like wildfire. A month after they met, in July of 1941, Pat got rid of Mary Sullivan. In fact, she got rid of her twice—once in life, and once in the first of the diaries (it had an appropriate superscription: “And here is my diary, containing the body”) she’d begun to use for recording her sexual adventures. “But I know in the way of intelligence, fidelity, dependability, and intensity, Mary is superior to Virginia. Perhaps I shall live to regret it—breaking with her. I told Mary what I felt about her. ‘But it wasn’t enough.’ And it wasn’t.”49

  “Mary Sullivan was an interesting woman,” Ruth Bernhard remembered during the conversations I had with her in her ninety-ninth year. “I never knew anyone that Mary Sullivan had a relationship with. If it was Pat, it was not a bad choice…. Pat was a very attractive person, a wonderful-looking woman, and people were drawn to her. She…had lots of connections and quite a few little love affairs.”50 Although Ruth Bernhard was “sure” she had taken nude photographs of Pat in the early 1940s, the photograph she best remembered making of Pat has nothing to do with physical exposure. It is as she described it: a “thoughtful,” dignified portrait of a young writer thinking about her work and imagining her future. Ruth Bernhard gave a copy of the photograph to Pat—and sixty years after she took it, she gave me permission to publish it here (see frontispiece).

  The next phase of Pat’s Manhattan social life—the phase that lasted the longest—coincided with the war-inspired exodus from Europe to New York of a great number of interesting and artistic expatriate women. And Pat was ready to meet them: an attractive, intermittently forward, highly talented twenty-year-old; a kind of “club kid” with brains and a master plan (success!), trying her luck and dreaming of artistic immortality. Until she could be famous, however, Pat was settling for seductive friendships. And many people were interested.

  In 1991, Pat remembered her longest streak of New York social luck.

  “I met Janet [Flanner] whan I was 20 in Manhattan, when I met some 20 interesting people all in a fortnight, many of whom I still know—it’s only a matter of their being alive.”51

  In July of 1941, Pat met Buffie Johnson, a wealthy, witty, charming painter with exquisite, if sometimes imperious, manners and highly cultivated tastes. Donald Windham, the handsome young novelist sitting next to Tanaquil LeClercq in Karl Bissinger’s Café Nicholson photograph, remembers when Buffie Johnson rented the whole floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice and let him stay there, but then wanted him to chaperone a statue back to the United States for her. “Just something small, darling,” said Buffie winningly. The statue was five feet tall and heavy as a house, and Windham wisely declined to be its minder.52

  In 1941, Buffie had recently returned from Paris, where she’d been living in the soprano Mary Garden’s famous house at 44 rue du Bac and studying painting with Francisco Pissarro. Buffie would later become known for painting the largest abstract expressionist mural ever to be commissioned in New York, the mural at the old Astor Theatre, but her social persona, her money, and her commitment to Jungian psychology and goddess history tended to overshadow her reputation as a painter.

  When she was in Paris, Buffie, who knew everyone and went everywhere, was invited to both Natalie Barney’s literary salon and Gertrude Stein’s gatherings on the rue de Fleurus. When Buffie went to the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude, as was her custom, immediately relegated her to the “women’s corner” of the room with Alice B. Toklas, while she, Gertrude, spoke of important things with the men. Although Alice Toklas was very kind, Buffie was piqued at being ignored by Gertrude, and so, as she was leaving the atelier, she leaned over and surreptitiously pinched Gertrude Stein on her bottom. “It had,” Buffie reported, “the consistency of a block of mahogany.”53

  At ninety, Buffie Johnson recalled for me where and how she first met Patricia Highsmith.

  “I met her at a party, a party of people I never saw again; people I didn’t care to see again…. I knew right away that Pat was very intelligent. There was an immediate [she made an intertwining gesture with her fingers to signal “connection”]. She was rather bold in her approach…. She wasn’t at all sophisticated when I first met her…. She wasn’t sleeping with just everyone. [Buffie stopped to correct herself.] Well I guess she was sleeping with someone or someones.”

  Buffie knew that “Pat was a student at Columbia” and was quite convinced that Pat was living with her grandmother. She thought Pat had told her that. “I didn’t know she had a mother.” Buffie also thought that Pat was “terrificly attractive and sparkly and energetic.” Invited to make a painter’s assessment of the likenesses of a number of photographs taken of Pat in her early twenties, Buffie chose a photo of Pat gesturing vigorously over a railing as “the most like.” “Not facially,” she said, but the gesture, the energy, that’s what was “like” Pat. She paused over a rather plain photograph of Pat’s face: “I forgot about that furrow,” she said, pointing to the concentrated knot of problems that had settled between Pat’s eyebrows by the time she was twenty. “She looks cross.” Pat did look cross in the photograph. But Pat didn’t look cross when Buffie first met her: “I would have remembered if she did,” Buffie said.

  Some years before I spoke with her, Buffie Johnson had dictated in a formal way her memories of meeting Pat—and the memoir fills in some gaps. At that time, in 1941, Buffie owned a “little house on East Fifty-eighth Street” on the Upper East Side, Pat’s favorite neighborhood for socializing.

  Although I cannot recollect our conversation at the party I was aware from her attention that she wanted to become my friend. When I was about to leave she asked if she could see me again and I said yes. But when I gave her my telephone number I noticed that she didn’t write it down. I mentioned this and she laughed, saying, “I’ll remember.” To my surprise, she did and I was impressed with this trick of memory especially since my own is so abominable.

  Although she was far from being sweet, she had an interesting and well-organized mind and indeed she knew what she wanted. Moreover, it was not every day that one meets an attractive and intelligent young woman. So, later when she did telephone we got together and would thereafter meet fairly often.54

  Pat’s accounts of her meetings with Buffie and of her own intentions are more intimate. Pat liked Buffie’s situation—monied—and she more than liked Buffie herself, wondering if her feelings for Buffie might be deepening. In her cool way, she assessed Buffie’s painting. “I was pleasantly surprised. Somewhat derivative—the Cezanne, Dalí—Chirico…Renoir School, but some portraits have something too.”55 Pat and Buffie continued to see each other—and Pat continued to meet many other women—for some months. Buffie allowed Pat to stay in her house when she went to California to prepare for her first marriage, and she continued to provide Pat with important introductions to people in the world of arts: people like the cult lyricist and wit John La Touche (“horribly, silencingly flip,” the intimidated Pat thought), who would write the lyrics for Cabin in the Sky and for the songs “Taking a Chance on Love” and “Lazy Afternoon” “Touche’s” quondam wife “Teddie” (“in cream colored tights, coachman livery…with black boots”),56 a lesbian from a prominent banking and investment family who interested Pat quite a bit; and the painter Fernand Léger (“Simply wonderful,” Pat en
thused when Buffie invited her to a Léger cocktail party).57

  It was probably Buffie who was Pat’s introduction to the heiress, art philanthropist, and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim (she had exhibited Buffie’s paintings) as well as to a larger professional circle to which Buffie had access and Pat, still just a junior at Barnard College but circulating socially with astounding assurance, did not. Forty years later, Buffie was also responsible for Pat’s reintroduction to Paul Bowles in Tangier, and Buffie remained a frequent subject for the lively correspondence that sprang up between Bowles and Highsmith.

  Two weeks after Pat and Buffie met, as Buffie Johnson tells it, “I was invited to a party of a friend whose husband was the editor and chief of Fortune magazine. Thinking this might prove fortuitous for my young acquaintance—many people there were highly placed in the hierarchy of Luce Publications—I took Patricia with me and, although they were much older, she immediately busied herself among them. Emerging from a deep conversation with my friend, I looked up and the room had emptied. Without even saying goodnight, Patricia had left with the group of editors.”

  Amongst those editors was Rosalind Constable, the woman who would haunt Pat’s diaries, cahiers, and life for the next ten years.

  Sybille Bedford, who remembered meeting Pat in the 1940s “in Rome when she was a little bit wild,”58 knew Rosalind Constable very well. In her dazzling memoir, Quicksands, Bedford wrote that Constable was “a bright light of the Life/Time establishment, hard-working, hard-playing.”59

  Fourteen years older than Pat, Rosalind Constable was a sophisticated arts journalist from England. She knew and was known by nearly everyone in British and American arts and publishing circles. She had blond “Norwegian”-looking hair, light, cold eyes, a serious intellectual background, and a pronounced ability to spot coming trends in all the arts: Rosalind was a “cool-hunter” avant la lettre. Long employed at Fortune, she was greatly influential in the magazine publishing world that Pat was finding so attractive. Rosalind had the ear of the publishing magnate Henry Luce, who, Daniel Bell says, gave Rosalind one of the most “enviable” jobs in New York. Rosalind was the editor of an in-house newsletter in the Luce corporation called Rosie’s Bugle. Its purpose was to alert all the other Luce magazine editors to the cultural subjects about which they should be writing.60

  Mary Highsmith—Pat had made the mistake of excitedly pointing out Rosalind to Mary from a Manhattan bus one day—took an instant dislike to Rosalind. And Mary’s eye for serious rivals was at least as good as Rosalind’s eye for serious art.61 She continued to blame Rosalind for years for the alienation of Pat’s affections: “Stanley and I were with you 100%,” she wrote painedly to Pat in Europe. “Then you met Rosalind—everything changed. We were no longer your friends…you wanted to make us out ignorant, crude and unthinking so you could show people how far you had sprung from your poor and slimy background.”62 Mary’s criticisms were rewarded in the way such criticisms are usually rewarded: Pat created a pedestal for Rosalind Constable and kept her on it for the next decade.

  Pat, more socially aggressive in the 1940s than she would ever be again (sober, that is), telephoned to Rosalind the day after they met and launched a long, complex friendship. The connection was vigorously pursued by Pat and indulgently encouraged by Rosalind. On her first visit, Pat was invited to spend the night in Rosalind’s guest bedroom and she did so. Long walks with hands intertwined followed, and Rosalind—this thrilled Pat—called her “Baby,” gave her cryptically dedicated books, and introduced her to people prominent in the arts world, including Rosalind’s own lover, the gallerist and artist Betty Parsons. “You’re a sloppy Joe,” Rosalind said to Pat, who never quite came up to Rosalind’s expectations of public presentation, “but I think you’re an artist!” Pat thought it was a fair exchange.63 There were lunches in expensive restaurants liberally irrigated with alcohol and much anticipated by Pat. (Rosalind, in the style of the times, drank a lot.) After lunch, Pat sometimes sat on Rosalind’s lap. It was the kind of Courtly Love story Pat preferred when she was young: a sensual pursuit of an older woman gauzily masked by an artistic and professional mentoring/mothering. This one had all the intoxications of a love affair that would never be physically consummated.

  Pat transferred to Rosalind some of the liens of her bondage to Mother Mary; that boyish and intermittent courtship of her mother of which Pat wrote at twenty: “I’m happy if I can be boss, lighting her cigarettes and dominating as I did yesterday.”64 Pat encouraged her friends to bring back reports of Rosalind—and delighted in the backchat. When Kingsley telephoned Pat with a “wonderful message”—“I have it on reliable authority that Rosalind Constable is your slave!”—Pat gleefully extracted the details from her. Kingsley had been to the Wakefield gallery, where Rosalind’s lover Betty Parsons presided, and Parsons had said to Kingsley: “‘Oh, Pat! Yes, Rosalind talks about her constantly! About how brilliant she is. In fact, I’m rather tired of hearing about her, etc.’ and how I inspire Rosalind to work so hard.”65

  Pat herself, although notoriously closemouthed in her suburban life in France and Switzerland, was regularly and correctly accused of gossiping in New York, in Snedens Landing, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and in Earl Soham, Suffolk. Pat couldn’t help telling tales on people: she was always somehow involved in making a “case” for herself—and that meant recounting stories of other people’s “behavior” towards her. “The reason I like to document things, and to have witnesses—is because I do not like to be falsely accused,” she wrote to her stepfather in the middle of a five-page single-spaced torrent of tattling on her mother.66 Perhaps Pat’s childhood habit of coolly and hotly discussing her mother with her grandmother had something to do with her tattling.

  Like Buffie Johnson, Rosalind was responsible for Pat’s introduction to “quality” and also to some very high-style amusements. Through Rosalind, Pat met sophisticates like Peggy Fears, the former Ziegfeld Follies girl whose film career had fizzled out by the mid-1930s but whose Hollywood connections, incessant partying (she was a close friend of the film actress Louise Brooks: c’est tout dire), and pursuit of beautiful women on both coasts was notorious. Pat, announcing that she was “looking for adventure,” began to visit Peggy daily in the fall of 1947 and was being far “too enthusiastic” about her for Rosalind’s taste. Peggy Fears, in addition to her other attractions, supplied the intermittently insomniac Pat with sleeping pills.67

  According to her diaries, Pat was always telephoning women at one thirty in the morning—from other women’s bedrooms, corner phone booths, bars, almost never from her own apartment—to come by unexpectedly, make love with them if they were willing and she was interested, and then depart. Sometimes Pat’s intentions were indirectly expressed, as when she paid an unanticipated visit to the novelist Hortense Calisher. (Decades later, Curtis Harnack, Calisher’s husband, would become the executive director of Yaddo, the arts colony to which Pat—at the very last possible moment—left all her worldly goods.) Calisher said that Pat dropped in on her apartment announcing “that she came about a house, but I really wondered if it wasn’t about me.”68

  Pat talked to every magazine editor, book publisher, and cultural arbiter she could get an appointment with: inviting Betty Parsons to dinner so that Parsons could look at her drawings (Parsons, as Rosalind Constable’s lover, provided Pat with another opportunity to be the third arm of yet another triangle); accompanying Buffie Johnson to artist “[Fernand] Léger’s madhouse cocktail party,” where she met the set and costume designer Stewart Chaney and the architect Frederick Kiesler (“very nice,” Pat thought), who in 1942, the year Pat met him, would create and supervise the visionary design of Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. Pat went, despite her afflicting shyness and contrasting boldness, to whatever she was invited to—to “[s]omething terrific…at Rosalind’s Thursday night,”69 to publishing parties, to art lectures, to openings. Wherever there might be people able to help a career or connect a social life,
there was this intelligent, magnetically attractive college girl, consumed by the American Dream of the perfect house, the right book contract, the burgeoning bank account, and the series of selves whose perfectability was always just around the corner.

  It would have taken a keener eye than the casually admiring or coldly censorious ones turned towards Patricia Highsmith during all those Manhattan evenings to see that her seductive behavior, heavy imbibing, rapid advances, and sharp withdrawals were signals through the flames burning in her psyche. (“Now I feel quite socialized once more,” she wrote after a week of frantic activity. “I want to be alone now.”)70 Only Karl Bissinger and the composer David Diamond seemed to notice the skull beneath her skin—and what was going on inside it. And only Buffie Johnson was perceptive enough to talk with Pat about her sexuality.

  “Buffie…told me she worried about me sexually and in a neat, catchy presentation like a lawyer’s two-edged sword, told me she worried if I had ever had an orgasm…. She said my tenseness is dynamic and charming now, but later will be a problem…. In the course of the afternoon, I assured her, with conviction, of being a confirmed free-lover.”71

  “Peculiar,” Pat wrote defensively in her diary, “with all [Mary] Sullivan’s experience she never had any complaints.”72

  In these heavily monitored times, it is easy to look askance at the young (and the old) Patricia Highsmith for her marathon drinking. More useful to remember—as every single person who approached drinking age in the 1940s told me—is the fact that people in New York in the 1940s drank a great deal more than people drink today. As the writer and editor Dorothy Wheelock Edson said, after explaining how her husband, “a very considerate man, always drove the drunks home” after one of their lively parties at their home on the North Shore of Long Island: “I can’t say that I knew Patricia Highsmith was an alcoholic—because everyone was drinking so much in the 1940s you could hardly tell the difference.”73