The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  “He is nice but increasingly melancholic,” Pat observed of Rolf Tietgens in July of 1950, implying somehow that this romantic quality made him “[m]y favorite friend.”39 But the quality of his melancholy began to strain Pat as the years passed—“This German Weltschmerz and negativity is so hard to deal with!” 40—and their mostly epistolary friendship ended in New York in 1970 when, as Pat wrote, Tietgens grabbed the front of Pat’s coat, “called me, among other things a shit” 41…“and shoved me against wall of his house.” 42

  No doubt it was something she said.

  In this last week of June 1953, the temperature in Manhattan is ninety-two degrees in the shade, the heat is shimmering up off the sidewalks, and a pneumatic drill is hard at work breaking up the concrete outside Pat’s temporary lodging: an apartment she and Ellen Hill are renting (but it’s Ellen who is paying) from Dell (Hans Felix Jüdell), the husband of Pat’s friend and confidante, Lil Picard.* Lil is the irrepressible émigrée fashion editor, revue artist, film actor (she appeared in a film with Emil Jannings), milliner, jewelry designer, writer, painter, and, well into old age, outrageous performance artist whom Pat had met “in an elevator at a gay party” in October of 1947.” 43 Pat managed to suppress her desire to kiss Lil, but Lil’s position as an older married woman “with a husband from whom she seems to keep secrets” enchanted Pat, and she began to visit Lil every day.44

  Pat and Lil Picard’s tempestuous friendship lasted for thirty years; and Lil, an Alsatian Jew who fled Berlin in 1936 and was au courant with every art movement in New York from Abstract Expressionism to Fluxus (and was photographed by, amongst others, Lotte Jacobi and Andy Warhol) became an identifiable figure in New York’s avant-garde. Her flamboyant performance pieces and her column in the house journal of the newly developing East Village, the East Village Other, assured her notoriety, although not her solvency, and she never allowed her fondness for Pat to get in the way of calling her a “fascist.” Lil called Pat a “fascist” very regularly.

  Of the novel Pat dedicated to her father, Jay B Plangman, A Dog’s Ransom, Pat said that she “rather modeled the character of Greta Reynolds after my friend Lil Picard.” 45 If so, it is a pallid version of the real Lil. Mother Mary, only four or five years older than Lil, was horrified by Lil’s free-wheeling sex life, her opulently unfettered self-expression, her influence on Pat, and—the very last straw—the fact that Pat had once lent Lil some money for an operation.

  Flayed by the sound of the drill outside her window and broiled by the “hot as a furnace” summer weather, Pat has been writhing in her coils for the last fortnight, trying to pick up on the Manhattan social and professional life she allowed to slacken in the two and a half years of her European travels.

  Three weeks ago, she’d gone to see Truman Capote’s play The Grass Harp in Sheridan Square and then tried to catch up on both gossip and business by inviting Betty Parsons, now the doyenne of her own influential art gallery, to have lunch at her apartment and look at her drawings. To Pat’s distress, Parsons preferred her “bloodless abstracts” to her representational work and told Pat that Carson McCullers had “fallen madly” in love with Kathryn Hamill Cohen, and had lingered in London for three months, begging Kathryn to live with her although “there was no affair.” 46 Now, Pat was writing “only to keep from going mad in my old city where all the business people neglect me as if I were officially boycotted.” 47

  Extending her mood into fiction, she’d spent the last week of May composing a short story she called “Born Failure.” 48 She continued to meet Betty Parsons for meals and drawing classes, saw “that burly fellow” Philip Rahv again at a Partisan Review party on Forty-eighth Street, and had dinner with Bobby Isaacson, lover of the poet James Merrill (son of one of the founders of New York’s largest stock brokerage company, Merrill Lynch). She noted, without personal comment, the imminent electrocution of the Rosenbergs for spying, but was exercised at the way American libraries were suddenly eliminating “controversial” authors from their shelves; authors like Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, and Langston Hughes.49 She “was on the brink of a depression quite as serious as the 1948–49 winter one” and was doubting both her agent Margot and her relationship with Ellen Hill: “Nothing is ever permanent,” she said. But it was really the permanency of her own feelings that Pat was doubting.50

  On the seventeenth of June, Pat went to a cocktail party at James Merrill’s apartment at 28 West Tenth Street where she ran into Jane Bowles. “She looks plumper, older, and is otherwise much the same—moderately friendly,” Pat thought. Jim Merrill “looked sweet in a lavender shirt of subtle hue. Also Oliver Smith, Johnny Myers, Harry Ford & wife, etc. Tietgens is not invited.” Rolf Tietgens hadn’t been invited because he’d had an unauthorized fling with Bobby Isaacson in Rome. One month ago, Pat had had her own unauthorized fling: the one-night stand with Tietgens she’d neglected to mention to Ellen Hill.51 At the party, Pat talked to Terese Hayden, manager of the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street. Hayden had done an “apparently unsuccessful” screen treatment of The Price of Salt, which Pat had received in Florence in June of 195252—with the character of “Carol…changed to Carl” and the title of the screen treatment changed to Winter Journey.53 By then Pat, embarrassed anew by her novel, was calling The Price of Salt a “stinking book” and marvelled to Kingsley that it had “sold to Bantam for $6500.”54

  On the eighteenth of June, tossing and turning in the unendurable heat, Pat had a nearly “sleepless night” which produced a “curious dream”—made out of the weather and her illicit feelings.* In retrospect, the dream seems almost to be a preparation for the dreadful incident which occurred with Ellen Hill ten days later. In the dream, Pat was with Kathryn Hamill Cohen and a naked girl. Their clear “intention was to burn the girl alive.” They put the girl in a wooden bathtub along with a wooden effigy of Pat’s grandmother “with arms outstretched,” and it was Pat who picked the bathtub up and ignited the papers under it. Pat reminded the weeping Kathryn: “Don’t forget, the girl asked us to do it to her!” But then a “horror went through” Pat at the “suffering of the girl.

  “A moment later, the naked girl simply stood up, stopped her crying, and stepped out of the bathtub unhurt except for singes: the fire had gone out. I felt guilty at the thought the girl would report what we had done…. Then I awakened.

  “I subsequently had the feeling the girl in the tub might have represented myself, because she looked a little like me in the dream, at the end. In that case I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.”55

  Despite the continuing heat, the lingering effects of this “horrid vivid dream,” and her daily efforts to break into the new medium of television with a script called “Innocent Witness,” Pat was finding the strength to launch a few more professional and personal advances.

  On the twenty-fourth of June, Pat went to lunch with a man “I like so much—better than any editor to date,” Cecil Goldbeck.56 Mr. Goldbeck, a vice president at the Coward-McCann publishing company, had already published one of Pat’s novels in paperback, The Price of Salt, and would go on to edit The Blunderer (for which her current relationship with Ellen Hill provided two characters and a situation) and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Now, he wanted to give her a thousand dollars “sight unseen” for her next “suspense” novel. Cecil Goldbeck’s enthusiasm for fiction like Pat’s seems to have run in his family. His brother, Willis Goldbeck, was the uncredited coauthor of a work whose themes—sexual humiliation and horrible revenge—were also Highsmith favorites: Tod Browning’s 1932 classic cult film Freaks.57

  The nominal purpose of Pat’s second visit to Mr. Goldbeck on 28 June was to “consult” him about her hardworking agent Margot Johnson’s “value” to her. Throughout her travels in Europe, Pat had been blaming Margot for her long run of bad publication luck. When Pat met the brilliant Proust scholar Mina Kirstein Curtiss (ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein’s sister) at a cocktail party at the literary agent Mme Jenny Bradley’s house in
Paris at the end of 1952—Curtiss had been Margot Johnson’s teacher at Smith College—she queried Curtiss sharply about Margot. “There is no better agent,” Curtiss replied.58 Ten days before that, Pat had written to Kingsley from Europe, asking her, too, to assess Margot’s reputation in publishing circles: “Margot hasn’t sold anything for me in ages…. I’d love to know just how her standing is at present.”59

  This time, however, Pat was angling to bypass Margot completely and deal directly with Cecil Goldbeck herself so that she could cut out Margot’s commission—a little bait-and-switch maneuver she would try, with variations, eight years later on her French publishers Calmann-Lévy (she ditched them, briefly, for Robert Laffont), and then again in 1979 on her next American literary agent, Patricia Schartle (whom she attempted to shortchange on European commissions).60 But Mr. Goldbeck honorably assured Pat that “Margot [was] the best agent” she could have. The others were like “factories,” he told her, “you produce or are thrown out.”61

  The Mother of Them All: the indomitable Willie Mae Stewart Coates and her husband, Daniel. The hand on the wall belongs to Daniel and Willie Mae’s granddaughter, Patricia Highsmith. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Little Patsy all dolled up by Mother Mary and expressing herself in the yard of her grandmother’s boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Mary Coates Plangman Highsmith. “I too am an extrovert and never met a stranger,” Mary wrote to one of Pat’s lovers. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Jay Bernard Plangman. Before his mustache, his marriage, and his disappearance from the life of his only child. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Mary and Stanley Highsmith, on their honeymoon in Galveston, Texas, in 1924. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Mary and Patsy in Galveston. Pat dated this photo “1925,” but other photographs and other evidence—including Little Patsy’s uncustomary dress and downcast demeanor—indicate that it was taken at the time of Mary and Stanley Highsmith’s honeymoon in 1924. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Pat, dressed more or less like Jackie Coogan in The Kid. From an early age, Pat felt she was a boy in the body of a girl. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Handsome Dan Coates, Pat’s “Brother Dan,” famous in Texas as a rodeo announcer for his “golden voice.” He was posthumously elected to the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Pat as a teenager, impeccably dressed for mounting an English saddle. (Collection Annebelle Potin)

  Pat in her early twenties: lovely, secretive, desired by many. (Swiss Literary Archives)

  Patricia Highsmith, editor of the Barnard Quarterly, surrounded by her staff in 1942. On Pat’s left is Kate Kingsley (later Skattebol). (Barnard College Archives, published in The Mortarboard, 1943.)

  Rolf Tietgens, the German photographer who wanted to marry Pat.

  Pat at 21, photographed by her new friend Rolf Tietgens.

  Judy Holliday. Pat and Judy were close friends at Julia Richman High School; Pat kept a copy of this photograph.

  The witty, wealthy, well-connected painter Buffie Johnson in a characteristic pose by Edward Weston. She and Pat met when Pat was a junior at Barnard College. (Collection Buffie Johnson)

  Rosalind Constable, a well-known arts journalist, the eyes and ears of the Luce magazine empire, and Pat’s idol for a decade. (Menil Collection)

  Lil Picard, the dress and hat designer, painter, journalist, and performance artist who was Pat’s “most inspiring” friend for thirty years. (Collection University of Iowa Libraries)

  The 1943 Alex Schomburg cover for the Superhero comic The Black Terror #2. Pat wrote extensively for Black Terror and his “mild-mannered” Alter Ego, Bob Benton. The Superhero and his Alter Ego first appeared in a Nedor comic in January 1941—and their resemblance to Superman and Clark Kent was entirely intentional.

  The splash page for “The Fighting Yank” in the October 1945 issue of America’s Best Comics. The Yank, who debuted in a Standard comic in September 1941, was another of the second-string comic book Superheroes Pat wrote for.

  Jap Buster Johnson defeats the Japanese army in New Guinea with extreme prejudice. Pat and Mickey Spillane both wrote for this wartime human killing machine, first published in a Timely comic in December 1942.

  The Destroyer, another of the wartime Superheroes-with-double-identities for whom Pat wrote. The first Destroyer story was written by Stan Lee for a Timely comic published in October 1941.

  Pat’s two meetings with Goldbeck were the bookends to her disastrous reunion with Ellen Hill, who had just returned to New York on 25 June from a trip to Santa Fe. Pat ducked the first evening with Ellen, spending it instead with Jean P., a new attraction. By 28 June, Ellen and Pat’s relations were “strained and insane.” Ellen wanted Pat to return with her at once to Santa Fe “in the new car. I am saying, due to her foul temper, I will not.” Pat was having “secret talks, all comforting” with Jean.

  By the time Pat and Ellen had arrived back in the States on 13 May 1953, and by the time Ellen had returned to New York from her solitary trip to Santa Fe to see her mother at the end of June, Pat was ready to have a little fun with someone else. In fact, she had already been having quite a bit of fun with several other women in Ellen’s absence.

  On 1 July, after arguing with Ellen for hours, Pat slipped out at three o’clock in the afternoon for a drink with Ann Smith, the lover with whom she’d intermitted her affair with Marc Brandel. (In a fit of writer’s revenge, Marc turned Ann, who was a very pretty blonde, into the caricatural “ugly lesbian” in his novel The Choice.) Pat then “arranged with a friend to bring Jean P. out to her place in Fire Island next weekend. By that time I thought to have Ellen en route for Santa Fe or Europe. Ann was wonderful,”62 Pat confided to her diary, excited, as always, to be juggling three women at once.

  After the drink with Ann, Pat returned to the apartment she and Ellen were sharing. She had another “violent” argument with Ellen that lasted two and a half hours, from five to seven-thirty in the evening, and threw a glass on the floor to “emphasize I did mean it when I said I wanted to separate.”63 Ellen “has tried everything from sex to liquor to tears to wild promises of giving me my way in everything.”64 Pat’s account of this evening is as numb to remorse as any scene Mickey Spillane, the scriptwriter for Jap Buster Johnson at Timely comics just before Pat took up Jap Buster’s story line, might have slipped into one of his Mike Hammer novels:

  “She threatened veronal & insisted on having two martinis with me which she tossed down like water. I said go ahead with the veronal. She was poking 8 pills in her mouth as I left the house. I love you very much were the last words I heard as I closed the door. She was sitting naked on the bed. Had just written her will giving me all her money, & saying give Jo [a woman who had been a lover of both Pat and Ellen] $5,000 when I got around to it. And called me the nicest person in the world for having stayed with her as long as I did this evening.”

  Ellen had threatened suicide once before, in 1952, when, after browsing Pat’s diaries without permission, she got the shock awaiting anyone foolish enough to break into a writer’s private thoughts: an uncomplimentary assessment of her own character. The diary shock was mutual and it was repeated: in the summer of 1954, Ellen peeked again at another of Pat’s diaries—and was caught again. Her “honest diary,” Pat wrote, was what had helped “to keep [her] on the right moral track…. Her “purging effect of putting things down in words” had been interrupted and it was all Ellen’s fault.65 Naturally, Pat punished herself: she stopped writing her diaries for the next seven years.66

  Still, Ellen was neither the first nor the last loved one to read Pat’s private writings without permission. Nor was Ellen the last woman to whom Pat would recommend suicide. When the roommate of another friend threatened to jump off a balcony in the 1980s, Pat was quick with her support. “Let her jump!” wrote Pat feelingly, and then followed this up with a gentler suggestion. “I’ve been in, and also witnessed, such dram
a, therefore I felt inspired tonight to state: get away from it, no matter what it costs in time and money.”67

  The bonds of love—never mind how eagerly she slipped into them—always eventually felt like iron chains to Pat Highsmith. Emotional blackmail of any kind, one of the many twisted strands by which she was still connected to Mother Mary, brought out Pat’s inner executioner and her outer escape artist.

  And escape from Ellen Hill she certainly did.

  After leaving Ellen in the act of swallowing those Veronal pills (and helpfully cancelling the evening appointment Ellen had made with the Czech painter Jim Dobrochek), Pat went straight to her friend Kingsley’s apartment on West Eleventh Street. Pat didn’t mention the scene she had just been a part of; she seemed, in fact, to be much more interested in what Kingsley and her beau, Lars Skattebol, were going to say about her latest novel. “They ripped me mercilessly (& stupidly) re my third novel [The Traffic of Jacob’s Ladder, now lost, which Pat was writing at the same time she was taking notes for The Blunderer]: a prerogative, and [said] I’d never write another decent novel having spat out such infantilism.”