The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Food and also clothes were Pat’s focus because this was the trip in which Switzerland revealed itself to be the only country in Europe that could fit Highsmith’s big feet with the right-sized shoes. As for the other clothes, she wrote, the clothes she was buying in Zurich in January of 1953, they were not only cheaper than clothes in Paris but they, too, “fit my American figure.” 4

  The ways in which Pat, in 1953, lingered over her fulsome accounts of what seems to have been just ordinary good Zurich food are like the semierotic fantasies of a woman who has been starving for a long time. And her descriptions of the countryside between Basel and Zurich—“delightful farm villages, happy, healthy looking children, stronger bigger horses than those of Eastern France…the vine-like trees that are trained to grow horizontally, supporting the house corners like living arms”—made a paradise of what she later complained was a car trip that drove her crazy.5 This trip did something other than drive her crazy, however. It gave her a line of travel into her future.

  Here is how Pat began her Swiss notes in 1953: “Whenever I get desperately homesick, but still not desperately enough to spend several hundred dollars getting back to America, I go to Switzerland…. And in fact it was that astonishingly self-confident statement in the Swiss tourist bureau ad in the Paris Herald Tribune—‘The only country in Europe where all your hosts speak English’—that gave me the final push to come.”6

  And here is how she ended her notes: “As long as there’s a Switzerland, I don’t know when I’ll get around to going home again.”7

  Switzerland reminded Pat Highsmith of the United States. Principally, it was the fact that she could find English speakers there: Pat resolutely refrained, as much as possible, from speaking the language of any country she lived in if that language wasn’t English. Wherever she lived, she remained oblivious to local holidays, customs, and newspapers, reserving her reading for the International Herald Tribune and her understanding for the fluctuations of currency exchange and the prices of goods and postal services. But it was also the abundance of produce (Switzerland, ostensibly “neutral” during the Second World War, was not subject to the vastations visited on the other countries Pat had passed through), the plenitude, the richness of the countryside, and the cleanliness of the cities that attracted her. Throughout the 1980s Pat would continue to contrast Zurich with the filthy and crime-ridden Manhattan.

  Above all, there was the famous orderliness of Switzerland, and order was a necessity for an author whose first written lines of fiction, set down when she was fourteen, began with two shoes neatly aligned beside a bed. Certainly, the idea of a country outside the battle lines drawn by the rest of the world, a country in a state of so-called neutrality, had the greatest appeal for a woman who said she couldn’t bear conflict, who yearned for world peace, and who was so often painfully and chaotically at war, divided against herself.

  Although it was her love affairs which drove her from pillar to post and from the United States to Europe, the main reason Pat went to Switzerland was because of the emotion that was slowly replacing love in her life: the desire to hang on to her money. The French law forbidding foreign residents in France from keeping their money in other countries—Pat left France because of it—was rescinded just after Pat moved herself to Aurigeno. She wrote to Monique Buffet that she wouldn’t have gone if she’d known about it.8 But the fact that her literary affairs were concentrated in Switzerland—Daniel Keel and his publishing company, Diogenes, were now her world representatives and were making a great deal of money for her—was crucial to her move.

  Daniel Keel doesn’t think he “ever quarrelled with Pat,” and he came to understand and appreciate her in a humorous and balanced way. (When I told him that the most frequent sentence I heard about Pat was “She wasn’t nice,” he replied: “That’s quite an understatement.” When I mentioned that Pat had written three hundred unusually kind letters to her last lover, he responded: “They’ll ruin her reputation.”) “She could be very hard,” he says, “with her voice, or with an answer or a question. ‘Don’t sit there!’ she would say…. She could be nervous and unpleasant…but only in a quite superficial way, just about a certain deal or event, or a check she didn’t like, or a title [of a book].” When Keel published Found in the Street in German, he called it, in German, Elsie’s Love of Life. It was a phrase he’d found in the book. Pat didn’t like the title change, but she accepted it. And a book which had sold sparsely in the United States became a bestseller in Switzerland.

  In fact, Pat never complained in writing or in conversation about Daniel Keel. When she was cavilling about the details of some transaction—and there were serious confusions in the selling and reselling of the Ripley film rights that went on and on and cost Diogenes, Pat, and the producer Robert Hakim time and money and angst—she always displaced her anger onto the company or the company’s lawyer. Given her tendency for finding fault, her complaints about Diogenes were remarkably controlled. Keel, in his turn, treated her like royalty.

  It was during a visit to Moncourt by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke in 1974* that Pat was first introduced to the picturesque European custom of authors being represented by their publishers, a custom as unthinkable in the United States as appearing in court without a lawyer. Wim Wenders had come to negotiate for a Highsmith novel to adapt to film—and, as he describes it, he arrived at her house with an already well-developed obsession for her work.

  I read one book by Patricia Highsmith, and that was The Tremor of Forgery, and I liked it so much that I read the next, and the next, greedily, until there was none left that I could have read. I was completely preoccupied by her writing. The sharpness of the observation! The immense knowledge of MEN and how their subconscious worked, but not written by a fellow man, but by a woman!…

  And I became obsessed with the idea of turning one of her books into a film. And of course, I started with my favorite and you remember right, that was Cry of the Owl…. I slowly worked my way through her entire bibliography. EVERYTHING was sold, that was the sad truth. Mostly bought up by American studios who weren’t doing anything with the properties. And then I finally summed up my courage and wrote to her. I wrote how appalling I felt that “hoarding” of her books was, and that I figured the studios had bought up all her books so nobody else could use them. I also wrote to her WHY I wanted to shoot a film based on a work of hers. My friend Peter Handke had given me her address. Soon afterwards, I got a letter by Patricia Highsmith in return. She had somehow already heard of this German director determined to turn a novel of hers into a film and she was curious what was behind it….

  And we talked for a while. I guess she wanted to find out for herself, if I was somehow “trustworthy.” And then she pulled this fat typewritten manuscript out of the drawer of her writing table and gave it to me. (Well, it must have been a copy.) And she said: “Even my agent hasn’t read this one yet. So I’m certain the rights are not sold yet. Maybe you want to read it.” Did I want to read it!? The title said: Ripley’s Game. I had finished it before I was home in Munich on the train. And I wrote to her: “Yes, absolutely. I want to acquire the rights to make a film after this novel!” And it became The American Friend. My first working title was: Framed. Did I know that she was Texan? Sure. I knew she was from Fort Worth. I had come through there once, so I knew HOW TEXAN that was!

  …After that initial meeting I only saw her again when I showed her the film. I was really happy with the picture and couldn’t wait to have Patricia see it. But then, to my great disappointment, she was quite disturbed by it, didn’t conceal that either and didn’t have anything good to say about it after the screening. I left utterly frustrated.

  Months later, I got a letter from her. She said she had seen the film a second time, this time in a public screening on the Champs-Elysées, during a visit in Paris. And she had much better feelings about it now…. And she was full of praise for Dennis Hopper, too, whom she had flat-out rejected the first time. She now wrote that my film
had captured the essence of that Ripley character better than any other films. You can guess how relieved I was!9

  During her meeting with Peter Handke and Wenders, Pat had been fascinated when Handke explained the European practice of editors representing authors. The idea might have been at the back of her mind one late evening in the summer of 1979 as she sat on a stool in Daniel Keel’s living room in Zurich, finding bitter fault with her sales, with her American agent (Patricia Schartle Myrer had just dropped Pat for her behind-the-scenes machinations over international commissions), and with most of her publishers. She was, says Keel, “very unhappy,” and so he suggested that he should telephone her current German-language representative in Zurich, Rainer Heumann, while she was still sitting there and talk to him about representing her more fully.

  “He’s already your German agent,” Keel said; “he handles things beautifully…. He’ll be transported with joy [or words to that effect] if he can manage your world rights.”

  So Daniel Keel picked up the telephone and called Mr. Heumann—now it was almost midnight and Pat was sitting at his elbow—and Heumann “shouted” back at him: “Are you mad?! I don’t want her or her world rights! She’s much too difficult and don’t you ever wake me up at midnight again!”

  Heumann, Keel says, “was afraid of her difficult nature,” and Keel had to struggle to keep the agent’s response from leaking out of the telephone. And so Daniel Keel offered to take over the world agenting for Pat, and the whole business of Diogenes becoming Pat’s world representative was the result of “an accident,” an accident whose final terms Pat negotiated for just as toughly as Diogenes over the next seven months. She sought constant counsel from Alain Oulman, and, anxious to preserve her ability to deal directly with Calmann-Lévy, she sent back at least one contract to Diogenes unsigned. Finally, the papers were signed in March of 1980, the month the douane invaded her house in Moncourt.10

  Marianne Liggenstorfer met Pat when she came to work in the foreign rights department at Diogenes in 1981. Pat took a distinct shine to her new rights representative, and although Marianne says she was unaware of any special feeling from her author, Pat was soon asking for Marianne Liggenstorfer whenever she telephoned Diogenes from Aurigeno. Liggenstorfer was trying to reorganize the complicated Highsmith backlist, centralizing and reselling her works to only one publisher in each country. “We always tried to get the best offers for her and then she’d say how expensive the house was, and would it be possible to get more money.”11

  An exceptionally patient woman, Marianne Liggenstorfer says she always took her cues from Pat’s own behavior: “It was very indirect; she didn’t exactly give me orders…. It was very important when dealing with Pat that you were not too fast with her. She needed a lot of time to get used to you and be comfortable.”12

  Marianne accompanied Pat on two separate publicity junkets to Spain, at the behest of Pat’s Spanish publisher: once they went to Barcelona, and then they travelled to the film festival at San Sebastian, where Pat was the guest of honor in an homage to Plein Soleil, René Clément’s film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. They stayed for about ten days each time, and although Pat “could blow up and calm down twenty times a day,” they enjoyed themselves. Pat drew all the time on both trips: “She’d go into her room, sit at the window, and she’d sketch.” She drank beer continually, and, says Marianne carefully, “when she drank a little more than usual, she was sometimes laughing very strangely, a stifled laugh, not very loud.” That was Pat having her own special kind of fun. At the festival, Pat answered a lot of questions amiably, and then, fascinated as always by a group of transvestites in the hotel hall, sat in the bar watching, and drinking, and talking about them.13

  When Liggenstorfer married a director at Diogenes, Pat came to her wedding party, and to everyone’s astonishment, she danced with both Daniel Keel and Liggenstorfer’s father. (There is a photograph of Pat on the dance floor, one enormous hand lightly bunched at the knuckles and resting on the shoulder of the smiling father of the bride.) And when Pat gave a housewarming party for the Casa Highsmith in Tegna in 1989 (“The house was HER,” says Marianne), Marianne Liggenstorfer (now Fritsch) came with her husband and stayed the night, suffering agonies because she’d forgotten her cat-allergy medicine and Pat’s cats were everywhere. It was part of the special care with which Pat was treated at Diogenes that Marianne never said a word about the “nightmare” of suffering caused by her allergies that night: she wanted to spare Pat’s feelings in her new house.14 Pat’s contract with Diogenes would make her a multimillionaire at a time when a million dollars was still a good definition of the American Dream.

  But becoming a Swiss citizen—a long and arduous process of certification which can last for fourteen years—was another matter, and Pat seems to have alternated her desire for it (she thought it would help her tax bill in America) with her fear of losing her American citizenship, one of her crucial identities. America was still the country which commanded her imagination, still the country with which she had the strongest emotional ties. As late as the end of 1991, she was writing to one of her legal advisors that “for sentimental reasons I may not wish to renounce USA citizenship.”15 And the depth of her feeling for her native land could always be measured by the agitated abuse she continued to heap on it. When she wrote to Kingsley about her campaign to become a Swiss citizen, it was in terms which reflected her ambivalence: “I am seriously considering switching to Swiss citizenship…. If I switch I’ll probably have to stay in bed 2 days, because of emotional shock.”*16

  If America remained the focal point of many of Pat’s feelings, her house in Moncourt, France, continued to be the locus of her dreams and her regrets.

  In 1988, after seven gardenless years in Aurigeno, Pat looked at “20 envelopes of photos from my desk cubbyholes”17—they were photographs of her Moncourt garden—and allowed them to put a halo of nostalgia around her feelings for the house. She wrote to Monique Buffet about it.

  “I must say I was touched by the sight of that garden in colour. Nothing can substitute for a happy garden (walled to boot), and nice friends around. I did not dwell on the photos; I am just serious on the subject; not the same kind of seriousness that brings tears, not at all.”18

  Perhaps Pat, a nightly reader of dictionaries, knew that the word “paradise” is derived from the Persian word for “walled garden.”

  In 1992, the house in Moncourt was very much on her mind when she sent a letter to Barbara Skelton in the Seine-et-Marne:

  “As I look back, as they say—I think I should have tried for compromise in 1980 with the frogs. 1971–80 was the happiest time of my life to work, garden, cats, friends. What else is life all about?”19

  But Pat’s Moncourt house was long since sold, and death would take the thorny question of citizenship out of her hands. She died an American citizen, with her American-born, Geneva-residing accountant, Marylin Scowden, as her very last houseguest. Pat had first met Marylin Scowden in Geneva on the evening of the April day in 1992 when she’d been chauffeured to Peter Ustinov’s house in Rolle for a double interview by German Vogue.20 Ustinov had requested Pat as his lunch partner for the interview, and she was quite taken with both Peter Ustinov and the paintings he had hanging in his house.21

  Although Pat was fond of Marylin Scowden and had gone some distance in the direction of trusting her (not, to be sure, with any personal information), and although Scowden had come to Tegna to settle some important financial matters with her client (Pat made her last will just three days before she died), Pat probably preferred the way in which this final guest availed herself of the hospitality of the Casa Highsmith, arriving, as Scowden did, at the white block of a house a little after Pat had been taken to the hospital in Locarno. Of previous visits to Pat in Tegna, Scowden says: “I think she was happy I came and very happy when I left.”22 This time—the very last time she had company—Pat was not obliged to share her house with her visitor.

  And there
are strong indications that she didn’t want to share her hospital room, either. When Scowden arrived in Tegna, she had a necessary meeting with Pat’s banker at Pat’s house, and then went straight to the hospital in Locarno with papers for Pat to sign.

  “I said to Pat: ‘This can wait till tomorrow,’ and Pat said: ‘No no, I want to sign them now.’ Her intuition made her feel that it was necessary to sign those papers: it was done at her insistence…. She was on morphine, very uncomfortable, and she kept saying ‘My legs are hurting, my legs are hurting,’ and I tried to massage them, and there was no muscle left.”23

  But Pat couldn’t bear the personal attention. “You should go, you should go, don’t stay, don’t stay,” she repeated several times to her deeply concerned visitor.24

  And so Marylin Scowden, with no indication from the doctors that this was to be Patricia Highsmith’s last night on earth, left the room.

  In January of 1980, on the third or fourth day after she had been hospitalized in Nemours, France, for a catastrophically gushing nosebleed, Pat asked a nurse to leave the door of her hospital room open. She was afraid of dying alone, and the prospect felt very near: she was “losing” more blood than she was “gaining.” She thought then that it was “maybe…a sign of vitality or brotherliness to want to speak to someone at the last and say, ‘Stay with me a minute, please—I’m going.’” The nurse refused her request to open the door because the children on the ward were “very impressionnant about blood,” and Pat, bleeding copiously every two hours, was covered with it. Pat was angry at the nurse, but she was also “ashamed of my fear of dying alone, since I’ve always known death is an individual act anyway. I swear to myself next time I’ll be better prepared.”25