The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  I had never seen a picture of her so I didn’t know what I was looking for except a woman in her sixties. When I finally realized who I was looking for I saw she was wearing her favorite rumpled mac, with her head bowed, and she had enormously large hands and feet. That was what I recall. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. She was maybe slightly taller than I, but she was rather bowed, and she was wearing these white boat shoes which made her feet look larger, white canvas deck shoes. Nothing about her suggested woman’s dress. She was wearing a tweed jacket. And her hair was the way it appeared to be for forty-three thousand years. The head ducked, a deep voice. It was alluring and completely without a hint of any European accent. But she had a very odd unplaceable American accent. She was not placeable. And she was pretty gruff, it was like meeting a famous old guy. “Hello.” Handshake. Extremely quiet. Said very little. I felt why does she want to speak to some kid.

  The Times hired a huge black limo to take us to Green-Wood [it looked like a hearse] and it was raining, drizzly, and I think the limo made her uncomfortable. It was very inappropriate. And she said not one word. She was on one side and I was on the other and she was staring out the window and I really didn’t know what to say…. Finally she turned to me and said “They”—and who knows who the “they” were—“they tell me you want to be a playwright.” “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Hmmm,” she said. “Hmmm.” Silence. More staring out the window, passing cars. “What do you think of Eugene O’Neill?” I thought, I don’t know what she wants to hear here, so I guess I just better say what I think. And I said. “Not much.” And she said. “Umm. Good.” More window. Ten minutes elapsed between her utterances. And then she said: “Tennessee Williams. What do you make of him?” And so I said, “I like him.” “Hmmm. Good,” said Pat. As we were driving into the cemetery she said, “Now, I saw a play called Fool for Love by a chap called Sam Shepard. Now, what do you make of that?” And I said: “Well, that’s a very interesting play.” And she said: “Yes, I thought so too.”

  With that, we take our tour of Green-Wood. Completely and utterly silent, she said not one word. We must have been there for ninety minutes poking around. She did make some vague exclamation when she came on Lola Montez’s grave and then there was a Steinway vault in the shape of a keyboard and she thought and said, “That was terrible.” That was it. And then we went to the crematorium, where we were subjected to a number of ghastly little pranks, like sticking your hand into still warm ashes, and she seemed to quite like that. And we finally got outside and it was late morning. And she took out this hip flask from her mac, and she said: “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.” She carried around a flask and she held it out to me and I knew it was a challenge, though I didn’t know what she was offering, and so I took a slug and it was scotch.

  And I got back into the limo and she said:

  “I don’t suppose you’d be free for lunch.”

  So I said, “Oh sure,” and we went back to her hotel room and the booze was lined meticulously up on the bureau. “Do you want a scotch or do you prefer beer?” “Beer,” I said, and Pat opened the little hotel fridge and it was full of beer. Budweiser, I think.

  And that was lunch.34

  • 39 •

  The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

  Part 6

  One of the many ways Pat kept herself company in both France and Switzerland was by animating her old relationships in America. She did this by restarting correspondences with old friends, very old friends in fact; the women she’d known from all those places in the 1940s and 1950s where women went to seek each other’s company: Manhattan, Fire Island, New Hope, Provincetown, Santa Fe, Snedens Landing, the Isle of Capri. This circle of women—most of whom were lesbians and many of whom had been each other’s lovers, friends, and/or rivals—were now, like Pat, getting old and getting ill. Most of them still kept cats; some of them had lost their lovers through death or misadventure; some of them were drinking heavily and feeling left behind by life. But all of them were quick to say how much they admired Pat for her accomplishments and how they were looking forward to her next book. Whatever else had happened (or hadn’t happened) between these women and Pat, they all possessed, in ways that Pat’s current neighbors never could, an important piece of her past.

  As Rosalind Constable wrote to Pat when explaining why she found it hard to make real friends in her new house in New Mexico: “Friendships simply have to have roots. Our roots, my dear, go down to China.”1

  And so Pat, without anything resembling a parking place in Switzerland for what was left of her deepest feelings, turned to this correspondence with her past. Perhaps it was to remind herself of days and loves and lives gone by, but it was also, almost certainly, to keep up with the gossip. With these old lesbian friends whose love affairs, given the times and the customs, had to be kept well under the social radar, it was the gossip which took the place of any recorded history. Gossip was both the most trivial and the most important record these women would ever leave of their lives. And Pat, harking back to her younger self, was avid for it. Closemouthed, opaque, and censorious about other people’s sex lives in older age in Switzerland, Pat had been, in her Manhattan youth and to the consternation of many, a pot-stirring tattletale and, in the right circumstances, quite the chatty Patty.

  Thus, in the Highsmith Archives there is a series of letters by women Pat had known for decades, written in answer to letters sent out by Pat; letters which on both sides evoke the good old days and the wild old times and provide descriptions of the smaller satisfactions these women were living with now. Rather like Proust and his Last Round-Up in the Guermantes’ salon in the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, Pat, by writing to her old friends and lovers in America, summoned up her heady affectional past and invited it to tread the thin emotional ground of her present. Her history began to parade before her in the form of nostalgic and touching news from women whose names had had vivid meaning for her when her future was still in front of her.

  Betty, Pat’s confidante from Fire Island during the days after Ellen Hill’s suicide attempt in 1953, wrote that she was living next door to her own old lover, Margot; she wrote that Lynn Roth, the sulphurous love of Pat’s most complicated Manhattan summer, was retiring from work with emphysema and living on Long Island with her longtime companion; she wrote that she, Betty, recalled how she and Pat had “got overly pickled at our reunion, and the next time we’re going to have to go more slowly,” and that “poor old Ellen Hill” had just invited her to her apartment in New York, and then tried, forcibly, to sell her an old coat that was much too large for her. (Pat tried the very same maneuver on Peter Huber, her neighbor in Tegna, and succeeded in making him pay for a pair of shoes that were too small for him. “I never argued with Pat,” Huber says, adding: “Of course, that was a kind of despising of her as well.”)2 Betty offered the opinion that Ellen Hill must be “missing some marbles somewhere” and provided several even more amusing examples of Ellen’s costiveness.

  Out of a job after being insulted by her “26 year old boss,” Betty had just discovered the singing voice of Patsy Cline and was struck to the soul by three viewings of the romantic lesbian film Desert Hearts. (“Like maybe some old bell rang in me,” she wrote.) She announced her shock at the death of the photographer Berenice Abbott—that great figure from Pat’s youth and her own—and giggled over the fact that at the New York Public Library exhibition of Abbott’s work, Berenice, in her nineties and “looking like a million…hugged Margot…and whispered in her ear, ‘Hi baby, how ya’ doing?’…All these people looking on and not knowing!”3

  “Dear Lord,” Betty wrote in her last letter to Pat in 1993, “just don’t take away my cocktail hour!” 4

  Gert Macy, the theatrical producer and lover of famed actress Katharine Cornell, wrote from Snedens Landing to say that she heard “from Doris occasionally” (the Doris who had been Pat’s lover), that she was just getting around to “corresp
onding about Kit’s death,” and that she was collaborating (with Tad Mosel) on a biography of Cornell.5

  Lynn Roth wrote to decline Pat’s invitation to Switzerland (Pat was inviting everyone she could think of to Aurigeno), and to say that although she wasn’t much of a letter writer, she would be glad to see Pat if Pat ever came back to Long Island.6

  Natalia Danesi Murray, Janet Flanner’s widow, said it was an “unexpected pleasant surprise” to hear from Pat, that she’d seen her name in Publishers Weekly and wondered where she was living, and that the publication of her own book, Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend (1985), a collection of Janet Flanner’s letters to her since 1944, “was a tough decision to make, but after all why not? I wonder what you’d think of it?”7 (What Pat thought was that Natalia should have sent her a free copy.)

  Gina, a photo editor who had lived with Natica Waterbury (Pat’s ex-lover) and had taken some of Pat’s book jacket photos, responded that she was in an old people’s home in the “hick town” of Ithaca, New York, and that, “unfortunately,” her brain surgeon had been very good. (“I had a serious operation on my head & I’m on pills til I kick the bucket.”) She reported that “Emmanuelle” (a woman they both knew) had been hospitalized for alcoholism, and that Annie Duveen, who had introduced Pat to the Barbaras of Islington, was dying of cancer. Annie’s lover had had a stroke. Gina wondered why Pat hadn’t sent her Annie Duveen’s address (“She’s #1 for me”), adding that she and Mary Ronin (Pat’s old lover) “are corresponding all the time” and that Mary would like to hear from Pat. Mary, she said, was living on the money Natica Waterbury had left her, and Mary’s longtime lover—the woman whom Mary had chosen over Pat all those years ago (thus inspiring Pat’s novel This Sweet Sickness)—was dead.8

  Polly Cameron, the designer friend responsible for two of Pat’s early book covers, who had been living in the renovated barn Pat first rented with Doris in Palisades, New York, more than three decades ago, sent Pat a photo of her 1990 Christmas tree, perched on “The Highsmith Bench”—“a wonderful crude redwood bench” Pat had made for the garden of the barn in the late 1950s. Polly moved it to her new house in Snedens Landing. “I said to myself ‘Highsmith lives along the Hudson’ as indeed you do.” There were mostly deaths to report now: Polly said she missed Gert Macy the most, but that Doris was comfortably ensconced with “a rich attractive painter, ably managing her affairs & money I’m sure.”9

  Betty Curry, a cousin of the artist Jean Tinguely, who had her own travel agency in New York, wrote back to say that she did indeed “remember that weekend in New Hope very well. It was somewhat like the twilight zone…an elysian setting with hell going on inside. Natica [Waterbury] making like she was Toad of Toad Hall…. And I recall Pat Highsmith drifting dark and concerned from one room to another.” Natica was staying with Betty Curry now, and Betty was caring for her as she died slowly of the throat cancer provoked, Betty thought, by “excessive smoking and long years of alcoholism.”10

  Perhaps it was this decade and more of news from friends and ex-lovers looking after each other in old age that prompted Pat to send the impecunious Daisy Winston in New Hope that unexpected check for five thousand dollars in April of 1992.11 Daisy wrote back that she felt like she’d won the Irish Sweepstakes.

  Daisy, in any case, had always had plenty to say and plenty to do for Pat, who asked many favors of her. But Daisy never did those favors quietly, and, unlike nearly everyone else, she never had any trouble speaking her mind to her exigent old friend: “I read your ‘First Love’ article in London Times—after it had made the rounds of New Hope…. in my opinion—it sounded rather stilted.”12 “It amused me when you spoke of your social security as though it was a pittance—my problems would be minimal if I drew that amount rather than my pittance of $384.”13

  When Daisy had shipped out yet another pair of American shoes for Pat’s big feet, she added her comments to the package: “In that size they should come with oars!” When Pat sent her a nasty letter, Daisy retorted immediately: “Your snide and insulting letter could not have come at a worse time…. I may run your errands but I’m not an underling & I never expect another letter as degrading as the last.”14 In January of 1985 Daisy was busy investigating the “Hood” house in New Hope for Pat—it was yet another of Pat’s desperate and unachieved ideas for escaping the stones of Aurigeno and moving back to America. And Daisy reproved Pat for the inhuman temperature at which she kept her houses: “Now why are you freezing to death? You seem to go from one cold house to another…. I really don’t understand you—don’t you know that 58 degrees is cold???”15

  At the end of 1991, Daisy, going through mounds of papers and letters, found the remnants, as she wrote to Pat, of their yearlong affair: “an envelope with a number of short notes—dated 1961—some very dear, some humorous, but all brought back very good memories. But you never brought me flowers—oh well, I won’t hold that against you. But fear not—it all went up in smoke.”16

  Buffie Johnson, who had responded to Pat’s queries about selling the several houses Pat had on her hands in the 1970s, continued to answer Pat’s questions about old friends after Pat moved to Switzerland. Yes, Buffie said, she had known Jane Bowles, but her relationship with Jane had been a short one. Jane liked to be “taken care of,” Paul Bowles knew how to do it, and besides, Jane liked older women. And, by the way, it was probably Jane’s enthusiastic consumption of gin that killed her—not the ministrations of the Arab woman who was Jane’s last lover.17

  Buffie only knew “of [Natica] Waterbury,” but Buffie had befriended the feminist writer Kate Millett and other, younger women writers. Buffie sympathized with Pat’s lack of sunlight in Aurigeno and invited her to Tangier, an invitation Pat finally took up in 1988. She kept Pat up to date with her art exhibitions, and told her that she found Janet Flanner “a pleasure,” and that she thought she might send Pat a xerox of Karl Bissinger’s photograph of her, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Donald Windham, and Tanaquil LeClercq “all lunching in a garden when we were young and lovely.” She asked Pat for a book jacket quote for her goddess book (and Pat sent a review of the book to Le Monde), and she confided to Pat the terrible troubles she was having with the property she owned in Manhattan.18

  When Pat became convinced that the journalist Joan Dupont was going to write a biography of her or do a picture book about her or use some of the interviews she’d done with her in an unauthorized way (Pat, after being interviewed for television by Dupont in October of 1989, began to suspect Dupont of being a “circling vulture”),19 she spent an evening at the end of 1989 making a list of people close to her whom she was “warning against [speaking to] Dupont.”20 Buffie, along with the French journalist Noëlle Loriot, Alain Oulman, Gary Fisketjon, and Tanja Howarth, was on the list.21

  Buffie and Pat’s correspondence survived Pat’s visit to Buffie in Tangier in 1988, and when Buffie finally gave up Jane Bowles’s apartment in Tangier (“The Arabs [are becoming] so hostile that it is far from pleasant”), she continued, from her loft in New York, to write to Pat—whose chief interest in answering from Switzerland was to reengage with her past.

  Ellen Hill, of course, had no need to write to Pat. She spent most of her time in Europe (between 1975 and 1985, Hill did not return to the United States), and, with apartments in both the Ticino and Zurich, she lived near enough to Pat to see her regularly. Until late in 1988, Pat and Ellen continued their quarrelsome friendship, meeting and telephoning and irritating each other as often as their mutual miserliness would permit. But in 1978, shortly after Pat had stopped speaking to Lil Picard, Ellen wrote consolingly to Lil and with surprising sympathy for Pat: “Don’t worry about Pat, she was mad at me for years and has now forgotten it. She does have a hard life, I am sure she will mellow finally.”22

  Lil Picard’s long friendship with Pat produced loving letters (“Dearest Lil,” Pat always wrote, and her valedictory was almost always “much love”), full of Pat’s acknowledgment of Lil’s work as
an artist. In response to a request Lil made for a publicity quote at the end of 1975, Pat wrote: “Lil Picard is fun. I have known her and her work for twenty-eight years and she is still fun. She is incapable of creating a boring drawing or painting.”23 Pat and Lil had numerous European and New York meetings (and quarrels) and then a full stop, caused, without a doubt, by one of their rampageous political arguments.

  In 1976, Pat was on her second trip to Berlin. There she would hear (without much comprehension) Allen Ginsberg declaim his poems and Susan Sontag wade through a thirty-page paper about her recent trip to China. Out of this evening, Pat carried away with approval only Sontag’s firm declaration that she didn’t and wouldn’t belong to any writers’ group.24 (Sontag later succeeded Hortense Calisher as president of PEN American Center, the most influential “writers’ group” in the United States: so much for promises.) Pat and Lil Picard were staying in the same Berlin hotel and this gave them the opportunity to irritate each other. Pat kept calling the Communists “bastards” and Lil kept calling Pat a “racist” and a “fascist.” They even managed to argue over Wim Wenders’s script for The American Friend: Pat thought he’d created Ripley as a “hoodlum” Lil dutifully reminded Pat that “hoodlums [are made] by society.”25 The next year, 1977, the year Pat broke off with Lil, was the year Pat’s interest in the Middle East began to assume an attitude best characterized as obsessive. But Lil was still on Pat’s mind after she had moved to Tegna.