* Ronald Blythe was “surprised” to see himself featured in a BBC documentary about Patricia Highsmith as one of her “lovers.” The idea, he says, is “ridiculous.”
* Camilla Butterfield is a pseudonym.
* That of Willie Mae Stewart Coates, Pat’s grandmother and Mary’s mother.
* Pat had good reason to think that her last name, Highsmith, wasn’t a legal one. On 16 November 1994, two and a half months before her death, she was still writing to a Swiss lawyer (Dr. Barbara Simone) about her long-pending Swiss citizenship and “in regard to legalizing my name Highsmith,” characteristically adding: “I hope I shall not get a large bill for this, or for the name legalization.”
* This was Pat being theatrical; as one of her former lovers sensibly pointed out (and as nude photographs confirm), Pat’s breasts were too small to conceal anything. Her usual method of snail smuggling was cottage cheese cartons.
* Harry Houdini’s celebrated “escape” from handcuffs secured by a double-nested Bramah lock at the London Hippodrome in 1904 seems to have been the result of a setup between the Daily Mirror’s owner, Alfred Charles Harmsworth, and Houdini himself. Harmsworth, incidentally, was a relation of one of Pat Highsmith’s young lovers.
* The urge to transform is as American as it is Ovidian. It was America’s first statesman and inventor, Benjamin Franklin, whose obsession with transformation from poverty to wealth produced Poor Richard’s Almanack: the self-help manual designed to instruct Americans in the useful art of reinventing themselves. And it was Franklin’s quick-change compatriots—the rebellious English colonists in Massachusetts whose forged identities as “Indians” allowed them to dump tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston Harbor and spark the American Revolution—who transformed themselves into the first American citizens.
* She gives Tom Ripley exactly the same adventure with young Frank Pierson in The Boy Who Followed Ripley.
* The publication of Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres in 1950 (Fawcett) opened the door to lesbian pulp fiction with its sales of four million copies, although Tereska Torres was and is a serious novelist, and Women’s Barracks, like The Price of Salt, is by no means a “pulp novel.” It was Torres’s husband, the writer Meyer Levin—as Torres revealed to me in an interview published in the fifty-fifth-anniversary edition of Women’s Barracks in 2005—who rewrote her novel in English (Torres wrote it in French) to include both the narrator’s anti-lesbian attitude and the invented “male friend” whose faintly prurient “introduction” frames the book.
* In October of 1977, Pat, rightfully enraged, sent a letter to the editor of the Evening Standard in London which had printed an article by Sam White (“That Lady from Texas,” 30 September 1977) mistaking Pat’s age and tastes while insinuating her sexual preference: “Markedly masculine in appearance, she is something of a man-hater, a kind of female chauvinist.” White had (less rightfully) also incurred the wrath of Nancy Mitford, who satirized him as Amyas Mockbar in her final novel, Don’t Tell Alfred.
* On both sides. Jay B Plangman is quoted at his retirement dinner in Fort Worth as having told his art students that they should “memorize eight new things a day.”
* The Coates and Stewart families’ bloodlines were the family histories Pat Highsmith researched most fully. She continued to link many of her own traits to them, even when she had taken to calling herself a “kraut.” Her inquiries into her father Jay B Plangman’s German Lutheran heritage were minimal; limited, more or less, to asking her father and his brother, Walter Plangman, if there was any “red Indian blood” in the family because they were all, Pat included, so very dark. Jay B assured Pat that the dark complexion came from his mother Minna Hartman’s family, direct from his grandmother Liena, who, with her two sisters, was part of the vast emigration of Germans to the United States in the 1850s. The three Hartman sisters became, Jay B wrote to his daughter, “servants in well-to-do homes in Galveston.” The Plangmans, Gesina and Herman, were also emigrants from Germany, and their son Herman Plangman married Minna Hartman and fathered Jay Bernard Plangman. Jay B’s brother Walter remembered that one of his grandmothers had taught him German before he learned English. He recollected this as he was answering yet another question from his uneasy niece Patricia about her German grandmother: “She definitely had no Indian Blood,” Walter wrote.
* He was assisted by Samuel Smith Stewart, the genealogist of the Stewart family, who sent all his research to Pat.
* Like Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, Daniel Hokes Coates’s three brothers fought in the War Between the States, taking their personal slaves with them and dying in battle. A mostly unreconstructed Rebel, Pat visited Civil War battlefields in states of high emotion and repeatedly named Robert E. Lee, commander of the Rebel army, as her favorite historical figure.
* Standard time wasn’t actually “standardized” or strictly enforced until the great train lines were laid across whole continents in the nineteenth century: in order to catch a train, you had to know the exact time it was leaving. It’s a sidelight on the imagination of Pat Highsmith, who, preoccupied with time herself, ran so many trains through her novels.
* Mistaking the date, Pat refers here to the three letters she wrote to her stepfather in 1970 justifying a break with her mother.
* Menninger, with his father and later his brother, founded the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and the clinic’s enlightened practices and sophisticated public relations did much to legitimize and Americanize Freudian theories of psychiatry in the United States.
* In Texas, Dan Oscar Coates, rodeo entrepreneur, cattleman, and wrestling announcer, was renowned as “the man with the Golden Voice,” and he was much better known in the West than his novelist cousin. Dan’s speaking voice, like Pat’s, was beautiful: compellingly deep and dramatic. Dan Oscar Coates was posthumously inducted into the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.
* Named after Julia Richman (1855–1912), the descendant of a long line of Prague rabbis and the first woman district school superintendent in New York City.
* With Betty Comden and Judy Tuvim (Holliday), Adolph Green founded the Revuers sketch comedy group which played the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village regularly. (Leonard Bernstein was the pianist.) Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the longest-collaborating team in American musical theater, went on to write the lyrics for some of Broadway’s most celebrated musical comedies.
* A previous biography has incorrectly placed the Highsmith family apartment on Grove Street in the building where Marie’s Crisis Café is located. The Highsmith apartment was (and still is) across the street and one block to the west of Marie’s Crisis Café.
* Pat would both suffer artistically and profit financially from the “crime” and suspense” categories into which her unruly work was regularly corralled.
* Pat’s fashion sense became markedly eccentric when she was required to dress like a “girl.” After finishing her novel A Dog’s Ransom in 1971, Pat went to visit her friend Trudi Gill, a painter who was also the wife of the American ambassador to Panama, in Vienna. Pat took her “one Yves St-Laurent dress”—which must have caused quite a stir at the three “embassy functions” to which she wore it in the chill Austrian November. The dress was “bright orange cotton.”
* Sholem Aleichem (real name: Sholem Rabinowitz), 1859–1916, the Ukrainian Jewish writer and popular humorist, was a prodigious author of works in Yiddish. The musical comedy Fiddler on the Roof is based on his collection of stories about Tevye the Milkman.
* Bessie Marbury, an outsized (in every way) personality and a mainstay of the Democratic Party, invented the profession of theatrical agent in America, saved Oscar Wilde’s royalties for him while he was in prison, produced Cole Porter’s first musical, and also backed a Broadway play in which Pat’s future lover, Kathryn Hamill Cohen, appeared.
* In A Suspension of Mercy (1965), Pat introduces her murdering fantasist, Sydney Bartleby, to his well-to-do young wife at a party on Sutton Place.
* “Everyone already knows, instinctively,” writes Graham Robb in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, “that Holmes is homosexual…. Without the tense, suppressed passion that binds him to his biographer, Holmes is merely a man with an interesting hobby” (pp.260–61).
* Not to mention the fact that the comics publishers Pat worked for were also producing pulp novels and magazines with fetching titles like Spicy Detective Stories, Ranch Romances, Hot Tales, and (the flirting-with-frontal-nudity) Pep Stories.
* The story of how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s “Superman” was sold out from under them (for $130) in a transaction almost as pitiful as the deal local Indians made when they traded the island of Manhattan for a fistful of beads and a few dollars—and the subsequent tale of how Siegel and Shuster’s Clark Kent/Superman was copied in some form or other by every comics shop in New York—is one of the founding fables in the short, violent, utterly absorbing history of the Golden Age of American Comics.
* Frederic Wertham was the consulting pyschiatrist for Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore during her incarceration there. He was one of the first psychiatrists to use art therapy for diagnosis and encouraged Zelda in her painting. In gratitude, she gave him eleven watercolors.
* In 1940, nearly two years before the United States entered the war, Superman hauled Hitler and Stalin before a World Court in a DC comic. In February of that same year, Timely comics’ Superhero Sub-Mariner tackled Nazi submarines. And in March of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, the most successful Superhero at Timely, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America, made his début on a sensational comic book cover by Jack Kirby (real name: Jacob Kurtzberg) on which Captain America knocked Hitler out of the frame with a well-placed punch to the jaw.
* A word about Black Mask. Black Mask magazine was founded in 1920 by the prominent critics H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to generate money for their upscale publication, Smart Set. Black Mask published “hard-boiled” fictions by mostly contemporary writers, many of whom were much better known than Pat, and most of whom went on to publish with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine when Black Mask was folded into it. (Pat’s story “The Perfect Alibi” appeared in the March 1957 issue of EQMM along with stories by Alberto Moravia and Agatha Christie.) Although EQMM was the most consistent publisher of Pat’s short fiction for decades, in later life she didn’t care to emphasize her “pulp” connection, even as a link to other authors. In 1950, Raymond Chandler, who published his first story in Black Mask, had a terrible time trying to make a film script from Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock. In 1977, in the introduction she wrote to a book about Chandler, “A Galahad in L.A.,” Pat deliberately ignored her EQMM “pulp” connection to Chandler, mentioning Black Mask only to say that it “paid a penny a word,” and alluding only to her more “respectable” film connection with him.
* The American painter Edward Hopper, who shared Pat’s fascination with architecture and alienation, labored for fourteen years as an advertising illustrator. His advertising work influenced his American subjects in much the same way that working for the comics—and sourcing her fictional crimes from newspaper articles—colored Pat’s.
* “Primroses Are Pink” (it exists in a longer, loopier manuscript copy) dramatizes the fatal instability introduced into a marriage when a husband brings home a monochrome painting of a jockey, sends it away to have the jockey’s silks properly colored, and then has a disturbing disagreement with his wife about just what color “primrose” actually is: is it American “primrose pink” or the more properly English “primrose yellow”? (The calibrations of class implied in this story were always on Pat’s mind anyway—and yellow was her favorite color.)
* But she hadn’t read Julien Green’s novel Si j’étais vous, which a previous biographer thinks is an influence on The Talented Mr. Ripley.
* With one of her discarded titles for Strangers on a Train, Pat gave a name to this territory. The name was The Other and she thought it “the best yet” for her book.
* In 1949, Legman wrote to Raymond Chandler, soon to be the unhappy script adaptor of Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock, accusing him, as Chandler put it, of “homosexualism” in his novels.
* In Paris, where Pat usually saw Mercedes de Acosta, she also met Germaine Beaumont, the novelist and literary critic who had been Colette’s protegée (and perhaps something more). Beaumont, who was an intimate friend of Janet Flanner (and saw Flanner regularly at Natalie Barney’s literary salon), admired Pat’s novels and wrote about them. Pat never quite grasped the importance of having someone as discerning as Germaine Beaumont approve her work. On 24 September 1966, the publicist for Calmann-Lévy in Paris had to remind Pat about the “[e]xtremely good article concerning This Sweet Sickness, written by Mrs. Germaine Beaumont, who is one of your most faithful fans. Since she is herself an excellent writer and a member of the Jury Femina, her appreciation has a great value.” Pat had a similar experience with Edouard Roditi. In 1967 she found herself at Roditi’s Paris apartment at 8 rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Again, Pat had no idea of who Roditi—polylingual poet, author of many books, and distinguished translator from ten languages—was. She thought he might be an art critic, tried to guess his age, and noticed only that a “diminutive Arab” (Roditi’s lover) was monopolizing his bathroom.
* Worth more than $4,000 in current buying power in the United States according to Department of Labor statistics—and considerably more than that in Mexico in 1943.
* The great German-born English writer Sybille Bedford travelled through Mexico with Esther Murphy Arthur in the early 1950s. Pat knew Esther Murphy Arthur and would meet Sybille Bedford in Rome and Paris. Out of her journey, Bedford produced the best book ever written about travelling in Mexico: A Visit to Don Otavio (1953).
* William Spratling, an American architect who settled in Taxco in 1929 and opened a silver shop, designed silver jewelry inspired by pre-Columbian Mexican motifs. He is credited with making Taxco the “silver industry” center of Mexico and is still known as “the Father of Mexican Silver.” Pat, who knew Spratling a little, was impressed: “Was für ein Mann! Interessante Keime,” she wrote. “What a man! Interesting germs.”
* Pat returned the favor, if favor it was (a search of the electronic edition of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns couldn’t confirm Lazarus’s anecdote), in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom Ripley’s best party trick is an impersonation of Mrs. Roosevelt writing her “My Day” column.
* In September of 1977, Pat took notes for a story, “As If Dead,” about a man who exaggerates his Who’s Who listing, then commits suicide “after rereading what he might have been, what he felt he was.” He is destroyed by his own entry “because it is false…and worse, some people believe it and write him congratulations” (Cahier 34, 9/15/77).
* Nevertheless, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—with its narrator-author consumed by love, loathing, and capillarial investigations of the faubourg’s forgeries—shares some fictional territory with Highsmith’s demotic dandies and middle-class sociopaths. And its fifth volume—The Captive & The Fugitive—reads like a paradigm for the fluctuations of Pat’s love life: “[I]t is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.”
* In a coincidental Manhattan crossing, Fleur Cowles, when she was Fleur Fenton, was responsible for reorganizing Home and Food, the little Greenwich Village journal that published Pat’s first “professional” story, “Uncertain Treasure.”
* Caroline Besterman slightly misremembered Eugene Field’s poem for children, “The Duel” (the gingham dog and the calico cat sat on a table not a mantle), but she got the sentiment right. The gingham dog and the calico cat “Wallowed this way and tumbled that / Employing every tooth and claw / In the awfullest way you ever saw.” The finale: “Next morning where the two had sat / They found no trace of dog or cat…/But the truth about the cat and pup / Is this: they at
e each other up!”
* A sentiment entirely unreciprocated by Mrs. Simpson, an elegant fashion editor at Vogue whose “set” included the decadent jeweler Fulco di Vedura; Johnny Nicholson, owner of the Café Nicholson; and the decorator and wife of Somerset Maugham, Syrie Maugham. Mrs. Simpson’s assistant at Vogue recalls her wearing “nothing but black dresses and huge jewels” (“Lady Liberty,” Vogue, August 2006).
* At the height of her brief and uncharacteristically intense “Communist period” in 1941, Pat contemplated Ludwig Bemelmans’s work and decided that “‘artists’ like Bemelmans will still be allowed to work in the Socialist state, that people, out of sheer need for recreation and diversion, will buy his things…. Even though he is not a fine-school artist andthough he does not paint or write things with social significance…. Now Bemelmans is apoor example because his stuff is really the most socially conscious in the world: Café Society & Hotel Society” (Cahier 5, 24/7/41).
* View was the Surrealist art and literary magazine started by Charles Henri Ford in 1940.
* Pat stayed friendly with Mary Sullivan and her longtime companion Rose, writing to one of her Greenwich Village “good eggs,” Rachel Kipness, in 1974 that Mary had just died shortly after a disastrously alcoholic visit to Pat’s house in Moncourt, France.
The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 94
