The Talented Miss Highsmith (39 page)

Later on, she would lend tricky Tom Ripley her ability to size up a room and assess the opportunities in it. Ripley's reaction to anything less than “quality” company was exactly the same as Pat's:

Pat's sexual attractions were also subject to elaborate rephrasings. In the fall semester of her freshman year at Barnard College, when she was trying to lure Mickey (a girl) away from Judy Tuvim (
tuvim
resembles part of the Hebrew word for “holiday,” hence Judy's stage name, “Holliday”), and fending off, as well as encouraging, the advances of Ernst Hauser, the journalist she met on her spring boat trip to Texas, Pat began to fall in love with the first of her several Virginias.
³⁷
Pat always wrote this first Virginia's name as though it were an abbreviation for the state, “Va.,” and Virginia tormented Pat in just the way Pat preferred: “Va. criticizes me always” and “Phoned Va. who was terrible to me as always on phone.”
³⁸
Virginia was two years older than Pat, and they kissed but rarely went further than that. The “Proustian” part of Pat's attraction is that Pat thought this first Virginia looked just like the resident royalty of English literature, Virginia Woolf.

This relationship, as well as Pat's scrutiny of two young girls, “Charlotte and Emily,” at play, helped to inspire a powerfully allusive short story of sexual complicity, “A Mighty Nice Man.” Pat finished “A Mighty Nice Man” on 24 August 1939, and it was one of the stories she published in the
Barnard Quarterly.
It is a testament to her naïveté about her work
and
the world that Pat thought this story of a very young girl being “groomed” by a molesting male was an example of the “good popular stuff…I shall yet write.”
³⁹

In the 1940s, much of Manhattan was still a place of unlocked doors, open hospitalities, and relatively inexpensive pleasures. Anatole Broyard captured its postwar spirit—and the
soul
of that spirit, which was Greenwich Village—in his memoir of the forties,
Kafka Was the Rage
. “New York City had never been so attractive. The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history. The Village was as close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the Twenties. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had.”
⁴⁰

But it was just as she was leaving her teens, six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the act which would eventually produce the “open Manhattan” Broyard was writing about—that Pat's serious sexual life began. Pat went to a gay party in Greenwich Village, to which she had been invited by an older woman she met in a bar, Mary Sullivan. Pat noticed the photographer Ruth Bernhard at the party but spoke a great deal with Sullivan, watching Mary “fly here and there all evening. The boys adore her!” Finally, Mary and Pat went to Child's Restaurant in Times Square to eat, where they talked until four thirty in the morning. Since they were near Mary's apartment, Pat went there to sleep. Mary politely gave Pat her bed and took the divan for herself. And it was then that the teenage Pat began her sexual career as she meant to continue it—aggressively, suggesting to Mary that the bed was big enough for both of them. As Pat later wrote in her diary in the bad French she reserved for matters of the body, Mary “accepted with alacrity. Quickly. And then well, we barely slept, but what does that matter? She is marvellous. Kind, sweet, understanding.”
⁴¹

Mary Sullivan ran what Ruth Bernhard called a “wonderful bookstore at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel,” and it was there that Bernhard, beginning her career in New York at her famous father's insistence (Bernhard's father was Lucian Bernhard [real name: Emil Kahn], the German graphic designer known as “the Father of the German Poster,” who created the running torchbearer emblem still used for Modern Library publications), met “the little Irish woman, Mary Sullivan,” some years before Pat did. This was in the late 1930s, when the same Child's Restaurant in Times Square where Mary Sullivan and Pat went to talk had “tea dancing for girls in the afternoon. The space was always filled, with everyone in snappy clothes, dressed up, even sophisticated. There was a band playing all the best tunes of the era. Everyone danced.”
⁴²

Mary Sullivan introduced Bernhard to Berenice Abbott—who would later say that no one photographed female nudes better than Bernhard—and so perhaps it was Mary who introduced Bernhard to Pat as well. A year or so after meeting Sullivan, Pat developed an intense friendship with Ruth Bernhard that, as all Pat's intense friendships did, briefly broke into a kind of love. But Bernhard, whose photography studio was in the same building as Rolf Tietgens's studio, introduced Pat to Rolf in the summer of 1942—thus giving Pat another chance to feature in her favorite geometrical figure, the triangle. And Pat came to feel that Bernhard was too “unfortunately feminine inside” for her.
⁴³

In the summer of 1942, Pat and Bernhard went with Rolf Tietgens on a weekend trip to a house on the swampy North Shore of Long Island—where Pat, whose luck with dogs was never good, was bitten on the “rear end” by a local canine. Ruth Bernhard almost fainted in response, and Pat and Bernhard spent a night in the same bed.
⁴⁴
Later, Bernhard and her sister read Pat's early stories and thought them “wonderful,” and Pat and Bernhard went out regularly for coffee, took the subway to Harlem together, and accompanied each other to gallery openings. Pat's lengthy description of an evening spent at the gallery managed by Betty Parsons shows her alertness to social maneuvering—and just how much she was depending on Ruth Bernhard for support.

In May of 1943, Pat asked Mother Mary if she thought Ruth Bernhard would be a good roommate for her: “I should be able to get along with her well.”
⁴⁶
Mary said it was an “excellent” idea and then asked the same inelegant question she'd asked about Berenice Abbott: “[D]id I think Bernhard was a les?”
⁴⁷

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.