The Talented Miss Highsmith (42 page)

When Pat moved to Europe, she brought her mid-century American taste for musical comedy with her, choosing, in April of 1979, as one of her selections for the BBC4 radio interview program
Desert Island Discs
a witty little ditty from the Rodgers and Hart musical
Pal Joey,
“Our Little Den of Iniquity” (“Just two little lovebirds all alone / In a cozy nest…”). It was perhaps a tip of the Highsmith hat to her lost but not forgotten love, Caroline Besterman, at whose house in London she had played that same song one amorous afternoon in 1962.

In May of 1988, when Pat was phrasing her anger at the “career failure” of her ex-lover, Tabea Blumenschein, in terms of a fictional murder—she thought about writing a “story reversing gender, so that a woman kills a younger man in whom she once had confidence perhaps as playwright, or actor, or writer”—the Cole Porter song “Use Your Imagination” (from the 1950 musical comedy
Out of This World
) became her inspiration for imagining the crime.
⁸⁹
“Cole Porter's Imagination—which I adore, puts me into a higher world, so that visible failure makes me angry. One is of course angry at past misjudgements, mistakes. Consequently, murder sometimes follows.”
⁹⁰

And one day, in the middle of a short filmed interview for German television about the Geissendörfer film
Die Gläserne Zelle
(
The Glass Cell
) at her house in Moncourt in 1977, Pat, “quite drunk,” grabbed the cameraman's white lighting umbrella and began to dance around the room with it, intoning the title song from the musical comedy film
Singin' in the Rain,
in her deep cigarette-and-alcohol-flavored voice. The celebrated lyricists for
Singin' in the Rain
were the very same Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had been Judy Holliday's young partners in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village—where Pat had gone to applaud them so many times in the 1940s.

At this unexpected display of high spirits and musical comedy–consciousness from the forbidding Miss Highsmith, the cameraman shooting the television film, Wilfried Reichardt, and the writer doing the interviewing, Christa Maerker, threw their own inhibitions to the wind and happily “joined in” to sing and dance along with Pat.
⁹¹

It must have been quite an international tableau: two filmmakers from Berlin and one soused and happy Texas-American novelist interrupting the shooting of an interview for a German television channel in the novelist's house in suburban France to perform an American musical comedy number whose words they all knew.
⁹²
Pat's early association with Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green makes the vignette more personal. Betty Comden, the last of the Revuers and, when she spoke with me in 2003, the last surviving member of the celebrated musical comedy team of Comden and Green, remembered very well how Judy Holliday had “mentioned Patricia to me and admired her work.”

“We all did,” said the legendary Miss Comden.
⁹³

Although Pat continued to love musical comedy all her life, a middle-of-the-night visit she made to a theatrical milieu in the winter of 1947 opened up another, darker side of the business for her.

On 9 December 1947, on her way back from yet another evening out on the town, Pat casually dropped in on the home of a Broadway producer, an unnamed woman she apparently knew quite well; well enough, anyway, to visit unannounced in the middle of the night. The producer was probably Peggy Fears, whom Pat had been visiting all fall and whose lengthy and contentious divorce from the financier A. C. Blumenthal—“I'm down to my last string of pearls” is how Fears put it in 1938—allowed her to try her hand at independent theatrical production. Pat wrote about this evening as a kind of warning to herself; a warning of what can happen when alcohol affects a talent, flattens a career, and diminishes the sexual appeal on which performing artists count so heavily.

After the war, Pat's social life in New York tilted more towards the professional and the commercial—she was particularly interested in selling her work to the “money magazines”—and she was careful to note the notables and the notables-in-waiting she met on her evenings out, often writing up her experiences in French or German. Her commercial intentions began to leak into her creative work, and in the days after Christmas of 1947 she was pierced with guilt about this artistic and spiritual “self-betrayal”:

But in May of 1947, Pat had been writing her story “Mrs. Afton, Among Thy Green Braes,” and feeling very pleased with it. She hadn't, she said, “worked so hard on a story since ‘The Heroine.'”
⁹⁶
“The Heroine” was the story against which Pat measured all her writing in the 1940s, going so far as to say, while she was working on
The Price of Salt
, that she hoped this book would be “better than ‘The Heroine.' O to remove that curse one day!”
⁹⁷
“Mrs. Afton” is a fine, quiet, disturbing tale, reminiscent of the eerie economies of Shirley Jackson's best short fictions.

Mrs. Afton (an alias) is a well-mannered, middle-aged Southern lady whose detailed report of her imaginary husband gives a consulting psychiatrist a bad afternoon. Because of Mrs. Afton's deception, the psychiatrist must track down Mrs. Afton's real name (it's Miss Gorham), and he is forced into a serious readjustment of his own ideas of “reality”: i.e., the knowledge that his psychiatric sense has failed him and that now he must treat “Miss Gorham” for a disease that “Mrs. Afton” did not seem to suffer from. “Mrs. Afton,” like so many of Pat's best stories, was published, fifteen years after she wrote it, in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
in December of 1962.

While she was working on “Mrs. Afton,” Pat was invited to a party given by the set designer Oliver Smith in the writer Jane Bowles's apartment on Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. Jane's wealthy lover from Vermont, Helvetia Perkins, was there, as well as the refugee composer Marc Blitzstein (“who had some sort of passion for me,” Pat thought),
⁹⁸
the choreographer Jerry Robbins, and the great theater actress Stella Adler. Forty years later, Pat remembered the evening as “a fabulous party, including Paul [Bowles], John Gielgud, Oliver Smith, Jerome Robbins—everybody notable except me—I felt!…I always had a high and awed respect for [Jane's] talent.”
⁹⁹
Pat, who had given some stories to Jane, got, not for the first time, some writerly advice from her: “Don't plan,” Jane said to the diagram-obsessed Pat. “It always works better to write first, and then rewrite.”
¹⁰⁰

At some point, Pat made a little line drawing of Jane Bowles.
¹⁰¹
Although Pat and Jane would never be more than social acquaintances eying each other appraisingly (Pat said that Jane was amongst the women who were sexually available to her, but that she wasn't “really attractive to me”),
¹⁰²
they actually had some common lifelines. For one thing, Jane, as Pat wrote appreciatively, “could hold half a bottle of gin in an admirably quiet way.”
¹⁰³
Jane and Pat had both lived in the borough of Queens as children, they had both attended Julia Richman High School (at different times), and they had discussed the idea of going to North Africa together, during the period when Jane was anxiously trying to rejoin her husband, Paul, in Tangier. In 1949, they accompanied each other to the passport office in New York City to register for their passports; Pat remembered the occasion because this was her first passport, although not her first attempt to get one.
¹⁰⁴
She also remembered that “at the question ‘What is the purpose of your journey (to N. Africa)' Jane said she wanted to write ‘To rejoin tribe.'”
¹⁰⁵
Although sexually uninterested in Jane, Pat was still alert to the opportunity: “[I]f we go to Africa no doubt something would happen.”
¹⁰⁶

Luckily, their African trip never came off. Jane Bowles had phobias about trains, tunnels, bridges, elevators, and making decisions, while Pat's phobias included, but were not confined to, noise, space, cleanliness, and food, as well as making decisions. A journey to the Dark Continent by Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles in each other's unmediated company doesn't bear thinking about.

The night after the party at Oliver Smith's, Pat went to a reception at Rosalind Constable's apartment to honor another potentially incongruous duo: Dorothy Parker and Simone de Beauvoir. Pat wangled an invitation for her then-primary lover, the alcoholic, divorced socialite Ginnie Kent Catherwood (see “
Les Girls: Part 1
”)—Pat called Ginnie her “wife, harlot, sweetheart—all in one! Irresistible.”
¹⁰⁷
—whose marital woes and child custody problems Pat would ruthlessly mine for the character of Carol in
The Price of Salt.
Securing an invitation for Ginnie entailed elaborate explanations to Rosalind by Pat, and after the party, Ginnie, in a rage about something, punched Pat. Pat laughed at Ginnie's flailing fists, just as she often laughed at violence. Everyone Rosalind had invited to the party for Simone de Beauvoir and Dorothy Parker showed up—except the guests of honor themselves. Wisely, they had decided to absent themselves from an evening which seemed to promise, in Dorothy Parker's immortal phrase, “fresh hell.”
¹⁰⁸

Ten days later, Pat was at a reception given by a well-connected lesbian couple for “Mrs. Chester Arthur,” the brilliant, garrulous, aggressively intellectual Esther Murphy Arthur, whose long-awaited book on Mme de Maintenon, last wife of Louis XIV, never did get written. (Perhaps it was unwritten because of Mme de Maintenon's own caveat: “I shall not write my life. I cannot tell everything, and what I could tell would not be believed.”) The English writer and wit Nancy Mitford, who was very fond of Esther Murphy Arthur, once described her to Evelyn Waugh as “a large sandy person like a bedroom cupboard packed full of information, much of it useless, all of it accurate.”
¹⁰⁹

Pat knew how brilliant Esther Murphy Arthur was, but she always got restive when Esther spoke. In Paris in the early 1950s, when she was seeing a lot of Esther Murphy Arthur in her “palatial apartment” on the rue de Lille, Pat just had to flee a St-Germain café in the middle of one of Esther's learned discourses. Esther, a daughter of the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, a companion of Sybille Bedford, and a friend of Janet Flanner (author of
The New Yorker
's fifty-year-long column, “Letter from Paris,” whom Pat had met through the lesbian community in New York), was a sister of Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate who “discovered” the Riviera and gave far too many parties for Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. During this reception for Esther Murphy Arthur, Pat also met the sharp-tongued, discreetly homosexual Bowden Broadwater, a researcher at
The New Yorker
. He was a year older than Pat and newly married to Mary McCarthy, the bright star in
Partisan Review
's firmament.

Amongst the other gatherings at which Pat was making appearances was Leo Lerman's informal Sunday evening salon at his Lexington Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Perhaps Pat had been introduced into the Lerman milieu by Buffie Johnson, who saw Lerman frequently and whose name was on Lerman's luminary-packed guest list for a party he gave for the couturier Pierre Balmain in 1948. Possibly it was the photographer who had also recently been Pat's lover, “Sheila”—she photographed Leo Lerman—who directed her to Lerman.
¹¹⁰
Perhaps Mme (Elizabeth) Lyne, the Hattie Carnegie designer who also knew Lerman and whose attentions Pat craved so deeply during the 1940s, was her entrée to Lerman's gatherings. Or maybe it was Betty Parsons. By now, Pat, advancing steadily if idiosyncratically in the direction of her dreams, was well connected enough to have been handed several keys to Leo Lerman's salon door.

Leo Lerman, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, wrote for many magazines and papers on the arts; he became a features editor at
Vogue,
then editor in chief of
Vanity Fair,
and finally served as editorial advisor to Condé Nast Publications until his death in 1994. Lerman shared with Pat a Proustian scrutiny of the social circles in which he moved (in his case, High Society and Café Society) and his journals are a treasure trove of 1940s Manhattan observations: “Stella Adler, when Ned Rorem told her that he had been introduced to her five times and she still did not recognize him: ‘To me all
goyim
look alike.'”
¹¹¹
“When Marlene [Dietrich] sits or rather strides a chair and growls ‘One for the Road' she is very beautiful in two sexes simultaneously.”
¹¹²