The Talented Miss Highsmith (50 page)

No doubt it was something she said.

 

In this last week of June 1953, the temperature in Manhattan is ninety-two degrees in the shade, the heat is shimmering up off the sidewalks, and a pneumatic drill is hard at work breaking up the concrete outside Pat's temporary lodging: an apartment she and Ellen Hill are renting (but it's Ellen who is paying) from Dell (Hans Felix Jüdell), the husband of Pat's friend and confidante, Lil Picard.
^*
Lil is the irrepressible émigrée fashion editor, revue artist, film actor (she appeared in a film with Emil Jannings), milliner, jewelry designer, writer, painter, and, well into old age, outrageous performance artist whom Pat had met “in an elevator at a gay party” in October of 1947.”
⁴³
Pat managed to suppress her desire to kiss Lil, but Lil's position as an older married woman “with a husband from whom she seems to keep secrets” enchanted Pat, and she began to visit Lil every day.
⁴⁴

Pat and Lil Picard's tempestuous friendship lasted for thirty years; and Lil, an Alsatian Jew who fled Berlin in 1936 and was au courant with every art movement in New York from Abstract Expressionism to Fluxus (and was photographed by, amongst others, Lotte Jacobi and Andy Warhol) became an identifiable figure in New York's avant-garde. Her flamboyant performance pieces and her column in the house journal of the newly developing East Village, the
East Village Other,
assured her notoriety, although not her solvency, and she never allowed her fondness for Pat to get in the way of calling her a “fascist.” Lil called Pat a “fascist” very regularly.

Of the novel Pat dedicated to her father, Jay B Plangman,
A Dog's Ransom,
Pat said that she “rather modeled the character of Greta Reynolds after my friend Lil Picard.”
⁴⁵
If so, it is a pallid version of the real Lil. Mother Mary, only four or five years older than Lil, was horrified by Lil's free-wheeling sex life, her opulently unfettered self-expression, her influence on Pat, and—the very last straw—the fact that Pat had once lent Lil some money for an operation.

Flayed by the sound of the drill outside her window and broiled by the “hot as a furnace” summer weather, Pat has been writhing in her coils for the last fortnight, trying to pick up on the Manhattan social and professional life she allowed to slacken in the two and a half years of her European travels.

Three weeks ago, she'd gone to see Truman Capote's play
The Grass Harp
in Sheridan Square and then tried to catch up on both gossip and business by inviting Betty Parsons, now the doyenne of her own influential art gallery, to have lunch at her apartment and look at her drawings. To Pat's distress, Parsons preferred her “bloodless abstracts” to her representational work and told Pat that Carson McCullers had “fallen madly” in love with Kathryn Hamill Cohen, and had lingered in London for three months, begging Kathryn to live with her although “there was no affair.”
⁴⁶
Now, Pat was writing “only to keep from going mad in my old city where all the business people neglect me as if I were officially boycotted.”
⁴⁷

Extending her mood into fiction, she'd spent the last week of May composing a short story she called “Born Failure.”
⁴⁸
She continued to meet Betty Parsons for meals and drawing classes, saw “that burly fellow” Philip Rahv again at a
Partisan Review
party on Forty-eighth Street, and had dinner with Bobby Isaacson, lover of the poet James Merrill (son of one of the founders of New York's largest stock brokerage company, Merrill Lynch). She noted, without personal comment, the imminent electrocution of the Rosenbergs for spying, but was exercised at the way American libraries were suddenly eliminating “controversial” authors from their shelves; authors like Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast, and Langston Hughes.
⁴⁹
She “was on the brink of a depression quite as serious as the 1948–49 winter one” and was doubting both her agent Margot and her relationship with Ellen Hill: “Nothing is ever permanent,” she said. But it was really the permanency of her
own
feelings that Pat was doubting.
⁵⁰

On the seventeenth of June, Pat went to a cocktail party at James Merrill's apartment at 28 West Tenth Street where she ran into Jane Bowles. “She looks plumper, older, and is otherwise much the same—moderately friendly,” Pat thought. Jim Merrill “looked sweet in a lavender shirt of subtle hue. Also Oliver Smith, Johnny Myers, Harry Ford & wife, etc. Tietgens is not invited.” Rolf Tietgens hadn't been invited because he'd had an unauthorized fling with Bobby Isaacson in Rome. One month ago, Pat had had her own unauthorized fling: the one-night stand with Tietgens she'd neglected to mention to Ellen Hill.
⁵¹
At the party, Pat talked to Terese Hayden, manager of the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street. Hayden had done an “apparently unsuccessful” screen treatment of
The Price of Salt,
which Pat had received in Florence in June of 1952
⁵²
—with the character of “Carol…changed to Carl” and the title of the screen treatment changed to
Winter Journey
.
⁵³
By then Pat, embarrassed anew by her novel, was calling
The Price of Salt
a “stinking book” and marvelled to Kingsley that it had “sold to Bantam for $6500.”
⁵⁴

On the eighteenth of June, tossing and turning in the unendurable heat, Pat had a nearly “sleepless night” which produced a “curious dream”—made out of the weather and her illicit feelings.
^*
In retrospect, the dream seems almost to be a preparation for the dreadful incident which occurred with Ellen Hill ten days later. In the dream, Pat was with Kathryn Hamill Cohen and a naked girl. Their clear “intention was to burn the girl alive.” They put the girl in a wooden bathtub along with a wooden effigy of Pat's grandmother “with arms outstretched,” and it was Pat who picked the bathtub up and ignited the papers under it. Pat reminded the weeping Kathryn: “Don't forget, the girl
asked
us to do it to her!” But then a “horror went through” Pat at the “suffering of the girl.

“A moment later, the naked girl simply stood up, stopped her crying, and stepped out of the bathtub unhurt except for singes: the fire had gone out. I felt guilty at the thought the girl would report what we had done…. Then I awakened.

“I subsequently had the feeling the girl in the tub might have represented myself, because she looked a little like me in the dream, at the end. In that case I had two identities: the victim and the murderer.”
⁵⁵

Despite the continuing heat, the lingering effects of this “horrid vivid dream,” and her daily efforts to break into the new medium of television with a script called “Innocent Witness,” Pat was finding the strength to launch a few more professional and personal advances.

On the twenty-fourth of June, Pat went to lunch with a man “I like so much—better than any editor to date,” Cecil Goldbeck.
⁵⁶
Mr. Goldbeck, a vice president at the Coward-McCann publishing company, had already published one of Pat's novels in paperback,
The Price of Salt,
and would go on to edit
The Blunderer
(for which her current relationship with Ellen Hill provided two characters and a situation) and
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Now, he wanted to give her a thousand dollars “sight unseen” for her next “suspense” novel. Cecil Goldbeck's enthusiasm for fiction like Pat's seems to have run in his family. His brother, Willis Goldbeck, was the uncredited coauthor of a work whose themes—sexual humiliation and horrible revenge—were also Highsmith favorites: Tod Browning's 1932 classic cult film
Freaks
.
⁵⁷

The nominal purpose of Pat's second visit to Mr. Goldbeck on 28 June was to “consult” him about her hardworking agent Margot Johnson's “value” to her. Throughout her travels in Europe, Pat had been blaming Margot for her long run of bad publication luck. When Pat met the brilliant Proust scholar Mina Kirstein Curtiss (ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein's sister) at a cocktail party at the literary agent Mme Jenny Bradley's house in Paris at the end of 1952—Curtiss had been Margot Johnson's teacher at Smith College—she queried Curtiss sharply about Margot. “There is no better agent,” Curtiss replied.
⁵⁸
Ten days before that, Pat had written to Kingsley from Europe, asking her, too, to assess Margot's reputation in publishing circles: “Margot hasn't sold anything for me in ages…. I'd love to know just how her standing is at present.”
⁵⁹

This time, however, Pat was angling to bypass Margot completely and deal directly with Cecil Goldbeck herself so that she could cut out Margot's commission—a little bait-and-switch maneuver she would try, with variations, eight years later on her French publishers Calmann-Lévy (she ditched them, briefly, for Robert Laffont), and then again in 1979 on her next American literary agent, Patricia Schartle (whom she attempted to shortchange on European commissions).
⁶⁰
But Mr. Goldbeck honorably assured Pat that “Margot [was] the best agent” she could have. The others were like “factories,” he told her, “you produce or are thrown out.”
⁶¹

 

The Mother of Them All: the indomitable Willie Mae Stewart Coates and her husband,
Daniel. The hand on the wall belongs to Daniel and Willie Mae's granddaughter,
Patricia Highsmith. (
Swiss Literary Archives
)

 

Little Patsy all dolled up by Mother Mary and expressing herself in the yard of her grandmother's boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas. (
Swiss Literary Archives
)

 

Mary Coates Plangman Highsmith. “I too am an extrovert and never met a stranger,” Mary wrote to one of Pat's lovers. (
Swiss Literary Archives
)