The Talented Miss Highsmith (52 page)

Lil Picard, the dress and hat designer, painter, journalist, and performance artist who was Pat's “most inspiring” friend for thirty years. (
Collection University of Iowa Libraries
)

 

The 1943 Alex Schomburg cover for the Superhero comic
The Black Terror #2
. Pat wrote extensively for Black Terror and his “mild-mannered” Alter Ego, Bob Benton. The Superhero and his Alter Ego first appeared in a Nedor comic in January 1941—and their resemblance to Superman and Clark Kent was entirely intentional.

 

The splash page for “The Fighting Yank” in the October 1945 issue of
America's Best Comics
. The Yank, who debuted in a Standard comic in September 1941, was another of the second-string comic book Superheroes Pat wrote for.

 

Jap Buster Johnson defeats the Japanese army in New Guinea with extreme prejudice. Pat and
Mickey Spillane both wrote for this wartime human killing machine, first published in a Timely comic in December 1942.

 

The Destroyer, another of the wartime Superheroes-with-double-identities for whom Pat wrote. The first Destroyer story was written by Stan Lee for a Timely comic published in October 1941.

 

Pat's two meetings with Goldbeck were the bookends to her disastrous reunion with Ellen Hill, who had just returned to New York on 25 June from a trip to Santa Fe. Pat ducked the first evening with Ellen, spending it instead with Jean P., a new attraction. By 28 June, Ellen and Pat's relations were “strained and insane.” Ellen wanted Pat to return with her at once to Santa Fe “in the new car. I am saying, due to her foul temper, I will not.” Pat was having “secret talks, all comforting” with Jean.

By the time Pat and Ellen had arrived back in the States on 13 May 1953, and by the time Ellen had returned to New York from her solitary trip to Santa Fe to see her mother at the end of June, Pat was ready to have a little fun with someone else. In fact, she had already been having quite a bit of fun with several other women in Ellen's absence.

On 1 July, after arguing with Ellen for hours, Pat slipped out at three o'clock in the afternoon for a drink with Ann Smith, the lover with whom she'd intermitted her affair with Marc Brandel. (In a fit of writer's revenge, Marc turned Ann, who was a very pretty blonde, into the caricatural “ugly lesbian” in his novel
The Choice
.) Pat then “arranged with a friend to bring Jean P. out to her place in Fire Island next weekend. By that time I thought to have Ellen en route for Santa Fe or Europe. Ann was wonderful,”
⁶²
Pat confided to her diary, excited, as always, to be juggling three women at once.

After the drink with Ann, Pat returned to the apartment she and Ellen were sharing. She had another “violent” argument with Ellen that lasted two and a half hours, from five to seven-thirty in the evening, and threw a glass on the floor to “emphasize I
did
mean it when I said I wanted to separate.”
⁶³
Ellen “has tried everything from sex to liquor to tears to wild promises of giving me my way in everything.”
⁶⁴
Pat's account of this evening is as numb to remorse as any scene Mickey Spillane, the scriptwriter for
Jap Buster Johnson
at Timely comics just before Pat took up Jap Buster's story line, might have slipped into one of his Mike Hammer novels:

“She threatened veronal & insisted on having two martinis with me which she tossed down like water. I said go ahead with the veronal. She was poking 8 pills in her mouth as I left the house. I love you very much were the last words I heard as I closed the door. She was sitting naked on the bed. Had just written her will giving me all her money, & saying give Jo [a woman who had been a lover of both Pat and Ellen] $5,000 when I got around to it. And called me the nicest person in the world for having stayed with her as long as I did this evening.”

Ellen had threatened suicide once before, in 1952, when, after browsing Pat's diaries without permission, she got the shock awaiting anyone foolish enough to break into a writer's private thoughts: an uncomplimentary assessment of her own character. The diary shock was mutual and it was repeated: in the summer of 1954, Ellen peeked again at another of Pat's diaries—and was caught again. Her “honest diary,” Pat wrote, was what had helped “to keep [her] on the right moral track…. Her “purging effect of putting things down in words” had been interrupted and it was all Ellen's fault.
⁶⁵
Naturally, Pat punished herself: she stopped writing her diaries for the next seven years.
⁶⁶

Still, Ellen was neither the first nor the last loved one to read Pat's private writings without permission. Nor was Ellen the last woman to whom Pat would recommend suicide. When the roommate of another friend threatened to jump off a balcony in the 1980s, Pat was quick with her support. “Let her jump!” wrote Pat feelingly, and then followed this up with a gentler suggestion. “I've been in, and also witnessed, such drama, therefore I felt inspired tonight to state: get away from it, no matter what it costs in time and money.”
⁶⁷

The bonds of love—never mind how eagerly she slipped into them—always eventually felt like iron chains to Pat Highsmith. Emotional blackmail of any kind, one of the many twisted strands by which she was still connected to Mother Mary, brought out Pat's inner executioner and her outer escape artist.

And escape from Ellen Hill she certainly did.

After leaving Ellen in the act of swallowing those Veronal pills (and helpfully cancelling the evening appointment Ellen had made with the Czech painter Jim Dobrochek), Pat went straight to her friend Kingsley's apartment on West Eleventh Street. Pat didn't mention the scene she had just been a part of; she seemed, in fact, to be much more interested in what Kingsley and her beau, Lars Skattebol, were going to say about her latest novel. “They ripped me mercilessly (& stupidly) re my third novel [
The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder,
now lost, which Pat was writing at the same time she was taking notes for
The Blunderer
]: a prerogative, and [said] I'd never write another decent novel having spat out such infantilism.”

Then, her usually uncertain appetite stimulated by the evening's excitements, Pat went on to Jean P.'s apartment, where she ate two hamburgers and alarmed Jean with “the sad story of tonight & Ellen.” When Pat finally made her way home at two o'clock in the morning (and she took her time about it), she found Ellen in “a coma—out, anyway, beyond coffee & cold towels…. A doctor…arrived, pumped her stomach to no avail [then] the police, then Bellevue [Hospital] where I delivered her at 4:30
AM
.

“There was a note on typewriter which the cops took”: ‘Dear Pat I should have done this 20 years ago. This is no reflection on you or anyone—'”

Pat spent the night with Jean P., then went in the early morning to Bellevue Hospital, where she answered questions about Ellen's health. The “doctor gives [Ellen] an even chance,” Pat noted without comment, and went on to her agent Margot Johnson's apartment. Margot provided “general comfort” and martinis (“unfelt”). Rosalind Constable's lover Claude offered her apartment to Pat for the weekend, but Pat said she was driving Ellen's Morris Minor out to Fire Island—“the first of the black eyes I give myself through apparently crude behavior where Ellen is concerned.”

The next morning, 3 July, Pat met Jim Dobrochek, Ellen's artist friend, at the hospital. She told him the whole story and gave him Ellen's “effects.” Ellen was still in a coma.

“Jim had been walking streets all night. Told me over
AM
coffee Ellen mistreated him on his arrival here…buttonholed him at the pier & said: Don't ever tell a
soul
that I am Jewish! I had not known before she was totally Jewish, from that tight, sophisticated, brittle German Jewish intellectual set of pre-Hitler Berlin.”
^*

After meeting Jim, Pat made her getaway to Fire Island with Jean P. in Ellen's car. This, she wrote, “is a major strike against me, with Ellen's mother. Ideal weather & connection & its heaven to be out here. I am escaping from hell.”
⁶⁸

By the following morning, 4 July, Independence Day, Pat was forcing herself to “work, half believing Ellen dead.” At six in the evening, she called Jim from the legendary Fire Island hotel, Duffy's (burned to the ground in 1956), and learned that Ellen “came to yesterday—early this morning. The strain is over.” At one thirty that morning, Pat, skunk drunk, “picked [a] fight with some late girl callers.” It was a physical fight and she was “sadly beaten,” ending up with a chest so bruised that she had to have it X-rayed when she got back to Manhattan. It was Jean P. who broke up the fight and pulled Pat away.

Pat was already planning to take an apartment with Jean, “a major decision…that cannot possibly last” and that evening she drove back to Manhattan with Jean and another friend from New York, Betty—“one of few confidants—in Ellen's car.” Betty may have been Pat's confidante, but Pat was confidently double-crossing her: Betty's lover was Ann Smith, Pat had been seeing Ann secretly again, and Betty didn't know a thing about it.

By 7 July, Pat was installed on Twenty-fifth Street in the apartment of a friend of Jean, cat-sitting, entertaining “T.V. speculations,” and feeling “[t]he old ambiguous pull—toward safety & toward destruction.” After trying to get away from Ellen, she was now afraid that Ellen was trying to get away from her—and she was dining out or having people in every night and carefully monitoring her “bruised chest,” “mental strain,” and low red blood cell count: “I am in the 60s in blood.”
⁶⁹

On the fourteenth of July—a Tuesday—a “Notice arrives
Neue Zuricher
[
sic
] pays me $18.70 [for an article]. Am extremely proud!” Ellen was already receding from her thoughts.