The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 10

  Her editor at William Heinemann in London, Janice Robertson, says that Pat’s submitted manuscripts were so “clean” that they rarely required correction.6

  But in the first few hundred of the thousands of pages of plain prose and careful grammar that Patricia Highsmith plied in her thirty-eight journals and eighteen diaries, there are two words she continued to capitalize unnecessarily and more frequently than any others. “Martini” is one of those words and “Mother” is the other one, and she capitalized them both with intention. Certainly, her “Mother” and her “Martinis” (as well as her Manhattans, her ryes, her scotches, and her beers) marked her life, branded her work, and deeply affected her development.

  By the time she moved to her last house in Switzerland at the end of the 1980s, Patricia Highsmith had refined her martini consumption right down to its essential ingredient: a bottle of alcohol (beer and gin or vodka for the mornings, scotch for the remains of the day) whose rations she carefully measured out for herself by drawing a line across the label.7 Every day, she drank down to that mark, and then, rigorous as always when in the grip of a “plan,” she stopped cold. But she was never able to draw a careful line across her mother, or to make a “plan” that would measure out Mary Highsmith’s painful loving into doses an achingly resentful daughter could tolerate.

  In the end, her mother proved to be a more potent brew than her martinis, and twenty years before Pat Highsmith’s death, it was not the alcohol she felt she had to give up for good—it was her mother, Mary Coates Highsmith. (“The warmth of brandy,” Pat had written in 1949, “is very like that of mother love.”)8

  The trouble with Mary Coates Highsmith was not, as her only child, Patricia, continued to insist, that she wasn’t a “rational” woman. The trouble with Mary Highsmith was that she was more like a character in a book or a play than she was like anything else.

  “Mary,” said her Texas grandnephew Dan, “was always an eccentric. You’d recognize Mary in a roomful of people; she just had a way about her. She was squirrelly as a tree full of owls and more fun than anyone you’d ever run into. Mary had a sharp, sharp wit—there’s no comparison with Pat.” She “wasn’t a drinker per se” but she was the life of every party, was ready for every party “with the most outlandish costumes and the funniest stories you ever heard.” She loved to be “the center of attention and she made sure that happened.”

  “Mary was the only woman I knew that smoked cigarettes with a cigarette holder. Hell, it depended on where you were going; she might have a twelve-inch cigarette holder for large occasions, and then for smaller occasions, she might have one that was three inches. She had an assortment of them. And Mary had the most beautiful hands, being an artist, and she had long fingers…a very artistic hand.”

  “What I remember most was the way Mary used her hands in conversation. It was so graceful, it was just beautiful, and you put a twelve-inch cigarette holder in that hand and she makes a sweeping gesture, and it’s Auntie Mame.”9

  Auntie Mame is the flamboyant character Patrick Dennis raised up to the level of literature in his 1955 bestselling novel, Auntie Mame. And Auntie Mame would have been an obvious comparison for an adoring nephew to make to his theatrical and glamorous Aunt Mary—especially because his aunt Mary seemed to share so many of Auntie Mame’s traits.

  In the postscript to a chatty, good-natured, bossy letter to her daughter, Patricia (ten-, twenty-, thirty-page single-spaced typewritten letters were nothing to the Highsmith women when they had something to say to each other), Mary Highsmith displayed the same weakness for attractive, youthful protégés that marked both the fictional Auntie Mame and the real Pat Highsmith in middle age.

  But, unlike her daughter’s much-younger, late-life protégées (who were mostly her lovers and whose memories of Pat—with one exception—are decidedly mixed), Mary Highsmith’s young friend, whom she called her “adopted boy,” went on to a spectacular career of his own and says that his relations with Mary were entirely pleasurable. Like her grandnephew Dan, he, too, saw Mary as a kind of Auntie Mame.

  Mary’s letter to Pat in January of 1965 introduces him:

  My adopted boy (by mutual wishes) whom I call Romano…is opening on B[road]way in Baker St[reet]—the musical…. He’s about 22 & handsome as a Greek god. Calls me Mamma mia. He said he was of English extraction. I said remember there was a Roman invasion. He’s tall, slim, and dark with the most beautiful black hair & handsome face. He’s as yet unspoiled, sweet and modest. I sent him a congratulation telegram last night.10

  Tommy Tune, the real name of the tall, dark, handsome young Texan Mary called “Romano,” grew up to be one of the American theater’s most accomplished stars. An actor, dancer, singer, choreographer, and director, Tune is the only artist in American stage history to win four of his nine Tony Awards—the Oscars of American theater—in four different categories. If nothing else, Mary Highsmith had a good eye for developing artists.

  Or perhaps, as Tommy Tune put it, “She just liked the way I looked.”

  In the summer of 1965, Tommy Tune was a stagestruck young performer working in a little theater in the Hill Country of Texas, “part of the performing troupe and also choreographing.” The theater was called the Point Summer Theatre and it was under the aegis of the Hill Country Arts Foundation. It was the kind of regional theater from whose stage hordes of young theatrical hopefuls issue forth to take the metropolis of New York by storm, ending, usually, by taking shelter from the storm themselves in the only performing jobs they can get: as members of Manhattan’s charmingly untrained chorus of restaurant workers. But Tommy Tune was that one-in-a-million talent who succeeds in New York—and he did so in the musical for which Mary Highsmith sent him her “congratulation telegram.”11

  The Point Summer Theatre was on the banks of the Guadalupe River, and Tommy Tune remembers that “you could open the back doors of the upstage and…see the river passing by.” The arts foundation running it had “an art class and I would pose for the art class to make extra money. And Mary was painting in the art class. She was quite a good painter…and on breaks we would go and have a Coke.”

  “I just thought Mary was so glamorous. She represented something you just didn’t find in the Hill Country. She was cosmopolitan in a way, and she was artistic. She’d make great sweeping gestures with her hands and I seem to remember her hair being red, almost Lucille Ball red. And she was an eccentric and of course I gravitated right to her. She was like Auntie Mame and she called me ‘Romano Romano.’ And that sounded so good because in Texas we didn’t know anything about Italy except spaghetti.

  “She was an opening for me; she opened a little bit of my tight fabric so that I might peer through.”12

  Tommy Tune can still visualize Mary’s handwriting—“sort of European…very legible, and it’s larger than we are taught and it’s on a slant”—so he and Mary must have corresponded for a while after he left for the bright lights and the big city. “It was an impressionistic relationship,” he says, “artist and model, Auntie Mame and young Patrick,” and because of Patricia Highsmith and because of Mary herself, he “often wondered what happened to Mary and what happened to the paintings she did.” When I told him that Mary lived to be ninety-five, he was delighted: “Oh she would be one of those! She would be one of those!”13

  And there was something else Tommy Tune remembered about Mary Highsmith, something about which he was emphatic:

  “She was so proud of her daughter, so proud of her. She just was so proud of her, not one inkling led me to believe that there were problems. She was SO PROUD.”14

  Even though Mary seemed to friends and family like an Auntie Mame, the American type she resembled most closely was the semitragic Southern Belle, dramatized on stage by Tennessee Williams and represented in art and life by Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald came from a social background that was several notches above Mary Highsmith’s, but she was Mary’s near contemporary, and like Mary she wa
s an Alabama girl, a talented painter, and a witty, attractive, erratic, misunderstood “eccentric.” (Zelda had wanted to name her only daughter, born in the same year as Pat, Patricia.)

  Mary’s face was longer and more vulpine than Zelda’s, but her photographed image has Zelda’s up-to-the-minute style and Zelda’s put-on self-confidence. And Mary’s pose, just like Zelda’s, conceals a history of wasted love and desperately thwarted ambitions.

  Patricia Highsmith was, as she liked to say, “born out of wedlock” but still “legitimate” making her debut on 19 January 1921, at three thirty in the morning, several months after the physical separation—and nine days following the legal divorce—of her twenty-five-year-old mother, Mary Coates Plangman, from her thirty-seven-year-old father, Jay Bernard Plangman, in the oil-rich, railroad-crossed city of Fort Worth, Texas.15

  Even her birth was the result of a dispute. Jay B, as her father was called, much in love with his new wife, Mary, said he wanted to establish them both as commercial artists in Manhattan before starting a family.16 Mary’s grandnephew Dan Walton Coates had a slightly different interpretation of Plangman’s motives: “He thought with Mary’s ability and his selling they could make some good money.”17 Mary and Jay B Plangman were already living in New York, “just getting started in the art field,” when Mary’s pregnancy became apparent.18 Plangman pressed Mary to have an abortion.

  Mary, who had been struck by a display picture of the darkly good-looking young Plangman in a “photographer’s window” in Fort Worth and then “sought (somehow) his acquaintance”19—a tendency to confuse art and life that her only child would inherit20—reluctantly agreed to terminate her pregnancy. When the turpentine she swallowed (“suggested by a friend”) didn’t work, Mary decided to keep the pregnancy and get rid of Jay B so she “could have the [child] in peace.”21 Returning to New York from a three-week separation from her husband in Alabama, Mary announced that she wanted a divorce. The Plangmans went back to Fort Worth because, as Jay B primly wrote his daughter fifty years later, “Mary had no grounds for a divorce in New York.”22

  Fort Worth, to which Pat Highsmith and her mother, Mary, were to return many times in the course of their checkered careers, is thirty miles from Dallas, Texas. At the time of Pat’s birth in 1921, Dallas was the cultural and industrial center of northeast Texas. With the establishment of the eleventh branch of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas in 1911, it had also become the financial center. Fort Worth was not yet the lively cultural municipality it is today; it was considered to be a second-class city, “a ‘cow-town’ where the West begins and culture ends,” as one prosperous Dallas resident put it. Leaving Manhattan and going home to her mother’s boardinghouse in Fort Worth must have felt a lot like failure to the career-minded Mary Coates.

  From start to finish—photograph to divorce court—the union of Mary Coates and Jay Bernard Plangman lasted little more than a year and a half.

  And so, despite her mother’s paint-thinner cocktail, Mary Patricia Plangman was born in her grandmother’s boardinghouse (no one ever called it her grandfather’s boardinghouse) in Fort Worth, at 603 West Daggett Avenue, a couple of blocks from the railroad tracks and just across the street from the Judson Boot Company and a printing business whose employees sometimes took their meals at Willie Mae’s table.23 The child came into a marriage dissolving in a cloud of acrimony and a sea of roiled feelings, and she bore if not the scent then certainly the burden of Mary’s turpentine tipple. Mother Mary liked to tell the turpentine story to Pat’s friends and lovers, in Pat’s presence and to Pat’s mortification. And Pat, insisting that she “didn’t mind one bit,” liked to repeat—to Mary’s detriment and for the benefit of interviewers—the way in which Mary always introduced the story: “It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat, because…”24

  Nevertheless, the great love of Pat Highsmith’s life—and, certainly, her greatest hate—was her artistic, stylish, erratic, critical, and very frustrated mother, Mary Highsmith. No one affected Pat more strongly than Mary did, and the reverse was also true. Until the moment she stopped communicating with her mother about twenty years before her own death (Pat actually disinherited herself in a letter to Mary) no one’s opinion mattered more to Pat than Mary’s.

  A critical letter from her mother—Mary and Pat wrote to each other with the venom and energy of disappointed lovers—was enough to do what perpetual motion, heavy drinking, racking love affairs, and financial and professional setbacks could never do; it stopped the formidable engine that was Patricia Highsmith’s writing. Sometimes, Pat said, it stopped it for days. Only noise from neighbors—Pat was sound-phobic and instantly converted all sound to “noise”—had anywhere near as disastrous an effect on Pat’s work habits as the maternal criticism. And this was criticism from a mother who loved her daughter passionately and said so, critically, at every opportunity.

  Dan Walton Coates thought it was “easier to be Mary’s friend or other relation than to be her daughter.” Don Coates, Dan’s younger brother and the Coates family historian, remembers that “Aunt Mary was a very talented artist,” very “career-minded,” and not at all the “gushing type” of mother. But he wonders if “Pat ever thought that it was Aunt Mary who actually educated Pat as to what a woman could do.” (Yes and no is the answer to that question.) It was Mary’s hard work that put Pat through Barnard College—and gave her an allowance, too—at a time when a college education was still considered a privilege for a young woman in America.25

  Everyone in the Coates family was abundantly aware that Mary and Pat’s relationship was “not a good one.” Still, like Tommy Tune, Dan Walton Coates was unequivocal: “Mary was very, very proud of Pat.

  “[But] I’ll tell you, Mary could be and was critical, and she would and did write some very hateful things [to Pat]…. And my father would say, Mary, why in the hell do you want to say something like that? It’s hurtful and it doesn’t do any good. And Mary would say: ‘Well, that’s the way I felt. And Pat ought to know it.’

  “Those two,” said Dan Walton Coates, “would burn each other up in the mail.”26

  Sulphur and brimstone are amongst the mildest of the odors that cling to many of the later, surviving letters the Highsmith women wrote to each other: the typewriters on which they were written should have been reduced to smoking slag and quivering springs. These epistles—as successful as smart bombs, as twinned as photographic negatives and their developed prints, and almost as painful as their authors’ actual physical meetings—kept the home fires of their bondage burning brightly.

  In a carefully controlled letter to Mary (very much foreshortened below), written on 12 April 1966, a year after Camilla Butterfield’s stormy tea party in Kensington and the violent “incident” at Pat’s Suffolk cottage, and simmering with every resentment it denies (including the inevitable Highsmith touch: a little prophecy of mutual death in the last paragraph), Pat states her case against her mother—her cases, actually. And she delivers a very good idea of what, by now, was the motor that drove these two women to run each other over every single time they met.

  “It is a terrible thing,” Pat writes to Mary, “if you think I have resentment toward you, and I shall try once more to explain why I haven’t.” And then Pat continues with a long list of burning resentments which trace back to her central complaint—the circumstances of her birth and her mother’s remarriage (“You had one divorce, but you might have had four or five.”)—and then works forward again to a long-cherished grudge:

  [T]o expect a child with such an odd parental history as mine to be like “other people” is a bit mistaken on your part. When I was fourteen, you said to me, “Why don’t you straighten up and fly right.”…And if you were concerned with me at fourteen, [you should] have taken me to a child psychiatrist, instead of…leaving me…to feel somehow inferior, or at any rate as if I were not meeting your approval.

  The reason I become upset after more than forty-eight hours with you is quite simple
, and also has nothing to do with resentment.

  And Pat goes on, resentfully, with another long list of Mary’s “sniping remarks” and “illogical” behavior at Bridge Cottage a year earlier, finishing with a description of how Mary always makes her feel: “I am in a state of mind best described as shattered. I feel helpless, baffled, even inarticulate.

  “I do not accuse you of it, but it may be you that resent me….

  “I hope very much I have made it clear that I have no resentment, not even for the broken promise when I was twelve, which marked a turning point in my life. [Mary, bent on divorcing Pat’s stepfather, Stanley, and joining Pat in Texas, sent Pat to Fort Worth for a year, but reconciled with Stanley instead.] If you would get rid of your guilt, it would make things better…because we may both die tomorrow—just by slipping in the bathtub, for instance—and I wanted to say all this to you before it is too late.”27

  And Pat signed this letter “With much love, PAT.”

  Mary seems to have retained something of her sense of humor—like Pat’s, it was interested in bodily functions—during that disastrous Bridge Cottage visit. As a souvenir, she sent her nephew Dan Coates in Texas ninety-four sheets of “Jeyes hygienic toilet paper,” including an advertising flyer for Jeyes on which she wrote jauntily: “That this T.P. is absolutely inadequate has been proven by me beyond the shadow of a doubt!!!”28

  As late as 1977, Pat was still preoccupied with dramatizing Mary’s visit to Bridge Cottage. In a letter to her cousin Dan, who with his wife, Florine, had assumed all the responsibilities for Mary’s later, erratic progress, Pat wrote from Moncourt: