The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  Pat worked diligently on The Click of the Shutting in Taxco, in between bouts of watching her recent history parade itself before her eyes. Ben-Zion Goldberg, her employer from FFF Publications, did come to visit her in Mexico, just as he’d written he would, and he stayed there mooning around her for quite a while. He told Pat he wanted to share a house with her for “two years.” Mother Mary took alarm from afar, calling him an “old goat” in a letter. Goldberg and Pat did some travelling together—to Acapulco, principally, in March—and some flirting too.

  In Acapulco, Pat worked on her novel while small lizards ran through her room and across the roof, and a “noisy pig” noisily enjoyed the orange peels she’d thrown away.52 The heavy concentration of ions in the air excited and energized her; the green sparks she and Goldberg could make by stamping on wet sand and the sparks she saw dancing on the water made her “very happy.” Those green sparks found their way into another interesting, unfinished text Pat would set partially in Mexico: The Dove Descending.

  Ben-Zion Goldberg, according to Pat, was in love with her, and he came to the same conclusion most of Pat’s rejected admirers would come to: “Goldberg says that I’m incapable of loving, that I am in love…. with myself.” On their trip to Acapulco, Goldberg visited her diligently every night at eleven o’clock in her room by the sea to speak about her novel and about their possible relations. And he stayed, talking, until the early hours of the morning.53 He was too much of a gentleman to press his case with more than a few “advances”—and Pat was too much of a lesbian to be interested in them.

  “His conversation is very inspiring,” Pat wrote in her Mexico Diary of their Acapulco trip, “and he tries with much patience to make me really fall in love with him, but that is impossible.”54 Goldberg would later ask her to read a lengthy novel he’d written, so she could show it to her agent, Margot Johnson. Pat didn’t find much in the manuscript to interest her.

  On 20 March, taking the swaying bus back from Acapulco to Taxco with Goldberg (who accompanied Pat even though it was out of his way), Pat refused to sit with other people because she wanted “to dream” by herself. When the bus stopped in Tierra Colorada, she was suddenly and sharply transfixed by the figure of a child which seemed to materialize out of previous “dreams”—transgressive dreams about young girls. This figure was “a nine year old girl, the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in Mexico. I wanted to bring her with me. She was asking for some centavos with others. I thought of her until Chispamingo and Iguala.”55

  Just before she left Taxco for the United States, Pat saw Chloe again, “my alcoholic beauty…in Mexico City. She, being immune to the subtle…effects of this Latin atmosphere, is staying on. Her hands still shake as badly as they did in New York—and for the same thing.”56

  As usual, Pat’s interest in herself and in what was directly around her in Mexico precluded interest in anything else. The Second World War didn’t wrest much prose from her pen. The few entries she made in her journals about the war seem to have been made in summary, with an eye to her future readers. They run along the lines of the journal entry she made shortly before leaving Barnard:

  Bali is now partially occupied, the British are maneuvering at Rangoon, the first American battleship has been sunk, the Bali fleet of Japan smashed and a new Russian army, trained east of the Urals, is ready to go. Today’s the anniversary of the Red Army! And tomorrow I have a date for lunch with Rosalind!57

  Unlike the comics Superheroes and war heroes whose scenarios she was still sending to Richard Hughes, and unlike some of her more adventurous Barnard classmates, it never occurred to Pat, once she’d left Barnard and the Sangor-Pines shop, to assist the U.S. war effort or to actually go to war. She was already indirectly assisting the armed forces by writing what amounted to war propaganda for the comics, but her most obvious response to the Second World War was to ignore it. Instead of going to war, she went to Mexico with an attractive model—and she worked on her first novel and hoarded up material for her cahiers and diaries.

  From Monterrey, in the second week of May 1944, Pat wrote to Kingsley wistfully about her Barnard classmates (and bedmates, although Kingsley wasn’t privy to this part of the story)—feeling, suddenly, as though she’d been left out of one of history’s great designs. She righted herself with a burst of ironic fantasy and a short shot of false “feminism.” (Even in the palmy days of its ascendancy, “feminism” was a word Pat would have used only under water torture.)

  “What has become of Babs? Is she in the war?…That girl will never know how much I like and admire her, and maybe it’s best that way…. And what of Helen and Peter? Bumping along in some ambulance in France, I suppose. Or in the Marines. My God, if I wanted to join any of those goddam things, I’d go to Russia, where they give women the honor of being fighter pilots. Better than cleaning out kitchens, no?”58

  No. Being a fighter pilot wasn’t better than cleaning out kitchens for someone like Pat Highsmith. She would never have joined the Russian air force because she was (1) too ambivalent to fight for any side but her own, (2) a terrible driver of any vehicle that required steering, (3) terrified of the sight of blood, and (4) actually very enthusiastic about cleaning out almost anything, kitchens included.

  In the same letter, Pat said that she was reading Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and wondered if it was a bad thing to do “for anyone writing a first novel…for the inevitable question appears—what need of more after this?” And she made the first of many requests over many decades for Kingsley to pick up for her personal use some of “the old Columbia spiral notebooks…. You know what a stickler I am for uniformity and I’ll need one soon.”59

  “Contrary to what you’ve read and heard,” said Pat’s cousin Dan Walton Coates, “for someone who didn’t like Fort Worth worth a damn, Pat sure as hell surfaced here quite frequently. When things were down for her, it was nice to go home.”60 Texas was both a magnet for Pat’s irritations and a mythical harbor where her battered little love boat could anchor and shelter in Grandmother Willie Mae’s upright manners and unyielding morals. Because of Willie Mae’s rocklike presence, the stability of the home situation in Fort Worth attracted Pat in exactly the same measure as its rigidity oppressed her. One of her notes for a “3rd person” short story, written during her precollege Fort Worth visit of 1938, reads: “Sunday at Grandmother’s…Stillness, the silence, the noises, the air, heat, the purpose. Depression, oppression, conscience.”61 But Pat kept coming back to Willie Mae, and Fort Worth was an interim stop on some of her trips to and from Mexico.

  Willie Mae’s house on West Daggett Avenue had a den with storage cabinets which ran all the way around the room. The doors to these cabinets were made up of unusually tall wooden panels, and Pat, stopping at Willie Mae’s on her way back to New York from Taxco, decorated every single one of the panels with paintings. She painted scenes from the Texas countryside into which she set, naturally enough, Texas cattle. And on the ground under the tail of one of those Texas cows, she carefully brushed in a large, fresh pile of cow dung. “That,” said her cousin Dan, “was a big subject of conversation.”62

  Back in New York at the end of May, Pat was poring over John Ruskin’s work. By the end of September, she was toting up the progress of her love life over the summer of 1944, during which she had enjoyed the reverse of her usual love troubles. One of the multiple affairs Pat began that summer was with the lovely, adventurous, alcoholic blond socialite Natica Waterbury, a woman Pat would keep up with all her life. Natica’s early death prompted Pat to dedicate a collection of short stories to her, and Natica’s daredevil exploits (she was a pilot) and literary and social interests (she assisted Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Company in Paris and was part of the international lesbian daisy chain) commanded Pat’s heart and head for quite a while. Still, it all seemed to come to the same thing in the end.

  “Loves by the dozen, love affairs by the dozen are all very well. But oh God, when they overlap! If one cou
ld merely be clear with one before beginning another, all would be well. It is the overlapping, the overlapping, the overlapping, until where one’s love heart is, is so thickly padded, nothing can any longer be felt.”63

  • 14 •

  Alter Ego

  Part 5

  Vince Fago, a cartoonist of considerable charm and sweetness (rabbits were his signature cartoon animal), was one of Pat’s editors at the comics company that was her most regular employer after she came back from Mexico; a company called Timely comics. Timely had offices in New York’s most famous landmark, the Empire State Building. During the Second World War, Vince Fago was responsible for hiring Timely’s freelance writers, and he would take the occasional walk and have the odd cup of coffee with his freelancer Patricia Highsmith. It was for Vince that Pat wrote the blood-drenched adventures of Jap Buster Johnson and the action-filled exploits of The Destroyer.1 (“The Destroyer” was a long-running feature story published in many comic books; amongst its other scripters were Otto Binder and Stan Lee.) Pat, always a go-getter, had approached Vince Fago for work in his office.

  “She came up and talked to me and I hired her. She did script scenarios, which meant a scene description and dialogue and sounds and captions for each panel. I’d give her eight- to ten-page stories to do at six to eight dollars a page. The money was terrific for anybody. We were rich and didn’t know it.”2

  On his eighty-eighth birthday, Vince Fago still remembered Pat Highsmith very well. It was her “beauty,” he said, which struck him first; he thought she was “just amazing,” a “terrific looker.” But Vince was newly and happily married when Pat came to work for him, so he thought he’d introduce Pat to the Timely editor whose post he had taken for the duration of the war, Stan Lee. Lee, now known worldwide as the public face of Marvel Comics (Timely evolved into Marvel) and the godfather of the enduring Superhero Spider-Man, was then a young soldier back in New York on leave from the U.S. Army. Vince Fago took Lee up to Pat’s apartment “near Sutton Place,” hoping to make a “match” between Pat and Stan Lee. But the future creator of the talented Mr. Ripley was not fated to go out on a date with the future facilitator of Spider-Man. “Stan Lee,” said Vince Fago, “was only interested in Stan Lee,” and Pat wasn’t exactly admitting where her real sexual interests lay.3 Lee, who invokes his failing memory and “murky mind,” remembers only Pat’s name from the incident.4

  Leon Lazarus, an associate editor at Timely for whom Pat wrote some romance comics at the end of the 1940s, remembered Pat as a “quiet, discreet person; a very intelligent woman” who moved in and out of the Timely offices like a ghost, delivering her scripts by laying them on his desk and then disappearing. He also thought he recalled one flattering notice: Eleanor Roosevelt, he said, had mentioned in her long-running newspaper column “My Day” (1935–62) that she was reading Strangers on a Train while riding on an actual train—and had liked the novel. And, said Lazarus, “The next thing you know, everybody went out and bought [the] book because Eleanor Roosevelt recommended it.”*5

  Pat had another editor at Timely after the war ended. Her name was Dorothy Roubicek. Will Eisner (whose testimony on this subject has been echoed by his contemporaries) emphasized that no women were really “well known” in the comics business.6 Roubicek, he said, was one of the few who had made her way into an administrative position. Pat used Dorothy Roubicek’s last name—minus the u—for one of the Grimm-est fairy-tale characters in The Price of Salt: the exhausted, middle-aged emigrée dressmaker whose attempt to reclothe and comfort the young heroine Therese ends in Therese’s disgusted rejection. Pat also slipped the name Sinnott into a manuscript: Joe Sinnott was one of the top artists at Timely comics. And in her Suffolk novel, A Suspension of Mercy, the television crime serial which her obsessive character Sydney Bartleby is trying to write with a partner (Pat was trying to do the same thing herself in Suffolk) is called “The Whip.” The Whip was a 1940s comics Superhero whose costume included a whip, very heavy makeup, and a fake Mexican accent.7

  Dorothy Roubicek was married to William Woolfolk, dubbed “the Shakespeare of comics” by one of the great rendering artists of the comics, Lou Fine. Woolfolk, a prolific television writer, the author of nineteen books and plays, and the creator of the comic book Superhero Captain Marvel’s immortal exclamation, “Holey Moley!” remembered what every man who worked with Pat remembered: how very “attractive” Patricia Highsmith had been in those days.8

  “We weren’t particularly sophisticated,” Woolfolk said of the people making the comics, “but we were all doing everything for the first time, including making money, having children, being comfortable. We were all chaste then about drink, but Pat wasn’t. She was very disappointed when she came to dinner and discovered that we didn’t have enough alcohol.”9 Pat said the same thing in her diary—and much less politely. By now, a dinner party without enough alcohol to help her through it made Pat furious.

  Woolfolk thought Pat was living “with the man who wrote Rain Before Seven.” That would have been Marc Brandel (real name: Marcus Beresford)—whose name Pat must have offered as both a smokescreen and a hope, for it was during the time she had dinner with Roubicek and Woolfolk that Pat was still trying to talk herself into marrying Marc.10 (See “Social Studies: Part 2.”) Pat liked to say that it was her grandmother Willie Mae who gave her the advice that closed the marriage-door on Marc Brandel. Could Pat bring herself to “wash Marc’s socks?” Willie Mae asked Pat in April of 1948. “I replied, no, come to think of it, I don’t think I’d like to…. So my grandmother advised me not to marry. May I say she was right.”11

  Vince Fago, Pat’s usual editor at Timely, met his artist wife, D’Anne, through another colleague at Timely—the eminent American fiction writer, critic, essayist, and editor Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was an editor at Timely Publications then, but not in the comics end of the business: “Why, I never read a comic in my life!” said Hardwick emphatically.12 Timely put out many kinds of publications, and Elizabeth Hardwick was editing Timely’s mystery-story line as well as contributing seriously to the intellectual circle supporting Partisan Review. She had no contact at all with the deadline-driven, pieceworking, assembly-line division that Pat was toiling for, although, said Hardwick, she wished she “had managed to meet Pat Highsmith.”

  Elizabeth Hardwick wasn’t the only prominent writer to work for a publishing company which also produced comic books. When Sam Rosen, a letterer for many comics companies, went into the army, his fellow artist Pierce Rice says, “there was a little going away luncheon for him…. The participants were: Miss Highsmith, then a comics writer, one of the [comics] editors, the guest of honor, and myself.”13

  The editor at that going-away luncheon was Stanley Kauffmann, later a theater critic for The New York Times and then, for twenty-five years, the film and theater critic for The New Republic magazine. He was the writer Pat had replaced at Cinema Comics when she went to work for Sangor-Pines (See “Alter Ego: Part 1.”) Kauffmann was a comics editor at Fawcett when this luncheon took place, and Pierce Rice thought that Kauffmann’s memoirs—“which included a chapter on the comics”—made “his connection [to them] more distant than it really was.”14 Many people who went on to distinguished careers outside the comics were unwilling to say they had ever worked in America’s newest art form.

  Mickey (“I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her”) Spillane was one of the exceptions.15 Spillane was working for Vince Fago at Timely comics when Pat was writing for Vince. Spillane and Pat both wrote stories for the same character—the bloodthirsty Jap Buster Johnson—but never at the same time. Comics’ artist Allen Bellman remembers Stan Lee handing him a Mickey Spillane script for Jap Buster Johnson in 1942 (a few months before Pat worked on the title), and Vince Fago said that during the war Spillane would come up to the Timely offices in the Empire State Building in his navy uniform to hand in his assignments. Spillane continued to write for the comics for years; he thought it was “a great train
ing ground for writers.”16

  Mickey Spillane had originally written up his perennial character Mike Hammer’s exploits as a feature story for comic books called “Mike Danger.” No one would publish it. In 1947, Spillane rewrote his comic book story as a pulp novel, I, the Jury, transforming Mike Danger into the violent, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, whose subsequent adventures made Mickey Spillane the twentieth century’s best-selling novelist. It’s the kind of joke Hammer himself might have tossed off before plugging yet another double-crossing dame.

  Pat didn’t think much of Mickey Spillane. “The old-fashioned morality of E[dmond] C[lerihew] Bentley will be remembered when Mickey Spillane is forgotten,” she wrote primly in 1953—making the rare admission that she was actually reading something other than the classics.17 As usual, the notes in her cahier give her away: she was not only reading the elegant English detective writer E. C. Bentley, she was also reading the work of Spillane himself. Bentley’s cleverly plotted, finely written works (there were only four detective novels, and he invented the verse form “clerihew”) focus on the “breakdown of identity” and the “false alibi”—two crucial themes that ran through everything Pat herself liked to read and write. Pat was eying all the competition, and the competition—no matter how much she tried to give the impression—wasn’t always Gide or Dostoyevsky.

  Vince Fago thought a lot of Pat. “She was a smart cookie. She could adapt herself,” he said. Adaptation to the quick reversals required by plot demands and printing deadlines was essential to success in the comics business. Pat was a “professional,” Vince said, “meticulous and clean and always met the deadline.”18 It was the same assessment Gerald Albert made of her when she worked at the Sangor-Pines shop. But Vince went a little further. “Working with her was just like working with a man,” Vince said. “She was one of the boys.”19