The Talented Miss Highsmith Page 34

  But Pat, by her own account, seems to have been drinking even more than the people she drank with, and her drinking raises all the serious questions about the motives and responsibilities of a chronic drinker. Can an alcoholic be held accountable for what she says when she is drunk? Or is alcoholism so distorting a disease that a prejudice expressed by an inveterate drinker is merely the bomb site for the detonation of a rage that cannot be released in any other way?

  Because Pat, like her birthday twin and fellow alcoholic, Edgar Allan Poe, suffered all her life from depressive cycles and agitated mental states, there are other questions to be raised. Kay Redfield Jamison, in her invaluable book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, has called them “complicated questions about whether the melancholic muse is also a ‘thirsty muse.’”74

  Did the drinking help ease Pat into the subconscious state from which her writing proceeded? And did she use it to relieve her depressions? Or did the alcohol itself increase her depressions, add to her rages, and contribute to the late-life waning of her work? Was she enough like Poe so that we can say—as Poe’s biographers have already said of him—that the forces which made Patricia Highsmith write were also the forces which made her drink? The answer to each of these questions is probably a variously qualified yes.

  And there is one more thing to be accounted for. In light of Pat’s more or less morning-till-night drinking habits (begun in late adolescence and exacerbated in her twenties), did anyone, after a certain point, ever actually see Patricia Highsmith sober? Some friends even claim to have been unaware that Pat was ever drunk, mostly because they had no basis of sobriety with which to compare her behavior.

  Phillip Lloyd Powell, furniture maker, designer, and resident of New Hope, Pennsylvania, for sixty years, was a close friend of Pat’s New Hope lover, Daisy Winston. He was “part of a group of people in New Hope” with whom Pat occasionally socialized in the very early 1960s. Although a casual acquaintance, he formed a vivid impression of Pat’s relationship to alcohol.

  “She was never visibly drunk; she kept a certain level. Her darkness would be exuded. She was surrounded by a black cloud. She WAS a black cloud.”75

  On 10 March 1963 (Pat noted the date and the encounter in her diary), Powell ran into Pat in Rome. They were both on their way to the airport. Pat had been staying in Positano, and she was on her way to London to be with Caroline Besterman, whose confusions over her marriage and her long-distance love affair with Pat had made her ill. Powell continues the story:

  At that time in Rome, the airport bus stopped in the train station. It was a beauty, an architectural landmark. You came into the bus station on the train and then the bus took you to the airport. The waiting room had all the amenities, cafeterias, bars, etc….

  I was sitting there waiting for my bus to the plane, with my Italian suit on, done up to the hilt because at that time you dressed to travel. And I saw this figure pacing, up and down the corridor, stalking was more the word, in a big ankle-length cloak. This tall dark figure, brooding and stalking up and down. And I realized it was Pat Highsmith. It was such a visual experience; she looked like a character out of a Gorey illustration. And she was very very into herself.

  And I went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m Daisy’s friend.” And she said “Oh I’m in a terrible state. A friend of mine in England, a married friend, a woman, is very ill. And I’m going back to see her and the plane is late.” And so we went for a coffee and as we were approaching the bar she said: “I don’t think I’ll have a coffee, I’ll have a grappa.” And I go up and I order an espresso and a grappa. And when we were served, the bartender put the coffee in front of me and the grappa in front of her. He knew, without being told, exactly who should get the alcohol in that group.76

  The English actress Heather Chasen, for whom Pat wrote her unproduced play When the Sleep Ends, met Pat through Annie Duveen shortly after Pat moved to England in the early 1960s. Like all theater people, Chasen dates her life from the plays she performed in, and she remembers that she was doing The Severed Head in London (“I was in it for two years, God help me”) when she first met Pat. “If Severed Head was on, it must have been ’63 or ’64.”

  “I was very fond of Pat…and I admired her talent…but she was an extremely difficult woman, extremely difficult. There was a period of time when I didn’t see her for several years when I felt she’d gone too far in her very strange behavior and she really pissed me off. The best relationship I had with Pat was through letters because she wrote wonderful letters and you couldn’t really fall out with her in letters.”

  When asked if she had ever seen Pat intoxicated, Chasen roared with laughter.

  All the time, dear. The proper question would be: did I ever see her sober. She was always the same, she was always topped up with alcohol, but it didn’t make any difference in her behavior. I never saw her sober, so I don’t know the difference. She was always aggressive and grumpy [and] she was always making passes. When you’ve had enough to drink, dear, you overcome your shyness…. [But] I saw underneath all this sort of grumpy, belligerent behavior and I saw a very vulnerable person and that touched me….

  I did a play, Call Me Jacky, by Enid Bagnold, and I played opposite Dame Sybil Thorndike. I played Jacky. When Enid lived in Brighton in the war, she couldn’t get a cook, so she got her staff from a local lunatic asylum and she got this woman called Jacky who was a homicidal lesbian drunk. And she wrote a play about her. It was a wonderful part to play. They wanted to dress Jacky in a cashmere twin set and pearls, but I dressed her like Pat, and Pat never knew. A maniac, an alcoholic. Perfect. [See illustration.]77

  Chasen visited Pat in France in the late 1960s and 1970s “in several places…she didn’t stay with me but I stayed with her and that was worse” and had the experience common to most Highsmith guests: she went hungry in a house whose hostess was indifferent, if not positively hostile, to food.

  “I remember being absolutely starving and looking in the fridge and all there was was peanut butter and vodka. I hardly saw her eat…. When she came here, she ate, because I provided the food. But when I used to say to Pat, “Oh come and let’s have lunch,” she would say: “I’VE GOT TO WATER THE GARDEN IF YOU DON’T MIND!” And lunch was never mentioned again and you never got it….

  “Someone asked me do they change for dinner in France and I said: ‘Yes, Pat used to change from gin to whiskey.’”78

  Jeanne Moreau, who met Pat in 1974 when she was acting in a Peter Handke play at L’Espace Cardin in Paris, had a somewhat similar experience at Pat’s house, although she framed it differently. Moreau and Pat got on very well, and she was invited to visit Pat with Peter Handke at Pat’s house in Moncourt. There, Moreau, a famous gourmand, “discovered that [Patricia’s] refrigerator was almost empty.”

  “She explained to me that she was very frugal and didn’t know how to cook. I told her that I adored cooking and she proposed that I return and cook a duck because she liked duck very much. So much so that each time I saw her, I arrived with a duck, we feasted, and Patricia’s cats feasted with us.”79

  Pat, who liked Jeanne Moreau very much—“I like the way she talks, I like the way she smokes,” she told a young friend80—made a culinary exception for her. Moreau was too discreet to mention the fact that while Pat’s houses were usually empty of food, they were always well stocked with alcohol. In 1975, Jeanne Moreau gave Pat a hazelnut tree for her Moncourt garden: Pat planted it and it continued to flourish.81 And Moreau visited Pat for lunch in Moncourt and traveled to her last house in Tegna, where Pat’s neighbor, Peter Huber, taking no chances, cooked for both of them.

  Another of Pat’s neighbors in Tegna remembered the time she’d brought “a dear friend and houseguest” who was “quite heavy” to Pat’s house.

  “Pat was horrible, insulted her with a comment about some people going to the grocery store and buying everything in sight…. The next day I telephoned Pat from the office [to confro
nt her] with [her] totally unacceptable behavior…. [S]he didn’t remember a single thing! She genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about. I wondered if she’d been drunk and we couldn’t tell…. I don’t think I ever introduced her to a friend…again.”82

  In most of Pat’s later-life outbursts, outbursts in which she had no trouble giving her array of prejudices overt and vocal form, alcohol was implicated. Enforcing the importance of drink in Pat’s life was the fact that alcohol is a recurring prop—virtually a character—in many of her novels. Like the small flask of gin, vodka, or scotch she always kept in her large Mexican purse, her bolsa (Grandmother Willie Mae also carried a flask of her “toddy” on car journeys with her family “in case she got sick”),83 Pat Highsmith took the idea of drink with her everywhere.

  In June of 1943, Pat accompanied Seymour Krim, a fledgling journalist who would later spend much of his career glorifying the Beat writers, to have coffee at the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson. Hyman, a brilliantly loquacious twenty-four-year-old literary critic, was already a staff writer at The New Yorker, while Shirley Jackson was at the beginning of her own career as a writer of near-perfect short stories (“The Lottery”) and uncanny novels (The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, et al.) Later in the decade, Jackson’s fictions would elegantly explore some of the same psychological states which obsessed Pat. A recurrent character in Jackson’s collection of short stories The Lottery (1949), Jamie Harris, “the daemon lover,” is a trickster figure who was more than a bit of a Ripley himself—six years before Tom Ripley made his literary debut.84

  On this visit to the Jackson/Hyman household, Pat seems to have been infuriated by the talk, and had undoubtedly tried to calm her insecurities by some presocial drinking at home. Perhaps Stanley Edgar Hyman’s wunderkind status at The New Yorker (which continued to reject Pat’s manuscripts and cartoons) got under her skin. Or maybe it was Hyman’s garrulousness (he was famously exuberant and Pat always felt inadequate around intellectuals) that provoked the little French phrase she wrote in her diary about the afternoon’s social call: “[T]he Jews disgusting!”85 Pat did better with Shirley Jackson, who, to be sure, wasn’t Jewish. Shirley gave her good advice about the importance of finding a literary agent.

  Pat usually preferred to do her socializing uptown, and as soon as she had moved to the Upper East Side, she declared her preference for it and her rejection of all the Village “losers” she had known. Among the people she called upon in her new neighborhood was Fanny Lee Myers (later Fanny Myers Brennan). Pat called Fanny Myers “a girl painter,” the same term she used for Buffie Johnson, and at twenty Fanny was already a known artist, with reviews and gallery showings to her credit. Fanny was the daughter of the Herald Tribune’s Paris bureau chief, Richard Myers, and the international hostess Alice Lee Herrick Myers, and she was connected through her parents to all the well-known or socially prominent people Pat would meet in New York and Paris, among them, Americans such as Janet Flanner (who had gone to the University of Chicago with both the Myerses) and Esther Murphy Arthur.

  After Fanny married Hank Brennan, Pat went to a party the couple hosted for Rosalind Constable in March of 1949. And she remembered that Fanny had been a painting student of Buffie Johnson, “which evokes a host of memories.”86 Fanny was Pat’s exact contemporary, and she had the kind of background Pat coveted: graduation from the Spence School and art study in Paris before coming back to New York. Fanny made perfect, minuscule landscapes, captivating worlds on a thumbnail, none of them larger than two or three inches on any side.87

  Fanny Myers’s tiny paintings were the likely source of inspiration for the character of Ripley’s friend Cleo in The Talented Mr. Ripley, although Pat, who knew Myers only slightly, entirely invented the relationship for Tom in the novel. Cleo comes from the same social background as Myers, and she paints exquisitely tiny paintings just as Myers did—except that Cleo paints them on pieces of ivory. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley spends chaste nights at Cleo’s Upper East Side apartment admiring her miniature paintings, drinking heavily of her wine, and sleeping quietly beside her—as a sister might do—on the floor in front of her fireplace. Cleo is the one person with whom Tom can share the good news of his “ambassadorship” to Europe, and she is the recipient of the only kiss—again, it is sisterly—he bestows in the novel. (Kisses in Highsmith novels are not quite as rare as kisses in Henry James’s work, but “scant” is a good description of their number.) Cleo is also the only good artist in the novel. Tom, who has both an “eye” and the adopted New Yorker’s desire to use it critically, is both disappointed by Dickie Greenleaf’s mediocre paintings and disgusted with Marge Sherwood’s dilatory attempts at novel writing.

  But nothing picked Pat out as a New Yorker more than her classically Manhattan attachment to musical comedy—and to her old classmate Judy Tuvim/Holliday’s musical comedy sketch group, the Revuers. Pat followed Judy’s career and the careers of two of her collaborators in the Revuers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, in their shows at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. And she went uptown to see them at the Rainbow Room, bringing Rosalind Constable with her. When Judy Tuvim transformed herself into Judy Holliday and starred as Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s play Born Yesterday (it opened on Broadway on 4 February 1946), Pat went to see the show several times and remembered that “Judy always welcomed me backstage…and was very friendly also to whomever I dragged along—my mother or my grandmother, maybe.”88

  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 vi
gnette 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.

  The end of a talent, perhaps a genius. For where does genius show itself more brilliantly in America than in the creation of musical comedy…? I chanced to drop in on the way home at one in the morning on a producer then hard at work with her two writers…. All were tight on Rheims champagne. “I’ve been auditioning hit shows—I BEG your pardon—since 1926, and you two CHILDREN try to tell me how to audition?—I’m very sorry, let’s try that number again, Phil.” And she sings to his piano playing…a few lines from the song’s main lyric…. What heart, male or female, can this soprano with the cracked face, the exhausted and false eyes, the straggling, not-even-bedroomy hair enflame…?94