The Talented Miss Highsmith Read online

  The chance meeting with Kathleen Senn in Bloomingdale’s in December of 1948 set off a series of reactions which were so disturbing for Patricia that she had to balance them out by squeezing them into the perfections offered by art—and by death. (There is no clearer example of the dangers and delights of creation than Pat’s own account of how she behaved while writing The Price of Salt.) Thus, the “automatic writing” of the plot of The Price of Salt that “flowed” from her pen was neatly counterweighted by the urge to tighten her hands around Kathleen Senn’s throat: an urge that was overpowering Pat by the time she’d finished her novel. It brought forth her fullest explanation of how the muscles of her life moved her work, and she wrote it down the day after she’d first gone to New Jersey to spy on Mrs. Senn.

  I am interested in the murderer’s psychology, and also in the opposing planes, drives of good and evil (construction and destruction). How by a slight defection one can be made the other, and all the power of a strong mind and body be deflected to murder or destruction! It is simply fascinating!

  And to do this primarily, again, as entertainment. (Better than Coates did it in Wisteria Cottage.)*

  How perhaps even love by having its head persistently bruised, can become hate. For the curious thing yesterday is I felt quite close to murder, as I went to see the house of the woman who almost made me love her when I saw her a moment in December, 1948. Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s affections?) To arrest her suddenly, my hands upon her throat (which I should really like to kiss) as if I took a photograph, to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue.74

  Murder was a call that came quite naturally to Patricia Highsmith when she was in the grip of an overwhelming desire. “Murder fills my heart tonight / Like the words of first love,” she’d written in 1947, in a love/jealousy poem to Virginia Kent Catherwood.75 If Pat’s brush with Kathleen Senn had been the inspiration for The Price of Salt, then Pat’s affair with Ginnie Catherwood provided many of the solid marital details of that novel—even down to the phallic recording spike driven into the wall of the motel room through which the pursuing detective gathers evidence to take Carol’s child away from her. The same thing had happened to Ginnie Catherwood, and Pat was “worr[ied] that Ginnie may feel Carol’s case too similar to her own.”76 That worry didn’t stop her from publishing Ginnie’s history, however. Publishing personal histories (lightly or largely transformed) was something Pat would do again and again to her friends, her lovers, and to herself. The persistent “neutrality” and “coolness” of her prose was the mark of the metaphorical flatiron she passed over these histories in order to press them, hotly, into the forms of her fictions.

  Pat first met Virginia Tucker Kent Catherwood at a party at the end of 1944 given by Rosalind Constable; Rosalind knew Ginnie and her husband through the publishing circles she frequented. Virginia’s husband, the “youthful Main Line socialite and financier” as Time magazine called him, Cummins Catherwood, had inherited fifteen million dollars outright in 1929, as well as a basket of trust funds that paid him an income of nearly a million and a half dollars a year through the Depression.77 By 1941, Cummins Catherwood was backing his cousin in the purchase of a venerable Philadelphia newspaper, the Philadelphia Public Ledger—a strictly Republican paper like the conservative New York Herald Tribune, the paper Pat had been reading every weekday since she was in high school.78

  No matter where else Pat’s perverse, unusually criminal imagination went on its travels, the Million Dollar American Dream was where it came to rest. She often placed herself, as she would write to Kingsley, at “that mystical point very near the foot of the rainbow where there is always a pot of gold, and presumably happiness ever after.”79 Virginia Kent Catherwood might have been tailor-made for Pat’s aspirations.

  Virginia Catherwood’s’s father, Arthur Atwater Kent, was the American Dream incarnate. A Vermonter whose early interest in automobiles led him to invent, amongst other devices, a distributor to facilitate the ignition of the internal combustion engine, he went on to found the largest radio company in the world, Atwater Kent, which manufactured radios of very high quality. When the fashion for small, cheap radios began, Kent refused to compromise on either the quality or the size of his models. Preferring to do things his way or not at all, he closed his company down in 1936. Virginia’s mother, with whom Pat would optimistically correspond about her wayward daughter, gave Ginnie Catherwood the kind of upbringing Mother Mary would have loved to have given to Pat (or to herself): finishing school, art study in Paris, and a socialite’s wedding.

  By June 1946, when Pat and Ginnie Catherwood started their affair, Ginnie had been divorced for five years, had apparently lost the custody of her daughter, and was a serious alcoholic under periodic treatment for addiction. She drank so much that Pat feared for her life—and with good reason. In May of 1947, Ginnie’s drinking caused her to temporarily lose her voice and the sensation in her fingers, a terrifying incident that found its way into the characterization of the alcoholic Charles Anthony Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Ginnie—this would have been the jewel in Pat’s psychological crown—even had another girlfriend, a photographer named Sheila. All the emotional and social tensions calculated to excite Pat were in place, and Pat, maddened with jealousy by Ginnie’s “infidelity,” and finding in her madness the oppositions that always enabled her as an artist, wrote: “There is nothing I would not do, murder, destruction, vile sexual practices. I would also, however, read my Bible.”80

  In fact, at the end of her relationship with Ginnie, Pat confined herself to one vile letter to Ginnie about her lover Sheila—and to the obligatory short affair with Sheila herself.81 (And she did keep on reading her Bible.) But Pat’s year with Virginia Kent Catherwood made an indelible impression: as she suffered, her imagination was set drifting, harvesting, and profiting artistically, as it always would do with every turbulent affair she ever had. It was only the calm affairs, like the bucolic relationship she had with “Doris” in Palisades, New York, in 1956–58, that provided Pat with relatively weak artistic results.

  With Ginnie, however, the artistic benefits would come later. In early January of 1948, Pat confided to her diary that the seventy pages of manuscript (Strangers on a Train) she’d worked on after her affair with Ginnie collapsed were written “as if I’d had a broken leg, when I wrote them,”82 and she destroyed several of the chapters. But The Price of Salt was a different matter: Pat said the novel could not have been imagined without her love affair with Ginnie, and without Ginnie Catherwood it would surely have been a very different book. While Mrs. Senn may have ignited the imaginative fever from which Pat produced her plot, the structure of Carol Aird’s life, her problematic divorce and troubles with child custody, the pursuing detective, the nature of her relations with Therese—everything in the work that was exciting to Pat—was loosely taken from the life of Virginia Kent Catherwood.

  Pat chose not to portray Ginnie’s daughter in The Price of Salt (Carol Aird’s daughter appears only as a photograph), but the child spent some time with Ginnie and Pat. And one afternoon by a swimming pool, Pat took the time to read to the little girl her own favorite story, one written in 1865 by an English don with the kind of uncomfortable attachment to young girls Pat had already noticed in herself. Later, Pat sent a letter to Kingsley about the story: “My highest ambition is to write a kind of Alice in Wonderland. Actually I’d prefer it to scoring another Crime and Punishment.”83

  For the rest of her life—especially when writing—Pat Highsmith would bring out the image of Virginia Kent Catherwood whenever she needed it, even though (and probably because) she and Ginnie never spoke again after they separated.84 “The Still Point of the Turning World,” a short story Pat wrote immediately after she and Ginnie broke up in 1947, is a little representation of Pat’s own understanding of the strict moral attitudes and physical jealousies she was left with when she lost Ginnie. Em
bedded in the tale is another origin story for the homosexual twinnings that would run through her writing. Two little boys, toddlers, Philip and Dickie, fall in infant love in a small Manhattan park in Chelsea and are poignantly separated because Mrs. Robinson, Philip’s mother, is both disdainful of Dickie’s déclassé mother and jealous of her romantic connection with a man who is not her husband. Mrs. Robinson lives in what is meant to be the lovely art deco London Terrace apartments on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. Dickie’s mother, palpably poor, uses the park to tryst with her lover-to-be, Lance, while her husband is at work and her child plays. Mrs. Robinson, awash in sexual jealousy and class contempt, takes little Philip away from Dickie and withdraws from the park, forever.

  Pat said she was technically interested in the shifting perspective she built into “The Still Point of the Turning World,” but the story’s best feature is its close observation and painful juxtaposition of the romantic and the “real.” It is reminiscent of the skillful economies and heart-piercing disappointments of a Shirley Jackson story.

  Although Pat didn’t think Ginnie Catherwood’s drinking habits would allow her to survive ten years beyond the end of their affair, Ginnie did just that. Her irregular trajectory finally brought her to the colorful southwestern United States—to Tucson, Arizona, in fact, where she did not cease to attract interesting women. Ginnie made a last appearance in print (in the press this time, not in a novel) on 29 November 1959, when she was sued for a million dollars by the imposter prince David Mdivani, a man who had awarded himself and his brothers titles when they arrived, impoverished, in America from the Russian state of Georgia. The Mdivani boys were known as “the marrying Mdivanis” for the astonishing number of wealthy women they managed to wed or otherwise strip of their assets. The legal case David Mdivani launched against Ginnie Catherwood was for alienating the affections of his current wife, the great silent film star Mae Murray, “by lavishing her with expensive gifts.”

  If Mae Murray, who is rumored to have been the inspiration for the demented movie star played by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Blvd., really did have a liaison with Ginnie Catherwood, then we are left with the entertaining possibility—in whichever alternate, postmodernist afterlife these things are worked out—of a literary love affair between Norma Desmond and Carol Aird. And if Pat had known about Ginnie’s relationship with Murray (she didn’t know), her trip to London in 1969 to write a feature article for Queen magazine about another Billy Wilder film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, might have had better consequences than the rather dull piece of journalism it produced.

  Ginnie Catherwood, asked to comment on the false prince’s lawsuit against her, declared, with a prudence which might have served her better had it been exercised earlier, that she had “nothing to say to anyone.”85

  • 18 •

  Les Girls

  Part 2

  Pat’s first trip to the Europe of her imagination—in June of 1949 just after she’d spent all her money on psychoanalysis—was as an engaged woman: she had changed her mind again and decided that marriage to her on-and-off-again fiancé Marc Brandel might just be possible in the distant month of December. She was also travelling as an author whose first novel, the soon-to-be-titled Strangers on a Train, had just been accepted by Joan Kahn at Harper & Brothers.* But she still had to earn money, and so, instead of watching Noël Coward dine at the captain’s table on the Queen Mary (he had settled in several decks above her in luxury class), Pat typed comic book scenarios for Timely comics in her cattle-class cabin all the way across the Atlantic.

  By the time the ship docked at Southampton she was ready to forget her engagement to Marc and travel in style to Waterloo Station. Pat’s hosts in London were Dennis Cohen, head of Cresset Press, and his wife, the psychoanalyst Kathryn Hamill Cohen, and they picked her up in their Rolls-Royce at Waterloo and drove her to their handsome house at 64 Old Church Street, Chelsea, just off the King’s Road. It was a nice change from the D deck and the third-class cabin Pat had just shared with three other women on the Queen Mary.

  Kathryn Hamill Cohen was an American-born former Ziegfeld girl who had come to London at twenty-four and trained as a geneticist. She was working as a psychoanalyst at London’s St. George’s Hospital when she met Pat in March of 1948 at a party at Rosalind Constable’s New York apartment. (Pat had asked Rosalind pointedly if the Cohens’ address was the “best address” she had to offer in England.) Kathryn was beautiful, intelligent, melancholy, monied, and married: a combination Pat always found irresistible. The fact that Kathryn’s husband, Dennis, founder of London’s Cresset Press (an imprint of Bantam Books), was interested in Pat’s work and would go on to publish Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer, and The Talented Mr. Ripley practically assured that a seduction was in the offing.

  During Pat’s fortnight at the Cohens’, Kathryn took her on a small cultural tour of London, out to lunch with the actress Peggy Ashcroft, and then to Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon, where they saw Kathryn’s friend Diana Wynyard play Desdemona and then visited her backstage. Pat’s appreciation of the actress known as the “Queen of Stratford” was a foregone conclusion: “She is charming, extremely, touchingly attentive to her guests. And how happy I am to spend a few hours with such a beautiful woman.”1

  Back in London, Kathryn brought a geneticist’s mind to Pat’s hormone deficiencies and a psychoanalyst’s perception to her love life, summing both up in a sentence which signalled her own attraction to Pat: “If you were added up, I think you’d have a little more on the male side—from your reactions to men, I mean.”2 Two days after she’d left the Cohen house for the Continent, Pat was in Paris, in the state of rapture that city always produces, and yearning for two women at once: “I need Kathryn, or Ann!” Then, hedging her bets, she added Chloe Sprague to her wish list.3

  Pat went to Marseille to stay with Mother Mary’s friend the cartoonist Jean David (“Jeannot”), who pressed his attentions on her. From Marseille, she wrote to Marc Brandel breaking off their engagement. (Like her previous good-byes to Marc, this one wasn’t quite final. When she did say a final goodbye in July of 1950, Pat recorded Marc’s “merciless” response: Marc thought she was “the most self-centered person he knew…. people didn’t exist for me except as opponents of some sort.”)4

  Beginning a vagabondage that would bring her to Venice, Bologna, and Florence, Pat took a bus from Marseille to Genoa, mopping up impressions as she went. In Genoa, she paused long enough to fling into the already littered streets the yellow pyjamas Marc had given her as a love gift.

  Two months after she’d left London, sick and solitary in her hotel room in Rome and feeling deeply sorry for herself, Pat took a chance on her feelings and wired Kathryn Cohen in London, asking her if she’d like to come to Italy. Yes, said Kathryn in a telephone call, she’d like to come to Naples. In anticipation of Kathryn’s arrival, Pat allowed the fetid smell and filthy streets of the city to bring her imagination back to The Argument of Tantalus, the manuscript that would become The Price of Salt. Love would often be a misery for Pat, but it never began as anything less than an artistic inspiration.

  When Kathryn arrived at the beginning of September, the two women drove to Positano—this was Pat’s introduction to the enchanting hill village that would prove to be a catalyst for The Talented Mr. Ripley—and took a romantic boat trip to Palermo and Capri. Sometime during the twenty days of their travels they became lovers.

  On her third-class boat passage back to New York from Genoa, Pat, enterprisingly carrying an accordion she planned to sell in New York, summoned up an image of Kathryn and began to work in earnest on The Argument of Tantalus. She was hoping, despite her “dissolute three days” in Paris (where she’d frequented the venerable lesbian bar Le Monocle), and her promiscuous behavior in London (where she’d managed to pick up and sleep with several women during the short time she stayed with the Cohens), to wring a “two year relationship” out of her feelings. Now, how
ever, never a woman to waste anything, Pat was using those feelings to thicken the texture of The Price of Salt.

  Kathryn Hamill Cohen and Pat never renewed their relationship. As a practicing psychoanalyst, Kathryn would have understood very well what Pat’s alluring needs really represented: flares in the night, illuminating the site of an accident that was just waiting to happen.

  Back in New York from this first exhilarating trip to Europe, in long-distance love with Kathryn and working on the novel that would make the most “truthful” use of her own biography, Pat was in “a period of greater happiness and contentment than in the past three or four years.” Out of her haze of happiness, she provided a little theory for her behavior.

  “I don’t think I trust anyone under the sun further than the length of my arm.”5

  The theory set out, she went on, three months later, to describe its practice:

  The entire pattern of my life has been and is, she has rejected me. The only thing I can say for myself at the age of twenty-nine, that vast age, is that I can face it. I can meet it head on…. In fact, I have learned to reject first. The important thing is to practise this. That my limping crutches are not trained to do…. Therefore, to one more love, good by. A dieu. But no—God will not be with you, not you.6