The Talented Miss Highsmith (11 page)

In her subsequent letters to Petit, Pat, as she usually was with young professionals, was chatty, forthcoming, supportive, and determined to get her money's worth out of the exchange. Remarking that Tabea had counted up his numerous film reviews, Pat cannily promoted one of her young protégées to another one:

And so the surface ripples closed gently over the deep waters of Pat's suspicions. But for six anxious days, Patricia Highsmith, awash in her overwhelming feelings for a much younger woman, nervous because she'd admitted her authorship of
The Price of Salt
, gamely attempting to keep her life in line by a small but significant act of forgery in her cahier, and occupied with what she automatically assumed were the criminal pursuits of her new friend, the young journalist Chris Petit, snapped right back to her default emotional position; the position which had long since determined her vision of how she confronted the world:

As an island of honesty in a sea of swindlers.

As a woman who always expected to be cheated.

As a writer who believed that everyone had something to hide.

Pat gave Therese in
The Price of Salt
and Howard Ingham in
The Tremor of Forgery
the suspicion on which this operating principle was founded: “All adults have secrets.” And all her murderers and escape artists live out its most extreme version. At moments of intolerable stress, they evacuate their identities, split off into Alter Egos, and re-create their personalities accordingly.

Here is David Kelsey, the romantic psychopath with the double identity in
This Sweet Sickness,
Pat's 1962 novel about the
other
love that dare not speak its name, summing himself up: “Call me Bill,” David said.
⁶⁰

And Tom Ripley, in
The Boy Who Followed Ripley,
costumed and made up as a woman and about to rescue a boy for whom he has an obvious attraction: “Don't call me Tom.”
⁶¹

And the affectless Ray Garrett, in
Those Who Walk Away,
hiding from himself and plagiarizing Sartre: “I'm not Ray Garrett tonight. I haven't been for days…. Perhaps identity, like hell, was merely other people.”
⁶²

In Highsmith Country, everyone—including the author—is a forger.

Part 2

Sixteen years before her spring break in the bars at the Berlin Film Festival with Tabea Blumenschein, Pat made another kind of pilgrimage to another European country—and it produced another act of forgery. She was still the official resident of a house on Sugan Road in New Hope, Pennsylvania (see “
Les Girls: Part 8
”), still travelling restlessly between countries, and still a month or so away from having her lifeline permanently crossed by a meeting with Caroline Besterman in London. Now she was in Paris to pay homage to the writer—himself a connoisseur of forgery and counterfeit—whose books she'd been reading since she was seventeen years old.

On 12 July 1962 Pat emerged from a lengthy ride on the Paris metro and entered a large gate set in a stone wall so long she couldn't see the end of it. She kept her eyes on her size 9½ shoes as they walked her up and over the hilly streets, “cobbled with huge, irregular stones,” of France's largest literary gathering ground: the Père Lachaise Cemetery in “the 20th Arrondissement of eastern Paris.”

“These stones,” she imagined with the kind of satisfaction that only thoughts of death could bring her, “must make a grim, loud noise when metal wheels of carts, carrying bodies, go over them!”
¹

It wasn't only Pat Highsmith who had to watch her feet on the cobblestones of Père Lachaise. Every writer who makes the pilgrimage there—and every writer does; Père Lachaise is the Dead Letter Office of Literary Aspirations—ends up with her eyes on the ground and “not,” as Pat carefully noted in her cahier, “on the names on the vaults and tombs.” Part of the secret pleasure in wandering the streets of this city of the dead is the perpendicularity of the visitor's position in relation to that of the defunct writers she is visiting; and no one strolling the cemetery wants to stumble on a stone and fall upon a grave. Pat, who would kill quite a few of her characters with nasty fictional falls, understood very well how the smallest irregularity in a rock could make the difference between life and death.

Paris is hot and bright this July day, perfect weather for cemetery walking. Fleecy clouds are chasing each other across an enormous expanse of Cézanne-blue sky, but Pat, who has a goal in mind, is not much interested in the atmosphere. She is carrying her
bolsa,
one of those large woven bags she brought back from her five months in Mexico in the early 1940s and never threw away. In it, she packs a three-by-five-inch spiral “travelling” notebook, along with something to drink and something to smoke. These are the props of her creative life and she is never without them: a notebook, a fountain pen, a lit cigarette, a bottle—and her tenebrous imagination.

Because the only thing Pat likes more than a good list is a good map, she is very much at home here. The moment she walked through the gate, she was handed—without charge; this was 1962—a map of the cemetery. And she needs it: Père Lachaise is the largest burial ground in Paris. It has its own “real roads,” its own prominently posted dead celebrity lists, and the map Pat is looking at shows the neat segments into which the cemetery's 105-acre plot is partitioned. But as she walks past the graves of Bizet, Balzac, and Alfred de Musset (and bypasses entirely the graves of Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan), “the only name which interested” her on the map was “Oscar Wilde's.” She finally “reached [his grave] after nearly a mile of walking among time-darkened rectangular vaults.”

“I came upon Oscar's [monument]—a large nearly square rectangle of granite with a large Egyptian figure in headdress, flying horizontally. Only his name on the front in large letters. On the back is engraved his birth and death dates, his achievements at school, data of the Newdigate Poetry prize at the age of 24, and then those great and most fitting lines.”

To an outsider artist—an outsider
everything
—like Pat Highsmith, the lines inscribed on Oscar's marble headstone (from his poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”) seem to be written for her alone. “And alien tears will fill for him pity's long-broken urn…. his mourners will be outcast men.”

“My eyes fill with tears,” she writes, and then corrects herself in her notebook: “(filled).” She doesn't want her future readers to think she is composing these words as she weeps at Oscar's grave. Nor she does she want them to feel she is conjugating the tense of her experience to harmonize the chronology of her notebook—something she has done many times before and will do many times again. This moment is too important, too
authentic,
to counterfeit. (But, still, she never takes her eyes off her audience.)

“Such tears,” she writes, meaning her own, “are brief and deep, like a stab wound,” and her mind flashes to her own fear of obscurity as she “remember[s] well the various accounts of [Oscar's] lonely, pauper's funeral to which nearly nobody came.” Pat needn't have worried. Her memorial service in Switzerland will have a full house and a German television crew to record it.

And then—perhaps it's an early appearance by the little fiend from Satan's Inner Circle who visited her in the preceding chapter—something rather odd happens; something which cuts another key to the complicated lock guarding the Highsmith imagination. The hypervigilant Pat misses a detail, mistakes a date, fastens on a wrong impression, and then creates a counterfeit description from her string of errors. It's the kind of mistake she will make more and more as her imagination, never really at home in Europe, is distanced by decades from the only place and time she ever knew well: New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. This is the modus operandi she will apply to Christopher Petit in May of 1978 when she misspells the young journalist's last name and then—improvising madly—turns him into a felon and a forger.

Although her tears for Oscar's fate are deeply felt, Pat has always cast a cold eye on life and death. And so, as she weeps, she can't stop herself from criticizing Oscar's funerary architecture. This is a most inappropriate monument, she thinks, for the tomb of a writer whose meditations on forgery and counterfeit, seductive portrayal of criminals, and long, unlovely martyrdom for homosexuality have moved her since she was a teenager. But Pat's critique of Oscar's grave rests squarely on the error she has just made; the result of a faulty application of the talent she is widely supposed to have mastered: close observation of detail.

Pat's mistake is to imagine that the sculpture surmounting Oscar's grave, Jacob Epstein's famous funerary monument of a winged Egyptian erected in the belle epoque, in 1909, is an art deco construction of the “mid-Twenties.” What's more, she judges “the Egyptian motif not at all appropriate” for Oscar Wilde. Thus, as well as getting the sculpture's style and epoch all wrong, she fails to understand the suitability of a pharaonic figure for the tomb of a writer whose delusions of grandeur were as outsized as those of Ozymandias; a writer who composed his own Egyptian-influenced poem called “The Sphinx” and who gave the sobriquet “Sphinx” to one of his dearest friends, Ada Leverson, grandmother of Francis Wyndham, the author and critic who will shortly give Pat's work its first and most intelligent written introduction in England.

And—was it her famous reluctance to see or speak in public anything that had to do with sex?—Pat also managed to miss the winged Egyptian's most salient feature: the mutilation of its marble genitalia. Jacob Epstein, the sculptor, had been criticized before for his “undue attention” to the sexual characteristics of his statues, and the prominent genitalia of this one had been hacked away by industrious lycée students in the half century since the monument was put in place. When Janet Flanner made her own pilgrimage to Père Lachaise in the early 1920s to place a single black iris on Oscar's tomb, Epstein's statue had already been emasculated.
²
Even today, almost five decades after Pat's visit, the winged Egyptian is still without its principal part.

And so Pat Highsmith—inspired observer of minute detail, serious fan of all things Wildean, compulsive collector of dates and times in her cahiers—mistook every single thing she saw at the tomb of Oscar Wilde: the style, the substance, the suitability, the context, even the epoch.

But at the graveside, the wheel of Pat's imagination was already spinning her errors of understanding into fictional gold. Because she didn't like what she had just misidentified as the “
Art Deco
Egyptian motif” of Oscar's art nouveau Egyptian monument, she began to search her mind for a suitable replacement, for the kind of tomb
she
might have created for the King of Counterfeit.

And inspiration came to her.

Oscar's funerary monument, Pat decided, “should have been a Greek boy.”

Part 1

Pat's owl's eye for detail—however she used it—was matched only by her proofreader's instinct for orthography and punctuation. There are just a handful of uncorrected errors in her manuscript files, which, says Anna von Planta, her editor at Diogenes Verlag, in a phrase Pat would have loved, are “so massive that when spread out they are 150 feet in length.”
¹
Pat liked to look at language in its simplest form before she fell asleep, so every night she read her dictionary for half an hour. (“As a novelist, I can say…the dictionary is the most entertaining book I have ever read.”)
²
And she kept endless lists of words and phrases in four or five languages and queried her publishers relentlessly about misprints and wrong facts.
³
“It is hard to believe so many errors could occur in such few lines,” she reproved the staff at
Who's Who
.
⁴
“This minuscule erratum will probably catch the eye of only one out of every three hundred and sixty-five Ellery Queen Magazine readers,” she wrote to
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
.
⁵

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:

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 was 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 inherit
²⁰
—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