Beautiful Shadow (35 page)

     The movie opened in America in July 1951, but as Highsmith was in Europe, she didn’t see it until October. She was initially quite pleased with it, especially Robert Walker’s portrayal of Bruno, but later voiced her disapproval at the way Hitchcock drained the work of its power to shock – in the film, Guy, played by Farley Granger, now a professional tennis player instead of an architect, fails to carry out his murder – and the casting of Ruth Roman as Ann, Guy’s love interest. ‘I thought it was ludicrous,’ said Highsmith. ‘It’s even more ludicrous that he’s [Guy’s] aspiring to be a politician, and that he’s supposed to be in love with that stone angel.’
⁴⁸

After months of procrastination, Highsmith’s relationship with Marc Brandel finally broke down in the fall of 1950. In November, she opened Brandel’s new novel,
The Choice
, and read the standard abrogation at the beginning of the book. ‘None of the characters portrayed in this book is intended as a reflection on any actual person.’ From the briefest of perusals, it was obvious that this was not so, as Highsmith herself recognised. ‘I am Jill Hillside & there down to the last detail  . . .’
⁴⁹

     Superficially Brandel’s book is a thriller – it concerns the strange case of Nat Mason, a roach exterminator who steals women’s underwear and sends poison pen letters – but really this is just an excuse for Brandel to explore his unhappy love affair with Highsmith. The book centres on the relationship between Ned Marlowe, a freelance comic book artist, his girlfriend, Jill, and her lesbian lover, Ann Dawson, and as such is a fictionalised account of the triangular situation that existed between Brandel, Highsmith and Ann Smith. Jill is a slender girl with dark hair, a woman with square and strong-looking hands, fragile thighs and small, childish breasts. Ned loves her but feels that she is distant towards him, especially during lovemaking. Sometimes in the middle of kissing her, she asks questions like, ‘ “What date’s Wednesday?” ’, or she reminds herself to pick up some toothpaste the next morning. ‘Oh, God, if he could only just once
reach
her, he thought,’ Brandel wrote.
⁵⁰

     When Ned realises the truth about the Jill and Ann, he is shocked and disgusted, and likens the discovery to that of a having a bandage removed: ‘You had known all along how bad it was, the doctors had told you, but you hadn’t believed it until you saw the stump.’
⁵¹
The homosexual world sickens him, he thinks it seethes with jealousy, transitoriness and hysteria while he describes gay bars as ‘freak-show places,’
⁵²
and Ned does everything he can to fight for his lover. One day he meets Ann, who tells him Jill regards him as nothing more than an ugly brute. But after a rather ridiculous climax, in which the roach exterminator is exposed and subsequently kills himself, there is the vague suggestion that Ned and Jill may get back together, something that was by now an impossibility for Brandel and Highsmith.

In October 1950 Highsmith started to have doubts whether her novel about the love between Carol and Therese should be published at all. She had, after the publication of
Strangers on a Train
, been labelled as a mystery writer; the last thing in the world she wanted was to be known as a lesbian novelist. Agent and writer compromised, however, when, Margot Johnson suggested she publish it under a pseudonym. Highsmith also worried about what eighty-four-year-old Willie Mae would think. ‘Pat said she wanted to use another name because she didn’t want to upset her grandmother,’ recalls Ann.
⁵³

     The pseudonym, Claire Morgan, was decided upon in January 1951 and was Ann’s idea – her mother’s cousin was married to Rex Morgan, an architect, while Claire was a friend of her mother’s.
⁵⁴
This was, as Highsmith wrote in her diary, a ‘temporary, partial relief from shame’.
⁵⁵

     Although Highsmith had written an upbeat ending for her lesbian novel – which was accepted for publication by Harper & Brothers in January 1951 – the greatest irony of all, she said, was that in life she had only ever experienced frustration and rejection. ‘Oh, I write a book with a happy ending, but what happens when I find the right person?’ she asked.
⁵⁶
Finding a woman who could act as lover and muse was essential for her survival. Without such a woman, ‘I cannot even develop as a writer any farther, or sometimes, even exist’.
⁵⁷
She planned another trip to Europe –
Strangers on a Train
was due to be published in Britain in February 1951 by Cresset Press and in France by Calmann-Lévy early the following year – but when she returned she wanted to live with a woman whom she loved. Surely this wasn’t too much to ask?

     Before she left, she decided to make one last trip to see Kathleen Senn. On 21 January, she travelled out to Ridgewood, New Jersey, to spy on the woman who had inspired her lesbian novel for the last time. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to submit the image of the house, with its fairy-tale-style towers, to memory. As she did so, she thought back to their meeting in the toy department and how that moment had changed the course of her life.

     When
The Price of Salt
was published in May 1952 it was described by the
New York Times Book Review
as being written ‘with sincerity and good taste’. The same reviewer, however, also remarked how the book ‘in spite of its high-voltage subject – is of decidedly low voltage . . . Therese herself remains a tenuous characterization, and the other personages are not much more than silhouettes.’
⁵⁸
Yet the public disagreed with this glib dismissal and, when it was published as a Bantam 25-cent paperback in 1953 it is said to have sold over a million copies. ‘The novel of a love society forbids,’ ran the catchline on the front cover of the mass-market edition; below was printed the lurid image of a troubled, innocent-looking girl, her shoulder being caressed by an older, more sophisticated woman, while in the background lurked the figure of an alarmed young man. The response from gay men and women around America was nothing less than phenomenal. Highsmith received between ten and fifteen letters twice a week for months on end.

     ‘The letters were very touching and revealed just how terribly repressed gay women were in small-town America, what with the Bible and the idea of Sin,’ says Ann Clark. ‘I remember particularly a letter from a woman in a small town, saying that until she read the book she thought she was the only woman in the entire world who had had such a strong feeling for another woman.’
⁵⁹

     Kathleen Senn, however, never had the chance to read the book she had unknowingly inspired. On 30 October 1951, she walked into her garage, closed the doors and switched on the engine of her car. Highsmith never knew what became of her real-life Carol or that she had ended her life.

Chapter 14

Two identities: the victim and the murderer

1951–1953

Slightly hungover, Highsmith boarded a plane from New York to Paris, arriving at Orly airport early on 5 February 1951. She would stay in Europe for the next two years, flitting between London, Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, Salzburg and Munich. Like her character Tom Ripley, whom she would create three years later, she had no permanent address and was forced to pick up her mail from American Express offices. She was, she noted, always, ‘ “care of Mrs Somebody” . . . I have never a home.’
¹
Europe, she told Kingsley, helped her in many ways: she found it easier to make friends than in America; she liked the people, whom she thought more serious and considered than the folk back home; the change in environment gave her a fresh perspective on life and stimulated her creative imagination and, on a practical note, the day-to-day expenses she incurred were less than in the States. Although individual items such as tissues were more expensive, ‘to have an elegant good time, with beautiful surroundings, is cheap,’ she wrote to her friend.
²

     After a few days in Paris, where she enjoyed cocktails with Janet Flanner – ‘Genet’,
The New Yorker
’s Paris correspondent – and her partner, the book publisher, Natalia Danesi Murray, Highsmith boarded a flight to London on 16 February. At Northolt the writer was met by reporters, who interviewed her in the rain about her new novel,
Strangers on a Train
. ‘Miss Highsmith is a modest, serious person,’ observed the
Evening News
, ‘and today she was dressed in a black suit, grey sweater and flat-heeled shoes.’
³

     Highsmith took a taxi from the airport to 64 Old Church Street, Chelsea. Kathryn Cohen, she thought, looked thinner and less radiant; although she gave her guest a warm welcome, Pat knew that they would never be able to resume their once passionate relationship. Highsmith went to bed, but couldn’t sleep and during the night had an idea for her next book, which she would call, initially, ‘The Sleepless Night’. Its plot would be ‘wild . . . involving much sex and violent action would naturally evolve’
⁴
and would centre on a young man, who allowed his wife to become the mistress of his friend. The next day, she developed a 103-degree fever – just as she had when she contracted chickenpox and
The Price of Salt
was born – which turned into bronchitis and she had to spend three days in bed.

     The idea for the novel, in itself, was not new; the central theme had haunted her thoughts for months. The previous November she had sketched the bare bones of a story about a husband who stands by while his wife sleeps with another man, noting that the cuckold could be used as a symbol for the pain of life itself. ‘We are all waiting in passive anger, resignation, or bewilderment, while the dearest thing we possess goes a-whoring: that is, the meaning of life, whose face we have even long ago forgotten, and never ever knew.’
⁵

     Staying with Kathryn, and knowing that she was not going to leave Dennis for her, was a painful experience and as the days passed Pat began to imagine that their time together had been nothing more than a dream. She showed Kathryn her lesbian novel, but felt disappointed by what she interpreted as her indifference towards it. ‘I don’t think she likes it enough to recommend it to Dennis as she did the last,’ Highsmith noted, feeling that she had failed her both as a person and as a writer.
⁶

     From London, she travelled first to Paris, then Marseille and arrived in Rome on 17 April, where the city had been taken over by crowds jostling to get a look at the visiting Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Philip. While in Rome, she received the news that
Strangers on a Train
had been nominated for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award in America. She acknowledged that most people in her situation would make the most of their ‘tour of triumph’,
⁷
but she felt crushed by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. When she met Natalia Danesi Murray, who as the American representative of the Italian publishing house Mondadori kept an apartment in Rome, together with a villa in Capri, she felt shy and tongue-tied.

     In the Italian capital, she visited the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, on the Piazza di Spagna, and wrote pieces about the city’s 2,700th birthday, which she sent off to the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
. With Natalia, she travelled to Naples, from where they took a boat to Capri. Retracing the journey she had made with Kathryn was agonising; everything she did reminded her of the moments of happiness they had shared in the late summer of 1949. Back in Rome, exploring the catacombs of San Callisto, she remembered the time when she had kissed Kathryn in the shadows of the underground burial site in Siracusa. Highsmith wondered why Kathryn did not write to her, conjecturing that she must hate her, an emotion she preferred to blank indifference.

     Continuing her own idiosyncratic version of the grand tour, Highsmith journeyed to Florence and Venice, which she once described as a miracle, both because of its beauty and because it still existed. In Venice, she met Peggy Guggenheim and Somerset Maugham for cocktails, but the two writers didn’t talk about their work; she admired Maugham, who she said was ‘short, stutters, extremely polite’,
⁸
for his ability to make the perfect dry Martini.