Beautiful Shadow (5 page)

     Yet her colouring was so swarthy that she felt compelled to make some discreet inquiries into her background. ‘Some time ago you inquired whether my mother (and Jay B’s) had any Indian blood, because of her dark complexion and dark hair and eyes,’ replied Walter Plangman, Highsmith’s uncle ‘She definitely had no Indian blood.’
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     The dark features could be traced back to Jay B’s grandmother, Liena, who, together with her two sisters, arrived in Galveston, Texas, from Germany, in the late 1850s. ‘They were servants in well-to-do homes in Galveston, which at the time was the largest city in Texas,’ said Jay B.
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     During the 1850s, nearly one million Germans settled in America, making it one of the peak periods of German immigration. The failure of the revolutions of 1848 to establish democracy, plus the subsequent crop failures and potato famines, caused hundreds of thousands of Germans to leave their homeland and sail to America. So substantial was the community that by the 1860s, around 200 German-language magazines and newspapers were published in America. Guidebooks were published in Germany to outline the range of opportunities offered in America, while a number of societies were formed to make the immigration process easier.

     Soon after stepping foot in Texas, age sixteen, Liena married Henry Hartman, another German immigrant, and on 6 September 1865, she gave birth to a daughter, Minna, in Indianola. When Minna, whom Highsmith only met on a couple of occasions, describing her as ‘very jolly, not tall and very dark-haired’,
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was twenty-one she married Herman Plangman, who, together with his parents Gesina and Herman, left their home in Emden, Germany, for a new life in Texas. ‘They were all Lutherans, I think,’ Highsmith later said, ‘hardworking, respectable, mildly prospering’.
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     Liena had another child, a son, Oscar, but after the death of her husband, from tuberculosis, Highsmith’s great-grandmother married again, this time a merchant, Ernest August Kruse, who had been born in Germany in 1839 and who owned property on Houston Street and Main Street, Fort Worth. By the 1880s, Liena and Ernest August Kruse were living in Fort Worth in a house across the street from her daughter, Minna, and grandchildren, Bernard, Herman and Walter. The latter remembered that Liena ‘taught me to speak German before I learned to speak English.’
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Although many first-generation German immigrants reconstructed much of their Old World culture, by 1917, as a consequence of the First World War, the majority of German Americans in Fort Worth had taken out citizenship in order to advertise their loyalty to their new country.

     Jay B, like his future wife Mary Coates, was artistic from an early age and as a pupil at the Sixth Ward School, the same school Highsmith would attend, he remembered that he ‘always liked to draw’.
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After a spell working for the Texas and Pacific railroad – he was a railroad buff all his life – he enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1912. The following year he started work at the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
as a staff artist and at the time of his daughter’s birth he was a draftsman at Pearce Oil Company. During the Depression, Jay B taught art in the Fort Worth Public School system and one fellow teacher later recalled his kindness. ‘He [Jay B] got $3 a day for teaching and gave me a dollar of it,’ said commercial artist Marvin Van Orden. ‘That shows you what kind of a man he is, what kind of character Mr Plangman’s really got – giving away a third of his salary when money was really short.’
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It would be simplistic to link Highsmith’s fictional fixation with identity too closely with her own unhappy circumstances, but her familial history was so dysphoric that it’s hard to see how it could fail to play some part. After all, Highsmith wasn’t even her real name – she was born Mary Patricia Plangman – and she didn’t meet her biological father until she was twelve years old.

     The marriage between Mary Coates and Jay Bernard Plangman took place on 16 July 1919, but a year later, the couple experienced a crisis that eventually resulted in divorce. In the summer of 1920, Mary discovered she was four months pregnant; she wanted to keep the child, but Bernard suggested she have an abortion. Five months before the birth, Mary tried to rid herself of her unborn child by drinking turpentine. ‘It’s funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat,’ her mother would tell her later.
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Fifty years after her birth, Highsmith asked her parents to explain the exact circumstances surrounding the attempted termination.

     ‘(I believe in abortion, and the decrease of the population, so you must not think for a moment I am annoyed by this idea),’ Highsmith wrote to her father in 1971, ‘and according to my mother, she wanted a child, and she divorced you to have it in peace.’
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     Jay B confessed that the abortion was his idea. ‘I did suggest an abortion as we were just getting started in the art field in New York and thought it best to postpone a family until some time later,’ wrote Jay B to his daughter. ‘The turpentine was suggested by a friend of Mary’s and tried with no results.’
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Jay B planned to travel with Mary to Manhattan, where she could work as a commercial artist, and he could act as her manager. ‘He thought that with her ability and his selling they could make good money,’ wrote Dan Coates to his cousin. ‘And when she became pregnant he thought she should abort because a baby didn’t fit into his plans at the time.’
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     After a short period of separation, when Mary was in Anniston, Alabama, on a three-week vacation, she returned to her husband and told him she wanted a divorce, not such an unusual request as one might think. Between the years 1870 and 1920, the number of divorces in America shot up by a factor of fifteen, and statistics show that in 1924 one marriage in seven ended in divorce. ‘More wives than ever before had done paid work during marriage,’ says Sarah Jane Deutsch, outlining women’s history between 1920 and 1940, ‘and they knew they had options other than staying in an unsatisfactory marriage.’
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Women felt newly emancipated – in 1920 women could vote in national elections on the same basis as men everywhere in the United States, the result of a seventy-year battle by American suffragettes. ‘Above all, in the 1920s, there was a pervasive sense of newness,’ Deutsch adds.
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It was, of course, the age of the flapper, when, according to Frederick Lewis Allen, whose classic book
Only Yesterday
defined the era, ‘women were bent on freedom – freedom to work and play without the trammels that had bound them heretofore to lives of comparative inactivity.’
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Women, with their bob hairdos and hiked skirts, mutated themselves into what Allen called unripened youths, ‘hard-boiled adolescents’ who no longer thought in terms of love, but sex.

     Jay B offered to ‘do anything to keep the marriage intact’,
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but it was no use. The union lasted only eighteen months in all. ‘I remember them [the Coates family] getting a lawyer and filing for a divorce and telling him [Jay B] they didn’t want anything he had,’ said Dan.
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     The minutes of the District Court 67th Judicial District of Texas, lodged at Tarrant County Court in Fort Worth, show that a divorce between Mary Coates Plangman and Jay Bernard Plangman was granted on 10 January 1921. Nine days later, at 603 West Daggett Avenue, Fort Worth, at 3.30 on the morning of 19 January 1921, Mary gave birth to a baby daughter, an only child.

     The man who would assume the role of her father was yet another commercial artist, Stanley Highsmith, who was five years younger than Mary and lived at 2424 College Avenue, Fort Worth. ‘Stanley was an extremely quiet man, very low-key, but he had a great, but rather dry, sense of humour and was a fabulous photographer,’ says Dan Coates.
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Photographs show him to be quite a dapper man, with a neatly clipped moustache and small, round spectacles. Born illegitimately in 1900, his mother was left to raise him single-handedly, until she married again. Pat did not know about the circumstances surrounding her stepfather’s birth until much later, when she was in her forties.

     ‘His character is not weak, but he has no push . . .’ she wrote to her mother about Stanley. ‘It’s plain now, from what you tell me, that he had “obstacles”, things that would make him feel shy and inferior since his early days.’
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     Mary Coates Plangman married Stanley Highsmith on 14 June 1924, when Patricia was three years old. Her family, which Highsmith would later look back upon as a little hell, was formed.

Chapter 2

Born under a sickly star

1921–1927

Highsmith was born into an America on the cusp of change, a country caught between nostalgia for the past and the exciting promise of the future. For the first time in its history, the United States, according to the census of 1920, was officially recognised as an urban nation, with over 50 per cent of its population living in towns or cities. (Ten years later the corresponding figure had increased to 69 per cent.)

     In the autumn of 1920, 16 million Americans – just over 60 per cent of those who voted – opted for the well-dressed, silver-haired Republican senator from Ohio, Warren Harding. Harding promised a return to ‘normalcy’ – ‘not revolution but restoration; not surgery but serenity’. Harding was quick to realise that what ordinary Americans wanted was not further involvement in world politics – the country’s backing of the Allied cause in the First World War had left it in a state of crisis, with increased inflation, unemployment and social unrest – but an increased investment and improvement in their own affairs. When Harding made his inaugural speech in 1921, an address broadcast on radio, the Republican promised to lower taxes and reduce legislation, measures which he hoped would boost the economy by helping to promote the rapid rise of the individual. Under President Harding – and subsequently, John Calvin Coolidge, Republican vice-president and presidential successor from 1923 – America recovered from its post-war depression and entered a feverish boom, which saw the economy flourish and consumer spending increase. By 1929, the gross national product increased by 40 per cent with corresponding low inflation.

     The twenties was the first mass-media age. Advertisers were labelled the new ‘captains of consciousness’
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and by the end of the decade three out of four Americans owned a radio and said they went to the movies at least once a week. Henry Ford’s ideas of mass production of low-cost luxury goods – and the payment of higher wages to workers so as to boost their power as consumers – were seized upon by America’s corporations. Yet the country could not sustain such high-energy intensity for long, and, like a person suffering from particularly serious case of bipolar disorder, in 1929, the mania that had gripped America was replaced by another crushing depression.

     Ironically, for all of Harding’s pledges to return America to a state of ‘normalcy’, the era was defined by fragmentation, social unease, and cultural crisis. From the beginning of the decade the United States was gripped by a fear of social revolution and paranoia surrounding anarchic uprisings; there was, according to one commentator, a strange poison in the air. In 1921, the year of Highsmith’s birth, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and self-confessed anarchists, were sentenced to death for the payroll murders in Braintree, Massachusetts, on the basis of what many believed to be flimsy evidence. ‘I am suffering because I am a radical . . . an Italian,’ said Vanzetti, while the judge in the case concluded that although the men may not have committed the murders they were nevertheless ‘the enemy of our existing institutions . . . The defendant’s ideals are cognate with crime.’ Despite a vigorous freedom campaign led by some of America’s leading intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, John Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker, the two men were executed in August 1927. The case split the country. ‘All right, we are two nations,’ wrote John Dos Passos in his novel
USA
– a book which Highsmith read – referring to the public’s reaction to the prosecution.

     At the same time, European and American art and literature was experiencing something of a cultural schism. ‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,’ said Willa Cather, referring to the year which she thought served as a barrier between the traditionalism of the past and the new modernism. That same year, Harold Stearns edited a book of essays,
Civilization in the United States
, which concluded that America did not have a civilisation, echoing the voices of disillusioned writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom left America for Europe. ‘We have no heritage or tradition to which we cling,’ said Stearns, ‘except those that have already withered in our hands and turned to dust.’
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