The Talented Miss Highsmith (65 page)

Pat had nothing to say about the festival films themselves, but the trip to France prepared her for her next big mistake: her three-month stay in the rented house on the estate in Fontainebleau—found for her by Elizabeth Lyne—and then her fatal move to Samois-sur-Seine in yet another double house which she and Mme Lyne would purchase together. But France was looking so much better to Pat than a loverless England, and the lack of self-esteem with which she began her twenty-eighth cahier was assuaged by the idea that someone actually wanted to share a home with her.

For the present, though, back at Bridge Cottage in Earl Soham in March of 1967, Pat was writing an article with a title that perfectly expressed her mood: “Writer's Block, Failure, and Depression.”
²⁹

Part 10

In her late forties, Pat began to rehearse the idea that photographs of women might be less damaging to her fantasies than the women themselves, and that her fantasies were more satisfying to her than any actual love life.

By November of 1969, Pat had a long list of personal failures to add up. There was her awful, protracted battle with Elizabeth Lyne in Samois-sur-Seine over their common house and property, and the bitter end of their twenty-year friendship. There was her “betrayal” by her inconstant French lover, Jacqui—the finish of her hopes for love with yet another woman who was “bad for her.” There was the fact that her new neighbors on either side of her new house in Montmachoux were exuberant Portuguese Catholic families who made her want to kill. (“It gives me more terror, really, than any crime story ever did, to know that I have people left and right of me who believe in hell.”)
¹

From the middle of her personal chaos, Pat wrote to Alex Szogyi in New York:

Pat kept the torn-out photograph of Anne Meacham
^*
—whom she never met,
refused
to meet by Alex Szogyi's account—for the rest of her life.
³
It is in her archives now, along with another arresting image clipped from a periodical: a photograph of Judy Holliday, looking entirely at ease in male attire and a stylish boy's haircut. The Holliday photograph is a still from
Adam's Rib
(George Cukor's brilliant comic film about the war between the sexes) depicting a scene in which a lawyer (played by Katharine Hepburn), trying to make a feminist point, asks a jury to look at the accused (played by Judy Holliday) as though she were a man. And briefly, before the jury's eyes, Judy Holliday turns into a man: haircut, suit, and attitude. Pat saw
Adam's Rib
in New York at the end of January 1950, with Elizabeth Lyne. Judy was “excellent” in the film, Pat thought.
⁴
She was right.

When Pat was sickening with love (literally) for the young German actress Tabea Blumenschein at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, she made a little verse about her rules of attraction. It was more an admission about her feeling for photographs and disguise than about her feelings for the girl:

Two weeks later, in a letter to Alex Szogyi, she explained how she'd met Tabea both in person and in the film made by Tabea's lover, Ulrike Ottinger, which starred Tabea.

“I fell in love with their film called ‘The Infatuation of the Blue Sailors,' in which everyone's sex was reversed. T. played a sailor…. I have never even shaken hands with Tabea, I think. I look at her as a kind of ‘picture.' It is very strange. I have the feeling that if I ever embraced her, she would fall to pieces…. I am afraid of getting a heart attack.”
⁶

By 1980, Pat was writing in her cahier: “It seems truly best to be in love with someone we cannot touch and do not profoundly know. One is always in love with an idea or an ideal.”
⁷
And for the rest of that decade and into the early 1990s, Pat, says a friend, “carried around an accordion-pleated photo folder—many men have them—of young blond German girls dressed à la
The Night Porter.
[She told her amused friend]: “I send them books, I try to improve their minds.”
⁸

Like Isabel Crane, the young woman in her short story “The Romantic,” the death of whose invalid mother should have freed her to pursue her dreams of “real love,” Pat chose to cling more and more to her fantasy life, preferring, as Isabel Crane finally did, her fantasies to whatever her “real” life could offer. Pat wrote “The Romantic” in 1984—or more likely she rewrote it then, because it has the mark of her 1940s Manhattan style. She completed the story by shutting the door on Isabel's Crane's sexual life, shortly after the door had been shut on her own.

Pat showed her photos of girls to everyone—even, in one unsettling instance (and between swigs of gin), to a journalist she didn't know during the course of an interview for a London paper.
⁹
Francis Wyndham remembers Pat displaying pictures of a “German girlfriend” (it was Tabea, but this was long after Pat's relations with Tabea had ceased) to him and Julian Jebb in London, “and she rather sort of boasted. It was so sweet, it was like a sailor on leave with a girlfriend back home. It was endearing in her.”
¹⁰

Julian Jebb, journalist, television producer, and the grandson of Hilaire Belloc, made friends with Pat when he went to film her during her unfortunate performance as president of the film jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978. (See “
A Simple Act of Forgery: Part 1
.” Six years later, Pat and Francis Wyndham were exchanging letters about Jebb's suicide.)
¹¹
In Berlin, Jebb had been as interested in the heavily made-up Turkish child prostitutes of Kreuzberg as Pat was, and he photographed her amongst the fish tanks in the basement aquarium at the Tiergarten for a BBC documentary that was never completed. Jebb's next-best-known work—perhaps not unrelated to his interest in Pat—was a spoof-documentary about Dame Edna Everage, featuring Barry Humphries dressed up in his elaborate drag as Dame Edna. It was Julian Jebb who loaned Pat his apartment in Chelsea for a London tryst with Tabea Blumenschein.

While Tabea and Pat were staying in Jebb's flat, they went out one night drinking at the Gateways. There, Pat was approached by a young Austrian woman, Linda, who had recognized Pat's face from publicity photographs. Linda and Pat struck up a conversation, and Linda drove Pat and Tabea back to Jebb's apartment. They invited her in for a drink. Tabea, she thought, was “rather beautiful” she had “some grace to her,” and Pat wanted Linda to speak German with Tabea because Pat's own German was so awkward. Linda noticed a film poster with Tabea's picture on it and a whole sketchbook full of Pat's drawings of Tabea in the flat.

As Linda and Tabea were chatting in German, Pat kept making more fast sketches of Tabea, trying to get her down on paper. When Pat went to the bathroom, Linda asked Tabea: “But what do you see in her, she's so much older?” Linda “found it rather strange because Tabea was so very young…. [Still, I had the sense that] Tabea was somehow attracted by Patricia, though what she said to me was: ‘You know, Patricia is buying me clothes, she's inviting me, and I let her.' The impression she wanted to give me, and she was without shame about it, was that she was in it for what she could get.” Later, Pat told Linda that “Tabea was a fan and had written to her first.”
¹²
(Tabea herself thinks Pat first took an interest in her because Pat wanted to sell her books to film and Tabea was in film.)
¹³
Perhaps Tabea and Pat were both playing a little with the truth. And perhaps Pat was remembering the furious remark Lil Picard had “bitterly hurled” at her in 1949: that she'd better get someone to keep her in Europe (she did: Ellen Hill) because, after fifty, she would have “to buy” her lovers.
¹⁴
In any event, Tabea was Pat's last real erotic obsession—and her last experience of the kind of misery her interpretation of Courtly Love required.

If it did nothing else, Pat's short, fantastical affair with Tabea Blumenschein seems to have persuaded her sophisticated friend Barbara Ker-Seymer of something. Ker-Seymer wrote to her own long-term lover Barbara Roett about it.

“I have been inundated with letters from Pat. She seems to feel I am the only person who truly ‘understands' Tabea and her feelings for her. What interests me is that Pat does seem to have a heart after all. I always thought she was completely without one.”
¹⁵

In October of 1992, Pat, on a trip to North America that included a stay with Dan and Florine Coates at Box Canyon Ranch in Weatherford, Texas, a reading at the Harbourfront festival in Toronto, and some appearances in Manhattan for
Ripley Under Water,
made a three-day visit to Marijane Meaker in East Hampton, New York. It was the first time the two women had seen each other in twenty-seven years, although they had begun to correspond two or three years before. Pat initiated this exchange, even as she was telling other people that Marijane had written to her first. To Marijane's house in East Hampton, Pat brought pictures of her own “very severe-appearing, fort-like house” in Tegna and of a “smiling, pretty” German girl (Tabea again), which she seemed anxious to show off.

“‘If I had to choose between the girl and the house, I'd choose the house,' Pat said,” after passing the photos to a roomful of Marijane's friends and colleagues. The women laughed along with her.
¹⁶
By now, Pat had travelled a long way from her youthful dreams of romantic love. Real estate and the pressing question of what she should do with her money were to be the major excitements and irritations of her last years.

According to Marijane Meaker, their three-day visit was marked by Pat's constant drinking and what was, by now, her stock parade of prejudices. Like a vaudeville Nazi, Pat reacted to every ethnic minority she saw. The sight of black people eating in a local restaurant—something she said she wasn't accustomed to in her small Swiss village—set her off on a series of remarks about blacks: how they were incapable of figuring out that sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy; how improvident they were with money; how black men got physically ill if they didn't have intercourse “many times a month.” Jews brought on a stronger reaction, and with a compulsion that continued to be personal and uncontrollable rather than political and rational, she inveighed constantly against the State of Israel and against the “Jews,” never referring to the citizens of Israel as “Israelis.”

“The yids,” Pat told Marijane, were responsible for banning the ham sandwiches she used to enjoy so much on first-class airplane flights. She inquired of her hostess if “your Jewish friends dance the holly, holly cost?” The picture she painted of racial attitudes in the Ticino, the canton of Switzerland she'd lived in since she moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s, was so extreme that Meaker just had to ask: “Do you live in some little Nazi coven?”
¹⁷

Two years before Pat's visit to Meaker, in August of 1990, a similar outburst from Pat had occurred. Only this time, uncharacteristically, Pat tried to publish her prejudices. Christa Maerker, the German writer and filmmaker who had suggested Pat for the jury of the Berlin Film Festival in 1978, tells the story:

“There was a series on German radio called
Impossible Interviews,
which the German station [Südwestrundfunk] had taken from an original Italian idea, where very famous writers did twenty-minute radio plays. You were allowed to interview in imagination anyone who is dead. I think Pat was declaring poverty at the time so I suggested she write one. ‘It's not much money,' I said, ‘but it's very fast. You can write it in no time. A person you think you know very well.'

“Pat interviewed [in imagination] somebody in Israel who was still alive at the time. [It was Yitzhak Shamir.] Out of her came something so ghastly that it could be a Nazi text.”

What Pat wrote was an eleven-page “radio play” with two characters and one line of action: Patricia Highsmith interrogating a highly caricatured Yitzhak Shamir—at that time prime minister of Israel—about the future of his country. Even allowing for Pat's loathing of Shamir's policies and militant Zionist background, it is an irrational work, poisoned by ethnic prejudices. It reads like a lost chapter from that toxic anthology of anti-Semitic canards,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
and the fact that Pat thought that the Germans—the only people in Europe who have grappled seriously with the ethical history of their country—would be receptive to broadcasting her “interview” is another example of how disconnected she was from anything except the ends of her own nerves.

Pat's unwavering line throughout her script is that the “Jews”—she makes an exception for Amos Oz, whom she suggests will soon be murdered by Shamir's government—are desperate to provoke another Holocaust because of the Holocaust's invaluable fund-raising properties for Israel. Pat's last comments to Shamir, in her role of Interviewer, are: “You seem to be courting another Holocaust…. as
you
might say, we'll hold back Holocaust Number Two out of sheer anti-semitism.”
¹⁸

The commissioning editor at the radio station was horrified by what Pat had produced, and Christa Maerker—still, she says, unable to accept the fact that Pat could actually
mean
this “disgusting text”—went to talk to the radio station about it. “And the head of the radio station said, ‘Good grief! What did you do to me!' It was like [Wolf] Donner and the [Berlin] Film Festival. ‘If I publish this, Patricia Highsmith will be dead in Europe.'

“And I said, ‘She must have misunderstood me. If I talk to her she could rewrite it.' And he said: ‘Do what you please.' So I called Pat and said, ‘Would you like me to come and help you retype it?' Lying, instead of saying, ‘How dare you write something like this!' I think I always lied to her; I didn't want to disturb her by such primitive notions as my offended sensibility. It's a motherly instinct.”