Beautiful Shadow (30 page)

In September, Marc Brandel rented a house in Provincetown, the fishing village at the tip of Cape Cod; he hoped that, in the few weeks they would spend together there, Pat and he would not only finish their novels, but resolve their difficulties and move towards a greater level of intimacy. Provincetown should have been the perfect setting for the culmination of such professional and personal epiphanies, as the quaint village located on the knuckle of Cape Cod’s clenched fist had long acted as a magnet for a wide range of artists and writers seeking inspiration and insight. In 1899, attracted by the near-Mediterranean quality of light, impressionist Charles Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod School of Art, and frequently held classes
en plein
on the beaches and wharves, capturing the essence of the Portuguese fishermen who had long made Provincetown their home. By 1916 – the year in which Eugene O’Neill had his first play,
Bound East For Cardiff
, produced by the Provincetown Players – there were five summer art schools in the village; from the 1920s onwards the area acted as a creative mecca for modernists such as Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis and, later, teachers such as Hans Hofman, who was instrumental in the development of Abstract Expressionism; while during the forties and fifties it attracted Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

     By the time Highsmith arrived in 1948, Provincetown flaunted its reputation as a Greenwich Village by the sea, a centre of bohemianism and avant-garde experimentalism. Although Brandel was aware of the village’s easygoing ways, nothing could have prepared him for the consequences of Highsmith’s visit. Rather than bringing them closer together, Provincetown only served to drive a further wedge between them. Nervous of Pat’s arrival, Brandel enlisted a stranger, Ann Clark, then Ann Smith, who was vacationing in a nearby fisherman’s shack, to help; little did he realise that the two women would become lovers within a few hours of meeting. Ann, a painter and designer, was twenty-five, slim, tall, gamine, an ex-fashion model for
Vogue
; drawings Highsmith made of her portray her as a girlish figure with impossibly long legs.

     ‘I had met Marc the night before and had taken an instant dislike to him,’ says Ann. ‘He was unattractive because of being so sneering and [a] nasty drunk, but also he had white white skin, freckles and looked unhealthy. He launched into a recital of his great success in England with his first novel and how he’d gotten high praise from Elizabeth Bowen for whom he had no regard and then after more unpleasant conversation he leaned over the deck rail and threw up.

     ‘The next morning he came over to my deck and he was a shattered wreck. He told me he’d been at Yaddo and had met a writer, Patricia Highsmith, who said she was gay, but he’d fallen in love with her and he wanted to marry her. He’d talked her into joining him in Provincetown to spend a few weeks finishing their novels, and she was arriving that day on the five o’clock bus. He was terrified and asked would I please come over at five for a drink? He begged and begged and I finally began to feel sorry for him. So I told him that me and a friend, who I was expecting for the weekend, would be over at five.

     ‘It had started to turn cold, it was rainy, and I hoped Marc had heat. Marc met us at the door and we went into the cavernous, dim living room. There, near the only lamp, behind a desk, stood Pat. Typical Pat, she took a step back, not forward, when she saw us, she was completely silent, looking apprehensive but perfectly beautiful.

     ‘After a great deal of drinking, the next thing I remember is standing near the main wharf, next to Marc, who was challenging me to dive in. Apparently the attraction between Pat and I was obvious and this was the only time in my entire life that I got into any sort of competition with a man over a woman. Marc dived in but I was scared and, instead, I decided to slide down a piling covered with mussels. But my legs got all cut up and I started to bleed through my pants. But there was no pain at all. The next memory I have is being in the women’s room of a big dance hall, where a black band was playing. Pat was on her knees sopping up blood and I was saying, “Don’t bother, it doesn’t hurt.” Then I remember it raining and Pat and I were on a pile of ropes on a little wharf near my deck and we were making love and I was going absolutely out of my mind. I’d never felt anything like that in my life.

     ‘The next morning of course my legs hurt and I felt thoroughly ashamed, hungover, and at the same time terrified I’d never see Pat again. As I started to pack to go back to the city, there was a knock on the door and it was her.’
²⁴

     The two women swapped addresses and as soon as Pat arrived back in Manhattan, at the end of September, she took a cab over to Ann’s tiny, roach-infested apartment on West 12th Street, where they went straight to bed.

     ‘Considering I’d been in bed with more men than I could remember, I couldn’t believe what was happening. The next morning I said, “I just lost my virginity.” She couldn’t believe I’d never been in bed with a woman before. But that was the truth. I told her she was everything I’d ever wanted in another – and I meant it. I also said I was floored because I thought I knew something about sexuality and obviously I didn’t. She said, “I didn’t invent it, you know.” I said, “For me you did.” Her first gift to me was a little three-minute egg timer encased in sterling silver on each end. With it came a note: “Dear Ann – the best things in life last at least three minutes – Love, Pat”.’
²⁵

     Ann has vivid memories of Pat’s apartment on East 56th Street. One entered, she said, through an iron gate, next to another residential building that opened into a courtyard, then one turned right into a separate two-storey structure and walked up one flight of stairs. The entrance led directly into a small kitchen, there was a bathroom and a closet, and on the wall outside the living room hung a photograph by Ruth Bernhard, a picture of a wooden arm holding a doll’s head. An archway led through to the living room, which had two windows and which overlooked the courtyard below, but, because there was no fenestration on the building opposite, the apartment was incredibly private. In the bedroom there was a three-quarter size bed, over which hung a painting by Allela Cornell. Near the window, Pat had placed a table on which stood a plant and her bowl of snails. Still in the bedroom, there was her desk, complete with typewriter, and the shelves above housed her notebooks and a dictionary which she would add to when she came across a new word. (‘What a pleasure is reading the dictionary!’ Highsmith wrote in her notebook. ‘The only book I know that is true and honest.’
²⁶
) There was a record player, and a stack of records, including their favourite, Lee Wiley singing ‘A Ship Without A Sail’.

     Ann worked only a few blocks away from Pat’s apartment and so, at the end of the day, they would meet at a little park at the end of 57th Street, or back at the flat, where Pat would cook Ann garlicked lamb chops or steak and a green salad. ‘We’d wander home to her apartment for coffee and at some hour or other we’d start to undress, to take showers and we’d start kissing and stand for hours, it seemed, not able to move,’ she says. ‘It was never that way with anyone else – if we touched it was like fire. We’d finally get to bed and make love until dawn. I’d wake up in time for work and I’d leave her sleeping and she seemed to sleep so deeply and serenely. There was something very quiet about her.’
²⁷

     The two women had a fondness for word games and Ann found Pat to be extraordinarily witty and humorous; they would clown around the apartment, dancing to music and saying silly things. In fact, they behaved, says Ann, very much like children when they were together. In the aftermath of Pat’s death in 1995, Ann was so grief-stricken she felt as though she was walking around with a gaping hole in her middle. ‘She was the only person with whom I was truly deeply in love – she pleased my eyes, my mind, my body, my spirit. She was the first woman I went to bed with and I would have been very happy if she’d been the last.

     ‘My memories of Pat and me are of laughter and music and passion in bed. But it seemed to me that she was slamming a door on her best ability – that is, her humour, her tenderness, her capacity to love and laugh and have a marvellous time in the sunlight, not the shadows.

     ‘I guess I always thought of Pat as essentially very feminine though she had distinctly boyish characteristics at times, and some boyish characteristics in structure. She always seemed so fragile in my arms – I was taller and though I have a small skeletal structure, I always felt stronger than Pat and had the wish to protect her. I never felt she was in good health. She was very careful of her eating habits and her weight never varied. She got me into the habit of keeping little bits of leftovers and never eating a big meal. Sometimes she seemed so exhausted and her colour seemed too pale. Well, writers often do have a haunted look.’
²⁸

At the end of November 1948, after a recommendation from the composer David Diamond, Highsmith embarked on a course of therapy with the New York psychoanalyst, Eva Klein Lipshutz. In post-war New York, psychoanalysis was almost de rigueur. ‘There was an inevitability about psychoanalysis,’ says Anatole Broyard. ‘It was like having to take the subway to get anywhere. Psychoanalysis was in the air, like humidity, or smoke . . . The war had been a bad dream that we wanted to analyze now . . . There was a feeling that we had forgotten how to live.’
²⁹
Highsmith had tried one session of therapy before – in March earlier that year, after an unsuccessful sexual experience with a man, she had visited Dr Rudolf Lowenstein, who told her she would need approximately two years of analysis – but now she was determined to try and change. Highsmith hoped that the therapy would help her be able to enjoy sex with Marc, whom she wanted to marry. Could she learn to become heterosexual?

     Freud believed that it was pointless trying to ‘cure’ homosexuals of their same sex desires; rather, psychotherapy could be used to help patients come to terms with their sexuality. However, American psychotherapists of the late 1940s and early 1950s, spellbound by the cult of self-improvement and the promise of restoring ‘normality’, translated Freud’s writings into a belief system which they thought could be used to erase ‘unhealthy’ erotic drives and banish all traces of homosexuality.

     ‘According to some psychiatrists of the post-war years, same-sex love was simply a symptom of a more general character disorder,’ writes Lillian Faderman, author of
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
. ‘It would disappear if the disorder were resolved, and the woman would then be content to marry and stay home, raising babies and tending to hubby’s needs.’
³⁰
The zeal to ‘cure’ gays of what psychotherapists perceived as their ‘mental illness’ continued throughout the 1950s. Indeed, one therapist, Albert Ellis, went so far as to claim that after ‘treatment’, one-third of his lesbian patients were ‘distinctly improved’, while two-thirds were ‘considerably improved’, in their quest towards conventional sexuality. ‘The metropolitan lesbian who has not, at one time or another, embarked on this voyage, is a rarity,’ wrote therapist Dr Richard Robertiello, in his 1950s book,
Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual
.
³¹
The book focused on a lesbian woman happy with her sexuality who came to the therapist complaining of insomnia. Robertiello seized on her case and claimed to cure her of her ‘perversion’ (though unfortunately, not of her insomnia).

     Highsmith’s therapist, Eva Klein Lipshutz, whom the writer only ever referred to by her unmarried name, gained a degree in psychoanalysis from Columbia University in 1947 and went on to write research papers on the treatment of alcoholics, the comparison of dreams in group therapy and the psychodynamics of skin disease. When Highsmith came to her for help, Klein was working at the New York Medical College. The money Highsmith earned from her comic books averaged $55 a week, and therapy took $30 of this, a situation that clearly did not please her. But at the time she thought that if the analysis helped her become heterosexual, then it was money well spent. Klein told her that sex with a man was ‘quite normal. Everyone does it’,
³²
but Pat found it physically impossible. ‘Sexual intercourse’, she wrote in a letter to her stepfather later, explaining the situation with Marc Brandel, ‘is steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place – leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a boewl [
sic
] movement. If these words are unpleasant to read, I can assure you it is a little more unpleasant in bed. I tried  . . .’
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