Beautiful Shadow (79 page)

     After spending the summer in Aurigeno, and making a visit to the Locarno Film Festival, where she met the director Kathryn Bigelow, Highsmith returned to her house in Moncourt, where she planned on staying six months. Yet, as she worked on
People who Knock on the Door
, she realised that she would have to return to America for another research trip. In October she visited Bloomington once more, where she stayed with Charles Latimer and Michel Block. During a trip with Charles and Michel to East Hampton, one of the many places she imagined living, the group stopped off in a small town in Pennsylvania. ‘After some junk food we went to fill up the tank,’ recalls Michel. ‘Looking at the view from that petrol station [of] mountains, white farms and churches dotting the wooded landscape, I commented on how archetypal of the US that view was. We got into the car and I couldn’t help but notice how she silently wept for quite some time while Charles and I chatted together in surprised consternation. I really think Pat sacrificed her “every day” life to her reputation as an artist . . . Be that as it may, I think she would have been much happier living in the States.’
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     Back in Moncourt, she took the trouble to answer a questionnaire sent by
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, one of the questions of which focused on her wanderlust. What did she look for in the place where she lived? ‘I need grass under my feet, silence, and a few friendly birds flying around,’ she replied.
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Highsmith spent that Christmas in London with Kingsley, then working as a television news producer with CBS in London. Despite an enjoyable break, she felt ‘wretchedly unhappy’,
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because of her dissatisfaction with her work, and on her return to France in January she suffered another depression. ‘This present world for me is hell,’ she wrote in her notebook, ‘and like a prison.’
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Her only escape, her one solace, was the recreation of a parallel world through her literary imagination. Her friends were only too aware of how difficult she seemed to find life. ‘She was not an easy going person. She would hide her feelings all the time,’ says Linda Ladurner. ‘I found her interesting, but, to be honest, if I had not known she was a good writer, probably I would not have found her so nice. She was not at peace with herself. She was often uneasy and she used this to write about uneasy people. She was so inhibited after a while it was catching.’
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     Feeling increasingly annoyed by the bureaucracy of living in France, unable to forget the invasion of her house by the customs officials and frustrated by the endless hopping about between Ticino and France, in March 1982, Highsmith decided once and for all to sell her house in Moncourt and move permanently to Switzerland. It was, she said, something she regretted, as she adored ‘that comfortable, homey house, not to mention the garden never-quite-in-order’.
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However, she did not, as she saw it, have a choice. ‘It’s the French law that I can’t be in Moncourt more than 6 months without incurring French residence status, with its attendant restricting laws against any foreign bank accounts, etc. which I prefer not to live with.’
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In addition, as she wrote to Barbara Ker-Seymer, Mitterrand, the French socialist president, was ‘going to make life increasingly difficult for anyone who earns more than a postman’.
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She did not, however, feel it necessary to talk to Monique Buffet about how leaving France might affect their relationship. ‘Pat and I didn’t talk about the end of our relationship,’ says Monique Buffet, ‘as it seemed like a natural step. It ended when she left for Switzerland, but we remained friends until she died.’
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Chapter 31

A strange interior world

1982–1983

The tall, dark-haired man followed her like her shadow. He brushed past her at the airport, stared at her on the train towards London and then watched as the novelist, dressed in a Burberry trench coat, walked through the foyer of the swish London hotel. Signing the registration book, Highsmith, who was ambidextrous, took hold of the pen first with her left hand and then with her right. A few moments after stepping into the lift, the man was by her side once more. That man was Ripley.

     Creator and character were brought together in 1982 for the London Weekend Television arts programme,
The South Bank Show
, a fifty-minute film entitled ‘Patricia Highsmith: A Gift For Murder’, comprising of an interview with Highsmith by Melvyn Bragg and dramatised scenes from
Ripley Under Ground
, starring Jonathan Kent as Ripley. Wearing a crisp white shirt, black leather waistcoat and black skirt, Highsmith looked distinctly uncomfortable as she was quizzed by Bragg. Why did she like the character of Ripley? ‘He’s rather free in spirit and audacious and occasionally amusing, to me,’ Highsmith replied.
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What was Ripley like when she first created him and how had he developed? ‘In the first Ripley he was quite green and young . . . just learning about Europe, about what he thought was culture and sightseeing and then he became envious of the richer young man . . . He decided to lift himself in his own eyes . . . The one murder that bothers him sometimes is the Dickie murder because the motive was very very sordid and Dickie had been a good friend to him.’
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Would she call Ripley insane? ‘I think in certain areas he could be called psychotic . . . a bit sick in certain areas. But I would not call him insane because his actions are rational . . . He’s not so psychopathic that he has to kill somebody. I consider him a rather civilised person who now kills when he absolutely has to. He kills reluctantly.’
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Did she admire him? ‘I’m not sure I could find qualities that could be admired in Ripley. He might have a little generosity but not much to be admired. But he’s not entirely to be censured, I think.’
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How would she describe Ripley’s sexual nature? ‘He’s rather shy of it, not very strong emotions and a little bit homosexual I would say, not that he has ever done anything about that. Very lukewarm.’
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     Immediately before shooting was due to start in September 1982, for broadcast that November, Jack Bond, producer and director of the film, received a telephone call from Highsmith’s French editor, Alain Oulman, asking whether Highsmith knew whom he had cast as Ripley.

     ‘Oulman said to me, “If you have cast someone as Ripley, whom she cares so deeply about, whom she sees so clearly in her mind, without her permission, God knows what will happen,” ’ remembers Bond. ‘Of course, I had cast Jonathan Kent in the role, but had not informed Highsmith. We were due to start shooting at Gatwick airport, filming a scene showing Highsmith arriving in the country, closely followed by Ripley. I told Jonathan to get behind her as she was moving down the travelator, hopeful that I could resolve the situation as we went along. However, the cameraman was not happy with the first, second or third tracking shots and finally Pat stormed up to me and said, “I don’t know whether I should mention this or not but there’s a young man who keeps following me everywhere I go.” I still did not tell her the truth and simply said that he must be a fan of hers. Anyway, at some point during the next shot, Pat must have cottoned on what was happening, because I looked around to see that she had literally pinned Jonathan, by the lapels, against the wall. A moment later, she stomped over to me and said, “I have just questioned this young man and he admits that he is playing the part of Tom Ripley. Is this your idea of Tom Ripley?” After I had admitted that well, yes it was, she said, “You’re God damn fucking lucky – he’s perfect.” ’
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In fact, as Highsmith wrote to Alain Oulman, Kent was the ‘best Ripley I have seen since Alain Delon’.
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     Jack Bond first met Highsmith at her house in Moncourt. Unable to find Rue de la Boissiere, Bond walked into a café to ask for directions, where he met a postman who not only gave him precise instructions about how to find Highsmith’s home but her post as well. ‘I banged on the door, the door flew open, Pat took the mail, said thank you and then slammed it in my face,’ he says. ‘However, after knocking again, I went inside and recall liking her immediately. She was difficult, a bit inaccessible and quite hesitant, but I liked her incredible bitchiness. She slagged people off as though by doing so she would actually remove them from the face of the earth. She was very nice to people in life who were doing “normal things” like delivering the mail or the milk, but she could be very tetchy in restaurants. She was a great slab of a figure – not in size, as she was incredibly slender – but in personality. You can’t help but adore people who stand four square to the wind and who live life on their terms, with no compromises. When you met her it was clear who she was and who you were with. She was always bitching about Hitchcock, about how cheaply he had bought the rights to
Strangers on a Train
, and of course she could drink and swear with the best of them. Although I would never inquire her about her personal affairs, she would always ask me, “How’s the fucking?” or “Who you fucking?” I remember her with a kind of joy.’
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     While filming
The South Bank Show
, Jonathan Kent and Highsmith – whose appearance on the programme was later described by Frank Rich as an ‘unsmiling figure . . . with a pugnacious, pouchy face framed by thick, parted black hair; she looks rather like her favorite bird, the owl’
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– stayed in adjoining suites at the Savoy. ‘Pat talked about Ripley as though he was real,’ says Kent. ‘And one of the reasons she liked me was because I was playing Ripley and she thought I
was
Ripley. She was so curious about me, really liked me, in a way that had nothing to do with me; it had more to do with her vision of Ripley.

     ‘I had an enormous affection for her. I liked her independence, her toughness, her slyness. She would hide behind her hair, peering out from under her fringe with a mixture of amusement, shyness and curiosity. She had a great influence on me because when I was twelve or thirteen, growing up in South Africa, I went to see
Plein Soleil
. I had never heard of Highsmith before then, but I saw the film twice and then went out and read my way through her novels. So in a funny way she formed me – I knew so much about her work I could have gone on to
Mastermind
to answer questions about her – and I felt unnaturally linked to her from then on. All her books are about men and their shadows and Ripley was, I believe, an expression of what she wanted to be, an expression of her shadow. Maybe she was incomplete, maybe she never really accommodated her shadow.’
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     A few weeks after filming
The South Bank Show
, Highsmith was back in Britain again to address a group of Eton schoolboys, a talk organised by seventeen-year-old pupil Roger Clarke, who had written to her in June. On 27 October she travelled by train from London to Slough, where she was met by Clarke and taken to the housemaster’s dining room for supper. Yet, according to Clarke, now a writer and journalist, it soon became apparent that Highsmith had started to clam up. After introducing her to the audience of boys, she sat in uncomfortable silence, not knowing what to say, forcing Clarke to step in as interviewer.

     ‘She looked like a cantankerous Texan librarian, fearsome, but at the same time she had this watchful and amused air about her,’ he says. ‘I got the feeling that she was dealing with things on a number of different levels, and that she had several personalities in play. When the talk was over, we took her back to Slough and a few days later I received the first of many letters from her, one of her usual gnomic three-liners. She told me how she had found this purple comb on the train back to London, how she took it home, washed it and used it. She drew a picture of it. It was then that I began to have an inkling of the depth of her strangeness. From then on we corresponded and became friends of sorts. But I couldn’t work her out. Each time we met she would become more mysterious, more peculiar, rather than less. The mystery of her never seemed to end.

     ‘One of the rare times I ever got a reaction from her was when I described, in a letter to her, a male brothel run by a friend of a friend in Chelsea. I went round there on several occasions and kind of hung out; it was intriguing, a den of secrets. One Monday night a punter came in and chose me instead of one of the boys. I didn’t accept his proposition and he stormed off. When I told Pat, she thought this was terribly funny; she loved the ambiguities of the situation, the slightly sleazy element, the idea of shifting identities, of amoral opportunities. She had this mischievous, atavistic streak. She was one of the great misanthropists, and there was something almost Swiftian about her. I could imagine her committing unspeakable crimes if she had no outlet, the outlet of her writing.’
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