Beautiful Shadow (74 page)

     After the interview, in which Highsmith cleverly avoided disclosing information about any aspect of her inner life, the two women met for a screening of Claude Miller’s
Dites-lui que je l’aime
(‘Tell Him I Love Him’), an adaptation of Highsmith’s
This Sweet Sickness
, starring Gérard Dépardieu and Miou-Miou, which the author thought was ‘Kinda crappy’.
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(The same year saw the release of another film adaptation, Hans W. Geissendörfer’s
Die Gläserne Zelle
, starring Helmut Griem and Brigitte Fossey, based on Highsmith’s
The Glass Cell
.) At the screening of
Dites-lui que je l’aime
, Highsmith confessed that she was suffering from Buerger’s disease, a narrowing of arteries and veins, in her right leg, while at the same time continuing to chain smoke. The following evening, on 21 September, Buck accompanied Highsmith to a performance of
Belle Ombre
, a dramatisation by Francis Lacombrade of two of the author’s short stories – ‘When the Fleet Was In at Mobile’ and ‘The Terrapin’ – at the Théâtre de l’Épicerie in Paris. At the theatre, Buck noticed how Highsmith was ‘hesitant, shy, with an expression of inner doggedness: no different, in fact, from the way she is at home’,
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observing that during the press conference she became increasingly non-communicative. One reporter had to repeat his question three times before Highsmith grasped it, but even then she did not respond. ‘The question is dismissed,’ wrote Buck. ‘That is her answer.’
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A clue to Highsmith’s state of mind can be found in a letter she wrote to Kingsley, in which she confessed that after the performance of
Belle Ombre
she felt so exhausted and overwhelmed that she simply ‘collapsed’.
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Her spirits did not improve when she read a ‘horrendous’
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gossip item in the
Evening Standard
in which Sam White wrote, ‘Her French remains primitive and she has difficulty adjusting herself to French ways, especially French food . . . She is in every respect a lonely woman, apparently indifferent to acclaim. Markedly masculine in appearance, she is something of a man-hater, a kind of female chauvinist.’
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Highsmith was so furious that she dashed off a letter to Simon Jenkins, then the editor of the
Evening Standard
, complaining of the fact that White called her sixty-three, instead of fifty-six, together with his ‘snide remarks’
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about her sexuality and appearance.

     Highsmith’s self-analysis continued throughout the summer and on 28 September she sat down at her typewriter and composed a short article for the German newspaper,
Welt am Sonntag
, on the subject of her political and religious beliefs. In the piece, published on 9 October, Highsmith argued that whatever one’s opinions one should be allowed to express them freely, revealing that she had written to President Carter on a number of issues. In the same article, Highsmith declared she no longer believed in God, either as an abstract power or as a divine presence within the human soul, ‘as I used to when I was seventeen or so’.
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God, she said, caused more wars than any real human conflict and she wished that a belief in the existence of a higher power bred not hatred of one’s fellow man, but kindness instead. ‘I believe as little in God,’ she said, ‘as I do in luck.’
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In November 1977 Highsmith travelled to Berlin to do some more research for
The Boy who Followed Ripley
. While there she had a taste of what it would be like to be a writer of celebrity status when a married woman, in the presence of her husband, declared her love for her. ‘She meant my books,’ added Highsmith in a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer.
⁴⁹
On 16 November, accompanied by Tabea Blumenschein and a couple of friends, she spent the night drinking at a gay bar, followed by a late-night whisky session back at her hotel. ‘I heard so many amazing things in Berlin,’ she wrote to Charles Latimer, ‘I was busy making notes.’
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She enjoyed the evening so much that she pasted the label from the bottle of Bell’s whisky they were drinking into one of her notebooks. ‘Berlin Nov. 17 1977 Hotel Franke – 5:30AM!’, she scribbled on to the label;
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next to the printed words, ‘EXTRA SPECIAL’, describing the age of the whisky, Highsmith added, ‘Indeed!’
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     Two months later, Highsmith was back, to serve on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival. She arrived on 22 February and was at once whisked off to the Pregnant Oyster for a meeting of the committee, where she was elected president of the jury – a decision she was not at all happy with. ‘I who am not capable of judging films really, because I do not see enough films . . .’ she admitted. ‘I had tried to push the office of president onto Angelopoulos, or Sergio Leone, but without success.’
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The film writer Christa Maerker, who worked for the festival and who later became a friend, remembers how she met Highsmith off the plane.

     ‘I hugged her before handing over the flowers, but she disliked that, stiffening and pushing a little,’ says Christa. ‘Then she whispered, “I would like to meet Christa Maerker.” I had two options – I could tell her that I was Christa Maerker, but she would be embarrassed, or I could lie but then there would be no escape. We walked to the car, and inside the vehicle I shook her hand again and said, “Christa Maerker.” “Of course,” she said, “I hadn’t looked.” She was terribly insecure and incredibly shy. She would always cover her face with a curtain of hair, which meant that she didn’t see anybody – a bit like a child hiding behind its hands.’
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     The jury had to squeeze in twenty-three films in ten or eleven days and Highsmith found the process exhausting and frustrating. ‘My simplest suggestions were thwarted . . . I was no good as “president”,’ she said.
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It was more an honest admission than a statement of false modesty. ‘She was chosen as president because she was perhaps the most famous of the group,’ says Christa, ‘but they were terribly unhappy with her, and she was not happy with the festival.’
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Highsmith often asked her friend Anne Morneweg, a Berlin-based film subtitler and translator, to accompany her to screenings. ‘She asked me, “Can you come along with me in case I miss some of the film,” ’ remembers Anne.
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Highsmith also loathed having to watch sex on screen. ‘For the first time in my life, I had to sit through and look at a lot of sexual intercourse, which I usually shut my eyes to,’ she commented.
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Yet she was intrigued by the boy and girl prostitutes of Kreuzberg – ‘Turks, all made up and in curious period costumes’
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– which she marvelled at with her friend, the documentary film-maker Julian Jebb, who was in Berlin to make a BBC feature about her. ‘We worked for two afternoons at the Tiergarten among the fish tanks in the basement aquarium there,’ she said. ‘Alas, nothing came of all this.’
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     This was Highsmith’s fourth visit to Berlin and her initial confusion had been replaced by a curious fascination for the city. In the evenings, exhausted after her day at the festival, she would return to her hotel, change into more comfortable clothes and then run outside into the darkness. ‘Berlin is bizarre, producing a desperate desire in individuals to be more bizarre, in a curious effort to be “stronger” than what is left of the city,’ she said. ‘The individual feels he must count for something, prove to himself that he is worth something, that he exists.’
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     Highsmith was, at fifty-seven, still a striking, if unusual, looking woman, but it was perhaps this urge – to reaffirm her existence as an alluring presence – which accelerated her towards what many of her friends regard as one of her greatest, and ultimately most self-destructive, passions. She had known Tabea Blumenschein, the twenty-five-year-old star and producer of the lesbian avant-garde pirate adventure, ‘Madame X’ for nearly two years and had had feelings for her since her last trip to Berlin, but, during the 1978 film festival, the relationship between the two women became more intimate. ‘I thought Pat was a little bit tough but so handsome, she was a bit like Gertrude Stein,’ says Tabea, now a painter. ‘I liked the fact that she was a writer – I found her books amusing – but the age difference did not bother me. She was passionate and romantic and she had a good body. She kept herself in good shape, she dressed elegantly but she never ate much and she drank a lot of whisky.’
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     To the outside world they may have looked an odd couple – the cranky-looking Highsmith, with her wrinkled face and mannish clothes, and the young German, all spiky blonde hair, outlandish make-up and punk-inspired outfits – but the two women shared many tender moments in Berlin. One day they visited the zoo to see the crocodiles and in her notebook, Highsmith wrote of how she would always remember the sight of Tabea pointing at the creatures’ wounds, a detail she incorporated into
The Boy who Followed Ripley
.

     ‘Pat fell in love with Tabea, she was completely infatuated by her,’ says Anne Morneweg. ‘She was fascinated by Tabea’s appearance and although the two women were so physically different, in those times Berlin was such a funny, queer place, it had a special insular existence and this kind of relationship was nothing special. In fact it was almost a must.’
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     After her trip to Berlin, Highsmith was left ‘spinning’
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by the experience and she returned home to Moncourt on 7 April full of longing for the younger woman. As she repeatedly played records she had bought in Berlin and stared at the bath mat she had stolen from her hotel, Highsmith became increasingly fixated on Tabea, or rather, like David Kelsey from
This Sweet Sickness
, compulsively attached to a fantasy image of her. On 9 April, she wrote a poem, addressed to Tabea, in which she describes falling in love not with a real person but with ‘a picture’. She is anxious that if she touches the object of her affections her image will disappear into the ether: ‘I don’t want to destroy you./I want to keep you in my eyes.’
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     As soon as Pat arrived home in Moncourt, Marion Aboudaram realised that their relationship was doomed. ‘She showed me a photograph of the German girl in a film looking lovely and as she did so Pat had very dreamy eyes,’ remembers Marion. ‘From that dreamy look I understood at once that she was in love. Her affair with Tabea was a very passionate and physical one. Pat talked to me all the time about her and I was very jealous of her.’
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     It was, as Highsmith claimed in a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer, the first time in her life that she had met a girl ‘who combines a strong sexual attraction (for me) with talent’.
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Tabea also reminded her somewhat of Lynn Roth: both women, wrote Highsmith, had the ‘same power to hold’, while they shared similar ‘juvenile qualities, need a master, a boss’, and were attracted to glamour, ‘a considerable interest in appearance, moreso [
sic
] in TB.’
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     During April, Highsmith continued to write poems to Tabea, including one which described her strange impulse to throw herself into a pool of deep water and drown. ‘This isn’t blackmail,’ she said. ‘I’d do it with a smile.’
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As she tried to organise for her German girlfriend to join her on a trip to London, Pat became so anxious that she refused to leave the house to get her lawnmower repaired in case Tabea phoned.

     Yet the six days Pat spent with Tabea in London at the beginning of May – in the Pelham Crescent flat of Julian Jebb, who was on holiday in Greece – were some of the happiest of her life. They took a number 19 bus up the King’s Road to a pub in Bramerton Street, Chelsea, where they met a visiting French woman, Linda Ladurner. ‘I recognised Highsmith because she had such a distinctive face,’ recalls Linda, ‘but she and Tabea were a strange-looking couple. When I moved to Paris, I phoned Pat and although we became friends, I never felt completely comfortable with her.’
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While in London Pat and Tabea browsed in record shops – ‘Pat bought me the
Stiff Little Fingers
record and an English-German dictionary,’ says Tabea, ‘I had a happy time with her,’
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– and enjoyed cocktails with Arthur and Cynthia Koestler. Before they went for drinks at the Koestlers’ house in Montpelier Square, Tabea said that she was apprehensive because she had not read any works by the famous novelist and intellectual. ‘Never mind, my dear,’ replied Highsmith, ‘the last thing writers want to talk about is their work.’
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It was true: ‘Koestler talked about 1968 and the student riots, black magic and Russian politics,’ says Tabea.
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