Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith Read online

  Gideon Coats married Sarah Deckered in 1842 and together they had eight children, including Highsmith’s grandfather, Daniel, born on 13 October 1859. The Coats were famous for having large feet and hands, physical characteristics inherited by Highsmith. ‘I think most of us were “bent too soon” in that we have large feet, also large hands,’ wrote one relative to the author, unable to resist making a pun on the name of the family’s birthplace.17

  Willie Mae’s father, Dr Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, was born in 1829, one of the sixteen children of Elizabeth Dechard and William Stewart, a Scot so pious he wore holes in the carpet of his bedroom by his ‘frequent and protracted kneeling in the act of prayer’.18 Oscar grew up to be a physician who served as a Confederate States surgeon in the Civil War, and with his wife, Mary Ann Pope, he raised eight children, including Willie Mae, who was born on 7 September 1866 in Auburn, Alabama. The girl was only seven when her 44-year-old father died of yellow fever, in Memphis, Tennessee, in September 1873.

  The two families were united when, on 25 December 1883, Daniel Coates and Willie Mae Stewart married in Coats Bend, Alabama. Although Daniel was given a grist mill, store and sawmill by his father, during the early years of the new century the couple, with their five children – Edward, Dan, John, Claude, and Mary, all of whom were born between 1884 and 1895 – decided to travel 600 miles west in search of a better life. ‘They packed up everything they had, their china, crystal and silver, and drove west,’ says Don Coates, Willie Mae’s great-grandson. ‘One of the reasons they decided to move was, I suppose, quite a selfish motive: they only wanted to look after their own family, not the extended family back in Alabama.

  ‘My great-grandmother did not go to college but she was self-educated and was a voracious reader. Willie Mae was also amazingly strong-willed, like Pat. I recall once going over there for Sunday dinner and I was slightly taken aback because she was sitting very upright in her rocking chair, not at all in her usual relaxed state. When Daddy asked what was wrong, she finally admitted that she had fallen off the ladder while painting the ceilings. Even though she was that old she was painting the twelve-foot-high ceilings, but that was Grandma, she was going to do what she wanted to do and you weren’t going to tell her otherwise. She was her own woman.’19

  Don’s brother, Dan, also remembers the matriarchal Willie Mae, who died in 1955 at the age of eighty-eight. ‘She was a very small woman – I guess she was five foot one – and kind of wiry, with little metal-framed glasses,’ he says. ‘She used to work hard, had a head of stone and was rather outspoken and opinionated. She was extremely independent and was not afraid of the Devil himself. And she made the best milkshake in America. Pat really identified with her and respected her for her work ethic.’20 Highsmith remembered Willie Mae as an extremely moral woman who taught her the difference between right and wrong: ‘She was a Scot, very practical, though with a great sense of humor, and very lenient with me.’21

  The Southside of Fort Worth, the part of the city in which Highsmith’s family made their home, was already a residential area by the end of the nineteenth century, but during the first decade of the twentieth century the neighbourhood witnessed a massive influx of new residents. Transport links were improved and the area boasted a street railway system, running in a square south down Main Street to Magnolia Avenue, west to Henderson Street, north to Daggett Avenue and east to Jennings.

  Willie Mae and Daniel first settled in Fort Worth at 523 West Daggett Avenue but by 1910 they had moved further along the street, to 603, into a traditional wooden-frame structure that looked like a miniature version of the Coats mansion, where they opened a boarding house. They did this, according to Highsmith, ‘with practically no capital . . . catering at first to young gentlemen of talent and sensibility.’22 Enterprising to the last, the couple also rented out a number of small, wooden, red-painted shacks to black families at the back of their house, an area which came to be known as Red or Negro Alley.

  ‘Behind the house was an alley, a large alley, in which there were little red-painted cottages that Willie Mae would lease out to black families,’ remembers Dan, ‘and that was part of her income. She was a pretty good business-woman and did a good job. One day the people back in the alley had a big party, and they all got drunk. There were about twenty-five blacks back there raising hell and cursing. She grabbed a white robe – I’ll never forget it – and went out to confront the blacks who were all boozed up. She walked straight out and told those who did not live there to get home where they belonged and she meant right this minute. And you know what? They did as they were told – oh gosh, the way they behaved, you’d have thought she was carrying a shotgun.’23

  Sometimes, black children who lived in ‘Red Alley’ would knock on the back door of the Coates’ house and ask if she had any leftovers. ‘She would fix them a dish of what was left from the noon meal and the children would take the food out to the alley,’ remembered Willie Mae’s grandson, Dan – the father of Dan and Don – who came to live with his grandparents in 1913 after the death of his parents.24 ‘The house, though plain and ramshackle, showing a hint of poverty even here and there, could always make room for one more, could always provide food for one more mouth, and generously, and love for one more heart,’ Highsmith wrote in her journal.25

  Across the street from the boarding house was a two-storey factory built from brick and occupied by Exline-Reimers Printing Company, whose employers also enjoyed Willie Mae’s hospitality. ‘She had quite a few mail carriers [men who sorted the mail for different towns as they travelled on the railroads] that ate there,’ wrote Dan to Highsmith, his cousin, ‘as well as the folks at X-REIMERS [sic] printing across the street.’26

  Willie Mae and Daniel’s only daughter, Mary Coates, was born in Coats Bend, Alabama, on 13 September 1895, the youngest of five children. She was striking-looking, ‘a double for Greta Garbo’.27

  A photograph taken of Mary a couple of years after giving birth to her daughter shows that she was a slim, elegant woman, with a fashionable flapper haircut framing a perfectly made-up face, while her knowing pose – hand placed seductively on the knee, ankles neatly crossed, eyes looking mischievously to one side – betrays a self-confident sexuality. It is obvious from the portrait that Mary took a keen interest in her appearance, not unusual in an age when, according to contemporary advertisements, a woman’s beauty really did make the difference between romantic success and failure. ‘The first duty of woman is to attract . . .’ ran one advertisement. ‘Your masterpiece – yourself,’ another promised its readers.28 In the same photograph, sitting next to Mary on the grass in front of the Coates house, is her daughter, Patricia, but Mary seems uninterested in the boyish-looking girl with her anxious expression, basin haircut and pudgy face.

  Mary confessed that there was a certain distance and frostiness between herself and her own mother. She was doted upon by her father, but Willie Mae never told Mary that she loved her and as a result Mary said that she grew up feeling rejected by the one person she wanted to please, an emotional pattern which Highsmith, too, would inherit.

  ‘You spoke of what your grandmother [Willie Mae] wouldn’t do,’ Mary wrote to her daughter, in an undated letter. ‘She treated you differently than she did me. It was as if she was not the same person. She went to her grave never letting me know that I ever made the grade. But my father wasn’t like that – he told her I was better than all the boys put together.’29

  Mary showed an early talent for drawing and painting and hoped to become a fashion illustrator. ‘She was incredibly creative and a very visual person, skills which Pat inherited from her and there’s no doubt that Willie Mae, Mary and Pat were all extremely strong-willed women,’ says Don. ‘Pat as a child had certain needs and wants which she felt Mary didn’t provide. But because of her success and her hard work, Mary was able to provide her daughter with an education. In many ways she did a lot more for Pat and her future than if she had been right there playing mom and baking cook
ies.’30 ‘Mary was, bless her soul, a very eccentric woman,’ adds his brother, Dan. ‘Oh my God, she was more fun than a barrel of monkeys, just a wonderful lady. She was very outgoing but probably not the best mother in the world. She was a very career-minded person, not a little homemaker at all.’31

  One day, when Mary Coates was in her early twenties, she was walking past a photographer’s window in Fort Worth when she saw the image of a black-haired, dark-eyed man with rather simian features and a slight, wiry body; apparently she was so struck by the picture that she sought him out. That man was Highsmith’s real father – Jay Bernard Plangman.

  Jay Bernard Plangman, or Jay B as he would later be called, was born one street south of the Coates family home in Fort Worth, at 508 West Broadway, on 9 December 1887. His parents, Minna Hartman and Herman Plangman, were both from German stock, and, perhaps unusually, it is from this side of the family that Highsmith inherited her dark hair and eyes and her somewhat sallow complexion.

  Highsmith’s physical characteristics intrigued her, but when anyone tried to suggest that she might have had black ancestors she acted swiftly to squash the idea. Five years before she died the writer received a letter from a man in Bradford, England. He enclosed a picture of his paternal grandfather, Henry Highsmith, a black man born in South Carolina, and asked whether she belonged to an offshoot of the same family. Highsmith – who thought herself a liberal but at this point in her life also believed blacks were responsible for the welfare crisis in America – gave the inquiry short shrift. She wrote back a sniffy letter, stressing that Highsmith was not the name of her biological father – Stanley Highsmith was her stepfather – nor did he have any black or Red Indian blood.

  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.’32

  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.33

  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’,34 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’.35

  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.’36 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’.37 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.’38

  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.39 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.’40

  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.’41 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.’42

  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.’43 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.44 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.’45 Women, with their bob hairdos and hiked skirts, mutated themse
lves 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’,46 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.47

  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.48 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.’49

  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.