List of Illustrations
1 Highsmith’s maternal great-grandfather, Gideon Coats. (SLA)
2 Minna Hartman, Highsmith’s grandmother, taken in 1885. (SLA)
3 Daniel and Willie Mae Coates, Highsmith’s maternal grandparents. (SLA)
4 Mary Coates, Highsmith’s mother. (SLA)
5 Jay B Plangman, Highsmith’s father. (SLA)
6 Mary with Patsy. (SLA)
7 Mary with Stanley Highsmith, whom she married in 1924. (SLA)
8 Patsy on the veranda of her grandmother’s house in Fort Worth. (SLA)
9 Pat while at Barnard College, New York. (SLA)
10 Highsmith, age twenty-one, just after leaving Barnard, photographed by Rolf Tietgens. (SLA)
11 Kate Kingsley Skattebol. (Courtesy of Kate Kingsley Skattebol)
12 Rolf Tietgens. (SLA)
13 One of the nude photographs of Pat taken by Rolf Tietgens in 1942. (Rolf Tietgens / SLA)
14 Virginia Kent Catherwood. (Temple University, Urban Archives, Philadelphia)
15 Novelist Marc Brandel, Highsmith’s fiancé. (Courtesy of Naomi Brandel)
16 Farley Granger as Guy and Robert Walker as Bruno in Hitchcock’s film of Strangers on a Train released in 1951. (Warner Bros, courtesy Kobal)
17 Highsmith sailed from New York to Europe in May 1949. (SLA)
18 Kathleen Senn, the ‘real-life Carol’. (Courtesy of Priscilla Kennedy)
19 Ellen Hill, with whom Highsmith had a torturous four-year relationship. (SLA)
20 Lynn Roth and Ann Clark. (Courtesy of Ann Clark)
21 Alain Delon in Clément’s 1959 film Plein Soleil . (Canal + and Jacques-Eric Strauss / BFI Stills, Posters and Designs)
22 Highsmith’s inscription in a copy of Ripley Under Ground . (The Charles Latimer Collection, University of British Columbia)
23 Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’ 1977 film Der amerikanische Freund ( The American Friend ). (# Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH, 1977/ BFI Stills, Posters and Designs)
24 Matt Damon as Tom Ripley in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley . (# Miramax Films / BFI Stills, Posters and Designs)
25 Jonathan Kent and Highsmith in a 1982 South Bank Show . (# LWT / BFI Stills, Posters and Designs)
26 The actress Tabea Blumenschein, whom Highsmith met in Berlin. (SLA)
27 Highsmith with Monique Buffet. (SLA)
28 Highsmith lived in France for thirteen years. (Bassouls/Sygma)
29 Highsmith in the summer of 1994. (Ingeborg Lüscher)
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the help of Highsmith’s literary executor, Daniel Keel, president of Diogenes Verlag, Zurich, and his trusted editor, Anna von Planta. They gave me unrestricted access to Highsmith’s most personal of journals – her diaries – and permission to quote from both her unpublished and published works. I cannot thank them enough for this and for their continued support while researching and writing the book.
The bulk of Highsmith’s papers – diaries, notebooks, letters, essays and sketches – are held at the Swiss Literary Archives (SLA), Berne, which gave me permission to publish material from their vast collection. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to all the staff at the SLA, but in particular Dr Thomas Feitknecht, Ulrich Weber, Stéphanie Cudré-Mauroux and Lucienne Schwery. In addition to their first-rate curatorial skills and utmost professionalism I would also like to thank them for their friendliness and hospitality. They made my frequent visits to the Swiss capital even more enjoyable.
I also consulted archival material in a number of private collections. Thank you to Ronald Blythe, Edith Brandel, Peggy Lewis, Christa Maerker, Janice Robertson, and Francis Wyndham for making their correspondence available to me.
Acknowledgement is also due to the following for the use and publication of other archival material: Barnard College, New York; Bloomsbury Publishing, London; Calmann-Lévy, Paris; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, (the Harper & Row archives); Edinburgh University Library (Koestler Archive); Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the