One day, in the middle of a short filmed interview

[breathedout]

[O]ne day, in the middle of a short filmed interview for German television about the Geissendorfer film Die Glaserne Zelle (The Glass Cell) at her house in Moncourt in 1977, Pat, “quite drunk,” grabbed the cameraman’s white lighting umbrella and began to dance around the room with it, intoning the title song from the musical comedy Singin’ in the Rain, in her deep cigarette-and-alcohol-flavored voice. The celebrated lyricists for Singin’ in the Rain were the very same Betty Comden and Adolph Green who had been [Pat’s friend] Judy Holliday’s young partners in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village—where Pat had gone to applaud them so many times in the 1940s.

At this unexpeted display of high spirits and musical comedy-consciousness from the forbidding Miss Highsmith, the cameraman shooting the television film, Wilfried Reichardt, and the writer doing the interviewing, Christa Maerker, threw their own inhibitions to the wind and happily “joined in” to sing and dance along with Pat.

It must have been quite an international tableau: two filmmakers from Berlin and one soused and happy Texas-American novelist interrupting the shooting of an interview for a German television channel in the novelist’s house in suburban France to perform an American musical comedy number whose words they all knew.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 15: Social Studies, Part 1)