Highsmithian ironies

[breathedout]

So. The Price of Salt (1952). First lesbian pulp with a “happy ending,” meaning in this case that neither of the female protagonists died, went mad, or decided they liked men after all (or, incidentally, chose to elope and cut themselves off from all the other people they love). To many readers—very much including me—the understated ending of Highsmith’s novel feels “more realistic” than either a typical romance-novel Happy Ever After, or the overblown, censorship-enforced, soap-operatic tragedy of pulps like Spring Fire.

Interestingly (suicide cw):

The character of Carol Aird was based closely on two real women in Patricia Highsmith’s life: Kathleen Senn and Virginia Kent Catherwood. Her interaction with Senn lasted only a few minutes: like Therese in The Price of Salt, Highsmith was working at the toy counter in Bloomingdale’s, unknowingly in the process of coming down with the adult chicken pox, when Senn came in and ordered a toy from her. Highsmith, instantly infatuated, ran downstairs after Senn left, bought a Christmas card, and mailed it to the home delivery address which she had memorized (again just like Therese). Unlike Therese, Highsmith never got a response to her feverishly-sent card; and instead of her chicken-pox fever bringing on the realization that she might be a lesbian (this would have been extremely old news to Patricia Highsmith, in any case), it facilitated the composition of the first section of her novel. Months later, as she was finishing the first draft, she actually paid a visit to the castle-like house where Senn—who by now, in Highsmith’s imagination, had been transformed into Carol Aird—lived: the creator stalking her creation. She was too timid to actually ring the doorbell, however; and temporized after the fact that it was just as well: that if she’d actually met Senn the illusion would have been shattered for her. (Knowing Patricia Highsmith, this is in fact extremely likely.) At least Senn lived on in the form of Carol, more or less sane and reunited with her girlfriend via the “realistic” ending of Highsmith’s novel, because in real life, as Highsmith biographer Joan Schenkar writes:

[S]ometime during the Halloween holiday of 1951, [Senn] walked into the closed garage of her Bergen County house—the house looked something like a castle in a fairy tale—turned on her car ignition, and killed herself with carbon monoxide gas just as The Price of Salt was being readied for its 1952 publication. She died as unconscious of the effect she’d had on Pat Highsmith as Pat was unconscious of her real-life model’s unhappy end.

So much, tragically, for realism.

Ginnie Catherwood, the other model for Carol, was Highsmith’s lover (and hotly beloved) for about a year. She bequeathed the character the details of her prolonged divorce from her wealthy husband (including the private detective who spied on Catherwood/Aird to gather evidence against her), her other girlfriend, and her loss of custody of her beloved daughter. In the novel, Highsmith gestures toward the possibility of Therese and Carol turning their backs on all their New York responsibilities and connections and setting up house together in the American Southwest. I talk in this post about why I’m glad she didn’t go that route, and why the current ending strikes me as, if somewhat grim, at least genuinely freeing and reflective of how actual adults live their lives. In actuality, however:

Although Pat didn’t think Ginnie Catherwood’s drinking habits would allow her to survive ten years beyond the end of their affair, Ginnie did just that. Her irregular trajectory finally brought her to the colorful southwestern United States—to Tucson, Arizona, in fact, where she did not cease to attract interesting women. Ginnie made a last appearance in print (in the press this time, not in a novel) on 29 November 1959, when she was sued for a million dollars by the imposter prince David Mdivani, a man who had awarded himself and his brothers titles when they arrived, impoverished, in America from the Russian state of Georgia. The Mdivani boys were known as “the marrying Mdivanis” for the astonishing number of wealthy women they managed to wed or otherwise strip of their assets. The legal case David Mdivani launched against Ginnie Catherwood was for alienating the affections of his current wife, the great silent film star Mae Murray, “by lavishing her with expensive gifts.”

If Mae Murray, who is rumored to have been the inspiration for the demented movie star played by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Blvd., really did have a liaison with Ginnie Catherwood, then we are left with the entertaining possibility—in whichever alternate, postmodernist afterlife these things are worked out—of a literary love affair between Norma Desmond and Carol Aird.

JUST GOES TO SHOW. From the scenario list “Rich yet despairing alcoholic housewife commits suicide,” “Woman loses custody of daughter and decides to give it a go with lesbian lover,” and “Silent film star lured away from gold-digging husband via expensive gifts (and other attentions??) bestowed by aging displaced New York socialite,” had I been asked to choose which two were drawn from real life and which from a lesbian pulp, I would probably not have chosen correctly.

Though it is, I think, fair to say that nobody involved got a simple Happy Ever After. And I definitely want to read the Carol Aird/Norma Desmond fanfic, tell you what.


[Note from 2019: I still await, and am tempted to write myself, the Norma Desmond/Carol Aird fanfic. A Yuletide possibility, perhaps.]