Cate Blanchett in “Carol” (left) and author Patricia Highsmith (right).
The film “Carol” — out Friday and already meriting Oscar buzz — is about a lesbian couple forced to hide their romance in the 1950s. But their duplicity pales next to the complicated creator of the film’s source material.
Author Patricia Highsmith, best known for her series of novels about the sociopathic Mr. Ripley, was a misanthrope with a vast trove of secrets. She carried on several affairs at once, with members of both sexes.
Highsmith’s 1962 novel “The Price of Salt,” which is the basis of “Carol.”
“She loved women, but preferred men as company,” Joan Schenkar, who wrote the authorized biography “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” tells The Post. “Her life [was] so divided that she kept secrets from everyone.”
Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt,” the basis for the movie “Carol,” was originally published under the pseudonym “Claire Morgan” because her mother disapproved of Highsmith’s interest in women. The parent and child had a close but fraught relationship.
“Before she was born her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine,” Andrew Wilson writes in his 2003 biography, “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith.” He adds that, “As a child, Highsmith had dreams of murdering her stepfather.”
Blanchett as Carol in “Carol.”
Born in Texas, in 1921, the author “thought of herself as a classical novelist, but supported herself with a secret seven-year career as the only woman writing for superhero comics in the 1940s,” says Schenkar. “The classic ‘alter ego’ of comics shows up in the divided psychologies of all Pat’s murdering criminal-heroes — [like] Tom Ripley, who assumes the identity of the man he killed.”
Highsmith could be prickly, racist and overtly cruel. She had friends who were Jewish, but in the 1980s she railed against Jews and the state of Israel in a series of letters to newspapers and elected officials — written under pseudonyms.
She maintained a crippling obsession with her mother, says Schenkar, that once manifested itself during a surprise visit: “When Pat learned that [her mother] was about to arrive, she simply fainted away. Crumpled ‘like a doll’ on the doorstep, said the friend who owned the house.”
Rooney Mara (left) plays Blanchett’s love interest in “Carol.”
The author, who lived in England and France and, finally, Switzerland, where she died in 1995, often fell for unavailable — sometimes married — women. Says Wilson, “She had a string of passionate but often unhappy love affairs, and as she aged, she became increasingly dependent on alcohol.”
Still, Highsmith must have been one interesting dinner guest. In an anecdote Wilson cites, she once leaned into a candle and deliberately set fire to her hair; at another bash, held in her honor, she ended up holding her hands over her ears because she couldn’t tolerate all the noise from drunken guests.
“Very occasionally she’d bring a few snails to a dinner party,” says Schenkar. “She adored snails because, like her, they existed between genders. They also have protective shells and are mysterious.
“No one whose favorite mollusk is a snail ever wants to be unshelled.”
