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Notes From A New Biography
What I uncovered about Highsmith’s relationship to the comics was so extensive and so surprising that I ended up devoting a quarter of her biography to the subject. This article is just a small indication of what I found: the lengthy, complicated, and much more specific history of Patricia Highsmith’s involvement in the Golden Age of American Comics is fully recounted in The Talented Miss Highsmith.
Talented Strangers Patricia Highsmith’s best-known novels are Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Amazing Mr. Ripley (1955) — both for their own virtues, and because they were made into noteworthy films. (Above:) Farley Granger and Robert Walker starred in director Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), in which two young men meet by chance and strike a devilish bargain to murder each other’s nemeses. Timely artist Allen Bellman has said that he always felt that Stan Lee (whom Vince Fago tried to fix up with a date with Highsmith) resembled Walker. The screenplay was by Philip Marlowe creator Raymond Chandler & Czenzi Ormonde. (Right:) Matt Damon starred in the 1999 cinematic version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a truly exceptional murderer. [Film materials ©2009 the respective copyright holders.]
Comics and had once tried to fix her up on a date with Stan Lee, also wrote to her in France. Vince was hoping to publish a book of his “hundred best comics” and, well aware of Pat’s celebrity, he was also hoping for her cooperation. Vince remembered Pat as very beautiful (which she had certainly been) and totally professional (she was always professional). Pat had come to Vince in the Timely office in the Empire State Building in late 1943 asking for work as a freelance writer, and she wrote many scenarios for Timely right up through 1946. One of the characters she wrote for was the same character Mickey Spillane had also worked on: the US Navy’s war-time human killing machine, Doug “Jap Buster Johnson.” Another was the super-hero “The Destroyer.” But the kind of cooperation Vince Fago needed from Pat for the book he had in mind would have forced her to reveal the length of her involvement in the comics and, although Timely had always been her favorite “outfit,” she wrote Vince back from her house in Moncourt to say she just didn’t have time for the comics now. In a long life of interesting secrets, the one secret Pat Highsmith didn’t reveal was the fact that she had been the most frequently employed female scriptwriter during the Golden Age of American Comics. But like her birthday twin Edgar Allan Poe and his purloined letter, Highsmith kept her secret hidden in plain sight. And that’s where I found it fifty years later when I began to research and write The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.
Remember Pearl Harbor? “Jap Buster Johnson” splash from U.S.A. Comics #14 (Fall 1944). Again, while Highsmith wrote for this dubiously titled wartime series, there is no certainty that she wrote this particular story; nor has the artist been identified. Scan supplied by Joan Schenkar. [©2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.]
In December of 1942, Pat Highsmith, a 1942 graduate from Barnard College desperate for work, answered an ad for a “research/rewrite job” at the SangorPines comics shop at 10 W. 45th Street in Manhattan. It was something like the ad sixteen-yearold Everett Ray Kinstler would answer six months later when he was hired as a penciler for Cinema Comics at the same shop. Ray Kinstler, now a prominent portrait painter, had a “heavy teenage crush” on Pat and he remembered her very well. She looked, he said, “a bit like Katherine Hepburn. An American College Girl Type. I could have pictured her at Smith College.” He also remembered her drive for perfection: