![]() Highsmith later recalled, “Perhaps I noticed her because she was alone, or because a mink coat was a rarity, and because she was blondish and seemed to give off light.” Like Alfred Hitchcock, Highsmith was captivated by frosty blondes, all the more so if they were married and rich. One day, a woman in a mink coat drifted into the toy department. When her analyst suggested that she join a therapy group of “married women who are latent homosexuals,” Highsmith wrote in her diary, “Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.” She never married Brandel-or anyone else. Highsmith was a Barnard graduate, and, like many sophisticates at the time, she viewed homosexuality as a psychological defect that could be fixed yet she had enough self-respect and sexual appetite to reject any attempt to fix her own. She wanted to explore the sharp ambivalence she felt about marrying her fiancé, a novelist named Marc Brandel. That Christmas season, she was working behind the toy counter at Bloomingdale’s, in Manhattan, in order to help pay for psychoanalysis. A Texas native with thick black hair and feral good looks, Highsmith made a habit of standing at attention when a woman walked into the room. Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was complete, but it would be more than a year before it was published. In December of 1948, Patricia Highsmith was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer with a murderous imagination and an outsized talent for seducing women. A blonde in a mink coat made Highsmith feel “swimmy in the head, near to fainting.” Photograph by Ruth Bernhard / Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource
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