Ripley's lady

Cornering the talented Ms. Highsmith

A dozen years ago, when Matt Damon was a Cambridge kid and the only film version of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley was the René Clément's 1960 French-language Purple Noon, I scored a journalist coup by securing an extremely rare interview with the late Ms. Highsmith (she died in 1995), at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, about the many movies that have been made out of her startling books, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. I wrote up some of what we talked about in my "Film Culture" column of July 5, 1996, but now that Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a critical hit, perhaps it's time to revisit that afternoon.

I knew that the reclusive writer, self-exiled from America, had been devastated by previous rubbings against the press. Well, our talk would be different, I convinced myself. She couldn't help being won over by someone who knew so many of her books and loved them so sincerely, including the most obscure ones.

Was I wrong! Highsmith couldn't have cared less. After gamely shaking my hand at her hotel door and saying, "Call me Pat," she got wildly uncomfortable when we sat down to talk. But then, she was a ferociously private person who chose not to be faced in public with what I'd discovered about her from research: her drinking problems and her lesbianism. Under the pen name Claire Morgan, Highsmith released a 1952 novel of lesbian love, The Price of Salt, that was especially radical for its time in employing a happy ending: Therese in the arms of Carol.

Readers and critics have noted the homosexual underpinnings of Highsmith's many tales of unlikely male friendships, particularly her Ripley novels, which also include Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, Ripley Under Water, and The Boy Who Followed Ripley. Tom Ripley in the books is continually mistaken as being "queer," and no wonder. He likes to attend all-male parties and masquerade in other men's clothes, especially the garments of those who obsess him.

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, and that's the way Matt Damon plays it in Minghella's movie, he gets an undeniable crush on Dickie Greenleaf before offing the young man. Through The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Tom had committed eight murders (by Highsmith's count) and gotten away with all of them.

Highsmith's opinion? "I don't think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that's true. But he's married in later books. I'm not saying he's very strong in the sex department, but he makes it in bed with his wife."

In doing The American Friend, Wim Wenders's personalized reading of Ripley's Game (with some uncredited steals from Ripley Under Ground), Wenders made Ripley (Dennis Hopper) into a bachelor once again. As Wenders told an interviewer, "Ripley . . . is not solitary and he's not a homosexual. Not explicitly. But the way he handles Jonathan has a lot to do with homosexuality."

Highsmith liked Wenders -- "his artistic quality, his enthusiasm" -- and she conceded that The American Friend has a certain "stylishness," and that the scenes on the train, where Ripley and Jonathan murder together, are terrific. But she was confused by Dennis Hopper's highway-cowboy rendition of Ripley and by Hopper's self-conscious soliloquies. "Those aren't my words," she snorted. "Wenders mingled two Ripley books. One of them he didn't buy."

She did feel that handsome Alain Delon was excellent as Ripley in Purple Noon, though she was jolted by the anti-Highsmith ending in which Ripley gets caught!!! But perhaps, she said, Strangers on a Train's Robert Walker, who played the psycho Bruno, would have been (I agree) the best Ripley of all.

"He was excellent! Walker had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother." Still, Highsmith regretted Hitchcock's decision to turn Guy (Farley Granger), an architect in her novel, into a champion tennis player. "I thought it was ludicrous. It's even more ludicrous that he's aspiring to be a politician. But the film seems to be entertaining after all these years. They keep playing it, ancient as it is."

Highsmith talked to Hitchcock only once, on the phone, and she never met Raymond Chandler, who wrote the final Strangers script, or seemingly any other writer of suspense novels. She didn't read them, she said, except, over and again, the master: Dostoyevsky.