RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ Malice’ for her quick wit. She created a lavish, almost visceral apartment for the writer on the UN Plaza, painting the drawing room blood-red and installing a Victorian carved rosewood sofa, a $500 Tiffany lamp, and a zoo of mimetic and dead animals, from a bronze giraffe and china cats to jaguar-skin pillows and a leopardskin rug. I can hear Pat’s horror. Cecil Beaton called it ‘expensive without looking more than ordinary’. But Capote approved, and asked Evie to design his Black and White Ball, the most famous, or notorious, party of the twentieth century, notable for the fact that, despite Evie’s recommendation, Capote declined to send an invitation to the President.

      She and Capote were snapped arriving at Manhattan’s fashionable Colony restaurant. Truman wears a bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles. He greets the paparazzi, his notorious guest list in his hand; how the magazine editors longed to see that roster. Evie is by his side, thin and chic, conspiratorial in dark glasses. They’re both diminutive, yet the centre of all attention. They retreat to one of the coveted back tables – the Cushing sisters on one side, James Stewart on the other – to plot the party. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll is added to the list – Evie says it never hurts to invite a few duchesses. Later, Capote crosses her off too.

      The venue was the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, celebrated in the twenties by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The event exceeded any of Gatsby’s parties. Evie ordered red tablecloths and gold candelabra entwined with ‘miles of smilax’, a green vine. The guests wore masks, barely disguising their celebrity: Lauren Bacall and Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer and Cecil Beaton, Henry Fonda and Tallulah Bankhead. There were Guinnesses, Kennedys, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, and it was a marvellous party; its ghosts might still be dancing now.

      Evie was never more in her element; her daughter couldn’t have cared less. High society was far from how Pat wanted to live; now she looks at those photographs, those thin society queens, with disdain. She was, and still is, a teenage rebel, a dropout, and had been ever since she first came to Provincetown, at the age of sixteen. In 1946, her mother had rented John Dos Passos’s house in Provincetown’s East End for a year, having been alerted to the Cape’s allure by Dorothy Paley, wife of William Paley and friend of Dos Passos. It was a heady introduction. It changed the course of Pat’s life.

      I find it almost impossible – but not quite – to imagine what this place was like then. Its lanes seemed part of the country; many still do. Fishing and whaling had left the remote town open to other influences; a wilderness which allowed the wildness of its inhabitants. Pat worked in the bookshop, but was fired because all she did was read. Then she worked as a waitress in the Flag Ship, where the bar was a boat, and where the owners didn’t feed her. Her mother complained that Pat was losing weight – less attractive to the rich Jewish boys with whom she tried to pair off her daughter. Pat would rather go out on Charlie Mayo’s boat and sit on the fly bridge, watching the whales and birds. Charlie lived across the street. He was a champion fisherman; his family, part Portuguese, had been on the Cape since 1650. His father had hunted whales, as did Charlie; he only stopped when he harpooned a female pilot whale and heard the cries of her calf beneath his boat. Pat saw Charlie as her surrogate father. They talked and fished. Her mother disapproved; she thought Mayo was a communist. Pat didn’t care. She cared about the sea.

      Evie had sent her to Austria, in the way that young women of wealthy families were sent to finishing school. Vienna in 1948 wasn’t a good choice for a girl like her; there were no zithers playing, and a former Nazi officer tried to rape her when he discovered she was Jewish. Pat came back to college at Pembroke, outside Boston. She loved riding and skiing. But her mother took her away, and her stepfather arranged for her to go to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, studying English literature and journalism. Pat felt abandoned all over again.

      After graduating in 1953, Pat went to spend time in Benson, Arizona, close to the Mexican border, working on a ranch with the horses she loved. ‘I was outside all the time I wasn’t sleeping.’ She planned to go to Taos, where Georgia O’Keeffe had worked; Pat had an artist friend there, and thought that she might learn to paint. But her mother protested about that, too, and Pat was persuaded to go to Paris, where she worked for the Paris Review and George Plimpton, typing up Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, riding round the city on a bicycle. She lived in a tiny room at the Hôtel Le Louisiane in Saint-Germain, where Sartre stayed and where the sight of her fellow tenant Lucian Freud, a man who had the look of a raptor, scared her. ‘I was not very hip and was hideously shy.’ On an assignment to Dublin, where her father now lived, Brendan Behan hit on her in a bar.

      No wonder. She was a fine, fierce, uncaptured muse, waiting for the moment. In New York she worked for Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Roger Straus was her cousin. She lived in a walk-up at 57 Spring Street, north of Little Italy, which was pretty funky and a long way from the UN Plaza; the building still stands, hung with its fire escape, two doors down from a restaurant called Gatsby’s. The rent was twenty-five dollars a month. Pat would fight with Italians for parking space for her black business coupé, and thought the poor Puerto Rican families were happier than her. On Friday nights she’d leave the office and drive all the way to Mount Washington to ski.

      When she had to leave her apartment she moved to the Chelsea Hotel, setting up an office in her room. She took a course in book design at New York University with the designer Marshall Lee. ‘He was a good teacher.’ It was the only formal training she had. She excelled at it. Even now she’ll hand me a new book from her packed shelves and flick through it, expertly analysing its qualities. Her designs were simple and smart. For Thom Gunn’s collected verse she created a helical motif, a graphic contrast to the poet’s photograph on the back, showing the bearded Gunn crouching in a field, shirtless, in tight jeans, a leather belt loaded like his name. Bennett Cerf, the celebrated founder of Random House, told her mother how brilliant Pat’s designs were. Evie just asked her daughter, ‘Exactly what is it that you do?’

      Pat and Evie. The pearls. The champagne. The lighted cigarette.

      Manhattan could never rival Provincetown, and Pat kept coming back. In the summer of 1956 she met Nanno de Groot, a Dutch-born artist, for the second time, having met him briefly when she was eighteen and he was living with his third wife, Elise Asher, in the West End, next to friends of Pat’s. That second meeting was memorable: ‘When I woke up he was sitting on top of a weir pole, on his feet like a bird looking out to sea, waiting for me.’

      He was an imposing figure, forty-three, six foot four, often bare-chested, and always bare-footed, as Pat would be. He’d been to nautical school in Amsterdam and had served on submarines, but was now the artist he had always wanted to be, part of the New York circle of de Kooning, Pollock, Franz Kline and Rothko. ‘We spent that week together,’ says Pat. She moved into his farmhouse in Little York, New Jersey. They got married on Long Island two years later; the reception was held at the Backers’ summer house on the sea-surrounded Sands Point – Daisy Buchanan’s East Egg. In the winter they lived in Little York; Nanno painted, Pat went to work in the city. In the summer, they’d return to Provincetown, living in a three-room cabin in a field at the end of town. A photograph shows them there: white light, Nanno naked to the waist, Pat svelte and tanned too, feet up on a table. Nanno painted the trees and the land and the sea – the passing seasons, fishermen’s nets drying in the fields – in between working as a mate on Charlie’s boat.

      It must have been mad and idyllic and frustrating and ecstatic, this life together, in the dunes, on the streets, at sea. Pat remembers 1961, the summer with no wind, when they’d go out on the boat in the glassy calm, so clear you might reach down and pluck fish out of the depths. It was ‘a visual onslaught’, Pat says in a later, filmed interview in which her style emerges, a mix of bohemian smartness and concentrated beauty. With her wavy, centre-parted hair she might be one of the Velvet Underground, or a Renaissance model. She looks straight at the camera, but sees something else in the distance. She talks about Nanno, who wrote, ‘In СКАЧАТЬ