Catherwood had lost custody of her child after a recording made of her in a hotel bedroom with another woman was used in court against her, a detail mined for the plot of The Price of Salt in a way that gave Highsmith pause. “Ginnie” and Highsmith were lovers in the mid 1940s and full vent is given in Highsmith’s diary to her powerful desire for her lover and also, at times, the feelings of murderous vengefulness that are expressed in all of Highsmith’s writings.
There was another inspiration for the character of Carol: Highsmith’s former lover Virginia Kent Catherwood, the elegant and well-heeled socialite from Philadelphia, whose divorce in the 1940s had kept gossip columnists in New York in a state of scandalised delirium with its lesbian intrigue. On her day off she took a bus to New Jersey, found the woman’s house (from the address on the sales slip) and simply walked by it.
Highsmith was working there as a sales-girl during the Christmas rush. She also admitted a specific inspiration: a “blondish woman in a fur coat”, who wafted into Macy’s in New York to buy her daughter a doll. “It flowed from the end of my pen as if from nowhere,” Highsmith wrote. Highsmith’s own publisher Harper & Brothers rejected it, so it was published first by a small press, and the solution of the pseudonym Claire Morgan was decided on. She showed some early extracts to her favourite teacher from Barnard College, Ethel Sturtevant, whose excited reply – “Now this packs a wallop!” – probably alarmed and reassured the former student in equal measure. “Those were the days when gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they were suspected of being homosexual,” she wrote, in a postscript to the novel, many years later. In 1952 Highsmith, barely 30, perhaps startled by the wayward success of her first novel Strangers on a Train (conferring instant stardom when the Hitchcock movie followed a year later), had good reason to be edgy about the reception The Price of Salt would receive.
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