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 moments of clarity I can sustain the idea that everything on earth is nature, including that which springs forth from a man’s mind, and hand.’ He read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and painted birds; birds which, as Pat says, ‘he felt he might have become’, just as she might have become a wolf.
From one of her studio shelves, low down where the cats prowl, Pat pulls a brown envelope, and from it a photograph of herself and Charlie.
It’s 1961. There’s no wind. The five-hundred-pound tuna dangles between them, suspended by a rope around its tail, so huge and bug-eyed, so stuck over and spiny it’s hard to believe it’s not cut out and glued on. They each hold a fin, these two anglers, smiling for the camera, proud of their catch.
Pat has a huge rod and reel. As slight and chic as she seems, in her rolled-up jeans, checked shirt and suntan, it was Pat, not Charlie, who did all the work; Pat who struggled to hoick the bluefin out of the sea and onto the deck; Pat who was given the trophy by the state governor for her prize catch, seen in another press photograph, dressed in a dark silk shirt-waister, as shiny as a fish, her glossy hair in curls. She looks like Hepburn or Bacall, gamine and self-assured, with Charlie as her Bogart.
It was Nanno and Charlie and Pat, out fishing, part of the sea. In 1962, Nanno and Pat built this big house, created to enable thin slivers of art. They bought the land for six thousand dollars. Pat drew up the plans and the house grew up from the shore. It didn’t so much look out to the sea as the sea looked into it.
‘It wasn’t conceptual,’ Pat says. ‘It rose up out of the mud.’ Locals thought it was impractical. It seemed built out of belief alone. A factory of the imagination.
That same year came Nanno’s diagnosis, ‘and everything that goes with that’. Photographs show him bundled up to the neck, sitting on the deck, while the house rises pristine behind him, full of light and space. Living with lung cancer, he painted his last painting, of the sea, the large canvas laid flat, supported on stools. It showed the harbour flats drained at low tide. For the first time, he painted no horizon.
‘It was,’ said Pat, ‘his last word on the subject of painting.’ They moved into the house at Thanksgiving, 1962. They were there together barely a year. The following Thanksgiving – just days after President Kennedy was shot – there was a terrible storm which worked its havoc through three high tides. ‘It took the bulkhead, the deck, and almost undermined the house,’ Pat recalls. A month later, that Christmas, Nanno died.
Pat had his coffin constructed from red cedar left over from the building of their house; as if he were being launched out to sea, like Ishmael. Nanno’s tempestuous scenes of the Atlantic shores still hang on these walls: Ballston Beach bursts with energy, as if it were just a window on the wall looking over to the ocean side of the Cape. Every cupboard, every drawer, every eave of this house is filled with art. Art seeps out through the knots in the wood, like the sea under the floorboards.
There were parties here back in the sixties and seventies, recorded in flaring home movies and remembered in the stories of those who attended them and spent a night in gaol for disturbing the peace. There were psychedelic drugs, and when Pat invited jazz musicians, like her lover, Elvin Jones, she’d find rotting fish on her doorstep, left by folk who took offence at her having brought black people to town. Nina Simone visited; I imagine coming downstairs and finding her sipping tea at Pat’s long table, talking in her rich voice. A faded photograph pinned to the wall shows Pat and her friends playing congas out on the deck. The drums still stand in her living room, but they haven’t been played in a while.
Pat had other visitors to attend to. In 1982, a lone orca appeared in the bay. It was a female, apparently habituated to humans; some thought it was an escapee from a military marine mammal programme, a dolphin draft-dodger. It was the biggest animal