Alex Haley (27 page)

After all her interviews and her intimate conversations with Haley, Romaine had put together a portrait of a likable narcissist, although she did not call him that. “Everybody likes Alex,” Betty Shabazz had said many years earlier.

* * *

Haley finally ended
his long dry spell of writing in 1988. That year he published a novella,
A Different Kind of Christmas,
about a slave's escape on the Underground Railroad. He also worked on
Roots: The Gift,
a 1988 Christmas television special. Neither was a creation of much import, and each depended a lot on Haley's celebrity for its limited success. Haley told David Wolper that the miniseries
Queen
was what got him writing again. He wrote a seven-hundred-page outline of
Queen
for Mark Wolper, David's son, who was producing the series, and the Australian screenwriter David Stevens, who was writing the eight hours of television script.
Queen
told the story of the relationship between Simon Haley's maternal grandparents, the Confederate Colonel James Jackson and a slave woman, and then the life of their child, Queen. Haley had met white Jackson family members in Florence, Alabama, and got information about the family from them. Some critics thought Haley soft-soaped the relationship between Queen's parents, perhaps making it a story of more romantic love than had actually existed. Still, the commitment to marry exclusively within one's race, an imperative of both black nationalists and white supremacists, was certainly waning in the broader culture, a truth the program perhaps sought to reflect. Or Haley might have been returning to the truth that blacks and whites had always had intimate relations in America, even if many such relationships were not undertaken by choice.
14

Haley watched with detachment in 1991 and early 1992 as Spike Lee's production of a biopic,
Malcolm X,
revitalized black nationalism. Lee and Amiri Baraka, the preeminent poet of black nationalism, engaged in a public argument over Lee's treatment of the slain icon's life. Haley said that Lee had every right to project his “vision of Malcolm.” The movie sparked a revitalization of interest in its subject. The renewed appreciation of Malcolm focused to a large extent on the autobiography, a text for which Haley was mostly responsible. That fact was not usually acknowledged amid the controversy over whether Lee had “gotten Malcolm right.”
15

In its February 1992 issue, the black celebrity magazine
Essence
celebrated Haley's return to writing, discussing
Queen,
which Haley had been talking about for a decade by then. The article noted that the writer's speaking engagements enabled his philanthropy—the full scholarships he provided for needy Tennesseans and Gambians to attend college.
Essence
concluded the piece with this paean: “Alex Haley is a national treasure, and his importance to the world, and to African-Americans in particular, was perhaps best expressed by Haley himself when . . . he wrote that in Africa ‘when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.' Fortunately, Alex Haley, our griot, lives!”

But not for long, because the
Essence
piece had just reached the newsstands when readers were shocked to learn that Alex Haley had died on February 10, 1992, at a hospital in Seattle. He had been admitted to the emergency room late on a Sunday night in the midst of having a heart attack. He had gone to Seattle for a speaking engagement, having met earlier that day with Mark Wolper in Los Angeles to discuss the
Queen
script. His family reported that he suffered from diabetes and a thyroid condition, but they thought he was otherwise in good health. Haley had long been a smoker, a high risk factor for heart disease, although it was not clear whether he was still smoking at the time of his death.
16

His funeral was held in Memphis, because there was no church large enough in Henning to accommodate the throng that assembled to honor him. Among the attendees were LeVar Burton and Cicely Tyson from the
Roots
cast; Dick Gregory; Betty Shabazz; Lamar Alexander, now U.S. secretary of education; and representatives from Senegal and the Gambia. All three of his wives were there, and the last, Myran Lewis Haley, eulogized him: “Thank you, Alex, you have helped us know who we truly are.” Also speaking were Malcolm's daughter Attallah Shabazz, who was Haley's goddaughter, and Jesse Jackson. “He made history talk,” Jackson said. “He lit up the long night of slavery. He gave our grandparents personhood. He gave
Roots
to the rootless.” Haley was buried on the front lawn of Will Palmer's home in Henning, just a few feet from the porch where he had heard the family stories. The funeral received coverage around the world and was the subject of a five-page spread in
Jet
magazine.
17

As is typical for a major celebrity in the United States, Haley's death inspired a fascination with his estate. According to his will, his brothers and his children were to inherit the bulk of his assets in trust. The will provided for cash gifts of $30,000 each to George Sims; Haley's half-sister, Doris; Nan; and Haley's longtime Los Angeles assistant, Jackie Naipo. Newspaper and magazines soon reported, however, that Haley was $1.5 million in debt when he died and that no money would go out anytime soon. According to the
New York Times,
the debts resulted from losses in real estate, and the article also cited Haley's cash gifts to friends and students. In fact, Haley's finances were a mess. The figure of his indebtedness almost matched what he had spent on his farm. He told people in the mid-1980s that his income was about $3 million a year, but that figure had fallen by 1991 to about $750,000, so that his lectures were his main source of income. Before he died, the debts were burdensome enough that he had put the farm up for sale. The indebtedness resulted in part from a decline in his income from royalties and from rising expenses connected to support staff in a Knoxville office, caretakers on the farm, and assistants in Los Angeles. Haley's lawyer blamed Haley's overpayment of staff and general mismanagement of money for the insolvency of his estate when he died: “People took advantage of him. Something that he could buy for a dollar, he paid six.”
18

When his will was probated in Knoxville in March 1992, a long line of creditors formed, led by banks, but also including furniture suppliers, a tractor company, and the Memphis morticians who conducted his funeral and now presented a bill for more than $39,000. George Haley, his brother's executor, announced that the estate would eventually return to solvency with the reduction of expenses. He believed that income from writing projects that were in the works when Alex died, particularly
Henning
and
Queen,
would bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
19

There then emerged a series of challenges to the will. Myran Haley had a prenuptial agreement with Alex and alleged that George Haley was withholding money that was due her. She said that she had been Haley's literary collaborator for many years and that a 1991 contract, signed after she had sued for divorce but before the divorce was granted, entitled her to a third of the estate and the right to finish
Queen.
The executors of the estate argued that the contract was unenforceable because Haley had signed it under duress. George Sims sued the estate for nonpayment of his salary as Haley's research assistant, for money Alex owed him for debts he had covered, and for half the royalties of both
Roots
and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
“I was with him for 32 years and [George Haley] knew nothing about his writing life,” Sims told a journalist. “They treated me like shit.” William and Nan Haley claimed that she should be the sole wife to inherit money, because she had never been legally divorced from Alex. His death certificate listed Nan as the surviving spouse. Betty Shabazz sued to get half-ownership of an early draft of the manuscript of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
There was much confusion over which items in Haley's personal papers were of value. In September 1992 in Knoxville chancery court, the estate was settled with Myran's and George Sims's interests recognized, along with those of Haley's family members.

George Haley then moved to liquidate as much of the estate as possible to reduce the debt. This decision angered Haley's Hollywood friends Blau and Wolper, who thought there should be a major museum devoted to his life and work, filled with the articles that George was selling. The farm was sold to the Children's Defense Fund, and the sale of home decorations and memorabilia got much press attention. Except for the $50,000 paid for the Pulitzer Prize, the bidding for manuscript material, especially the Malcolm X drafts and tapes of
Playboy
interviews, brought the most money. Gregory Reed, a Detroit dealer in literary property, bought the three chapters of Malcolm's autobiography that were removed before publication. The University of Tennessee bought much of the manuscript material to go with the large deposit of his files Alex Haley had made not long before his death. Haley's housekeeper watched the auction with deep sadness, saying, “If he could see what was happening now, he'd be shaking his hand and saying, ‘Aw, babe, I can't believe what a fuss they're making. 'Cause Mr. Haley didn't want people to bother and fuss.”
20

* * *

Roots
had been mostly supported by public opinion in the face of doubters about its authenticity. In the 1980s and 1990s, that support dissipated, as memories faded and both
Roots
miniseries went on the shelf. A few detractors kept hounding Haley even after his death. The opening of his papers at the University of Tennessee library was probably the prompt for an exposé written by the journalist Philip Nobile and published under the headline “Uncovering Roots” in the
Village Voice
in February 1993, exactly a year after Haley's death. The
Voice
had published Eliot Fremont-Smith's critical article in May 1977, and Nobile himself had already written a skeptical editorial piece for the
New York Times
about Haley's genealogical claims. The 1993 article was a full-scale assault on Haley's career and character, drawing together a compendium of allegations of professional malfeasance—essentially all that had been made over the years and then some. Nobile called
Roots
“a hoax, a literary painted mouse, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of bogus research,” and a fraud successful only because a “massive perjury” had covered it up. Nobile called
Roots
“an elegant and complex make-it-up-as-you-go-along scam.” He repeated the Ottaway charges about inaccuracy in Haley's Gambian research, and he found a transcript of a recording made during Haley's first visit to Juffure that contradicted Haley's account of it in
Roots.
Nobile alleged that all of the events of that day had been staged. Nobile interviewed Ebou Manga, who provided information that confirmed that Haley had given an inaccurate chronology of his research. Nobile then asserted that Haley had not even written the sections of the book detailing the African background. He found in the Haley papers a file called “Fisher-edited copy” that showed how thoroughly Murray Fisher had rewritten the African section of
Roots.

Nobile rounded up many of Haley's detractors. Margaret Walker called the deceased writer a “hack.” Even the words of Haley's best friends were used for character assassination. John Hawkins, Haley's literary agent after Paul Reynolds retired, told Nobile that “Alex was a man with many compartments and nobody knew them all,” sort of “a literary Kim Philby.” Extending that analogy, Nobile wrote: “Like a master spy, Haley could persuasively lie about anything.” He quoted Haley's oldest friends as saying things that implied dishonesty on the part of the writer. George Sims, embittered over the disposition of Haley's estate when Nobile talked to him, said, “Alex didn't know 10 blacks or 10 whites in Henning. I was there for 18 years and he was there for 18 months. Those were
my
stories, but Alex could tell them better.”

Some of Nobile's accusations were misleading or simply incorrect. He wrote that Haley had copied eighty-one pages of Courlander's book when in fact Courander alleged that eighty-one
passages
had been copied. Most of the allegations were simply not convincing. Nobile reported from a secondhand source, for example, that Haley had said Margaret Walker Alexander might have won her suit if she had had a better lawyer than her son. It is doubtful that Haley said it, but if he did, he was clearly wrong. Haley's lawyer, George Berger, later said that Walker would not have prevailed before Judge Frankel if “Oliver Wendell Holmes had been her lawyer.” Nobile dismissed as a lie the claim that Haley had slept in the hold of the
African Star
on his way from Dakar to Florida in 1973, basing the accusation on a sailor's insistence that Haley could not have done so because of the noxious cocoa beans in the hold. But in fact Haley had made that trip on the
African Star
two years earlier, and Nobile had no information about what was in the hold of the ship then.

Nobile ended his article with a long quote from an interview that Haley gave near the end of his life to Charles Thomas Galbraith, a New York genealogist and originally a Haley admirer. Haley admitted to Galbraith that he had made errors in
Roots
and, by way of explanation for not admitting or correcting them earlier, said: “The quest for the symbolic history of a people, just swept me like a twig atop a rushing water.” Then he made an unfortunate change of metaphor. “I guess it was sort of like riding a tiger . . . you always remember, you ride this tiger and the crowds [are] cheering, [you] always remember if you fall off the tiger, you's eaten.”
21