Mockingbird (28 page)

*   *   *

On Monday, May 2, when
To Kill a Mockingbird
was in its forty-first week as a bestseller and had sold nearly half a million copies, the phone rang in Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain's offices. It was a friend of Williams's at a publishing house who wanted to speak to Nelle about hearsay from a reporter.

In California, Pakula had already heard the same rumor and was excitedly calling his partner, Bob Mulligan.

When Mulligan answered, Pakula shouted, “We got it! We got it!”

“We got what?” asked Mulligan.

“The Pulitzer Prize. Our book won it!”
45

Nelle hardly dared believe it until she received an official call: “A friend from a publishing company called and had gotten the word from a newspaper. I haven't heard from the Pulitzer committee yet, but I haven't been back to my apartment since I heard the news.”
46
When she finally did hear from a spokesperson for the Pulitzer Prize Committee, she called Alice several times, who by now was becoming adept in the role of her sister's spokesperson and at fielding phone calls from reporters. “Nelle was anxious to find out the local reaction,” she said in response to questions. “She still claims Monroeville as her home, and when she leaves, it is usually for business purposes” (a hint that Alice was not reconciled to Nelle's living months at a time in New York). “The whole town of Monroeville is amazed about the Pulitzer prize.”
47

The annual Pulitzer Prizes in drama, letters, and music, created by the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in a bequest to Columbia University, were worth only five hundred dollars each at that time, but their cachet, in terms of bringing artists' names to the public, was enormous. Hudson Strode immediately tapped out a letter of congratulations to Nelle: “I announced the good news to my writing class last night and there was a response of cheers. The University and the State, and the whole South are proud of you. But no one more than myself.”
48

Besieged by phone interviews that kept her pinned inside Williams's office for hours, Nelle resorted to modesty and humor in responding to questions about herself. “I am as lucky as I can be. I don't know anyone who has been luckier.”
49
She claimed that the effort to write the book had worn out three pairs of dungarees. And about whether a movie was forthcoming, all she would say was that production was slated to begin in the fall.

Almost immediately, a second avalanche of fan letters began. “Snowed under with fan letters,” wrote
Newsweek
, “Harper Lee is stealing time from a new novel-in-progress to write careful answers.”

It was the proverbial Cinderella story: from nowhere comes a young writer, without benefit of grants, fellowships, or even an apprenticeship at a major newspaper or magazine, who produces, on her first try, a novel snapped up by three American book clubs: Reader's Digest Condensed Books, the Literary Guild, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. In addition, the British Book Society had selected
Mockingbird
for its readers, and by the spring of 1961, translations were under way in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Czechoslovakia.

Truman Capote, who craved winning the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, and hoped he would with
In Cold Blood
, wrote to friends in Kansas: “Well, and wasn't it fine about our dear little Nelle winning the Pulitzer Prize? She has swept the boards.”
50

Despite Capote's casual tone, he no doubt resented this turn of fortune in his friend's life. After all, when they were children, he had been the one to urge her to write stories (he later revised the nature of their partnership, telling the
Washington Post,
“I got Harper interested in writing because she typed my manuscripts on my typewriter. It was a nice gesture for her, and highly convenient for me”). Moreover, Lee tended not to put the emphasis on winning the Pulitzer Prize that Capote would have. “The Pulitzer is one thing; the approval of my own people is the only literary reward I covet,” she wrote to a friend.
51
It was gall that Truman had to swallow, as gracefully as he could, but his cousin Jennings Faulk Carter recalled, “The only time I've ever heard him say anything about Nelle's book was that he remarked, ‘She got the Pulitzer, and I've never, never done that.' I forget how he put it, but you could tell he was hurt badly. That as much writing as he had done, he had never won it, but Nelle had.”
52

In mid-May, the Alabama legislature attempted to pass a resolution honoring Nelle, but a segregationist senator named E. O. Eddins stepped in to stop it. The senator had been at the head of the charge to ban Garth Williams's 1958 book
The Rabbits' Wedding
, which featured the wedding of two rabbits, one black and one white. The White Citizens' Council in Alabama, with Eddins's support, had attacked the Williams book as “communistic” and promoting racial integration. Eddins and other legislators tried but failed to remove the state's director of the Alabama Public Library Service, Emily Wheelock Reed, for refusing to remove the book from library shelves. But this time, Eddins sensed that a similar backlash might build if he lambasted Lee and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, so he finally withdrew his protest “lest it make a martyr of the author.”
53
A joint resolution passed on May 26 offering “homage and special praise to this outstanding Alabamian who has gained such prominence for herself and so much prestige for her native state.”

And there was surely more to come from an author so promising. She had written an essay, “Love—In Other Words,” which appeared in the April issue of
Vogue
magazine. She told reporters that she had several short stories under way. She seemed to have talent and a work ethic that indicated that a long career was just beginning.

In its first year,
To Kill a Mockingbird
sold more than 2.5 million copies. W. S. Hoole, director of the University of Alabama libraries, “nearly fell over his size thirteens asking for the manuscript!” Nelle wrote to friends in Mobile, but she thought better of giving it to him.
54

Maurice Crain, Annie Laurie Williams, and certainly Tay Hohoff, couldn't wait for Nelle's second novel. In July 1961, a teasing note arrived at Nelle's apartment on the Upper East Side, where she had just moved with a friend, Marcia Van Meter: “Dear Nelle: tomorrow is my first birthday and my agents think there should be another book written soon to keep me company. do you think you can start one before i am another year old? We would be so happy if you would. (signed) the mockingbird and annie laurie and maurice crain.”
55

To reporters asking the same question—What are your plans for a second book?—Nelle replied, “I guess I will have to quote Scarlett O'Hara on that. I'll think about that tomorrow.”
56

The remark was more than apt. As for Scarlett O'Hara, unpleasantness and hard decisions could always be put off until an eternal tomorrow, so “tomorrow” would never come for Nelle Harper Lee as an author. With her first novel, which became the most popular novel in American literature in the twentieth century, and which readers rank in surveys as the most influential in their lives after the Bible, Lee seemed poised to begin a writing career that would launch her into the annals of illustrious American writers. Instead, almost from the day of its publication,
To Kill a Mockingbird
took off, but gradually left its author behind.

 

ten

“Oh, Mr. Peck!”

“He's got a little pot belly just like my Daddy!”

—H
ARPER
L
EE

One cold night in early January 1962, Wednesday night services had just ended at the imposing First Baptist Church on Monroeville's town square when a stranger made his way up the front steps through the trickle of worshippers exiting the sanctuary. By his downcast and rough appearance, he appeared to be homeless.
1

“May we help you?” asked one of the ushers.

“I'd like to see the reverend,” came the gruff reply.

The usher assured the man that if he needed a meal or a place to stay, then that could be taken care of. No, that wasn't the problem, said the stranger. He needed to see the reverend. The usher, beckoning over a couple of gentleman who were busy returning hymnals to the backs of pews, explained the situation. They agreed to accompany the visitor to Dr. L. Reed Polk's office.

Reverend Polk was just hanging up his vestments when the little group appeared on the threshold of his office. He thanked the ushers, invited the tall and rather well built man in, and shut the door so they could have some privacy.

“What can I do for you?” asked Reverend Polk.

Looking up suddenly and extending his hand, the stranger said, “How do you do, sir—I'm Gregory Peck.”

Peck was in town to meet the Lee family and to soak up some of the setting for the character he was going to play in the film version of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
The reason he had stopped at the First Baptist Church, he told Dr. Polk, was that he wanted to speak to someone who knew the town and its people. Polk had been the minister at First Baptist for more than fifteen years. Peck apologized for the disguise, but he didn't want word to get around that he was visiting before he'd gotten a chance to get his bearings and meet the reverend. Dr. Polk was amused and flattered that Peck had come directly to him.

For the next hour, the two men talked about the town and about the man Peck was going to play. The actor asked for particulars about Mr. Lee's standing in the community, his thoughts and behaviors—anything that “set Mr. Lee apart” would be helpful. Polk stood up and demonstrated how Lee had a tendency to fumble with his pocket watch as he talked and how he paced back and forth. Peck watched intently, making mental notes about how he was going to embody Atticus Finch on the screen.

*   *   *

Gregory Peck had not been Universal Studios' first choice for the role. Rock Hudson was offered the part, and he was prepared to do it when the project entered what is now sometimes called “development hell” in Hollywood—the period of massaging the screenplay and wrangling over creative control. But, in a nutshell, Pakula didn't want Hudson for the part; he wanted Peck. The studio agreed that if the latter would sign on, then they would provide the financing. Pakula sent the actor a copy of the novel. “I got started on it,” said Peck, “and of course I sat up all night and read straight through it. I understood that they wanted me to play Atticus and I called them at about eight o'clock in the morning and said, ‘If you want me to play Atticus, when do I start? I'd love to play it.'”
2
Peck formed a production company called Brentwood Productions, which would be a three-way partnership with Pakula and Nelle Lee, who, with the assistance of Alice and Annie Laurie Williams, had formed her own company, Atticus Productions, as a tax shelter. Peck, however, would have input into the film's casting, the development of the screenplay, and other creative decisions.

With Peck on board, the next piece of business was turning the novel into a screenplay. Pakula deferred to Nelle before approaching anyone else, but she wasn't interested in the difficult work of adaptation. First, she was busy with a new novel, also set in the South. Working on it, she told a journalist, was like “building a house with matches.”
3
The second reason was that she didn't mind if someone else pruned the book to fit a feature-length movie. She felt “indifference. After all, I don't write deathless prose.” So Pakula turned to the playwright Horton Foote instead. “I was asked to write the script,” said Foote, “because the actor, producer, and Miss Lee were familiar with my writings.”
4

A stocky, soft-spoken Texan with blue eyes, Foote actually had very little experience as a film writer. The only other screenplay he'd written was a film noir piece,
Storm Fear
(1955), the adaptation of a novel by Clinton Seeley, starring Cornel Wilde. A former actor, Foote had begun his career with the American Actors Theater, a small repertory group founded in the early 1940s. The theater's members at that time included Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, and Mildred Dunnock. But he soon realized he was a so-so actor and started listening to friends who advised him to write plays about the town of Wharton, in southeast Texas, where he was raised.

When he was given the job of adapting
To Kill a Mockingbird
, he recognized a historical kinship with Nelle. His forebears had come from Alabama and Georgia in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, he worried about “despoiling the quality of the story” because “it's agonizing to try to get into someone else's psyche and to catch the essence of the work, yet knowing you can't be just literal about it. There has to be a point where you say, ‘Well, the hell with it—I've got to do this job for another medium, and I've got to cut out this over-responsible feeling and roll my sleeves up and get to work.'”
5

At Pakula's urging, Foote ratcheted up the drama by compressing the novel's three years into one. He added a touch of backstory, too. “Harper never mentions the mother, and I was wondering how I could sneak in that emotional element. I remember as a boy my bedroom was right off the gallery on the porch and when I was supposed to be asleep I would hear things I was not supposed to hear from the adults. This was something I invented for the two children.”
6

Most important, he heightened the intensity of the novel's social criticism. Social protest, particularly about racial conditions in the South, receives more emphasis in Foote's screenplay than it does in Nelle's novel, a reflection of the civil rights movement's gaining momentum. To underscore this theme's seriousness, Foote removed some of Nelle's satire, probably thinking that too many caricatures of southern types would diminish the courageousness of Atticus's moral stance against the town. Gone are Aunt Alexandra and her racist church ladies; Colonel Maycomb, admirer of Stonewall Jackson; Miss Fisher, the barely competent first-grade teacher from northern Alabama who behaves like a carpetbagger of education; and Mrs. Meriwether, the long-winded speaker at the Halloween pageant. Foote added a dab of love interest to the story by having Miss Maudie from across the street appear at Atticus's breakfast table one morning, hinting that a relationship might be in the offing. Nelle, on the other hand, preferred her hero to be absolutely asexual—deaf, in fact, according to a political cartoon described in the novel, to the siren call of ladies in Montgomery who find the eligible attorney-legislator attractive.