Mockingbird (31 page)

After reviewing Peck's memo, Mulligan and Pakula made another pass at reediting the film, but the star still wasn't satisfied. In a second memo to Universal's Tucker, on July 6, Peck wrote, “I believe we have a good character in Atticus, with some humor and warmth in the early stages, and some good emotion and conflict in the trial and later on.… In my opinion, the picture will begin to look better as Atticus' story line emerges, and the children's scenes are cut down to proportion.”
37
More footage fell to the cutting room floor, including whole scenes of the children. Pakula said later, “It just tore my heart out to lose the sequence [where Jem reads aloud to Mrs. Dubose, who is dying].”
38

In the end, Peck positioned himself firmly and prominently at the center of the film. Only about 15 percent of the novel is devoted to Robinson's rape trial, whereas in the film, the trial scenes add up to more than 30 percent of the two-hour running time.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Nelle continued to work on her follow-up to
To Kill a Mockingbird
; the pressure was on her for a repeat performance. In August, Capote wrote to the Deweys, “As for Nelle—what a rascal! Actually, I know she is trying very hard to get a new book going. But she loves you dearly, so I'm sure you will be the first to hear from her when she
does
reappear.”
39

The success of her first novel had given her something like the corner on the market for popular fiction about growing up in the Deep South. Other authors who wrote about the same region discovered that reviewers held up
To Kill a Mockingbird
as the standard. Elise Sanguinetti, Nelle's friend from the
Rammer Jammer
days, complained about comparison because her novel
The Last of the Whitfields
(1962) seemed to be getting scant attention. A coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of an adolescent, it describes how two upper-middle-class white children in Georgia cope with the new social order welling up around them. “The book is running into some difficulties with this Mockingbird rage that is going about,” Sanguinetti wrote to her mentor, Hudson Strode. “The early reviewers seem to think they are very similar. I didn't think so, and ironically I wasn't very taken with that book. The Negro-white situation there was much too melodramatic for my taste and somewhat unbelievable (as was a nine-year-old daughter of a lawyer going around saying ‘ain't' all the time etc.). But one can't argue with success, can you?”
40

Success was an understatement. By now, Nelle's novel had completed an eighty-eight-week run on bestseller lists, and she was wealthy. In September 1962, the Methodist Episcopal Church of Monroeville broke ground on a new educational building and chapel, helped by an annual percentage of royalties which Nelle had earmarked for it. In addition, she purchased furnishings for the chapel in memory of her parents and her brother, and commissioned a statue of Methodist founder John Wesley. Nevertheless, she was uncomfortable with the assumption that she was rich, which she tried to undercut with rough humor. On the day of the dedication ceremony for the chapel, Nelle rose to use the ladies' room before events got under way. Reverend A. F. Howington cautioned her not to leave her purse on the pew. “Goodness, don't do that—someone might take something,” he said.

“Take something!” Nelle replied. “I spent my damn money on this church. There's nothing in it.”
41

*   *   *

Although
To Kill
a
Mockingbird
was no longer on the bestseller lists, it continued to sell thousands of copies weekly, both in the United States and abroad, buoyed along not only by its appeal to readers but by a wave of concern about race and justice that was gaining strength.

On September 25, 1962, James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old black Air Force veteran, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi, at Oxford, where he had been accepted. Surrounded by white United States marshals, Meredith approached the offices of the Board of Trustees. Blocking the doorway was Governor Ross Barnett.

“Which one of you is Meredith?” asked Barnett. The fifty state legislators flanking the governor erupted in laughter. Barnett then read a prepared statement: “I, Ross R. Barnett, governor of the State of Mississippi, having heretofore by proclamation, acting under the police powers of the state of Mississippi … do hereby deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.”

Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Meredith, this time accompanied by 536 deputy U.S. marshals wearing white helmets and carrying billy clubs, arrived at his assigned dormitory and was placed under protective guard. Then a contingent of marshals walked a half mile to the Lyceum building to prepare the way for Meredith to register for classes. But the registrar was nowhere to be found. Outside the Lyceum building, students tore down the United States flag and ran up the Confederate Stars and Bars. By nightfall, thousands of students and townspeople were battling with the marshals. Rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally bullets spattered the streets. President John F. Kennedy went on national television to announce the federalizing of fifteen thousand National Guard troops to maintain law and order in Mississippi. During the riot in Oxford, two men were killed and hundreds injured. Of the 536 marshals, 166 were injured, and 30 suffered gunshot wounds. Said one military police officer, “I can't believe this is America.”

On October 1, Meredith walked to his first class, a seminar on colonial American history, again escorted by U.S. marshals past a crowd of hundreds of jeering students.

*   *   *

Against this backdrop, in November, Nelle received her first honorary doctorate of letters, from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Along with Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, she had been chosen, said Mount Holyoke authorities, because the two women had “won the kind of recognition in their own fields that is customarily accorded to men.” At the Founder's Day ceremony, college president Richard Glenn Gettell said,
To Kill a Mockingbird
had “made possible in us a deeper perception of the forces at work in our society. Without sensationalism, without cynicism, without bitterness, but with delicacy and strength, compassion and sternness, you have humanly treated the great themes of justice and suffering and the growth of understanding, and have formed them into a memorable work of art.”
42

Her appearance at Mount Holyoke was the start of a long period of standing before audiences. The film
To Kill a Mockingbird
was slated for release at Christmas in order for it to qualify for the 1962 Academy Awards, and Nelle had agreed to pitch in with publicity. Alice claimed that her sister “would be terrified to speak” to groups, but it was not so, judging from how cleverly she handled herself before a roomful of newsmen in Chicago shortly after the film's release. After a local press agent muffed her introduction by calling her “Miss Hunter,” Nelle stepped up to take questions. “She is 36-years-old, tall, and a few pounds on the wrong side of Metrecal [a diet drink],” wrote a reporter for the Chicago Press Club's newsletter,
Overpress.
“She has dark, short-cut, uncurled hair; bright, twinkling eyes; a gracious manner; and Mint Julep diction.” Lee's repartee with the reporter was keen.
43

R
EPORTER:
Have you seen the movie?

L
EE:
Yes. Six times. (It was soon learned that she feels the film did justice to the book, and though she did not have script approval, she enjoyed the celluloid treatment with “unbridled pleasure.”)

R
EPORTER:
What's going to happen when it's shown in the South?

L
EE:
I don't know. But I wondered the same thing when the book was published. But the publisher said not to worry, because no one can read down there.…

R
EPORTER:
One of your sisters is a lawyer. Is she a criminal lawyer?

L
EE
(DEADPAN):
She's not a criminal, no.

R
EPORTER:
You studied law, too, didn't you?

L
EE:
Yes. For three years. I had to study something in college, and I grew up in a legal household. (Her father, like the hero of
Mockingbird,
is also a lawyer—ed.) The minute, though, that I started to study law, I loathed it. I always wanted to be a writer.

R
EPORTER:
How did the lawyers you know like the book?

L
EE:
Southern lawyers don't read novels much.

R
EPORTER:
I understand that Gregory Peck, after seeing his straight dramatic performance in
Mockingbird
, says he will no longer do romantic leads.

L
EE:
Maybe he liked himself in glasses.

R
EPORTER:
When you wrote the book, did you hold yourself back?

L
EE
(PATIENTLY):
Well, sir, in the book I tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South, that there isn't a lynching before every breakfast. I think that Southerners react with the same kind of horror as other people do about the injustice in their land. In Mississippi, people were so revolted by what happened, they were so stunned, I don't think it will happen again.

R
EPORTER:
If you wanted to be a writer, why did you study law?

L
EE:
I think you should always do the opposite thing from what you want to do. If you have a job writing during the day, I think it's too hard to try and write four hours when you go home. So dig ditches for a living, anything. A change of pace is good.

R
EPORTER:
Do you find it difficult to write?

L
EE:
I've found it difficult in terms of time. A lot of people like to drop around and visit now. I'm drinking more coffee than ever.

R
EPORTER:
Do you find your second novel coming slow?

L
EE:
Well, I hope to live to see it published.

R
EPORTER:
How long have you been working on it?

L
EE:
I've spent one and a half years on it now.
Mockingbird
took two and a half years of writing.…

R
EPORTER:
What do you think of the Freedom Riders?

L
EE:
I don't think this business of getting on buses and flouting state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity, and violence. I think Reverend King and the NAACP are going about it in exactly the right way. The people in the South may not like it, but they respect it.

R
EPORTER
(CUB VARIETY):
I came in late, so maybe you've already been asked this question, but I'd like to know if your book is an indictment against a group in society.

L
EE
(NONPLUSSED):
The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.…

R
EPORTER:
Were the characters in the book based on real people?

L
EE:
No, but the people at home think so. The beauty of it, though, is that no two people come up with the same identification. They never think of themselves as being portrayed in the book. They try to identify others whom they know as characters.

R
EPORTER
(GRINNING SLYLY):
What with royalties and a sale to the movies, you must be getting awfully rich.

L
EE:
No, not rich. You know that program we have at Cape Canaveral? I'm paying for it. Ninety-five percent of the earnings disappeared in taxes.

R
EPORTER:
Will success spoil Harper Lee?

L
EE:
She's too old.

R
EPORTER:
How do you feel about your second novel?

L
EE:
I'm scared.

R
EPORTER:
Don't some people presume the name “Harper Lee” belongs to a man?

L
EE:
Yes. Recently I received an invitation to speak at Yale University, and was told I could stay in the men's dormitory. But I declined that part of the invitation. (She smiled.) With reluctance.

Truman intimated to others that he knew how Nelle was coming along with her new book, but apparently she didn't confide in him about it. “I can't tell you much about Nelle's new book,” he wrote to Donald Cullivan, a former Army buddy of Perry Smith's. “It's a novel, and quite short. But she is
so
secretive.”
44
In any case, she couldn't have been devoting much time to it, because publicity demands having to do with the upcoming release of the film were keeping her busy.

For instance, amid all the other scheduled appearances, she received an invitation to visit the Texas home of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. Lee and novelist Allen Drury (
Advise and Consent
, 1959) were called on to speak to students. They answered questions ranging from “How can you prepare yourself to become a novelist?” (“Read your head off,” Lee recommended) to “Do novelists make exceptional grades in high school English?” (“Those were the only good grades I ever did get,” she said).
45
But don't think, she added, that writing a novel will make you automatically beloved. One afternoon she was leaving a country school near Monroeville when a boy of ten or twelve followed her out from the building with his teacher.

“Herbert,” said the teacher, “do you know who she is?”

“No, ma'am.”

“She has written a very famous book,” the teacher hinted.

“She has,” Herbert said flatly.