Mockingbird (36 page)

She finished reviewing
In Cold Blood
and then hurried off to Fire Island again to spend time with the Browns, who had returned for another season. She was almost done with a draft of her second novel and hoped to polish it up before showing it to Hohoff.

*   *   *

Capote, meanwhile, was certain he was on the verge of volcanic fame, and he was feeling ecstatic about it. The
New Yorker
would begin serializing
In Cold Blood
at the end of September, in four consecutive issues. Anticipating that this would be his best book yet, he had a huge party in mind, the Black and White Ball, which would set high society on its ear. Even though the date for the ball was more than a year off, he was already dropping tantalizing hints about the exclusive guest list, and promising invitations to those with whom he wanted to curry favor.

So he was stunned when Harold Nye threatened to throw a wrench into everything.

As a perfunctory last piece of business, Truman had mailed Nye a copy of the manuscript. He asked Nye to give it a final read-through for accuracy. But Nye, reading it from beginning to end for the first time, saw that Alvin Dewey, the KBI's “office boy” as he later bitterly characterized him, had been cast as the book's hero. When Truman arrived in Kansas City, right before the first magazine installment was scheduled to run, the disgruntled detective abruptly dug in his heels.

“Truman and I, we got into a heck of a fight,” said Nye. “That happened in the Muehlebach Hotel on 12th and Baltimore Avenue when we got together. He brought down, I can't remember—he was an editor of the
New Yorker
, who was also a ‘piccolo player'—and my wife and I went over to the hotel and had dinner with them. Well, this came up after our dinner and we went through the manuscript and I had told him I would not approve it, because it wasn't true.”

Capote was aghast, and went into a rage reminiscent of one of his boyhood tantrums.

“And we got into a hell of a fight right in the Muehlebach Hotel,” said Nye. “He marched me outside and he was screaming. He called me a tyrant and told my wife I was a tyrant. Now, I had been invited to the Black and White Ball and he told me that night, ‘Cancel your invitation!' and that I'd never get another one. Never did, of course.”
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Capote threw aside Nye's objections, and on the strength of his own word and the
New Yorker
's exhaustive fact-checking, the 135,000-word serial began anyway, on September 25, 1965, beginning with the oft-quoted sentence “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.'”

The
New Yorker
's circulation soared, and sightseers poured down the elm-lined road to the Clutters' old house.
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*   *   *

Nelle's physician decided that an operation would be necessary after all; otherwise, scar tissue would permanently impair her hand. “Just a wee note to tell you that Maurice and I will take Nelle Harper to St. Luke's on Sunday,” Annie Laurie Williams wrote Alice Lee in September. “Monday Maurice will go up alone to be with Nelle Harper when she comes out from under and opens her eyes. He will then telephone you. And when the doctor says she can be released Maurice will take her back to her apartment and see that she is fed and taken care of until she feels well enough to let him leave. Nelle Harper thinks this is a lot of nonsense, but we don't pay any attention to what she says, as we want to be with her.”
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The operation was a success.
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And the timing was perfect, because Lee's high school English teacher Gladys Watson-Burkett was coming to New York at her invitation. The teacher and former student were about to embark on a memorable month-long trip to England on October 8, and Nelle had insisted on paying for the excursion. “It was a thank-you for editing her manuscript,” said Sarah Countryman, Gladys's daughter.
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“Harper Lee and Gladys got away on schedule yesterday,” Williams informed Alice. “Maurice went with them and saw that they got aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
with all their baggage. The day before Nelle Harper brought Gladys in to meet us and we enjoyed our brief visit with her.”
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A completed second novel had not materialized before Nelle left, and Tay Hohoff was getting tired of the delay. Williams sprang to Nelle's defense: “I told her that I thought it was better the way things turned out about her second book, as she was under pressure and thought she had to write it this summer,” she assured Alice.

It doesn't have to be written according [to] her publisher's schedule and I think she should take her time and not try to work on the book until she gets back down to Alabama with her folks.… Too many people up here ask too many questions and she seems to feel that she is expected to turn in another manuscript, because everybody says, “Are you working on another novel.” I always say “Of course, she is going to write another book but she is not
going to be hurried.
” It is difficult, as you know to follow Mockingbird as this book was such an all-around success that measuring up to that book is almost impossible.
But she is a writer
and her next book will be a success too, and will have some of the flavor of the first one. I am saying all of this to you, because I want you to know that she was depressed when she didn't come back from Fire Island with a finished manuscript.
She doesn't have to be driven by her
publisher to turn in another script, as she is in the driver's seat and can be independent.
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Lee returned from England in November. As a parting gift for her favorite teacher, she took Watson-Burkett, Crain, and Williams as her guests to see Beatrice Lillie in Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's musical
High Spirits.
Watson-Burkett had never seen a Broadway show before, and it was a fitting send-off. Then, a few weeks later, Nelle followed her to Monroeville.

*   *   *

In Cold Blood
would be out soon. The magazine serialization had served as a drum roll leading up to publication. For Harper Lee, it would be the end to a long experience. More than five years earlier, she had bucked up Truman in Garden City when he was convinced that they would never get past people's suspicions about them. Then, for two months, she had served as his listening post in town and made friends with the folks he needed to interview. Later, she had accompanied him on return trips: once to attend the trial, and two more times just to go over the territory—sifting, sifting for more information. “Without her deep probing of the people of that little town, I could never have done the job I did with it.”
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And finally, she had tightened up his manuscript while she was supposed to be working on her second novel.

So when, in January 1966, she opened the first edition of
In Cold Blood
, she was shocked to find the book dedicated to her, a patronizing gesture in light of her contribution—“With Love and Gratitude,” it said. And, out of the blue, she found she had to share Capote's thanks with his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy.

Lee was not a woman who was quick to anger or demanding of attention. Still, “she was very hurt that she didn't get more credit because she wrote half that book—really upset about that. She told me several times,” recalled R. Philip Hanes, who became friends with her later that year.
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She was “written out of that book at the last minute,” maintained Claudia Durst Johnson, a scholar who has published extensively about
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Not even the perfunctory acknowledgment page paid tribute to Nelle's large and important contribution.
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Capote's failure to appreciate her was more than an oversight or a letdown. It was a betrayal. Since childhood, Truman had been testing their friendship, perhaps because, deep down, he believed that no one, including Nelle, really liked him—not since his parents had withdrawn their love. He was constantly showing off to get people's attention and approval, all the while gauging their response. But hurting her so gratuitously, perhaps to see what she would do, spoke volumes about whether she could trust him. She would remain his friend, but their relationship had suffered its first permanent crack.

If Capote suspected the amount of damage he had done to their lifelong friendship, he doesn't seem to have taken special steps to repair it. For instance, he could have counteracted the rumors that he had written all or part of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but he never went to any strenuous lengths to do so.
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And later, when
In Cold Blood
didn't win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize, he used a little trick of backhanding his friend's success by asking interviewers if they'd ever heard of her book. What he did to Nelle was the beginning of his deliquescing into the sad person he became at the end of his life.

Harper Lee's disappointment over the
In Cold Blood
affair was soon to be compounded by another incident. In 1966, the Hanover County School Board in Richmond, Virginia, ordered all copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
removed from the county's school library shelves. In the board's opinion, the novel was “immoral literature.”
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The episode began when a prominent local physician, father of a Hanover County student and a county Board of Education trustee, protested that a novel about rape was “improper for our children to read.” On the strength of his criticism, the board voted to ban
To Kill a Mockingbird
from the county schools. The next day, the
Richmond News-Leader
editorialized about the board's “asinine performance” and created a Bumble Beadle Fund, named for the officious guardian of children's morals in
Oliver Twist
. The first fifty students of the local high school who requested a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
would receive one gratis, courtesy of the newspaper.

For almost two weeks, the controversy went back and forth on the letters-to-the-editor page, until the
News-Leader
called a halt by allowing Nelle to have the last word. She fired with both barrels.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is “immoral” has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink. I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.
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Eventually,
To Kill a Mockingbird
was restored to Hanover County school libraries because of a technicality in board policy. But the Richmond debate over the book's suitability for young readers was the first of many in the ensuing years. As more schools added
To Kill a Mockingbird
to their reading lists, the book also joined the list of the one hundred novels most often targeted for banning.

*   *   *

Despite indications that Lee was close to finishing her second book, the spring of 1966 found her accepting another responsibility. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had appointed her to the National Council on the Arts. It was going to be a long commitment, six years, which would cut into her writing time when she was already far behind in delivering a second manuscript to Hohoff. But it's likely that she accepted the appointment because Gregory Peck had urged her to say yes.

How the council would function was left in the hands of the chairman, theatrical producer Roger Stevens. One morning, during the council's first meeting, Stevens went for a walk with council member and industrialist R. Philip Hanes, Jr. “‘We can't be all going off the council at the same time,' he said, ‘so we're going to have two-year terms, four-year-terms, and six-year terms. I'll draw names out of a hat and see what happens. But I'll tell you right now, your number's going to be six! And Gregory Peck—he's a hack actor—he's going to be a number two.'”

“Well,” recalled Hanes, “Gregory hadn't been on there a year before he took off for several months and he went to every single repertory theater in America: to Providence, to Cleveland, to San Francisco, to Houston. He went to every single one and saw at least one play, sometimes two. And he came back to the council and produced a huge written report. Stevens was stunned!”
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As a result of Peck's research, repertory theater companies and the training of young actors occupied an equal place beside larger initiatives on the council's agenda. Then, probably because Peck was now in a position to pull some strings, the number of members on the council increased from twenty-four to twenty-six, to make room for the abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn and for Harper Lee.

“Gregory just worshipped her,” said Hanes. “Often he would be seated studying his papers, and when Harper would walk in, he would jump up like a bolt of lightning and pull out her chair.”
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Although the nation had more pressing needs than putting money behind the arts—particularly with the Vietnam War claiming American lives everyday—“If anything,” said council member and sculptor Jimilu Mason, “we felt we had to do more in the arts to counteract the effects of the war.”
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Lee reserved her comments at council meetings for times when she believed she needed to speak up. “She was quiet, unassuming—concise, terse, powerful, and gained the love and respect of all. She only spoke when she had something to say. It was always something important and always heeded. And often her remarks were wry. She would seldom say more than just a sentence, but they would drop down like a small bomb. She had the total respect of Roger Stevens.”
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When she couldn't be found during a social hour before dinner, she could often be spotted with John Steinbeck, standing in a corner discussing favorite books.
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