Mockingbird (39 page)

The Maxwell killings were tailor-made for someone with Nelle's experience. Moreover, Radney was “really excited about the possibility of a book or movie” when she contacted him about giving the story an
In Cold Blood
treatment. He agreed to share all his files going back to the beginning, when he first met the reverend. For the movie version, she said she wanted him to play the defense counsel. Gregory Peck would probably get the lead, she said.
12

For about a year she made her writing headquarters the Horseshoe Bend Motel in Alexander City, where she pored over the records of the trials and took notes on the setting, the same way Truman had closeted himself at the Wheatlands Motel outside Garden City. Then she shifted to her sister Louise's house in Eufaula for three months.
13
Louise, though never especially interested in Nelle's writing, was glad for company, since her husband, Herschel, was in poor health. During the next few years, Nelle would call Radney with updates on how the book was progressing, sometimes saying that it was practically done. “The galleys are at the publishers; it should be published in about a week,” she would say.

But nothing materialized. According to Jack Dunphy, Capote's former lover, Nelle couldn't find a satisfactory structure for the material. About 1984, Radney finally concluded, “she's fighting a battle between the book and a bottle of Scotch. And the Scotch is winning.”
14
It may have been so. Shortly before his death that year, Capote remarked about Lee's drinking. It “was a problem in that she would drink and then tell somebody off—that's what it amounted to. She was really a somebody. People were really quite frightened of her.”
15

Impatient with being put off over and over, Radney went to New York to retrieve his files. After that, he gradually stopped hearing from Nelle. “Don't bring up writing,” a friend of hers cautioned William Smart, the Sweet Briar College professor whose creative-writing classes Nelle had addressed years earlier. He, too, was going to meet her in the city. “She's very sensitive about that.”
16

Nelle's conflicted feelings about writing, the past, and the invasiveness of publicity came to a head in 1988 with the publication of Gerald Clarke's bestselling
Capote: A Biography.
Reminiscing to Clarke about growing up next door to the Lees, Capote claimed that Mrs. Lee had twice tried to drown two-year-old Nelle in the bathtub. “‘Both times Nelle was saved by one of her older sisters,' said Truman. ‘When they talk about Southern grotesque, they're not kidding!'”
17

Nelle was outraged. There was no more vulnerable or painful side of her life he could have touched on.

She wrote to Caldwell Delaney, an old friend and former director of the Museum of Mobile, “Truman's vicious lie—that my mother was mentally unbalanced and tried twice to kill me (that gentle soul's reward for having loved him)—was the first example of his legacy to his friends. Truman left, in the book, something hateful and untrue about every one of them, which more than anything should tell you what was plain to us for more than the last fifteen years of his life—he was paranoid to a terrifying degree. Drugs and alcohol did not cause his insanity, they were the result of it.”
18
Newscaster Paul Harvey repeated the story of Mrs. Lee on his program in 1997, this time, provoking a public broadside from Alice. “It was a fabrication of a fabrication,” Alice told the
Mobile Register
, a “pack of lies. My mother was the gentlest of people. According to the broadcast, I was one of the ones who saved Nelle from drowning. It is false. How would you feel if someone told a story that in essence accused your deceased mother of being an attempted murderer?”
19

*   *   *

Protecting her legacy became important to Nelle as the chances of her publishing again diminished. At one point, her cousin Dickie Williams asked her, “‘When are you going to come out with another book?' And she said, ‘Richard, when you're at the top there's only one way to go.'”
20

Meanwhile, Monroeville had realized its singular advantage as the birthplace of the author who had written one of the most popular and influential novels of the twentieth century. By 1988, the National Council of Teachers of English reported that
To Kill a Mockingbird
was taught in 74 percent of the nation's public schools. Only
Romeo and Juliet
,
Macbeth
, and
Huckleberry Finn
were assigned more often. In addition, as the lightly fictionalized setting for Nelle's novel, Monroeville enjoyed a second distinction that no other town could claim.

In 1990, on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Monroeville staged its first production of the play based on the novel, which had just that year been licensed for amateur theatricals.
21

The Monroeville staging of
To Kill a Mockingbird
had charms that no other production could have matched. Audience members sat in chairs and risers placed outside the courthouse, next to sidewalks where Nelle had roller-skated as a child. Huge pecan trees provided a natural canopy above the sets representing porches on the street where the Finches live. The cast, consisting of residents—businesspeople, farmers, students—rehearsed for weeks in the evenings, trying to recapture the Depression in Alabama, though few could personally recall it. Some hoped that Nelle might make an encouraging appearance at their inaugural opening night, but they were destined to be disappointed. “She sort of hates publicity,” said Julie Fallowfield, Lee's agent at McIntosh and Otis. “The book stands. Which in a way is wonderful.”
22

The first act unfolded under trees by the side of the courthouse, where mockingbirds can be heard singing cascades of brilliant notes in the branches. When Atticus raised a rifle to shoot an imaginary mad dog in the distance, the children in the audience gleefully covered their ears.
Bang!
echoed off the storefronts on the square. For the scene in which Atticus defies a lynch mob bent on kidnapping his client, the courthouse's side door doubled as the entrance to the jailhouse. Across the street was the actual jail Nelle had in mind.

During intermission, the actor playing the sheriff called the names of twelve white males in the audience for jury duty—the only citizens eligible to serve under the laws of Alabama in the 1930s. Coolers heaped with ice, a welcome anachronism, provided drinks and snacks during the break to combat the weather, which, as early as May, was already muggy.

Once inside the courthouse for the start of the second act, the audience settled into the pewlike benches. Up in the “colored” gallery members of a local black church sat and watched, a poignant reminder of how things once were. In the jury box, a dozen white men prepared to hear the case.

Everyone knew the trial's outcome, although in the stuffy courtroom built in 1903 with one ceiling fan turning tiredly high above, there was a sense that the sins of history could be reversed if only the jury would find Tom Robinson not guilty. But while the jury was sequestered in a hot, dark stairway to “deliberate,” the sheriff informed them that no verdict except the “right one” would be tolerated.
23
The foreman then led the jury back into the courtroom and Robinson was again convicted for a crime he hadn't committed.

The play was such a success—both in attendance and for the boost it gave civic pride—that the following year, 1991, the Monroe County Heritage Museum—a consortium of local history museums—hired a director to further capitalize on Monroeville's link with
To Kill a Mockingbird.
In light of such a tribute to the novel and its creator, few could have anticipated that it would be the start of an uneasy relationship between Nelle and the town.

As the annual theatrical performances of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in Monroeville became more popular, and the Monroe County Heritage Museum tended to put more emphasis on Monroeville's link to Harper Lee, the author was not pleased to see that her birthplace was getting on the bandwagon, so to speak. It augured more requests for autographs, more fan mail, and more occasions when strangers would quiz her about the book. At a Christmas party one year in Monroeville, an out-of-towner began chatting her up about
To Kill a Mockingbird.
She turned on her heel and walked away.
24

By now Nelle was in her seventies and weary of any attention connected with
To Kill a Mockingbird.
She had put that far behind her, along with the film. Rarely could invitations to receive honors induce her to depart from her well-worn paths. Twice, Huntingdon College invited her in the 1990s to attend graduation. She never replied.
25
The University of Alabama succeeded in awarding her an honorary degree in 1993—perhaps the appeal for Nelle was closure after never having graduated—but all she would say to the audience was, “Thank you.”

The distance she felt from her only published novel was unmistakable in a foreword to the thirty-fifth anniversary edition in 1993. “Please spare
Mockingbird
an Introduction,” she wrote.

As a reader I loathe Introductions. To novels, I associate Introductions with long-gone authors and works that are being brought back into print after decades of internment. Although
Mockingbird
will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I am still alive, although very quiet. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come.
Mockingbird
still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive without preamble.
26

With dismay, she watched the transformation of Monroeville into the “Literary Capital of Alabama.” After volunteers had finished painting twelve-foot-high outdoor murals of scenes from the novel, Nelle pronounced them “graffiti.” When a television crew asked to film portions of the play and interview the actors, Nelle responded through her agent, “Not just no, but
hell
no.”

“She would give you the shirt off her back,” remarked a resident, “but do not try to take it without permission.” In fact, it was lack of permission that brought about a showdown between Nelle and the Monroe County Heritage Museum. The trouble arose over a cookbook.

Calpurnia's Cookbook
, named for the Finches' cook and housekeeper, was a recipe collection of the kind assembled by churches to raise money. In this case, the idea was that profits from the sale would support the museum. When Nelle got wind that one of her characters' names would soon be appearing beside
To Kill a Mockingbird
pens, coffee mugs, and T-shirts in the courthouse museum gift shop, she threatened to sue. The entire print run of the cookbook, several thousand copies, was pulped.

*   *   *

Yet Nelle's secluded life and decades-long silence continued to exert a fascination for newspaper editors and other media people looking for a good story. Features headlined “What Ever Happened to Harper Lee?” cropped up several times a year. Whether she intended to or not, she created a mystique when she withdrew from the public eye.

It's unusual for an author, an actor, an artist, or a playwright to “loathe” a new introduction to her work; to respond “Hell, no!” to a request to film an amateur play for a few minutes; to write “Go away!” at the bottom of a letter requesting an interview; to call a mural painted by students “graffiti.” Harper Lee has never, in sixty years, attended a reunion of the sisters of Chi Omega house at the University of Alabama. “I've written to her many times,” said a sorority sister, “and she's never acknowledged receipt of my letter.” But a street on campus is named for her.

If they could publish only one book in their lifetime, many authors would choose to write one with as much popularity and influence as
To Kill a Mockingbird
. What could account for Harper Lee's extreme dislike of talking about the novel? She rebuffed attempts by Mary Badham, the child actor who played Scout, to communicate with her. “Mary acts like that book is the Bible,” Lee groused.
27

Could it be that she lacks a sense of ownership?

Tay Hohoff took a long, rambling, discursive, and highly autobiographical manuscript from a young woman who had never published in a national magazine or newspaper, and recrafted it until it went from
Go Set a Watchman
, the “parent of
To Kill a Mockingbird
,” as Lee later said, to the novel that sold millions.
28
As the years passed, Lee continued to assure friends, and her agent, that she was working on another one. It was coming along.… It was very hard to do.… It was almost ready for the publisher. But it never materialized.

 

Epilogue

The Dike Is Breached

Greed is the coldest of deadly sins, don't you think?

—H
ARPER
L
EE
, quoted in
The Mockingbird
Next Door
(2014)

In June 2007, Harper Lee didn't arrive for a lunch appointment with friends in New York. They went to her apartment—the one on East Eighty-second Street where she'd lived for over forty years—knocked on the door, and heard faint cries for help coming from inside. They found the eighty-two-year-old author lying on the floor, where she had been for a day, possibly longer, after suffering a stroke.

Her eyesight had been getting worse because she had macular degeneration, and she was losing her hearing. Her glasses were fitted with side panels to widen her frame of vision, and she wore a hearing aid. With the aid of her headgear, she continued taking city buses everywhere, dressed in her favorite outfit for excursions—a running suit, sneakers, and a big purse slung across in front. She frequented used bookstores, favorite diners, and museums, and she was a bleacher bum at Shea Stadium every summer.