Mockingbird (40 page)

But now, in the judgment of friends, it was out of the question for her to keep living alone. While she was in the hospital recovering from the stroke, which weakened her left side, arrangements were made to drive her back to Monroeville to stay. The apartment sold quickly.

*   *   *

The residents of Monroeville had grown accustomed to seeing her in town during the balmy winter months. She had been coming south since the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in 1960, traveling twenty-four hours by Amtrak sleeper car to Birmingham, insisting that friends meet her at the train station to drive her four hours south to Monroeville.

In the one-story brick house she shared with Alice was a small library. There were bookcases in the foyer and in Alice's bedroom. At the end of the hall, the shelves in Nelle's room reached from floor to ceiling. To Harper Lee, a day well spent was a day spent reading.

When she ventured out on errands, the locals had learned how to notice her out of the corner of their eye without imposing. The famous Harper Lee was the woman with short, blunt-cut white hair, combing the aisles at the Dollar General store for bargains. During the week, she might be spotted at the Excel Laundromat waiting for a dryer to become available, or at Whitley Lee Lake sitting beside Alice on a bench, feeding popcorn kernels to the ducks and geese. On Saturdays the sisters frequented Dave's Catfish Cabin for a plate of catfish fillet, sweet tea, and hush puppies from the children's menu. And on Sundays they liked to go to out for coffee after church, or to the country club for brunch. If an old blue Buick was parked outside the post office, then Alice and Nelle were inside getting the mail, which usually brought dozens of letters from readers. They stuffed them into a plastic shopping bag and took it out to the car.

The sisters' weekly rounds weren't hard to figure out, as enterprising journalists sometimes did. The less enterprising only needed to consult the phone book, because Alice Lee's address and home phone were listed. If she declined an interview on her sister's behalf, or if Nelle wrote, “Hell, no,” at the bottom of a written request, reporters who arrived on the front step had to gamble that the door would be closed on them, politely but firmly. And woe to any neighbor who pointed out the Lee residence to a stranger; he or she was sure to come in for a “blessing out” with “hell and pepper” from Harper if she found out about it. “Walking on eggs,” an old-timer said—that was part of being her friend. She used to sign books as a favor to shops on the square, but when she heard that customers were selling them online for more than eight thousand dollars each, she stopped.
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To forestall any unnecessary unpleasantness, a cadre of retired gentlemen served as Monroeville docents. Their job was to provide a welcome for those interested in Harper Lee, but also to play a kind of shell game with them. Journalists who researched the town ahead of time probably found it puzzling to read the same two or three people quoted over and over, telling the same folksy stories, as if they were going past on a merry-go-round with a friendly wave. If a reporter got a little too warm during his scavenger hunt for Harper Lee, the docents took evasive action. A BBC reporter in town with a camera crew discovered too late that he had been only a few feet away from his quarry during lunch at the country club, but neither of his chaperones let him know. The Britisher shrugged it off as “good fun.”

*   *   *

So when Harper Lee returned permanently to Monroeville in late summer 2007, it seemed easy to ensure her privacy—even easier when she moved into an assisted living facility three years later. With royalties of close to a million dollars a year from forty million copies sold of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, plus residuals from the film, she had plenty of options for long-term care; she chose a residence called The Meadows, on Highway Bypass 21, just a few blocks from the town's commercial center. The Meadows resembles an inexpensively built Protestant church, long and narrow like a motel, with a big gabled roof at the center where the entrance is. The staff would insulate her from intrusions (an extra precaution was putting a fictitious name on her hallway door); but there were also encouraging indications in recent years that she had become a little less prickly about being famous.

In 2002, for instance, a journalist for the
Chicago Tribune
, Marja Mills, went to Monroeville to write a feature story about Lee. Others had failed and she was denied an interview, but Nelle agreed to have her photograph taken, and the sisters came to like the young woman; as related in the subsequently published story, Alice even went so far as to confide that Nelle's second novel never got beyond an outline. “I'll put it this way,” she said. “When you have hit the pinnacle, how would you feel about writing more? Would you feel like you're competing with yourself?”
2

It seemed that the ice was broken and the sisters were willing to go on the record with her about their lives. So two years later, Mills, who suffers from lupus, left the pressures of her job at the
Chicago Tribune
and moved to Monroeville. The Lees assisted her with renting the house next to theirs—a gesture of trust never shown to another outsider.

For the next year and a half, Mills participated in the lives of her elderly neighbors. Harper Lee enjoyed meeting for lunch at Radley's Fountain Grille, the name of which she grudgingly tolerated because the octogenarian owner was a friend. Alice set aside time at the law office to visit; and on Sunday afternoons, the threesome went on long drives in country, during which the sisters narrated the history of homes they passed, the families who had lived there, their troubles or successes, and the feuds between people long since dead.

A few juicy tidbits came Mills's way. “Truman was a psychopath, honey,” Harper Lee told her. “He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn't apply to him.” About
To Kill a Mockingbird
: “I wish I'd never written the damn thing.”

But as might be expected from a pair of ladies who never married, had no children or grandchildren, never traveled widely, and resided in a small town, most of what they said was fairly commonplace.
3
“Oomph. I'm bushed.” “I shouldn't have the cheese grits. But I'm going to.”

Still, the material gathered was suitable for a memoir, and just to make clear that Mills intended to publish a book, she sent Alice a letter agreement: “This is to confirm, should anyone want such a confirmation, that you and Nelle cooperated with me and, I would add, were invaluable guides in the effort to learn about your remarkable lives, past and present, in the context of your friendships and family, your work, your recollections and personal reflections, your ancestors and the history of the area. By signing below, you confirm this participation and cooperation, and that I moved into the house next door to yours only after I had the blessing of both of you.”

Alice signed, and then Mills returned to Chicago to work on
The Mockingbird Next Door
for what turned out to be almost ten years.

*   *   *

Marja Mills's success at breaking the seal on Harper Lee's reclusiveness was followed by more developments of that kind. Two films arising out of renewed interest in Truman Capote appeared in theaters in 2005; Sandra Bullock played Lee in Douglas McGrath's
Infamous
, and Catherine Keener played her in
Capote
, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for best actor. Bullock was proud of not troubling Lee while she was preparing for the role. “I would never have contacted her. Wouldn't have done it in a million years. I have family that lives very close to Monroeville.”
4
Lee commented on
Capote
, but her response wasn't what most would have expected after almost fifty years of silence. There was a mistake in the trial scene in Kansas, she said in a letter printed in the
New Yorker
: the photographer Richard Avedon wasn't present.

It was the beginning of something, though. During May 2006, she appeared in public more times than she had in decades: at the Los Angeles Public Library to accept an award, and at the University of Notre Dame to receive an honorary doctorate, for instance.
O
magazine carried a personal remembrance about how she loved to read as a child. “Now, seventy-five years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”

All of this seemed to augur that Harper Lee might be more approachable as a year-round resident of Monroeville, more of a participant in the spirit of the community trying to live up to its name as “The Literary Capital of Alabama.”
5
After all, about thirty thousand visitors come to Monroeville annually to see the courthouse, attend the annual play on the lawn, or buy a few mementoes at the Monroe County Heritage Museum.
Mockingbird
foot traffic keeps the shops on the square and the strip malls humming.

No one would have anticipated that Harper Lee's permanent return to her hometown would see the playground boss of Monroe County Elementary School knocking a few heads together.

*   *   *

The Wind Creek Casino and Hotel, a high-rise, Las Vegas–style entertainment center in Atmore, Alabama, is about an hour south of Monroeville, and Harper Lee liked to gamble. During the 1980s and 1990s, she vacationed in the resort town of Gulf Shores, on the Gulf of Mexico, where Jimmy's Casino Shuttle would take her door-to-door to any of the half-dozen gambling establishments. But Wind Creek is so much closer, and she didn't have to leave the premises. There's a spa, a bowling alley, a cinema, a cooking school, and an amphitheater for live concerts. The fifty-thousand-foot gaming floor has row upon row of machines all chiming, blinking, speaking, blazing with lights, and spouting jangling music in the bluish dimness of an eternal casino night.

Lee's close friend of many years, the Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, the silver-haired pastor emeritus of the United Methodist Church in Monroeville, likes to gamble, too. He took her to Wind Creek so they could drink (“I've seen her drunk as a lord,” said a friend) and seek out “loose slots.”
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As odd as this seems for a clergyman, Reverend Butts apparently puts a generous construction on Methodism and the responsibilities of one of its ministers. In 1983 he was publicly tried before thirteen church elders for drunkenness and having an affair with a married woman. Acquitted on both counts, he was suspended from the ministry for two years for denying an associate minister due process before firing him.
7

Not long after Harper Lee's stroke, he ran into her at Wind Creek Casino, rolling up and down the aisles in a wheelchair and merrily feeding quarters into the machines. He was glad to see her out and about so soon after returning to Monroeville. Pushing the wheelchair and putting coins into her right hand, because her left side was paralyzed, was Tonja B. Carter, whom the reverend knew. She was married to Patrick Carter, one of three sons of Truman Capote's cousin Jennings Faulk Carter—evidence once again of how, it is said, “people in small Southern towns are mixed together like blended peanut butter.”
8
But the man accompanying them was someone Butts wasn't familiar with—a short gentleman, bald, and wearing a loud sport shirt with the tail hanging out.

“That's my agent,” Lee said. Butts extended his hand. Instead of taking it, however, the man reached up and plucked the reverend's winnings for the night, a $100 voucher, from his sports jacket pocket.

“I'm taking this,” he said.

Butts wasn't amused. “You're a real carpetbagger, aren't you?”

“And you're a redneck, aren't you?”

“I certainly am and proud of it,” Butts said.

Carter wheeled Harper Lee around and headed her in the direction of Wind Creek's glass-walled steakhouse. Lee's agent gave the voucher back to Butts and strolled after them.
9

*   *   *

His name was Samuel L. Pinkus, and he was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father had been a hospital administrator. After high school, Pinkus went on the bum using his winnings from playing poker to travel around the Middle East. For a few winters he worked as a ski instructor out West. After graduating from Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, he became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and later a copyright attorney providing counsel to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. While vacationing at a Club Med, he met Leigh Ann Winick, daughter of Eugene Winick, the president of McIntosh & Otis, the literary agency representing Harper Lee.

McIntosh & Otis had inherited Lee from Maurice Crain. When Crain became ill in the mid-1960s, he asked Elizabeth Otis and her partner, Mavis McIntosh, to manage his list of authors, provided each of them approved of the idea. McIntosh & Otis had been in business since the 1920s and were so beloved by John Steinbeck, a discovery of theirs in 1931, that he shared his 1962 Nobel Prize money with them.

Lee's new agency worked the copyright of
To Kill a Mockingbird
through subagents around the world, arranging for licenses and translations, collecting royalties and paying them to her. Their assiduousness in promoting the novel was really the reason it became read worldwide. Their outside legal counsel was Eugene Winick, the attorney of record in several cases involving the literary estates of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, and others. Winick was aggressive about protecting clients from copyright infringement, such as when an advertiser used without permission the name “John Galt,” Ayn Rand's protagonist in
Atlas Shrugged.
He went after copyright violators on principle.