Mockingbird (41 page)

In 1984, after McIntosh & Otis had been in business for almost sixty years, Winick became president. He and his wife, Ina, an educational consultant, lived in a rather ordinary suburban home that belied his success. Case in point: four years after taking over the agency, he landed a $10 million contract for Mary Higgins Clark for four novels and a book of short stories.

About that time, his daughter Leigh Ann married Samuel Pinkus, and Winick began to teach his new son-in-law the business. Pinkus was a quick study and showed promise. But as he gained access to some of the agency's best clients, however, something about him changed, as if being the heir apparent entitled him to show off.
10
His style became audacious and flamboyant. One night for the opening of a Broadway play, for instance, he showed up wearing plaid pants, sandals, and a bowling shirt. To a female relative of John Steinbeck's who complained to him about how he was stirring up litigation in connection with Steinbeck's estate, Pinkus replied, “Go fuck yourself.”
11

In 2002, Eugene Winick suffered a traumatic brain injury that affected his memory; Pinkus replaced him at the helm of McIntosh & Otis, pulling down a salary of a million dollars a year, and began cutting his own deals through a side agency called Veritas Media, Inc. that Winick knew nothing about. Pinkus walled off certain clients from review, including review by his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein, who handled the agency's foreign, film, and theater rights. Three years later, with Winick threatening a lawsuit, he left the agency in 2005, but was still empowered to act for one of his clients, Harper Lee.

*   *   *

They are provincial women, the Lee sisters, and they have always put themselves in the hands of the comparatively few people they knew and trusted. Most of Harper Lee's friends—in New York, in Monroeville, and those she made while in Kansas helping Capote with
In Cold Blood
—have passed away. She never taught writing, appeared at a writing conference, accepted a position as writer-in-residence, or served on the board of a foundation except for the stint on the National Council of the Arts in the 1960s, which she undertook as a favor to Gregory Peck. Money from the novel didn't interest her, either—“Well, it doesn't matter because I only make ten percent on it.”
12

She left all of her business affairs to Alice to handle. Beginning with the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Alice figured her sister's taxes, paying what was owed from their personal joint bank account as if they were paying utility bills. Alice reviewed contracts, too, and the complicated terms regarding returns, reprints, rights, pay schedules, and percentages, before allowing her sister to sign. McIntosh & Otis, during forty years of representing Harper Lee, had never given Alice reason to think they were being treated unfairly. For half that time, their point of contact was agent Julie Fallowfield, until her retirement in 1996. The Lee sisters trusted her and Winick without reservation.
13
They felt the same about Samuel Pinkus after Fallowfield left. Nelle thought he was “the most wonderful agent in the world.”
14

But the way he playfully picked Reverend Butts's pocket at Wind Creek Casino in the summer of 2007 seemed symbolic of the way he rolled now. In early May, while Lee was still in her New York apartment, he had dropped by with some papers to sign. Alice would have preferred to have been consulted, because she knew her sister tended to sign anything anybody put in front of her just to be done with it.
15

And in fact, Nelle later couldn't recall what had transpired. Pinkus bid her adieu afterward and went outside into a sunny, breezy spring day in New York, knowing he had just succeeded in getting her to sign away all her rights in the copyright of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The agreement did not recite any consideration for the transfer of her rights, was not notarized, and contained legal language that would try most people's patience—let alone an elderly woman who couldn't see well. Pinkus's intent, claimed Nelle's attorneys in a subsequently filed lawsuit, was not only to secure for himself “irrevocable” interest in the income derived from both the novel and the film but also to assist him in efforts to avoid having to return any money he owed to McIntosh & Otis for commissions.
16

None the wiser, Harper Lee received the Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in a ceremony at the White House that November. Bush praised her “outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition. At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, helped focus the nation on the turbulent struggle for equality.” Still infirm from her stroke, she took the arms of the president, and C-Span founder Brian Lamb, who was seated beside her, to rise from her chair so she could stand for the honor.

But she decided not to keep the medal; she gave it to Sam Pinkus instead, because she told him that he had lost family in the Holocaust. He deserved it, she said, not her.
17

He visited her often at The Meadows after that, usually unannounced, again needing to conduct business. It was probably during one of those visits that the names “Tonja Carter” and “Samuel Pinkus” replaced Alice Lee as cotrustees of Harper Lee's literary estate and gained decision-making power over her intellectual property. Pinkus also prepared, and had Lee sign, “To whom it may concern” communications that allegedly were designed to protect his, rather than Nelle's, interests. She received royalty checks every six months, but no accompanying information about the number of books printed, shipped, or sold. HarperCollins, her publisher, couldn't get a response from Pinkus about offering
To Kill a Mockingbird
as an e-book. The silence from his corner left Lee “increasingly dissatisfied.”
18

*   *   *

Tonja Carter had been selected to serve as cotrustee with Pinkus because Alice thought her former secretary was wonderful. Clerks and bank tellers in town became accustomed to seeing her run errands for the law office. “Miss Alice just loved her. She's almost like family.”
19

Carter was born in Ohio, coming to Monroeville as a teenager when her father started work at the Alabama River Pulp Company in Perdue Hill, a fifteen-minute drive from Monroeville. Her husband, Patrick, whom she had married in 1990, piloted small airplanes like his father, Jennings, an aerial crop duster in the county for more than forty years. Patrick's private plane service flew out of the single-runway Monroe County Airport three miles south of Monroeville. One of his regular passengers happened to be a close friend of Harper Lee's—George Landegger, chairman and CEO of Parsons & Whittemore, which owns the pulp mill.

Alice Lee saw a successor in Tonja, someone to carry on the practice. Just as her own father had encouraged her to take “lawyering” in the 1940s, Alice made it possible for her secretary to attend the University of Alabama School of Law, which would have been Harper Lee's alma mater had she graduated. When Tonja graduated in 2006, Barnett & Lee became Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter.

That same year, the first version of this biography appeared; the Lee sisters told Reverend Butts they were “very unhappy” about it and told friends not to read it.
20
Setting aside the question of its merits, however, the first life of Harper Lee to be published occasioned quite a few reviews, and invited a fresh reassessment of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

That millions still loved the book was indisputable. A World Book Day poll in 2006—the poll is held annually in the United Kingdom and Ireland—named it the number one book every adult should read, beating the Bible into second place.

And yet since at least the mid-1990s, assigning the novel in English class had been generating uneasy feelings among some teachers. Integration had made classes more diverse, and some—in particular, black students—argued that Tom Robinson and other black characters—Tom's wife, Helen; Calpurnia; and Reverend Sykes, who admonishes Scout, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.”—existed for whites in the novel to test their ethics against.
21

In a lengthy review of this biography for the
New Yorker
titled “Big Bird,” the critic and novelist Thomas Mallon argued that the novel that had beguiled millions of readers for decades appeared rather shopworn in postmillennial America. To him, Atticus came off as a “plaster saint”; his conversation with his children “tends toward the stagey and the sententious.” Mallon also faulted Lee's twin narrators as a “wildly unstable compound,” saying Jean Louise and her nine-year-old self “serve only to jar us out of a past that we've already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl.”

However, the novel's most serious shortcoming in Mallon's view was that it lacked moral complexity regarding racism and injustice. “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience,” says Atticus. Mallon speculated that
To Kill a Mockingbird
's popularity in classrooms “is less because the novel was likely to stimulate students toward protest than because it acted as a kind of moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.”
22

*   *   *

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
in 2010 provided Monroeville with another opportunity to strut as the hometown of the author. Harper Lee's publisher wished to lend a hand, but Samuel Pinkus did not respond to requests for assistance.
23

Not that it would have mattered, because boosters in Monroeville had become accustomed to going it alone. For twenty years, the nonprofit Monroe County Heritage Museum, which manages six local historical sites, had been drawing attention to Lee's association with the town without imposing on her. The museum board was thrilled when she attended a reading by Patricia Neal of Capote's “A Christmas Memory,” and sent her flowers afterward. “My dearest friends,” she replied, “the roses are spectacular and I love them, sincerely yours, Nelle Harper Lee.”
24
But that was the only time Lee put in an appearance.

And it seemed highly unlikely that Lee would be involved in any commemoration of
Mockingbird
's fiftieth anniversary because, as Alice Lee wrote to Marja Mills, “She doesn't know from one minute to the other what she's told anybody.… She's surprised at anything that she hears because she doesn't remember anything that's ever been said about it.”
25

For the celebration there would be games, walking tours, and cake, ice cream, and lemonade served on the courthouse lawn to counter the July heat, followed by a Sunday evening banquet of southern foods: collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, and Lane Cake. Once again, the Mockingbird Players were cautioned not to deviate from the licensed script—no ad-libbing, in other words. Not only out of deference to the author, but also to avoid a repeat of the episode in 2002 when Lee threatened to sue the museum for trademark infringement in connection with its publication of
Calpurnia's Cookbook
. Although two hundred copies of the cookbook were secretly stored in the museum's attic—perhaps in the fond hope that Lee might relent someday—it was vital to walk on eggshells. Tickets to the play were $50 per person, and sales provided 25 percent of the museum's budget.

In the gift shop, volunteers laid in an extra-heavy supply of souvenirs with tie-ins to
To Kill a Mockingbird
—aprons, T-shirts, fleece vests, infant clothes, hand towels, soaps, wine bags, magnets, glassware, bookmarks, beverage huggers, and more. With thousands of visitors expected for the four-day festival, hope ran high that this would be a banner year.

Against that, background noise about the novel continued. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the
New Yorker,
described Atticus as an accommodator, not a reformer. A blog post titled “Stuff White People Do: Warmly Embrace a Racist Novel”—and cited in the
Huffington Post
—condemned a National Public Radio piece for implying that whites who reread the novel would come away feeling that “things are oh so much better now.” In
Mockingbird
's defense, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described the story's effect on her when she read it for the first time at age eleven and delighted in its humor; and then how, as an adult, she came to admire it for “its clear-eyed depiction of American tribalism in its three major manifestations: race, class and region.”
26

In any case, the volunteers preparing for the fiftieth-anniversary celebration couldn't afford to think about such things. Twenty percent of Monroeville's residents have incomes below the poverty line. There's no money to repair the original law offices of A. C. Lee on the square, which would cost half a million dollars just to bring up to code.
27
On the site of the ramshackle Boulware house—the original of Boo Radley's place—is an independent gas station; and the rock wall where Nelle and Truman played tightrope between their houses marks the edge of the parking lot of Mel's Dairy Dream drive-up. Unless the town could continue advertising its kinship with
To Kill a Mockingbird
via ticket sales to the annual play, and selling keepsakes from the gift shop, financially the “Literary Capital of Alabama” would have its wobbly legs kicked out from under it. So it was good news for the town when, on Harper Lee's eighty-fifth birthday in April 2011, Penguin Press announced it had purchased Marja Mills's memoir,
The Mockingbird Next Door
. For curious fans, it seemed that at last, after decades, the dike guarding the author's privacy had been breached, because Mills had “written with direct access to Harper and Alice Lee and their friends and family.” Readers would be privy to the sisters' memories of growing up in Monroeville, how the novel changed their lives, and so on—a complete departure from the way things had been for so long. Among the optimistic in town, it sounded like a favorable change in Harper Lee weather.