Mockingbird (42 page)

But immediately the next day, Penguin's announcement was challenged. In a terse statement released by Lee's editor at HarperCollins and purportedly written by the author, Lee implied that Mills was taking advantage of her. And because the response was attached to an e-mail from the law offices of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter, it carried a whiff of potential legal consequences.

“Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills. Neither have I authorized such a book. Any claims otherwise are false.”

Alice Lee was taken aback and asked Carter about it. In a letter sent to Mills a month later, Alice related that, without her knowledge, her law partner had written it herself and taken it over to The Meadows for Nelle to sign. She claimed, “Poor Nelle Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence,” Alice wrote to Mills a month later. “Now she has no memory of the incident.… I am humiliated, embarrassed, and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity at my office.” Penguin later released a portion of the letter, with permission, claiming that the Lee sisters had indeed cooperated with Mills.
28

*   *   *

In October, a meeting took place at Monroeville Bank Trust, which is below the law offices of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter. It lasted an hour; three persons were present. But later, they couldn't agree on what occurred.

There was a visitor from London: the rare books expert Justin Caldwell from Sotheby's, the three-hundred-year-old auction house; Tonja Carter, to whom Alice Lee had recently given power of attorney for her sister; and Samuel Pinkus. Pinkus was there because, although he was no longer her agent—she had finally fired him in January 2009 and replaced him with Andrew Nurnberg Associates in London—he was still coexecutor of her literary estate.
29

From the bank's vault, a safety deposit box belonging to Lee was carried into a private conference room. Inside were letters, contracts, and personal papers. Caldwell had been invited to make a literary appraisal of what was in there, for insurance purposes, while Carter and Pinkus looked on. But after the two men got down to work, Carter left because she had to run some errands, and so she missed out on an astounding discovery that Caldwell and Pinkus didn't tell her about. That's one version of events.
30

Another is that Carter and Pinkus presented Caldwell with a gift box from Lord & Taylor, inside of which was an item he needed to see for himself on the premises. This suggests the pair had previously found something valuable of a literary nature and decided it was important enough to call in an expert.
31

The third version puts all three back in the conference room for an hour, going through Lee's personal papers. In this telling, with Carter fully participating, Caldwell examined two items carefully: a publisher's proof of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, which was not a particularly valuable item, he decided. The other was a lengthy typewritten manuscript. Caldwell read about twenty pages, glancing back and forth between it and a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
that Carter had brought into the room. The typed story was set in the fictional town of Maycomb and inhabited by the same people.
32
But the two didn't match: the manuscript lying on the table was the original of
Go Set a Watchman
, which Tay Hohoff had read in 1957.

Alice Lee might have told them that, but she wasn't there. She was one hundred years old and profoundly deaf, and she had broken three ribs in a fall. In December, ill with pneumonia, she entered a nursing home.

The meeting ended and
Go Set a Watchman
was returned to the safety deposit box and locked in the vault again. For the time being, nothing was said publicly.

*   *   *

Tonja B. Carter was the only remaining active partner of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter after Alice Lee left, and beginning in 2012, Harper Lee became part of litigation that whipped out the doors of her assisted living facility like a Gulf hurricane. First, she sued her agent Samuel Pinkus and others for breach of various fiduciary duties during Pinkus's representation of Lee. The suit alleged that, in order to protect Pinkus's Veritas Media from a judgment his father-in-law sought for commissions owed to McIntosh & Otis, Pinkus had created a series of shell companies that fit inside one another like Russian dolls, each with continually changing bank accounts.

The suit also sought to have all defendants and entities controlled by the defendants assign to Lee whatever rights they owned in the
Mockingbird
copyright and warrant that they had not encumbered the copyright in any way.
33
According to an arbitration award entered against Veritas Media that was referenced in Lee's lawsuit, Pinkus had siphoned off commissions totaling more than half a million dollars that were due to McIntosh & Otis.
34
About his son-in-law's behavior, Eugene Winick said, “It was an absolute betrayal, not only as an employee, but also as a family member.”
35

The following year, Lee filed a federal lawsuit against the Monroe County Heritage Museum, claiming gift shop sales of
Mockingbird
-themed T-shirts, totes, towels, and coffee mugs—many of them also available at the museum's former website
www.tokillamockingbird.com
—interfered with her efforts to trademark the novel's title, adding that the museum had ignored cease and desist letters for twenty years. The museum's mission was not historical, the suit alleged; its true purpose was to trade on the novel and Lee's renown. “The town's desire to capitalize upon the fame of
To Kill a Mockingbird
is unmistakable: Monroeville's town logo features an image of a mockingbird and the cupola of the Old County Courthouse.”
36

Through its attorney, the museum expressed shock: “Lee's greedy handlers have seen fit to attack the non-profit museum in her hometown that has been honoring her legacy.” But as one of the prime movers behind the museum had said some years earlier, “Yes, she has got us by the gonads.”
37
The governor of Alabama, Robert J. Bentley, asked George Landegger, the wealthy pulp mill owner and close friend of Harper Lee and the Carters, to broker a settlement. He advised the museum to back down and take its medicine, because it had “pulled the tiger's tail”; but his efforts were complicated when he was indicted for tax evasion on the basis of having maintained Swiss bank accounts containing millions since the early 2000s.
38
Friends who thought they might suggest reconciling, a “healing,” tried to see her at The Meadows, but the staff had been instructed by Carter not to admit visitors whose names were not on a preapproved list. The owner of Radley's Fountain Grille, who had been bringing her potato soup every Thursday, discovered from a letter sent by the law firm that he wouldn't be able to see her any longer, either.

In protest, residents boycotted a new restaurant that had just opened on the town square: the Prop & Gavel—the name referring to the professions of the owners, pilot Patrick Carter and his attorney wife. The restaurant's manager, the Carters' daughter, shut the doors for a year, leaving the salt and pepper shakers still on the tables, and posted a sign saying it was undergoing remodeling, which included turning the empty store beside it into the new offices of Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter. During the rehabbing of the old storefront, a large word was discovered under the drywall, painted on the original brick: “Monala,” the name proposed by Alice Lee in a contest for the new drugstore on that spot in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, Harper Lee, through her attorney, applied to register her trademarks and offered to sell authorized merchandise to the Monroe County Heritage Museum. The museum refused this proposal. In February 2014, lawyers for both sides filed a joint motion seeking to end the suit under terms that were confidential. As part of the settlement, however, the museum's attorney agreed to publicly apologize on behalf of the museum for any suggestion “that Miss Lee is not in control of her own business affairs.”

*   *   *

Six months later, on the evening before the publication of
The Mockingbird Next Door
, the threat of another suit was again in the wind. Through her attorney, Lee stated again that the book was unauthorized. In addition, she denied being friends with Mills and claimed that her sister, who “would have been 100 years old at the time,” had been duped into signing something.

“Miss Mills befriended my elderly sister, Alice. It did not take long to discover Marja's true mission; another book about Harper Lee. I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised. I immediately cut off all contact with Miss Mills, leaving town whenever she headed this way.… Neither my attorney nor I have retracted my original statement. Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.”
39
The publisher immediately responded by supporting Mills and quoting again from Alice's original letter, clarifying that the April statement “was sent without my knowledge and does not represent my feelings or those of my sister.”

Mills said, “I can only speak to the truth, that Nelle Harper Lee and Alice F. Lee were aware I was writing this book and my friendship with both of them continued during and after my time in Monroeville. The stories they shared with me that I recount in the book speak for themselves.”

*   *   *

On November 17, 2014, Tonja Carter confirmed that Alice Finch Lee, age 103, had died of natural causes at the Monroe County Hospital. Until her retirement two years earlier, Monroeville's “tax lady” had been the oldest attorney still practicing law in Alabama—possibly in the United States. More than once, she had been asked about her secret to a long life. Her sensible answer was, “I don't do anything to bring on dying.”
40

During her three years of retirement, most of it spent in ill health, Alice tried to catch up on her reading. Even her method of falling asleep for the night was a mental exercise. She began by reciting the names of all the presidents of the United States. If she was still awake when she got to Obama, she started on the vice presidents. After that, if she hadn't drifted off yet, she began on the first ladies and then the governors of Alabama. Her last resort was reciting Alabama's sixty-seven counties and the license plate tag numbers for each one. Almost a century after the event, she could recall, as if it were yesterday, the parade and celebration in Monroeville when she was a child of seven, to welcome home the doughboys who had served in the Great War of 1914–1918. She had been enamored of the free cake.
41

The morning of the funeral there was a small earthquake centered near Tuscaloosa, a coincidence that a few mourners sorrowfully made light of as a sign of “Miss Alice's passing” at the First United Methodist Church during the service that afternoon. It was a partly cloudy day in the sixties, the kind of temperate winter weather that had always brought Harper Lee home to Alabama. Seated in a wheelchair at the front, she was heard babbling and muttering loudly to herself. She was eighty-eight, the last of the Lee siblings, and had said many times to Reverend Butts, who was in attendance, that she didn't know what she would do without Alice.

During the service, friends and family members went to the front of the church to recall Alice's devotion to the church and the community. She was the first woman to chair the Alabama–West Florida Council on Ministries and the first to chair the Board of Directors of the United Methodist Children's home. She was legal counsel to her own church after joining her father's law firm, and taught adult Sunday school classes for over sixty years. As a “Pink Lady” volunteer in the evenings for the local hospital, she was one of the first to reach five hundred hours of service. In 1992, the Alabama–West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church established the Alice Lee Award for women who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the United Methodist Church. The Chamber of Commerce chose her as Monroeville's Woman of the Year and the Kiwanis Club created its Citizen of the Year award just for her.

As Butts listened to the tributes, he couldn't help but think that the recent problems surrounding Harper Lee and her novel “never would have developed if Alice was still handling things. Her sister adored her.”
42

*   *   *

Three months later, in February 2015, HarperCollins announced that a second novel by Harper Lee titled
Go Set a Watchman
had been discovered, in a statement attributed to the author, by “my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter,” and it was hailed as the most important literary event in a generation.

*   *   *

Nelle Harper Lee followed her sister in death on February 19, 2016, passing away in her sleep at eighty-nine in Monroeville. In keeping with her wish that her funeral not attract attention, the following day private services with a few dozen people attending were held at the First United Methodist Church, where her family had worshipped since she was a child, and she was laid to rest in the church cemetery near her parents and Alice. In every direction is the world that meant the most to her, a world that could be encircled in a leisurely hour's walk with the Lee family headstone as its center.

Lee's attachment to Monroeville was constant and lifelong. Sixty years earlier, living alone in a barely furnished, cold-water flat, she had been overwhelmed with homesickness. “New York streets shine wet with the same gentle farmer's rain that soaks Alabama's winter fields.… I missed Christmas away from home, I thought.… I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother's night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father's bumblebee bass humming ‘Joy to the World.'”