Alex Haley (16 page)

In 1972 Haley sought greater media attention for his book. In early May he made what would prove to be an effective change in the title, when he began referring to the work as “Roots.” In April Haley had appeared on the television quiz show
To Tell the Truth,
on which he was the figure he and two impostors claimed to be. He identified “Alex Haley” this way: “Actually my story is much more than the story of one family. In effect, I have charted the history of every black American. I say this because every one of us is directly descended from some African who was taken from his homeland, dragged to America, chained in the hold of a ship, and callously sold as a slave.” Later that year he appeared on David Frost's late-night talk show and spoke with what the
Christian Science Monitor
reported was “a cool neutrality that adds to the excitement” of his writing project. In July 1972 Haley published his first article about the book since 1965. In “My Furthest-Back Person—The African,” which appeared in the
New York Times Magazine,
he gave an emotional rejection of his own mixed racial identity, one that departed from the earlier equanimity, even pride, about his Irish ancestry. Arriving in Juffure, he wrote, he had been surrounded by the villagers. “It hit me like a gale wind: every one of them, the whole crowd, was
jet black.
An enormous sense of guilt swept me—a sense of being some kind of hybrid . . . a sense of being impure among the pure. It was an awful sensation.”
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In August 1972 Paul Reynolds read a further-revised 408 pages of “Roots,” the part called “The African Heritage.” Reynolds thought the pages were “beautifully written” and added that if Haley wanted to become a novelist, “you would be a very successful one.” But Reynolds said he was “a little appalled at the length this book is going to be.” The book might have to be published in two or three volumes, because one book containing the entire text would require a price so high it would hurt sales. (Later in 1972 Haley reported that the 952 pages of the book had all been written the previous summer.) But in the spring of 1973, Doubleday made clear that it was publishing only a single volume.
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Haley taught black history at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 1973; there, he wrote the Middle Passage section of “Roots.” He also spent time in Los Angeles working with Fisher on the book. He liked California for the old friends there. Through Lou Blau, he now knew more people in Hollywood. By this time he was turning his ambitions to film and television, though he still talked about books that he would write after “Roots.” The money in Hollywood was better than in publishing, and his role in the creation of entertainment for television was less laborious than writing for print. He wrote the script for a 1973 film,
Super Fly T.N.T.,
the sequel to the successful blaxploitation film
Super Fly,
starring Ron O'Neal as a Harlem cocaine dealer. O'Neal starred in and directed
Super Fly T.N.T.,
which was a commercial and artistic failure.
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In May 1973 Haley told Reynolds that he planned to take out a loan for a year's projected expenses so that he could stop lecturing and spend long periods of time writing aboard freighters. Reynolds thought that was a good idea, because he was “beginning to get a backlash” from those—no doubt at Doubleday—demanding to know, “Where is the book?” It is not clear whether Haley got the bank loan, but he certainly did not abandon the lecture circuit. He gave thirty-seven lectures in the next year. But rather than spend another summer on a merchant ship, he rented a house in Negril, a village on Jamaica's western coast. He loved the setting and the climate. There were few telephones, and the mail was slow. He worked there for much of the next two years.
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In 1973 the IRS put a lien on Haley's bank account. He had deposited $800 and written checks for twenty-two bills, every one of which bounced because the IRS had confiscated his funds. “That kind of thing would plunge you into an abyss and for that moment, [I thought], you dumb son of a bitch, what in the world are you doing?” Julie had been put in a psychiatric hospital, and he needed money to look after Cindy, now nine years old.
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Help came from Hollywood. In 1974 Columbia Pictures canceled its 1968 contract for film rights to “Roots” because of the studio's financial problems. Lou Blau then negotiated with Warner Bros. for film rights to “Roots,” but nothing came of that. David Wolper, a producer of documentaries, had heard of Haley's book in 1969 from the actress Ruby Dee, wife of Ossie Davis. Dee and Davis had known Haley through Malcolm X, and at black arts events in New York, they heard him talk about his family research. From the moment Wolper heard of “Roots,” he wanted to produce it. In 1974 Wolper heard that Warner had relinquished the rights, contacted Blau, and negotiated a contract for a television series. He paid Haley a $50,000 option on the $250,000 full fee for rights when the book was finished.
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With Hollywood money starting to flow, Haley bought a house in Jamaica. At Blau's suggestion he set up the Kinte Corporation, a tax shelter. He and his brother George were planning to produce a line of dolls and other memorabilia that capitalized on the new interest in the African past. They had already created a foundation to gather material for a genealogical library. Leonard Jeffries, chair of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York, did much of the work for this project. The Haleys received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation for almost a half-million dollars to get the library going. “Probably I've become the person most knowledgeable about black genealogy,” Haley told the
Wall Street Journal
in 1972. That seemingly harmless boast set him up for later criticism.
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* * *

Reynolds congratulated
Haley on the television deal but warned him, “With no book, your whole house of cards would fall to pieces.” Though Haley maintained warm relations with Lisa Drew, by 1974 he felt embittered toward the publishing house. He told Reynolds that he had “a deep canker in my insides” against Doubleday, because it had “consistently pinched, and squinched as if [this book] was some marginal gamble by an unproved writer.” Murray Fisher had told him that writers broke contracts all the time to get more money, and Haley wanted to do that. Reynolds dismissed all suggestion that they might get another publisher to buy Doubleday out of the book. “It's known all over New York that you've been writing this book for 7 years. Any publisher is going to wonder whether the next two-thirds of the book can be written and finished within six months or a year.” At the same time, Drew was getting constant demands from Doubleday executives to either get a book out of Haley or get the company's money back. She defused the situation by saying the book was almost finished as she tried to get Haley to complete it.
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Drew and Ken McCormick, now semiretired, had read the 871 pages of the book delivered in November 1973. They enlisted Reynolds to try to get the book finished. Drew told Reynolds that some of the writing was good but other parts were “simply too long and lose the impact of what Haley is trying to say by excessive repetition.” She and McCormick thought the conversations that Haley had created among slaves during the American Revolution were unrealistic and “beyond [the slaves'] scope, given their limited education.” Neither of the editors wanted to include a section at the end of the book about Haley's research. The Doubleday staff was relieved when Haley insisted in April 1974 that the book would be submitted in the next few weeks. Reynolds deflated their hopes. “Alex will never deliver in May or June. . . . His problem is money and he's had to go back to lecturing.” Sure enough, Doubleday did not receive any more of the manuscript until December 1974, thirteen months after the previous installment had come in.
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In the press to finish the book, Haley relied heavily on Murray Fisher. Fisher would later claim to have been Haley's “personal editor” and “deeply involved in the creation” of
Roots
—a fair claim by any standard of measure. In 1969 Fisher had so completely rewritten the African portion of the book—150 pages, almost a fourth of the book—that the prose was probably more his than Haley's. In 1973 Haley had informed Reynolds that he wanted Fisher to get 10 percent of the proceeds of the book in repayment for his great contribution to the work and 5 percent of all movie residuals. The editors at Doubleday had little knowledge of Fisher's role in editing the book until 1974, when, with some desperation, they agreed that Fisher could make the cuts Doubleday wanted in the 871 pages received in November. Fisher was an overbearing and interfering man who exceeded the bounds of editor. He objected to Reynolds that he had not been given an opportunity to edit the copy that
Reader's Digest
was excerpting. A furious Haley told Fisher that he was not to call Reynolds or anyone else handling the production of “Roots.” Haley told Reynolds that Fisher was “an aggressive, dominating type of personality, which I regard as fine for his own life, but don't thrust it upon
me.
” If Fisher did not back off, Haley would not let him see the second half of the manuscript. If he fired Fisher but had to keep paying him, “I'd regard it as another costly lesson learned.” But the fact was that Haley needed Fisher to get the second half of the book out. About three hundred pages of new text reached New York in early 1975. Reynolds thought it was good but needed some cutting. Haley again turned to Fisher to attend to such problems.
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Haley kept Drew in the dark about his progress, or lack thereof. She pleaded with Reynolds for information on what Haley was doing. In May 1975, David Wolper expressed concern that “Roots” would not be finished soon enough to appear in bookstores before March 1976, when the television series was scheduled to air. Haley then promised that he would deliver the final manuscript to Doubleday by June 15, 1975. In mid-June Drew went to Jamaica with the intention of giving editorial suggestions to Haley on the spot and then returning to New York with a final manuscript. Drew was surprised to find Murray Fisher also in residence and shocked to discover that the manuscript was far from complete—only about 70 percent of what would eventually comprise the book had been written. Drew worked in one room reading the manuscript while Haley wrote on the porch. He was writing the Chicken George portion of the book in longhand on a legal pad, and when he had written two or three pages, he gave them to a typist. When the typing was complete, Fisher edited the text. “Alex tends to overwrite a great deal,” Drew later said. “He had a lot in his head, and he was putting down everything in it.” Fisher cut, tightened sentences, moved material around, and then gave the pages back to the typist, who produced a new draft. Drew then read Fisher's edits and made more suggestions, and the manuscript was typed again. Drew thought Fisher's edits were beneficial.
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At the end of the first day, Drew asked Haley for a few minutes to go over her edits, and when she left him to read more, Fisher came to Drew and ordered her not to talk directly to Haley. All her comments should go first to him, Fisher said, and he would pass them on to Alex. Furious at his high-handedness, Drew said she would deal with Haley as she saw fit. When she asked Haley if he knew about Fisher's behavior, he replied that he did not and that Drew should come directly to him whenever necessary. Drew and Fisher kept their distance from each other from then on, until Drew was leaving to return to New York, at which point Fisher gave her a set of pages—only the first third of the manuscript. She turned to the title page and saw “Roots, by Alex Haley and Murray Fisher.” Drew told Haley that dual authorship was not acceptable. Haley and Fisher had a bitter argument, and Haley told Fisher to leave. Haley told Reynolds that all had gone well among the three of them and that the manuscript would be finished by July 15. He wanted people in New York to believe that he was enjoying smooth sailing toward the completion of the book. In late September he had still not completed the Chicken George chapters, seventeen in all, or about 150 pages of manuscript. But he promised that they would be submitted soon and that in the next six weeks he would push to the end of “Roots.” Throughout the entire writing process, this was the only promise of a delivery date that he kept.
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In early October 1975 Fisher met with Haley and Stan Margolies, producer of the television series. Fisher interrupted each time Margolies asked Haley a question about the story. Haley angrily left the meeting and informed Fisher that he would finish “Roots”
without his help. They were almost opposite personalities, Haley said; Fisher relished conflict and admitted his “private disdain for people who don't meet [you] in confrontations. . . . You all but personify intransigence. . . . Once the manuscript's in your hands, who dares intrude?” Haley despised “any unnecessary confrontations—as I think most are.” Haley was angry that Fisher had told Lisa Drew “to keep secret” what she saw in Jamaica, meaning Fisher's heavy involvement in the manuscript's formation. Such a comment, “dropped, seeded, in enough places,” could become “the sort of titillating tidbit that can outgrow weeds and outlast dye,” and “in time it's heard in cocktail parties in Idaho, ‘Look, I happen to know he didn't really write it—.'” On the lecture trail he had been asked regularly if it was not true that a white man had actually written
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Haley had been sensitive to gossip about himself since cocktail-party chatter in New York in the 1960s about his failure to get articles published in
Reader's Digest
had gotten back to him. Haley acknowledged that Fisher had greater abilities than he did. Haley said that he himself researched good stories and that “I'm an innate[ly] good story-teller; an adequate author.” Maybe he and Fisher could work together in the future, but for the time being they were through.
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