I Am Scout (24 page)

Nelle's oldest friend, however, Truman, whose ties with her spanned Monroeville and New York, seemed to be undergoing a slow-motion breakdown she was unable to stop. Fears and regrets assailed him. When
People
magazine requested an interview in
1976
, he brought Nelle along for comfort. As he was describing his unhappy childhood, she interjected that the kindergarten teacher in Monroeville had smacked his palm with a ruler because he knew how to read.

“It's true!” Truman wailed.

Glancing protectively at him, Nelle explained, “It was traumatic.”
5

Truman's deterioration became newsworthy in July
1978
when he appeared as a guest on
The Stanley Siegel Show
radio program in New York. During the first few minutes, he seemed all right, but gradually his speech became slurred and hesitant. Clearly, there were problems.

“What's going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?” Siegel asked.

Seconds of dead air followed while Truman tried to rally himself. Finally, he replied in a croaky voice, “The obvious answer is that eventually I'll kill myself.”
6

He hung on for several more years, washing up now and then like driftwood in hospital emergency rooms, until he died in
1984
, a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday. His last words were for his mother, Lillie Mae, who had committed suicide years before.

Nelle, along with Al and Marie Dewey, attended Truman's memorial service in Los Angeles, where the first chapter of
In Cold Blood
was read aloud as a tribute. Afterward, they went to the home of one of Truman's friends from happier times, novelist Donald Windham. When Windham asked Nelle during dinner when the last time was she'd spoken to Truman, she had to say she hadn't heard from him in a very long while.

*   *   *

Truman's death ended a long chapter in Nelle's life. But it also spun her thoughts back
25
years to those Kansas days when she'd been most creative. In
1960
, she had been his “assistant researchist,” contributing to one of the most sensational and highly regarded books in American literature, while her first novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird,
was just months away from publication. That brief period had been the highest point of her writing life thus far.

And so, in the mid-
1980
s, retracing her steps over familiar ground, Nelle embarked on a book project that resembled
In Cold Blood.
It would be a “nonfiction novel” based on a serial murder case in Alabama she'd read about involving a man accused of killing relatives for their insurance money. And this time, unlike
In Cold Blood,
the book and the credit would belong wholly to her. The working title she chose was
The Reverend.
7

The story revolves around W. M. “Willie Jo” Maxwell, a veteran of World War II, born and raised in east Alabama. During the mid-
1970
s, in addition to working in the wood pulp business, he did some preaching on the side in black churches in Alexander City and became known as the Reverend Maxwell. One night, Tom Radney, Sr., an attorney and former state senator, received a call from Maxwell. “You've got to come out here to my home,” Maxwell pleaded, “the police are saying I killed my wife.” Mrs. Maxwell had been found tied to a tree about a mile outside of town and murdered.

Radney agreed to take the case. Fortunately for the reverend, the woman next door provided him with an alibi and he was found not guilty. From a portion of his late wife's insurance policy, Maxwell paid Radney's fees. Later, he married the woman next door.

“A year or so passed,” said Radney, “and then the new wife showed up dead.”

Again Maxwell asked Radney to defend him. During the trial, the jury was persuaded that there was no evidence linking Maxwell to the murder. He was acquitted, and he paid Radney from his second wife's insurance policy.

The third time Maxwell was charged with murder was in connection with his brother, who was found dead by the side of a road. The district attorney argued that Reverend Maxwell, either by himself or with someone's help, had poured liquor down his brother's throat until he died of alcohol poisoning. But the jury wasn't convinced and returned another verdict of not guilty. Maxwell was his brother's beneficiary and had another lump sum due him. The Alexander City Police Department began referring to Radney's law offices as the “Maxwell Building.”

The fourth death involved Maxwell's nephew, discovered dead behind the wheel of his car. Apparently, he had run into a tree. The following day, Radney, retained again as Maxwell's attorney, inspected the crash site. “Not even the largest trees were more than two inches around,” he said. “It was obvious that hitting those little trees didn't kill the reverend's nephew. However, the state could not prove the cause of death. I remember having a pathologist on the witness stand. I asked him, ‘C'mon, what did he die of?' And the reply was, ‘Judge, I hate to tell you, but we don't know what he died of.'” Maxwell left the courtroom a free man and settled with Radney from proceeds from his nephew's insurance policy.

The fifth death touching the reverend appeared on the front page of the
Alexander City Outlook
on June
15
,
1977
. Police reported that Shirley Ellington, Maxwell's teenage niece, had been changing a flat tire when her car fell off the jack and killed her. After reading the news story, Radney decided, “I've had enough.” When Maxwell showed up at his offices, his erstwhile attorney turned him down.

“Mr. Radney, you're not being fair to me,” Maxwell protested. “I have done nothing wrong. You've got to defend me.”

Radney later recalled the next few minutes clearly. “I said, ‘Reverend, enough's enough. Maybe you're innocent, you never told me anything differently, and I'll never say a word against you, but I will not defend you anymore.' In the meantime, the area behind my office building was filled with cameras and reporters from Birmingham, Montgomery, and Columbus, Georgia. A newswoman was standing behind his car, and the last thing I heard the reverend say as he got into his big Chrysler was, ‘Ma'am, if you don't move, I'm going to run over you.'”

The police waited to arrest him, hoping Maxwell might do or say something during his niece's funeral service that would incriminate him. Instead, a scene took place that Nelle decided was the perfect beginning to
The Reverend,
one that was both awful and comic in one stroke.

A week after Shirley Ellington's death from being crushed underneath a car,
300
people gathered for her memorial service in the chapel of the House of Hutcheson funeral home. One of the teenager's uncles, Robert Burns from Chicago, took a seat in the pew behind Maxwell. As the organist was playing and the choir singing in the loft, Burns took out a .
45
from his suit jacket and shot Maxwell point-blank in the back. For a moment, Maxwell dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief while blood spilled from his mouth. Then he fell to the floor, dead. All the mourners ran for the doors, but finding police blocking the exits, they pushed back inside.

“Two or three ladies, little heavy ones,” said Radney, “tried to get out the windows and got stuck. The preacher didn't stop preaching, he just got under the pulpit. The organist got under the organ and kept playing, and the choir in the choir loft kept singing—nothing stopped. The next day, police found more than a dozen guns and twice as many knives scattered under the pews.”

That's where Nelle would end her first chapter.
8

Radney defended Burns, after first checking with the Alabama Bar Association that it wouldn't be a conflict of interest. But since Maxwell was dead, there was none. The jury was out
20
minutes and came back with a verdict of not guilty. The judge sent Burns on his way. As court adjourned, the district attorney mused aloud that he must be the only prosecutor in the United States to have lost a first-degree murder case when there were
300
witnesses.

The Maxwell killings were tailor-made for someone with Nelle's experience. Moreover, Radney said he 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. (Peck, who had kept up his friendship over the years, was bewildered when she said she had a really good part for him if he could play an old woman! “I'm not sure she was kidding,” he mused.)
9

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. Then she shifted to her sister Louise's house in Eufaula for three months. Louise, though never especially interested in her sister's writing, was glad for company because 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.

Impatient with being put off about the book any longer, 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, a college professor whose creative writing classes Nelle had addressed years earlier. “She's very sensitive about that.”
10

*   *   *

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, a former reporter for
Time
magazine, about growing up next door to the Lees, Truman told tales about the family and Mrs. Lee's emotional problems. “When they talk about Southern grotesque, they're not kidding!”
11

Nelle was outraged. There was no more vulnerable and painful side of her life he could have touched on. “I hope you read the book with a salt-shaker at your side,” she wrote to Caldwell Delaney, an old friend and former director of the Museum of Mobile.
12

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.

If you found yourself in a Monroeville that was strange to you, remember that Gerald Clarke was on his own for the first time, without the fact-checking services of TIME, Inc., and relied on information from Truman's relatives!

*   *   *

Protecting her legacy became important to Nelle, as the chances of her publishing again seemed more and more unlikely. 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.”
13
She meant
down
in readers' esteem.

Meanwhile, her hometown, Monroeville, had realized its singular advantage as the birthplace of the author who had written one of the most popular and truly influential novels of the
20
th 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, Monroeville enjoyed a second distinction as the setting for the novel, which no other town could claim.

So in
1990
, the
30
th anniversary of the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Monroeville staged its first production of the play based on the novel, adapted and licensed for amateur theatrical use by Christopher Sergel, owner of Dramatic Publishing. As far back as
1965
, Sergel had persuaded Annie Laurie that “Schools all across the country continue to write to us with requests for a dramatization of
To Kill a Mockingbird
—it is much more requested than
any
other book.”
14
Thus Monroeville was tardy in embracing its literary heritage by
25
years, but eager to see what the local response would be.

The Monroeville staging of
To Kill a Mockingbird
had charms that no other production could match. Audience members sat in chairs and risers placed outside the courthouse, next to sidewalks where Nelle 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 sorts of hates publicity,” said Nelle's agent at McIntosh and Otis, an understatement for those who were unfamiliar with Nelle's ways by
1990
. “The book stands. Which in a way is wonderful.”
15