The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (6 page)

“She was wonderful.”

“I understand you had quite a conversation.”

“We did. I just wrote her a note.” I nodded toward the desk. “I’ve been making the rounds and told her I’d keep her up to date on that. She told me I should talk to Dale Welch and Reverend Butts.”

She scowled and leaned in a bit closer.

Was that the wrong thing to say?

“Pardon me. I didn’t hear you.”

I raised my voice. “Your sister told me I should talk to Dale Welch and Reverend Butts.”

The scowl deepened. She cupped her hand to her right ear. “What?”

The air-conditioning unit just to my right and under the window seemed to have two settings: noisy and off. I switched it to off. The loud rumble and blowing abruptly ceased. It was a reckless move in summertime southern Alabama but it worked.

“Is this better?” I asked. “I can turn it back on if it gets too warm.”

Her face relaxed and she smiled. “No, that’s better.”

Alice had filled her in on our conversations.

Before we began talking in earnest, she was very clear: This would not be an interview. “Just a visit.”

I agreed, and filled her in on the One Book, One Chicago happenings.

I mentioned the movie showings. I’d enjoyed Gregory Peck’s remarks in a documentary about meeting Lee and filming
To Kill a Mockingbird.

At the mention of Peck, she leaned forward. Her eyes danced.

“Isn’t he delicious?”

She had as many questions for me as I had for her. She wanted to know more about the One Book, One Chicago program, and she also asked about the director of the program, Mary Dempsey, with whom she had spoken. She also asked about the specifics of my stay, including where I had gone, who had spoken with me, and what they had said. I didn’t feel I was being grilled; her tone was conversational.

I did want to know what she thought of Monroeville today.

“I read that when they were going to film the movie, they decided Monroeville had changed too much from the thirties for them to film here.”

She made a face, as if she had tasted something sour. There was something childlike in her expressions, not childish but animated, spontaneous in an appealing way. At the same time she spoke with an almost formal grammar.

“This is not the Monroeville in which I grew up. I don’t like it one bit.”

She was not one to equivocate, clearly.

We spoke at some length about how the character of the town had
changed. She also echoed Alice’s comments about the continual attention she received and the toll it took on both of them. As she put it, “Forty years of this gets to be a bit much.”

She was a woman of formidable intellect. I would have loved to hear her expound on any number of topics. But I trod carefully that first day. I was concerned about her famously private nature. Yet here she was, putting me at ease. I came to realize later that she set the tone of any conversation.

“Alice told me a little about your parents, and Finchburg. And Burnt Corn.” That was a nearby community, tiny but still something listed on maps. We laughed together about some of the colorful place names in Alabama. She lamented that local flavor was being lost. Later, she noted how developers often named new subdivisions for what they had destroyed to create them. As Lee put it, many paved Oak Groves stood where oak trees had fallen.

Mayor Daley wasn’t the only prominent Chicagoan to have proclaimed his love of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Oprah Winfrey spoke of the influence the novel, one of her favorites, had on her. I’d heard she’d wanted to pick the novel for her immensely popular televised book club but that the novelist declined.

Lee confirmed this. “I met her. We had lunch together.” The two discussed Winfrey’s request over lunch in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, she said. Lee declined her request but was impressed by Winfrey’s knowledge of her characters, and her passion for the book.

“What did you think of her?” I asked.

“Well, for a girl, a black girl, growing up in poverty in Mississippi when she did to accomplish what she has . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It is remarkable.”

Winfrey had been a cultural force as long as I could remember. It was easy to forget—unless you remembered the place and era in which
Winfrey grew up—how unlikely it was at the time that she would become a cultural figure of influence and wealth beyond all imagining.

Lee mused aloud as to why Alice and I developed a quick rapport. With her index finger stabbing the air as if she were pressing an invisible doorbell—a gesture, I’d come to learn, that was as automatic to her as breathing—she delivered a true compliment, given the character of the woman to whom she compared me.

“I know what it was,” Harper Lee said. “Quality met quality.”

I had never heard that formulation before. It might have been particular to her.

I was surprised, once again, that she seemed in no hurry to leave. When she did stand to say good-bye, I thanked her and she wished me safe travels.

But she had one last surprise.

She hugged me. I hoped I didn’t look startled. And then she was gone.

Chapter Four

A
lready I found myself fascinated by Harper Lee and Alice Lee as sisters. Even at their ages, it was clear Alice was the steady, responsible older sister, and Nelle Harper the spirited, spontaneous younger one. Born fifteen years earlier, Alice was as much mother as sister to Nelle. Alice had lived most of her life in Monroeville, and she and Nelle shared her home several months of the year. The rest of the year Nelle lived in her New York City apartment. Alice handled, in large part, Harper Lee’s financial affairs. Her sister had no interest in that, Alice said.

They were utterly different in temperament and the paths they chose. Nelle left Monroeville in 1944 to attend Huntingdon College, as Alice had done, in Montgomery. After a year, Nelle went on to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and studied law. The summer of 1948, she studied at Oxford and fell in love with England.

Both she and Alice were fascinated with English history and English literature. Their own English roots went deep, back to the barons of Runnymede, the feudal landowners who made history by forcing King John to accept the Magna Carta, limiting his powers, in 1215. The more Nelle and Alice learned about British history, the more they
wanted to know. It was true when they studied it in high school and college, and it was true in the decades of personal reading that followed. Alice’s research into the family’s origins led her to believe they also had an ancestor who, four hundred years later, was one of the scholars to help translate the King James Version of the Christian Bible for the Church of England. Nelle believed this translation to be simply the best, hands down, no argument.

After Oxford, Nelle returned to her legal studies in Tuscaloosa but left a semester before she would have gotten her degree. The philosophy and human drama of law interested her. The dry technicalities did not. Alice recalled, “She got an itch to write.”

Or, rather, to devote herself to writing. She had dabbled in it before, starting with the stories she and Truman made up as children. At the University of Alabama, she wrote for and edited the
Rammer Jammer,
a student humor magazine. Like Alice, she was also a lifelong correspondent. “Her letters,” her friend Tom later told me, “are like short stories. Her powers of description are extraordinary.”

And so the dark-haired young woman was off to New York, at age twenty-three, to a walk-up, cold-water flat and a job as an airline reservations clerk. It was several years before she was able to quit that job and start writing full time, in a turn of events worthy of an O. Henry short story. On Christmas Day in 1956, Harper Lee was spending the holiday at the home of her friends Joy and Michael Brown. She found an envelope addressed to her on the tree in their living room. Inside was a simple message: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

Lee wrote about that turning point, calling it “a full, fair chance for a new life,” in the December 1961 edition of
McCall’s
magazine. “I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle,” she wrote. “Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not
to fail them.” They meant it to be a gift, but she insisted on repaying them. The Browns remained lifelong friends and a surrogate family in New York. When Nelle went to the White House in 2007 to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Browns were in attendance.

Nelle extended the same kind of gift to many others. Alice told me her sister gave very generous sums to charities, behind the scenes, and I came to learn she had educated many people who never knew she was their benefactor. She preferred to do her charitable giving quietly. Some of it was distributed through the Methodist Church. Other regular contributions went, quietly, to local charities and other organizations. But that came later. When she moved to New York, she had little money and lived frugally. Even after the unexpected success of her book, she still lived frugally when it came to spending on herself. In Monroeville, she bought clothing at the local Walmart and the Vanity Fair outlet. In Manhattan, she took taxis on occasion but mostly rode the bus.

Lee’s initial efforts, living in New York in the 1950s, were short stories. Then, at the suggestion of her literary agent, Maurice Crain, she expanded one of them into what would become
To Kill a Mockingbird.
For a time, the title was simply
Atticus.
She wrote the novel in Manhattan and Monroeville, where she spent time helping out after her father fell ill. When she had first submitted the novel to J. B. Lippincott Company, she was asked to rewrite it. It was finally published in June 1960. She expected the work to be met with “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the critics.”

It was not. Nelle Harper Lee, the onetime tomboy roaming Monroeville by foot and the world at large by vivid imagination, was now Harper Lee, literary celebrity. The
New York Times
review praised her “level-headed plea for interracial understanding” and her “gentle affection, rich humor and deep understanding of small-town family life in
Alabama.” The reviewer, Frank H. Lyell, also wrote, “The dialogue of Miss Lee’s refreshingly varied characters is a constant delight in its authenticity and swift revelation of personality.” Lyell did judge, however, that “the praise Miss Lee deserves must be qualified somewhat by noting that oftentimes Scout’s expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal flatness quite out of keeping with the narrator’s gay, impulsive approach to life in youth. Also, some of the scenes suggest that Miss Lee is cocking at least one eye toward Hollywood.”

I’d sent along a photocopy of the
Chicago Tribune
review, an unqualified rave of an “engrossing first novel of rare excellence,” with the materials I mailed to Alice Lee before my trip south.

Whatever her discomfort with public speaking, the Harper Lee of those early years after the book’s publication granted interviews and even, in 1965, gave a speech to several hundred West Point cadets.

“This is very exciting,” she began that day, “because I do not speak at colleges. The prospect of it is too intimidating. Surely, it’s obvious—rows of bright, intense, focused students, some even of the sciences, all of them analyzing my every word and staring fixedly at me—this would terrify a person such as myself. So I wisely agreed to come here, where the atmosphere would be far more relaxing and welcoming than on a rigid, strict, rule-bound, and severely disciplined college campus.”
*

The cadets roared.

She came across as quick-witted and passionate. In more than one interview, she admitted to being fearful of how a second novel would fare. But she gave little indication of the toll that, privately, was being exerted by the publicity and demands of her success.

Lee dutifully made the rounds promoting the book. She sat for
radio and print interviews and showed a writer and photographer for
Life
magazine around her hometown. She appeared at press conferences and book signings. Several years after the book was published, she still was fielding questions and replying with a characteristic mix of low-key erudition and self-deprecating wit.

People wanted to know more about the dark-haired woman from Alabama whose first book was becoming a phenomenon. What were her plans? Did she date? Did the characters’ relationships in the book reflect those in her own life? What would she write next?

She was also spending long hours responding to fan mail and requests for additional interviews and appearances. Capote wrote a friend that he wished she could enjoy the fruits of her success. Instead, she seemed hassled. He reveled in his literary fame. She endured hers.

For someone who disliked dressing up and fussing over her appearance, that aspect of life in the spotlight was one more reason to dislike public appearances.