by Casey Cep
It was, you might say, rich: poor, penniless Harper Lee, who had been living without hot water, writing on a makeshift desk, walking to avoid paying bus fare, begging her agents for more money from her advance to cover expenses, flat-sitting for Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy to save on rent, and surviving on peanut butter and whatever meals she could filch from friends—that same Harper Lee was suddenly so wealthy that she couldn’t work. Very few people ever knew exactly how wealthy, beyond her agents, her editor, and her sister Alice, whose expertise in tax law had suddenly become extremely convenient. But if Lee expected to be taxed at a 70 percent rate that year, she had probably already earned somewhere around $700,000 in today’s money—a huge amount for a novelist even now, and seven hundred times the size of her advance.
And that was before the book even came out. To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. It hit the best-seller list immediately, then kept moving up it, propelled by glowing review after glowing review. In December, it made all the end-of-the-year roundups and rankings; in January 1961, the film rights sold, and not long afterward the public learned that Horton Foote would write the screenplay and Gregory Peck would star as Atticus Finch. Publishers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Czech Republic bought foreign rights. In May, it won the Pulitzer Prize. By its first anniversary, To Kill a Mockingbird had already sold half a million copies. The film opened on Christmas Day in 1962, was nominated for eight Oscars not long after, and won three of them in April 1963. There was no lull in the accolades, no slackening in sales, no shortage of royalties, and no end to the taxes.
Alice could advise her sister about financial planning all she wanted, but no one could teach Harper Lee to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s with gladness. When the esteemed professor Hudson Strode, who had taught Lee Shakespeare at the University of Alabama, wrote to say how much he’d loved her novel and to ask if Mr. Atticus Finch might not be Mr. A. C. Lee, she wrote back to say, “Yes, Atticus was my father. He is now teaching me to pay my taxes cheerfully, but with little success!” When a reporter followed Lee around Hollywood as she visited the set of the film adaptation, she complained so much that he ended his piece by writing, “Success hasn’t spoiled Harper Lee, but it has changed her life. She can’t quite convince people that the book hasn’t made her an instant millionairess. The fact of the matter is that tax laws can be great for sharp-minded movie stars and oil men but are hell on authors.” Her agents found themselves in the unusual position of apologizing to a client for how many checks were coming in: “We can’t stop them, once they get started, and we know you will do everything you can to keep some of the money. We hate to think of so much of it going out in income tax.” More than fifty years later, when Lee was well into her eighties, she wrote to congratulate the distinguished Alabama historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton on her memoir—Teddy’s Child: Growing Up in the Anxious Southern Gentry Between the Great Wars—and to warn her it had better sell under three million copies: “If it sells more, you will have tax collectors hounding you!”
It was, as Dolores Hope had noted, the sort of problem most authors can only dream of having. Within a few years of its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird was selling a million copies a year. Lee got all the royalties from those books—and from all the foreign editions and special editions, too—plus a cut of the hefty film profits, because Annie Laurie Williams had negotiated a sweetheart deal where Lee took less cash up front in exchange for a larger percentage of the film’s royalties in perpetuity. Rarely has a double bet paid off so lavishly. The film became an American classic, and the book has scarcely waned in popularity since its annus mirabilis; to date, some forty million copies have been sold.
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The better To Kill a Mockingbird fared, the worse its author seemed to, and if Lee resented the taxes, she loathed the publicity. The summer of the book’s release, she wrote to a friend that she had been “in New York, where I became Famous; in Connecticut, where the Famous go to get used to it; in East Hampton, where the Famous go after they’ve gotten used to it.” But Lee never got used to it. There was a profile of her in Newsweek, written from an interview conducted at the Algonquin Hotel, where she played dumb about her own celebrity. There was a whole spread in Life, after a long, awkward photo shoot around Monroeville, where she played kickball in her old schoolyard, posed on the balcony of the Monroe County Courthouse, pretended to be typing at Barnett, Bugg & Lee, addressed her favorite teacher Gladys Watson Burkett’s class, golfed with some friends at the local course, sat reading with her father and sister on their front porch, and peered into the windows of a house taken to be the model for Boo Radley’s home.
Every bookstore wanted Lee to come for a signing, and every classmate, teacher, neighbor, waitress, librarian, soda jerk, landlord, and golf caddy she’d ever encountered wanted her to autograph their copy of her novel. They also all wanted in on her story: in a pattern of distortion that would last the rest of her life, a few minutes with almost any member of the Lee family became an epic interaction, and near strangers suddenly began passing themselves off as close confidants.
Lee herself had no patience for this budding Harper Lee Industrial Complex. But even when she started declining interviews and refusing events, there was still the matter of mail. Most of the letters she got were complimentary, but some were coarse indictments of a southern lady who had sold out her ancestral land or a white woman who had betrayed her race. The letters came by the dozens every day, and Lee found herself wanting to respond to all of them, less out of appreciation than out of obligation. Her young admirers, especially, seemed to her to merit replies; you could stock a whole library with the notes that Harper Lee wrote back to children who had read her novel.
As a result, in the year after Mockingbird came out, Lee wrote more letters than anything else, but she did manage to eke out a few small pieces. There was the essay for McCall’s that described her friends the Browns and their Magi-like gift. There was that farcical crackling bread recipe for The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook, which sounded like something from her Rammer-Jammer days. “First, catch your pig,” it began, then proceeded to advise would-be chefs to “ship it to the abattoir nearest you,” variously fry and bake what comes back, and combine it all with cornmeal, salt, baking powder, egg, and milk. What you finally remove from the oven, she cautioned, will have cost you $250: “Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.”
There was a two-page story for the April 15, 1961, issue of Vogue called “Love—in Other Words,” which, in his files, her agent Maurice Crain aptly retitled “The Gospel According to Nelle Harper.” Ostensibly an essay on love, it was, instead, an appealing jumble of all the texts and authors bouncing around in her brain: Cervantes, Shakespeare, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria. But it was autobiographically revealing in other ways as well. Tucked into it was a vignette about a sixteen-year-old grandson sneaking his dying grandfather hamburgers in the hospital. The boy was one of her nephews, and the man in the hospital was Lee’s father, whose health had once again taken a turn for the worse.
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Lee was still dividing her time between New York and Alabama, and in the fall of 1960 she went home to see her father and sister in Monroeville, then her other sister in Eufaula. In both places, she was feted like a prodigal daughter. Her comings and goings were front-page news; unfortunately for her, pictures were de rigueur, and she seldom liked the process or the results, especially because she was no longer the slip of a girl she’d been in childhood. Having decided that she weighed more than she wanted, she began the cycle of “reducing” that would continue over the next decade through extreme diets.
In New York, the friends who had watched Lee struggle to become a writer since her School Executive days were over the mo
on for her. One of those friends was also now her next-door neighbor at a new apartment on East Eighty-Second Street: Marcia Van Meter, a fellow Chi Omega and glee clubber from Massachusetts, had rented an adjoining apartment. They were together one night, doing laundry in the basement, when they rescued a polydactyl kitten; they rushed him to a veterinarian, nursed him back to health, and then delivered him in an Abercrombie basket to Tay Hohoff, who named him Shadrach, made him a permanent resident of her home, and later gave him prime real estate in her memoir Cats and Other People.
Marcia Van Meter worked some as an editor for the College Board and then for The New Yorker. She and Lee traveled together, took in baseball games in the city, and watched over each other’s affairs. When Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain sent a telegram to Lee on the one-year anniversary of the publication of Mockingbird, it was sent care of Van Meter: “Dear Nelle—TOMORROW IS MY FIRST BIRTHDAY AND MY AGENTS THINK THERE SHOULD BE ANOTHER BOOK WRITTEN SOON TO KEEP ME COMPANY. DO YOU THINK YOU CAN START ONE BEFORE I AM ANOTHER YEAR OLD.”
Lee was already trying desperately to do just that, but writing a second novel was proving more difficult than writing the first. She needed quiet, and even in the best of times she could take all day to do something as simple as move a character across a room; now she had too little time and too many interruptions. She had already started complaining about “the second-novel doldrums” in August 1960, and by September of the next year she told a friend, “If I’d had any sense, I’d have done a J. D. Salinger,” warning that “you can spend the rest of your life simply having lunch, cocktails, and dinner with people who simply MUST meet you.”
She found some respite at an old farmhouse in Connecticut owned by her agents, and she went there whenever she could rent a car or catch a ride with them, sometimes spending weeks away from the city. But her father’s health had continued to worsen, and late in 1961 she rushed home again after he had another heart attack. She stayed two months to take care of him. That was while the movie version of her book was being made, and in November its art director came to Monroe County to have a look around. Lee took him to see the almond trees and collard patches, the shacks where black families lived, fancier houses that might pass for the Finch place, and the courthouse that would soon be the most famous in America. In January, Gregory Peck came down, and she showed him around real-life Maycomb, too.
The mash notes followed her home, especially when her fans realized that just about all it took to get a letter to her in Alabama was a postage stamp and the surname Lee on the envelope. Truman Capote, who was greener with envy than all of the pine trees in the state, nonetheless registered the toll that success was taking on the Miracle of Monroeville. To a mutual friend, he confided that “not long ago she wrote that she was going to Alabama for a few weeks rest-up: poor darling, she seems to be having some sort of happy nervous-breakdown”; to the Deweys, he wrote, “Poor thing—she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail’ when she received 62 letters in one day. I wish she could relax and enjoy it more.”
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When Lee finally returned to New York, in the middle of February, she tried to return to her work as well, but she had barely settled back into life there when her father had another heart attack. It was April 12, 1962. Harper Lee was, by then, thirty-five years old—a decade past the death of her mother and her brother, a decade into carrying the burdens of her father’s poor health. For years, she had worried when his fatigue kept him from going into the office and dreaded the day his arthritis would make it impossible for him to check the time on his famous pocket watch or turn his familiar pocketknife over and over. She had come and gone from Monroeville to help Alice and Louise take care of him so often that when the call came in, she knew all eleven hundred of the miles she had to cross to get to his bedside. This time, however, there would be no coming back from the hospital, no long, slow recovery where he eased into walking with a cane in one hand and a daughter or grandchild steadying the other. Harper Lee’s father died three days later, early in the morning on Palm Sunday.
At the time of his death, A. C. Lee was eighty-two years old. His disappointment at his youngest child not becoming a lawyer had disappeared, and with the publication of Mockingbird his fears about her chosen vocation had turned into pure pride. “I never dreamed of what was going to happen,” he had told The Monroe Journal. “It was somewhat of a surprise, and it’s very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York.” He’d taught Nelle to read and given her books her entire life, but he never imagined that she would write one of the world’s most beloved ones or that he would be the model for its hero. Before his death, A.C. had taken to answering to Atticus and signing his name that way when anyone asked him to autograph his daughter’s novel; the year after he died, Gregory Peck carried his pocket watch as he accepted the Academy Award for best actor.
To Kill a Mockingbird wasn’t a biography of Nelle Lee’s father, yet she had fixed some essential part of him on the page, sharing his virtues at the very moment when readers most wanted to believe that there were noble white men in the South and that good men could remain that way even in bad times. That fall, she gave money to Monroeville’s First Methodist Church, where all her family’s funerals had been held, to cover the cost of a renovation and expansion in memory of her parents and her brother. But her real memorial to her family would always be her work, and when she returned to the city, she tried to find her way back into the habit of writing.
She tried in Connecticut, at her agents’ Old Stone House; she tried on Fire Island, where the Browns had a summer cottage in Saltaire; she tried in West Brattleboro, Vermont, where her friend Lucile Sullivan, who worked for Annie Laurie Williams, rented a summerhouse and then an apartment. But her grief followed her everywhere, and so did the publicity demands of what she had taken to calling “the Bird,” as if it were alive and had an existence apart from her own. On top of all that, there was pressure from her publisher. Although other Lippincott editors remember Hohoff as “a junkyard dog,” ferociously protecting her most famous author, no one thought it was good for Lee to go more than a few years without producing another book.
Meanwhile, Capote was delayed with his book, too, though not because he was having trouble writing it. Endless delays and appeals had kept Perry Smith and Dick Hickock alive. He and Lee had visited them in prison the previous year, just after Gregory Peck had come to visit her and tour Monroeville. Capote felt he wouldn’t have an ending until their fate was decided. He had drafted almost all of what he was already calling In Cold Blood, and in April 1963 he and Lee made their final visit together to Kansas. Capote had bought a new Jaguar, which he called his Fabergé on wheels, and he came to fetch her from Monroeville, where she had been staying since the holidays and where he hadn’t been in eight years. His relatives threw a party, and forty friends came to celebrate the hometown authors.
Between them, Capote and Lee had one surviving parent. Her mother and father were dead, while his mother had overdosed on Seconal and scotch. Nostalgic from his time in Monroe County, Capote took a meandering route to Garden City, stopping first in Shreveport, Louisiana, to visit his father, whom he hadn’t seen since his mother’s funeral almost a decade before. While just about every journalist in the country was headed to Alabama to cover the civil rights movement there, Lee and Capote were leaving it behind, driving west toward Kansas; they arrived in Garden City while Martin Luther King Jr. was writing his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The two writers stayed a week, mostly for Capote to check in with sources, then took the long way home, stopping in Colorado Springs to celebrate Lee’s thirty-seventh birthday at the Broadmoor resort.
It had been more than three years since the two had first arrived in Kansas. Capote was nearly finished with his book, which his editor was already calling a masterpiece, but Lee had seen her only other fiction submissi
on rejected. “Dress Rehearsal” was a story that Esquire had requested but then turned down partly because it was overly didactic, but also because of its complicated depiction of southern racism. Like Watchman, it featured, in her words, “some white people who were segregationists & at the same time loathed & hated the K.K.K.” The Esquire editor seemed to her to regard that premise as “an axiomatic impossibility,” a concern that Lee, in turn, regarded as ridiculous: “According to those lights, nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”
She was right, and not just about the South. The kinds of people she described in her story weren’t only possible; they were prevalent. A 1961 Gallup poll found that less than one in four Americans approved of the freedom riders’ attempt to integrate buses, even though the Supreme Court had already declared segregated interstate transit unconstitutional. The overwhelming majority who opposed them included a lot of people who didn’t know a klavern from a kleagle, or who knew of the Klan but disapproved of its activities; indeed, it included Lee herself. When asked about the freedom riders during a press event in Chicago, she said, “I don’t think this business of getting on buses and flaunting state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity, and violence.” (That was even after the photographer and reporter who had come to Monroeville to profile her were beaten by a mob in Montgomery while trying to cover one of the freedom rides.)
