Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  As for Lee’s take on domesticity: there are no nuclear families in Mockingbird, and Lee herself was skeptical of the institution. Her life was full of friendship and family, but if it ever included romantic partnership, she took tremendous pains to keep it private. When someone once suggested that she and Capote were a couple, she joked that the only thing they had in common was their interest in men—though whatever interest she had, or feigned, she appears never to have acted on it, including with Maurice Crain. At the same time, she forcefully denied insinuations that she was a lesbian, even though her close relationship with Marcia Van Meter over many decades led plenty of people close to her to suspect as much.

  Lesbianism might have been the only rumor Capote spared her. Her childhood friend variously claimed that, among other things, she’d had a ruinous affair with a law professor at the University of Alabama and wanted to have another one with a married man; there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for the former, and he later retracted the latter. But Capote’s own notoriety continued to be a nuisance for her even after his death. “George Plimpton’s minions are busy scouring the corners of the nation,” Lee wrote in 1986, and soon enough they came looking for her in Monroeville. Lee wasn’t there, so Plimpton couldn’t talk to her, but that didn’t stop him from including her in Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.

  When Gerald Clarke’s authorized biography of Capote came out in 1988, Lee wrote to historian Caldwell Delaney to advise reading it with a saltshaker in hand and to condemn, in particular, “Truman’s vicious lie—my mother was mentally unbalanced and tried twice to kill me (that gentle soul’s reward for having loved him).” She was also angry at Clarke’s suggestion that Capote wasn’t responsible for his life’s course. “Drugs and alcohol did not cause his insanity, they were a result of it,” she wrote, before going on to argue, either illogically or insensitively, that despite his insanity her friend should have taken responsibility for his life. “Most of us in the Western world make our own lives,” Lee had said elsewhere. “Life doesn’t make us. We create our events. Nobody asked us to be born, but while we’re here we should do the best we can with what we have.”

  You don’t have to have sinned as greatly as the Reverend Willie Maxwell for there to be a gap between your sermons and your actions. Paul had preached the dualism of body and soul to the Romans, and however much Harper Lee scoffed at the gloomy Protestant dogmas of her neighbors in Monroeville or joked about God being deafer than her sister Alice once her hearing went, she was born and raised in a faith that trained her to believe that moral perfection was not only possible but the product of discrete personal decisions. Yet it took a very long time for her to stop making one kind of choice and start making another. Somewhere along the line, she stopped doing two things destructive to her own well-being. One was drinking; the other was writing. By the time she responded to Madison Jones, telling the novelist that the Maxwell case was all his, she had freed herself from the expectations of writing about it. After three dark decades, her letters become more buoyant—no longer anguished, and absent almost any mention of trying to write.

  “Books succeed, / And lives fail,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, and indeed throughout Lee’s life To Kill a Mockingbird succeeded. In 1993, she told her agent Julie Fallowfield that she wasn’t interested in writing an introduction for an anniversary edition of her novel. “Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction,” she wrote. “Although Mockingbird will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I am still alive, although very quiet. Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.” HarperCollins printed Lee’s refusal as the foreword to its thirty-fifth anniversary edition.

  The same year she wrote that note, Lee attended a ceremony honoring alumnae of the University of Alabama—even though she herself was not one, having dropped out before graduation. But she had also turned up around that same time to accept an honorary degree, and both appearances seemed to mark a new willingness to acknowledge that she had written a masterpiece, if only one. In 1997, she accepted another honorary doctorate, this time at Spring Hill College in Mobile, and not long after that, a filmmaker with financing from Universal Studios began shooting a documentary about the adaptation of Lee’s novel. Charles Kiselyak interviewed many of those involved in the production of the film, including Gregory Peck, screenwriter Horton Foote, and director Robert Mulligan. He also spent time in Monroe County, assisted by Harper Lee, who was impressed by an essay he had written about Hank Williams. She accompanied his crew and suggested interview subjects, including neighbors who had known her and her family since childhood. Although she refused to appear on camera, Lee can be heard laughing offscreen during the interview with Ida Gaillard, one of her teachers at Monroeville High School. The documentary took its name, Fearful Symmetry, from her favorite bit of William Blake, and the narration sounded as if she might have written it: “Fame was a four-letter word, and boredom was for rich and dull-witted Yankees.”

  One of the subjects in that documentary was an English professor at the University of Alabama, a southerner who was more hot sauce than sweet tea. Claudia Durst Johnson had written some of the few scholarly articles on To Kill a Mockingbird, which she expanded into a critical study called Threatening Boundaries. There and elsewhere Claudia defended the novel when it was derided for being childish or middlebrow, attacked for its use of racial epithets, or accused of being insufficiently liberal. Lee had agreed to meet Claudia after her old friend Jim McMillan convinced the writer to at least sit in the same room with someone who had written admiringly about her work. Whatever Claudia said that first day she “interviewed” Lee in Tuscaloosa, it must have been Alabamian for abracadabra, because the writer, who had turned down more than a few would-be biographers, declared Claudia her Boswell. Virtually in the same breath, though, Lee all but doomed the project by making Claudia promise that she wouldn’t get started until all of the dust was settled—the dust, in this case, being the kind usually accompanied by ashes.

  The would-be biographer and subject exchanged letters every so often and talked on the telephone once Claudia moved to California, but Lee continued to insist that no work begin on a biography until she was dead, an insistence she maintained even after her sister Louise started showing signs of dementia. “Her memory is fragile these days,” Lee explained in a letter to a family friend. Eventually, Weezie left Eufaula for Florida, where she spent her final years in an assisted living facility, the disease taking her further and further from those she knew; some days, she did not even recognize her sisters.

  Lee, though, was still going back and forth to New York, albeit more slowly. She went for shows at the Cort Theatre, art exhibitions at the Met and the Frick, Mets games at Shea Stadium, lunches at Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village, and drinks at Elaine’s a few blocks up Second Avenue from her apartment. She had given up on the New York Public Library when it switched to computerized catalogs, but she still went regularly to read and borrow books at the Society Library near her apartment. Back in Monroeville, she stayed in her room with the built-in bookshelves in Alice’s home, bought stationery at Walmart, retrieved her own mail from the same post office box she’d had for decades, and every so often played the penny slots at the Wind Creek casino in Atmore. She got her groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, ate supper at David’s Catfish House, and, never mind that she was a millionaire many times over, carried her own laundry to the Laundromat. Alice, by then in her nineties, was still practicing law, and her most demanding client was still Nelle Harper Lee, whose contracts—domestic reprints and foreign editions, film royalties, stage rights, and any requests related to one of the most popular novels in the world—all flowed through Barnett
, Bugg & Lee.

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  On January 16, 2003, Alabama’s governor, Don Siegelman, declared an official Tom Radney Day. Harper Lee and everyone else in the state would have seen in the newspaper that the former senator Howell Heflin, the former congressman Ronnie Flippo, and dozens of other bigwigs turned up to watch Mr. Democrat receive the proclamation. Big Tom’s four children all had families of their own by then, and a passel of grandchildren turned out to help him celebrate. An elder statesman and community giant, Radney had outlived any animosity that he had attracted in his younger days, but the Yellow Dog was still as busy as ever trying to turn the South blue. He had championed what became known as the Radney Rule, which prevented candidates from running as a Democrat if they hadn’t supported the party’s nominees in the previous four years.

  That fall, when Nelle Harper Lee was seventy-seven years old and Alice Lee was turning ninety-two, the sisters celebrated by visiting the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The archives are in Montgomery, just across the street from the state capitol, where Big Tom had once taken family photographs for his final campaign, and once inside the Lees sat at a table on which the staff placed Albert James Pickett’s notes, sketches, and maps. Nelle and Alice paged through the historian’s papers, examining some of the source material that he had turned into the book they both loved so dearly. After that, they looked at the volume of legislative acts that included what Alice called “Daddy’s prized bill,” a law requiring counties to balance their budgets, and then at a hand-drawn map of Monroeville from 1930, which Alice could still populate house by house from memory.

  The Lees’ own childhood home on South Alabama Avenue had been replaced by an ice cream parlor in the 1950s, not long after their father sold it and moved to West Avenue. A section of the stone wall that separated Nelle from Truman is still standing, but what used to be the Faulk house on the other side is an empty lot. In the 1960s, when the set designers came to scout locations for To Kill a Mockingbird, they already found Monroeville too modern to pass for Maycomb. Like small towns around Alabama and across America, it had lost itself to fast-food and chain stores, franchises taking over the way kudzu had decades before. The Boulware house across the street had become a gas station; the oak tree with its ambry was filled with cement and then cut down to a stump.

  In 2003, the same year the Lee sisters took their birthday visit to the archives, Al Benn, who was drafting his memoirs, brought some chapters to Alice’s law office to see if her sister might not endorse them. A few days later, the excerpt arrived back with a note from Harper: “After a long career of responsible and at times courageous reporting, Al Benn brings his probity to his vivid memoirs.” But while she was praising the autobiography of the former editor of The Alexander City Outlook, Lee was still refusing to write her own, or to let anyone else write about her life for her. When she heard tell of an unauthorized biography in the works, she warned her friends not to talk with the writer, Charles Shields, whose 2006 Mockingbird would be the first full-length biography of her. The Lee sisters, however, made a different choice and decided to talk with Marja Mills, a journalist from the Chicago Tribune who, after writing a profile of Harper Lee for the newspaper, moved in next door to write a book, ostensibly about Monroe County. Lee herself spent a lot of time with Mills, not only during that first visit, but in Alice’s home and on adventures around the Black Belt throughout the journalist’s stay in Monroeville. When the resulting memoir came out under the title The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee, Lee disavowed it, saying that she hadn’t intended to cooperate with a biographical project.

  Long accustomed to appearing unwillingly in print, Lee had also by then appeared unwillingly on stage and screen. Her dislike of Monroeville’s annual production of a theatrical version of her novel had only increased as the audiences grew and the performances multiplied, and soon she had to contend with two competing films about the writing of In Cold Blood, both of which featured her as a central character, played first by Catherine Keener and then by Sandra Bullock. Lee saw both films, praised Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote in Capote, and complained about the sartorial choices—socks with pumps—imposed on her in Infamous. For someone who had so assiduously avoided publicity for more than four decades, she must have felt as if the walls of Jericho were falling down around her, so much so that she mounted at least one uncharacteristic defense.

  In April 2006, she wrote a letter to the editor of The New Yorker regarding the film Capote. It was the first time her byline appeared in those pages. “Of the screenwriter’s many inventions,” she complained, “his concept of William Shawn’s activities during the creation of In Cold Blood is weirdly off.” In only seventy-six words, she corrected two errors: first, she never spoke with Shawn on the telephone; second, Shawn never accompanied Capote to Kansas. Lee said nothing about who she was or why she might know better than the filmmakers, but her signature (“Harper Lee, Monroeville, Ala.”) said everything. Or, as ever, nothing: even while correcting inaccuracies in the film version, she remained utterly silent about her friend’s own transgressions in his book.

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  A worse crisis than celebrity, though, found Lee next. Around midnight on Saturday, March 17, 2007, Lee suffered a serious stroke. It wasn’t until Monday that two friends found her and rushed her sixteen blocks uptown to Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors discovered that she was paralyzed on the left side. Some of her oldest and best friends in the city came by, including Joy Brown, bringing fried chicken and gossip, two of the things Lee liked most, but instead of convalescing in New York, she made arrangements to be moved to Birmingham. Lee came home to Alabama on the Amtrak Crescent that May, as she had for almost sixty years, only this time in the handicap room. The route was the same as it had been since she had first moved to New York: the train got to the nation’s capital by supper, Atlanta by breakfast, and by lunchtime the next day she was back in Alabama.

  She had lost more than twenty pounds, but after months of intensive physical therapy, she regained some mobility. By November 5, 2007, Lee had recovered enough that she was able to travel back up to Washington, D.C., stand up, and take President George W. Bush’s arm as he awarded her the Medal of Freedom. It was her first visit to the White House since the Johnson administration. She still had a boyish haircut, not unlike the one from her earliest book jacket, and she looked just as surprised by all of the attention as she had forty years before.

  It was the last time Lee would leave Alabama. When she got back, she settled into the Meadows of Monroeville, a one-story, sixteen-room assisted living facility on the Highway 21 Bypass. The fan mail found her there, as it always had no matter where she went, and one day it included a letter from a writer born in Alexander City. David Brasfield wanted to know what Lee knew about the Maxwell case, and on January 9, 2009, she replied to say that her own reporting had produced “a mountain of rumors and a molehill of facts.” Brasfield ended up writing a pulpy, fictionalized version that borrowed Lee’s title, The Reverend, and, apparently, borrowed Lee as well: one of the characters is a female novelist by the name of Hunter James who barely escapes being murdered.

  A few months later, in June 2009, Alice Lee responded to another letter about Maxwell. This one was from a woman named Sheralyn Belyeu, whose husband had bought her an Encyclopaedia Britannica at the Salvation Army in Alexander City. Tucked beside the entry for Harpers Ferry, Belyeu had found a card from Harper Lee dated June 11, 1978: it was the note she had written thanking the Cribbs for the cocktail party she had attended just before leaving town. Belyeu wanted to know if Lee would mind if she made the letter public. Alice gave her permission, albeit in tragic terms. “Nothing you have done or will do in the future,” she wrote, “will effect [sic] Harper Lee since she has no plans in the future [to write] about the experience. She is in frail health, nearly blind and paralyzed on the left side by a stroke.”<
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  Both Alice and her sister had serious vision deficits. Harper Lee’s macular degeneration had gotten so bad that she could barely see a page of paper to write on it, and her letters, once Pentateuchal in their plots and Pauline in their syntax, were now short, scrawled by hand, and absent anything but the occasional and often recycled literary allusion. In the years after her stroke, and especially in the years after her return to Monroeville, Lee’s letters shortened to notes, and they were rarely more than dispatches from the war her body was fighting against old age—updates on her eyes, ears, and mind and what they were less and less able to do. Her hearing got bad enough that she couldn’t talk on the telephone, and her memory, by most accounts, could reach back in time but not hold on to the present.

  In October 2009, when Louise Lee Conner died in Gainesville, Florida, neither of her sisters was well enough to attend the services. Five years later, in November 2014, Alice Lee, who had practiced law into her triple digits, died at one hundred and three. By then, the family law office had moved from the Monroe County Bank and acquired an extra name on its shingle, Tonja Carter, who, after suing the author’s former literary agent, had taken over her affairs. Three months after Alice Lee’s death, it was Carter who declared her client’s enthusiasm for a shocking piece of news: Harper Lee would be publishing another book.