Alex Haley—A Writer of Destiny

“I’m going to be a writer if it kills me!” said one of the first customers in my saloon. He wasn’t a star then. Unknown and unpublished, Alex Haley was destined to be a writer who would command the attention of the world.

I first met Alex in 1951 when I was teaching creative writing in an adult education program at the Marina High School in San Francisco. He was a cook in the Coast Guard and had achieved considerable success in a strange branch of writing: While at sea, he would write imaginative love letters at a dollar a pop for his shipmates, who would subsequently reap fine rewards on shore from the objects of their affections. He was a steady customer at El Matador, my restaurant and bar. He didn’t drink, but he hung around the bar, always hoping to meet people in the writing game who could help him achieve his lifelong ambition of being a writer. He had little natural talent, but he was a good storyteller, worked hard at writing every day, read everything about writing and never gave up. He finally sold a little piece about the Coast Guard to the Sunday newspaper supplement “This Week.” He said, “They paid me one hundred dollars. I went and got it cashed into one hundred one-dollar bills. I had fifty in one pocket and fifty in the other, and I walked down the street squeezing them—oh, that tactile feeling.” In the Matador that night, we broke out a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

One night the author Budd Schulberg flew in from New York and came to the Matador; I phoned Alex in Oakland and he sped over the bridge to San Francisco in record time. Alex’s favorite books happened to be Waterfront and What Makes Sammy Run, and he was thrilled to meet the author of them. They sat in the bar and talked until four in the morning. Budd encouraged Alex’s writing, and in a few months Reader’s Digest published “My Most Unforgettable Character,” an essay by Alex on his Pullman porter father. His career, while not exactly soaring, was beginning to take off. He did countless articles for many different magazines such as True, Argosy and True Confessions. He always said the confession magazines were a great training ground for learning the importance of conflict and characterization. Then he had a great breakthrough: He created a question and answer format while writing an article on trumpeter Miles Davis, and this became the style for the Playboy interview. Alex had been given six weeks to write six thousand words. Halfway through, he realized he didn’t have enough to write the article.

“Miles was monosyllabic,” he said. “If you’re a friend of Miles Davis, around 6:30 in the afternoon the phone might ring and a voice would come on and say, ‘Chili,’ and hang up. The translation was that he had cooked up a mess of chili, and you should come over and partake.

“So what I did, because I was desperate to get into that magazine, I took a gamble. I took half of that six thousand words and did the best I could—rewrote and rewrote—an essay about his world. Then I took the other three thousand words, took every utterance he’d made, and made up questions to make it seem he’d answered them. I took it to the editors and the readers liked the style.”

That style for the Playboy interview still exists today.

He did many such interviews for that magazine, including one with the infamous neo-Nazi and racist George Lincoln Rockwell. Alex’s bizarre encounter with the self-styled führer occurred at Rockwell’s extensive headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. When Playboy called Rockwell to set up the interview, the neo-Nazi agreed “as long as you don’t send down one of your Jews.”

When Alex called to tell Rockwell when he was arriving, the man said, “Now you’re sure you’re not a Jew?”

“Uh, no,” Alex assured him. “No, uh, I am definitely not a Jew.”

“Okay then,” said Rockwell. “I’ll give you one hour.”

Once he arrived, Alex was escorted by burly, uniformed men past Nazi flags and portraits of Hitler to Rockwell’s office. “Sieg heil!” the guards said, as they opened the door. Rockwell’s jaw dropped when he saw that Alex was black.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. Still, he reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the interview.

“But let’s get this one thing straight!” growled Rockwell, leaning back in his chair. “I regard you and your people as no better than chimpanzees.”

“That’s fine,” said the unflappable Haley. “You’re welcome to your opinion.” As they started the interview, Alex spotted an electric typewriter on a stand by the desk.

“Mr. Rockwell, I generally take notes on a typewriter. May I use that one?”

Rockwell looked at him and exclaimed pointedly, “But it’s electric!”

Alex smiled back. “I think I can manage, sir.”

Alex began the questioning and typed the answers as Rockwell gave them with exaggerated slowness.

“Sir, you may speak faster,” said Alex, who once won a championship speed-typing contest in California.

“Well, when I was born . . .”

“You may talk faster, sir.”

Rockwell went a little faster, at normal speed, and Alex recorded the words almost as they were spoken. Rockwell speeded up, and Alex kept up with him. Faster and faster Rockwell spoke, and Alex’s typing went right along with him. Rockwell stopped and gazed at Haley in unfeigned amazement. Alex looked back, shrugged and said modestly, à la Stepin Fetchit, “Pretty good for a chimpanzee, eh man?”

Later, Alex wrote the successful biography of Malcolm X, which has sold over six million copies. But he had an even bigger book inside of him, begging to get out: The story of his origins, his roots, told in the form of his own family’s oral history, which had been passed down to him by his grandmother and aunts on the front porch of their house in Henning, Tennessee—a story that could be that of virtually every black American. At first he called it Before This Anger, and he wrote part of it in my studio while I was living in Tahiti. Upon my return, I was so moved as he told me the story that, even before he had finished writing it, I sent him to Hollywood to see my agent, lawyer Louis Blau. Blau is highly successful, tough and always frantically busy with clients, who include many famous stars, directors and writers.

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes to tell your story, Mr. Haley,” he said. “That’s all the time I have.”

Alex began to recount in his quiet way the saga of Kunta Kinte, his ancestor, who was captured in the rain forest of the upper Gambia River in Africa. Kinte was brought in chains to America and sold to Dr. William Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Alex began to tell the story of Chicken George, of Tizzy and of the entire larger-than-life family—the great tapestry of characters that would eventually be known throughout the world of literature and television as Roots.

At the end of fifteen minutes, Blau told his secretary to cancel all his appointments and telephone calls and sat riveted for two hours as Alex told the entire tumultuous story of all the generations that had preceded his birth. Blau said not a word until Alex had finished with the last sentence: “And that little baby was me.”

Then Blau stood up slowly, extended his hand and said huskily, “Mr. Haley, if you can write that story the way you just told it, you will change the world!”

Alex could, and Alex did.

And before that day with Blau ended, Alex had a deal to make the TV series that more people in the world would see than any other in history.

After Roots became a runaway bestseller and won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, Alex Haley was in great demand as a speaker. He gave one talk at Simpson College in the little town of Indianola, Iowa, to a crowd of one thousand people, and afterward, while autographing books, he noticed one man, a patrician-looking person, who seemed to want to speak to him but was hanging back diffidently. Alex finally said, “Sir, did you wish to say something to me?”

The man cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Haley, I’m the academic dean here, and I read your book, and I checked my family records. I’m a genealogy buff like you.”

“Yes?” said Alex.

“Well, I’m not sure how to put this delicately.”

“Yes, go on.”

“Well, it would appear, Mr. Haley, that Dr. William Waller, my great-great-great-great-grandfather owned your great-great-great-great-grandfather, Kunta Kinte.”

Alex told me later, “There we stood, staring at each other, the mutually great-great-great-great-grandsons of the late-1760s master and slave. In Dr. Waller Wiser’s home, we exchanged lineages into the wee hours and became friends for life.”

Not all of Alex’s stories about his family are in Roots. He told me one about his father, which directly shaped Alex’s and his siblings’ lives.

Simon Haley, the son of a former slave and sharecropper from Savannah, Tennessee, was determined not to end his days as a field hand. He worked his way through high school and struggled partially through A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina. However, he began to feel he’d have to give up his dream of an education because of the double burden of earning both his living and the tuition fee. He took a job as a Pullman porter while deciding whether or not to return home to sharecropping. On one of his trips, he waited on R.S.M. Boyce, a retired executive of the Curtis Publishing Company, who took an interest in the polite, alert young man. Boyce asked him about his life and his ambitions. Later, he sent Simon five hundred dollars, enough for full living expenses and tuition for a year at college. This enabled Simon to graduate, first in his class, and win a scholarship to Cornell University for his master’s degree.

Thus Alex, instead of growing up on a farm in bleak sharecropping poverty, was reared in an atmosphere of books and the love of learning, and he became a writer; his brother George is chairman of the U.S. Postal Rate Commission; his brother Julius is an architect; and his sister, Lois, is a music teacher. All because of one man’s generosity on a train way back in 1918.

Alex was always the storyteller; one he told us in El Matador reflected the kind of simple man of great values that he was. He described a cousin from his hometown, an arrogant and conceited young man who flaunted his education. He never left home without his Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from a gold chain around his neck. One day, an elderly aunt took a close look at the cousin’s Phi Beta key, wrinkled her old brow, and said: “Ver’ nice, boy, ver’ nice, but what do it open?”

Alex is gone now, and I will simply say, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “I can lose a friend like that by my death but not by his.”

Barnaby Conrad