A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.
—The Washington Post, July 3, 1960
Harper Lee presented Capote with one hundred fifty pages of typed notes, organized by topics such as the Landscape, the Crime, Other Members of the Clutter Family, and so on. Truman, feeling expansive as he rested in Spain after several months of working on the outline for In Cold Blood, was suddenly in the mood to make one of his gossipy pronouncements, for it was immensely satisfying to him that his protégée—which is how he now regarded her—had written a publishable novel in which he was an important character. He urged his friends, film producer David O. Selznick and Selznick’s wife Jennifer Jones, to watch for it. “On July 11th [1960], Lippincott is publishing a delightful book: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee. Get it. It’s going to be a great success. In it, I am the character called ‘Dill’—the author being a childhood friend.”1
* * *
In the meantime, in Manhattan, the freezing air rang with the cries of snowball fights between children. From the window of her apartment, Lee could see ambushes about to be sprung from behind doorway stoops, and retreats made to the safety of parked cars. During her eleven years in New York, she had never witnessed such deep snow accumulating over a single night.
Somehow, though, a surprising spring snowstorm seemed in keeping with the dramatic, absolutely unexpected events that were turning the thirty-three-year-old woman’s life around. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and the Literary Guild had chosen To Kill a Mockingbird as a selection for subscribers, meaning thousands of instant sales. Maurice Crain called and read to her over the phone the introduction written by the editor of the Literary Guild, John Beechcroft.
This month we offer our members another discovery—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is a first novel and shows the sincerity and intensity that so often marks an author’s first book. The author calls it ‘a love story pure and simple,’ and it is the story of a small town and of a way of life that were close to the author’s heart. Harper Lee was born in a small town in Alabama, and as she writes, the reader feels she is writing about people and places at once dear to her and unforgettable.2
After putting down the phone, Nelle hadn’t been able to sit still. Torpor would have been a sign of ingratitude—the only thing that would do was for her to take the Lexington Avenue express subway down to Crain’s office and share her happiness. “I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little.”3
The temperature was in the upper twenties, and she had a five-block walk to Lexington Avenue. She turned north to get the Eighty-sixth Street express stop, startled by a police officer blowing his whistle and pointing at her. She glanced around uncertainly.
“Yes, sir?” she said reflexively, her southern manners coming to the fore.
“You walked against the light. Couldn’t you hear the cars?”
“Cars?”
He made her recite her name and address, then ripped off a ticket from his pad and handed it to her with a peremptory “Be careful.”4
The incident rankled for a few minutes, but by the time she was standing on the subway platform with the train swooshing in front of her like a grimy silver dragon, the effect had worn off.
Five months before, in November when she had turned in the final version of her manuscript to Hohoff, there had been no indication that she should expect to be so happy. Lippincott’s publicity department had slipped a note inside advance copies sent to reviewers. “Please set aside an evening or two real soon to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’d be very happy to know your reaction.… We are rushing this paperbound copy to you so that you may share with us the rare fun and lift in the discovery of a new, fresh talent.” Capote had contributed a blurb for the review copy. “Someone rare has written this very fine first novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life, and the warmest, most authentic humor. A touching book, and so funny, so likeable.”
Hohoff, while confident, had some reservations. A novel set in the South at the center of which was a rape trial might not send readers rushing to bookstores. “Don’t be surprised, Nelle, if you sell only two thousand copies—or less. Most books by first-time novelists do.”5
But now, suddenly, To Kill a Mockingbird was in impressive company: some of Reader’s Digest’s recent picks had included Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, John Hersey’s A Single Pebble, and A Rockefeller Family Portrait, by William Manchester. Being selected by the Literary Guild, Crain said, practically guaranteed that her novel would be a commercial success. At the prepublication party he and Annie Laurie threw for her, she expressed her gratitude in a presentation copy especially for them. “Maurice and A.L.: this is the charming result of your encouragement, faith and love—Nelle.”6 Then guests gathered around a cake in the dining room, frosted to look like the novel’s cover—a leafy tree stood against a light brown background; the title in white letters in a black band across the top. As Nelle cut the first piece, everyone toasted her and the book, which already felt like a success.7
In Monroeville, the news of a local girl making good led to an exuberant item in the Monroe Journal: “Everybody, but everybody, is looking forward to publication … of Nelle Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird.… It’s wonderful. The characters are so well defined, it’s crammed and jammed with chuckles, and then there are some scenes that will really choke you up.”8 Ernestine’s Gift Shop, on the town square, scored a coup when the owner announced that Nelle would be holding a book signing there just as soon as she was back in town.
Within a few weeks after the publication party in New York, To Kill a Mockingbird hit both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune lists of top ten bestsellers in July 1960. Reviewers for major publications—who would generally cast a skeptical eye on tales about virtue standing up to evil and peppered with homespun verities about life—found themselves enchanted by To Kill a Mockingbird.
“It is pleasing to recommend a book that shows what a novelist can do with familiar situations,” wrote Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times. “Here is a storyteller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.” Frank Lyell, in another New York Times piece, breathed a sigh of relief that “Maycomb has its share of eccentrics and evil-doers, but Miss Lee has not tried to satisfy the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity.” The New York World Telegram predicted “a bright future beckoning” the author, and the Tennessee Commercial Appeal announced the addition of “another new writer to the growing galaxy of Southern novelists.” The Washington Post began its review by praising the novel’s power to carry a moral theme: “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”9 Annie Laurie Williams, who had been dumped by Capote as his agent for film and drama rights, couldn’t resist gloating to him, “We are so proud of Nelle and what is happening to her book is thrilling.”10 Alden Todd, another one of Williams’s young author-clients, strolled into the Francis Scott Key Book Shop in Washington, D.C., and learned that the owner had hand-sold two hundred copies of Mockingbird in less than a week.11
A few critics later found fault with the double-narrator technique whereby Scout and Jean Louise Finch—Scout as an adult—both tell the story. Phoebe Adams in the Atlantic dismissed the story as “frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.” Granville Hicks wrote in the Saturday Review that “Lee’s problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn’t consistently solved it.” W. J. Stuckey, in The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look, attributed Lee’s “rhetorical trick” to a failure to solve “the technical problems raised by her story and whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view, she switches to the other.” (On the other hand, the reader wonders how it will all turn out; there’s a feeling of suspense, of “continual mystery” since Jean Louise is recalling the past with fondness.)12
* * *
In hindsight, reviews of the novel when it was published say a great deal about American culture then, especially prevailing attitudes about race. What was not discussed about the novel is more revealing than what was.
To begin with, To Kill a Mockingbird divides people and behavior into good or bad. Democracy, justice, and courage are good; racism, incest, and false allegations of rape are bad. Good white people like Atticus get respect from blacks who get to their feet in the colored gallery when he passes below, and the implications of this aren’t questioned. Bad white people get what they deserve and die or disappear. There are no bad black people at all, which is simultaneously a stereotype and a subtle endorsement of racism. Black characters are one-dimensional, leaving readers feeling that they understand Calpurnia, Helen Robinson, Zeebo—for that matter, all blacks.
Racism receives tacit endorsement from Atticus, too. He overlooks the racism of characters such as Mrs. Dubose, while praising the “courage” she shows in breaking her drug addiction. Lynch mobs, such as the one that confronts Atticus outside the jail, are made up of decent people who can be shamed by a child out of their desire to torture and mutilate. Mr. Cunningham, Atticus says, is “basically a good man … he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” And he assures Scout that the Ku Klux Klan was “a political organization more than anything” that briefly emerged “way back about nineteen-twenty” but “they couldn’t find anybody to scare.”
He’s resigned to certain things as a wise man because good or bad behavior is often the fault of “breeding.” The poor white-trash Ewells are irredeemable, because their kind are dirty, incestuous, and drunken; they belong at the dump. Bob Ewell has raped Mayella all her life but “what my pappa do don’t count,” and no one in court finds that abhorrent—that’s just white trash for you. In the same way, nothing can be done about Boo Radley, held prisoner by his father for years, except to leave him alone, says Atticus.
Folks in Maycomb County get along because people have sense enough to stay in their lane, so to speak; by this logic, racism and segregation sound like a civic duty. The real problem in the South, according to the novel, is a mystery disease; just as rabies can produce a dog who’s out of his mind, so racism is a form of confusion, or a result of being raised poorly, or a matter of not having any manners. Scout sails into her cousin Francis for calling her father “a nigger-lover”; she doesn’t quite know what he means—it’s how he said it, she explains. It was rude.
As Francine Prose wrote, albeit almost forty years later, “To read the novel is, for most, an exercise in wish-fulfillment and self-congratulation, a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would never harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel.”13 Yet had To Kill a Mockingbird not reflected the political and social sensibility of the 1950s, even though it’s set much earlier in the 1930s, it wouldn’t have been as popular or talked about.14
* * *
Americans wanted to see themselves as justice-loving and believing in freedom, for example, especially in the face of communism, but the Emmett Till trial of 1955 in Mississippi was a notorious example of the opposite. An all-white, all-male jury deliberated sixty-seven minutes before acquitting two white defendants of murdering fourteen-year-old Till for whistling at a white woman. Hence the injustice of Tom Robinson’s trial was greatly amplified in reader’s minds in 1960 because it seemed much nearer in time, not an event from an earlier, benighted age in American history.15
Also, sexual intimacy between blacks and whites had always been an incendiary issue; but it was never was more violently opposed than after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education threatened to violate sexual taboos by mixing black and white schoolchildren. An exhaustive 1947 study of southern culture by Gunnar Myrdal asked whites to choose among six categories in gauging what they believed blacks most desired by asserting their civil rights. First in ranking came “intermarriage and sex intercourse with whites.”16 From his research, Myrdal concluded that “sex was the principle around which the whole structure of segregation … was organized. And it was because of sex that racial segregation … was intended to permeate every aspect of society.” By putting interracial sex and injustice at the center of her fictional trial, Lee made the adult concerns of the novel simultaneously present-day and enduring, too.
And perhaps that’s why Atticus Finch had to lose in court; because had the law triumphed over “the secret courts of men’s hearts,” in Scout’s phrase, meaning their fears and prejudices, the verdict would have been abhorrent to segregationists. What the law threatened to make them do, they could resist so long as they stood their ground. But the novel provides hope. Atticus and Sheriff Heck Tate choose not to have Boo Radley arrested—a subversive ending, an act of justice in spite of what the jury decides in the Tom Robinson case. It gives strength to the belief that people of good conscience can change society.17
In American culture, To Kill a Mockingbird would become like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Portnoy’s Complaint, On the Road, The Bell Jar, Soul on Ice, and The Feminine Mystique—books that seized the imagination of the post–World War II generation. A novel that played a part in questioning the “system.”
* * *
A torrent of requests for interviews and book signings left Nelle breathless. Sacks of fan mail arrived at Lippincott. Capote wrote to friends: “Poor thing—she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail’ when she received sixty-two letters in one day. I wish she could relax and enjoy it more: in this profession it’s a long walk between drinks.”18 Most of the letters lauded the book, but a few were angry. “In this day of mass rape of white women who are not morons, why is it that you young Jewish authors seek to whitewash the situation?” complained a reader. Lee was tempted to reply, “Dear Sir or Madam, somebody is using your name to write dirty letters. You should notify the F.B.I.” And she planned to sign it, “Harper Levy.”19 Another outraged letter read:
Regarding your successful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, you picked the kind of plot the Yankee element literally read.… You picked the same counterpart of Uncle Tom—the kind, harmless Negro accused/abused falsely by the arrogant whites.… You could write a book describing Southern whites killing Negroes and stacking them up like cordwood. It would make you another bestseller.… I’ve lived in the North five years. There are many good ones who mind their own business. Whenever you find the wiseacre who is going to remake the South—and never been here, they are filth and poison.20
As sales of the book rose into the hundreds of thousands during the fall of 1960, Lee had the singular pleasure of a congratulatory letter from Hudson Strode, her former Shakespeare professor and director of the writing workshop at the University of Alabama. “I enjoyed the book very much indeed. It is fresh, and skillfully done, with delightful characters and the best possible ending.… I think part of your success lies in the shock of recognition—or as the Japanese might say, ‘the unexpected recognition of the faithful “suchness” of very ordinary things.’ You have a wide, warm audience waiting for Number Two.”21 (Privately, Strode wished she had been enrolled in his creative writing seminar, telling his students, she learned a lot from him through Shakespeare.”)22
One day, to escape the attention for a few hours, Nelle used the excuse that Tay Hohoff was mad about cats to deliver to her an abandoned kitten with six toes on its forefeet. Nelle had found the kitten in the basement of her building, cuddled up to the furnace. She named it Shadrach, after the biblical character who endured Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. After delivering it safely to the Hohoff sanctuary, a “beehive of books” scented with aromas of good tobacco and whiskey, Nelle sank into a big comfortable chair and muttered, despite the early morning hour, “I need a drink. I’m supposed to be at an interview right now.” After she left, Hohoff and her husband, Arthur, had a good laugh about how their young friend was finding out that literary success was not all it was cracked up to be.
For someone like Lee, who preferred solitude over parties, observing instead of participating, the onrush of instant celebrity resulting from To Kill a Mockingbird imposed a tremendous strain she hadn’t expected. Capote, hearing of the effects of celebrity overtaking his friend, remarked: “Poor darling, she seems to be having some sort of happy nervous-breakdown.”23 Somehow, in the space of a very short time, just a few months, Nelle had gone from having a private self that she could control, to a public persona that she could not. Unlike Capote, for instance, who said, “I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous,” Nelle didn’t regard herself as an important person, and the attention being paid to her almost seemed to be happening to someone else. A revealing moment about her self-perception occurred during an interview with Newsweek in the lounge of New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Catching sight of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan walking by, she confessed, “I’ve always wanted to meet an author.”24
Just as long as the intense attention stayed primarily on the book, she could cope with it. Usually, her quick, folksy wit stood her in good stead during interviews. She was the first to poke fun at her heavy Alabama accent. (“If I hear a consonant, I look around.”) She deflected seriousness by claiming to be a Whig and believing “in Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Corn Laws.” Asked about how she wrote, she cracked, “I sit down before a typewriter with my feet fixed firmly on the floor.” Not even her appearance was off-limits, within reason; she admitted to being a little heavier than she would like to be (according to a friend, she put herself on a thousand-calorie-a-day diet of “unpalatable goop”).25 Generally, interviewers, such as Joseph Deitch for the Christian Science Monitor, found her “instantly good company … a tall, robust woman with a winsome manner, a neighborly handshake, and a liking for good, sensitive talk about people and books and places like Monroeville, Alabama, her home town.”
Monroeville offered the safest harbor for getting away from the attention. (This although the Boulware family was making noises about suing over the likeness between Son Boulware and Boo Radley. The Lee sisters adopted a policy of brushing aside comparisons between characters in the novel and Monroeville residents. “They come right up to me and stuck their noses right in my face and declared there’s nobody in the book that’s real,” said Capote’s aunt Mary Ida Carter.)26
Not too many years earlier, the town’s remoteness had been one of Nelle’s chief reasons for wanting to stay in New York; now it guaranteed some peace of mind. Reporters and interviewers, after studying maps of Alabama where two-lane roads meandered like blue and black threads, opted to telephone the Lee residence instead of stopping by. When the phone rang, it was Alice who answered, refusing to allow her sister to take the call if it was about the novel.27 The world and its demands could wait on the Lees’ doorstep. Inside, Nelle liked to curl up with a book. Alice wouldn’t even permit a television in the house, lest it disturb the quiet.
When word went round in Eufaula, however, that Nelle Harper Lee was coming to visit her sister Louise, a line of dessert-bearing ladies got busy. One woman, Solita Parker, with a reputation in the neighborhood for being a wit, pretended to be jealous that Monroeville had been chosen for the novel’s setting. She firmly announced that Eufaula ought to chip in and rent Nelle an apartment, because there were so many peculiar characters in Eufaula to write about.
“Oh, you want a kick-back on stock in the publishing company,” Nelle teased back.
“No,” said the woman, “I just want to read the book.”28
That kind of pleasantry and the feelings of gratification it inspired were exactly what Nelle had expected from publishing a novel. Here in these familiar surroundings, with people who spoke, thought, and joked as she did, she could be what she wanted—a Southerner satisfied with joining the tradition of regionalist writers south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here she could give free rein to her personality. To a cookbook editor’s request for a recipe that would “demonstrate food as a mean of communication,” Nelle provided one for crackling bread—a backwoods staple—couched in the style of tongue-in-cheek southern humor that mixed formal talk with nonsense.
“First, catch your pig,” she instructed. “Then ship him to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send you back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away.” Having wasted most of the pig, the cook was then supposed to add the fat to meal, milk, baking powder, and an egg, and bake the dough in a “very hot oven.” The result, Nelle promised, would be an authentic dish: “one pan crackling bread serving six. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.” To the editor, she concluded, “I trust that you will find the above of sufficient artistic and social significance to include in the cookbook.”29
It was a response that friends would recognize as “typical Nelle”—offbeat, skeptical, thought-provoking. Friends from her days at the University of Alabama described her to the Montgomery Advertiser as “a warm though independent-minded girl who took great delight in deflating phoniness wherever it appeared.”
To requests for more information about herself, she responded coyly. At Huntingdon College, the librarian Leo R. Roberts tried to compile a profile of the former freshman in response to journalists, alumnae, and Nelle’s admirers who were clamoring to know more about the author whose book had sold more than half a million copies in six months. Roberts, probably a little nonplussed by the lack of information about Nelle in Huntingdon’s archives, finally wrote to her in January 1961 requesting some facts about her background.
“I’m afraid a biographical sketch of me will be sketchy indeed; with the exception of M’bird, nothing of any particular interest to anyone has happened to me in my thirty-four years,” she replied. After supplying a few details about her family, she deadpanned, “I was exposed to seventeen years of formal education in Monroeville schools, Huntingdon College, and the University of Alabama. If I ever learned anything, I’ve forgotten it.”30
* * *
In September 1960, she agreed to a book signing at Capitol Book and News Company in Montgomery. Seated at a table next to a vase of white carnations and wearing a fresh-cut corsage pinned to her dress, she was the center of attention. Less a literary event than a combination celebration and reunion, the book signing was an occasion where people “crowded into the bookstore because they saw her picture in the paper, wondered if she were kin to so and so, heard that her book was good, knew her at the University of Alabama, knew someone who used to know her somewhere or had read the book and enjoyed it and came to say so.”31
Nearby was her father, eighty-two-year-old A. C. Lee, looking very old as he watched quietly with his large owlish eyes through big glasses. His wife, Nelle’s mother, Frances, had been dead for almost a decade. (A.C. himself would die in two years, still in the harness at the law office.) His suit vests, once buttoned tightly over a healthy paunch, now hung loose. The knuckles of his right hand turned white when he pressed hard on the crook of his cane to rise from his chair and shake someone’s hand, perhaps an old acquaintance from his days as a state legislator. “I never dreamed of what was going to happen. 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. She will have to do a good job next time if she goes on up.” And then—still marveling, apparently, that Nelle had strayed from the narrow but dependable path of a nine-to-five job—he added, “I feel what I think is a justifiable measure of pride in her accomplishment, and I must say she has displayed much determination, confidence and ambition to give up a good job in New York and take a chance at writing a book.”32
* * *
And because of the influence of his two daughters, and the passage of time, A. C. Lee had changed his views about race relations, too. Formerly a conservative on matters of race and social progress, he became an advocate for voting rights in his final years.
Part of the reason for his change of mind was the influence of events that no thoughtful American in the 1950s could ignore. Autherine Lucy, a black student, attempted to enroll at Harper Lee’s alma mater, the University of Alabama, but violence on the campus for three days forced her to flee. Despite a court order to readmit her, the Board of Trustees barred her from campus. The former Alabama state senator J. M. Bonner, whom A. C. Lee probably knew from his own career in the statehouse, wrote to the Tuscaloosa News, “I call now on every Southern White man to join in this fight. I proudly take my stand with those students who resisted, and who will continue to resist the admission of a Negress named Lucy.”
A contest of principles was gearing up in the South, and a civic-minded man like A. C. Lee could not fail to recognize it happening in his own backyard. In 1959, the Ku Klux Klan forced the cancellation of the annual Monroeville Christmas parade by threatening to kill any members of the all-Negro Union High School band who participated. Influencing A.C., too, was Alice, more progressive than he in matters concerning race. At a critical moment in the reorganization of the United Methodist Church, her beliefs about integration, honed over the decades, electrified an audience of hundreds of fellow worshippers.
During a meeting in 1964 at Huntingdon College of the Alabama–West Florida Conference, one of the few regional holdouts against integrating black Methodists with whites, a committee report concerning the “problems of our racially divided church” and society came to the floor. “A Call to Christian Thought and Conduct” called upon “Christians to uphold the law, repudiate racial hatred and violence, support freedom and equality for all, and apply compassion and understanding to those with whom we differ.”33 A motion to amend the church bylaws in favor of integrating congregations had been made, and the question was open for discussion. Those who were against were prepared with countermeasures—perhaps even a walkout, if necessary, depriving the meeting of a quorum.
For years, Alice had been impatiently waiting for such a moment.34 Taking the floor microphone, she said: ‘I move the previous question,’ and sat down. The conference applauded enthusiastically and voted overwhelmingly to support her motion, voted to close discussion, and then proceeded to adopt the committee report without further debate. The advocates of racism were left holding their long-prepared speeches. “Miss Alice became the hero of the conference and from that day the enemy of the racists.”35
By the time To Kill a Mockingbird was published, A. C. Lee was involved in redrawing congressional district lines. In 1962, while a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser was interviewing Nelle at her home in Monroeville, Alice and A.C. stopped by on their way to the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee. The elderly lawyer interrupted to speak earnestly to the reporter about the importance of reapportioning voting districts to provide fairer representation for black voters. “It’s got to be done,” he said.36 And then he continued on his way. It’s interesting to speculate what he might have accomplished had he lived longer. When Monroeville residents politely stopped him on the street to ask him to sign his daughter’s book, they often said, “But please don’t sign it ‘Mr. Lee’—sign it ‘Atticus.’”
* * *
The success of To Kill a Mockingbird caught Hollywood’s attention almost immediately, and Annie Laurie Williams, as Nelle’s agent for dramatic rights, had been reviewing proposals from filmmakers. She was in her element brokering deals between studios or production companies hunting for literary properties. Sifting through the proposals on her desk, however, she found too much of the usual overheated language about turning the book into a Hollywood hit.
The producer Robert P. Richards, for instance, wrote on behalf of himself and his partner, James Yarbrough. Yarbrough’s credits included television dramas such as Robert Montgomery Presents and two western series, Rawhide and Bonanza. Richards felt strongly about the need to shoot on location and use “as many natives as possible for extras and bits.” For the roles of Aunt Alexandra and Miss Maudie, he suggested Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan. “Atticus is a problem,” Richards admitted; among the biggest leading men of the day—Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, and a few others—“the only one who might be right is Gary Cooper, but I’m afraid that his public image is wrong. The public is unwilling to think of Cooper as an intellectual.” Yarbrough had an idea, though: “to ask John Huston to play the part, he is Atticus, in thought, body and personality, a little wilder, a little crazier.”37 Williams politely turned down their offer.
Most offers were from small outfits and partnerships. Major studios were conspicuously absent because To Kill a Mockingbird lacked the tried-and-true ingredients that attracted movie audiences: shoot-’em-up action, a love story, danger, or a clear-cut “bad guy.” In addition, the press had likened To Kill a Mockingbird’s nine-year-old narrator Scout to preadolescent Frankie in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, and the film version of McCullers’s novel had flopped. (The surface similarities of the two novels were not lost on McCullers, either, who commented acidly about Lee to a cousin, “Well, honey, one thing we know is that she’s been poaching on my literary preserves.”)38
It was just as well that the big studios weren’t sniffing around, anyway. In thirty years of working with Hollywood, Williams had learned to adhere to a basic principle: try to get for authors and playwrights what they need to feel appreciated or satisfied. Some required top-dollar deals to feel validated; others would work only with directors or playwrights they admired. In Lee’s case, Williams had an author who did not put emphasis on conventional marks of prestige. But she would be reluctant to let go of the story unless she could be assured that a film version would not be undignified or hurt people she loved. That was her price; and other considerations—the money paid for screen rights, percentage agreements, and so on—were of much less concern to her.
A second reality about doing business with Harper Lee was that the locus of control over the book was slipping from her hands alone and into Alice’s. Williams knew she could close a film deal for the novel only if Alice approved of the people involved as much as Nelle did. Whoever was chosen to turn the novel into a film had to come across as decent and trustworthy.
The Lee family had come to the To Kill a Mockingbird party late, so to speak, but once it was clear that Nelle had achieved something grand, Alice began taking over her affairs. Previously, when Nelle was working full-time in New York as an airline reservationist and was down-at-the-heels, the Lees had allowed her to scrape along, probably figuring she would come to her senses eventually. Then, against all odds, this long run-up to what should have ended in a sorry admission that A.C. had been right all along instead resulted in Nelle’s producing a novel that was becoming famous. Suddenly, the family was receiving calls from reporters, and with no choice except to acquit themselves well, they were undertaking the responsibility of managing their prodigy.
So it was that when Williams sent a follow-up letter to the Lee home about selling the motion picture rights to Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan, she acknowledged that Alice, as family spokesperson and Nelle’s self-appointed manager, would have to be reckoned with every step of the way. “Dear Alice and Nelle,” the letter began,
[I tried] to keep in mind everything you said[,] Alice[,] about not getting any cash money for Nelle this year and not too much each succeeding year.… The sale is to Alan Pakula and Robert Mulligan, who are forming their own company to produce together, with Bob Mulligan also directing. This is the real “prize” having him direct the Mockingbird picture. Alan is a good producer but he knew when he first talked to Nelle in our office, that he must have a sensitive director to work with him. We think that Bob Mulligan is just right for this picture.39
She was not overstating their good luck in closing with Pakula and Mulligan, and she had held off a major studio until the pair could make their bid. As filmmakers, they were drawn to stories about character, life’s tragic quality, and situations that were ripe for strong dramatization.
At first glance, Pakula would not give the impression of being the right man for the job of making a film about racial prejudice in a small southern town in the 1930s. Darkly handsome, the son of Polish immigrants, and a Yale graduate who dressed like a 1960s IBM salesman, Pakula was fastidious in ways that extended even to his film crews, insisting they pick up their cigarette butts after shooting on location. But he was also personable, warm, and conscientious. At twenty-two, he had turned away from the family printing business in New York, and become a production assistant at Paramount. His father underwrote his first film as producer, Fear Strikes Out (1957), the story of baseball player Jimmy Piersall’s mental illness caused by his obsessively critical father, for which Pakula teamed with Robert Mulligan as director. The film was well received, and it not only launched Mulligan and Pakula’s careers but also earned praise for newcomer Anthony Perkins in the role of Piersall. A publicist at Lippincott had urged Pakula to read To Kill a Mockingbird, and Pakula in turn had made Mulligan read it.
Bob Mulligan did not have Pakula’s exterior polish, nor was he as reserved. Sandy-haired, informal, and impulsive, Mulligan was born in the Bronx and studied briefly for the priesthood before enrolling at Fordham University, where he majored in radio communications, receiving training that made him a specialist in the Marines during World War II. After the war, he started at the bottom at CBS as a messenger, but rose during the popularly nicknamed Golden Age of Television to become a director of live dramas aired on The Philco Television Playhouse, Studio One, and Suspense. Mulligan was part of a new wave of postwar directors learning their craft on television—men such as John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, George Roy Hill, and Martin Ritt. Unlike Pakula, however, who later moved into directing films with a social-political agenda such as Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), Mulligan would remain attracted to telling human interest stories: Love with a Proper Stranger (1963), Up the Down Staircase (1967), Summer of ’42 (1971), and The Man in the Moon (1991).
Overall, the fit was good between the content of To Kill a Mockingbird and what Pakula and Mulligan wanted to do artistically. Even better, the relationship between Nelle and Pakula had gotten off to a good start in Williams’s office the previous autumn, during a meeting that Williams had presided over like an old-fashioned matchmaker. Well before the deal was closed, in January 1961, she had sent Pakula a letter lecturing him about not trifling with Nelle or her book: “From the very beginning, everybody who had anything to do with the book has felt that it was special, deserving the most thoughtful handling. Now if you can find exactly the right Atticus and exactly the right children, especially the little girl to play Scout, we will feel confident that you can produce the kind of picture you promised Harper Lee you would make when you first met her in our office.”40
In the meantime, because Mulligan was still working on The Spiral Road (1962), a big-picture drama with Rock Hudson and Burl Ives about colonialism in the tropics, Pakula made arrangements to visit Monroeville and “see Nelle about the ‘creative side,’” as Williams put it—though he knew in advance he was auditioning for Alice and A.C.’s approval, too. When he arrived in Monroeville in February 1961, the weather was overcast and rainy. But even if he had seen the town under the best conditions, it wouldn’t have changed his mind about using it as a possible location: “There is no Monroeville,” Pakula wrote glumly to Mulligan, meaning that modernization over the last thirty years had rendered the town characterless. Except for the courthouse, which the citizenry was considering tearing down because a new, flat-roof, cinder-block version was on the drawing board, Monroeville was a mishmash of old and new. A façade for Scout’s neighborhood would have to be built on a studio back lot, and the interior of the old courthouse, which was not in good repair, would have to be measured and reconstructed on a Hollywood soundstage.
After spending several days getting to know the Lees, Pakula left for California, apparently having secured their approval about the ideas he and Mulligan had in mind for the film: “They want to give the movie the same approach that the book had,” Alice said approvingly. Nelle, trying to assuage Pakula’s disappointment about Monroeville with a dose of lightheartedness, sent him a few photographs with a note: “Here is the courthouse, some rain-rotted lumber, and two sprigs of Spanish moss to keep you company. If you’ll believe me, that’s the sun, not a flashbulb, shining on the side of the house.”41 He thanked her for the pictures, betraying no sense of concern about the crimp in his plans, and saying he was looking forward to meeting up with her in New York soon to introduce her to Bob Mulligan—“Affectionately, Alan.”
* * *
The setting for fictional Maycomb that Pakula had expected to find had seemingly vanished. Where Capote’s house had stood—the one belonging to Dill’s aunt in the novel—was an empty lot. The streets that had emanated sour red dust on a hot day in the 1930s were smooth with blacktop. Now, teenagers crowded into the Wee Diner for Cokes and hamburgers, a hot spot for dates made from two buses joined together, with flower boxes and brightly painted booths. A visitor resting on one of the benches on the courthouse square might conclude, just looking around, that a film with a story like To Kill a Mockingbird was passé. How different times seemed from the days of lynch mobs and racist trials. On the other hand, blacks were not allowed to use the park or recreation facilities owned by the Vanity Fair underwear factory, the largest industry in town, and there were separate water fountains marked “White” and “Colored.”
A few days after newspapers announced the sale of the movie rights to the novel in February 1961, an unsigned squib headed “Spreading Poison” appeared on the letters-to-the-editor page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “That book ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is to be filmed. Thus another cruel, untrue libel upon the South is to be spread all over the nation. Another Alabama writer joins the ranks of traducers of their homeland for pelf and infamous fame.”
* * *
In late spring 1961, planning for the movie entered a lull. Pakula and Mulligan were anxious to, in casting parlance, “set the star”—get a commitment for the leading man—so they could move on to making a distribution deal. The previous fall, Nelle had engaged in some star hunting on her own, thinking that a direct approach might entice an actor with a reputation for integrity that made him suitable for the role of Atticus. Through the William Morris Agency, she sent a note to Spencer Tracy. “Frankly, I can’t see anybody but Spencer Tracy in the part of Atticus.”42 The actor replied via an agent, George Wood, that he “could not read the book till he has finished his picture ‘The Devil at Four O’clock.’ He must study and concentrate at present.” Instead, Wood suggested Robert Wagner who “would love to hear from you and any ideas that you might have for him.” In March 1961, Maurice Crain wrote to Alice: “The latest development is that Bing Crosby very much wants to play Atticus.… He should be made to promise not to reverse his collar, not to mumble a single Latin prayer, not to burble a single note.”43
Aside from the movie, things were continuing to percolate on the literary front. By mid-April, To Kill a Mockingbird was approaching its thirty-fifth week on the bestseller lists. Yet Lee apparently couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still an amateur who could learn from her betters. After having lunch with Crain, she went back to his office and happened to see the manuscript for a new novel by Fred Gipson, author of Old Yeller. “She picked up the first page, just to see how Fred Gipson began a story,” Crain wrote to Gipson. “Under protest she was dragged away from it 111 pages later to keep another date, but took a copy of Old Yeller with her. You have another fan.”44
Back home in Monroeville by the end of the month, Nelle was invited to attend a luncheon of the Alabama Library Association. At the table of honored guests was her former professor Hudson Strode, with one of his former creative writing students, Mississippi regionalist writer Borden Deal, who had just published his sixth novel, Dragon’s Wine. At the conclusion of the luncheon, Nelle received the association’s literary award.
* * *
On Monday, May 2, when To Kill a Mockingbird was in its forty-first week as a bestseller and had sold nearly half a million copies, the phone rang in Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain’s offices. It was a friend of Williams’s at a publishing house who wanted to speak to Nelle about hearsay from a reporter.
In California, Pakula had already heard the same rumor and was excitedly calling his partner, Bob Mulligan.
When Mulligan answered, Pakula shouted, “We got it! We got it!”
“We got what?” asked Mulligan.
“The Pulitzer Prize. Our book won it!”45
Nelle hardly dared believe it until she received an official call: “A friend from a publishing company called and had gotten the word from a newspaper. I haven’t heard from the Pulitzer committee yet, but I haven’t been back to my apartment since I heard the news.”46 When she finally did hear from a spokesperson for the Pulitzer Prize Committee, she called Alice several times, who by now was becoming adept in the role of her sister’s spokesperson and at fielding phone calls from reporters. “Nelle was anxious to find out the local reaction,” she said in response to questions. “She still claims Monroeville as her home, and when she leaves, it is usually for business purposes” (a hint that Alice was not reconciled to Nelle’s living months at a time in New York). “The whole town of Monroeville is amazed about the Pulitzer prize.”47
The annual Pulitzer Prizes in drama, letters, and music, created by the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in a bequest to Columbia University, were worth only five hundred dollars each at that time, but their cachet, in terms of bringing artists’ names to the public, was enormous. Hudson Strode immediately tapped out a letter of congratulations to Nelle: “I announced the good news to my writing class last night and there was a response of cheers. The University and the State, and the whole South are proud of you. But no one more than myself.”48
Besieged by phone interviews that kept her pinned inside Williams’s office for hours, Nelle resorted to modesty and humor in responding to questions about herself. “I am as lucky as I can be. I don’t know anyone who has been luckier.”49 She claimed that the effort to write the book had worn out three pairs of dungarees. And about whether a movie was forthcoming, all she would say was that production was slated to begin in the fall.
Almost immediately, a second avalanche of fan letters began. “Snowed under with fan letters,” wrote Newsweek, “Harper Lee is stealing time from a new novel-in-progress to write careful answers.”
It was the proverbial Cinderella story: from nowhere comes a young writer, without benefit of grants, fellowships, or even an apprenticeship at a major newspaper or magazine, who produces, on her first try, a novel snapped up by three American book clubs: Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, the Literary Guild, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. In addition, the British Book Society had selected Mockingbird for its readers, and by the spring of 1961, translations were under way in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Czechoslovakia.
Truman Capote, who craved winning the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, and hoped he would with In Cold Blood, wrote to friends in Kansas: “Well, and wasn’t it fine about our dear little Nelle winning the Pulitzer Prize? She has swept the boards.”50
Despite Capote’s casual tone, he no doubt resented this turn of fortune in his friend’s life. After all, when they were children, he had been the one to urge her to write stories (he later revised the nature of their partnership, telling the Washington Post, “I got Harper interested in writing because she typed my manuscripts on my typewriter. It was a nice gesture for her, and highly convenient for me”). Moreover, Lee tended not to put the emphasis on winning the Pulitzer Prize that Capote would have. “The Pulitzer is one thing; the approval of my own people is the only literary reward I covet,” she wrote to a friend.51 It was gall that Truman had to swallow, as gracefully as he could, but his cousin Jennings Faulk Carter recalled, “The only time I’ve ever heard him say anything about Nelle’s book was that he remarked, ‘She got the Pulitzer, and I’ve never, never done that.’ I forget how he put it, but you could tell he was hurt badly. That as much writing as he had done, he had never won it, but Nelle had.”52
In mid-May, the Alabama legislature attempted to pass a resolution honoring Nelle, but a segregationist senator named E. O. Eddins stepped in to stop it. The senator had been at the head of the charge to ban Garth Williams’s 1958 book The Rabbits’ Wedding, which featured the wedding of two rabbits, one black and one white. The White Citizens’ Council in Alabama, with Eddins’s support, had attacked the Williams book as “communistic” and promoting racial integration. Eddins and other legislators tried but failed to remove the state’s director of the Alabama Public Library Service, Emily Wheelock Reed, for refusing to remove the book from library shelves. But this time, Eddins sensed that a similar backlash might build if he lambasted Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, so he finally withdrew his protest “lest it make a martyr of the author.”53 A joint resolution passed on May 26 offering “homage and special praise to this outstanding Alabamian who has gained such prominence for herself and so much prestige for her native state.”
And there was surely more to come from an author so promising. She had written an essay, “Love—In Other Words,” which appeared in the April issue of Vogue magazine. She told reporters that she had several short stories under way. She seemed to have talent and a work ethic that indicated that a long career was just beginning.
In its first year, To Kill a Mockingbird sold more than 2.5 million copies. W. S. Hoole, director of the University of Alabama libraries, “nearly fell over his size thirteens asking for the manuscript!” Nelle wrote to friends in Mobile, but she thought better of giving it to him.54
Maurice Crain, Annie Laurie Williams, and certainly Tay Hohoff, couldn’t wait for Nelle’s second novel. In July 1961, a teasing note arrived at Nelle’s apartment on the Upper East Side, where she had just moved with a friend, Marcia 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? We would be so happy if you would. (signed) the mockingbird and annie laurie and maurice crain.”55
To reporters asking the same question—What are your plans for a second book?—Nelle replied, “I guess I will have to quote Scarlett O’Hara on that. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”56
The remark was more than apt. As for Scarlett O’Hara, unpleasantness and hard decisions could always be put off until an eternal tomorrow, so “tomorrow” would never come for Nelle Harper Lee as an author. With her first novel, which became the most popular novel in American literature in the twentieth century, and which readers rank in surveys as the most influential in their lives after the Bible, Lee seemed poised to begin a writing career that would launch her into the annals of illustrious American writers. Instead, almost from the day of its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird took off, but gradually left its author behind.