Mockingbird (34 page)

Of the two possible outcomes, Capote knew that the most satisfactory dramatic denouement would be execution. KBI detective Harold Nye, who had pursued Hickock and Smith all over the West, wouldn't settle for anything less. “I'm not really bloodthirsty,” he wrote to Truman, “but I will never feel the case is closed until I see that pair drip [
sic
] through the hole.”
26
Capote was not so blunt, but he had taken the precaution to ask permission to attend Smith and Hickock's hanging. On Truman's behalf, Cliff Hope wrote to Robert J. Kaiser, director of Penal Institutions, requesting that Capote be allowed to serve as a witness. Kaiser replied, “I can tell you quite frankly that I would not recommend to the Warden such permission. Numerous people have made a similar request, and I can anticipate many more in the event an execution date becomes imminent.”
27

Until the book was in print, it was important that Truman remain in good standing with the folks of Garden City and Holcomb. He would need some of them to sign legal agreements. In the spirit of reciprocating their hospitality, for instance, Truman let it be known that he would welcome a visit from anyone who happened to be in New York. But he was surprised when Duane West, the Finney County prosecutor, took him up on the offer. West had never acted friendly to Truman and Nelle, and Capote had already whittled down his role in the book to a nub. West wrote to say that he and his wife would be attending a Red Cross convention in Manhattan in May 1964. Inwardly, Truman groaned. He called Nelle and asked her to please help him by playing hostess. She agreed, which meant getting gussied up, one of her least favorite things to do.

They fêted the out-of-towners by pulling out all the stops. First, they escorted them to a performance of
Hello, Dolly!.
Then, after the curtain, Truman played his trump card by escorting everyone backstage to meet the show's star, Carol Channing. Next it was off to Sardi's for a late dinner, during which the author pointed out a caricature of himself hanging on the restaurant's wall of celebrities. When the two couples finally parted, Truman breathed a sigh of relief. “I spent all of last week in the city—where [I] was caught by Mr. Duane West,” Truman wrote to the Deweys. “Nelle and I (for our sins) took them to see ‘Hello, Dolly'—ugh. I thought he was bad, but
the wife is worse!
The End. What a pair! Never again.”
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A few weeks later, he followed up with a letter to West, recounting their good time together and asking him to sign a release. The release stated that West would never write about the Clutter murders.

But West was a “good ol' boy” who could tell when he was being had, Nye said, and he didn't take the bait. “Now I know why we were treated so royally in New York,” West said later, apparently convinced Nelle was in on it, too. Capote was angry, but tried to conceal his frustration in a chilly reply. “If you do not care to sign the release, that is of course your privelege [
sic
]. But please do not think, as I am told you do, that this matter of the release was why I tried to be hospitable during your New York visit. My motive was much simpler: I liked and respected you—and because you wrote to advise me of your impending trip, assumed you have some regard for me.”
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Things went better a few months later when Harrison Smith, Perry Smith's attorney, arrived with his children for a visit. Again, Nelle and Truman rolled out the red carpet. They guided the Smith family to the 21 Club for dinner, where Bennett Cerf and his wife were waiting. (The attorney recognized Cerf as the “guy from ‘What's My Line?.'”) And the top-drawer treatment had its intended effect. “It was the thrill of a lifetime for my kids,” said Smith. Capote also mentioned that his apartment was available for months at a time—why didn't Harrison keep that in mind for the family's next trip? “You know,” said Smith, “he must have thought I was somewhat of a good Joe if he'd invite me to use his apartment.”
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Whether Lee had any second thoughts about helping Capote manipulate the people he needed for his book isn't clear. All she would say about her role in assisting him was, “It was the sort of obligation I was proud to pay back.”
31
The irony is Capote was using her, too. It seemed as if the process of reporting and writing the book had transformed him into a person who was, more than ever, completely self-centered and willing to exploit any of his friends in his own self-aggrandizing quest for fame and fortune. About the time he had written all but the final chapter of
In Cold Blood
, Capote stopped off in Topeka to see KBI detective Harold Nye at his home. While they were talking about the case and the final stages of the book, Nye remarked. “Well, Nelle will certainly play a part in all this.”

“
No
,” Capote said emphatically, “she was just there.”

That response never sat well with Nye. “As well as they knew each other,” he said, looking back, “there is no reason not to give some credit to her.”
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*   *   *

Shortly before the visits of the Wests and Smiths to New York, Nelle gave one of her last interviews, in March 1964, which also happened to be her best. She appeared on Roy Newquist's evening radio show,
Counterpoint,
on WQXR in New York. Newquist, a Midwesterner, loved everything about books and writers. He had studied creative writing under Sinclair Lewis and Mari Sandoz; then, bowing to the exigencies of having to make a living, he went into advertising. But his syndicated book reviews and radio program eventually became a second career. Once a month, he commuted from his Chicago-area home for his broadcast in New York. A genial and engaging man, he had the ability to put people at ease. And Nelle, normally given to bantering with reporters and deflecting personal questions, opened up as she never had about her work and her aims as a writer.

She described herself to Newquist as someone who “
must
write.… I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much.” Newquist asked her to name the contemporary writers she admired most. At the top of her list she put her friend Capote.

“There's probably no better writer in this country today than Truman Capote. He is growing all the time. The next thing coming from Capote is not a novel—it's a long piece of reportage, and I think it is going to make him bust loose as a novelist. He's going to have even deeper dimension to his work. Capote, I think, is the greatest craftsman we have going.”

About her own ambition as a writer, she expressed a desire to write more and better novels in the vein of
To Kill a Mockingbird.

I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse. I would like, however, to do one thing, and I've never spoken much about it because it's such a personal thing. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope to do this in several novels—to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to
Tobacco Road,
as opposed to plantation life.

As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.

And then she added a remark that set the bar high for herself—perhaps too high, in hindsight—but one that seemed plausible for a writer who had already written one of the most popular books since World War II.

“In other words,” she said, “all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
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*   *   *

In the summer of 1964, with her novel still unfinished, she opted for a vacation on Fire Island, hoping for a salutary effect on her imagination by combining work and play. The Browns were staying on the island for several months and invited her as their guest. Michael had written and produced a musical revue called the
Wonderful World of Chemistry
for the Du Pont pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. A dozen times a day, performers clad in space-age tights of white and orange, and white bowlers with sprays of Styrofoam molecules, sang and danced the story of chemistry from ancient Greece to modern times. The show would run for a year, and as Michael and Joy liked to do with financial windfalls, they were celebrating.

Nelle's accumulating fortune, on the other hand, continued to worry her, because her income had catapulted her into a tax bracket associated with the rich. The situation was at odds with the simple lifestyle she preferred. “We know that Nelle Harper wishes these checks would not come in every few months, but I'm sure we understand that there's no way of stopping them,” Williams wrote to Alice in August, enclosing another check.
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The original J. B. Lippincott edition of
To Kill a Mockingbird
was still selling, and the Popular Library paperback had sold about five million copies.
Reader's Digest
magazine continued to distribute two million copies of the novel's abridged version. There were six hardbound editions in German, an Italian version, and the Swiss book club Ex Libris had chosen it as a selection. The novel continued to sell vigorously in England, in both the Heinemann and Penguin editions. British Reader's Digest Condensed Books and its branches in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa distributed the novel as a bonus to new members. During the summer Nelle was on the island, translations in Hungary, Romania, and Greece appeared. The U.S. Information Agency was looking into publishing translated editions in the Middle East. Nelle had received invitations to speak all over the world. Even in the Soviet Union, beyond the reach of copyright, audiences packed a playhouse to see an unauthorized adaptation of the novel for the stage.

*   *   *

To check in with his bestselling client, Maurice Crain took the thirty-minute ferry ride to Fire Island. It was obvious to him from a glance that Lee wasn't going to get much done on her new book. Joy Brown was nine months pregnant, and the couple's two little boys were at the age when they raced between the cottage and the beach all day. Not long after Crain departed for the mainland, Joy ignored her doctor's advice to go home to Manhattan because she was due. One night, after the last ferry from the island had left, “Mike had to get a patrol boat and hire an ambulance to rush her to the hospital,” Williams wrote Alice Lee. “She got there just in time as the baby was born only fifteen minutes after she got there.”
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In circumstances suitable for a romantic comedy, Nelle pitched in, putting her work aside, and helping the Browns get a handle on the pandemonium.

She stayed on all through September, being a good sport, while Crain and Williams went up to the Old Stone House without her. Perhaps in a bid to induce Nelle to return to Connecticut, where she could enjoy peace and quiet, Williams wrote Alice, “We talk to Harper Lee on the phone almost every day, but we go to Connecticut on the weekends, so do not get to see her. I have not been out to Fire Island yet, and feel sure that I won't get around to making the trip this season.… Wish we were greeting the Lee sisters. I can realize [
sic
] it has been a year since you all were here.”
36

Nelle stopped off only briefly in the city before taking the train to Monroeville for the holidays. But then, the third week of January 1965, she was involved in a terrible kitchen accident. She “burned herself very badly, especially her right hand. It seems some sort of pan caught fire and exploded,” Capote wrote to Perry Smith. Friends called and sent cards from New York and Kansas as word spread that the accident was serious and Nelle was in the hospital.

With her hand wrapped in white gauze from her fingers to her forearm, she was limited to reading and answering correspondence with Alice's help. It would be months before doctors would know whether she needed plastic surgery. Perhaps because she was out of action at the typewriter, Nelle accepted an invitation of the sort that she would normally have refused on the grounds that she was “in no way a lecturer or philosopher.”

Colonel Jack Capp, course director of English 102 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, had added
To Kill a Mockingbird
to the freshman syllabus. With the concurrence of the department head, he ventured to invite Lee to address the freshman class of cadets. There was a precedent: three years earlier, William Faulkner had accepted a token honorarium of $100 for speaking. “She was interested,” recalled Colonel Capp, “but deferred acceptance until we could meet her in New York to discuss details. Midmorning on the appointed day, Mike Cousland, a well-featured, mannerly bachelor major and I went to Harper's pied-à-terre in Manhanttan, a small apartment on the upper East Side.” It was only 10:30, but Lee insisted on pouring mixed drinks. After a nice get-to-know-you chat, a date was suggested and Nelle agreed. Then she insisted they go to Sardi's for lunch. More drinks followed, after which “Mike and I floated happily back up the Hudson” behind the driver of an Army sedan to West Point.
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In March, the thirty-nine-year-old writer arrived on the campus, located fifty miles north of New York City on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River. The talk was scheduled for the auditorium, and until Nelle took her seat on the stage, the seven hundred young men in gray uniforms remained standing. “After the introduction formalities, she began lighting a cigarette,” said Capps, “but, turning to Major Cousland and referring to the cadet on her left, asked, ‘Can he smoke?' ‘No,' said Mike, ‘he can't.' ‘Then I can't either,' she replied and stubbed out her cigarette in the nearest ashtray. Once the cadets were seated, they studied their speaker. She was “conservatively garbed in a simple dark dress,” according to Gus Lee, who later wrote
Honor and Duty
about his experiences at West Point, “her hair wrapped in a conservative bun atop her head. Her voice was softly Southern, with high musical notes, and crystal clear in a hall that was utterly silent.”
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