Mockingbird (38 page)

Hohoff was on her own since the death of her husband, Arthur, several years earlier. On the evening of January 4, 1974, her son-in-law, Dr. Grady Nunn, daughter Torrey, and granddaughter, also named Tay, went to her apartment in New York to urge her to move in with them in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “It was hardly an ideal solution,” Dr. Nunn remembered. “Tay loved Manhattan, and the Deep South was a far cry from what she was accustomed to. But it would have worked. She had the heartfelt assurances of our affection and welcoming embrace. And she knew from visits with us in Tuscaloosa over the years that we attracted and were attracted to the kind of people with whom she was comfortable. Tay accepted our invitation, and it was settled.”

The next morning, the Nunn family came to talk more about the arrangements, but Hohoff had passed away. “There was no response when we knocked on Tay's door. In the next few days we were gratefully kept busy doing all the things that had to be done and calling all the people who had to be notified. It fell to me to call Nelle Lee with the news.”

And so she was deprived of the editor whom she trusted and who, many believe, had urged her on in the heavy revisions of the manuscript that became
To Kill a Mockingbird.
85

About the same time, a strange thing happened. Peter Griffiths, a film producer visiting Monroeville for the BBC, asked Alice Lee what ever happened to the second novel her sister was supposed to have been working on. According to Alice, just as Nelle was finishing the novel, a burglar broke into her apartment in New York and stole the manuscript.
86

It's hard to believe that someone would make off with a ream of paper; besides, they were looking in the wrong place, as it turned out.

 

twelve

The Golden Goose

“Not just no, but
hell
no.”

—H
ARPER
L
EE

Glimpses of Harper Lee during most of the 1970s and '80s were as infrequent as sightings of rare southern birds in New York's Central Park. In 1967 she moved to a new apartment, still on the Upper East Side, only her third address since arriving in the city almost twenty years earlier. All of the apartments where she had lived were within a fifteen-minute walk of one another, and none was particularly luxurious. She wasn't living like a rich person; that wasn't her style. The new place—a four-story brick building—would have looked quite ordinary to most passersby. “I couldn't pick it out from a hundred others,” said a visiting friend.
1
It seemed the perfect camouflage for someone who wanted to go unnoticed. Lining her side of the street were a dozen stunted trees, which served more as identifiers of where residents should put their garbage cans once a week than as adornments for the neighborhood. The usual commercial properties interrupted the eye's sweep of the block where there was a dry cleaner's, a travel agency, and a restaurant that served wild game. The only hint of community was a storefront church.

Inside Lee's apartment, 1E, the décor was unexceptional, too. There were no indications that she was the author of a book that had sold nearly ten million copies by the late 1970s. A visitor trying to describe it years later could recall no particulars.

Slowly, Harper Lee's world was becoming more circumscribed. Although she continued her migratory pattern of returning to Monroeville every October and staying until spring, she stayed close to familiar haunts while in New York. “I honestly,
truly
have not the slightest idea
why
she lives in New York,” said Capote in an interview. “I don't think she ever goes
out.
”
2
When a friend visiting from Alabama suggested that they meet downtown for dinner, Nelle objected, “My God, I wouldn't go into downtown Manhattan for the world!”
3
Any new venture seemed to make her hesitate. Several times over the years she phoned Louise Sims, an acquaintance from her earliest days in New York, to set up a lunch date. But if Louise said, “I'll have to call you back,” Nelle would reply “Okay, I'll get back to you,” and hang up without giving a phone number where she could be reached. Horton Foote marveled that for years Nelle lived within blocks of mutual friends of theirs without ever contacting them.
4

Instead, she preferred friends from long ago. She corresponded regularly with Ralph Hammond, a writer from her days on the
Rammer Jammer
at the University of Alabama. (“I've got a whole drawerful of letters from Nelle,” he liked to boast, “she's my best friend in all of Alabama.”)
5
And Joy Brown could always be relied on for shopping trips and jaunts to secondhand bookstores. But Nelle's oldest friend, Truman, whose ties spanned both Monroeville and New York, seemed to be undergoing a slow-motion breakdown she was unable to stop. Fears and regrets assailed him. When
People
magazine requested an interview in 1976, he brought Nelle along for comfort. As he was describing his unhappy childhood, she interjected that a kindergarten teacher in Monroeville had smacked his palm with a ruler because he knew how to read.

“It's true!” Capote wailed.

Glancing protectively at him, Nelle explained, “It was traumatic.”
6

Truman's deterioration became newsworthy in July 1978 when he appeared as a guest on
The Stanley Siegel Show
TV program in New York.
7
During the first few minutes of the program, he seemed all right, but gradually his speech became slurred and hesitant. Clearly, there were problems.

“What's going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?” Siegel asked.

Seconds of dead air followed while Truman tried to rally himself. Finally, he replied in a croaky voice, “The obvious answer is that eventually I'll kill myself.”

Thoughts of suicide preoccupied him because of an emotionally disastrous situation he'd gotten himself into. Between 1975 and 1976,
Esquire
magazine ran installments of
Answered Prayers,
the title taken from a remark by St. Teresa of Avila that answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered. Truman claimed he had been working on the book for years, but at other times said he'd tossed it off as a lark. It was a public shellacking of many of his friends from the glittering social world—Jackie Kennedy, Babe Paley, and Johnny Carson—who had once embraced him.

Revenge was swift. Knowing how much Truman cherished his role as raconteur to the rich and famous, they simply turned their backs on him. He was no longer included in their lives. Perversely, he proved that no one really liked him by making himself persona non grata.

He hung on for eight more years, washing up now and then like driftwood in hospital emergency rooms, until he died in 1984 in the home of Joanna Carson, Johnny Carson's ex-wife. His last words were for his mother.
8

Lee, along with Al and Marie Dewey, attended Capote's memorial service in Los Angeles, where the first chapter of
In Cold Blood
was read aloud as a tribute. Afterward, they went to the home of one of Truman's friends from happier times, the novelist Donald Windham. When Windham asked Nelle during dinner when the last time she'd spoken to Truman was, she had to say she hadn't heard from him in a very long while.

“In my opinion,” said Dolores Hope, her Kansas friend, “the strain in her friendship with Capote came with his continuing debauchery—alcohol and drugs—and with his sordid treatment of longtime friends, associates and celebrities in his book, never completed,
Answered Prayers.
”
9

Truman's death ended a long chapter in Nelle's life. But it also spun her thoughts back twenty-five years to those Kansas days when she'd been the most creative. In 1960, she had been his “assistant researchist,” contributing to one of the most sensational and highly regarded books in American literature, while simultaneously her first novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, was just months away from publication. That brief period had been the apogee of her writing life thus far.

*   *   *

And so in the mid-1980s, retracing her steps over familiar ground, Nelle embarked on a book project that resembled
In Cold Blood.
It would be a nonfiction novel based on a serial murder case in Alabama she'd read about involving a man accused of killing relatives for their insurance money. And this time, unlike
In Cold Blood
, the book and the credit would belong wholly to her. The working title she chose was
The Reverend.
10

The story revolves around W. M. “Willie Jo” Maxwell, a veteran of World War II, born and raised in east Alabama. During the mid-1970s, in addition to working in the wood pulp business, he did some preaching on the side in black churches in Alexander City and became known as the Reverend Maxwell. One night, Tom Radney, Sr., an attorney and former state senator, received a call from Maxwell. “You've got to come out here to my home,” Maxwell pleaded, “the police are saying I killed my wife.” Mrs. Maxwell had been found tied to a tree about a mile outside of town and murdered.

Radney agreed to take the case. Fortunately for the reverend, the woman next door provided him with an alibi, and he was found not guilty. From a portion of his late wife's insurance policy Maxwell paid Radney's fees. Later, he married the woman next door.

“A year or so passed,” said Radney, “and then the new wife showed up dead.”

Again, Maxwell asked Radney to defend him. During the trial, the jury was persuaded that there was no evidence linking Maxwell to the murder. He was acquitted and paid Radney from his second wife's insurance policy.

The third time Maxwell was charged with murder was in connection with his brother, who was found dead by the side of a road. The district attorney argued that Maxwell, either by himself or with someone's help, had poured liquor down his brother's throat until he died of alcohol poisoning. But the jury wasn't convinced and returned another verdict of not guilty. Maxwell was his brother's beneficiary and had another lump sum due him. The Alexander City Police Department began referring to Radney's law offices as the “Maxwell Building.”

The fourth death involved Maxwell's nephew, discovered dead behind the wheel of his car. Apparently, he had run into a tree. The following day, Radney, retained again as Maxwell's attorney, inspected the crash site. “Not even the largest trees were more than two inches around,” he said. “It was obvious that hitting those little trees didn't kill the reverend's nephew. However, the state could not prove the cause of death. I remember having a pathologist on the witness stand. I asked him, ‘C'mon, what did he die of?' And the reply was, ‘Judge, I hate to tell you, but we don't know what he died of.'” Maxwell left the courtroom a free man and settled with Radney with proceeds from his nephew's insurance policy.

The fifth death touching the reverend was reported on the front page of the
Alexander City Outlook
on June 15, 1977. According to police, Shirley Ellington, Maxwell's teenage niece, had been changing a flat tire when her car fell off the jack and killed her. After reading the news story, Radney decided, “I've had enough.” When Maxwell showed up at his offices, his erstwhile attorney turned him down.

“Mr. Radney, you're not being fair to me,” Maxwell protested. “I have done nothing wrong. You've got to defend me.”

Radney later recalled the next few minutes clearly. “I said, ‘Reverend, enough's enough. Maybe you're innocent, you never told me anything differently, and I'll never say a word against you, but I will not defend you anymore.' In the meantime, the area behind my office building was filled with cameras and reporters from Birmingham, Montgomery, and Columbus, Georgia. A newswoman was standing behind his car, and the last thing I heard the reverend say as he got into his big Chrysler was, ‘Ma'am, if you don't move, I'm going to run over you.'”

The police waited to arrest Maxwell, hoping he might do or say something during his niece's funeral service that would incriminate him. Instead, a scene both awful and comic took place. Nelle decided it would make the perfect beginning to
The Reverend
.

A week after Shirley Ellington's death, three hundred people gathered for her memorial service in the chapel of the House of Hutcheson funeral home. One of the teenager's uncles, Robert Burns from Chicago, took a seat in the pew behind Maxwell. As the organist was playing and the choir singing in the loft, Burns took out a .45 from his suit jacket and shot Maxwell point blank in the back. For a moment, Maxwell dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief while blood spilled from his mouth. Then he fell to the floor, dead. Suddenly, all the mourners made for the doors, but finding police blocking the exits, they pushed back inside.

“Two or three ladies, little heavy ones,” said Radney, “tried to get out the windows and got stuck. The preacher didn't stop preaching, he just got under the pulpit. The organist got under the organ and kept playing, and the choir in the choir loft kept singing—nothing stopped. The next day, police found more than a dozen guns and twice as many knives scattered under the pews.”

That's where Nelle would end her first chapter.
11

Radney defended Burns, after first checking with the Alabama Bar Association to determine that it wouldn't be a conflict of interest. Since Maxwell was dead, there was none. The jury was out twenty minutes and came back with a verdict of not guilty. The judge sent Burns on his way. As court adjourned, the district attorney mused aloud that he must be the only prosecutor in the United States to have lost a first-degree murder case when there were three hundred witnesses.