I Am Scout (21 page)

After reviewing Peck's memo, Mulligan and Pakula made another pass at editing the film, but the star still wasn't satisfied. In a second memo to Tucker, on July
6
, Peck wrote, “I believe we have a good character in Atticus, with some humor and warmth in the early stages, and some good emotion and conflict in the trial and later on.… In my opinion, the picture will begin to look better as Atticus' story line emerges, and the children's scenes are cut down to proportion.”
34
More footage fell to the cutting room floor, including whole scenes of the children. Pakula said later, “It just tore my heart out to lose the sequence [where Jem reads aloud to Mrs. Dubose, who is dying].”
35

In the end, Peck positioned himself firmly and prominently at the center of the film. Only about
15
percent of the novel is devoted to Tom Robinson's rape trial, whereas in the film, the running time is more than
30
percent of a two-hour film.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Nelle continued to work on her follow-up to
To Kill a Mockingbird,
because the pressure was on for a repeat performance. In August, Truman wrote to the Deweys, “As for Nelle—what a rascal! Actually, I know she is trying very hard to get a new book going. But she loves you dearly, so I'm sure you will be the first to hear from her when she
does
reappear.”
36

Truman hinted that he knew how Nelle was coming on her new book, but apparently she didn't confide in him about it. “I can't tell you much about Nelle's new book,” he wrote to a friend. “It's a novel, and quite short. But she is
so
secretive.”
37
In any case, she couldn't have been devoting much time to it, because publicity demands having to do with the upcoming release of the film were keeping her busy.

On Christmas Day
1962
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
premiered in Hollywood. At a buffet supper afterward, film celebrities who had attended the screening—Rock Hudson, Gregory Peck, Natalie Wood, and Paul Newman, among others—offered Nelle their congratulations. “It's a fantastically good motion picture,” she said happily to the press, “and it remained faithful to the spirit of the book. It is unpretentious. Nothing phony about it.”
38

First Lady Jackie Kennedy arranged for a private showing in Washington, D.C., in early January for one of her charities. Alan Pakula proudly showed it to several senators and Supreme Court judges, but he ended up with the wrong print, “a study in grays—no black and white resonance. It was one of the worst nights of my life.”
39

On Valentine's Day
1963
, the film opened in New York City. Nelle soldiered on through another public appearance, having given her word that she would. Audiences lined up around the block. Reviewers by and large praised the film as entertainment, though some of the more perceptive identified problems created by the differences between the novel and the script.

“The trial weighed upon the novel, and in the film, where it is heavier, it is unsupportable. The narrator's voice returns at the end, full of warmth and love … but we do not pay her the same kind of attention any more. We have seen that outrageous trial, and we can no longer share the warmth of her love,” wrote
Newsweek
.
40
Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
pointed out, “It is, in short, on the level of adult awareness of right and wrong, of good and evil, that most of the action in the picture occurs. And this detracts from the camera's observation of the point of view of the child.… [I]t leaves the viewer wondering precisely how the children feel. How have they really reacted to the things that affect our grown-up minds?”
41

Brendan Gill, writing for
The New Yorker
, disliked that the film's resolution, Bob Ewell's death, was no more defensible than it was in the novel: “In the last few minutes of the picture, whatever intellectual and moral content it may be said to have contained is crudely tossed away in order to provide a ‘happy' ending.… The moral of this can only be that while ignorant rednecks mustn't take the law into their own hands, it's all right for
nice
people to do so.”
42

Nelle was unfazed. “For me, Maycomb is there, its people are there: in two short hours one lives a childhood and lives it with Atticus Finch, whose view of life was the heart of the novel.”
43

*   *   *

The Alabama premiere took place on March
15
, with many shows sold out in advance. Two weeks later, the film arrived in Monroeville, and Nelle was there to witness the reaction. A full-page ad in the
Monroe Journal,
paid for by local businesses, trumpeted, “We Are Proud of Harper Lee … and Her Masterpiece! We Would Like to Share with Her These Moments of Artistic Triumph!” Reserved-seat tickets were on sale by March
17
at the theater box office or by mail order: $
1
.
00
for adults and $
0
.
50
for children. The first five customers who brought in a live mockingbird would receive $
10
apiece.

Dorothy and Taylor Faircloth drove over from Atmore on a clear and cool night to see the movie. “You were really fortunate to get tickets. It was a fantastic event for a small town like Monroeville.”
44
Also in the audience was Joseph Blass, who, as a teenager, had caddied for Nelle's father. “Mr. Lee did not look much like Peck in the movie, although Peck, who had spent time with Mr. Lee, copied some of his mannerisms in a way that was almost eerie to those of us who knew him.”
45

When the final credit ended, there was no applause. Few people said anything until they reached the lobby. “At that time in the South, everybody seemed to be divided. You were either a liberal or a racist. And when the movie ended, the discussion afterwards went along those lines.”
46
The film was held over a week. Nelle posed for a photo under the marquee with some Monroeville dignitaries, squinting in the springtime daylight, but obviously beaming.

The movie was the object of enjoyment and praise, but judging from its premiere in Birmingham, Alabama, at least, it didn't seem to prick people's consciences. When it opened on April
3
at the Melba Theater, “huge crowds jammed the street … to catch a glimpse of the movie's two child stars: Birmingham natives Mary Badham and Phillip Alford,” writes Jonathan S. Bass in
Blessed Are the Peacemakers.
At the same time the Melba Theater was filled with appreciative audiences, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had organized thousands of black children for a civil rights march in the city. Police carried them off to jail in buses. When there was no more room, Police Chief “Bull” Connor ordered that police dogs and fire hoses be turned on the demonstrators. The torrent of water sent small children skidding down the street.
47

*   *   *

By spring of
1963
, the film version of
To Kill a Mockingbird
had been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Mary Badham), Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Music Score—Substantially Original.

On awards night, April
8
, Nelle went to a friend's house in Monroeville to watch the presentations. She didn't own a television because “it interferes with my work.” Horton Foote won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and the team of Art Directors/Set Decorators for
To Kill a Mockingbird
also received the top honor. Some days before the ceremony, Nelle had sent Gregory Peck her father's pocket watch, engraved, “To Gregory from Harper.” Now, as he sat in Hollywood waiting for the envelope to be opened and the announcement made of who had been voted Best Actor, Peck clutched the watch. When Sophia Loren read his name as the winner, he strode onto the stage with the watch still in his hand. One of the first people he thanked was Harper Lee.

She cried “tears of joy.”
48

A few days later, Truman returned to Monroeville from Switzerland to visit his aunt Mary Ida Carter. About
40
people attended a little party at the Carter home for both Truman and Nelle. But most of the attention, Truman couldn't help but notice, went to Nelle.
49

Chapter 9

The Second Novel

After the end of the publicity for
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Nelle was free now to work practically as much as she liked on her next novel. Splitting her time between New York and Monroeville, she bent to the task of trying to write regularly. Requests for personal appearances and speeches were still pouring in, but she decided since “I'm in no way a lecturer or philosopher, my usefulness there is limited.” At a dinner given in her honor at the University of Alabama, she warned her hosts to expect a “two-word speech,” and that if she felt talkative, she might add “very much.”
1

Even in Monroeville, however, demands on her time were hard to escape. “I've found I can't write on my home grounds. I have about
300
personal friends who keep dropping in for a cup of coffee. I've tried getting up at
6
, but then all the
6
o'clock risers congregate.”
2
To get away by herself, she went to the golf course, forgiving her neighbors for their trespasses on her privacy. “Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for a cup of coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.”
3
She liked to spend the hours on the golf course thinking about her novel. “Playing golf is the best way I know to be alone and still be doing something. You hit a ball, think, take a walk. I do my best thinking walking. I do my dialog, talking it out to myself.”
4

She had to know at least two chapters ahead what characters were going to do and say before she could make any progress. Even so, she was a slow writer. Her method was to “finish a page or two, put them aside, look at them with a fresh eye, work on them some more, then rewrite them all over again.”
5

As
1963
neared an end, Alice did a rough estimate of her sister's income and taxes. Nelle “nearly flipped,” Alice wrote Annie Laurie about the tax implications, “and she worried terribly for a short while, then she took off to the golf course and had a good time.”
6

*   *   *

In the spring, Nelle returned to New York. She was eager to continue her stays with Annie Laurie and Maurice at the Old Stone House in Connecticut, where she could be with friends but also left alone when she needed to work. “I have a place where I don't know anybody and nobody knows me. I'm not going to tell, because somebody would know.”
7
Although writing “has its own rhythm,” she said, it was “the loneliest work there is.”
8

She also had to be back in New York because Truman needed her help with the final phases of
In Cold Blood
. For more than four years, he had been laboring on the manuscript. His childish handwriting filled more than a dozen school notebooks, every paragraph double-spaced and written in pencil. The work continued while he made return trips to Garden City, sometimes accompanied by Nelle, and to the Kansas State Penitentiary to interview Perry Smith and Richard Hickock on death row.

Nelle at the Old Stone House in Connecticut, where she often went to work on her second novel. That book never appeared. (Papers of Annie Laurie Williams, Columbia University)

Most of the book was finished by
1964
, but appeals by the killers' attorneys forced the case upward through the legal system, even to the U.S. Supreme Court. Truman wrote to his publisher, Bennett Cerf at Random House, “please bear in mind that I
cannot
really finish the book until the case has reached its legal termination, either with the execution of Perry and Dick (the probable ending) or a commutation of sentence (highly
un
likely).… Nevertheless, it is the most difficult writing I've ever done (my God!) and an excruciating thing to live with day in and day out on and on—but it
will
be worth it: I
know
.”
9

Of the two possible outcomes, Truman knew that the most satisfactory dramatic ending would be execution by hanging. KBI detective Harold Nye, who had pursued the killers 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.”
10