Harper Lee article

November 12, 1997

The News & Observer

Mockingbird won't sing

By KATHY KEMP; SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Page: E1

MONROEVILLE, Ala. -- She was not expecting company. Barefoot, white hair uncombed, the 71-year-old woman answered the doorbell wearing a long white pajama top and a scowl.

"What is it?" Harper Lee wanted to know.

Staring at her through the storm door were a reporter and a photographer, for whom Lee has a famous dislike. We'd been warned, repeatedly, by folks all over town: "Don't even think of trying to do an interview."

Instead, we thrust forth a copy of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and asked for her autograph.

"Good gosh," Lee exclaimed, a look of disgust on her face. "It's a little late for this sort of thing, isn't it?"

It wasn't yet 6 p.m. on a balmy Tuesday. Folks on Lee's street in this small southeastern Alabama town were just coming home from work. We apologized.

"Just a minute then," she snapped before disappearing into the house. Seconds later, she was back with her fine-point pen and an even more pointed lecture. "I hope you're more polite to other people," she said as she opened the book to the title page.

"Best wishes, Harper Lee," she wrote in a neat, modest script.

She handed back the volume. "Next time try to be more thoughtful."

"Thank you," we said, frankly terrified. And for the first time since opening the door, Harper Lee smiled. In a voice full of warmth and good cheer, she replied, "You're quite welcome."

### 37 years of silence: Some people, if they think of Harper Lee at all, assume she is dead, which isn't so much an insult as a natural response to 37 years of silence. It has been that long since Lippencott published her novel, "To Kill A Mockingbird," the story of a 1930s small-town Alabama lawyer who defends a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. A year after it was published in 1960, "To Kill A Mockingbird" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Two years later, during the worldwide Academy Awards telecast from Hollywood, the movie garnered Gregory Peck a best-actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the lawyer of Lee's story.

Onstage to accept his award, Peck clutched a gift from Lee - the pocket watch carried by her deceased father, Monroeville lawyer A.C. Lee, the model for one of literature's greatest heroes.

Even in those heady days of early celebrity, Lee never gave an in-depth interview. For the rare reporter able to get her to offer up anything more than a stony look, she revealed, essentially, three things: her fondness for golf, her admiration for her father ("He is one of the few men I've known who has genuine humility") and her plan to publish more novels.

That she never published another book, and declined to explain why, has helped establish Lee as a near mythical literary figure, alongside the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger, author of "Catcher in the Rye," and Thomas Pynchon, who is said to be so private that few people know even what he looks like.

Periodically, and especially since 1995, when HarperCollins published the 35th anniversary edition of "To Kill a Mockingbird," journalists travel to Harper Lee's hometown and leave with little solid information. Many resort to speculation.

Lee was sufficiently annoyed by a recent Paul Harvey radio broadcast to allow her sister, 86-year-old Alice Lee, a Monroeville lawyer, to grant a rare interview to The Monroeville Journal, the weekly newspaper their father once published.

Harvey - quoting from Gerald Clarke's biography of Truman Capote, who as a boy had lived next door to the Lee family - reported that Harper Lee's mother twice tried to drown the young Harper.

"I can't say that the story was a lie in enough ways to get the point across," Alice Lee told the newspaper.

When we telephoned Alice Lee to ask if she would talk more about her life and that of her youngest sister, she was polite, but unapologetic. "That's a no-no," the elder Lee said. "It has been a no-no in my family for 37 years."

### Nuggets from a life: Nelle Harper Lee is not a recluse. Elusive maybe, when it comes to fans and reporters, but among friends and family and hometown acquaintances, Nelle - which is what they all call her - is a familiar and jovial presence. has in the bank.' That sounds just like her."

Considering that "To Kill A Mockingbird" has sold about 15 million copies (it still averages several thousand sales a year) and has never been out of print, it's a safe assumption that Nelle Harper Lee has a healthy bank account.

She divides her time between a New York apartment and Monroeville, where she lives with "Miss Alice," as her sister is known, in a modest brick house near the junior high school. Afraid to fly, Lee travels by train to and from New York.

At David's Catfish Cabin, where she's a regular, the world-famous writer always orders sweet tea and a child's plate of catfish filet, for which she pays $6. "They're both a little hard of hearing, but nice," said waitress Janet Flowers. "Miss Alice's hearing aid is always turned wide open. You hear it go 'weeee,' and then Miss Nelle tells her to turn it down. They always fight over the ticket. Miss Nelle pays one week and Miss Alice the next."

Lee's cousin, Richard Williams, 61, runs Williams Drugs in downtown Monroeville, across the street from the old courthouse that served as a model for the one in the movie. Williams is used to strangers stopping by to inquire about the town and Harper Lee.

He's protective but an enthusiastic public-relations man nevertheless. "Nelle is a real individual-type person, real pleasant to talk to," Williams said. "I asked her one time why she never wrote another book. She told me, 'When you have a hit like that, you can't go anywhere but down.' " ### Travels with Truman: Truman Capote took Lee with him to Kansas in the early '60s to help him research "In Cold Blood," which chronicles the shotgun murders in 1959 of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan. I t was Capote's down-to-earth companion in dungarees and tennis shoes - to whom "In Cold Blood" was dedicated - who was able to break the ice with the reticent Kansans, who had never before met anyone like the theatrical, gossip-loving Capote.

One of the legends that has grown up around the two friends is that Capote, who had published fiction since his late teens, actually wrote "Mockingbird," using drafts provided by Lee.

"I think Harper Lee had more to do with 'In Cold Blood' than Truman had to do with 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' " scoffed Claudia Durst Johnson, a retired University of Alabama English professor and an expert on Lee's book.

Capote himself, who died in the mid 1980s, denied any involvement in the writing of "Mockingbird." He did happily take credit for inspiring the character of Dill, the boy who lived next door to the Finch children, Jem and his tomboy sister Scout, through whose eyes Lee's story is told.

In the early '90s, Johnson persuaded Lee, through mutual friends, to sit down for a talk about her book and writing in general. Johnson gathered that Lee had abandoned the Maxwell murder book project and was working on her memoirs. Lee discussed her literary heroes - Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Eudora Welty.

Today, you can walk the streets of Monroeville and find vestiges of "To Kill A Mockingbird."The original 1903 Monroe County Courthouse, with its noble clock tower, remains the centerpiece, even though the low-slung building next door has long replaced it as the site for courtroom dramas and other county business.

### Even today, an enigma: In 1995, when HarperCollins released the anniversary edition of "Mockingbird," the publisher asked the author to pen an introduction. Lee wrote what was more like an anti-introduction: "The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. 'Mockingbird' stills says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble."

And so, it seems, has Nelle Harper Lee. In that same nonintroduction, she offered a tiny personal note, which is more eloquent than any sentence about her by another writer.

"I am still alive," she wrote, "although very quiet.

Section: Day Edition: Final Estimated Printed Pages: 5

Index Terms: Nelle Harper Lee LEAD

Article Type: LEAD

Caption: photo; file; 2 c photos

The courthouse in Monroeville is a museum devoted to Harper Lee

and her friend, Truman Capote. Harper Lee, 71; at right, Gregory

Peck and Mary Badham in the movie.

Scripps Howard Photos

Record Number: 1997315076