Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  This created something of a crisis. However good his “techniques of reportage” might have been, Capote had shown up in Kansas without any proof that he was a journalist, and law enforcement officers weren’t inclined to take him at his word. The case they were working was sensitive, and they wanted to protect both the integrity of the investigation and the privacy of the two surviving Clutter daughters, who were in their early twenties and already living away from home when the rest of the family was murdered. Capote made some calls and got someone at Random House—almost certainly the editor in chief, Bennett Cerf—to try to intercede on his behalf with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A call to the bureau was duly placed, but unfortunately for Capote the FBI checked its files, consulted Who’s Who in America, and decided he wasn’t sufficiently “legitimate” for them to intervene with the local field office.

  Capote didn’t have any better luck pleading his case directly with Dewey, so he and Lee did what they could without access, gathering clippings from local newspapers, collecting tourist brochures from around town, and eavesdropping on locals in cafés and at the post office. Lee set about learning what she could about the setting of Capote’s story, from its agricultural history to its social and religious traditions to its most famous quack—one John Romulus Brinkley, who performed surgical goat-gland transplants on men as a kind of early-twentieth-century Viagra and whose wife had blasted Bertrand Russell for promoting free love while she and her husband were trying to sell it.

  But background was one thing; the tragedy itself was another. When Lee and Capote tried approaching a few promising sources, including neighbors of the Clutters and relatives of the two teenage girls who had discovered the bodies, they were rebuffed or ignored. Under the best of circumstances, the shibboleths of a tiny town like Holcomb are hard to master, and during a time of such immense fear and grief residents were going out of their way to shield themselves from outsiders. But to the apprehensive locals, Lee was everything Capote was not: warm, empathetic, and familiar enough that they felt their stories were safe with her. “Absolutely fantastic lady. I really liked her very much,” Harold Nye, one of the KBI agents who worked on the Clutter case, said of Lee, but of Capote he confessed, “I did not get a very good impression of that little son of a bitch.”

  That impression was surely affected by the fact that when Nye and three other agents arrived at the Warren Hotel to introduce themselves, Capote was wearing a pink negligee. But neither the lingerie nor the lesbian bar in Kansas City where the author later took Nye and his wife could dull the shine the couple took to Lee. Crucially, Agent Dewey, the lead investigator on the case, came to feel the same way. “If Capote came on as something of a shocker, she was there to absorb the shock,” Dewey said. “She had a down-home style, a friendly smile, and a knack for saying the right things.” Dolores Hope, a local newspaper writer and the wife of Clifford Hope, the Clutter family’s lawyer, explained, “Nelle sort of managed Truman, acting as his guardian or mother. She broke the ice for him.”

  * * *

  —

  Charmed by the sensible southern lady and curious about her unusual friend, the town that had resisted sharing its shock and grief with strangers now began welcoming the two out-of-towners into its living rooms. And other rooms, too: Lee and Capote were soon permitted to tour the Clutter family home, even though it was still an active crime scene. They followed the stairs up to the children’s bedrooms, where mother and daughter had been found, and back down to the basement to where father and son had been killed. All of the blood had been washed away by four of Herb Clutter’s friends who had come the day after the murders with mops, scrub brushes, rags, and pails, but there were still the shadows of stains where the bodies had been, and the house felt like a crypt.

  Capote and Lee drove the fifteen minutes back to town and retired to the Warren Hotel to work. He made three pages of notes that evening; she made nine, including details on every one of the Clutter house’s fourteen rooms. Lee recorded the height of the kitchen cabinets and the titles of the books, the color of the walls and the patterns of the linoleum, the gauges of the shotguns in the closet, the autographs on framed pictures, the presence of a Ping-Pong table but the absence of Ping-Pong balls. She drew floor plans of the first story, the second story, and the basement, along with maps of the property and the landscaping.

  Inevitably, Lee began drawing conclusions about the family that had lived there, too. In many ways, the Clutters were like the Lees, and she could intuit things about them that Capote could not. She had lived the liturgical cycles of their years in the Methodist Church, and like the Clutter children she had made record books for her 4-H Club. More strikingly, she had grown up in a family not unlike theirs: a self-made father whose sterling reputation crossed county lines, a troubled mother whose mental health alternately made her seek treatment in faraway cities and kept her mysteriously homebound, and children of disparate ages—two of them old enough to be out of the home, the third an anxious striver whose diary showed her struggling to please her father and appease her mother, and the fourth a loner who kept books by his bed.

  For Capote, they were a story; for Lee, they were a family. She was already building a psychological portrait of the victims, and her ability to think of them as people brought her closer with those in town who had known them. During the third week of December, the Hopes called the Warren Hotel to invite Lee and her friend to Christmas dinner, worried that they would have nowhere else to go. For their part, the writers had been worried that they wouldn’t be able to get anything done that week, but if the courts and everything else were closed for the holiday, the people were finally open.

  After the Hopes welcomed the odd couple from Alabama, everybody else in town wanted to meet them, too, including the Deweys. Capote and Lee had nicknamed Agent Dewey “Foxy” because of how closely he guarded information about the investigation (and possibly also because he was attractive, a characteristic Nelle recorded, complete with schoolgirlish hearts, in a letter to her agents). But his wife, Marie, a native of New Orleans, was prepared to extend her southern hospitality even to big-city journalists and invited the writers to dinner. While they were getting to know the family, including the Deweys’ two young sons and a giant tiger-striped cat called Courthouse Pete, Mrs. Dewey plied them with avocado salad, country-fried steak, shrimp, sauterne, and a Cajun dish with rice and navy beans and bacon. As it turned out, though, none of that was the main dish. While Capote and Lee were over that night, a telephone call came for Agent Dewey: the men who murdered the Clutters had been arrested in Las Vegas, a thousand miles away.

  That news was a relief to the residents of Finney County, who could finally turn off their lights when they went to bed and pull the ten-penny nails out of their window frames, but it complicated matters for Capote. Originally, he hadn’t planned to see the investigation through to its end; on his first day in town, he’d callously commented that he didn’t even care if the murders were ever solved. He and Lee had already interviewed dozens of people, and he had reams of notes ready to take back with him to New York—more than enough raw material for the story he had pitched. Now that the suspects had been arrested, though, Capote knew he would need to tell their story, too, and that meant he and Lee would need to stay in Kansas a while longer.

  In early January, the two writers were waiting outside the Finney County Courthouse, her feet numb and his ears red from the blistering cold, as Perry Smith and Dick Hickock emerged in handcuffs from police cars. They watched the next morning, too, as the two men were arraigned on first-degree murder charges, Hickock sounding like a cowboy as he waived his preliminary hearing, Smith sounding more like a cleric. On the next Monday, Capote paid fifty dollars each for an interview with the killers, and Lee came along. Perry Smith, the son of a Cherokee mother and Irish father, wouldn’t sit until Lee was seated, and then he wouldn’t say much at all, beyond allowing that he would think about tal
king with them for their story. By contrast, Dick Hickock, a blond, tattooed mechanic born and raised in eastern Kansas, began cooperating right away; he addressed Lee as “ma’am,” answered every question the pair had, and would have kept talking all day if Agent Dewey hadn’t returned him to his cell.

  One week later, both men came back to Dewey’s office for another interview, and another fifty dollars. This time, Smith was more forthcoming, and Hickock was even more garrulous than before: both talked about why they had targeted the Clutters (a false rumor that Herb Clutter kept a safe full of cash on the property) and where they had traveled while on the lam (a complicated itinerary that crossed several state lines and the Mexican border). Lee could already tell that Capote was overly drawn to Perry Smith, partly because of a certain physical resemblance but mostly because of their common emotional experiences. Both men were the size and shape of a crab apple, and both had fallen from the same sort of tree: their fathers were absent, their mothers alcoholic. It was obvious to Lee that the balance of Capote’s authorial intent was already shifting from elegy to apologia; there wouldn’t be much complexity allotted to the victims, because he would need all of it for his new protagonists, the men who killed them.

  Capote knew plenty of the why of those murders from the interviews with the accused, and Lee had cadged him excerpts of the interrogation transcripts from Agent Dewey, which added the when and where and how. All told, Capote figured he had enough material to start writing what he was now calling a “nonfiction novel”—an attempt to use the techniques of fiction to tell a true story—and together with Lee he left Kansas the next day. They splurged on the luxury train, spent a night in Chicago, and got back to New York on January 18, 1960. At Grand Central, they parted ways, Nelle heading uptown and Capote going back to Brooklyn. By the end of the week, he had already talked the editors of The New Yorker into letting him turn his Kansas story into a multipart series and signed a book contract with Random House.

  * * *

  —

  Not long after they got back to the city, Nelle moved. She didn’t leave Yorkville, but she upgraded her apartment to one a handful of blocks south, at 403 East Seventy-Seventh Street, where she could have heat and hot water both. While Capote was celebrating his latest book deal, she was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on her first one, literally: she arrived home to page proofs for Mockingbird that had to be reviewed. But she also had other work to do. Partly to make money, having long since spent the advance on her book and not knowing if it would ever earn royalties, and partly to do Capote a favor, since they both knew that he would need to stay in the good graces of everyone in Kansas, she had taken her own assignment related to the Clutter case. Before becoming a KBI agent, Alvin Dewey had worked for the FBI, and Lee had agreed to write a profile of him for one of the nichiest magazines in the nation: The Grapevine, the newsletter of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  The house style of The Grapevine hovers somewhere between alumni notes and an autopsy report, and Lee’s profile of Dewey is no exception. Her piece was sandwiched between head shots of agents who had retired or died and announcements about conferences and events, and either by design or by brute-force editing, it came out sounding just like the rest of The Grapevine. It was unremarkable, unsigned, and mailed out to former G-men on mimeographed pages, but it was still her first clip since college.

  A gossip sheet for the organization least inclined to gossip, The Grapevine is basically unknown to those outside the FBI, and Lee’s article came and went in the March 1960 issue without much of a fuss. Even if it had been signed, almost no one at the time would have recognized its author’s name, but the profile served its purpose of keeping Capote close with the Deweys, and it kept Lee close, too; later that spring, when Capote went back to Kansas for the sale of the Clutter family farm and the trial of Hickock and Smith, she went with him. This time, they brought along the photographer Richard Avedon, best known for his fashion shoots and celebrity portraits.

  Although she didn’t appear in any of the pictures that later ran in Life magazine, Lee shows up in Avedon’s contact sheets from that trip, and she showed up every day to report, too, as she had during the previous visit. In fact, this time, she proved even more valuable, because she had spent her entire life around courthouses and was only one semester short of a law degree. When Smith and Hickock went to trial on March 22, Capote and Lee were both in the courtroom, but only she made any notes about the jurors—who, seven days later, after less than an hour of deliberation, found both men guilty and sentenced them to death. “Why they never look at people they’ve sentenced to death, I’ll never know,” Lee wrote of the jurors in her notes, echoing a sentiment she loans to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. A few days later, the judge set the date of execution for May 13, 1960.

  It was, in the most terrible and literal way, a deadline. Capote was going to write this book the way he had written his last one: in the Mediterranean, far from the social temptations and professional obligations of New York. Lee did what she could to help her friend, readying all of her material from their time in Kansas and presenting him, before he left, with more than 150 pages of typed notes. These she divided into ten sections: one on the town, one on the landscape, one on the crime, one on each of the four victims, one for the two surviving daughters, one on their interviews, and one on the trial. She also included a dedication, offering up her work “To the Author of The Fire and the Flame and the Small Person Who So Manfully Endured Him”—a tender nod to some of Capote’s juvenilia and an acknowledgment of the three decades they had already spent collaborating before they ever set foot in Kansas.

  Those notes formed the template for how she would organize her own crime reporting almost twenty years later in Alexander City. At the top of almost every page, above the substance of the interviews themselves, Lee noted the date that each one was made, or the date to which it corresponded on the timeline of the Clutter investigation, plus whom they had talked with and where they had done so. Wherever she could, she also set a little scene, so that however much time passed before Capote returned to the notes, he could be transported back to the living room or dining room or courthouse where the interview had taken place. She also did Capote the favor of starting to put all of the voices they’d heard in conversation with one another, gathering into separate sections what each of their many sources had said about Mrs. Clutter, Mr. Clutter, Kenyon, and Nancy, and adding questions and theories about the crimes along the way.

  Lee pinned more than fifty people on the page this way, including some she interviewed and Capote did not: friends of the Clutter children, neighbors of the Clutter family, the county coroner, agents of the KBI, detectives, clergy, the judge, the sheriff, the jury, the gossips at the café, and the worrywarts at the post office. Her notes were full of sources who had talked about the Clutter case only because they were talking to her. Bobby Rupp, Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend and the last person to see the family before the murders, said that if it had been only Capote conducting the interviews, he “would probably have walked out of the room.”

  More than mere transcripts, Lee’s voluminous notes are those of a careful observer, a keen legal mind, and a tragicomic chronicler of American history. She recorded for Capote the height of Mrs. Clutter’s socks and the length of Nancy Clutter’s mirror—registering even the reflection that wasn’t there and exactly how much of herself the girl could have taken in every morning before school. She summarized the court testimony, explained legal strategies, and offered psychological portraits of the jury. And she gave Capote the gift of notes on things that had nothing to do with the murders but everything to do with the place where they occurred—its cats, customs, charlatans, and seasons. More than most field notes, hers were a book waiting to be written.

  But juries aren’t the only ones who have trouble looking directly at the damned. It would take years for Hickock a
nd Smith to run out of all their legal options and arrive, finally, at the gallows, and it would take Capote just as long to figure out a way to write about the Clutter case without blinking. In the end, after both men were dead, he finally finished In Cold Blood, and it became the best seller he had always hoped it would. But that was five years away, and by then Harper Lee had already published one of her own.

  | 19 |

  Death and Taxes

  Of all the reasons a writer might stop writing—addiction, anxiety, depression, the vitriol of critics, the distraction of love, the arrival of children, a lack of ideas, an avalanche of doubt—perhaps the least likely is taxation. Yet before To Kill a Mockingbird was even available in bookstores, Harper Lee claimed that the Internal Revenue Service was keeping her from working.

  That unusual claim was first recorded by Dolores Hope, the newspaper columnist Lee had met in Kansas. As the author of “The Distaff Side,” an almost daily feature of the Garden City Telegram, Hope wrote up everything from cookbooks to diets to a proposed “Girdles Day,” and after she met Capote and Lee in 1959, the writers started making regular cameos in her column. The following year, when the pair came back for the trial of Hickock and Smith, Hope wrote about Lee’s forthcoming novel. It was two weeks before Tax Day, and Hope revealed that although To Kill a Mockingbird wouldn’t be published until July, it had already been purchased by the Literary Guild and Reader’s Digest for reprinting and sale through their services. For most authors, Hope wrote, “this is what is known as hitting the jack pot in a large way,” but not for Lee, who would no longer be freelancing because “she can’t afford to make any more money.” Instead of praise for her book, Hope continued, Lee “jokingly asks only one bit of recognition—that her name be inscribed on a future rocket. Because, she says, she figures to pay for one.” That was a wild exaggeration, but it’s true that the affluent were aggressively taxed at the time; America’s postwar prosperity was fueled partly by tax rates that could reach as high as 90 percent. According to Hope, Lee griped that “the government will get at least 70 percent of her earnings.”