* * *
Besides Tay, there were others in her corner, of course. Her second family in Manhattan gathered around her, giving her creative and emotional support. Michael and Joy Brown continued to depend on Nelle as an aunt to their children, and as Joy’s best friend. Nelle’s husband-and-wife agents, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, invited her to their summer place, the Old Stone House in Connecticut, for long weekends. Nelle wrote them chatty letters from Monroeville during her visits home, catching them up on family news and local events.
Finally, in the spring of 1959, right before the final draft of the manuscript was ready for delivery to Lippincott, Nelle reached out to an inspirational figure in her dream of becoming a writer. She presented her novel to her former English teacher, Miss Gladys Watson, now Mrs. Watson-Burkett, and asked her to critique it.
At night, Mrs. Watson-Burkett would take it out of her sewing basket, jot notes in the margins, and discuss it with her husband.48 One day after school, she asked a student, Cecil Ryland, to come up to her desk. According to Cecil, Mrs. Watson-Burkett said she had finished proofreading a novel by a former student and would he please run it over to her house. “And so, I gathered up the manuscript in an old stationery box, and took it and went knocking on her door. Nelle Harper Lee came to the door, and I said, ‘Here’s your book.’ And she said ‘Thank you.’ Little did I realize that I held a little bit of history in my hands.”49
* * *
That fall, Nelle was biding her time waiting for galleys of the book to arrive when Truman phoned in mid-November. An item in The New York Times had caught his attention, headlined “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” It read, in part:
Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 (UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.
The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds.
There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.
“This is apparently the case of a psychopathic killer,” Sheriff Earl Robinson said.50
Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker magazine, had assigned Truman to use the item as a springboard for writing about the impact of a quadruple murder on a small town. It was going to be a tough assignment. The Kansas story involved murder, and the killer or killers were still on the loose. Truman, slight, blond, bespectacled, was looking for someone to go with him.
His idea was to interview dozens of Holcomb residents and create a composite of the town’s traumatized psyche. It sounded like an adventure that was poles apart from the drudgery of writing alone, and Nelle accepted instantly. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she explained. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.”51
Before they could go, however, they needed a contact in Kansas who was influential, someone who could open doors. Bennett Cerf, Truman’s publisher at Random House, happened to know the president of Kansas State University, James McCain. Mr. McCain offered that if Truman spoke to the English faculty, McCain would provide letters of introduction to key people in Garden City, Kansas, the nearest big town to Holcomb.
So, on the strength of this slim connection, Nelle and Truman prepared to travel by train to Kansas during the second week of December 1959.
They met at Grand Central Terminal, the most convenient location for both of them, and at about 5:30 P.M., walked to the gleaming 20th Century Limited, one of the finest passenger trains in the country at that time. They had a pair of roomettes reserved for the 800-mile run to Chicago, where they would catch the Santa Fe Super Chief going west. At 6:00 P.M. sharp, the train pulled out, heading north along the Hudson River and west to Buffalo. Sometime during the night it would turn southwest, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and head straight for Chicago.
Then it was south to St. Louis, where they changed trains and continued on to Manhattan, Kansas, and Kansas State University. Truman spoke to the English faculty at the university, as promised. For the trip to Garden City, Nelle and Truman rented a Chevrolet and settled in for the almost 300-mile drive straight south.
Chapter 6
“See NL’s Notes”
They arrived at twilight in garden city, a town of 11,000 on the high western Kansas wheat plain, as the sky was turning a deep icy green. The radio kept repeating the same bulletin at intervals: “Police authorities, continuing their investigation of the tragic Clutter slaying, have requested that anyone with pertinent information please contact the sheriff’s office.”1 Driving down North Main Street, Truman and Nelle glanced expectantly left and right for the Warren Hotel. It was supposed to be the best and closest accommodation to the Clutter farm in Holcomb, a village of 270 residents, seven miles west on US-50.
They registered for adjoining rooms and then took the elevator upstairs to rest. The drive from Manhattan, Kansas, was monotonous, the last 100 miles of it through country so flat and featureless that a willow tree by a pond seemed interesting.
The next day, December 16, they walked a block to the Finney County Courthouse, the headquarters of the murder investigation. The person they needed to see was Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Alvin Dewey, who had been appointed to coordinate the investigation by KBI chief Logan Sanford. Dewey was both a former Finney County sheriff and a former FBI agent. Chief Sanford had given him the additional responsibility of handling the press because he was not easily ruffled. In the field, a team of investigators was combing western Kansas for leads.
Nelle and Truman consulted a hand-painted directory on the first floor of the courthouse and took the stairs to the second. A secretary greeted them and escorted them to Dewey’s office.
Alvin Dewey was “just plain handsome,” Nelle decided on the spot, and made a point of saying so in her notes.2 Dark-haired and dressed in a blue suit, he was seated at a mahogany desk positioned catty-corner in a cramped room. His mission as a lawman seemed defined by two prominent items in the room: a large map of the United States on the wall, and a thick criminal statute book on the desk. Dewey’s brown eyes sized Nelle up—“a tall brunette, a good looker,” he thought, indicating that Nelle had dressed well to help Truman make a favorable impression.3
Dewey invited them to sit down. His curiosity was piqued: he hadn’t seen either of them among the reporters who had been hanging around during the past three weeks.
Truman, about five foot four and wearing a sheepskin coat, a long scarf that reached the floor, and moccasins—his version of western wear, apparently—acted as though he thought he was pretty important. Nelle took her cue from Truman and waited for him to begin a carefully rehearsed introduction. Dewey concealed a smile behind a drag on his Winston cigarette when he heard the sound of his visitor’s babyish voice.
“Mr. Dewey, I am Truman Capote and this is my friend, Nelle Harper Lee. She’s a writer, too.” The New Yorker magazine, he explained, had assigned him to write an article about the Clutter case. Miss Lee was his assistant. Now they needed to get down to business. They were here to find out the facts about the murder, the family, and how the town was reacting.
Dewey listened noncommittally. They sounded like average reporters trying to get the inside scoop. “You’re free to attend press conferences,” he said. “I hold them about once a day.”
“But I’m not a newspaperman,” Truman insisted. “I need to talk to you in depth.… What I’m going to write will take months. What I am here for is to do a very special story on the family up to and including the murders.”
Dewey indicated that he hadn’t heard anything to make him change his original offer: they could attend press conferences with the rest of their kind.
“Look,” Truman said, struggling to separate himself
from newspapermen with daily deadlines, “it really doesn’t make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not.”4
Dewey’s face darkened, and Nelle sensed immediately that Truman had just torpedoed the mission. In fact, privately Dewey had been worrying for three weeks about the trail growing cold, and the dread of defeat was starting to gnaw at him.5
Anger suddenly got the better of him. “I’d like to see your press card, Mr. Cappuchi,” he snapped.6
Truman let the mispronunciation pass, seeing that they were off on the wrong foot. “I don’t have one,” he said mildly.
The get-to-know-you meeting had turned into a showdown. Deciding it was best to leave, Nelle rose. Both men got to their feet. Dewey bid them a stiff good-bye and, after they had gone, returned to his work.
“From then on,” Alvin Dewey said later, “he and his friend joined the news people at every conference. They were quiet, attentive, asked few questions, and, as far as I could tell, caused no commotion. I did hear they were hard at work, interviewing everyone, people said … in Holcomb, up and down Garden City’s Main Street, in farm homes, in the coffee-drinking places, in the schools, everywhere.… Once Miss Lee broke the ice, I was told, Capote could get people to talking about the subject closest to their hearts, themselves.”7
* * *
Nelle had accompanied Truman to Kansas as his salaried “assistant researchist”—a term he invented for her. Their assignment was to take a six-inch news item in the New York Times about the murder of the farm family in Holcomb, just a pinprick on the map, and find the humanity buried beneath the crime. They would have to find out everything about the family—Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their children, teenagers Nancy and Kenyon—so the Clutters would be real. Truman wanted to accomplish all this without the benefit of taking notes or tape-recording during interviews. He was convinced that people were more guarded when they could see they were going on the record. He would just talk to people instead, conduct interviews as conversations.
Nelle’s job was to listen and observe subtleties that Truman might be too busy to notice. Then they would return to the hotel and separately write down everything they could recall. Nelle’s gift for creating character sketches turned out to complement Truman’s ability to get people to open up. Many times over the next month, Truman’s jottings would end with “See NL’s notes,” to remind himself to use her insights later.
If they drew a blank about a fact or a remark, they would prod each other’s memories. In instances when key information was missing or unclear, they would have to go back and visit a person a second or a third time. “Together we would get it right,” Nelle said.8
* * *
Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles to getting good interviews was Truman himself. From the beginning, he just didn’t go over very well with people. “Nelle looked like normal folk, she was just a fantastic lady,” said Harold Nye, one of the principal KBI detectives running down leads on the Clutter case, “but Truman was an absolute flake.”9 Mr. Nye, who at one point went five days and nights without sleep during the week after the murders, had no patience for snoopers from the big city.
Neither did postmistress Myrtle T. Clare. “Capote came walking around here real uppity and superior-like and acting so strange that I think people was scared of him. He was real foreign-like, and nobody would open their doors for him, afraid he’d knock them in the head.”10
“I thought Capote was queero,” said Gerald Van Vleet, Clutter’s business partner. “He was nosy as hell and very, very rude. He came out to my farm on a few occasions to talk to me, and I tried to avoid him.”11
Perry Smith (right), one of the Clutter family murderers, receiving a mental fitness examination in March 1960 before his trial. (AP photo)
Smith’s partner Dick Hickock was talkative and friendly. “Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st-degree murder charges,” Nelle marveled in her notes. (AP photo)
Alvin Dewey, a detective on the Clutter case, helped Nelle and Truman gain inside information about the investigation as it unfolded. (Corbis)
And there were key people who refused to be interviewed under any circumstances; they’d had their fill of reporters describing the gory details of a crime involving a respected family. For example, the first witnesses to find Nancy Clutter’s body had been teenagers Nancy Ewalt and her friend Sue Kidwell, who had run screaming from the Clutters’ house. When Nelle and Truman approached Nancy’s father, Clarence, and asked for a moment of his time, he fixed them with his watery blue eyes, framed in a red, weather-beaten face, and said evenly three times to their questions, “I’m a busy man,” and finally turned away.12
After several days of this, Truman began to believe that coming out to Kansas had been a mistake all around. “I cannot get any rapport with these people,” he told Nelle. “I can’t get a handle on them.” Except for two high school English teachers who had read some of his work, no one knew him from the man in the moon. How many more times was he going to be called “Mr. Cappuchi” or “Ka-poat”?
“Hang on,” Nelle said. “You will penetrate this place.”13
A few days later they got their big break.
* * *
On Sunday, December 20, Nelle and Truman were waiting to be picked up in the lobby of the Warren Hotel by Herb Clutter’s former estate attorney, Cliff Hope. Hope was on Dr. McCain’s list of people to get to know, and Truman had been pestering him for several days. Finally, he had agreed to drive the pair out to the Clutter farm. The KBI had placed the farm off-limits, but Hope agreed to intercede with the family’s executor, Kenneth Lyon, explaining that Nelle and Truman were friends of Dr. McCain’s. Mr. Lyon acquiesced, but insisted on being present and drove the 200 miles from Wichita to meet them there.14
The farmhouse was at the end of a quarter-mile lane in Holcomb. Hope parked near the side. The yellow brick and white clapboard home with 14 rooms, 3 baths, and 2 wood fireplaces had been built in the late 1940s, at a time when many homes in the county went without running water. Surrounded by a lawn landscaped with pointed, jade green bushes, the big house had been the crown of Mr. Clutter’s 4,000-acre farm. When Kenneth Lyon unlocked the front door, everyone started up the hedge-lined walk. The heat in the house was off, but the scent of lemon furniture polish hung in the chilly air.
In a way, Nelle and Truman had come full circle from their childhoods in Monroeville. They were figuratively once again on South Alabama Avenue where they had lived next door to each other and fantasized that a madman lived down the street in the tumbledown house owned by the Boleware family. They had spied on that house, speculated about the goings-on inside, and dared each other to sneak inside that lair. Nelle had used it, with some embellishments, as the home of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. By contrast, this successful Kansas farmer’s house, perched in a breezy, sunny spot, didn’t have creaking hinges, broken shutters, and flickering shadows, or any of the lurid conventions associated with horror. But by exploring it, they were embarking once again on a hunt for something monstrous.
It took them about an hour to comb the house and the outside. They went room by room, noting the furnishings, their color, the art on the walls, and even the books on the bookshelves. Nelle drew a detailed floor plan of the house to help jog Truman’s memory when he was back in New York. In every respect, the house looked normal inside. The KBI had erased most of the gruesome evidence of the murders and returned the Clutter home to its almost museumlike emptiness and silence. Except for a bloodstain on the basement floor, there was no sign that four innocent people, two teenagers and their parents, had been murdered in the middle of the night. And for what? According to investigators, the only thing missing was a portable radio.
Nelle and Truman thanked Mr. Hope and Mr. Lyon for making the house available to them. Van Vleet, Clutter’s business partner, had arrived for the inspection, too, but he expressed his disapproval by sitting off by himself most of the time.
&n
bsp; * * *
The day following the visit to the farm began the workweek leading up to Christmas, on Friday, which would mean an enforced break from gathering interviews. The courthouse, library, and post office would be closed; even local law-enforcement authorities would be hard to reach. To celebrate Christmas Day, Nelle and Truman would probably have to fall back on a holiday dinner special in the Warren Hotel coffee shop—turkey, gravy, instant potatoes, and canned cranberry sauce. It sounded bleak.
On Christmas Eve, Nelle spent part of the day assembling a description of the Clutters’ last evening, based on several interviews with Nancy’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, who had stayed at their house watching television until 10:00 P.M. on November 14. Sometime after that, police estimated, the killers had arrived.
The phone rang in Nelle’s room. It was Cliff Hope. “You and Truman going to be in town tomorrow?” he asked.
Nelle said they were.
“Any plans?”
None that she knew of.
“How about coming over for Christmas dinner?” He mentioned that he and his wife, Dolores, were having another couple over: Detective Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie.
She and Truman accepted.15
* * *
The Hopes lived in a cream-colored, two-story house built in 1908 in Garden City—an old house by western standards—on Gillespie Place, a block-long street with a sign announcing PRIVATE DRIVE at either end.
Truman and Nelle arrived half an hour late because first he had to locate a gift bottle of J&B scotch, his favorite brand. During the introductions, Detective Al Dewey’s wife, Marie, an attractive, dark-haired woman, explained her southern accent by saying she was Kansan by marriage but Deep South by birth and upbringing—New Orleans, in fact; to which Truman replied that he had been born in New Orleans and Nelle was from Alabama. “It was instant old home week,” said Al Dewey.17 Nelle, shaking hands, insisted everyone call her by her first name.
I Am Scout Page 9