Haley and Fisher talked on the telephone about drafts of the book for a couple of hours nearly every day in 1970. Haley was living in San Francisco after divorcing his second wife, Julie, and it would be three years before he would see the couple’s young daughter, Cindy, again.13 “‘Before This Anger’ really now is happening,” Haley wrote to his agent Paul Reynolds at the end of the year. “My best writing happens in thrusts,” Haley told Reynolds, noting that he was “working about 18 hours each day, sleeping in short takes.” Haley tried to avoid distractions and accepted telephone calls from only a handful of people, such as Fisher. “When Murray has done his thing, editing, at which he is magnificent, sometimes he is enough overcome by the steadily building sheer overwhelming drama of the book being done now that he will telephone and read the last take of it over the phone,” Haley said.14
Fisher could be a harsh editor. He often returned drafts to Haley with barbed comments in the margins: “What the hell is this?”; “Enough of this already—blah, blah, blah”; “Pretty dull stuff”; “This is history not story”; and the writing workshop standard, “Show, don’t tell.”15 Haley considered Fisher a “brilliant editor at cutting and condensing,” and he responded remarkably well to these criticisms of his work.16 While Haley had a sizable ego, he also recognized, rightly, that he needed an editor to rein in his story. Left to his own devices, Haley gathered more and more research material and continuously revised his chapter drafts. The top of one draft includes Haley’s handwritten note: “A further rewrite not originally intended, but I began doodling, then it demanded eventually full rewrite.”17 Haley’s creative process required him to continually iterate, and this made an editor indispensable to the development of Roots.
Haley’s favorite place to write was at sea, and he frequently booked trips on freighters to work on his book. The summer of 1971 found Haley on a ship that sailed around Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean before returning to San Francisco.18 “I am working better than ever in any other locale,” Haley wrote to Reynolds as the ship pulled away from Buenos Aires. “Tomorrow I will write Chapter 31 . . . in which Kunta Kinte, 16, is captured. By Rio, ten days from now, I hope to have him across the Atlantic and in Colonial Annapolis. Then I am going to have about another 40 days, living and eating and sleeping with Kinte and his descendants across ante-bellum slavery, and the Civil War, Emancipation and my birth.” Haley was optimistic that the writing would go more quickly once Kunta had reached America. “It will go appreciably faster once Kinte is in the Colonial US—because then there is natural forward movement,” Haley wrote. “It has been agonizingly hard to create movement, steadily, in the static situation of 31 chapters whose primary purpose is to instill deeply into readers an awareness of what was African culture. But I know I have done it. No one ever will read this book and again think of a no-culture Africa.”19 Haley also reminded Reynolds that he intended to be one of his most successful clients. “The next time you chance to be talking to Irving Wallace,” Haley said, referring to the best-selling novelist, “mention to him that I said you cannot go into a South America bookstore without his titles all over! The guy’s sales must be utterly incredible! (Although I am going to show him something, with ‘Before This Anger,’ to be sure!)”20
Haley’s desire to introduce readers to African culture led him to gather pages and pages of research notes. “I’ve invested so much time and work collecting all of the items I have of the 1750s-1760s authentic Mandinka (Mandingo) village culture, from which Kunta was taken (and, symbolically, all slaves)—that at this stage, I want every item woven into the rough manuscript, so that culling necessary can be done from that total material. . . . I feel it momentously important,” Haley wrote. “One, this is, genuinely, Black History which is being so-clamored for. Lecturing across this country, North, East, South, West, sharing with audiences, mixed black-and-white, really only bits and pieces of what is to be in the book, I have witnessed emotional responses actually often to the point of tears (including my own). So that’s another reason I’m including here even the unused-as-yet, for you to appraise for potential weaving-in: the book is pre-tested in its effect.”21 Haley sent Fisher fifty single-spaced pages of notes on topics ranging from Gambian folktales and traditional fishing methods to kingdoms in Mali and the practices of Nigerian elephant hunters.22 In one of his notebooks, Haley wrote that he wanted the book to have “enough details to make the story live and real—but not a history lesson (i.e., don’t know how many pounds of beeswax).”23 Haley’s research impulses ran toward the collecting of minute details as though he needed to gather pages of historical facts to balance the fictional parts of his story. Haley later told Reynolds, “Sometimes, even I can’t understand why had it taken so long [to finish Roots]. I mean apart from all of the lecturing, and so forth. I think that I did the thing called ‘over-researching,’ in fact I know I did, for I find myself not using whole blocks of this or that which took weeks, or even months to get into my notebooks.”24 Fashioning this material into a narrative quickly grew unwieldy, which is one of the reasons Fisher took on such an important role as an editor.
Fisher came to play such an crucial role in developing Roots that Haley gave him 10 percent of the book’s literary rights and 5 percent of the motion picture rights. Haley wrote to Reynolds in the spring of 1973, asking him to draw up the paperwork. “My reason for this derives from the special mammoth nature of ROOTS, and the fact that Murray is investing, as my friend, a really singular job of editing which will contribute much to ROOTS’ success, which will be also singular,” Haley explained. Haley said that he valued the “intensiveness, expertness and otherwise overall caliber of editing of ROOTS that Murray Fisher is doing” and felt this work was worthy of significant monetary compensation.25 Haley’s agreement with Fisher was also motivated by Haley’s recognition that Roots overwhelmed him. “I’ll never again work as hard as this, at least for as long as this, on another book,” Haley told Reynolds. “I feel as if I’m climbing up a waterfall. It is really like writing four books.”26
Money problems continued to trail Haley, making it more difficult to complete his epic book. The IRS put a tax lien on Haley’s bank account in the summer of 1973, and at times Haley could not afford the xeroxing fees to send copies of drafts to Fisher, Reader’s Digest, or Doubleday.27 “You surely know that I’m so characteristic of so many of my craft, who have no ability in properly managing their finances,” Haley wrote to Reynolds. “Indeed, that’s a good part of why ‘Roots’ isn’t in bookstores now; for lack of proper managing otherwise, my chief income is from lecturing, which although it pays well still has eaten up all kinds of time that should have been spent with my typewriter and editing pen.”28 Haley’s busy and lucrative lecture schedule proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, lectures brought Haley much-needed money and built a robust advance audience for Roots. On the other hand, every day Haley traveled to deliver a lecture was a day he was not writing his book. “I have got to become able to quit lecturing until after ‘Roots’ is delivered,” Haley concluded.29
Haley’s financial problems were compounded in August 1973 when his ex-wife Julie was committed to a psychiatric hospital for severe depression. Haley was in Negril, Jamaica, when he received the news. “Of course I’m sorry for Julie, who had dropped her insurance,” Haley wrote to Reynolds, before reflecting on what this meant for his daughter. “Immediately my problem is Cindy, without a functional mother. [Julie’s mother] says someone can be hired fulltime, or she herself will quit work if I can reimburse. My child support’s not quite half enough to handle all this.”30 Haley wrote to Lisa Drew at Doubleday to ask for a $10,000 advance to cover these unexpected expenses. Reynolds told Haley not to be too optimistic on this front. “Remember, they signed a contract for this book in Aug. 1964,” Reynolds reminded him. “I don’t think they’re going to write out a check for $10,000 now.” The solution, Reynolds argued in his familiar refrain, was to finish the book. “Of course you must try to h
elp Julie and Cindy, but Cindy will not starve if you can’t help her and finishing Roots will mean that you can help her in the future,” Reynolds wrote.
If you help her now and as a result cannot finish Roots, you will be incapable of helping her six months or a year from now when she’ll need your help just as much. Your whole career so depends on your finishing Roots. . . . As far as I can predict, Roots should solve your financial problems. Nothing else that I know of will. What I’m trying to say is that I think you’ll be doing more for Cindy and Julie for the long pull by finishing Roots and not helping them than you will by not finishing Roots because of immediate help to them.31
The failures of Haley’s first two marriages and his shortcomings as a father did not make him unique among celebrities and career-oriented men of his generation, but they are noteworthy since he wrote the most famous family chronicle in American history. This is less paradoxical than it may seem. Haley described his search for roots as a detective story, and the project, with international travel and regular speaking engagements, suited his wanderlust and fulfilled his need to meet and woo new people. Roots allowed Haley to engage with the idea of family on his terms in a way that day-to-day life as a husband and father did not.
Haley took Reynolds’s coldly pragmatic financial advice and rededicated himself in the fall of 1973 to finishing Roots. Haley said that he recognized that “the biggest negative presently in my career is that my years of delay with ROOTS understandably has [sic] lowered my credibility among publishers.”32 Still, Haley sent Reynolds an ambitious three-year work schedule in which he planned to finish not only Roots but also a how-to book on black genealogy and a book on the Great Migration titled Booker. He expected to cap off this remarkable stretch of productivity with the film version of Roots coming out during the bicentennial in 1976. “It is almost as if Roots was written for that timing, through we know it wasn’t,” Haley said.33 By this time Haley projected that Roots would be over sixteen hundred pages, and Fisher was busy cutting and condensing Haley’s drafts.34 With every passing month, Haley’s optimism about finishing Roots seemed increasingly unwarranted. The book that had established him as a writer, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was almost a decade old. He had missed dozens of book deadlines. And the racial tensions of the 1960s that had inspired Haley’s desire to move “beyond this anger” were no longer front-page news.
When Reader’s Digest published the first excerpt from Roots in 1974, no one was happier than Haley. “I am having the good, warm feeling of being vindicated,” Haley wrote upon hearing that his Digest editor liked the piece. “As you know, literally for years I have been dropping notes, saying I’m in this or that process with the book, until I know that it was starting to sound almost mythical.”35 While Haley’s story of his search for roots had already circulated widely via lectures, television talk show appearances, and articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers and magazines, the Reader’s Digest piece was the first time readers saw the narrative of Kunta Kinte that Haley had written and Fisher had polished. In Reader’s Digest Haley found a perfect venue to launch Roots. Haley had published his first national magazine article in Reader’s Digest in 1954, he had spoken several times at the Digest-affiliated World Press Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the magazine had supported Haley’s family history project since 1966, providing much-needed travel and research funds. Each month the magazine delivered accessible, interesting, and educational stories to a hundred million readers across thirty countries. Reader’s Digest’s goal was to bring culture to mass audiences, which was also what Haley hoped to achieve with Roots. Haley’s description of what he hoped to accomplish through his writing could have been the mission statement for Reader’s Digest. “I want and hope merely to try and write what I do in such a way that it will evoke such response as comes from the great bulk of my readers, ‘I had not realized _____,’ ‘I didn’t know _____,’ ‘I feel that I better understand _____’ and so forth,” Haley wrote in 1974. “Stated another way, if I can be a cause of an increased genuine awareness, and understanding, among we collective creatures of The Maker here upon this earth, then I will be happy.”36
Millions of people read Haley’s Roots preview in Reader’s Digest, and thousands wrote to tell him how much the work moved them. “As I finished tears streaked down my face,” a woman from Columbus, Ohio, wrote. “I found your [two-part condensed] book the most touching truthful work of our heritage. Thank you for this. I hope to someday see this as a permanent part of Black History in our public school system.”37 A public school official from New York told Haley that his efforts to make readers feel as though they were part of the story were successful. “I was alongside of Kunta from Juffure to Virginia,” she wrote. “Roots was the best thing I have ever read in my whole entire life.”38 A Philadelphia Daily News editor told Haley, “The joy of seeing it in Reader’s Digest is that it will reach its largest audience. Largest, that is, until TV does it. That will be The Event.” This editor also told Haley that he liked the book’s blend of fact and fiction. “Roots is one of the great mystery novels of our time,” he wrote. “Don’t let it get Dewey-Decimal-ed into sociology!”39 Haley was thrilled at the outpouring of admiration for the condensed version of Roots. “One of the most meaningful things for me is that it’s seeming to have quite as much intrigue for whites as for blacks,” he wrote. “The whites predominantly writing that Roots evokes in them the want to know more of whence they came. It reinforces my feeling that what Roots actually does is present the black facet of the humankind saga.”40
Producers David Wolper and Stan Margulies had the most important responses to the Reader’s Digest article. Originally from New York City, Wolper had studied film and journalism at the University of Southern California and had cofounded a television distribution company in his early twenties. By the early 1960s he had established Wolper Productions, which developed and sold dozens of documentaries to the broadcast networks. Stan Margulies, who joined Wolper Productions in 1968, recalled that he and Wolper had sold ABC in 1972 on two shows about generations of family. One focused on Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, while the other focused on four generations of police officers. Neither show was produced, but Wolper and Margulies remained interested in the idea of bringing generational stories to television.41 They found the story they were looking for in Roots. “In the current (May) issue of Reader’s Digest there is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Roots, by Alex Haley,” Wolper wrote to Margulies. “He is an American Negro who painstakingly traces his family back to its original roots in Africa. Using stories handed down in his family, plus his education and historical museums and associations, he manages finally to locate the actual African village where his family began. It is an incredible mystery-suspense tale, spanning three continents and seven generations.”42 Actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee had told Wolper about Haley’s story in 1972, but at the time Columbia Pictures had an option on the film rights. By 1974, however, the book still had not been published, so Columbia elected not to extend their option.43 Wolper told Margulies that he expected Roots to be “next season’s biggest and most prestigious project” and said they should make an offer for the rights.
Figure 7. Stan Margulies and David Wolper celebrate their Emmy win for Roots, 1977. Nate Cutler/Globe Photos Inc.
Haley’s agents, entertainment lawyer Lou Blau in Los Angeles and literary agent Paul Reynolds in New York, were also busy cultivating potential bidders for the film/television rights to Roots. “I suspect that across the next two months, as the Reader’s Digest condensation runs, we are going to collect some motpix/TV bids of great interest,” Haley wrote.44 Haley was also eager to capitalize on Roots’s marketing potential. “Unlike most motion picture properties, this one involves two valuable subsidiary aspects that we should . . . participate in to a major degree,” Haley wrote. “Very valuable will be the academic markets for any documentary film of My Search for Roots, as evidenced by the
perennial heavy demand for my merely lecturing about it. And anticible is a coming market for ‘Roots’ or ‘Kinte’ oriented products, such as sweatshirts, jigsaw puzzles of African villages, sundry models of applicable things.”45 While some critics blamed the television production for commercializing Roots, it is important to acknowledge that Haley was always eager for his work to achieve its full commercial potential. The success of the Reader’s Digest preview made Haley more ambitious about the promotional possibilities. Haley initially planned to follow Reynolds’s advice to wait until Roots was finished to sell the film/TV rights, when there would be “a very maximum seller’s market.”46 Lou Blau, however, was eager to make a deal. With producer David Merrick and Warner Brothers studio also showing interest in Roots, Blau negotiated a deal with Wolper.47 Wolper paid Haley $50,000 for the film/television option to Roots, with another $200,000 promised when Haley finished the book. The payment went to the Kinte Corporation, a tax shelter Haley set up on advice of Lou Blau.48 In Haley’s decade of work before finishing Roots, Doubleday paid him $77,000.49 These payments went toward Haley’s tax debts and child support obligations, and Haley always felt as if Doubleday did not value the epic book he was writing. The deal with Wolper was the windfall Haley had hoped to achieve with his project from the outset. While Haley had missed dozens of deadlines with his publisher, the television deal gave him the financial incentive and pressure he needed to finish writing Roots.
Making Roots Page 9