Like his previous pitches to Doubleday and Reader’s Digest, Haley’s spoken presentation of Roots over lunch at the Beverley Hills Tennis Club wowed Wolper and Margulies. “What I didn’t know there but learned later was that what Alex did at lunch was basically to give us his university lecture, which is dynamite, but over a lunch table it is double-dynamite,” Margulies remembered. “We sat there and our mouths dropped open 14 feet and we told Alex on the basis of that we were interested.” Margulies and Wolper also persuaded Haley that television, rather than film, was the best medium for Roots. “Alex was interested in communicating with the greatest number of people and we said one night on television is the equivalent to ten years of a movie run,” Margulies said. “If you really want to reach America, it’s called television and at the end of the luncheon we had a feeling that Alex was for it.” Once they had the television rights to Roots, Wolper and Margulies sold the project to ABC by having Haley give his presentation to ABC executives in a private room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.50
The television deal gave Haley some much-needed cash, but it also meant he now had both Doubleday and Wolper/ABC waiting for him to finish Roots. Reynolds worried that Haley was spending too much time in Los Angeles talking with Wolper about the television production. “This is ‘Dr. Reynolds, the slave driver’ talking,” Reynolds wrote to Haley, referencing one of the white characters in Roots. “Delighted as I am with your deal with Wolper . . . unless Roots is completely finished you should not go back to California, you should not do a stroke of work for Wolper . . . regardless of the contract. The book is the vital thing. . . . With no book, your whole house of cards would fall to pieces.”51 Reynolds had reason to worry. As the head screenwriter Bill Blinn was starting a treatment of the first television episode of Roots in December 1974, Haley missed yet another deadline with Doubleday.52 “I completely understand their dubiousness where I’m concerned,” Haley told Reynolds regarding Doubleday. “Ten years is a long time for any book. (I wager that will be one of the chief things advertised.)”53
Lisa Drew, Haley’s editor at Doubleday, had not heard from Haley for weeks before the missed deadline and learned from a newspaper article that Wolper had made a deal with ABC to broadcast Roots.54 “Somebody has given me a clipping from the Durham, North Carolina Morning Herald which says that Alex Haley’s ROOTS is being developed as a film for ABC,” Drew wrote to Reynolds. “Is this correct? If so, could you please give me an idea as to when they plan to use it on television? Do you have any further word on when the rest of the book is coming in to me?”55 Working on opposite coasts, Drew and Margulies talked regularly on the telephone trying to stay abreast of Haley’s progress. Drew recalled that “Stan would call me up and say, ‘We’re up to the point where Tom has run off and done this and what happens next?’ and I’d say, ‘Why are you asking me? You guys are ahead of me.’”56 While the schedule of ABC’s production was not yet determined, it was clear to Drew and her colleagues at Doubleday that “it was going to be a big deal” and that “there was going to be extremely serious extended publicity of our publication.”57
ABC initially planned to air Roots in March 1976, and Wolper feared that Haley would not get his manuscript to Doubleday in time for the book to be published before the series broadcast.58 Screenwriters Bill Blinn and Ernest Kinoy had completed treatments of Roots episodes 2 and 3, but neither they nor Wolper knew how Haley’s story would conclude. “Alex, we are running out of time,” Lou Blau told Haley in August 1975. “David Wolper is most apprehensive that ABC might very well walk away from the project if they were aware of the fact that all of the material has not yet been submitted to Wolper. Wolper emphasized that what you have submitted so far is not enough for his purposes, and you must submit your complete manuscript. It would indeed be a tragedy if the ABC deal goes down the drain.”59 Haley, working in Jamaica at the time, replied that even with Fisher’s editing assistance, Roots was too much for him. “Right now, this room is so inundated with Roots, not to mention my head, that I feel I don’t know if I’m coming or going,” Haley told Blau. “I understand Wolper’s concern, Doubleday’s concern, I’m working to finish the utterfastest I know how, like about 19 hours spent between editing pen or at this machine since this time yesterday; and I have the Faith that we’ll see sundry records and precedents set when Roots gets out there next year.”60 Haley had written Reynolds and Stan Margulies days earlier, telling them that Lisa Drew and Murray Fisher had both joined him in Jamaica and that the place had been a “beehive of work” as the three worked to finish the book.61 “We’ve arrived at a kind of rough schedule where all work pretty much through the day,” Haley wrote. “After dinner, Lisa works until 10:30 or so, and Murray to midnight or one a.m. I sleep for awhile after dinner until Murray’s ready to turn in, when he wakes me, and I take the swing shift until day, in the quiet, working ahead of them.”62 Haley said that all three got along very well but that Fisher had asked Drew not to say anything about the hands-on role he was playing in the completion of Roots.63
Haley knew that if he did not finish Roots by November 1975 Wolper would choose not to exercise the option on the television rights. This would cost Haley $200,000 plus all of the exposure that a nationally broadcast series would bring to him and his book. The pressure of making this all-important deadline exposed simmering tensions in Haley’s relationship with Fisher. The two had worked so closely for so many years on Roots that Fisher began to feel possessive of the story. While Haley desperately needed an editor’s assistance, he bristled at Fisher’s domineering manner. Just before Reader’s Digest published the first excerpt from the book in 1974, Fisher called Reynolds and said he was furious that he had not seen the final version of the chapter before it went to the magazine.64 For his part, Haley was upset that Fisher had phoned Reynolds. “I do not want him calling you or anyone else involved in handling Roots,” Haley wrote. “That is not his role. I am the author. He is an invited editor. Murray is a good friend; he is a brilliant editor, I think. He possesses an aggressive, dominating type of personality, which I regard as fine for his own life, but don’t thrust it upon me! I feel so strongly about these overstepping-of-role tendencies of his that if I find that he continues to exhibit them, considering that it’s my book, my career, then I have quietly determined that he simply will never see the manuscript of the book’s latter half.”65 Later in the same letter, though, Haley told Reynolds he hoped to patch things up with Fisher and then “press him to catch up” on editing the drafts.
These tensions reemerged in September 1975 when Stan Margulies hosted a dinner with Haley, Fisher, and screenwriter Bill Blinn. As the dinner guests talked about the Roots project, Haley grew annoyed that Fisher repeatedly interrupted him to finish stories about characters and events in the book. Haley felt upstaged and retreated to a balcony to collect his thoughts. Back in Jamaica, Haley wrote Fisher a lengthy letter.
“I’m taking Roots from here in without your editing,” Haley told Fisher, promising that the editor would still receive the agreed-upon percentage of the book and television rights. “The arrangement I volunteered makes it clear how much I both respect and solicit expert editing,” Haley continued. “During our working month, cumulatively I came to feel that you all but personify intransigence, that you consider that once the manuscript’s in your hands, who dares intrude? The author who would long sustain a cooperativeness with that perspective inevitably sustains a subjective sense of being professionally reduced, diminished; of self-doubt; of dribbling out his pebbles of self-confidence as a writer. Murray, I hope you can understand that it was scary, for awhile after I returned here, to write, uncertain inside if what was on the pages was going to survive. I’m too fond of me for that, my friend!”66 Haley told Fisher he was angry that the editor had directed a typist to put “Edited by Murray Fisher” on the title page of an earlier manuscript draft. Haley said he considered this akin to giving Fisher “co-credit” for writing Roots. “That is absurd Murray,” Haley wrote. �
��For my friend to perform his technical expertise, in appreciation I volunteered a generosity that’s far as I know, without precedent in the authorship business.”67 Haley also worried that Fisher was telling too many people about their work together on Roots. “This information dropped, seeded, in enough places, it can become the sort of titillating tidbit that can outgrow weeds and outlast dye,” Haley wrote. “Gaining dimension as it goes, in time it’s heard in cocktail parties in Idaho ‘Look, I happen to know he didn’t really write it.’ . . . I have got to avert any occasion for any ‘secret’ attaching to Roots.”68
As Haley navigated his relationship with his editor and rushed to finish Roots before the television deadline, he was stalked, as always, by money problems. “In a nutshell, my money situation is I’ve next to no income until I finish the long, long book, which I contractually must by Nov 30,” Haley wrote explaining why he did not have $760 to pay for his Master Charge account. Haley told the assistant manager at San Francisco’s Crocker National Bank that his money woes would soon be over. “In the first half of December I’ll receive $200,000 as a first payment on the TV rights,” he wrote. “The first day after that first sum’s deposited I plan to spend writing checks.” Haley even had to apologize to Flying Finger Manuscript Service for failing to pay a bill for typing a draft of Roots.69 Haley was philosophical about his constant money trouble. The “irony was that as long as I kept on those incredible lecturing itineraries you know I used to keep, earning the $50–80,000 a year I did at times . . . I could never possibly find the time to finish my book,” Haley wrote. “Or put another way, I was solvent, I was ‘secure,’ but I could not remain that and gamble on myself on the BIG one, you know? There’s something metaphysical about that.”70
Haley also felt the accumulated pressure of a decade of missed deadlines. “All I know is that I feel ready to cry when now or then someone writes, or says, ‘Aren’t you finished yet?’” Haley wrote to sociologist and University of California Santa Cruz administrator Herman Blake.71 “I have written about 18 hours every day, seven days a week all the summer, finishing Roots which absorbs work like a sponge,” Haley wrote to another friend. “Now I have about five weeks left to make a deadline on whose making hangs publication in early August 1976, followed by a long television series (14 hours) to open in Sept. It is so pressured that I am sending increments to the film people, whose writers are doing scripts from that, as they get it.”72 Haley said he felt “like a steamroller was chasing” him.73
With the television deadline looming, Haley wrote to Fisher to mend fences. Haley started the letter at four in the morning; he had been up late working with an ear infection, fever, and sore throat. “I think that we have the very real potential to work together in achieving some of the most formidable literature that has come down the line; and of visual products that will rank with the best as well,” Haley wrote to Fisher.74 Haley told Fisher that he still needed him as an editor, “our new understanding being that simply I will follow you to make sure it feels right, is right, to me.”
Over a ranging five-page letter, Haley wrote openly about what it meant to him to achieve success as a black author and the slights he continued to face. “I have heard I suppose two or three hundred of us [black artists, scholars, and celebrities] testify that in countless ways we have perceived how the average white people tend to underestimate us; to see us and so often to deal with us in ways which like as not they are themselves unconscious, as of lesser capacities for thinking, for discerning,” Haley wrote. Haley had interviewed and socialized with enough black celebrities to know that success did not eliminate racism and could heighten jealousy and distrust. “What all of this has to do with you and me and Roots is that Roots aspires to be a very symbol of black people’s bidding via the immensely powerful route of literature to be taken into the mainstream of acceptance of groups of people on par with each other. . . . For a book to achieve this for a historically maligned group would amount to a very staggering human contribution.”75 Haley recognized that Roots was going to lead to an intense level of scrutiny of him. “It is clearly imperative that I be worthy to sustain that image,” Haley wrote. “I have got to be able to stand under the spotlight of the scrutiny that will come, first curiously, then as the book grows bigger, increasingly critically. . . . It doesn’t go on forever, this scrutiny of critical bent; if a period of it can be weathered without the object of it springing any serious leaks, then okay, then it relents, and all’s okay.”76
For Haley, he and Fisher had to make it clear that Roots was an authentically black book. Haley believed that black celebrities like Motown Records founder Berry Gordy and actor Sammy Davis Jr. were victims of “black rejection phenomena.” To cut down successful black people, Haley felt, the media “subtly discover and reveal that in fact they’re somehow the product of, or controlled by, or contained by, white people. That seems to satisfy white people that all’s well; among black people the nice hopeful hero is virtually dumped with infuriation, or with disdain.”77 Haley asked Fisher to help him navigate this danger. “You and I have both got to be fully aware of the potentials of threats to what’s at stake,” Haley advised. “By no means does this intend to suggest you’re obscured from sight. . . . I want your editor role to be known. My only concern now is the context in which we do this. . . . You present the writer who faced the staggering organizational and presentation problems, which you as a trained, fresh eye and editing brain sought to help . . . and we’re homefree.”78 Haley described having already been visited in Jamaica by a representative of a civil rights organization who pressed the author to demand more black writers and production staff on the television series. Haley brushed away these concerns. “It seems of little moment that I am black, that Roots projects to pioneer in its area for black interests at large,” Haley wrote. “I can hear now some shrill [critics], black, ‘didn’t you know any black editors?’ I can deal with that. The thing I cannot deal with is the slightest innuendo that I am a product, or controlled, or contained, or any variation of such, however untrue; the point is it cannot be let to start.”79
Haley was much less worried about the response of black critics to Roots or the lack of black screenwriters or directors on the television series than he was with meeting the deadline for Wolper. Haley told Fisher he looked forward to hosting him in Jamaica to make a final push to the deadline. He promised that My Lewis, a recent PhD graduate from Ohio State University who had sought out Haley as a mentor, would be on hand to type up the revised manuscript. Lewis, whom Haley described as “diminutive, black, cute, quiet, sensitive, [and] very, very sharp,” later became Haley’s third wife.80 “We have GOT to make this deadline,” Haley wrote as he wrapped up the letter at 5:30 a.m. “Wolper Inc., must have it, in time to read, as their option has to be lifted by November 30, which means money, the start of it. I do not think I mentioned previously that in the way the Good Lord works His wonders, the new TV format is that they’ll premiere it (after early August book publication) with a September night’s full prime-time three-hour show, to be followed by weekly one-hour shows. That ought to sell over a million books in hardcover, don’t you think?”81
CHAPTER FIVE
Producing Roots
“Alex Haley has completed the manuscript for the book Roots,” producer Stan Margulies wrote to ABC’s Lou Rudolph after Thanksgiving in 1975. “Now that you have got this, don’t expect anything else in your Christmas stocking.”1 By the time Haley finished his epic book, Margulies and head screenwriter Bill Blinn had been working for over a year to adapt the story for television. For much of this time they were working to develop story lines, scenes, and characters that Haley had not yet committed to paper. Soon after Blinn joined the project in the fall of 1974 he attended several of Haley’s lectures to get a handle on the story. Haley and Blinn got along well, and he thought the series of lectures would show the screenwriter how diverse audiences responded to Roots. “I couldn’t have planned a much better succession of audiences f
or the accompanying scriptwriter to share a wide range of responses to my ‘narrating,’ in effect, the Roots researching adventure,” Haley wrote to Margulies. “Commonwealth [College]’s an open enrollment college. W. Maryland’s a church college. After a banquet of professional librarians we’ll have an audience of very conservative Mennonites. Winston-Salem State is a Black university. Finally, World Press Institute is an annual assembly of foreign professional journalists sponsored by Reader’s Digest.”2 Like almost all of Haley’s lecture audiences, Blinn was captivated by Haley. “It was mesmerizing to watch Haley tell his story,” Blinn recalled. “He was a fascinating storyteller. He talked quietly, he talked with almost no histrionics, no role playing. . . . You could not look away, you could not not listen to what he was saying. He was hypnotic.”3
Blinn and Margulies wrote the early treatments for the Roots television series using flashbacks that moved between Haley’s research process in the 1960s and 1970s and Haley’s ancestors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “I felt very strongly that the story needed a twentieth-century identification,” Margulies recalled. “I felt that we would all be better off if we could tell the story through the person of a sophisticated, intelligent, worldly citizen of the US of America in 1977—that we’d understand him in a minute because he is obviously one of us, and if we liked him we could then go into his story.”4 One version started with Haley asking African delegates at the United Nations for help identifying the Mandinka words that Haley said he had heard from his elders. Another draft opened with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 as the event that sparked Haley’s quest.
Making Roots Page 10