With that, Paul Reynolds made his way to the NOI restaurant for an audience with Malcolm. Reynolds recalled that Malcolm was an “erudite man” who quoted Shakespeare to him, which prompted the agent to respond, “Now will the winter of thy discontent be made into glorious summer by the writing of Haley.” That’s from Richard III, Malcolm noted. Reynolds and Malcolm chatted amiably about the book contract. Haley later shared with Reynolds Malcolm’s comment that “that White Devil himself hath class.” In a written agreement Malcolm and Haley set clear ground rules for the content of the book. Malcolm promised to give Haley enough time to elicit material sufficient for a hundred-thousand-word book. Nothing could appear in the book that Malcolm did not approve of, and anything Malcolm particularly wanted in it would be included. When Malcolm signed the contract, he said to Haley, “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.” Later Haley got Malcolm to give permission for him to write his own comments at the end of the book, without Malcolm’s review. Haley decided not to be listed as Malcolm’s co-author because he thought that would imply that he shared Malcolm’s views, “when mine are almost a complete antithesis of his.” The book would be by Malcolm, “as told to Alex Haley.”3
Why did the NOI open itself to book-length scrutiny at a volatile time in American race relations? Haley was only vaguely aware that all the media attention given Malcolm had antagonized Elijah Muhammad and his inner circle. According to Manning Marable, Malcolm believed the autobiography would give him a means to reconcile with Muhammad by demonstrating in print his fealty to the Messenger. Both Malcolm and Muhammad tolerated negative interpretations of their movement for the sake of the publicity that men like Haley brought the NOI.4
Reynolds set the price of the book for prospective publishers—$20,000. He soon had an offer from Doubleday and Company. “They are a large house, a conservative house, a conscientious house, and publish quite a lot of distinguished writers,” he explained, without mentioning that Doubleday had recently published two books that Reynolds himself had written. In the post–World War II years, Doubleday had been the single largest publisher of books in the world, putting out a long list and operating many bookstores and a successful book club. The senior editor, Kenneth McCormick, oversaw a large group of successful writers, including Leon Uris, Irving Stone, Allen Drury, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. McCormick and his small army of assistants would edit Haley’s book, which they wanted to bring out soon.5
Haley was now connected to some of the most powerful people in American publishing. DeWitt Wallace and Charles Ferguson ran the most widely circulated magazine in the United States, Paul Reynolds was almost without peer among literary agents, and McCormick was one of the most influential and prolific editors in New York. The men saw each other socially and trusted one another professionally, and in 1963 they quickly brought Haley into their network.
Reynolds soon learned, however, that he would earn his fee for representing Haley. Malcolm informed Haley that his half of the advance should be made payable to Muhammad’s Mosque No. 2, the NOI Chicago headquarters, and then wanted assurance that Reynolds would in fact pay out the Doubleday advance. Reynolds replied stiffly to Haley that Malcolm would not have to worry about collecting from him. Haley asked Reynolds for $500 of his advance before it came in from Doubleday. Reynolds sent the money but appended a note: “I can’t always promise to be able to advance money at any time. I always tell authors that we’re not bankers.” Haley promised to deliver the book by September 1, 1963, less than three months away, because there was not “as much complex composition as another book might take.” Reynolds replied that there was no need to rush, because Doubleday did not have time to publish the book in 1963.6
Haley immediately revealed a penchant for jumping ahead to another book before the one at hand was written. Just after signing the contract, he wrote to Reynolds, “It’s my hope that quite early in 1964 I’m going to be able to hand over to you the first four chapters and remainder in outline of the novel that I nearly know by heart, ‘The Lord and Little David.’” Reynolds gently advised him to slow down. “You’re going to do a lot of books and I don’t want you to kill yourself with work.”7 The admonition went unheeded. Two months later, having submitted nothing of the Malcolm X book, Haley wrote, “You mentioned that after this project, we would talk of others. I have it, Mr. Reynolds. I guarantee you a fine book, perfect for these times, its title to be ‘Before This Anger.’” This idea was a slight variation on the one he had proposed for a book on Henning.8
Haley struggled at first to win Malcolm’s confidence. In their early meetings, the NOI spokesman remained tight-lipped and noncommittal. Malcolm’s wife, Betty, was also reserved and suspicious when she met the writer, but Haley charmed her when he admired a pie she had baked. “Hey, this is delicious,” Haley, himself an experienced cook, said. “How on earth did you make it?” Betty soon decided Haley was wonderfully cosmopolitan: “I thought . . . this is a man of the world.” Betty’s biographer called Haley her “periscope to an urbane, secular scene.” In the next few years, she and Haley often chatted amiably over the telephone, and their fondness for each other lasted for decades. Betty took care of several small children and took the unending telephone calls that came for Malcolm. Eventually she confided her frustrations with Malcolm to Haley. But she also mirrored Malcolm’s growing affection for Haley. “I love Alex,” she said years later.9
Once the autobiography was under way, in June 1963 Malcolm began coming to Haley’s apartment in Greenwich Village late at night, arriving in his blue Oldsmobile. Their sessions went on for hours, with Haley typing notes. Haley thought the interviews got off to a poor start because the two men were “spooky” of each other. Malcolm still addressed Haley as “Sir,” and his talk dwelt entirely on NOI philosophy and the evils of the white devil. He may have been reticent because he thought the FBI was bugging Haley’s apartment. In the early interviews, Haley got little of a personal nature from Malcolm, and he feared he would have to tell the publisher that there was not going to be a book. He had to beg Malcolm for more interview time: “I badly need it. Justice to what the book can do for the Muslims needs it.” To loosen Malcolm up, he had George Sims sit in on the interviews, because Sims seemed to relax Malcolm. Haley’s son, Fella, was sometimes there, too, and the teenager soon announced he wanted to join the Nation of Islam.10
Haley noticed that Malcolm often doodled on napkins, writing sentences and phrases that revealed inner thoughts. For example, “[The white man] so quick to tell [the black man], ‘Look what I have done for you!’ No! Look what you have done to us.” Another one: “[The] only persons [who] really changed history [were] those who changed men’s thinking about themselves. Hitler as well as Jesus, Stalin as well as Buddha. . . . Hon. Elijah Muhammad.” One scribble went, “Woman who cries all time is only because she knows she can get away with it,” which prompted Haley to ask for Malcolm’s views on women. “You can never fully trust any woman,” he said, adding that his wife, Betty, was the only woman he ever met he could trust 75 percent of the time. He had seen too many men destroyed by their wives. But he scribbled, “I have a wife who understands, or even if she doesn’t she at least pretends.”11
Haley finally got access to Malcolm’s personal life when he interrupted a rant against blacks who condemned Elijah Muhammad. “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?” Malcolm’s speech slowed down. “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat. We stayed so hungry that we were dizzy. I remember the color of dresses she used to wear—they were a kind of faded-out gray.” Malcolm talked until dawn, and from the memories he recounted, Haley got material for the first two chapters of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which for many readers would be the most compelling parts. At that point in American literature, there was little besides Richard Wright’s novel Native Son that gave insight into the inner-city black experience. As the two men talked about Malc
olm’s time on the streets as a hustler, Malcolm became more introspective and self-critical. “The only thing I considered wrong,” he said of those days, “was what I got caught doing wrong. I had a jungle mind, I was living in a jungle, and everything I did was done by instinct to survive.”12
Manning Marable portrays Haley as an opportunistic, bourgeois, and politically conservative opposite to Malcolm, one who saw his collaboration with the NOI minister mainly as a chance at writing fame. In fact, as Haley accompanied Malcolm to college lectures, television appearances, and walks through Harlem over the next few months, the two men became friends. Haley listened to Malcolm discuss his intellectual interests in philology, and, like Paul Reynolds, Haley was impressed with Malcolm’s intelligence and learning. Indeed, Malcolm was much more than the “fearsome black demagogue” Haley had promoted to the publishing world. Haley began to see that Malcolm’s grievance about the demagogue epithet was justified. The two men’s understanding of the world and the people in it were not so different. Haley found that Malcolm did not really consider all whites devils. Nor did Malcolm actually dismiss all middle-class blacks as Uncle Toms. He admired the photographer Gordon Parks, the actor Ossie Davis, and the psychologist Kenneth Clark as forthright supporters of all blacks; at the same time Malcolm disliked Thurgood Marshall, Carl Rowan, Jackie Robinson, and Roy Wilkins, who had all caustically dismissed the Nation of Islam. Malcolm liked the black journalists Louis Lomax, James Hicks, and Jimmy Booker, who took Malcolm seriously, and he admired the Christian sociologist C. Eric Lincoln. Malcolm soon made it clear that he also liked the bourgeois, Christian Alex Haley.13
Malcolm gradually revealed to Haley his sensitive nature. In the course of talking about his life as a hustler, Malcolm leaped from his chair in Haley’s tiny apartment and demonstrated his prowess at the Lindy Hop, a dance popular in the 1940s, all the while “scat-singing” and snapping his fingers. He laughed freely and then scorned whites for not being able to do the same. He was touched when a Harlem couple named their baby after him, saying to Haley tearfully, “What do you know about that?” Walking around Harlem, Haley watched Malcolm avoid crowds at 125th Street and move among people living, literally, on side streets. To a wino, he said, “It’s just what the white devil wants you to do, brother. He wants you to get drunk so he will have an excuse to put a club up beside your head.” Haley thought Malcolm saw him as someone to whom he could express himself with candor, and “like any person who lived amid tension, he enjoyed being around someone, another man, with whom he could psychically relax.”14
In 1963, while Haley conducted interviews with Malcolm, Malcolm never left the public spotlight. The speculation about his significance to American race relations never ceased. When Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief, turned dogs on demonstrators, Malcolm said, “If anybody sets a dog on a black man, the black man should kill the dog—whether he is a four-legged dog or a two-legged dog.” Asked to comment on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birmingham tactics, he said, “Real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” After the demonstrations were over, New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis quoted Malcolm telling a black audience in Washington, D.C., “You need somebody that is going to fight. You don’t need any kneeling in or crawling in.” Lewis reported that the Kennedy administration told a group of white Birmingham businessmen, “If they do not accept Dr. King’s way they will get the Muslims’ way.” To a Harlem audience Malcolm said, “The Rev. Martin Luther King is an intelligent man. When he sees his method won’t work, he’ll try something else.” But in August, during the time of the historic March on Washington, Malcolm gave speeches in the nation’s capital damning “the farce on Washington” as a pointless demonstration controlled by the Kennedy administration.15
* * *
By June 1963 Haley was smitten with Juliette Collins, an airline stewardess, and, like Nan and Jeanne Noble, pretty, demure, and southern. He probably met Collins during his journalistic travels between 1960 and 1963. Reynolds gave a surprise engagement party for Alex and Julie. Haley sent Reynolds a gushing note of appreciation: “Julie is so impressed with sudden entry into a world where she meets such important people. I likewise so much enjoy being your client, I truly do, and . . . it’s my full intent to make your investment of time and interest in my development as an author prove to be variously worthwhile.” But Haley and Nan were still married, and when Haley pressed his wife for a divorce, she did not cooperate. The record is not clear as to when Haley and Julie married, though by early October he was calling her his wife. Later, Nan and Fella said there were no documents proving that Haley had obtained a divorce in Mexico, as he claimed. By early 1964 Julie was pregnant, and at some point, she and Haley were married legally.16
By September Reynolds was worried because he had not received any chapters from Haley. “I think the situation is rather serious,” he wrote to Haley. He and McCormick had expected to have an outline of the book by then. Haley told them that his conflict with Nan was keeping him from working on the book. “I realize you’re having your difficulties and I suppose I seem to be unsympathetic,” Reynolds replied, “but this book is very important to you for money and for your career and it’s got to be licked.” Thus Reynolds was relieved when Haley submitted two chapters, even if they were not in chronological order. In the first, entitled “The Farce on Washington,” Malcolm alleged that the six most powerful black leaders at the March on Washington had taken $1.5 million from white men to prevent a radical turn in race relations. Doubleday’s libel attorney worried that the allegation would invite suits from various directions, as had Malcolm’s disparagement of Bull Connor. The Birmingham police chief had already won a $500,000 libel judgment against the New York Times.17
The first chapters were enough to worry Paul Reynolds about Malcolm’s anti-Semitism, a bit of which the Yankee aristocrat seemed to share. “Our Miss Sherman,” he wrote to Haley, referring to a person on his staff, “tells me he is always very anti-Jewish when he appears on television. I realize that he damns the whites, the negroes, the liberals, and everybody, and all of that is what’s going to make it interesting to the reader, but the Jew is very sensitive and also of course very powerful in controlling newspapers, magazines and a good many book stores.” Malcolm’s across-the-board condemnation of Christians and Jews was where the trouble lay, Reynolds thought. “I realize he’s got to damn them and of course it’s his book, not yours,” but he wished that the particular denunciations of Christians and Jews were no stronger than his damning of whites in general. Reynolds also suggested that Haley note in an introduction that Malcolm preferred for the sake of objectivity to have a non-Muslim help him with his book. “What I’m trying to say is for you to get in somewhere that you’re not a Black Muslim. I’m just thinking of your future career.”18 Haley had another solution. “So I am going to encompass Malcolm’s Jewish criticisms with the body ‘white,’ with no specifications. The section in which he, by implication, extolls the Jewish community—as a model for the Negro to study, and copy . . . will be retained as it is. Through careful handling, I feel that I can get this pattern past Malcolm X.” But, in fact, a large number of anti-Semitic statements remained in the book.19
Haley and Reynolds were not the first to worry about the anti-Semitism of black nationalists. From Marcus Garvey to Elijah Muhammad to, later, H. Rap Brown of the Black Power movement, a number of black nationalists voiced special hostility toward Jews. Nor was Haley the first to attempt to expunge anti-Semitism from the published record of black nationalists. That had begun with W. E. B. Du Bois, who had studied in Berlin with anti-Semitic professors in the 1890s and brought home enmity that he integrated into Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois wrote that in the post–Civil War South “the Jew [was] the heir of the slave-baron. . . . Only a Yankee or a Jew could squeeze more blood from [the] debt cursed tenant.” He denounced “shrewd and unscrupulous Jews” and “the enterprising Russian Jew,” who by fraud had left blacks landle
ss. Against such oppression, Du Bois advised that Negroes practice “the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying . . . the same defence which the Jews of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries.” In 1953, fifty years after Souls of Black Folk appeared, Du Bois substituted “immigrant” for references to Jews—very similar to the revision that Haley proposed.20
From the outset of the writing of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley shaped the content of the book to maximize both its sensational value and its commercial success. He had the advice of mentors in making the manuscript accommodate political and commercial realities—and prejudices. Haley planned to append several essays to the autobiography in which he would interpret Malcolm’s life from the point of view of a Christian, liberal black man. He would counter the Nation of Islam’s anti-white positions, and then he would urge blacks toward Christianity, his answer to Malcolm X’s message. Haley reported to his editors that Malcolm agreed to his appendices. “You write what I want to say,” Malcolm concluded, “then you say whatever you want to.” In Haley’s mind, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was also the story of Alex Haley.21
Haley wrote Reynolds and McCormick long, excited letters, sometimes every day. The letters rejoiced over unwritten chapters. “Golly, what a book! I only wish that I could convey to you in one rush what a galvanic drama of the cartharsis of a man . . . is yet to unfold. It is such that even I do not fully appreciate its power until I get into the cumulative development of chapter by chapter.” Haley was certain that “no one who reads it, including negroes, is going to put it down very quickly, or is going to ‘pooh-pooh’ it, or is going to fail to react to it.” Another letter announced that “America’s most dramatic, successful demagogue—a new breed, the black one, the young, black one—is onstage.” By the time he wrote this, in the fall of 1963, Haley had heard Malcolm angrily reject the use of “demagogue” about himself, but Haley continued to use it to promote the sensational appeal of the book. The letters also contained minutiae about Haley’s life. He signed one seven-page, single-spaced missive, “’Bye. I’m going to run across the street and get a bite.” At the end of another letter, he reported, “Incidentally, I bought a car, that runs, a 1955 Dodge, for $80. Isn’t that just wild!”22
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