Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  He also hosted parties at a 130-acre farm he bought from Irwin, next door to the Museum of Appalachia. There, he renovated an old farmhouse and built several buildings to accommodate visitors. He created a two-acre lake with a dock leading to a gazebo at its center. He hired a decorator specializing in African American–themed art, but when she hung an image of a black fist, he fired her and put up his Hollywood memorabilia and scenes from Appalachia.11 In the next few years, he entertained his publishing friends from New York, among them Lisa Drew, and his television friends from Hollywood, including Lou Blau.

  Haley was a good citizen of Knoxville, a constant promoter of the joys of Tennessee life. He accepted many invitations to speak for free. Once he spoke to a student honor society that as a service project sponsored the local home for unwed mothers, and afterward he posed for pictures with a dozen pregnant teenagers. He agreed to teach a course at the University of Tennessee, and the university administrators asked the English department to name him an adjunct professor. But the English professors, often struggling with plagiarism by students, thought he might have already set a bad example. The journalism department did take him on, but his service did not last long because he often failed to make it to class, and his unreliability was reported in the student newspaper.12

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  Haley had attracted a biographer who learned perhaps more than anyone else about the inner life of the writer. Anne Romaine was a pretty and extroverted forty-three-year-old North Carolina native who had studied history in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the mid-1960s. While there, she turned to civil rights activism in the Southern Student Organizing Committee, which led to her create the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, a racially mixed troupe of traditional singers and musicians who toured the South performing protest songs. She also wrote, produced, and recorded folk music. She and her activist husband, Howard Romaine, lived in Nashville in the mid-1970s, and there she worked as a curator for the Tennessee State Museum, becoming involved in the naming of the Haley home in Henning as a state landmark. She met Haley in 1986, and they agreed that she would write his biography. By the time she was seriously at work on it, in the mid-1980s, she and Howard Romaine were divorced.

  Anne Romaine did a massive amount of work collecting documents and conducting interviews, but her research was not a comprehensive quest for sources, and her interviews were not systematic inquiries and usually were poorly transcribed. Eventually she got access to Haley’s personal papers, which might have yielded a good biography. But she died suddenly of a burst appendix in 1995, before she could write much of her book. Her papers, containing her research on Haley, were deposited at the University of Tennessee archives. Romaine’s curiosity about Haley was intensely personal, and her findings revealed his personal side in a way that his almost continuous autobiographical writing and talking never had.

  Romaine spent a lot of time with Haley, although not as much as she wanted. She said he found “one obstacle after another” to delay the biography. But they were, she later said, “close friends for six years.” He told her of his first sexual encounter and recounted the two times in life he had had angry confrontations. She knew his tastes in music and appears not to have approved of his affinity for Mel Torme, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, and Arthur Prysock. She witnessed his friendships in Knoxville with rich, Republican men, of which, again, she did not approve. She witnessed his “status as a folk hero.” She noted that once, in Nashville, a black woman stopped him on the street and castigated him for wearing polyester pants: “A man of your stature who represents success for those of us who are black should dress like he is somebody—not like some ordinary, old-timey man.” Haley asked Romaine what was wrong with polyester pants, and she explained that natural fibers were more stylish. He now understood, but the problem was, “I just ordered seven more pairs from the Sears catalog. I got them in every color. . . . They come already hemmed to my length.”13

  Romaine freely speculated about Haley’s psyche. She agreed with Nan Haley that “Alex is a master at not showing his feelings.” He did not appreciate Simon Haley’s “outgoing, free wheeling” manner, much preferring his grandfather, Will Palmer, “the strong silent type.” Romaine asked about Haley’s marital woes just as he was getting divorced from My Lewis. He was “too intensely private in his marriages,” he admitted to Romaine. She interviewed Haley’s daughter Lydia Anne, his first child and Romaine’s exact contemporary. Lydia Anne Haley was “a reformer and spiritualist,” but Romaine thought she was an embarrassment to her father, going against his view of “what a woman ought to be,” quiet and demure like the three he had married. Lydia Anne Haley was a “flashy and brassy” woman who helped people “understand why they are here.”

  Romaine recounted spending late nights interviewing Haley at his Knoxville homes, just the two of them, with the writer lying on a sofa. Then in a private note, she wrote, “He told me he had been in love with me for a long time[,] since we first met in 1986.” She does not say they became lovers, nor does she deny it. She sensed his insecurities: “I am a Greek chorus to Alex. ‘Here are the things I admire about you. You are wonderful.’”

  Romaine’s curiosity about Haley’s inner self led her to pose personal questions to the dozens of people she interviewed. She discovered that “he surrounds his outer professional life with white women and men and his close circle with black men and women.” She got intimate details of Haley’s first marriage from Nan. She elicited from William “Fella” Haley his bitterness about Alex’s neglect of him, which was less surprising than William and Nan’s belief that Alex and Nan were never legally divorced. While Romaine was interviewing Alex’s half-sister, Doris, his stepmother, Zeona, suddenly appeared, and Romaine captured Zeona denouncing Alex as a lout—and confirming the shrewish character that some saw in her but that Alex would not comment on. She learned of Leonard Jeffries’s pain over Haley’s failure to acknowledge his contributions toward advancing black genealogy. She listened as David Wolper, who adored Haley, expressed his bafflement at Haley’s contradictions. Wolper told Romaine he wanted her to find out why Alex, “the ultimate symbol of the family,” could not “keep a family together. . . . Why is he such a wanderer, and why he didn’t write any more than he’s done, why he can’t meet deadlines. . . . Why you go in his houses and he has not one picture of his children, no picture of his wife, there’s no picture of his mother and father.” Those were good questions, but even the ever-personal, ever-penetrating Anne Romaine never got the answers.

  After all her interviews and her intimate conversations with Haley, Romaine had put together a portrait of a likable narcissist, although she did not call him that. “Everybody likes Alex,” Betty Shabazz had said many years earlier.

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  Haley finally ended his long dry spell of writing in 1988. That year he published a novella, A Different Kind of Christmas, about a slave’s escape on the Underground Railroad. He also worked on Roots: The Gift, a 1988 Christmas television special. Neither was a creation of much import, and each depended a lot on Haley’s celebrity for its limited success. Haley told David Wolper that the miniseries Queen was what got him writing again. He wrote a seven-hundred-page outline of Queen for Mark Wolper, David’s son, who was producing the series, and the Australian screenwriter David Stevens, who was writing the eight hours of television script. Queen told the story of the relationship between Simon Haley’s maternal grandparents, the Confederate Colonel James Jackson and a slave woman, and then the life of their child, Queen. Haley had met white Jackson family members in Florence, Alabama, and got information about the family from them. Some critics thought Haley soft-soaped the relationship between Queen’s parents, perhaps making it a story of more romantic love than had actually existed. Still, the commitment to marry exclusively within one’s race, an imperative of both black nationalists and white supremacists, was certainly waning in the broader culture, a truth the pr
ogram perhaps sought to reflect. Or Haley might have been returning to the truth that blacks and whites had always had intimate relations in America, even if many such relationships were not undertaken by choice.14

  Haley watched with detachment in 1991 and early 1992 as Spike Lee’s production of a biopic, Malcolm X, revitalized black nationalism. Lee and Amiri Baraka, the preeminent poet of black nationalism, engaged in a public argument over Lee’s treatment of the slain icon’s life. Haley said that Lee had every right to project his “vision of Malcolm.” The movie sparked a revitalization of interest in its subject. The renewed appreciation of Malcolm focused to a large extent on the autobiography, a text for which Haley was mostly responsible. That fact was not usually acknowledged amid the controversy over whether Lee had “gotten Malcolm right.”15

  In its February 1992 issue, the black celebrity magazine Essence celebrated Haley’s return to writing, discussing Queen, which Haley had been talking about for a decade by then. The article noted that the writer’s speaking engagements enabled his philanthropy—the full scholarships he provided for needy Tennesseans and Gambians to attend college. Essence concluded the piece with this paean: “Alex Haley is a national treasure, and his importance to the world, and to African-Americans in particular, was perhaps best expressed by Haley himself when . . . he wrote that in Africa ‘when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.’ Fortunately, Alex Haley, our griot, lives!”

  But not for long, because the Essence piece had just reached the newsstands when readers were shocked to learn that Alex Haley had died on February 10, 1992, at a hospital in Seattle. He had been admitted to the emergency room late on a Sunday night in the midst of having a heart attack. He had gone to Seattle for a speaking engagement, having met earlier that day with Mark Wolper in Los Angeles to discuss the Queen script. His family reported that he suffered from diabetes and a thyroid condition, but they thought he was otherwise in good health. Haley had long been a smoker, a high risk factor for heart disease, although it was not clear whether he was still smoking at the time of his death.16

  His funeral was held in Memphis, because there was no church large enough in Henning to accommodate the throng that assembled to honor him. Among the attendees were LeVar Burton and Cicely Tyson from the Roots cast; Dick Gregory; Betty Shabazz; Lamar Alexander, now U.S. secretary of education; and representatives from Senegal and the Gambia. All three of his wives were there, and the last, Myran Lewis Haley, eulogized him: “Thank you, Alex, you have helped us know who we truly are.” Also speaking were Malcolm’s daughter Attallah Shabazz, who was Haley’s goddaughter, and Jesse Jackson. “He made history talk,” Jackson said. “He lit up the long night of slavery. He gave our grandparents personhood. He gave Roots to the rootless.” Haley was buried on the front lawn of Will Palmer’s home in Henning, just a few feet from the porch where he had heard the family stories. The funeral received coverage around the world and was the subject of a five-page spread in Jet magazine.17

  As is typical for a major celebrity in the United States, Haley’s death inspired a fascination with his estate. According to his will, his brothers and his children were to inherit the bulk of his assets in trust. The will provided for cash gifts of $30,000 each to George Sims; Haley’s half-sister, Doris; Nan; and Haley’s longtime Los Angeles assistant, Jackie Naipo. Newspaper and magazines soon reported, however, that Haley was $1.5 million in debt when he died and that no money would go out anytime soon. According to the New York Times, the debts resulted from losses in real estate, and the article also cited Haley’s cash gifts to friends and students. In fact, Haley’s finances were a mess. The figure of his indebtedness almost matched what he had spent on his farm. He told people in the mid-1980s that his income was about $3 million a year, but that figure had fallen by 1991 to about $750,000, so that his lectures were his main source of income. Before he died, the debts were burdensome enough that he had put the farm up for sale. The indebtedness resulted in part from a decline in his income from royalties and from rising expenses connected to support staff in a Knoxville office, caretakers on the farm, and assistants in Los Angeles. Haley’s lawyer blamed Haley’s overpayment of staff and general mismanagement of money for the insolvency of his estate when he died: “People took advantage of him. Something that he could buy for a dollar, he paid six.”18

  When his will was probated in Knoxville in March 1992, a long line of creditors formed, led by banks, but also including furniture suppliers, a tractor company, and the Memphis morticians who conducted his funeral and now presented a bill for more than $39,000. George Haley, his brother’s executor, announced that the estate would eventually return to solvency with the reduction of expenses. He believed that income from writing projects that were in the works when Alex died, particularly Henning and Queen, would bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.19

  There then emerged a series of challenges to the will. Myran Haley had a prenuptial agreement with Alex and alleged that George Haley was withholding money that was due her. She said that she had been Haley’s literary collaborator for many years and that a 1991 contract, signed after she had sued for divorce but before the divorce was granted, entitled her to a third of the estate and the right to finish Queen. The executors of the estate argued that the contract was unenforceable because Haley had signed it under duress. George Sims sued the estate for nonpayment of his salary as Haley’s research assistant, for money Alex owed him for debts he had covered, and for half the royalties of both Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “I was with him for 32 years and [George Haley] knew nothing about his writing life,” Sims told a journalist. “They treated me like shit.” William and Nan Haley claimed that she should be the sole wife to inherit money, because she had never been legally divorced from Alex. His death certificate listed Nan as the surviving spouse. Betty Shabazz sued to get half-ownership of an early draft of the manuscript of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. There was much confusion over which items in Haley’s personal papers were of value. In September 1992 in Knoxville chancery court, the estate was settled with Myran’s and George Sims’s interests recognized, along with those of Haley’s family members.

  George Haley then moved to liquidate as much of the estate as possible to reduce the debt. This decision angered Haley’s Hollywood friends Blau and Wolper, who thought there should be a major museum devoted to his life and work, filled with the articles that George was selling. The farm was sold to the Children’s Defense Fund, and the sale of home decorations and memorabilia got much press attention. Except for the $50,000 paid for the Pulitzer Prize, the bidding for manuscript material, especially the Malcolm X drafts and tapes of Playboy interviews, brought the most money. Gregory Reed, a Detroit dealer in literary property, bought the three chapters of Malcolm’s autobiography that were removed before publication. The University of Tennessee bought much of the manuscript material to go with the large deposit of his files Alex Haley had made not long before his death. Haley’s housekeeper watched the auction with deep sadness, saying, “If he could see what was happening now, he’d be shaking his hand and saying, ‘Aw, babe, I can’t believe what a fuss they’re making. ’Cause Mr. Haley didn’t want people to bother and fuss.”20

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  Roots had been mostly supported by public opinion in the face of doubters about its authenticity. In the 1980s and 1990s, that support dissipated, as memories faded and both Roots miniseries went on the shelf. A few detractors kept hounding Haley even after his death. The opening of his papers at the University of Tennessee library was probably the prompt for an exposé written by the journalist Philip Nobile and published under the headline “Uncovering Roots” in the Village Voice in February 1993, exactly a year after Haley’s death. The Voice had published Eliot Fremont-Smith’s critical article in May 1977, and Nobile himself had already written a skeptical editorial piece for the New York Times about Haley’s genealogical claims. The 1993 article was a full-scale as
sault on Haley’s career and character, drawing together a compendium of allegations of professional malfeasance—essentially all that had been made over the years and then some. Nobile called Roots “a hoax, a literary painted mouse, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of bogus research,” and a fraud successful only because a “massive perjury” had covered it up. Nobile called Roots “an elegant and complex make-it-up-as-you-go-along scam.” He repeated the Ottaway charges about inaccuracy in Haley’s Gambian research, and he found a transcript of a recording made during Haley’s first visit to Juffure that contradicted Haley’s account of it in Roots. Nobile alleged that all of the events of that day had been staged. Nobile interviewed Ebou Manga, who provided information that confirmed that Haley had given an inaccurate chronology of his research. Nobile then asserted that Haley had not even written the sections of the book detailing the African background. He found in the Haley papers a file called “Fisher-edited copy” that showed how thoroughly Murray Fisher had rewritten the African section of Roots.