by Marja Mills
His subject matter intrigued her as well.
Capote called Nelle his “assistant researchist,” a title that did not reflect the depth of her contribution to the book. Those times in Kansas were among the last when the two old friends would enjoy a real camaraderie. In the years spent writing the book, and those that followed its 1966 publication, Capote was sinking into heavier abuse of drugs and alcohol.
“Truman was a world-class gossip and given to embellishment,” Nelle told me. “If not outright lies,” she added. It was one more reason the distance between them grew. He gossiped about her, same as he did with most famous people he knew, and she resented it.
What Nelle and Alice resented more than anything was Capote’s claim that Frances had tried to drown Nelle. “Talk about Southern grotesque!” he had said.
The story infuriated Nelle and Alice. Even decades later, their indignation rose in their voices.
“Imagine someone saying that about your mother,” Nelle said.
Alice’s affable tone during one of our Sunday afternoon interviews turned to disgust when I brought up the topic. “I was upset because Mother had a very gentle nature. Nothing could have caused her to try to dispose of one of her children. Truman would say anything when he was drunk,” Alice said.
After In Cold Blood, Capote’s subsequent celebrity centered more on his society connections than on his writing. He threw the famed, masked Black and White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel, and was a regular on the talk-show circuit. His long-awaited book became Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. It was published in 1986, two years after his 1984 death from drugs and alcohol.
While his decline continued the Lees didn’t want to have any more to do with him. Nelle attended Truman’s funeral in Los Angeles, where he had been living in the guesthouse of Joanna Carson, ex-wife of Johnny Carson.
With time, Nelle’s anger toward Truman was accompanied by sadness that his life turned out the way it did, that he seemed unable to put aside drugs and alcohol and whatever demons haunted him long enough to produce more of the quality writing he had in him.
She came to view his invention of his own myth, starting with his supposedly wretched childhood in Monroeville, as an inevitability, a character flaw over which he perhaps had little control.
In one of my early driving tours with Nelle and Alice, as the sisters were squabbling over Nelle’s accelerating at a yellow light, the topic of Truman came up.
Nelle clarified her feelings then. As far as she was concerned, Truman lied about people and belittled them as a way of life and he didn’t care whom he hurt.
“Truman was a psychopath, honey.”
That stopped me short. Nelle used language precisely. She wasn’t just tossing out the word like kids on a playground do, calling one another “psycho.”
“You mean in the clinical sense?” I asked.
“If I understand the meaning of the term,” she answered. “He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn’t apply to him.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Lees loved to explore their corner of Southern Alabama. Two of the first places Alice and Nelle took me were the nearby communities of Burnt Corn and Scratch Ankle. In 1814, local settlers fought Creek Indians in the Battle of Burnt Corn. Three years later, the town was established officially. Now all that’s left is a gas station, a collection of small houses, and a shuttered general store. Not far from there is the smattering of homes, churches, and, yes, a gas station that people still call Scratch Ankle. Officially the maps designate it as “Franklin and surrounding area.” The origin of the name Scratch Ankle? It’s up for debate. The leading theory attributes the name to the dog-borne fleas that, back in the day, worked their way under men’s socks and trousers and just below the hemline of women’s long skirts, bringing on an intolerable itch.
On a shopping trip to Mobile, Nelle, Judy, Ila, and I stopped by a Barnes & Noble in a large strip mall. Nelle was muttering about the decline of civilization after the young man in the music department hadn’t heard of the classical CD she was looking for: Mozart’s Magic Flute. In the local history section, I found a slim paperback with a maroon cover titled Place Names in Alabama.
On the drive back to Monroeville, I found Burnt Corn in the book and read the entry aloud. Nelle had a question: “Is Smut Eye in there?”
Sure enough, on page 129 was an entry for the Bullock County community, its humorous name generally attributed to “smut from fires blackening the faces or getting in the eyes of persons working over them or passing near them . . .”
Nelle asked me to look up the town of Reform—so named, the story goes, because of a traveling preacher who refused to return to the small settlement until its wayward citizens reformed. The name game was on. Judy, Ila, and Nelle tossed out other quirky names, some official, some not. I read the entries for places closer to Monroeville: I found Pine Apple, Opp, Mexia, and the town of Brewton’s Murder Creek, where in 1788, three men camping along the riverbank were robbed and killed. Once again, our drive turned to memories of old Alabama. Laughter and stories flowed as we skimmed past miles of cotton fields.
Clearly, some of the locales cited in the book were named to describe rather than to entice: Bug Tussle, Gravel Hill, Needmore, and Hell’s Half Acre. Not to mention Rattlesnake Mountain, Penitentiary Mountain, Sinking Creek, Polecat Creek (polecat being slang for “skunk”), and the former Massacre Island—no relation to Murder Creek.
The nicknames that proliferated back then were as fun as the place names.
In Tom Butts’s tiny community alone, he grew up with Shorty Higdon and Fatty Burt, Specs Watson and Legs Ryland. Shorty’s name and Fatty’s are self-explanatory. Fatty’s cousins, Pig and Bear Burt—farm kids like all the rest—got their nicknames from older brothers who decided one was a stinker and the other lumbered from room to room. Or at least that’s the speculation, thin on evidence.
Legs Ryland, a classmate of Tom’s, was tall. As for their pal Hickory Nut Salter, Tom never knew his real name or how the young Mr. Salter came to be Hickory Nut. “He grew up to be a Holiness preacher. I don’t know if he still goes by Hickory Nut or not. We could try to find out.” We never did.
On a crisp, sunny October day Nelle and her friend Bill Miller, a former Vanity Fair executive, were “going to ride,” taking a country drive. They invited me along. First we’d stop for breakfast at Nancy’s Ranch House Café, successor to the ill-fated Wanda’s Kountry Kitchen. Breakfast was eggs and grits, bacon and toast, and coffee. Lots of coffee.
Our waitress, a young woman in a black cowboy hat, stopped by our table.
“Would you like more coffee?”
“Yes,” Nelle said. “Mounds of it.”
At one point, Nelle held out her arm to show us a large, gold-toned wristwatch.
“Isn’t this marvelous?”
She chuckled. It was from a catalog for people with low vision.
On the pearly face, the little hand and the big hand were huge. Ken Johnson, the jeweler over on the square, had replaced the already large hands with even bigger ones. She was the proud owner of a tricked-out wristwatch.
“This will see me through.”
Through to the end of her life. I was growing accustomed to Nelle and Alice, Dale and Tom referring to this matter-of-factly.
We headed for nowhere in particular, passing lumber mills and cotton fields.
At the end of our expedition, we crested the small hill where Clausell Avenue meets the busier Claiborne Street and headed to West Avenue. As we passed the Hopewell CME church, Nelle had a question.
“What does Mr. Marzett have on his sign today?”
Bill slowed and I read it aloud. “EXPOSURE TO THE SON MAY PREVENT BURNING.” Clever, but Nelle and Alice’s favorite remained the one they spotted earlier. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON?
Language,
as always, was play.
Chapter Twenty-two
In many instances, the riverhead of their language was their early training in faith. Only Alice remained as deeply involved in the affairs of the Methodist Church as their father had been, but Nelle continued to support the church, generously, and attended services, in Monroeville and Manhattan, as long as her hearing allowed.
But Nelle said if she ever wrote her memoirs, she’d want the book to be called Where My Possessions Lie. The phrase is from the poem and hymn by Samuel Stennett that became popular at Methodists camps.
In her novel, the African American Reverend Sykes sings and lines this with his congregation the morning that Scout and Jem accompany Calpurnia to church. There are not enough hymnbooks to go around. This is the first time they’ve seen a minster line, or feed lines to the congregation, who repeats them back.
In the hymn, earthly existence is one of turmoil. Not so the afterlife, the Promised Land. It begins:
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
And cast a wishful eye,
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.
O’er all those wide extended plains
Shines one eternal day;
There God the Son forever reigns,
And scatters night away.
CHORUS:
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land;
Oh who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the promised land.
Alice offered little encouragement that any such memoir would be published, even posthumously. “There have been a number of people who have suggested she write her autobiography,” Alice said. “But she has not shown any interest.”
If Nelle never sat down to write her own story—and no one, not even Alice, can know for sure—she remained fascinated by the characters who populate rural Alabama. Past and present.
In fact, Nelle was so intrigued by a sequence of murders in the late 1970s in Alexander City, Alabama, that she started researching an In Cold Blood–style true-crime chronicle. Her research focused on a black minister who continued to collect insurance money as wives and relatives showed up dead, in succession.
After a year or so of investigation and interviews, Nelle eventually dropped the project.
Nelle told me that her research uncovered information she believed put her in personal jeopardy. She would not elaborate. She did say that she passed her notes along to a writer in residence at Auburn University, but he came to the same conclusions and also bowed out.
“Who was the writer in residence?” I asked.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said.
I didn’t pursue it. Alice echoed Nelle’s comments.
Certainly a nonfiction narrative of the case would have been fascinating. In a bizarre sequence of events, the part-time preacher, W. M. Maxwell, collected insurance money after five mysterious deaths that occurred over a few years.
In the first four cases, Maxwell was represented by attorney and former state senator Tom Radney Sr. When Maxwell requested Radney’s services for the fifth case, involving the death of his teenage niece, Radney refused. During the niece’s funeral, another uncle shot and killed Maxwell from the pew behind him.
At the subsequent trial, Radney defended the uncle, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Tom Radney Sr. died at age seventy-nine in 2011.
The defense attorney in the case, a main source for Nelle, later maintained that she struggled with the writing, and perhaps alcohol, and gave up.
Whatever the case with the Maxwell book, I had learned that alcohol could be a problem for Nelle.
That wasn’t my experience. I never saw her have more than a glass or two of wine with dinner. I also never got the kind of angry late-night calls from her that Tom had warned me about early on.
“I’ve thought about whether to say something about this to you,” he had told me. “I don’t know if you’ll get a call like that, but if you do, I don’t want you to drop dead of a heart attack. I’ve gotten them. Alice has gotten them. Other friends have gotten them. And it’s really startling when it happens. And then that’s it. There’s no mention of it the next time she sees you.”
We were quiet for a moment, as I reflected on this.
“Well, I appreciate the warning. You’re right. I might have had a heart attack on the spot if I didn’t know that could happen.”
“She did it once to Hilda when I wasn’t home and I took her to pieces over that. She never did it again, not to Hilda.”
“She always speaks so sweetly about Hilda.”
“And she means it. I don’t know, really, what’s behind it. Some paranoia that comes with being famous and being afraid people will take advantage of you for your money or whatever. She accuses people, chews them out. The alcohol fuels it. I don’t know if it’s some kind of release valve for pressures she feels or what. We all have our problems and doing that, well, it’s one of hers.”
If Capote is to be believed on the subject, the calls went back many years.
It struck me as the flip side to her lust for life. With great passion comes temptation. With extraordinary gifts come demons. As disciplined as Alice was in her personal habits and routines, Nelle was a woman of appetites. It was part of what was appealing about her; her gusto for experiences and spirited debate and food.
She was never hugely overweight but often wished she were twenty pounds lighter. She once checked herself into the local hospital (“back when you could just check yourself in”) in order to subsist, with her doctor’s help, on fluids for a week. She dropped weight, but quickly regained it. Many years later, when I knew her, it was still on her mind.
“I shouldn’t eat this,” she would say about the dessert before her, “but I’m going to.” It was a point of commiseration between us, as I, too, wanted to lose a few pounds.
She could summon discipline, however. Nelle sympathized with the difficulty a friend of mine was having trying to quit smoking. We were getting back into my car after stopping at Rite Aid.
“You’ve never smoked, have you,” Nelle said. It wasn’t a question, and she was right. I hadn’t. “It’s terribly hard,” Nelle told me. “But it can be done. I went cold turkey.”
Chapter Twenty-three
I was fascinated by the Lee family history, from a slave-holding ancestor on their mother’s side to the hardscrabble existence on their father’s. A. C. Lee’s life took him no farther than from Florida, where he grew up, to neighboring Alabama, where he raised his family. The distance was formidable nonetheless: He went from helping on his parents’ modest farm to reading law and becoming the attorney upon which Atticus Finch was modeled. Alice told me that her father refused to cultivate even a garden, so strong was his aversion to working the soil given his upbringing on the farm in rural Florida. A.C. never graduated from high school, much less college or law school, but “read” the law, as was the custom in the day.
The dark brown piano against the far wall, Alice told me, was the first major purchase their parents made as a married couple. Music mattered to Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Though some neighbors remember Mrs. Lee as a quiet woman who sat on the front porch for hours, seemingly at loose ends, Alice and Nelle described a mother whose piano playing would fill the living room, who loved to sing and read. Her more privileged background exposed her to the arts in a way she was pleased to pass on to her daughters.
The mental health of Frances Lee, and what that meant for Nelle’s upbringing, has been a matter of speculation both around Monroeville and in the press. It comes up in Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote, and would again in Charles Shields’s 2006 biography of Harper Lee. Frances had a breakdown after her second child’s failure to thrive. The ordeal with the infant Louise had not been previously reported.
I wanted to know everything Alice was comfortable telling me. And she was ready to set the matter straight for the record, as this particular myth deeply bothered both sisters. In interviews before I moved to Monroeville, while I lived next door, and in the conversations that continued after, the story of Frances’s ordeal emerged, along with what it meant for Alice, Nelle, and the rest of the family.
Alice was healthy as a baby; Louise was not. As she failed to thrive, A.C. and Frances grew more alarmed. They were at a loss for what to do and exhausted. “Mother collapsed,” Alice said, “because Louise was not getting any nourishment and she was crying twenty-four hours a day and she was losing weight. Mother thought she was losing her baby and also did not get any rest. She could not get away from that crying child. Well, you see, what was happening, the baby was starving to death and the doctors there did not know what was wrong. They tried her on all the kinds of baby food that you had then.”
Nothing worked. A.C. was working during the day. At home, he tended to his wife, five-year-old Alice, and baby Louise. “I don’t know how he held up under it,” Alice said, “because he couldn’t rest, either, with this crying baby.” In desperation, they sought out a specialist. “Well, they finally got to Selma and this famous pediatrician, Dr. William W. Harper. He diagnosed the problem,” Alice said, “and put the baby on a complicated formula, which almost from the first taste, Daddy said, she retained it and ate it and stopped crying.” Frances was relieved but exhausted. She was distraught, showing signs of what the family then, and now, called “a nervous disorder.”
“Well, Mother had had it,” Alice said. “She just absolutely collapsed. And my grandmother in Finchburg kept us.”
Again, the Lees found themselves dealing with a serious illness and sought the help of a specialist. That took gumption in an era when mental illness so often was confused with character defects. People with depression, anxiety disorders, and other conditions usually went without a diagnosis or treatment. Not Frances, who received a specialist’s care in Mobile, first in the hospital and then as an outpatient.