Mockingbird sings

The first biography of the reclusive Harper Lee shows that she contributed much more to "In Cold Blood" than we thought.

By Margot Mifflin

Read more: Books, Reviews, Book reviews

June 6, 2006 | The good news is that Harper Lee is alive, living with her sister in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala. She hasn't published a book since her Pulitzer Prize-winning "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), the most popular American novel of the 20th century (still beguiling nearly 1 million readers a year), which begat a film so true to its namesake that the two have merged in the public mind. The bad news is that she gave her last interview in 1964 and refused to cooperate with Charles Shields for this biography, which starts with a bang and ends with a desperate cry for help. Still, what "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" lacks in access, it makes up for in excellent timing and impressive research.

After the 2005 release of the film "Capote," with its frustratingly hazy depiction of Truman Capote's friend and "research assistant" Nelle (to friends) Harper (to readers) Lee, the door swung open for a biography. "Mockingbird" is the first, arriving just after she turned 80. Though it's ostensibly about the author, whose Alabama family and Southern racial consciousness inspired "To Kill a Mockingbird," it's also about Lee and Capote, childhood friends who grew up to become symbiotic figures, both personally and artistically, during the '60s. Both were precocious children out of step with their peers, whose slippery grip on gender was a social liability. As Shields puts it, "she was too rough for the girls, and he was too soft for the boys." Each had emotionally absent mothers: Capote's was a self-absorbed social climber; Lee's was chronically depressed, though in her more functional youth she'd played piano at Capote's 16-year-old mother's wedding. (To embroider this family quilt, Capote's father came on to Lee when she was a teenager and she responded by punching him in the nose; Capote hated Lee's gossipy mother, and parodied her, at age 10, in a story called "Mrs. Busybody.")

If the two shared what Lee called a "common anguish" and Capote dubbed "an apartness" in childhood, they were inverted artistically as adults: Each was fascinated by crime, but "In Cold Blood," Capote's genre-busting "non-fiction novel" about the murder of a Kansas family, exposed a world of random violence, presaging a future of rogue postal workers and murderous schoolchildren, while "To Kill a Mockingbird" painted a moral portrait of good and evil, leaving the reader comfortably nestled in the lap of righteousness. Shields doesn't frame it this way; his story is more anecdotal than analytical, but he gives you the raw material, neatly packaged, on which to base any number of term papers about the correlations between the two writers and their work. He answers several questions that have swirled around Lee and Capote (yes, the character Dill was based on Capote; no, Capote did not write part or all of "To Kill a Mockingbird"), and he introduces fresh information that puts a new spin on both authors. For example, Lee inspired Capote's character Ann "Jumbo" Finchburg, ("a sawed off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique") in his story "The Thanksgiving Visitor," as well as the boyish Idabel Tompkins of his novel "Other Voices, Other Rooms."

For fans of both Capote and "Capote," Shields' most salient revelation will be that Lee's contribution to "In Cold Blood" was much greater than the film conveys. First, Lee served as a social lubricant for Capote, who impressed Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective Harold Nye as "an absolute flake" in contrast to his assistant, who "looked like normal folk." Lead detective Alvin Dewey said, "If Capote came on as something of a shocker, she was there to absorb the shock." (He also called her a "good looker," though she was known for being frumpy.) More significantly, Capote relied on Lee not just for research, but also for characterization. "Nelle's gift for creating character sketches turned out to complement Truman's ability to recall remarks," writes Shields, reporting on the duo's first trip to Holcomb, Kan., to research the murders in 1959. "Many times over the next month, Capote's telegraphic descriptions of a conversation would end with 'See NL's notes' to remind him to use her insights later."

Lee noted that Dick Hickock's face, disfigured in a car accident, looked like someone had "cut it down the middle, then put it back together not quite in place." Capote wrote, "It was as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center." Capote paid the murderers $50 each to meet with him and Lee. In her notes about Hickock's demeanor during the interview, Lee wrote, "Never seen anyone so poised, relaxed, free & easy in the face of four 1st degree murder charges. He gave the impression of being completely in the moment, with no concern about tomorrow's troubles." Capote observed Hickock in prison: "Outwardly, Hickock seemed to one and all an unusually untroubled man."

Capote left out unflattering details about the Clutter family, some of which Lee had collected, because he needed his victims to look good. For example, Lee reported that the two surviving Clutter daughters showed up the day after their entire family was murdered and argued over who would take what, down to the kitchen utensils. Lee spoke to a family friend who recalled Nancy Clutter breaking down and crying about her mentally ill mother. And she wrote about how lonely and isolated Nancy was, asking, "How did she maintain the outward semblance of a wholesome, extremely bright and popular teenager without cracking at the seams? Her family life was ghastly." Capote sought the emotional truth of the Clutter murders, but, partly because of his careerism, he and Lee seem to have found two different stories.

Shields' chapter on "In Cold Blood" is almost worth the price alone, and makes you wonder why the film's producers didn't comb Capote's papers for material with Shields' thoroughness. He also draws compelling points of connection between Lee's own childhood and the events of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

For practical purposes, Atticus Finch was A.C. Lee, Harper Lee's father, a respected Monroeville lawyer who had defended two black men accused of murder, and lost. (Nelle's maternal grandfather was named Finch.) But the book's plot was based on a case in which a white jury convicted a black man of raping a white woman in Monroeville in 1934, causing local citizens to question the fairness of the decision. Shields notes, however, that A.C. Lee "only gradually rose to the moral standards of Atticus ... Like most men of his generation, he believed the current social order, segregation, was natural and created harmony between the races." He didn't become a civil rights advocate until the '50s. As a father, too, A.C. Lee was Atticus: firm, moral but never sanctimonious, and a bit old for fatherhood by the time Lee, the youngest of four children, was born. Gregory Peck met and studied him in preparation for the role of Atticus, calling him "a fine old gentleman of eighty-two, and truly sophisticated although he had never traveled more than a few miles from that small southern town."

Next page: Scout, Lee's 6-year-old narrator, is an icon of American girlhood