Marja Mills was the Chicago Tribune reporter and feature writer who was instructed to go to Monroeville, Alabama in 2001. Monroeville is Harper Lee's hometown. Earlier that year, the Chicago Public Library had chosen the elusive author's book To Kill a Mockingbird as the first selection it its One Book, One Chicago program. Mills was tasked with finding out more about the famously publicity-shunning Harper Lee. Luckily for her, Harper Lee and her sister Alice Lee opened their doors to her. Thus began long conversations and a warm friendship between Mills and the Lee sisters that lasted about five years. Mills even rented a house next door to the Lees and stayed there for about 18 months when she stopped working for the Tribune as a result of her being afflicted with lupus. She later wrote a book The Mockingbird Next Door Life With Harper Lee based on her friendship with the Lees and their close friends in and around Monroeville.
However Mills' book faces controversy when it was about to be published. On July 14, 2014, the day before publication of the book, Harper Lee issued a statement saying that The Mockingbird Next Door was executed without her cooperation or permission and based on false pretenses. Apparently Lee issued a similar statement back in 2011 when Penguin Press announced that it had acquired the book.
I have read that book by Mills and have written something about it, in a post with a title just like the book dated February 7, 2016. From the way the book is written, is quite difficult for me to imagine Mills as trying to deceive the Lees by publishing that book. The book is about warmth and closeness between good friends. There is a lot of tenderness and care between Mills and the Lees, despite their age difference. Mills had taken copious amount of notes from their conversations and interviews while she was in Monroeville. Boxes after boxes of notes and tapes. Did she hide the fact that she was going to turn all those notes and recorded conversations into a book? Well, I definitely would have guessed that, if I were one of the Lees even if Mills did not tell me. Did Harper Lee specifically said no to a book? There was no mention of it in that memoir. Well, never mind all that. The important thing is the memoir is awesome and is in no way degrading of belittling whatsoever to the Lee sisters.
The first segment below is a question-and-answer session with Marja Mills regarding her first book. While the second and third segments are articles written by Mills about the Lee sisters and her close friendship with the sisters and their friends in Monroeville.
LIFE
Author Q&A: Marja Mills
Jana Hoops, Clarion-Ledger correspondent. Jul 11, 2015
Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Marja Mills describes her friendship with Harper and Alice Lee, saying she “was surprised by the big sense of fun both sisters had — perhaps because Harper was known to be so private, and Alice such a proper attorney. Nelle loved telling a good story.
Born and reared in Madison, Wisconsin, Marja Mills is a 1985 graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Her interest in other cultures led to studies in Paraguay, Spain and Sweden. A former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, she now lives in downtown Chicago.
She often spends time in Madison and her father's hometown of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, about half the size of Monroeville, Alabama, where she met and eventually moved next door to Harper "Nelle" Lee and her sister, Alice Fitch Lee.
Mills has memories of her dad talking about living in Pass Christian for a time in 1943, and what a different climate and culture it was for a 6-year-old boy from Black River Falls. He and his mother stayed in a hotel when his father was stationed nearby in the Navy.
"My dad used to follow around the hotel's maintenance person, an African-American man called Brown, who was endlessly kind to a small boy who had no one to play with there," she said.
In "The Mocking Bird Next Door," you share your memoir of an unlikely and incredible opportunity to befriend and write about Harper "Nelle" Lee and her sister Alice Lee, as you lived for a while next door to them (from 2004 through 2006) in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala. Please relate the story of how the "One Book, One Chicago" program set the stage for this in 2001.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" was the first book chosen for the library system's new citywide reading program, which continues to this day. The novel also happened to be Mayor Richard M. Daley's favourite book. So it was in that context that my editor at the Chicago Tribune stopped at my desk one day in 2001 and asked, "Want to take a trip?"
I wrote a letter to Alice Lee, Harper Lee's older sister, lawyer and gatekeeper, letting her know when I'd be in town on assignment. When I knocked on their door as I neared the end of my reporting in Monroeville — I had not expected to meet either sister — Alice answered and invited me in. It was the beginning of a long friendship.
What would you say surprised you most about the sisters?
I was surprised by the big sense of fun both sisters had — perhaps because Harper (known as "Nelle" to her friends) was known to be so private, and Alice such a proper attorney. Nelle loved telling a good story, but sometimes she could hardly finish because she would begin laughing so hard. She'd take her glasses off, tip her head back and laugh until she could resume her story.
And Alice's knowledge was something to behold. A friend of theirs said that her memory brought to mind the African proverb that when an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.
I hadn't known they were great fans of football and golf. In fact, in earlier years, both had played golf on the local course.
I was also surprised at how modestly they lived. They treasured books and experiences more than material goods. Nelle told me "One thing about us, we can appreciate beauty without needing to possess it."
In light of Harper Lee's determination to stay out of the spotlight and grant very few interviews since the release of her phenomenally successful novel in 1960, why do you think the sisters granted you such open access?
I'd already known them for three years when I moved next door, with their blessing. They had liked the piece I'd written about them and their town in the Chicago Tribune in 2002, and had invited me on return visits.
By living in Monroeville, I had the opportunity to really get to know the place and the people, to let them reveal themselves over time. That's a luxury most journalists don't have. Nelle and Alice did things on their own terms and in their own time. The way this experience unfolded gradually was more compatible with that. "You let the river run," was the way (their friend) the Rev. Thomas Butts put it.
Timing played a part as well. It happened that while I was there, two movies and a biography involving Nelle were in the works, and she didn't know how she'd be depicted. Both movies were about Truman Capote's researching of "In Cold Blood," when Nelle accompanied him to Kansas. She was played by Catherine Keener in "Capote," and by Sandra Bullock in "Infamous."
She and Alice talked about myths and untruths that had proliferated over the years. Alice was the keeper of the family history. She and those around her were aware that her family stories could be lost if they weren't recorded.
What did you originally envision for the purpose and the form of the book, and in what ways, if any, was the finished book different from your early intents?
I wanted to record as much as people were willing to share with me and, of course, didn't know at the outset exactly what shape that would take. There was such a wealth of material. As it turns out, the book chronicles the last chapter of life as the Lee sisters long had known it. Nelle had a serious stroke in 2007, the year after I left Monroeville, and wasn't able to live at home any more. Alice continued to work and live at home until she was about 100. She died last year at age 103.
Please tell me about the cover of the book.
That's a photograph taken on the Hollywood set of the 1962 movie of "To Kill a Mockingbird" that starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Here, Harper Lee shares a porch swing with Mary Badham, the young actress who played Scout.
Did you continue to stay in touch with the Lee sisters and could you comment on recent confusion about their authorisation of the book?
I saw Alice last fall, about a month before she passed away in November. I last saw Nelle in 2010.
As for the confusion, Alice looked into a 2011 letter attributed to Nelle Harper that disavowed the book. Alice issued a statement that said the other had gone out without her knowledge and did not represent her feelings or those of her sister. Someone had typed up the letter and taken it to Nelle to sign. "Now she has no memory of the incident," Alice said in a fax to me after asking her sister about it.
Have you spoken to Harper (Nelle) Lee about the planned release of what will be her second book, "Go Set a Watchman," this July? Can you comment on this "surprise" announcement? The book has been described as a sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird," even though it was written first.
I was as surprised as anyone about this new book. For so long, she had said she wouldn't publish another book.
"The Mockingbird Next Door" is your first book. Personally and professionally, what would you say you took away from this rare experience?
The sisters were marvellously generous with their time and insights, and I treasure the friends I made in the South. This opportunity was a rare gift for which I am forever grateful.
The Harper Lee I Knew
By Marja Mills July 20, 2015
The Washington Post
Harper Lee published her second novel, “Go Set a Watchman”, more than 50 years after the Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
The highly anticipated, controversial release of “Go Set a Watchman” has trained a spotlight on Nelle Harper Lee and the Alabama hometown that was — she once told me wryly — “100 miles from anywhere.”
It still is, but the distance that strikes me most is the one between her life 10 years ago when I lived next door to her and her existence now, in a wheelchair in an assisted living centre, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door.
For decades, Nelle, as her friends call her, divided her time between her apartment in Manhattan and the modest, book-filled house she shared with her older sister, Alice Finch Lee, in their south Alabama hometown of Monroeville. She chauffeured Alice, whom she fondly called “Atticus in a skirt,” to and from the law firm where Alice had practised for nearly 70 years. “Driving Miss Alice,” Nelle would say with a smile.
When I lived next door to the Lee sisters from the fall of 2004 until the spring of 2006, she and I would sometimes take an exercise class for seniors at the community centre. She did her laundry at the Laundromat one town over because they didn’t own a washing machine. She liked to slip behind the wheel of her Buick and explore the red dirt roads of the rural county she vividly brought to life in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Together, Nelle and Alice dealt for decades with the complicated business of being Harper Lee. Nearly 15 years older, Alice served as gatekeeper, adviser, protector. We’d first met in 2001, when I was on assignment for the Chicago Tribune. Nelle was 75 then, and Alice about to turn 90. They liked the long profile I published, “A Life Apart: Harper Lee, the Complex Woman Behind a Delicious Mystery,” and invited me to continue visiting. Over time, the idea of my writing a book about the Lee sisters and their world in Monroeville, with their guidance, had taken root in our conversations. With their blessing, I rented the house next door.
After the phenomenal success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Nelle famously withdrew from the public spotlight in the early 1960s and never published another book — until last week. She long had maintained that she wouldn’t publish another. She didn’t want to go through the publicity again, she told friends. And she had said what she had to say in “Mockingbird.” It was clear that the overwhelming affection people had for the novel and its characters was both a privilege and a burden. That was true in 1960. It was true 40 years later.
“There were so many demands made on her,” Alice told me. “People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”
Alice, for her part, handled much of the business and correspondence that were part of the novel’s remarkable success. Daily, as she had for years, Alice visited their post office box and, in plastic grocery bags, toted the letters home or to the office.
The highly anticipated, controversial release of “Go Set a Watchman” has trained a spotlight on Nelle Harper Lee and the Alabama hometown that was — she once told me wryly — “100 miles from anywhere.”
It still is, but the distance that strikes me most is the one between her life 10 years ago when I lived next door to her and her existence now, in a wheelchair in an assisted living centre, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door.
For decades, Nelle, as her friends call her, divided her time between her apartment in Manhattan and the modest, book-filled house she shared with her older sister, Alice Finch Lee, in their south Alabama hometown of Monroeville. She chauffeured Alice, whom she fondly called “Atticus in a skirt,” to and from the law firm where Alice had practised for nearly 70 years. “Driving Miss Alice,” Nelle would say with a smile.
When I lived next door to the Lee sisters from the fall of 2004 until the spring of 2006, she and I would sometimes take an exercise class for seniors at the community centre. She did her laundry at the Laundromat one town over because they didn’t own a washing machine. She liked to slip behind the wheel of her Buick and explore the red dirt roads of the rural county she vividly brought to life in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Together, Nelle and Alice dealt for decades with the complicated business of being Harper Lee. Nearly 15 years older, Alice served as gatekeeper, adviser, protector. We’d first met in 2001, when I was on assignment for the Chicago Tribune. Nelle was 75 then, and Alice about to turn 90. They liked the long profile I published, “A Life Apart: Harper Lee, the Complex Woman Behind a Delicious Mystery,” and invited me to continue visiting. Over time, the idea of my writing a book about the Lee sisters and their world in Monroeville, with their guidance, had taken root in our conversations. With their blessing, I rented the house next door.
After the phenomenal success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Nelle famously withdrew from the public spotlight in the early 1960s and never published another book — until last week. She long had maintained that she wouldn’t publish another. She didn’t want to go through the publicity again, she told friends. And she had said what she had to say in “Mockingbird.” It was clear that the overwhelming affection people had for the novel and its characters was both a privilege and a burden. That was true in 1960. It was true 40 years later.
“There were so many demands made on her,” Alice told me. “People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”
Alice, for her part, handled much of the business and correspondence that were part of the novel’s remarkable success. Daily, as she had for years, Alice visited their post office box and, in plastic grocery bags, toted the letters home or to the office.
Life in Monroeville was one of familiar routines. Nelle and I were having breakfast at one of her favourite hole-in-the-walls, the City Café, one morning. A woman from the Finchburg area approached nervously with her grandchildren. Nelle was gracious, and they chatted briefly as our eggs cooled. As the group walked away, I thought to myself how pleased they looked, how many times this encounter would be told and retold, surely a favourite story. Nelle had a different thought: “I hope I didn’t disappoint them,” she said.
It was a glimpse at the weight of expectations she shouldered all those years, in the literary world and in day-to-day life.
I was diagnosed with lupus in my 30s, so part of my daily routine was managing that condition. Even though I was decades younger than the Lees and the friends with whom we socialised, the autoimmune condition forced me to live at a slower speed. I moved at their pace. During an early visit to Monroeville, I made a trip to the emergency room. As I was receiving treatment, I was surprised to discover Nelle sitting across from my gurney. She glanced over at the nurses. She lowered her voice and leaned in closer: “If anyone asks, I’m your mother-in-law. Otherwise they won’t let me stay back here with you. Only relatives. Rules.” She spit out the last word.
These were spirited women, passionate about the history of their rural corner of the South. Country drives we took together inspired stories of their growing up and amusement at the more creative Alabama place names. Burnt Corn and Scratch Ankle were two favourites. The sisters also encouraged me to visit as many churches as I could to educate me about the South. Before she took me to Miss Mary’s Pentecostal Church in Scratch Ankle, Nelle said, “Don’t worry. There won’t be any snakes. At least I don’t think so. They’re the least roll-y of the Holy Rollers.”
The sisters also delighted in the memory of their father. A.C. Lee was the inspiration for the character of Atticus Finch. He died in 1962, but he remained a presence in Alice and Nelle’s lives. He regularly came up in conversation, and when someone would share a story of their father, they lit up. You could see the girl in them at these moments, still proud daughters all those years later.
“I adored my father and wanted to be just like him,” Alice said. She practised law with him, shared the Lee home in Monroeville with him until his death, and, like him, was deeply involved with the Methodist church.
The sisters still lived in that same house when I knew them. In 2005, Nelle was growing increasingly anxious about a coming biography and two Truman Capote movies in the works. She didn’t know how she’d be depicted in any of them. I think the combination of those events encouraged her to open up to me even more. “I know what you can call your book,” she told me one day over coffee at Burger King. She leaned in and stabbed her finger in the air, as she often did when making a point: “’Having Their Say.’ I know they used it with the Delany sisters, but titles aren’t copyrightable.” Nelle beamed. “Having Our Say” was a bestselling book about two African American sisters, one sweet and one salty, looking back on their lives. In our scenario, Alice was the sweet one. Nelle was the saltier one.
After the release of the movies and the biography, well after the storm of fresh publicity was over, I reminded Nelle of something she had said to me about “To Kill a Mockingbird” years before at the Excel Main Street Diner: “I wish I’d never written the damn thing.” On this day, over coffee, I had my notebook out and was going over items I wanted to include in my book. “Do you still feel that way?” I asked her. She glanced away, reflecting on the question. Then she looked at me again. “Sometimes,” she said. “But then it passes.”
It was a glimpse at the weight of expectations she shouldered all those years, in the literary world and in day-to-day life.
I was diagnosed with lupus in my 30s, so part of my daily routine was managing that condition. Even though I was decades younger than the Lees and the friends with whom we socialised, the autoimmune condition forced me to live at a slower speed. I moved at their pace. During an early visit to Monroeville, I made a trip to the emergency room. As I was receiving treatment, I was surprised to discover Nelle sitting across from my gurney. She glanced over at the nurses. She lowered her voice and leaned in closer: “If anyone asks, I’m your mother-in-law. Otherwise they won’t let me stay back here with you. Only relatives. Rules.” She spit out the last word.
These were spirited women, passionate about the history of their rural corner of the South. Country drives we took together inspired stories of their growing up and amusement at the more creative Alabama place names. Burnt Corn and Scratch Ankle were two favourites. The sisters also encouraged me to visit as many churches as I could to educate me about the South. Before she took me to Miss Mary’s Pentecostal Church in Scratch Ankle, Nelle said, “Don’t worry. There won’t be any snakes. At least I don’t think so. They’re the least roll-y of the Holy Rollers.”
The sisters also delighted in the memory of their father. A.C. Lee was the inspiration for the character of Atticus Finch. He died in 1962, but he remained a presence in Alice and Nelle’s lives. He regularly came up in conversation, and when someone would share a story of their father, they lit up. You could see the girl in them at these moments, still proud daughters all those years later.
“I adored my father and wanted to be just like him,” Alice said. She practised law with him, shared the Lee home in Monroeville with him until his death, and, like him, was deeply involved with the Methodist church.
The sisters still lived in that same house when I knew them. In 2005, Nelle was growing increasingly anxious about a coming biography and two Truman Capote movies in the works. She didn’t know how she’d be depicted in any of them. I think the combination of those events encouraged her to open up to me even more. “I know what you can call your book,” she told me one day over coffee at Burger King. She leaned in and stabbed her finger in the air, as she often did when making a point: “’Having Their Say.’ I know they used it with the Delany sisters, but titles aren’t copyrightable.” Nelle beamed. “Having Our Say” was a bestselling book about two African American sisters, one sweet and one salty, looking back on their lives. In our scenario, Alice was the sweet one. Nelle was the saltier one.
After the release of the movies and the biography, well after the storm of fresh publicity was over, I reminded Nelle of something she had said to me about “To Kill a Mockingbird” years before at the Excel Main Street Diner: “I wish I’d never written the damn thing.” On this day, over coffee, I had my notebook out and was going over items I wanted to include in my book. “Do you still feel that way?” I asked her. She glanced away, reflecting on the question. Then she looked at me again. “Sometimes,” she said. “But then it passes.”
Now, she has another book generating record-breaking sales. (HarperCollins reports that the book is the fastest-selling in its history.) She has the intensity of the media spotlight she avoided for many years. What she doesn’t have is Alice: her sister, her protector, her attorney and, for all those years, her partner in that sometimes exhilarating, sometimes maddening and always complicated business of being Harper Lee.
“I don’t know what I’ll do when she’s gone,” Nelle once told long-time Lee family friend Thomas Lane Butts, a Methodist minister, about her sister.
Her assisted living facility is a short distance from the house she shared with Alice, but it is a world away from the existence she knew 10 years ago. She’ll be 90 next year. Sadly, she is facing the final chapter of her life without the benefit of the sisterly partnership upon which she relied all of her life.
She no longer sees some of the friends with whom she used to regularly spend time. These days, communications go through the attorney handling her affairs. Her visitors are restricted to those on an approved list. I am not on that list and have not enjoyed the pleasure of her company for several years.
Alice practised law until she was 100. In 2011, she wrote to me, “Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.” Alice Lee died in November, at 103. Two and half months later, the publication of “Go Set a Watchman” was announced.
Marja Mills is the author of “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee” (Penguin).
A Life Apart
Harper Lee, The Complex Woman Behind 'A Delicious Mystery'
September 13, 2002|
By Marja Mills, staff reporter, The Chicago Tribune
MONROEVILLE, Ala. — They could be any two ageing Southern sisters out for a Sunday drive.
The younger of the two stashes her sister's walker in the back of the Buick, then slips into the driver's seat and heads for open road.
With the love of exploration they have always shared, the women leave behind their small hometown, with its courthouse bell tolling the hours. Their windows rolled up tight against the bugs and sledgehammer heat of southern Alabama, they skim past cotton fields that stretch to the horizon.
The car kicks up little clouds of red dust on the dirt roads that slice through the region's piney woods and pockets of poverty.
It is a corner of the Deep South made familiar to readers around the world by the spirited, white-haired woman at the wheel. For she is not just another resident of this rural county. She is the elusive, fiercely private author of one of the 20th Century's best-read novels, "To Kill a Mockingbird."
She is Harper Lee.
For nearly 40 years, Lee has been, in the words of a local historian, "a delicious mystery."
Despite abiding interest in the author and her 1960 novel of small-town childhood, racial injustice and personal courage, she has maintained a public silence that essentially predates the Vietnam War.
"To Kill a Mockingbird," set in Depression-era Alabama, won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for the classic film starring Gregory Peck. Peck won an Academy Award for his portrayal of attorney Atticus Finch, the widowed father and man of principle who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in their segregated town.
A staple of English classes nationwide, the book has sold well in excess of 30 million copies and been translated into three dozen languages.
And it resonates today as strongly as ever, its annual sales actually increasing in recent years. The book sold one million copies in the U.S. last year, and is on track to exceed that in 2002.
Last fall, the Chicago Public Library made "To Kill a Mockingbird" the first assigned reading in "One Book, One Chicago" the city's community-wide book club. Similar programs that have sprung up in Cleveland; Jacksonville, Fla.; Duluth, Minn.; and elsewhere have followed suit, prompting thousands of readers to discover, or rediscover, Harper Lee's powerful novel.
But who is this enigmatic woman, now 76, whose message of tolerance, shared humanity and resolve in the face of conformist pressure never has been more timely? How does she live her life, and why has she chosen to spend it in relative anonymity? And, perhaps the most-asked question of all: Why has one of the most successful and affecting American novelists of all time elected never to publish another book?
In the wake of the work's "One Book, One Chicago" run, which culminated in a week long series of events that Lee -- as she almost always does -- declined to attend, the Tribune went searching for answers.
Characteristically, Lee declined comment for this story.
But, over the past year, through extensive reporting and rare interviews with Harper Lee's older sister, Alice Finch Lee, and some of Harper Lee's close friends, all of whom granted unprecedented access to the details of the author's life, a portrait of a remarkable woman emerged: a woman who divides her year between small-town Alabama and New York City; who often is labelled a recluse yet crisscrosses Manhattan by city bus and goes, unnoticed, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to baseball games and restaurants; who reads voraciously, especially history, but does not discuss what, if anything, she might be writing when she works at her Royal manual typewriter; and who relishes fishing, golf and University of Alabama football.
The interviews revealed a sometimes sharp-tongued woman who is warm and engaging in her personal life but uncomfortable in the public eye and weary of fame; who lives relatively simply and donates large sums to charity; and who quietly opposes those who would commercialise what she calls "my characters" from her novel.
(Lee did deviate from her long-standing policy and allowed herself to be photographed for this article.)
In an era obsessed with celebrity, Harper Lee has done the unexpected. She has chosen a life apart: apart from the trappings of her literary stature, apart from the increasing "Mockingbird" tourism here, apart even from the public-speaking and talk-show pulpit she would surely command if she so desired.
"She wants to live her life the way she wants to," said Thomas Lane Butts, the semi-retired minister of her Methodist church here, and a close friend.
"Hero worship, just adulation, she doesn't know where to put that," he said. "Most people would eat it up."
Early on, she grew tired of the lack of privacy and demands on her time that accompanied sudden fame. She took a dim view of the press, one she still holds, because of published reports about her that she considered inaccurate and intrusive.
