Harper Lee’s huge international fame is not just because To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer prize. Nor is it because any secondary school worth its name features it in their syllabus. Or even that her novel is an astonishing plea for good race relations involving simple humanity, a rare thing half a century or more ago to trip off the typewriter of a white woman in the deep south. No, her renown has a lot to do with Gregory Peck.
And it’s also thanks to Peck that, back in 1978, I met Harper Lee. Stories that she hasn’t talked to a journalist for 50 years are totally untrue. It was while I was writing my authorised Peck biography that the relationship between author and star of the film adaptation was revealed. Plainly, it seemed they loved each other – but like a daughter loves a parent. They were only 10 years apart in age, and yet it seemed to me that he was a sort of surrogate father, even when her own father, on whom Peck’s role as Atticus Finch was based, was still alive.
I know I was very privileged. Unlike all the others who tried to get access to Harper Lee, I managed it. I had hoped there would be a trip to Monroeville, the Alabama town where she was born and where her sister, Miss Alice, was a lawyer, like their father.
They told me the place was just like Maycomb, the setting for To Kill A Mockingbird. But I didn’t see it, and she hadn’t seen it for a long time either. In 1978 she lived in an apartment close to Central Park in New York, as unlike rural Alabama as, say, Stoke-on-Trent is from Staten Island. We sat round a big table in a book-lined room. Although as far as almost anyone in the world knew, she had never written another book and had no plans to do so, her neighbours knew her as “the author”. We talked easily and informally. I was expecting someone who even back then had a formidable reputation: a hard-looking woman, who held uncompromising views on things she thought important.
Instead I was greeted by an attractive brunette in her early 50s, who spoke with an equally attractive southern accent, more than happy to talk about the trivia of movie-making, and of our mutual friend. I had got to know the subject of my book pretty well after a year or so of travelling round the world with him. We both knew him as “Greg”. And it was Greg who had made our meeting possible.
I remember very well how the rendezvous was arranged. We were sitting in his big rustic kitchen, in Holmby Hills, which was a lot more fashionable than Beverly Hills down the road. In the days before mobiles, the kitchen was the most convenient place to pick up a phone. He dialled the number and, all these years later, I remember his side of the conversation almost word for word. “Now Harper,” he said. “I want you to meet this nice young man. From England. You won’t let him down, will you?” From what I heard, she said. “Of course, I won’t Greg.” It was father and daughter time.
I remember that when she and I were saying goodbye, she used, of all things, a Yiddish word that surely had never before tripped off the tongue of anyone from her part of the world. Perhaps New York, with its working and business populations, had rubbed off on her. “He’s a mensch,” she said, which is more than just a man, but a man with integrity. Maybe it was to show an empathy with me, whom she recognised as being Jewish, although we never discussed it. Perhaps she believed she had found an untranslatable word to demonstrate what he meant to her. I have often wondered. But it was the right word.
I switched on my heavy tape recorder. There was, I remember, a hint of trouble there. “Do you really need to use that?” she asked. I said I did and I’m glad. Without it, the chapter about Mockingbird in my biography would have been different. In 1978 she insisted that she was not to be misquoted. I promised, of course, that I wouldn’t do that. And I didn’t.
Naturally, I had gone to see her to talk about working with Greg. I somehow expected there would be words of complaint. Few authors really like the way actors portray their characters. And Atticus Finch was no ordinary character. He was very firmly based on her beloved father. But from our first words together, it was plain that, to her, Peck was perfection personified.
He himself told me that the part of Atticus, the lawyer who took on impossible cases just because he believed in his clients, even though they rarely had any money to pay him, was “ like putting on an old suit of clothes – just comfortable”. Plainly, that was what Harper Lee thought too. The first day that she saw Greg in his white suit, she thought it fitted him comfortably, along with the script. “I saw him walk out of his dressing room in the three-piece white suit and called out, ‘My God, he’s got a little pot belly just like my Daddy’.” Greg remembered that he responded: “That’s no pot belly, Harper, that’s great acting.” She told me she liked that. Maybe, it was the sort of thing her daddy, Amasa Lee, might have said.
At her request, Greg met the real Atticus, a man who didn’t have long to live and was crippled with arthritis, but liked the idea of the actor virtually playing himself as much as she did. Harper told me: “In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.” It was down to pressure from the director and producer at Universal Studios that Peck agreed to read the part, although his agent, George Chasin, tried to talk him out of it. “You will lose the entire south,” he warned. Harper felt she couldn’t resist Gregory Peck. Not like the man who had been first choice for the role, Rock Hudson. “No,” she said. “He wouldn���t have been right at all.”
The fact that most of the white folks round about wouldn’t like the film any more than they liked the book was probably behind Harper’s decision to eventually allow the picture to be made. She believed it was important that the wickedness of an innocent black man with a damaged arm being lynched after his trial for the rape of a white woman needed to be told. “That film was a work of art and there isn’t anyone else who could play the part,” she said when I asked her about the magic that it spun. “I was one of the luckiest people in the world.”
She wanted to give Peck a present to physically demonstrate how much she appreciated his work. “My Daddy,” she told me, “had a pocket watch that he wore at all times in court. I gave Greg the watch, and showed him how Daddy used to use it.” In Monroeville everyone knew about Amasa and the watch.
I asked, as everyone always has for 55 years, about a possible sequel. Harper gave no indication about the Watchman book. Some time after the quiet, non answer I got at first, she said: “No. I couldn’t.” Strangely, with the benefit of hindsight, I have wondered if Peck had hinted to me about its existence. “The people behind To Kill a Mockingbird said they wanted to do another film and asked me to do it,” he told me. “But I’m not in favour of sequels. I knew there could be another script out there somewhere. But I never think you could repeat something that you know was pretty good.” Was that other script really Go Set a Watchman? No one was saying.
Peck went on to get an Oscar for his role, just as Harper Lee got her Pulitzer prize. And on the evening of the Academy award presentation, old Mr Lee’s watch was firmly in his pocket.