Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Cep Casey

Author:Cep, Casey [Cep, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, Crime, Mystery, Adult
ISBN: 9781101947869
Amazon: 1101947861
Goodreads: 41883932
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2019-05-07T07:00:00+00:00

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The Gift

Nelle Lee was twenty-three years old when she moved to Manhattan. By the time she arrived, Truman Capote had already grown sufficiently bored of New York that he had taken off on another one of his fabulous grand tours. In Morocco that summer and unable to welcome her, he went to the British Post Office in Tangiers and wrote to another friend to ask him to look after her. Michael Brown had moved to New York two years earlier from Mexia, Texas, to try to make a career as a lyricist, and he felt that the code of displaced southerners obliged him to go meet the young woman who had once lived next door to Capote in their tiny Alabama town.

“Nelle and I were instant friends,” Brown said. Along with both being southerners, they had a lot else in common: he, too, had mostly been raised by a much older sister, after his mother died; he, too, idolized his father, a physician who had supported the family and helped put him through college and graduate school. And he wanted so badly to shed his small-town identity that he began, as Nelle later would, by changing his name. Born Marion Martin Brown, he came to New York after World War II—having served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, like Nelle’s brother—and introduced himself to everyone as Michael.

Brown was writing songs on book jackets and paper towels while earning a living as a typist, and soon enough Nelle found a day job, too. In the spring of 1949, she went to work as an assistant editor for a trade magazine called The School Executive, a monthly publication of the American School Publishing Corporation. For three dollars a year, readers of The School Executive could keep up with trends in pedagogy, new textbooks and teaching aids, commentary on education policy, and profiles of school systems around the country. But working at the magazine required the regions of Nelle’s brain that she most needed for her own writing, and she left after only six months. She then took a job as a ticket agent, first for Sabena Belgian Airlines and then with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Air travel was expensive and exciting in those days (to her delight, she had once taken a call from Sir Laurence Olivier, who needed a flight home to London), and Nelle thought that in addition to paying the bills, the position might help her, like Olivier, get a ticket back to England. It turned out, though, that she would use the employee passes only to return to Alabama, the very place she had tried to leave behind. Like the School Executive job, the ticket agency work was adjacent to yet removed from the life to which she aspired.

Around the same time, Lee moved into an apartment at 1540 Second Avenue, in the Yorkville neighborhood of the Upper East Side. The apartment was a few blocks from the East River and what must have

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