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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Harper Lee is the moral conscience of the film," Bennett Miller, the director of "Capote," explains in an interview included on the movie's DVD. "We were looking for an actor who had composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a morality and a sober-mindedness." But though Miller acknowledges that "people who have those qualities tend not to go into acting, as a rule," he fails to note that such people do not tend to swell the ranks of creative writers, either. Any viewer of Catherine Keener's lambent performance in "Capote" is prepared to believe that she possesses all these traits, but they would not naturally recommend her for an authentic portrayal of the plain and sometimes stubborn Harper Lee, the subject of Charles J. Shields's new biography, "Mockingbird" (Holt; $25).
During the Second World War, Lee, a student at Huntingdon College, in Montgomery, shunned the standard cardigan-and-pearls attire of the all-female institution in favor of a bomber jacket she'd been given by her brother, an Army Air Corps cadet. Her language was "salty," and she sometimes smoked a pipe, and, while her face seems to have been pleasantly approachable, she described herself as "ugly as sin." After she transferred to the undergraduate law program at the University of Alabama, mostly to please her father, her lack of polish struck some as ill-suited to the judicial decorum she was being trained to observe.
Growing up, she had preferred tackle to touch football, and tended to bully her friends, including the young Truman Capote, who, during the late nineteen-twenties and the thirties, was fobbed off by his feckless mother on relatives who lived in Lee's home town, Monroeville. He put her into his fiction at least twice--as Idabel Tompkins ("I want so much to be a boy"), in "Other Voices, Other Rooms," and as Ann (Jumbo) Finchburg, in "The Thanksgiving Visitor." Lee did the same for him in "To Kill a Mockingbird," turning the boy Truman into Dill, an effeminate schemer with an enormous capacity for lying. One year, Lee's father gave her and Truman a twenty-pound Underwood typewriter, which the two children managed to shift back and forth between their houses and use in the composition of collaborative fictions about the neighbors.
In 1959, when Capote asked Lee to accompany him to Kansas while he looked into the murder of the Clutter family, he was thirty-five and already famous, a sort of self-hatched Faberge egg--the author of high-gloss magazine journalism, some dankly suggestive Southern-gothic fiction, and the silvery "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Lee was just reaching the end of a decade-long literary struggle. After dropping out of the University of Alabama, in 1948, the year Capote published his first book, she had gone to New York to write one of her own, despite her father's apparent belief that literary success was unlikely to favor Monroeville twice. In the city, she scrounged for change in parking meters and used an old wooden door for a writing desk. She spent...
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