O, what a tangled web has ensnared a Mockingbird. Poor N. Harper Lee lives in a limbo of blindness, deafness, and paralysis in an Alabama assisted-living facility. If this is (fair & balanced) sadness for a poor, old woman, so be it.
[x VF]
To Steal A Mockingbird?
By Mark Seal
Tag Cloud of the following piece of writing
The old lady played the quarter slots. She would roll up and down the rows of jangling slot machines in her wheelchair until she sensed a likely jackpot. Then she would feed quarters for hours, reveling in the anonymity of the Wind Creek Casino & Hotel, a high-rise, Vegas-style gambling establishment about an hour south of her hometown, Monroeville, Alabama. In the gaudy confines of the American Indian casino, she felt safe; nobody seemed to recognize her or give a good goddamn about that book of hers.
That is how Harper Lee, the fiercely private author of To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, who had refused to give a substantive interview since 1964, spent her sunset years. Often at her back, pushing her wheelchair, was her Methodist minister and close friend, Thomas Lane Butts, who drove me to Wind Creek one evening in May to visit the scene where what is shaping up to be one of the most disturbing chapters in American letters began.
“I used to take Harper Lee down here until she got too old to play,” said the refined, white-haired reverend, stopping beside a corner slot machine, where in early May 2007, he said, he had found the writer gambling in the company of her local attorney, Tonja Carter, “who was handing her money,” and a visitor from New York in a “sport shirt with the tail hanging out,” whose name was Samuel L. Pinkus.
“That’s my agent,” Lee told her friend.
According to Butts, he walked over and extended his hand, but Pinkus ignored it. Instead, he playfully reached into the pocket of the reverend’s sport coat and snatched out a voucher for roughly $100—Butts’s winnings for the evening.
“I’m taking this,” he said.
“You’re a real carpetbagger, aren’t you?,” Butts told him.
“And you’re a redneck, aren’t you?” said Pinkus.
“I certainly am and proud of it,” said Butts.
The reverend then watched Carter and Pinkus escort Lee to dinner at Fire, the casino’s glass-walled steak house. Around this time, according to a lawsuit filed by Lee in May, Pinkus did to her pretty much what he had done in jest to Butts. Only, instead of a casino voucher, Pinkus allegedly had Lee sign over to him the copyright of her perennial jackpot of a novel.
“Have you seen the lawsuit?,” Reverend Butts asked me. “It’s the darnedest thing.”
Filed in New York District Court, the suit names Pinkus, his wife, former TV-news writer Leigh Ann Winick, and Gerald Posner, a Miami-based attorney and investigative journalist with a questionable reputation, as defendants. It claims that Pinkus “engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,” and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled. (The defendants are not accused of stealing her royalties.)
As the emerging scandal rocked the publishing world, I flew to Monroeville and stood in its former county courthouse, now a museum devoted to the town’s two literary sensations, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who were childhood neighbors and lifelong friends. Upstairs in the museum is the courtroom where Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman “A. C.” Lee, tried his cases, and where Harper, as a child, and the character Scout in her novel, watched adoringly from the balcony. Lee thinly disguised Monroeville in the book as Maycomb, “a tired old town…. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.” She gave her father the name Atticus Finch.
Lee, who is now 87, resides in an assisted-living center a few blocks from the courthouse. “She is paralyzed on the left side, profoundly deaf, 95 percent blind, and has very poor memory,” said Butts. But, according to another longtime friend, the former University of Alabama English professor Claudia Durst Johnson, who recently spoke by phone to Lee through an attendant at the center, she is fully aware of her raging legal battle.
Most literary agents would kill to have Nelle Harper Lee as a client. She published only one novel, but today, 53 years later, it remains a global blockbuster, having sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages and still selling 750,000 copies a year, according to HarperCollins, the publisher. In one typical six-month period alone, ending December 2009, Lee earned $1,688,064.68 in royalties, according to court papers. Required reading in many schools, To Kill a Mockingbird, a child’s view of the trial of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman and the small-town Alabama lawyer who defends him, is among the most widely read books by students in Grades 9 through 12, according to one survey. In 1991, the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book said it rated behind only the Bible in books that are “most often cited as making a difference in people’s lives.” The Washington Post raved in its 1961 review, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere eighteen ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.” Nearly 50 years later, Oprah Winfrey told the documentary-film maker Mary Murphy, “I think it is our national novel.” Laura Bush, when she was First Lady, told USA Today, “In a lot of ways, the book changed how people think.”
The 1962 film adaptation, made for $2 million, won three Academy Awards, including one for best actor for Gregory Peck, whose character, Atticus Finch, was designated by the American Film Institute in 2003 as “the greatest hero in 100 years of film history.” More recently, two movies have featured contemporary actresses playing Harper Lee: Sandra Bullock in Douglas McGrath’s "Infamous" and Catherine Keener in "Capote," for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won the 2006 Oscar for best actor. Both films focused on Lee’s invaluable help when she accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to investigate a farm family and their killers for his nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood.
For Lee, however, celebrity became a cross to bear. She soon stopped trusting reporters, who she felt misquoted her, and she sadly watched fame turn her friend Capote—darling little Dill, that “pocket Merlin” with snow-white hair “that stuck to his head like duck-fluff” in her novel—into a drunken, drugged-out clown. “Not just no, but hell no” became her standard response to the legions of journalists who made pilgrimages to her door. By 1965 she had retreated into a stony silence.
According to Charles J. Shields in Mockingbird, his 2006 biography of Lee, her single literary creation began with a gift, a 1956 Christmas surprise from Broadway lyricist Michael Brown and his wife, the ballet dancer Joy Williams Brown, to whom Lee was introduced by Capote. The Browns became her adopted family in New York, where the eternal tomboy and law-school dropout worked as an airline reservationist until she found an envelope addressed to her on their Christmas tree. The note inside read, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
It’s ironic that Harper Lee would ever wind up suing a literary agent for alleged misconduct. After all, To Kill a Mockingbird might not exist had it not been for the efforts of her first agent, Maurice Crain, the husband of Annie Laurie Williams, the film agent who had sold the movie rights to Gone with the Wind and who would later do the same for To Kill a Mockingbird. That winter, a shy young Harper Lee arrived in Crain’s Manhattan office with a few short stories. After reading them, Crain encouraged her to try a novel, and she began dropping off pages to him every week. “Two months of back-and-forth revisions followed between author and agent until … Crain judged that the manuscript was in suitable shape to send out,” writes Shields. Crain not only edited Lee’s work but also suggested a title, Atticus. The original publisher, J. B. Lippincott, offered a contract and a small advance.
Crain was more than an agent, Lee would tell friends years later; he was her friend, critic, business adviser, champion, and marketer. He may have been even more. “About Nelle. I am rather worried about her,” Capote wrote in a 1961 letter to friends in Kansas. “Just between us, I have good reason to believe that she is unhappily in love with a man impossible to marry, etc.” When Crain died, in 1970, so did the old way of agenting, at least for Lee. By the late 1980s she was lamenting that the literary business was a whole new ball game. Agents like Crain had been replaced with whippersnappers, whose only concern was their commissions. As Lee explained, agents die but their agencies continue, and that was the case with her.
‘When Maurice became ill, he asked Elizabeth Otis, who was the president of McIntosh & Otis, if she would take on—given the authors’ approval—his list, which McIntosh & Otis did,” Julie Fallowfield, Lee’s beloved agent there until 1996, told me. The agency, known as M&O, was created by Otis and her friend Mavis McIntosh, who had both reportedly left another agency in the mid-1920s after they discovered it to be highly suspect in its practices. McIntosh’s daughter Sheila Riordan told me, “Somebody wrote them a note about a young writer in California, and then along came John Steinbeck.”
Steinbeck felt so indebted to M&O that he reportedly gave it a percentage of the money he was awarded when he won the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. In the 1970s, Eugene Winick, a copyright attorney who had represented the estates of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Ayn Rand, and others, was hired as M&O’s outside counsel. When the agency’s principal, Patricia Myrer, retired, in 1984, she tapped Winick to be president of M&O, and he became the agent and attorney for the literary estates handled by M&O as well as for writers including Mary Higgins Clark and Harper Lee.
“During its decades of representation, M&O acted appropriately and in Harper Lee’s interests, handling the kinds of activities that are the business of a literary agent,” Lee stated in her lawsuit. Around 2002, however, Winick became embroiled in a drama worthy of his best fiction writers. It began 14 years after his daughter Leigh Ann married Samuel Pinkus.
Valuable Estates
‘This story is bigger than Harper Lee,” said Gail Steinbeck, insisting that, in order to understand Lee’s fight against Pinkus, I would have to understand what happened to her and her husband, Thomas Steinbeck, the only surviving son of John Steinbeck. Gail, Thomas, and I sat in the office of their Montecito, California, home as they described their long-festering war against M&O.
They told a sad tale, complete with an allegedly evil stepmother, John Steinbeck’s third wife and widow, Elaine, who, according to a lawsuit Thomas and his father’s only granddaughter filed in 2004, conspired with her husband’s literary agents Eugene Winick and, later, Sam Pinkus in a “30-year hidden conspiracy to deprive John Steinbeck’s blood heirs of their rights in the intellectual properties of John Steinbeck,” which Gail Steinbeck claims had earned $45 million just in the 10-year period ending in 2004.
The chief ally in Elaine Steinbeck’s hold over her husband’s literary estate was Winick, who, according to Thomas and Gail, said that the best way for such an estate to continue without interruption was to give his agency power of attorney. During our meeting, Gail pulled out a legal folder from her mountain of files, which contained the names of the lucrative estates Winick and M&O have managed. “The Steinbeck estate was the crowning glory of M&O, and Eugene Winick had complete control over it,” she said.
Elaine Steinbeck gained control of her husband’s literary estate in 1983, through an agreement whereby Thomas Steinbeck and his brother, the late John Steinbeck IV, signed powers of attorney regarding their interests in their father’s works over to their stepmother in exchange for higher copyright revenues. According to court documents, when Elaine Steinbeck died, in 2003, her will excluded any biological relatives of her husband’s, and it stipulated that for her beneficiaries to inherit her estate, including the Steinbeck copyrights, they had to sign over irrevocable powers of attorney to Eugene Winick and M&O.
In 2009 the suit brought by Thomas and his niece was dismissed in favor of the estate of Elaine Steinbeck and her heirs, a ruling affirmed a year later on appeal, which said that they alone controlled John Steinbeck’s copyrights.
Today, Thomas and Gail live in a rented house, having lost the case and most of their money in the lawsuit. From behind her desk, Gail pulled out a photograph of Winick, a gray-haired gentleman in a neat suit and tie. A long stickpin pierced the picture. I asked her why. “Because I believe in voodoo,” she said. Then she laughed and added, “I got so mad at him, I just did that one day.”
Samuel Pinkus, the son of a Scranton, Pennsylvania, hospital administrator, found his way to a better life. “He played poker, and that’s how he got money to go to college and travel,” said Beth Wareham, former director of lifestyle publishing at Scribner. “He traveled all around the Middle East and went skiing in the West. He was a ski instructor when he was young, which he said was weird because he was a balding little Jewish ski instructor.” After graduating from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, he became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. He later became a copyright attorney, affiliated with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. “Sam was a cool guy,” said Wareham. “Then something changed when he became an agent.”
His new career grew out of his marriage to Winick’s daughter Leigh Ann, whom he had met at a Club Med, one of the worldwide getaway resorts known for catering to singles. She was a television newswriter. “Pinkus previously had no experience in the literary business, so Winick taught him how to become a literary agent,” read the arbitration documents that Winick and M&O would later file against him and his literary agency Veritas Media, Inc. (VMI). “Pinkus was given access to and the opportunity to work along with Winick on behalf of M&O’s most important and famous clients. . . . M&O named Pinkus as its president in 2001, paid him a salary that topped $1.2 million in 2004, and provided him and his family with heath insurance and other benefits. However, it soon became clear that Winick’s generosity was not enough.”
For many years, Pinkus seemed content with staying in the shadow of his unpretentious father-in-law. Despite representing some of the most iconic American authors and their estates, Winick carried his papers in shopping bags and lived quite simply with his wife, Ina, in an ordinary suburban New York home.
“Eugene and Sam could not have been more different,” said Wareham. “Gene was old-world charm. Three-piece suits. He reminded me of Roger on "Mad Men." Sam, on the other hand, was smart, tough, not so charming, and his clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained.”
‘Gene did a lot of Tai Chi and was a very grounded guy,” said Ethan Becker, grandson of Irma S. Rombauer, who in 1931 published what would become one of the best-selling cookbooks in history, Joy of Cooking. Her daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan’s mother, illustrated the book. “When I looked at him and looked at the balance of professional accomplishment, devotion to his family, and how he combined all those things—it was pretty close to ideal from my perspective.”
We were having dinner in New York, and I asked Becker what he thought of Sam Pinkus. After unleashing a string of stinging expletives, he calmed down enough to say, “Sam was always there, the roly-poly guy who would play the court jester to Gene. Sam liked to play the sleazy-agent routine.... Think of literary agents in movies. Are any of them upstanding citizens? I thought it was all a joke. But Sam seemed to revel in it.” In 2002, Becker continued, things got “weird.”
“Eugene Winick suffered a traumatic brain injury many years ago,” M&O’s attorney said in a 2012 arbitration hearing. “It affects his short-term memory. He goes to the office and conducts his business, but with a lot of assistance from his wife and daughter and other colleagues. . . . If he appears hesitant or confused, that may be because of his short-term memory problems.”
“So the next time I was in New York,” continued Becker, “Sam arranged lunch with Eugene and me. And Gene did not appear to be right.” Pinkus, however, he said, seemed totally unchanged. “The son-in-law, junior partner, being the way he always was with Gene: ‘He’s the boss. I’m the second banana and know my place. And I keep everybody amused.’ ” With Winick out of commission, Pinkus soon took charge. “When Gene had his medical problem, his firm fell apart, and Sam did everything there for a while,” said Wareham. “I know Sam had horrible burnout. I remember him showing up in giant Bose headphones, and he listened to music the entire meeting. Another time, I left him sleeping in the vibrating chair at Brookstone in Midtown because he was so exhausted.”
Before long, however, Pinkus apparently decided he had learned enough at M&O and was ready to strike out on his own.
Pinkus told Becker that he was leaving M&O and two of the agency’s premier clients were going with him. During our dinner, Becker imitated Pinkus’s agent-speak: “He’d just bring it up kind of casually in conversation. The man is smooth. Mary Higgins Clark was always Mary, and Harper Lee was always Harper Lee. He said, ‘Mary understands the situation, and I’m going to be representing her, and Harper Lee understands it, and I’m going to be representing her.’ ” Becker says Pinkus even offered to indemnify him in the event of problems with M&O. “Therefore, we got behind Pinkus and signed up with him. And things went downhill from there.”
Pinkus named his new agency Veritas Media, Inc. Latin for “truth.” Odd, since he allegedly didn’t reveal its existence to his father-in-law. “After Winick returned, there were some difficulties with Pinkus,” according to M&O’s court and arbitration documents. Winick had left his son-in-law to handle “M&O’s most important clients. However Pinkus refused to permit others in the agency to have access to those clients, including Winick’s daughter [Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein], who handled all foreign rights for the agency, and M&O’s experienced film and theatrical agent.”
“The scariest thing in the world is when you start to believe your own bullshit,” said Becker. Thomas Steinbeck agreed: “Sam would go to the opening night of a theater piece wearing plaid pants, sandals, and a bowling shirt, while everybody else was dressed up. He just had no clue. And he was rude. He once told my wife to go fuck herself.”
“We always joked that he operated out of a phone booth but was hard to get on the phone,” said one publisher. He added that Pinkus was “a pain-in-the-ass negotiator.” Jeff Wilson, executive director of contracts at Simon & Schuster, found Pinkus to be a strong advocate. “He’s a tough negotiator, and, albeit polite, he does raise his voice at times, which, for some people, would create bad feelings, because publishing is so genteel,” Wilson told me. “He was really pushing hard to get the best deal for his clients.” On the other hand, crime novelist Keith Gilman told me, “I’ve known Sam since we were children in Scranton. . . . For me, he was a nothing agent.”
Harper Lee apparently came to feel the same way. Her lawsuit outlines her frustration: “In the years since Pinkus left M&O, he has acted on Harper Lee’s behalf primarily to the extent of trying to secure irrevocably his right to commissions from TKAM until the end of copyright. He has not responded to offers by HarperCollins to discuss the licensing of e-book rights; he failed to respond to requests for permissions from other publishers, which sometimes went without responses for years; he failed to respond to HarperCollins’s requests for assistance related to the 50th anniversary of TKAM’s publication.”
George Thomas Jones, 90, who has known Lee since grade school, expressed the dismay of many in Monroeville regarding her lawsuit. “They’re very private people,” he said. “I saw Nelle out at the assisted-living center about a month ago. Of course, she’s had a stroke. Her short-term memory is not good, but her long-term memory is excellent. I don’t think she would have signed anything without getting her sister to approve it.”
In the summer of 2003, Oprah Winfrey relaunched her book club with East of Eden, which propelled John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel to 37 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and ignited Hollywood interest in remaking Elia Kazan’s 1955 film version, starring James Dean. “Everyone in Hollywood converged, including Brad Pitt, and the next thing we knew, they threw it into an auction,” said Gail Steinbeck. “We brought in Ron Howard to direct, along with his production company with Brian Grazer.” At that time Thomas Steinbeck still held some rights to East of Eden and to some of his father’s other titles, so he and Gail pushed Pinkus to close the movie deal. They showed me an e-mail from him, dated March 2004, in which he expressed surprise at Thomas’s frustration over the lack of communication from him and M&O in the movie negotiations. Pinkus told the Steinbecks that he hadn’t received responses from Warner Bros. about the project and assured them he would advise them as soon as he did:
You should understand that we do not report the absence of news. If we had to do so for all of the parties represented by McIntosh and Otis no work would ever get done other than, of course, the constant reporting of nothing.
Gail and Thomas were at the Steinbeck House, in Salinas, California, where a lunch with Thomas had been auctioned off to a Steinbeck fan, when Pinkus called Gail on her cell. “I said, ‘Sam, this is going to be a brilliant, beautiful project. You need to get this deal closed.’ And he goes, ‘You fucking bitch. How dare you interfere in my business?’ And it wasn’t about the deal; it was just about his ego. I said, ‘You are my employee—you work for me. You get back in your office and close that deal.’ After lunch, Thomas said, ‘Fire him.’ So we fired him.”
She continued, “Evva Pryor, who is now dead and was Eugene Winick’s paralegal and later his film and dramatic-rights agent, said that we should calm down, and that Sam was gone. And I said, ‘Well, how is Sam going to make a living?’ And she said, ‘Gene gave him some clients.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah? Who? Not us, I hope.’ And she said, ‘No, he gave him the Joy of Cooking family estate, Harper Lee, and Mary Higgins Clark.’ ”
Winick’s arbitration documents state that he believed that his son-in-law might possibly work as a sub-agent at M&O, and that he might “allow” his son-in-law to “service Mary Higgins Clark (and perhaps The Joy of Cooking Trusts, and Harper Lee),” not knowing that Pinkus had already persuaded those clients to move to his new agency.
“While discussions continued about Pinkus’ role, M&O discovered that Pinkus had created his own agency, VMI, and changed existing contracts to divert agency commissions from M&O to VMI on contracts negotiated by M&O,” according to M&O’s filing, which added that Pinkus had maintained that if the authors moved to his new agency they were no longer obligated to pay M&O commissions.
The New Agency
Eugene Winick was “pissed,” said Ethan Becker. He felt betrayed, not only by his son-in-law but also by the clients who had abandoned him. “This tragedy befell him,” said Becker, “a combination of the surgery gone bad and Sam Pinkus. It was like something out of a bad novel. Gene and his wife, Ina, were very, very angry. I wrote a letter saying that, whatever the hell was happening, they shouldn’t let it tear the family apart, and they should figure out some way to get it straight without the fucking lawyers. But things had gone beyond that.”
“We were trying to settle things among the family,” Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein, now president of M&O, later testified in an arbitration hearing, in which she addressed Pinkus directly, saying, “We could have sued you back then, but we chose to mediate because you are married to my sister.” Mediation resulted in a December 2008 settlement “addressing M&O’s entitlements to commissions for works of M&O clients that had been diverted to VMI by Pinkus,” according to New York Supreme Court documents. The two agencies would share some commissions that VMI had received since 2006 from the supposedly diverted authors. Five years later, however, the commissions would still be in dispute and the family still at war. Pinkus would claim that his father-in-law’s dogged pursuit of his share of Veritas’s commissions—some of which Pinkus had indeed paid to M&O—was unjust. Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein would later testify of Pinkus, “There was no trust.”
Meanwhile, Pinkus ran his one-man agency, VMI, out of his home, which was near his father-in-law’s house, in Hastings-on-Hudson, a town some 20 miles outside of Manhattan. There, Pinkus became increasingly removed, according to some of his most important clients.
Pinkus would, however, take time for lunch. “When you’re working on Joy of Cooking, you eat high on the hog, and we would all go to Per Se,” said Beth Wareham, who edited the 75th-anniversary edition, referring to the restaurant operated by the California chef Thomas Keller in the Time Warner Center, in Manhattan. Ethan Becker added, “Whenever somebody else was paying—i.e., the publisher—we’d have lunch and Sam would be ordering good cognac, or good whiskey. We’re talking top-shelf here; we’re talking about the stuff they keep in the safe.”
Becker added, “I realized that we were going to get nowhere with him. I think it was this licensing deal that finally did it. And I just called him up and said, ‘You’re fired.’ The only thing he said was ‘You still have to pay me.’ ”
Pinkus also lost the mega-selling “Queen of Suspense,” Mary Higgins Clark. But he still had Harper Lee. “He expressed such love and respect for her,” said Wareham. “Sam was cool because of Harper Lee. She was his goddess! I would ask him how she was doing, and he was always: ‘Nelle’s great!’ He admired, loved her, I believe. Sam’s face changed when he talked about Nelle. He beamed.”
She couldn’t have been a difficult client. According to one friend, her 101-year-old spinster sister, Alice Lee, who had practiced law daily in her father’s office until she was 99, tried to keep contracts away from her sibling. “Alice said that Nelle didn’t remember things, and she would sign almost anything anybody put in front of her,” said the friend. Suffering from macular degeneration, Harper Lee was unable to read documents unless they were printed in large type. And in the beginning she trusted Eugene Winick and, for a time, Sam Pinkus completely. “She thought she had the most wonderful agent in the world!” said Claudia Johnson.
Pursued by M&O to pay commissions due, Pinkus allegedly attempted to collect fees on Harper Lee’s huge royalties, without his father-in-law or M&O being able to detect or, even worse, seize them.
The Other Harper Lee
Every year, Harper Lee left Monroeville, where she lived in her sister’s modest house, for her other life, in New York City. She never flew, insisting on traveling by train, which required friends’ driving her four hours to Birmingham, where she boarded the Amtrak for a 24-hour ride to New York.
She loved the city, not as a celebrated author, merely as a New Yorker. She became a discount-driven Auntie Mame for visitors from home. She traveled by bus and would never dream of taking a taxi. Although she lived frugally in her apartment on East 82nd Street, she enjoyed attending Mets games, treating friends to meals in restaurants, going to the theater, visiting museums and cemeteries, and playing the slots in Atlantic City. In New York she did something she never did in Monroeville: she drank. Scotch. “I’ve seen her drunk as a lord,” said one friend. “She has the saltiest tongue on earth,” said Claudia Johnson, Lee’s official biographer, to whom she ever granted only one interview.
A friend once asked Lee if it was true that she’d never written another novel because she didn’t want to compete with herself.
“Bullshit!” she snapped.
“Why then?” the friend asked.
“Because I wouldn’t go through all the terrible publicity and the strain of what happened with Mockingbird for any amount of money.”
Asked about the volume of Mockingbird sales, she replied, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because I only make 10 percent on it.”
She rarely talked about money and never handled it. Her checks bore the account name of Harper Lee and Alice Lee, and Alice balanced her sister’s books, paid her taxes, and reviewed her contracts. “As is customary for a literary agent, M&O conferred with Harper Lee and her lawyer (her sister, Alice Lee) about publishing opportunities before securing them on Harper Lee’s behalf,” read her lawsuit. “Both Harper Lee and her sister trusted and relied on M&O, and worked amicably with the agency for over forty years, first with Eugene Winick, and then with his son-in-law, Pinkus (during the years when Pinkus was employed by M&O).”
What happened next baffled even Hugh Van Dusen, Lee’s editor for the last 20 years. “It’s one of the great mysteries!” he told me of Lee’s lawsuit. “I thought it was remarkably well written. It’s just an incredible story.” So incredible that not even the chieftains at HarperCollins, he added, “can quite figure out what’s happening.”
For Van Dusen, though, everything with Lee was unexpected, beginning with their first meeting, at a marketing luncheon for 12 at the Four Seasons restaurant, in Manhattan. “We had always been told she was a complete recluse, but at the end of the lunch she walked around the table to me and said, ‘Do you think the two of us could have lunch à deux? Just the two of us?’ And I was just overwhelmed.”
He had to make the arrangements by letter. “Because nobody knew her phone number.” At their second lunch, he said, “she couldn’t have been more … not just charming, but really outgoing and interesting and completely contradicting this reputation as a recluse.” HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham stopped by their table to say hello. “After she finished her glass of wine, she said to me, ‘Is he’—pointing to Jonathan—‘paying for this?’ I said yes, and she said, ‘Do you think I could have another glass of wine?’ ”
Sam Pinkus was a constant presence, even though Van Dusen said his job as the editor of the one-book author consisted of “nothing, really. It was really trying to get Sam—not that Sam was delinquent, I don’t want to give that impression—but our permissions department needed answers to various things and sometimes didn’t get answers from him. If I prodded him, he tended to give them an answer. He was extremely punctilious and protective of his client,” Van Dusen continued. “He did his job thoroughly, and there was no reason to believe that there was anything shady going on.”
In November 2007, Harper Lee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Few knew that earlier that same year, in June, she had suffered a stroke. “I got a call from Joy Williams Brown,” said Claudia Johnson. “She said that Nelle had asked her to call me. She had a stroke in her apartment.”
“My wife and I saw her in the hospital in New York,” said Van Dusen. “There was a cluster of women friends there.” Pinkus took Lee home to Monroeville. “Sam thought that as her friend and agent he should be the one to take her down,” said Van Dusen. “When she was released from the hospital, he took her to Alabama on the train and got her into an assisted-living place. He went to see her regularly. I would suppose from talking to her that he went every two or three months to see her. I don’t think he went to discuss legal details. I think he went to make sure she was all right.”
Last year Alice Lee, after falling and breaking three ribs, entered a rehab center just around the corner from her sister’s assisted-living quarters. As Alice’s age advanced and her attention to her sister’s affairs decreased, some say, Pinkus assumed greater control. Soon decisions seemed to be coming not from Alice Lee’s law office but, as one local put it, “from that bunch in New York City.” Reverend Butts remembers one painful call from Pinkus: “He said, ‘She will sign anything if you put it in front of her, so you shouldn’t ask her to sign any more books.’ I said, ‘Mr. Pinkus, I’ve known her longer than you have. She’s my friend, and I’ll ask her to sign anything I want to.’”
Getting in touch with Pinkus after Lee’s lawsuit was filed in May proved to be as tough as landing an interview with Lee. The address of VMI is the same as that of his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, “a circa 1925 Tudor-style house known as The Castle for its prominent turret story-book setting,” as he and his wife wrote on their architect’s Web site after a renovation around 2009. However, my repeated calls, e-mails, and a letter delivered to the Castle all went unanswered. (As Vanity Fair was going to press, Samuel Pinkus, through his attorney, declined to comment on this story.)
"Mr. Pinkus just wants us to accept on faith that he has paid everything, dollar for dollar, over to Ms. Lee. We have no evidence of that, nothing from his bank, no bank statements … nothing,” said M&O’s attorney at a contentious May 4, 2011, arbitration hearing to settle the festering commissions dispute between M&O and VMI. Running his business “without an operative email or fax number,” according to the arbitrator, Pinkus claimed that VMI was broke, annihilated by M&O, which had brought legal action against not only Pinkus but also his client Ethan Becker to ensure that M&O’s back commissions would be paid. (Pinkus had agreed to pay Becker’s legal fees to keep him as a client.) “McIntosh & Otis destroyed Veritas’s business,” Pinkus testified at the hearing, saying he believed his company’s assets had been sold in 2009. “Had it not been for McIntosh & Otis’s nefarious activities, [VMI] may actually still be a viable company. But thanks to them, it no longer exists.” He couldn’t elaborate, he said, because “Veritas Media, again, thanks to McIntosh & Otis, doesn’t have the assets to pay for your honor’s time.” Any documentation that would show the commissions he’d received had been thrown out. He could provide only a spreadsheet. Using that spreadsheet and information from others, the arbitrator attempted to determine how much Pinkus’s agency owed M&O.
As for Lee, Pinkus insisted in the arbitration hearing that she had fired him as her agent effective January 1, 2009, and that Alice Lee and Tonja Carter, “down in Alabama,” were “taking over.” M&O’s attorney asked Pinkus, “Was Miss Harper Lee’s termination of the agreement in writing?”
“It was, actually,” Pinkus replied. “If I had a copy of it, it would certainly benefit this matter, but I really did not keep anything, because it was just, you know, taking up space.” According to M&O filings, Pinkus claimed that payments received by his company in 2009 and 2010 had been sent directly to Lee, without any commissions deducted. Since he had received no commissions for these royalties, Pinkus contended, he owed nothing more to M&O. As to why he had not notified HarperCollins, the publisher of To Kill a Mockingbird, that he had been fired by Lee, he attributed this failure to administrative disorganization and “sloth.”
“HarperCollins records reflected that VMI continued to represent Nelle Harper Lee,” the arbitrator’s report said. “M&O also offered other documentary evidence that VMI continued to act on behalf of Nelle Harper Lee well into 2010. . . . Overall, I draw a negative, adverse inference for VMI’s failure to present evidence to support Mr. Pinkus’ testimony … and Mr. Pinkus’ cavalier attitude toward VMI’s obligations.”
The gavel came down: VMI owed M&O $779,780.34, which included $212,161.87 in Harper Lee commissions alone. The Supreme Court of the State of New York confirmed the award and ordered VMI to pay the amount due.
Instead of paying, Pinkus launched his “scheme to dupe” Lee, according to her lawsuit, “to avoid M&O’s effort to collect on a judgment that it had recovered. . . . To avoid that judgment against VMI, Pinkus created several different companies to handle the receipt of royalties and commissions and directed the payment of royalties to a continually changing series of bank accounts.”
His first move was to obtain the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, which he did on May 5, 2007, “as part of a scheme to secure to himself an irrevocable interest in the income stream from Harper Lee’s copyright and to avoid his legal obligations to M&O under the arbitration decision,” Lee’s lawsuit contends. “Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see. He also knew that Harper Lee and her sister (and lawyer) relied on and trusted him. Pinkus abused that trust and took advantage of Harper Lee’s physical condition and years of trust built at M&O to engineer the assignment of her copyright in a document that did not even ensure her a contractual right to income.”
Once Lee signed over her copyright to Pinkus, whether with or without her knowledge, he had the authority to do with her book whatever he pleased. “Once the copyright is assigned, you stop being an agent and become the principal,” Eric Brown, a publishing-law attorney, told me. “This applies to all media. As the owner of the copyright in the book, you can make whatever deals you want. You are now Harper Lee.”
At the 2011 arbitration hearing, M&O’s attorney said, “Rather than requiring McIntosh and Otis to get a judgment against an empty shell corporation, which by Mr. Pinkus’ own testimony, has had [its] assets sold and its bank accounts cleaned out, I think Mr. Pinkus engaged in a campaign of arguing to divert monies that were supposed to be shared by McIntosh and Otis to third parties. Bargaining away those revenues, diverting them to other accounts that he opened or controlled and then cleaning out the assets of the corporation to leave McIntosh and Otis without a remedy.” To which Pinkus replied, “Judge, not a bit of evidence to support that statement that money has been diverted to any bank accounts that I control.” However, Lee’s lawsuit states that he “created multiple, ever-changing bank accounts and companies that further concealed … receipt of royalty income subject to the award.” In September 2007, Pinkus created the first of these companies, called Nassau Marketing L.L.C., with a process-service address of 911 Avenue U, Brooklyn, New York 11227, the same address as that of another company Pinkus would later establish, Keystone Literary L.L.C., which listed his wife, Leigh Ann Winick, as president.
Another Agency, Another Name
Meanwhile, back in Monroeville, according to the complaint, Harper Lee had become “increasingly dissatisfied” over receiving royalties with no backup information, as well as over Pinkus’s visits to the assisted-living facility, where Pinkus often visited her, “especially when he had papers that needed to be signed … sometimes without prior announcement until Harper Lee finally gave orders that the management of the facility was not to permit his entrance.”
Her lawsuit continued, “Pinkus had taken other steps to secure his own interests at the expense of Harper Lee’s interests. First, he arranged for the formation of a new corporation, Philologus Procurator, Inc. (PPI). On January 26, 2011, PPI was incorporated in Florida, by Gerald Posner. . . . Days later, in a document dated February 7, 2011, Pinkus, acting as president of VMI, assigned the copyright in TKAM from VMI to PPI … whose address is identified as located at Posner’s Miami Beach address.”
Thus, in essence, by owning the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, Gerald Posner was now Harper Lee, able to make unilateral decisions regarding her novel. But as Lee and her friends must surely have asked: Who the hell is Gerald Posner?
When Posner filed the incorporation papers of Philologus Procurator, Inc., in 2011, he was digging out from a journalism scandal. In February of the previous year, he had resigned as chief investigative reporter of the Daily Beast Web site following allegations of serial plagiarism. Later that same year, he was sued for copyright infringement by the Miami writer Frank Owen, who charged Posner with such pervasive plagiarism in his book Miami Babylon from Owen’s book about Miami, Clubland, that, as Owen said in his lawsuit at the time, Posner should be “eligible for the Guinness Book of World Records for copyright infringement.” (The lawsuit was settled out of court.)
It was a long fall for Posner, an attorney who had joined a Wall Street law firm at 23 before becoming an investigative journalist and the author of more than 10 books, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Case Closed (1993), in which he pronounced that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted totally on his own in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
By 2011, Posner was representing Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, until the Middle Eastern politician was assassinated in Kandahar. He was also teaching law on a Web site while apparently working with Pinkus—who had been his literary agent since he wrote Miami Babylon—in representing Lee. “When I speak about this, you will be the first person I call,” Posner wrote me in a Facebook message in May. “Thank you in the meantime for your patience. Now you will excuse me for being rude and not answering other notes until that time arrives.” (He wrote later that he had been advised not to comment.)
According to Lee’s lawsuit, on April 11, 2011, two months after assigning his To Kill a Mockingbird copyright to Posner and PPI, Pinkus met with Harper Lee and Tonja Carter, who was a legal protégée of Alice Lee’s, and the agent presented them with a document to confirm that Lee had signed over her Mockingbird copyright to him. “Harper Lee signed the document … Ms. Carter notarized her signature. . . . Until that moment, neither Harper Lee or Harper Lee’s estate lawyer or Ms. Carter was aware of the 2007 Purported Assignment.”
I wanted to know why they would sign such a document, but Carter wouldn’t say when I e-mailed her. She replied, “I have no time available.”
As the payment periods passed, millions of dollars in Mockingbird royalties were piling up around the globe, but there was confusion as to where to send the money. An unsigned e-mail from the address used by Posner—“the principal person that the foreign agents worked with,” according to the Lee lawsuit—advised a British agent that the checking account to which British agents had been wiring royalties had been closed, directing them to “make all royalty payments due her via check made payable” to PPI. The e-mail instructed the agent to send the checks to Sam Pinkus, who “will forward the checks to [PPI],” to which, Pinkus insisted to HarperCollins, he had no connection. The lawsuit lists a dizzying maze of ever changing Sam Pinkus e-mail addresses, directives, and routings of Mockingbird royalties.
By the end of 2012 it seemed Posner wanted out. He filed an amendment stating that he was no longer associated with PPI: “As of December 31, 2012, Sam Pinkus is the full and only owner of all shares of this corporation.”
In January 2012, Tonja Carter, along with Harper Lee’s estate attorney, had attempted to force Pinkus to assign the Mockingbird copyright back to Lee, which he did in April. Carter obtained power of attorney over Lee and fired Pinkus as her agent, despite his protestations that he had a signed agreement from the author that “assured his role as agent.” (Pinkus refused to present the agreement unless Lee signed a confidentiality agreement, which Lee refused to do, according to her lawsuit.)
One year later, Pinkus made a last attempt, the lawsuit contends: using his 2007 copyright-transfer assignment and the 2011 confirmation, and e-mailing what he called “a grant from miss lee to Veritas” to a sub-agent in Britain, he began “pressuring” the U.K. agent to pay royalties to PPI. “The UK agent ... was on the brink of wiring the royalties and commission,” according to the lawsuit, when Lee’s attorneys stopped him.
In Monroeville, there seemed to be a reluctance to open the door on Lee’s literary life, especially in light of a potential scandal. Instead of immediately contacting a litigator, her representatives attempted to settle the matter less sensationally. “Another literary agency was brought in to understand what the situation was, to look at the contracts,” said a publishing insider. “And they finally said, ‘This is a legal matter that needs to be done by an attorney.’ ” Gloria C. Phares, the New York lawyer chosen, who specializes in cases involving intellectual property, began examining documents from publishers and sub-agents worldwide, before filing the May 3 lawsuit, which seeks the forfeiture of all commissions received by Pinkus’s companies after Lee signed over her copyright to him in 2007, warranties that the Mockingbird copyright has not been encumbered in any way, and damages to be determined at trial. (No trial date has been set.)
Meanwhile, Pinkus has not paid Eugene Winick or M&O one cent of the $779,780.34 in diverted commissions that the Supreme Court of New York ordered him to pay, according to someone closely involved in the case.
Though Pinkus no longer holds the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, he does supposedly own at least one important Harper Lee memento. “You know Nelle received the Medal of Freedom from President George Bush?” said a friend. “She gave that goddamned medal to Sam Pinkus.”
“Why would she do that?,” I asked.
“She said, ‘Because Sam’s a Jew and he had people that were in the Holocaust, and he deserved it more than I did.’ That’s how highly she once thought of him.”
Asked to comment through an intermediary, Harper Lee said, in essence, “Not just no, but hell no!” Tonja Carter e-mailed me: “Any information you need can be obtained through the complaint. I’m sure you have a copy. You are forbidden from contacting my client. I will not be able to meet either.” Ω
[Mark Seal has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 2003. Seal's magazine writings have appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Condé Nast Traveler, Golf Digest, Texas Monthly, InStyle, Town & Country, Time, and The New York Times. Seal is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.]
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