8 Reading Harper Lee “went on a number of interviews she typed her own notes, and I had these and could refer to them. She was extremely helpful in the beginning when we weren’t making much headway with the town’s people, by mak- ing friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet.” And further, “She is a gifted woman, courageous, and with a warmth that instantly kindles most people, however suspicious or dour” (January 16, 1966). At the end of the day, after long interviews, Truman and Nelle Harper would retreat to the Warren Hotel where they typed up their observa- tions. Nelle Harper’s notes are over one hundred typed pages. When Claudia Johnson asked Nelle Harper if she had seen any of her own words in the published book, she paused for a few moments, shrugged, and said “yes.” In 1959, Nelle Harper, especially, having made close friends with the chief detective and his family, was dining at his house with Capote when news of the arrest of suspects Perry Edward Smith and Richard (“Dick”) Eugene Hickock was announced. Capote and Nelle Harper were present for the opening of the trial on March 1960, on one of several trips to Kansas. Nelle Harper reported that she accompanied Capote on every trip to Kansas except the one he made for the execution. Even then, the con- demned men wrote to her asking her please to be present, but with her traveling back and forth from New York to Alabama, she (thankfully) didn’t receive the letter in time. Nelle Harper’s Reaction to the Film Capote After the release of the film Capote, Nelle Harper provided her view of its accuracy. In the first place, she declared that the performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman was stunningly done to perfection: he was Capote down to the last detail. Otherwise, except for the scene of the crowds in the streets, she considered the movie total fiction. Indeed, when law enforcement officials in Kansas heard that the film- makers were planning to (and eventually did) show Capote bribing them for access, they asked Nelle Harper to get substantiation from the In Cold Blood files in the New York Public Library to prove that they had never accepted any payment. Unfortunately, though Nelle Harper made the trip to the library, her macular degeneration prevented her from finding the material the Kansans were looking for. Yes, she told Claudia Johnson, there was little doubt that Capote tried to bribe law enforcement officials, but they maintained their integrity. Also important, she said, was that Capote never spoke with either of the condemned men in their cells. (Rumor had it that Capote even had
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