Johnny Carson was for many, many years arguably the most famous person in the United States. But what did we really know about him? He was so accessible to millions with a remarkably easygoing style yet he remained an elusive character. I took it as a challenge to break what I have called the Carson “veil of secrecy” and suggest clues as to who this man really was.

When did you first become aware of Johnny Carson?

Like so many of my generation, I first became aware of Johnny Carson on those rare nights when my parents allowed me to stay up late. It would have always been a Friday night, I’m nearly sure, because I would never have been allowed to stay up late on a “school night”. Then I remember watching Johnny ring in the New Year on The Tonight Show – I must have been eleven or twelve years old. It was a big deal to stay up and I remember somehow thinking that this guy was funny. He reached a kid which I later discovered was his great gift: he managed to reach out to young and old alike. It was an amazing achievement.

While making the film, did you learn anything that surprised you about Johnny Carson?

What surprised me most was how much his ex-wives still loved him. Though only Joanne Carson, who was his second wife, went on-camera for an interview, I managed to spend time with his third wife Joanna and his widow, Alex Carson. Johnny’s divorce from Joanna was very public and very acrimonious. Nevertheless, in later years, they rekindled their relationship very quietly. They spoke on the phone but didn’t tell people about it. I clearly got from my time with her that Joanna considered Johnny to be the love of her life. Though Johnny and his fourth wife Alex were living basically separate lives in his later years, they remained close. She never stopped caring about him and he never stopped caring about her.

Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or the interviewees?

Because we had finally received the cooperation of Johnny’s nephew, Jeff Sotzing, people felt comfortable speaking more openly about Johnny Cason in a way they had not before. Their candor was moving. I remember when I interviewed Drew Carey, all I said was, “Drew, please tell me the events leading up to and including your first appearance on The Tonight Show.” Well, Drew proceeded to talk for 51 straight minutes without stopping once! This was clearly one of the most impactful experiences of his life and he wanted to make sure I heard every detail. As you can see in the film, he became quite emotional talking about his appearance. As it happened, Ray Romano had his first appearance on The Tonight Show just a few weeks after Drew had his first appearance. They knew each other back then, and Ray called Drew after Ray did his set and left the message, “Thanks, Drew for taking all the laughs.” He was kidding because Ray did very well his first night on the show, too. But for all these guys, their first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the beginning of their real careers.

Please describe your approach to the film.

From the very beginning, we wanted to find clues to Johnny’s character and his past from actual moments on The Tonight Show itself. Johnny revealed things about himself on the show that he felt uncomfortable sharing in his “real” life, if that makes any sense. Somehow, he could tell 15 million people things that were hard for him to communicate with even close friends. It’s what made him such a fascinating subject and we knew from the get-go that the key was the clips we pulled from The Tonight Show. The clips we pulled for our film were entertaining but we also wanted them to reveal something specific about him as a performer or as a person. The other priority was to rely on first-hand memories and reflections of those that were closest to him.

What were some of the obstacles in achieving your vision of the film?

Well, without the cooperation and participation of Carson Entertainment Group, there would have been no opportunity to have a vision! Johnny famously owned all existing episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from 1962-1992. The film we had in mind could never be made without unrestricted access to those shows. When that finally happened, well, that was our biggest obstacle. For that, I will be eternally grateful to his nephew, Jeff Sotzing, President of Carson Entertainment Group and basically the “keeper of the legacy”. Jeff had to take a leap of faith because he knew his uncle had never wanted to cooperate with any production on his life and career during his lifetime. I finally convinced him that even a figure as legendary as Johnny Carson would be forgotten if something were not done. I think that is what convinced him to take that leap of faith.

Please describe your background credits, how maybe they led to this film.

I have rarely said this but do you know I made documentaries on Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen in part to get Johnny Carson’s attention because I knew those were two idols of his? True. When Johnny finally called me after all those years of turning me down to tell me he appreciated the letters but he still wasn’t going to do anything, he made a point of telling me he also appreciated the films I had sent him through the years. Two of those, he mentioned by name, were Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen! In later years, we made films about two icons that had both appeared on Johnny’s Tonight Show – Judy Garland and Bette Davis. In fact, in our Judy Garland film, we used a clip of her last appearance on The Tonight Show before she died where she sang a song entitled, “It’s All For You” about a performer’s love of the audience. We licensed that clip with Johnny’s express permission back in 1996. Well, a short sixteen years later, we finally got to make a documentary about him and we made sure to show a shot of Judy Garland on The Tonight Show in our documentary – a little full-circle tribute to the long process of bringing this to fruition.

Here—or, more indelibly, heeeeeeere—is John William Carson who, on May 22, 1992, did for the very last time what nobody else has ever done better (or with greater panache and seismic authority), from behind or in front of any desk, performing invaluable national service nightly on a television screen. There, all cool and bright, he was a man named Johnny (never John, which he had always been—even in boyhood—and would remain to those who knew him best).  Moreover, he was a man of unprecedented omnipotence for his line of work:  It was October 1, 1962—just a few weeks before his thirty-seventh birthday—when Carson commenced his fabled epoch of hosting The Tonight Show, NBC’s venerable bedtime franchise.  Across the next 29 years, 7 months, 3 weeks total, he rose to reign iconic as the smooth midnight sentinel king whose political japes and cultural enthusiasms mightily swayed popular taste at whim or wink.  (The Carson wink, incidentally, would be the last best wink known to humankind; it transmitted, among other things, surefire stardom to aspiring personalities, especially comedians, and privileged co-conspiracy to regular viewers who became his spontaneous partners in sly mockery. He made high art, too, of the silent sidelong glance into whatever camera lens available—his eyes impishly saying everything he chose not to speak aloud, only saying it louder.)

Patriarchal broadcast lion Walter Cronkite, a.k.a. the Most Trusted Man in America (arguably a time-share mantle owned in equal part by Carson), once summed up the long-shadow legacy of the late-night stalwart as that of “a cool kid from Nebraska with a cockeyed smile who became the most durable performer in the whole history of television.”  True, like sun and moon and oxygen, Johnny Carson was there always, steadfast and suavely reassuring; even when he took time off for restorative behavior, his presence loomed while guest-hosts tarried gamely at his formidable desk.  That he was watched and collectively experienced by an impossibly vast constituency during hours most intimate and vulnerable only deepened his American meaning. (Gravitas personified:  Halfway through his run he was drawing an average of 17.3 million faithful, whereas today’s comedy night-boys are lucky to lure more than five million captive, albeit in a wholly different cable-splayed universe.)  “We are losing a continuum,” fretted critic Tom Shales twenty years ago, evincing the groundswell of abandonment angst burbling as Carson’s final Tonight Show broadcast approached. “For nearly thirty years, at a tender and delicate hour . . . he has cured innumerable cases of the blues, alleviated countless depressions, mercifully interrupted millions of arguments. . . . It’s natural to panic.”

Johnny Carson, circa 1967. Credit: Courtesy of Omaha World Herald

Carson was, for certain, the bump in the night that delivered hope and perspective. His opening monologues (ever his pride and joy) navigated us through seven presidential administrations, rasping out the perfect pitch of populist incredulity, always with subtle precision; the Carson version of history, as it occurred daily, anchored mass sanity funniest in a world gone perpetually mad.  Also, like no one else in a latter century lifetime, his was the last face flickering onto the brain before so many billions of slumbers, thus launching the dreams of generations. (Medical science, no less, immortalized him by naming in his honor a form of temporary one-eyed blindness caused by burrowing the other eye into a pillow while nodding off watching TV:  Carsonogeneous Monocular Nyctalopia.)  Indeed, the great director Billy Wilder once gratefully proclaimed him “the Valium and the Nembutal of a nation.”  Only two weeks before the king’s abdication, Frank Rich put it this way in The New York Times:  “The actual content of a Carson show did not matter.  At a time of anxiety, who cares about the color and material of a security blanket?”  The unassailable upshot:  No other performer had ever felt so dependably essential to his country’s sense of well-being—or, quite likely, would ever wish to.

Famously the most public of private men and vice-versa (which was only part of his peculiar genius for longevity), he could joke, “I will not even talk to myself without an appointment.”  While openly on display for three decades of nocturne, he was at the same time barely spotted anywhere outside of television screens—which was how he liked it, then and ever after.  (His gift for hiding in plain sight didn’t diminish during the intractably cloaked thirteen-year retirement he spent relishing spotlight-free living; Garbo and Salinger had nothing on his powers of ordinary civilian invisibility.)  Still, a silken aw-shucks Everyman exemplar—confident and dashing and eternally boyish—he was also slippery as the night is long, never easy to pin down, yet always an affirming presence to behold whenever he could be beheld:  “And that’s why Carson has no equal—not even Cary Grant, whom he resembled in shyness, smartness, and lethal counter-punching style—as a model of what an American man might be,” wrote David Thomson, the fanciful British expatriate film scholar.  “He came away from that scrutiny as both an American ideal and a mystery man; agreeable and withdrawn; good company and intensely alone; attractive yet cold . . . always there, never graspable.  . . . I feel he stayed unknowable so as to be seductive, to stay there, on TV.”  Carson, the staunch Midwestern pragmatist, would simply ascribe all that to good business sense:  “Always leave them wanting more,” he would genially repeat to quell chronic speculation about his personal world—all evasive twinkle, all the time.

Johnny Carson, circa 1970s. Credit: Courtesy of Carson Entertainment Group

“Johnny packs a tight suitcase,” was the definitive Carsonian metaphor coined by Ed McMahon, his Gibraltar-like sidekick and irrepressible foil since 1958 when they joined disparate forces in New York on the hit afternoon ABC quiz-fizz Who Do You Trust? That glib daily showcase would four years later springboard them (how could he not take Ed?) to The Tonight Show, which beamed from NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Center, Studio 6B, during Carson’s first decade of enthronement preceding its permanent shift westward to California.  (Meanwhile, McMahon’s nightly vowel-elasticizing host introduction—“Heeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!”—would be consecrated in 2006 as the number-one ubiquitous television catchphrase ever, according to the TV Land cable network.)  But the Carson personal world was knowable enough—and gingerly becomes only more so in his majestic if complex mortal wake.  Devotees had long known, for instance, that he married four times and divorced thrice from a trio of wives with ridiculously similar first names:  Joan Wolcott (his University of Nebraska college sweetheart who bore him three sons while absorbing all of his career birthing pains as well), Joanne Copeland (whose impassioned loyalty propelled his early stratospheric Tonight Show stewardship), and Joanna Ulrich Holland (who gracefully enhanced and broadened his relocated lifestyle of California kingliness).  He took his final and considerably younger bride Alexis Mass in 1987, making theirs his longest turn at wedlock, inevitable bumps in the last years notwithstanding.  “Marriage takes a lot of work,” he once said, certain of his limitations.  “Some fellas have a proclivity for that, and some can make model airplanes . . .  I do well with this show.”

Most viewers also knew that as a kid he learned magic (enter The Great Carsoni!), largely to overcome shyness, and never stopped creating illusions, especially when trapped at parties (he went nowhere without a deck of cards) or when making hypnotically irresistible television after dark.  He entered existence on October 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, the middle child of Homer L. (“Kit”) Carson, a kindly power-company yeoman, and the former Ruth Hook, an exacting woman of refinement with thin patience for her future-famous son’s strivings.  When John was eight, the family settled in Norfolk, Nebraska, where just under a handful of years hence he snagged a friend’s magic-manual and would, at age fourteen, as Carsoni, earn his first performance fee—three dollars—from the town Rotarians.  Thus, as Time’s Richard Corliss saliently suggested, he’d “found within himself the secrets of conjuring—misdirection, poise, timing, a commanding personality—which are also the secrets of standup comedy.”  All pieces more or less fell into place thereafter with haphazard surety.  Starting in Omaha, where TV arrived the same time he did, at station WOW (true), he began a life of hosting that led him to gilded Los Angeles and local acclaim on KNXT, the CBS affiliate, with quirky novelty programs that eventually beguiled the network to shove him into his own national primetime Thursday night half-hour, The Johnny Carson Show (debut date June 30, 1955), an ongoing experiment in sketch-and-song confusion that crashed after 39 weeks.  His promising glimmer resurfaced and shone at last some 18 months later in New York, helming the game show originally (if ironically enough) called Do You Trust Your Wife? before the titular Trust question was generalized ungrammatically.

“I turned The Tonight Show down the first time it was offered to me because Who Do You Trust? was very comfortable and quite easy,” he recalled sometime after he changed his mind, agreeing to replace the legendarily manic sensation Jack Paar who’d worn of the relentless grind not yet five years into his own jangly reign supreme.    “My first reaction was, ‘Why do you need that kind of trouble?’ Then they came back [three weeks later], and I said, ‘If you’re really going to take a shot at it, if you really want to entertain, you ought to grab for all the marbles or get out of the business.’  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Tonight was the only network show where I could do the nutty, experimental, low-key thing I like best.”

Forty years after having first seized the night to do what he and his country liked best, and one decade after he had quit, I found myself the beneficiary of his lively company for a long red-wine-sipping lunch, as he submitted to the lone magazine profile (or media visitation of any sort) since the early onset of his retirement vanish.  “I think I left at the right time,” he told me that January afternoon in 2002, which also turned out to be almost exactly three years to the day when emphysema took him forever (January 23, 2005). “You’ve got to know when to get the hell off the stage, and the timing was right for me.”  (IT’S ALL IN THE TIMING, I knew, was his life’s credo as well as the hand-stitched mantra on a needlepoint throw pillow he treasured.)  Unavoidably, among the grand tales and meandering topics that flew from him that day, he gently groused only a little about being asked constantly whether he missed the work whose standard he’d made unmatchable.  With a shrug and a whiff of quiet satisfaction, he repeated the three-word response he gave whenever the question arose:  “I did it.”   Who could argue otherwise?

“Red” Upshaw (pictured fifth from left) and Margaret Mitchell’s (pictured sixth from left) wedding photo, September 2, 1922. Upshaw is believed to be the model for the Rhett Butler character in Gone With the Wind. Best man John Marsh (pictured second from left) would become Mitchell’s second husband, July 4, 1925, and her editor when writing Gone With the Wind. Also pictured, Mitchell’s older brother Stephens (far right). Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta. Her great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Mitchell fought in the American Revolution (1775-83), and his son William Mitchell took part in the War of 1812. Her great-grandfather Isaac Green Mitchell was a circuit-riding Methodist minister who settled in Marthasville, which later was named Atlanta. Mitchell was thus a fourth-generation Atlantan. Her grandfather Russell Mitchell fought in the Civil War and suffered two bullet wounds to the head during the fighting at Antietam. Twice married, he had twelve children, the oldest of whom was Mitchell’s father, Eugene.

Mitchell’s mother’s family was Irish Catholic. Her great-grandfather Phillip Fitzgerald came to America from Ireland and eventually settled on a plantation near Jonesboro in Fayette County. (This portion of the county now lies in Clayton County.) The Fitzgeralds had seven daughters. Annie Fitzgerald, Mitchell’s grandmother, married John Stephens, who had emigrated from Ireland and settled in Atlanta. Stephens amassed large real-estate properties and helped found a trolley-car system in the city. The Stephenses had twelve children; Mary Isobel (May Belle), Mitchell’s mother, was the seventh. May Belle married Eugene Muse Mitchell on November 8, 1892. Eugene was a noted Atlanta attorney, and May Belle was a staunch supporter of woman suffrage. They had a son, Stephens, followed four years later by a daughter, Margaret Munnerlyn.

Mitchell began making up stories before she could write, dictating them to her mother. Later she made her own books with cardboard covers and filled them with adventure stories using her friends, relatives, and herself as characters. As she grew older she switched to copybooks, which her mother stored in inexpensive enamel bread boxes. A few of the hundreds of tales that she wrote have survived, including two Civil War tales. When the family moved to Peachtree Street, the young Mitchell attended the Tenth Street School and later Woodberry School, a private school. She branched out to writing, directing, and starring in plays, coercing the neighborhood children to take part.

From 1914 to 1918 Mitchell attended the Washington Seminary, a prestigious Atlanta finishing school, where she was a founding member and officer of the drama club. She was also the literary editor of Facts and Fancies, the high school yearbook, in which two of her stories were featured. She was president of the Washington Literary Society.

When America entered World War I (1917-18), the seminary girls were in demand at dances for the young servicemen stationed at Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson. At one such dance in the summer of 1918 Mitchell met twenty-two-year-old Clifford Henry, a wealthy and socially prominent New Yorker who was a bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon. The two fell in love and became engaged shortly before he was shipped overseas. He was killed in October 1918 while fighting in France.

In September 1918 Mitchell entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she began using the nickname “Peggy.” Her freshman year at college was disrupted when an influenza epidemic forced the cancellation of classes. In January her mother contracted influenza and died the day before her daughter reached home. Mitchell completed her freshman year at Smith, then returned to Atlanta to take her place as mistress of the household and to enter the upcoming debutante season. During the last charity ball of the season, Mitchell created a scandal by performing a sensuous dance popular in the nightclubs of Paris, France.

Soon Mitchell met Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, who was from a prominent Raleigh, North Carolina, family. They were wed in 1922, but the marriage was brief. After four months Upshaw left Atlanta for the Midwest and never returned. The marriage was annulled two years later.

In the same year that she married, Mitchell landed a job with the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She used “Peggy Mitchell” as her byline. Her interviews, profiles, and sketches of life in Georgia were well received. During her four years with the Sunday Magazine, Mitchell wrote 129 articles, worked as a proofreader, substituted for the advice columnist, reviewed books, and occasionally did hard news stories for the paper. Complications from a broken ankle led her to end her career as a journalist.

Mitchell’s second marriage was to John Robert Marsh on July 4, 1925, and the couple set up housekeeping in a small apartment affectionately called “the Dump.” They entertained the newspaper crowd and other friends on a regular basis. Marsh, originally from Maysville, Kentucky, worked for the Georgia Railway and Power Company (later Georgia Power Company) as director of the publicity department.

In 1926, to relieve the boredom of being cooped up with a broken ankle, Mitchell began to write Gone With the Wind. Setting up her Remington typewriter on an old sewing table, she completed the majority of the book in three years. She wrote the last chapter first and the other chapters in no particular order. Stuffing the chapters into manila envelopes, she eventually accumulated almost seventy chapters. When visitors appeared, she covered her work with a towel, keeping her novel a secret. There has been much speculation on whether the characters were based on real people, but Mitchell claimed they were her own creations.

In April 1935 Harold Latham, an editor for the Macmillan publishing company in New York City, toured the South looking for new manuscripts. Latham heard that Mitchell had been working on a manuscript and asked her if he could see it, but she denied having one. When a friend commented that Mitchell was not serious enough to write a novel, Mitchell gathered up many of the envelopes and took them to Latham at his hotel. He had to purchase a suitcase to carry them. He read part of the manuscript on the train to New Orleans, Louisiana, and sent it straight to New York. By July Macmillan had offered her a contract. She received a $500 advance and 10 percent of the royalties.

As she revised the manuscript, Mitchell cut and rearranged chapters, confirmed details, wrote the first chapter, changed the name of the main character (originally called Pansy), and struggled to think of a title that suited her. Titles considered included Tomorrow Is Another Day, Another Day, Tote the Weary Load, Milestones, Ba! Ba! Blacksheep, Not in Our Stars, and Bugles Sang True. Finally she settled on a phrase from a favorite poem “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, / Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng.” Published in 1936, Gone With the Wind was 1,037 pages long and sold for three dollars.

Gone With the Wind was a phenomenal success and received rave reviews. Overnight, Mitchell became a celebrity and remained very much in the public spotlight through the production and premiere of the film based on her novel in 1939. She was in constant demand for speaking engagements and interviews. At first she complied, but later, pleading poor health, she usually declined these requests and stopped autographing copies of her book. She said she wanted to remain simply Mrs. John Marsh.

Gone With the Wind was Mitchell’s only published novel. At her request, the original manuscript (except for a few pages retained to validate her authorship) and all other writings were destroyed. These included a novella in the Gothic style, a ghost story set in an old plantation home left vacant after the Civil War. According to the recollections of Lois Cole, a friend of Mitchell’s and a Macmillan employee, three people had read this tale (written before Gone With the Wind)  and thought it was worth publishing by one of the bigger publishing houses. Cole suggested that Mitchell enter it in the Little, Brown novelette contest.

Possibly one of the reasons that Mitchell never wrote another novel was that she spent so much time working with her brother and her husband to protect the copyright of her book abroad. Up until the publication of Gone With the Wind, international copyright laws were ambiguous and varied from country to country. Correspondence also took much of her time. During the years following publication, she personally answered every letter she received about her book. With the outbreak of World War II (1941-45), she worked tirelessly for the American Red Cross, even outfitting a hospital ship. She also set up scholarships for black medical students.

August 11, 1949, Mitchell and her husband decided to go to a movie, A Canterbury Tale, at the Peachtree Art Theatre. Just as they started to cross Peachtree Street, near 13th Street, a speeding taxi crested the hill. Mitchell stepped back; Marsh stepped forward. The driver applied the brakes, skidded, and hit Mitchell. She was rushed to Grady Hospital but never regained consciousness. During the five days before she died, crowds waited outside for news. U.S. president Harry Truman, Georgia governor Herman Talmadge, and Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield all asked to be kept informed of her condition. Special phone lines were installed at Grady Hospital, and friends manned the lines in four-hour shifts. Mitchell died on August 16, 1949, and was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.

Mitchell was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement in 1994 and into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

Interviewer: Tell us why particularly you decided to do this documentary?

Pamela Roberts: Well, to be honest with you, I had never read Gone with the Wind, and I knew that the book was turning seventy-five years old, and I knew that I was here in Atlanta, and that I’d better read the book. So I read it, and I thought, “You know what, if anything this is better than the movie,” and that’s saying a lot!

Interviewer: That is saying a lot.

Pamela Roberts: So I got interested in who the person was that could of written such a book. And when I got into Margaret Mitchell’s life. It was an amazing journey, and I have decided that she is more interesting than Scarlett O’Hara.

Interviewer: Wow

Pamela Roberts: But I do think that only Margaret Mitchell could have created a character like Scarlett O’Hara.

Interviewer: Well you certainly are telling a powerful story, who knew how sexy she was, that she was a flapper, and that she really enjoyed life, and was a bit of a feminist.

Pamela Roberts: She was a feminist, you know, you’ve seen the fact in this documentary that her mother was a suffragist, and, basically, you know, that meant Margaret Mitchell was ahead of her time. Because she was born into, well, a family that educated her in a way so that she could understand what to do as a young women growing up in ways a lot of young women couldn’t do, so she was ahead of her time.

Interviewer: As a documentary maker you have to tell the truth, and you chose here to really delve into an area where some people might not have wanted to hear this story.

Pamela Roberts: And you are talking about the issue of race. Basically how this all began for me, is that I learned that Margaret Mitchell was secretly giving money to educate African-American doctors. It blew me away, and in a way I worked backwards, because here is a person who wrote a book that is racially polarizing, and not wanting to be in a class with a black student when she is in college. What happened in her life from the beginning of that to the end? What was the arch of change? And who knows exactly, we weren’t there with her every step of the way. But this documentary told the truth, and I got some pushback from people who said, “Don’t tell that story let’s just celebrate Gone with the Wind.” Well we don’t do that at Public Broadcasting, we have the integrity of telling like it is, what happened.

In my opinion, Margaret Mitchell, she was writing so much as a reporter that she was able then to be used to writing in a certain way, and I think that it was important for her. So I encourage people to read the columns that she wrote for the Atlanta Journal. Because a writer doesn’t come from nowhere. They have to have that time where they develop their craft and she had that chance through actually being a reporter which is very interesting. She became a great storyteller.

Interviewer: And as you have said, Pam, Margaret Mitchell was even more of a character than Scarlett O’Hara.

Pamela Roberts: She was! Pat Conroy has just said that this went on to become the most popular novel in America in the twentieth century. And it is hard to believe that it is still a best seller. It sells a quarter of a million copies each year all over the world; it has been published in a thousand editions, there are new editions coming out all the time. So there is something about what she was able to do with this story that transcends basically what most writers can do. In fact Pat Conroy told me after the interview he said, “All of us as writers wish we could have that one success.”

Interviewer: That one novel.

Pamela Roberts: It was really amazing what she accomplished.

Interviewer: Well I can tell you this documentary is surely a success.

What gave you the idea for your book [Scout, Atticus, and Boo]?

Director Mary Murphy. Photo by Chris Carroll.

This all started as a documentary. When I was a producer at CBS News, I suggested stories about To Kill a Mockingbird but they were always turned down. My bosses would say, “No interview with Harper Lee, no news.” I read the novel again after I started my own production company. Freed of the demand for news, I thought about it differently. The novel was the story, not the novelist. How the novel came to be, its impact, influence, and enduring popularity—all that was a phenomenon well worth exploring. I started researching, reporting, and setting up interviews. By the time I cut twenty minutes of what was to become my documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird, I knew I had too much great material that would never make it onto the screen. I wanted to make the entire interviews available; hence the book.

What was the most surprising thing you learned from the interviews?

What I found most surprising was not one specific thing but how wonderfully wideranging all the responses were, whether it was Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, once the pastor of Harper Lee’s church in Monroeville, Alabama, saying the novel gave him comfort when he was organizing a bus boycott and confronting the Ku Klux Klan in Montgomery, Alabama, or Oprah Winfrey saying it was the first book she encouraged other people to read—in other words, her earliest book club selection. There seems to be an unlimited supply of fresh commentary about To Kill a Mockingbird. Every time the camera rolled, I heard something I had not heard before. This continued when I visited schools, libraries, bookstores, and film festivals after my book was published and the documentary released. Readers of all ages were eager to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and share their own experience. This was true in schools from Upper Arlington High School in Columbus, Ohio, to the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. It happened at libraries in Waterford, Connecticut, to Steamboat Springs, Colorado; in bookstores from Partners in Westport, Massachusetts, to BookPeople in Austin, Texas. And it was the case at film festivals from Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. I think this explains why the novel endures to this day. It has something for everyone, something meaningful and memorable.

How did you decide on the interview subjects?

Some of them had already written about To Kill a Mockingbird, like Wally Lamb and Scott Turow. Both are bestselling novelists and have the added perspectives of being a teacher (Lamb) and defense lawyer (Turow), so I approached them early on. I read historian Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, and knew she would provide historical context and had a personal story to tell about her connection to the film. I wanted to speak to a civil rights leader, and Andrew Young agreed. In some cases I had a hunch. I read the memoirs of James McBride and Rick Bragg and thought I saw To Kill a Mockingbird’s influence on their work.

Some interviews were the result of sheer serendipity. I was at a book convention to interview novelists Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus and ran into Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch. When I told him about my project and asked if he had any authors I should talk to, Pietsch pointed me to Mark Childress, who was born in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee’s hometown. I did a lengthy interview with Childress the same day. He was especially eloquent about how the novel helped to fuel the civil rights movement and gave white Southerners a way to question the system. Childress also had corresponded with Harper Lee herself and told me about it. He is a great presence in the documentary and it was my good luck to be able to include him.

Were the interviews difficult to get?

It is a testament to the novel that most of the writers I approached were only too happy to talk about its influence. They were easy to schedule and generous with their time. The people closest to Harper Lee were the hardest. The novelist’s older sister, Alice Finch Lee, and her close friends Michael and Joy Brown, the couple who aided her financially so that she might quit her job and write full-time, have up until now declined to give full interviews. It is a point of pride for me that they decided to answer my questions.

In both cases, it took time. After a few letters and a viewing of a rough cut of the documentary, Miss Alice agreed to see me. We had a delightful visit in her law office in Monroeville. Miss Alice tutored me in Alabama history, politics, soil, family history, and the Mitford sisters, among other things. Then she allowed me to return with a camera crew. When I interviewed her, Miss Alice was ninety-eight. She is deaf and on-camera questioning presented challenges. Miss Alice needed to be able to see my lips up close. You cannot see it onscreen but there were only about twelve inches of space between my face and hers.

The interview went on for five hours and Miss Alice never flagged. She is a remarkable person and, quite apart from her talented younger sister, she is a role model who has made a little history herself. One of the first women to be admitted to the bar in Alabama, Miss Alice is the oldest practicing attorney in the state. She has been a great mentor and support to women who want to become lawyers, including Tonja Carter, now one of her partners at Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter. Miss Alice also has held many posts within the United Methodist Church. Like anyone her age she has ailments and health issues, but does not complain. Miss Alice has a sharp memory and a good sense of humor, and enjoys keeping up with news, especially splashy murder and criminal trials. It has been a privilege to be in her company and I visit her as often as I can.

It was a privilege to interview Joy and Michael Brown. They are Harper Lee’s closest friends in New York City, and if not for their generosity at Christmas in 1956, giving her a year off from working for what was then known as the British Overseas Airways Company so that she might write full-time, To Kill a Mockingbird might never have happened. The Browns agreed to talk to me after my book went to the printers, and so their interviews appear only in the documentary.

Harper Lee wrote about the couple in an affectionate essay for McCall’s magazine, but she never named them: “They were a handsome pair, healthy in mind and body, happy in their extremely active lives. Common interests as well as love drew me to them: and an endless flow of reading material circulated amongst us; we took pleasure in the same theater, films, music, and we laughed at the same things, and we laughed so much in those days.”

Lee met Michael Brown first. A native of Mexia, Texas, Brown moved to New York after returning from overseas at the end of World War II and worked at temp jobs while finding his way as a composer/lyricist. Through a family friend, he met Truman Capote. “We got along very well,” Brown told me. “I thought he was phenomenal. I’d never met anyone quite like that. And his writing really amazed me.”

Brown and Capote stayed in touch. And out of the blue one day came a letter from Tangiers, where Capote was visiting the photographer Cecil Beaton. In his tiny handwriting, Capote said he had a shy friend from Monroeville, Alabama, who was moving to New York. Her name was Nelle Harper Lee. Would Brown kindly look after her? “Had she been a dreadful person, out of comradeship with Truman I still would have looked after her as best I could,” Brown said. And dreadful she was not. Brown, who is ninety now, with receding white hair and dancing hazel eyes, happily remembers meeting her at the Park Avenue apartment of Capote’s mother and stepfather: “Nelle and I were instant friends. Looking back on it, I can see why. We both came from small Southern towns; we both read books at an early age; we both loved New York. So here we were with similar backgrounds, blending Scotch, Irish, and English tribes. We had been brought up under parallel circumstances. Because of the death of my mother, my ten-years-older sister had taken care of me, while Nelle, too, had an older sister who took charge of her. Our respective fathers were gods to us, hers a lawyer, mine a doctor, and they were wonderful gods, indeed.”

Brown would soon abandon working as a typist for Billboard magazine to become a successful performer of his own words and music at New York’s most prestigious supper club, Le Ruban Bleu, where in his very first engagement he broke the house record with a run of fifty-four weeks. What made him different as an entertainer was that as often as not, his work was satiric, depicting such disparate real-life luminaries as Judge Crater, Lola Montez, and Tammy Faye Baker. “Lizzie Borden” was his first nationally known hit, followed by “The John Birch Society,” which later morphed into “The George Bush Society” to the same melody. Brown, it turned out, also was destined to have a literary success of his own. His children’s stories about Santa Mouse first appeared in 1966 and have remained popular every Christmas season since then.

In due course Michael met Joy Williams, a beautiful graduate of George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. Balanchine subsequently brought Joy into the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Later she joined Roland Petit’s Les Ballets de Paris as a principal dancer and met Margot Fonteyn, with whom she remained close friends for the next forty years.

Michael and Joy married, lived in a brownstone house on the east side of Manhattan, and had three boys, Michael, Kelly, and Adam. Lee was an intimate friend of the whole family and became an integral part of it. “We thought back then that Nelle Harper essentially was a writer,” said Joy Brown, who at eighty-three is a striking figure with a ballerina’s carriage, hair swept up around her head, and pale blue eyes. “She was not going to spend her life working as an airlines clerk while hoping to become something else.”

Lee shared some of her writing with her friends. “We read character sketches that she wrote about people in Monroeville,” said Michael. “And they were unusually perceptive. How could two people like Truman and Nelle be such close friends as children and grow up to see things the rest of us couldn’t envision? She just amazed us.”

In the fall of 1956, the Browns had a financial windfall when Michael created a show for an Esquire magazine presentation and the couple decided they could afford a special Christmas present for their friend. “I thought, here we have this bit of money, so why don’t we see if Nelle Harper could take some time off?” Joy remembered.

The rest, as we now know, is history. “Of course it tickled me,” Joy said. “They were going to publish five thousand copies, for Heaven’s sake!” At Lee’s insistence, the present became a loan and was paid back in full long ago. “At a time when we really needed the money,” Michael stressed. The Browns, who have never spoken publicly about their gift, would never dream of saying how much it was. The couple’s humility is plain to see. “We are not responsible for what occurred,” Michael said emphatically. “She was a writer to the depths of her soul. It would have happened with or without us. All that we did was hurry it up a little.”

The three friends remain as close as ever. When they talk, they do not spend a lot of time marveling about what happened, but it does come up. A few years ago, Miss Lee and Mr. Brown made a quiet trip to the New York Public Library so that Lee could look something up in Capote’s papers. They took a bus; children of the Depression do not take taxis. Returning from the library, as they walked along Forty-second Street in the anonymity of pedestrians, Brown remembered Lee’s speaking in genuine wonderment at the book’s phenomenal success. After all those years, it had still not quite sunk in.

Did you get to meet Harper Lee?

Harper Lee has famously scrawled “Hell, no” on the top of interview requests and sent them back, so I was not expecting much. Her literary agent turned down all my requests. There are many questions I would love to ask. But short of her telling me what’s what, I do think her sister and the Browns have added a great deal to the record. They bring new facts, anecdotes, and history. They have shared Harper Lee’s thinking and given us new insight into the writing process, why the novelist stopped speaking publicly, and why no second novel was forthcoming.

What has been the reaction to Scout, Atticus, and Boo?

When I set out to make a film and write a book about To Kill a Mockingbird, I knew high school English teachers would be a part of the audience but I didn’t know just how enthusiastic they would be. To Kill a Mockingbird was never assigned to me in high school and maybe that is why I became a student of it later in life. As a teenager, I may have missed the chance to savor the novel with the help of a teacher, but I am more than making up for it now. No one knows more about why Harper Lee’s first and only novel remains so popular than the teachers who teach it. They are a big part of the reason.

I showed an excerpt of the documentary and gave a talk at the 2010 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and the appreciative response was overwhelming. That led to many speaking engagements at schools across the country. It has been a tremendous experience.