As Harper Lee wages a courtroom battle against her literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who allegedly duped her into signing over to him the copyright to To Kill A Mockingbird, Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal speaks to Lee’s friends and intimates for an explosive August-issue story. “I used to take Harper Lee down here until she got too old to play,” her close friend and Methodist minister Thomas Lane Butts tells Seal about the Wind Creek Casino & Hotel, the Vegas-style gambling establishment where she used to feed quarters into slot machines for hours, reveling in the anonymity. Seal reports that Lee used to roll up and down the rows of jangling machines in her wheelchair and nobody seemed to recognize her.

posted 3937 days ago