View from the Whirlpool

Talking about where he has been in the past two frantic years, Alex Haley sounds like a gazetteer. Osaka, Paris, Tehran, Tel Aviv. They seem as familiar to him as stations on a commuter run in Connecticut. Then, listening to him self, he stops and smiles apologetically. "And to think that when I was growing up in Henning, Tennessee, it used to be a big deal to get a lift on a feed truck to Memphis!" The phenomenal success of Roots has not so much changed Haley's life as it has obliterated it, giving him a new and often uncomfortable persona as if he were seeing himself in a strange, distorting mirror. "It's like a kaleidoscope, a whirlpool into which I've fallen," he says. "My feet are suspended above ground and I can't get a perch.

For months at a time I average only four hours of sleep a night."

Haley can even pinpoint the moment his old world stopped. It was Jan 31, 1977, the morning after the last episode of Roots was aired. Many writ ers find their lives altered by a bestselling book, but perhaps no other writer in history, from Homer to Norman Mailer, has been hit so hard so suddenly with so great a success. Roots as a book was already a bestseller; then came the TV triumph, which sent hundreds of thousands of additional read ers out to look for the book, making it the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller in 1977.

After watching the final segment of the television version in New York, Haley went out to the airport to fly to Los Angeles. He was mobbed, and the airline attendant who came to his rescue told him, "You'll have to be pre-boarded from now on, sir. Your life will never be the same."

In fact, fame had been a long time coming. For years even Haley, who is now 57, did not know that he was a writer. He got only mediocre grades in high school, and after two years in a North Carolina teach ers college he became a cook in the Coast Guard, where he stayed for 20 years. He started writing to relieve the bore dom of life aboard ship, and when he left the service in 1959 he decided on even more hazardous duty, the life of the freelance journalist.

It was in London, on a writing assignment in 1964, that he conceived the idea of Roots. Looking at the British Museum's Rosetta Stone, which is the key to an understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, he wondered if the strange African sounds his grandmother had passed on to him could somehow be the key to his own background. He discovered that they could, and he spent the next twelve years doing research and writing, eventually tracing his own origins back seven generations to a young African by the name of Kunta Kinte.

If he had had money to hire researchers and typists, Haley believes he could have finished Roots in a third the time. But he is not bitter about the delay; he feels that he was paying his dues as a writer all those years. What does bother him is the three plagiarism suits that have dogged him ever since the book became a hit. Though two of them, both filed by the same claimant, were dismissed and are now being appealed, the third, brought by Harold Cour-lander, author of The African, is reported to have cost him $500,000 in out-of-court settlement fees. "There were three notes," paragraphs Haley from the admits, "and book it that was futile to appeared try to verbatim defend in my my self. I honestly can't recall what was in mind when I wrote something at 3 a.m. five years ago. The plaintiffs lawyers found the paragraphs on a piece of paper in one of several cartons of notes I had turned over to them. The material had been given to me by someone helping me research. My lawyer advised me to fight, but I was anxious to get back to what I do -- write." He could afford to settle:

Roots in its two forms, words and TV, has already brought him a sum that he will only say is "plural millions."

At the moment Haley is finishing up a book about the writing of Roots called Search, which is to be published in the spring of 1980. After that he wants to begin another book, probably about the islands of the Caribbean, an area that fascinates him because of its complicated mixture of races. Unfortunately, he complains, there is little time any more for Haley the writer. His mail arrives in giant, gray bags, and some 60 speaking invitations come in every month. He has a staff of two in Los Angeles to handle the traffic, but are far behind.

Haley the private man scarcely ex ists at all, and outside of frequent phone calls to his three chil dren, he does not have what might be called a personal life.

Twice divorced, he spends much of his time going from one lecture to another. The chief virtue of his rented eight-room house in Cheviot Hills, in fact, seems to be that it is less than half an hour from the Los Angeles airport. Though he has a swimming pool in the backyard, he has been in it exactly twice. Still, Haley has found time to oversee the making of Roots 11, and he is pleased by it. He particularly likes James Earl Jones, who plays Alex Haley. "Seeing myself on the screen was awesome. It wasn't fun watching myself losing my first wife and seeing how I was at fault, but I had to admit that it was true. I felt an obligation to be honest."

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