I Am Scout (20 page)

After two whirlwind days in Hollywood, she had to leave on family business. It was too bad she couldn't have stayed to see the courtroom scenes. To film them, scenarists constructed a sound-stage set built to look exactly like the interior of the courthouse in Monroeville, based on painstaking measurements. Ironically, one of the novel's major themes is tolerance, but a production assistant kept reassembling the extras for the trial by shouting, “All the colored atmosphere upstairs; all the white atmosphere downstairs.” Brock Peters had a word with him, and the call was changed to “Downstairs atmosphere in, please; balcony atmosphere upstairs, please.” Because of the values of the times, Phillip, Mary, and John were not allowed to attend the filming of the courtroom scenes, even though they appear to be watching from the courtroom gallery. For children that age, listening to a trial about rape and incest, even a fictional one, was considered inappropriate.

Producer Alan Pakula and Nelle Lee watch scenes on the set of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
(AP photo)

Gregory Peck points out something in the script to Nelle. (Corbis)

During the trial, Brock Peters delivered one of the most memorable performances in the entire film. For two weeks of rehearsals and filming, he was required to break down on the witness stand, begin to weep, and then make a dignified attempt to try to stifle his sobs. By the end of this slow disintegration, his self-respect has to gain hold again and turn into barely suppressed rage at being falsely accused. Bob Mulligan coached him until “Once we were on track I needed to go only to the places of pain, remembered pain, experienced pain and the tears would come, really at will.” Peters later called those two intense weeks “my veil of tears.”
22
Peck found it difficult to watch Peters because the actor's performance was so affecting.

Between Gregory Peck and James Anderson, however, there was no love lost. To begin with, Anderson would speak only to Mulligan for some reason. Peck tried to make a suggestion about one of their scenes; Anderson snarled back, “You don't show me
shit
!”
23
Second, he was a Method actor, meaning that he tried to remain in character at all times, which in this case was a violent man. In the struggle with Jem Finch near the end of the film, Mr. Anderson yanked Phillip out of the camera frame by his hair.
24

*   *   *

In April, after a month of filming, word reached the set that Nelle had returned to Monroeville just in time because her family needed her again. At age
82
, A. C. Lee died early in the morning on Palm Sunday, April
15
,
1962
.

Of his daughter Nelle, A. C. Lee had said, “It was my plan for her to become a member of our law firm—but it just wasn't meant to be. She went to New York to become a writer.”
25
It was typical of him that he tended to think the best of others, including his headstrong daughter, who had proven him wrong about her choice to drop out of law school and write fiction instead. He believed that people are basically good, capable of improving, and as eager as the next person for a better future.

Worth pointing out, however, is that A. C. Lee himself only gradually rose to the moral standards of Atticus during his life. Though more enlightened than most, he was no saint, no prophet crying in the wilderness with regard to racial matters. In many ways, he was typical of his generation, especially about issues surrounding integration. Like most of his contemporaries, he believed that the current social order, segregation, was natural and created harmony between the races. For him, it was a point not even worth discussing that blacks and whites were different. As the Bible said, “In my Father's house are many mansions.” That divine structure's great roof covered all humanity. Hence, blacks deserved consideration and charity as fellow creatures of God; and the law should protect them. But they were not the same as white people; and for that simple reason—to continue the biblical metaphor—they did not need to be in the same room with whites.

And it may surprise admirers of Atticus Finch that the man he was modeled after did not believe that a church pulpit was the proper place for preaching about racial equity. He insisted that the mission of the Methodist Church, where his family had worshipped for generations, was to bring people to salvation,
not
to promote social justice.
26
On this point he was in agreement with Methodist pastor G. Stanley Frazier, an outspoken segregationist in Montgomery who believed that the church should bring souls to God, and not ensnare them in passing social problems.

But A. C. Lee changed his views during the remainder of the
1950
s. And Nelle watched as her father, formerly a conservative on matters of race and social progress, became an advocate for the rights of blacks.

Part of the reason for his change of mind was the influence of events that no thoughtful American in the
1950
s could ignore. In
1954
, two white men murdered Emmett Till, a
14
-year-old black visiting Mississippi from his home in Chicago because he had whistled at a white woman. The killers were acquitted, and then bragged about their crime to the media. Two years later, Autherine Lucy, a black student, attempted to enroll at Nelle's alma mater, the University of Alabama, but racist violence on the campus for three days forced her to flee.

A contest of warring principles was gearing up in the South, and a civic-minded man such as A. C. Lee could not fail to recognize it happening in his own backyard. In
1959
in Monroeville, the Ku Klux Klan forced the cancellation of the annual Christmas parade by threatening to kill any members of the all-black Union High School band who marched. The morning after the parade was canceled, A. C. Lee walked into the store owned by A. B. Blass, noting that the store's exterior was covered with racist graffiti. As president of Kiwanis, Blass had made the decision to call off the parade for safety's sake. “Mr. Lee came down to our store from his office and knowing what we had done put his hand on my shoulder,” said Blass, “looked me in the eye and said, ‘Son, you did the right thing.'”
27

By the time
To Kill a Mockingbird
was published, A. C. Lee counted himself an activist in defending the civil rights of blacks. In
1962
, while a reporter was interviewing Nelle in Monroeville, he and Alice stopped by on their way to the offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee. The
81
-year-old A. C. Lee interrupted to speak earnestly about the importance of reapportioning the voting district to provide fairer representation for black voters. “It's got to be done,” he said.
28

Though this was not a complete reversal of his belief that the church should stay out of nonreligious affairs, it was clear that racial equity had become a matter of conscience for A. C. Lee, and so it had entered the realm of moral judgment where he had to confront what he believed about humanity. Like his persona, Atticus Finch, he came to believe “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
29

Influencing him, too, was his daughter Alice, more progressive in outlook in matters concerning race than he was. At a critical moment in reorganizing the Methodist Church, for instance, Alice took her stand.

During a meeting in the mid-
1960
s of the Church's Alabama–West Florida Conference, one of the few regional holdouts against integrating black Methodists with whites, a “committee report concerning the problems of our racially divided church and society had come to the floor,” said Reverend Thomas Butts of Monroeville. “Amendments had been made, and debate had started. The advocates of continued racism were poised and ready to try to drag the church deeper into institutional racism, but before their titular leader could get the floor, a wee woman from Monroeville got the attention of the presiding officer of the conference.”

For years, Alice had been impatiently waiting for such an opportunity. A simple motion had been made and seconded to combine the black and white churches. The floor was open for debate. Taking the floor microphone, recalled Reverend Butts, Alice made “her maiden speech to the Alabama–West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church. Her speech electrified the seven- or eight-hundred delegates. It consisted of five words. She said: ‘I move the previous question,' and sat down. The conference applauded enthusiastically and voted overwhelmingly to support her motion, and then proceeded to adopt the committee report without further debate. The advocates of racism were left holding their long-prepared speeches. Miss Alice became the hero of the conference and from that day the enemy of the racists.”
30

*   *   *

On Easter Sunday, a week after his death, the
Montgomery Advertiser
wished for more men like A. C. Lee to come to the aid of the South and help pour oil on the roiling waters of the civil rights movement and its opponents: white supremacists.

Harper Lee, as is the case with most writers of fiction, says that the father in her book, Atticus Finch, isn't exactly
her
father. But she told John K. Hutchens of the
New York Herald Tribune
book section the other day that Atticus Finch was very like her father “in character and—the South has a good word for this—in ‘disposition.'”

What makes Atticus Finch or Amasa Coleman Lee, thus a remarkable man? He was a teacher of his own children, a small-town citizen who thought about things and tried to be a decent Christian human being. He succeeded.

… Many Southern individuals and families with the Lee-Finch family principles have not asserted themselves and offset another image of the Deep South.

This may be an appropriate thought for this Easter Day. But if it is appropriate, let the individual say. The Lee family, and the Finch, is one of great independence. Amasa Coleman Lee, so evidently a great man, voted Democratic until the mid-
30
s, then independently. Said a daughter, “We have a great tendency to vote for individuals, instead of parties. We got it from him.”

Indeed, was and is the Lee-Finch family so unusual? Could Amasa Coleman Lee, in his care, responsibility and sense of justice, have been so unusual and served so long in the Alabama Legislature, or so long edited a county newspaper in the deep south of this Deep South state?

There are many “likenesses” of Atticus Finch. They are far too silent.
31

After her father's death, Nelle buried herself in writing. “Not a word from Nelle,” Truman wrote to Alvin and Marie Dewey on May
5
, “though I read in a magazine that she'd ‘gone into hiding; and was hard at work on her second novel.'”
32

Principal shooting on
To Kill a Mockingbird
had ended May
3
, and the picture wrapped in early June
1962
. During the five months of production, Phillip Alford, in the role of Jem, had grown from four foot eleven to five foot three, and his costumes had to be altered several times. Also, his voice was beginning to change. The final scene to be filmed was the one outside the jail when Atticus is protecting his client from a lynch mob and the children unexpectedly intervene. Mary, who didn't want the film to end, kept deliberately flubbing her lines over and over, until her mother pulled her aside and told her that Los Angeles traffic would be a nightmare if she made everybody stay any longer. Chastened, she said her lines correctly, then Peck, whom the children loved to spray with squirt guns, stepped back. From overhead, the lighting crew poured buckets of water on Scout, Jam, and Dill.

Peck said he felt good about how the shooting went. “It seemed to just fall into place without stress or strain.”
33
He was not pleased, however, when he saw the rough cut of the picture. In a memo to his agent, George Chasin, and to Universal executive Mel Tucker, dated June
18
,
1962
, he itemized
44
objections to the way his character was presented. In sum, the children appeared too often, in his opinion, and their point of view diminished the importance of Atticus. “Atticus has no chance to emerge as courageous or strong. Cutting generally seems completely antiheroic where Atticus is concerned, to the point where he is made to be wishy-washy. Don't understand this approach.” But Pakula and Mulligan had taken the precaution of stipulating in the beginning that they would make the final cut, which kept them, not the studio, in control of the editing.