Mockingbird (30 page)

Pakula and Mulligan had already arranged to shoot many of the scenes on soundstages at the Revue Studios, but that still left the question of what do to for exterior scenes, since Monroeville no longer resembled a Depression-era southern town. Alexander Golitzen, a former architect and the film's co-art director, studied sketches and photographs of Monroeville until he came up with an idea. Some of the houses in old Monroeville resembled clapboard cottages that were disappearing from the outskirts of Los Angeles. Golitzen suggested to his colleague, Henry Bumstead, that they get tips from wrecking companies on houses slated for demolition. Near Chavez Ravine, where a new baseball park for the Los Angeles Dodgers was nearing completion, they found a dozen condemned cottage-style houses. For a total of five thousand dollars, they hauled the frames to the set. Sometimes known as “shotgun hall” houses because they have a center hall with all the rooms off to the left or right, the houses were popular everywhere in the United States during the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century. For a quarter of the cost of building them from scratch on the set, the relocated houses were placed on either side of a re-created Alabama street, with porches, shutters, and gliders (seat swings) added for a touch of southern flair.
21

When Nelle arrived on the set, she was dazzled not only by the illusion—the set “looked so real that I wanted to sit down in a rocking chair and fan myself”—but also by the attitude of the crew making the film. “I know that authors are supposed to knock Hollywood and complain about how their works are treated here,” she said, “but I just can't manage it. Everybody has been so darn nice to me and everything is being done with such care that I can't find anything to complain about.”
22

On February 12, principal photography began. Until now, Nelle had been harboring some doubts about Peck's suitability for the role. “The first time I met him was at my home in Alabama.… I'd never seen Mr. Peck, except in films, and when I saw him at my home I wondered if he'd be quite right for the part.” But that was without seeing him in character. “[T]he first glimpse I had of him was when he came out of his dressing room in his Atticus suit. It was the most amazing transformation I had ever seen. A middle-aged man came out. He looked bigger, he looked thicker through the middle. He didn't have an ounce of makeup, just a 1933-type suit with a collar and a vest and a watch and chain.”
23
According to Michael Freedland, the author of
Gregory Peck
, “The day Harper Lee saw him for the first time walk out of his dressing room in his Panama hat and three-piece white linen suit she burst into tears and called, “He's got a little pot belly just like my Daddy!” “That's no pot belly, Harper,” said Peck, “that's great acting.”

Since her arrival in Los Angeles, Nelle had been “getting the royal treatment from the studios,” according to novelist Fred Gipson's wife, Tommie, who kept Maurice Crain informed of his favorite client's activities. “I saw Nelle Lee's picture in the
L.A. Times
the other day. The story said she was visiting the Universal International lot. I was hoping we could buy her a dinner or a drink or something. She was only here for the weekend, it turned out, and was booked solid.”
24

The reason Nelle had to leave so abruptly was that her family needed her. Crain replied to Tommie, “She has a nephew in the Air Force, stationed at Lowry Field, Denver. His little pregnant wife developed pneumonia and landed in a hospital soon after she arrived in California. He couldn't get off the base often, and was worried sick. Nelle was the only member of his or her family within a thousand miles, so she went to Denver and took charge until the girl was out of danger. She finally made it home yesterday [February 19] and called us.”
25

It was too bad she couldn't have stayed to see the courtroom scenes. To film them, set designers constructed a soundstage 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, the film's Tom Robinson, had a word with him, and the call was changed to, “Downstairs atmosphere in, please; balcony atmosphere upstairs, please.” Because of the mores of the times, Alford, Badham, and Megna 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 deemed inappropriate.

During the trial, Brock Peters delivered one of the most memorable performances in the entire film. For two weeks of rehearsals and filming, Peters was required to break down on the 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. Mulligan coached him until, as Peters said, “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.”
26
Peck found it difficult to watch Peters because the actor's performance was so affecting.

Between Peck and James Anderson, the actor playing Bob Ewell, however, there was no love lost. To begin with, for some reason Anderson would only speak to Mulligan. Peck tried to make a suggestion about one of their scenes, and Anderson snarled back, “You don't show me
shit
!”
27
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, Anderson yanked Philip Alford out of the frame by his hair.
28

*   *   *

In April, after a month of filming, word reached the set that Harper Lee had returned to Monroeville because her family needed her again. At age eighty-two, A. C. Lee had died early in the morning on April 15, 1962.

Of his daughter, A.C. 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.”
29
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. Change was necessary.

It was true that in his private life, rigorous and traditional Methodism confined his reading of the Bible to questions of faith and salvation. But when, toward the end of his life, it became increasingly clear to him that issues of race and fairness overlapped with Christian morality, he enlarged his view of his responsibilities as a religious man. Also, political realities connected with the Civil Rights movement indicated that the law would eventually accomplish in secular ways what people of conscience had so far failed to do, or resisted.

On Easter Sunday, a week after his death, the
Montgomery Advertiser
wished for more men like Lee to come to the aid of the South, and help pour oil on the roiling waters.

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-30s, 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.
30

*   *   *

After her father's death, Nelle buried herself in writing. “Not a word from Nelle,” Capote 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.'”
31
To her friend Dolores Hope in Garden City, Lee confided that the work was “rough going,” because of demands on her time connected with both
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the film. Worrying her more, though, was the strain involved in writing anything that must follow an all-out success. “The book reviewers wait with axes sharpened. They'll be like vultures.” She had been lucky the first time; but this was different.

She may have retreated to Maurice Crain and Annie Laurie Williams's Old Stone House in Riverton, Connecticut, which was becoming one of her favorite places to work. Located on a winding black tar road surrounded by woods and constructed in 1749 from stones and hand-hewn timbers, the original was as solid as a colonial outpost and ideal for solitude. In the backyard, Crain had planted gardens and built two pools for his nieces, Penny and Joy Hafner. “He wasn't afraid of work. He was often out there in a pair of overalls and mixing cement or laying stones and so forth,” said Douglas Roberts, who dated one of the Hafner girls. Near to Crain and Williams lived fellow Texan Ruth Cross, author of
The Golden Cocoon
, who labored with her husband to restore forty run-down acres and a crumbling house. When they were finished, they dubbed it Edendale. Because the Old Stone House was conducive to writing without distractions, Williams and Crain regularly offered it to authors, among them Kathleen Winsor and Alan Paton.

Lee found the Old Stone House congenial, and not just because she was so fond of Crain, Williams, and their relatives Fern and “Dutch” Hafner, who were frequent guests. Nelle didn't own a car, but many times she drove her hosts in a rented car, and the threesome enjoyed the ride up to Connecticut, bringing them to the Old Stone House before nine o'clock on a Friday night for a late dinner. If the Hafners or other in-laws were there, a few hands of bridge or games of Scrabble by the fireplace were favorite ways to spend an evening. “You had to be careful playing against Nelle or Maurice, they were both so bright—minds like cameras.”
32
Sometimes, Lee stayed behind on Sunday, when the others had left, and worked the entire week alone. A neighbor, Roy Law, brought groceries from town, took care of the property, and delivered wood for the fire when the weather was cold.

It was an idyllic setting, but even there she found no magic charm for turning out publishable material. In fact, the previous November she had received what probably was her first rejection letter—from
Esquire
magazine. Commissioned to write a short nonfiction piece on the South—an easy assignment it would seem for the winner of the Pulitzer Prize—she submitted an article so far off the mark that editor Harold Hayes was a little embarrassed about how to respond.

I feel lousy about returning this to you.… What seemed to go wrong—from our point of view—is that the piece is working too hard to carry a lot of weight—humor, characterization, the barbarity of the Klan, the goodness of a brave man and so on. A novel's worth, in fact, with the result that it never quite makes it on either of these levels as a short feature. I'm sympathetic to your decision to change it to a fictional form, and I really don't think that is a factor against it.

Hayes paid her two hundred dollars for her “willingness to be pursued relentlessly by us for a piece that was our idea for you to do.”
33
The fact that she had submitted a piece of fiction with
To Kill a Mockingbird
overtones again, when a nonfiction piece was requested, suggests a certain lack of versatility.

*   *   *

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, Alford 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 outside the jail, when Atticus is protecting his client from a lynch mob and the children unexpectedly intervene. Badham, 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 L.A. 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 them.

Peck said he felt good about how the shooting went. “It seemed to just fall into place without stress or strain.”
34
He was not pleased, however, when he saw the rough cut of the picture. In a memo to his agent, George Chasin, and Universal executive Mel Tucker dated June 18, 1962, he itemized forty-four 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.”
35
But Pakula and Mulligan had taken the precaution of stipulating that they would make the final cut, which kept them, and not the studio, in control of the editing. “Universal did not like the picture very much,” said Foote, “and if they had got their hands on it, God knows what they would have done, but they couldn't.”
36