Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Letters and comments in the Journal implied that the Christmas parade controversy ended the Klan’s influence in Monroe County, but that wasn’t true. In fact, if anything, it was the Klan that could have claimed victory. For some seven or eight years, white folks in Monroe County had been mindlessly consenting to racial integration in the annual Christmas parade, and now the Klan had put an end to the whole thing. One of the letters that the Journal reprinted boasted that the parade cancellation had boosted applications for membership by “1,000 percent.” The group held public rallies in Monroeville in January and March 1960. In the latter case, several hundred Klansmen paraded around the Monroeville square in cars decked in Confederate flags. Regardless of what the Monroe Journal said, militant segregationists were alive and well in Monroe County. And throughout much of Alabama they were still in control.

  Yet the best decision that Harper Lee ever made as a writer was to put all that aside. She stopped trying to use her fiction to gauge the political winds in Alabama. Instead, in Mockingbird she crafted a fable about racial violence, the white mob, and the visceral, deep-seated fears that underlie both, fears that seem to close people off from any understanding of those different from them, and, yet, when confronted in the light of day, are as frivolous as a child’s fear of the bogeyman in the haunted house next door. In the process, she wrote one of the most popular and enduring novels in American literary history.

  No one could have seen it coming, least of all the Lee family. They were just thrilled that Nelle Harper had finally finished her book. A. C. Lee received a copy in the mail and sat down to read it. It took him three days. After the first day, he sent his daughter a note: “I am reading it. I think it is very good.” After the second, “I have not yet finished it. I don’t read as fast as I used to.” After the third, “You’ll have to go some to beat this on your next one.” Of course, there wouldn’t be a next one, but no one could have guessed that at the time either. A. C. was surprised when folks around town started greeting him as Atticus. He hadn’t recognized himself in the book at all. His main concern had been the news that Ernestine’s Gift Shop, Monroeville’s lone bookstore, had organized a book signing for Nelle Harper, and, in anticipation of the big event, had bought one hundred copies. He assured the owner that he would buy whatever books were leftover.

  PART III

  ATTICUS IN THE WORLD

  Chapter 5

  The Noble Man

  The consensus among the Hollywood types was that Harper Lee’s book wasn’t really movie material. Before publication, when movie rights were typically sold, none of them paid much attention to her quiet little novel. It was understandable given industry convention. The book had little dramatic or violent action, no love interest, no female lead. The plot was carried largely by children, who were difficult to cast and rarely came with star power. And then there were the racial politics. At the heart of the novel was an interracial rape trial in a southern courtroom. How could filmmakers dramatize the scene without alienating southern theatergoers? Boycotts, pickets, letter-writing campaigns could surely ensue.

  Only when Mockingbird started showing up on best-seller lists in the late summer and fall of 1960 did Annie Laurie Williams begin to receive some tentative inquiries. One proposal pitched the idea of filming the movie on location in the South with an unknown cast. Explaining his cautious strategy, the producer James P. Yarbrough noted Mockingbird’s similarity to The Member of the Wedding, the Carson McCullers novel, which had bombed at the box office. Also of concern for Yarbrough was “the ever-present Southern problem.” Williams politely declined the offer and suggested that Yarbrough consider finding a well-known star to play Atticus.

  Williams herself had already begun a search. If she could get a leading man interested in playing Atticus, then the rest would fall into place. In August she sent a copy of the book to Spencer Tracy’s agent, along with a handwritten note from Harper Lee to the movie star. “Frankly, I can’t see anybody but Spencer Tracy in the part of Atticus,” Lee wrote. Tracy, however, was in the middle of filming The Devil at Four O’Clock. His agent reported that he could read nothing until filming was over, so Lee would have to wait. Other names tossed among Lee’s inner circle included Gary Cooper and John Huston.

  Eventually, however, a young producer-director team came along with an offer and Williams took it. The thirty-three-year-old producer, Alan Pakula, had grown up in the Bronx, the son of a successful printer of Polish Jewish ancestry. A Yale graduate with a drama degree, he had gone immediately to Los Angeles after graduation and landed a job reading scripts and working as an assistant producer. He teamed with the thirty-six-year-old director Robert Mulligan, a fellow Bronx native from an Irish Catholic family. As a young man Mulligan had briefly studied for the priesthood, but he found his vocation in the 1950s in the burgeoning field of television, and he went on to direct a number of successful live dramas. Pakula and Mulligan had made one film together, Fear Strikes Out (1957), based on a memoir by the major league baseball player Jimmy Piersall. Pakula, who had considered studying psychiatry before turning to film, was drawn to the story of Piersall’s difficult relationship with an overbearing, psychologically abusive father.

  Once the filmmakers had the rights to Mockingbird, they needed three things—a script, a star, and money. The script they would get from Horton Foote, a successful playwright and television writer. The star was the key to getting the money; no studio would bankroll a movie without a big-name actor to fill theater seats. Bing Crosby’s agent got in touch with Annie Laurie Williams to make a late bid for the role. Maurice Crain quipped that Crosby “should be made to promise not to reverse his collar, not to mumble a single Latin prayer, not to burble a single note.”

  Pakula and Mulligan settled on Gregory Peck, who in 1961 was among the small handful of Hollywood’s iconic leading men. Each of them had a distinctive quality. Cary Grant was effortlessly charming; Marlon Brando was dark and brooding; Rock Hudson was the quintessential hunk. Peck’s calling card was his decency. In his most memorable performances he was the embodiment of earnest integrity: a missionary priest in Keys of the Kingdom; a loving, understanding father in The Yearling; or a crusading reporter exposing anti-Semitism among the patricians in Gentleman’s Agreement. He had been nominated for best actor for each of these roles, as well as for his portrayal of a demanding Air Force officer in Twelve O’Clock High, but he had never taken home the Oscar.

  Pakula sent Peck a copy of Lee’s novel, which he read in one sitting, staying up late into the night to finish it. He called Pakula first thing the next morning to tell him he wanted to do it. Peck would later recall for reporters how aspects of the novel reminded him of his own childhood growing up in La Jolla, California: the houses with no numbers; children going barefoot all summer long; the odd characters who everyone knew. He even remembered how the Ku Klux Klan once burned a cross on a hill behind the town.

  Peck liked the story so much that he decided to put his own money behind it. With Peck’s production company committed, Universal Pictures agreed to handle distribution. Peck included an unusual provision in his contract with the studio, requiring that Pakula and Mulligan be given control over the final cut. He wanted the most important artistic choices in the hands of the filmmakers themselves, not the studio executives distributing it, whose interests would naturally run to the commercial. But given the relative inexperience of Pakula and Mulligan, and the influence that Peck, the film’s major star and primary financier, had over them, it also meant that Peck himself would have significant say in the film’s final shape. This would prove important late in the process as Peck pushed for recuts that emphasized a more heroic vision of Atticus than Horton Foote, or Harper Lee, initially imagined. Over time, it would be Peck’s version of Atticus that predominated in popular culture, one that differed from the character in the novel in subtle but significant ways.

  TWO EVENTS IN May 1961 raised the profile of the project considerably. The first was when Mocking
bird won the Pulitzer Prize. Harper Lee heard the news on a dreary Monday morning in Maurice Crain’s office. She was in low spirits for no particular reason when Crain’s phone rang. “What have you got to be worried about?” he told her, putting down the receiver; “you’ve just won the Pulitzer prize.” Lee immediately called Monroeville, and A. C. picked up. “Dad, I got the Pulitzer Prize,” she told him. He already knew. Riley Kelly had read it on the AP wire and had driven straight over to tell him. The press and publicity events that Harper Lee had done up to this point had been nothing next to what she would be asked to do as a Pulitzer Prize winner. When the prize was announced, her picture ran in the New York papers, and for the first time ever she was stopped on the street in Manhattan and asked for an autograph. When she went to the bank to cash a check, they didn’t ask for identification. Yet the publicity for the Pulitzer would pale in comparison to the circus surrounding the movie. Harper Lee was becoming a celebrity, and she wouldn’t like it one bit.

  He was only half right. In Anniston, Klansmen attacked a group of riders at the Greyhound bus station. The mob followed the bus out of town, forced it to the side of the road, and firebombed it. The riders only barely The second important event that month could be connected to Harper Lee’s novel only in retrospect. On May 4, a group of thirteen civil rights activists, seven black and six white, led by James Farmer, the forty-one-year-old director of the Congress of Racial Equality, boarded buses in Washington, DC, bound for New Orleans. The trip, dubbed “Freedom Ride 1961,” was designed to challenge southern laws segregating interstate travel, which the Supreme Court had outlawed the previous year. The group made it through Virginia and North Carolina with little incident. In South Carolina, the future US congressman John Lewis was attacked in Rock Hill, but they passed through Georgia peacefully. In Atlanta, Martin Luther King Jr. met the riders for dinner, building up their spirits, shaking hands with each one. His organization had received rumors of a violent plot in the works, which he passed on to trip organizers. To a journalist traveling with the group, King predicted privately, “You will never make it through Alabama.” escaped with their lives. Meanwhile, another group of riders made it to Birmingham on a Trailways bus only to be greeted by a mob of Klansmen armed with lead pipes and brass knuckles. In an agreement between Klan leaders and Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor, a deal to which the FBI was privy but did nothing to stop, local police gave the Klan fifteen minutes to assault the riders. A melee ensued, sweeping up Freedom Riders, reporters, and innocent bystanders alike. With no drivers willing to take them to their next stop, Montgomery, and reports of another mob lying in wait there, the Freedom Riders opted to take a flight directly to New Orleans.

  Reinforcements flocked to Birmingham to finish the ride. Greyhound agreed to provide a bus and driver only after intense lobbying from the Kennedy administration. When the new group of riders arrived in Montgomery, another white mob was given free rein by local police. Among those beaten and left unconscious was Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, who had been dispatched to negotiate with Alabama governor John Patterson (“There’s nobody in the whole country,” Patterson told Seigenthaler in their first meeting, “that’s got the spine to stand up to the goddamned niggers except me”). The next night, at a gathering to honor the Freedom Riders at First Baptist Church, some three thousand rioters surrounded the building, held back by a contingent of only several hundred US marshals. Inside the church, Martin Luther King provided updates on the mob’s activities to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy via telephone. As the situation worsened, Kennedy prepared to send in federal troops, which prompted Governor Patterson to finally take action. He declared martial law, and called up the National Guard.

  A Gallup poll taken the following month showed that 63 percent of Americans disapproved of the Freedom Rides. Harper Lee was part of that majority. “I don’t think much of this business of getting on buses and flaunting [sic] state laws does much of anything. Except getting a lot of publicity and violence,” Lee told a reporter in March 1963. She contrasted the Freedom Riders with Martin Luther King and the NAACP, who were “going about it exactly the right way. The people in the South may not like it but they respect it.”

  Lee was wrong about the impact of the Freedom Rides. More than anything up to that point in the civil rights struggle, they made plain the crisis in the Deep South, crystallizing for the nation and the world that there were Americans who were willing to die for the cause of civil rights, and that there were other Americans who were willing to kill them. In between the two groups was an abyss of resentment and misunderstanding. There wasn’t a single political leader in the state of Alabama who was willing or capable of bridging the divide.

  The Freedom Rides brought an unprecedented amount of negative attention to Alabama. As a consequence, a number of business and political leaders in the state finally began to take a hard look at the militant segregationist movement, and the degree to which it had dictated politics in the state. The chairman of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, for example, Sid Smyer, first learned of the violence in his city when he saw a picture of Klansmen assaulting a Freedom Rider on the front page of the newspapers in Tokyo, where he had gone for a convention of the International Rotary Club. When he returned home, he created a “study group” composed of some of the city’s most powerful figures to examine Birmingham’s racial problems. It was the first time since the outbreak of militant resistance that local leaders in the Deep South’s largest, most intractable city took some form of progressive action. The effort culminated two years later in the ousting of Bull Connor, the kingpin of Birmingham’s militant segregationists. A similar story played out in Montgomery. Mob violence against the Freedom Riders in that city marked a turning point. Extremists who had dominated public discourse in Montgomery since the bus boycott finally began to get some pushback from other white leaders.

  None of this amounted to any magic resolution of Alabama’s racial crisis. So much hatred and violence were still to come. But the extremists who had dominated the state’s politics since the Autherine Lucy crisis in 1956 would increasingly be denied what one historian has called “their essential comforting myth, that they spoke for an undivided white community.”

  But if you had gone looking for quiet dissenters in the summer of 1961, it would have been almost impossible to find them. Sid Smyer and his study group were deep undercover. They weren’t about to invite the calumny of the Klan and Bull Connor. The same was true in every city and town across the state. People who publicly identified as moderates were rare birds indeed. Perhaps the best place to spot one, and thereby gain some glimmer of hope that there might be a solution to the South’s racial crisis short of outright military occupation, was not in any newspaper; it was in the pages of Harper Lee’s novel.

  Countless people did just that. By August 1961, the book had sold two and a half million copies. By May 1962 it had been on the New York Times best-seller list for ninety-two consecutive weeks, with three million copies sold in hardback, and one million paperbacks sold the first week they were offered. A reviewer described it as “a comparative oddity among contemporary fiction works—one you can enjoy tremendously yet need not apologize for if your maiden aunt (we assume she comes from Dubuque, like most maiden aunts) happens to leaf thru it.” A sign of the novel’s phenomenal, cross-cultural popularity was that it could be enjoyed by not only the executive secretary of the Chicago District Golf Association, Carol McCue, who was so taken by the book that she gave up her weekend on the links just to finish it (reportedly a “feat only one step this side of miraculous”), but also Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. Wilkins paid a visit to James Farmer in jail in Mississippi, after the Freedom Rider was arrested in Jackson. Nearly two decades later, in an oral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Farmer would talk about how his former mentor brought him two books as gifts to help pass the time. One of the titles he couldn’t recall, but the other, he distinc
tly remembered, was To Kill a Mockingbird.

  EVERY ADAPTATION OF a novel into a film is a creative act that involves myriad choices that can alter the ideas and emphasis of the original work. Screenwriters must reduce the complex, detailed events that novelists develop over hundreds of pages into the conventional running time of a major motion picture, ideally no more than two hours (Mockingbird is two hours and ten minutes). The major action has to be compressed. Important characters have to be left out. Subplots are condensed or eliminated.

  For a brief time, Harper Lee considered doing the work herself. Maurice Crain wrote to her in late January 1961 with a “brainstorm” about how the screen story might go. His suggestions reveal how he thought about the potential political message for the movie. Crain recommended establishing Tom Robinson in the film early on, to “fatten up the part a little, so that the audience reaction would be a little stronger when he is tried.” He imagined a scene in which the children see Tom helping Zeebo, Calpurnia’s son, collect garbage. Tom and the children exchange playful birdcalls. Crain, who himself had deep southern roots—his grandfather had been a field officer in Lee’s Army of Virginia—also suggested that in the lynch mob scene in front of the jail, not only should the newspaper editor let Atticus know that he had had him covered the whole time, but Crain had Link Deas walking out of the alley, shotgun in hand, announcing his presence as well. Atticus would call up to the jail window: “Tom, it seems you’ve got more friends around here than you know about.” Crain thought the addition of Link to the scene would “stand for the southerners whose hearts are in the right place, but who rarely speak out.”