Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  The ham was interesting. Whitey, our prop manager, made that ham and made it out of chicken wire and papier-mâché. We had these press photos to do, so I had to pretend that I was helping Whitey paint it. So we had to put the ham on, and I couldn’t see out of it. Then they had to put a harness on to hold it off my body. When I went to take a step it was too tight. So it cut my shins. He had to cut the bottom of it off, and then they had to pad it up so that I could walk.

  The tire scene: What you don’t see was, off to the side there was this big utility truck. And evidently we had one of our disagreements that morning and the boys decided they just about had enough of me. They were just going to kill me and not have to deal with this anymore. So they took that tire and pushed it as hard as they could into that utility truck. After that, Bob Mulligan put a stunt double in the tire scene. You see me in the very beginning and you see me in the very end. But that long shot down the way, that’s a stunt double.

  “Hey, Boo” was a hard scene to do. For some reason I got tickled. And I couldn’t do it. Or, I felt like I wanted to laugh and I had to do this thing. But it turned out OK.

  The hardest scene by far was the jail scene, where we go looking for Atticus. The reason it was so hard was because it was the last day of filming. That was the last thing we shot, and I knew that I would have to say good-bye to all these people and I would never see any of them ever again. We’d been together long enough that these people were like family. So I didn’t want to say good-bye. I didn’t want it to end.

  I have that long speech, [I wasn’t doing my lines right], finally Mr. Mulligan called “Cut!” and my mom took me to the trailer and said, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you better get yourself together. Do you know what the freeway is like at five o’clock? These people have to go home.” So I went out and I did the stuff: “Hey Mr. Cunningham” and “I know your son.” It was just hard to do that whole thing, to know that I’d never see those people again.

  [Gregory Peck] was my Atticus. He will always be Atticus. He was so wonderful. I miss him a lot. Years later, the phone would ring, and he’d be on the other [end of the] line. “What ya doing, kiddo?” He’d check on me just to see how I was doing because I lost my parents very early in my life. My mom died three weeks after I graduated high school. My dad died two years after I got married. When most people still have their parents, I didn’t have anybody. It was kind of hard. I felt really cut off. So after they were gone, Atticus would call and check on me. If he was gonna be on the East Coast, he’d say, “I’ll take you out to lunch.” And whenever I’d be in California, I’d always go up to the house and visit. It really meant a lot to me. He was such a role model, and I always wanted him to be proud of me.

  My father was very much like Atticus. We were raised with all those morals, all that grounding, all those same rules and regulations for females were in place. Little girls were expected to toe the line and learn to take care of the house and be mothers and wives, and that was about it. Atticus understood Scout. He didn’t speak down to his children. After my daddy died, it was good to have the continuance of that male role model.

  I had three daddies. There was Atticus, and there was my own daddy, and there was Brock Peters [who played Tom Robinson].

  I didn’t understand the importance of the film until much, much later. I didn’t even get to see any of the film until we had the premiere. Then I got to see the whole story, and then I really kind of understood it.

  When Scout’s talking to Atticus when she comes home after the attack, and she says, “Well, it’d be sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?”—her insight, picking up on the whole situation and showing that she really had been listening to everything her father says, taking it all in and looking at her life and saying, “Oh, so this is the way it is”—Scout has that realization of the other, of the world, of her community, and the changes. She is caught there between adulthood and childhood and lost somewhere in that questioning and knowledge.

  You don’t get a chance to have a film and a book that makes that kind of impact. The messages are so clear and so simple. It’s about a way of life, getting along, and learning tolerance. This is not a black-and-white 1930s issue, this is a global issue. Racism and bigotry haven’t gone anywhere. Ignorance hasn’t gone anywhere.

  Boaty Boatwright

  International Creative Management (ICM) theatrical agent Alice Lee “Boaty” Boatwright grew up in Reidsville, North Carolina, in the fifties. She played an important role in the film; albeit offscreen. Boatwright cast the children.

  I think I read To Kill a Mockingbird the day it came out. It was second only to Gone with the Wind for people to read who had ever lived in the South.

  First of all, one had enormous identification with it, of what it’s like to grow up in a small town. I grew up in a town where you went back and forth next door. Every small town had some kind of person that we thought was crazy or a character who maybe sat on a porch. I had a woman who worked in our house named Soola, and she reminded me a great deal of Calpurnia, the warmth, the love, the understanding. I lost my mother at seventeen. I also adored my father. I think the novel is about children and families and parents and understanding—basically, how people find a better way of understanding other people. It is so indigenous to one’s childhood.

  I thought I knew the characters. I identified a great deal with Scout. My best friend until I was nine years old was a little boy who lived across the street from us. His name was Philip. I think everybody goes back to some event or moment when they feel that they can identify not only with the story itself, but with the characters.

  When I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I was living in New York and had just started working for Universal Pictures. I was doing publicity, but not in any executive capacity. Subsequently I heard that the book had been bought by Universal.

  Then, quite by chance one night at a restaurant in New York, I met Alan Pakula [the producer of To Kill a Mockingbird], who was introduced to me by a mutual friend. I knew that Alan and Bob Mulligan [the director] had bought the book. I don’t know if Greg [Gregory Peck] was in it at the very beginning or not.

  Alan was so in love with books, as was Bob. They had such an amazing collaboration.

  When we met, I immediately, as Alan said, wouldn’t let go. I just said, “You can’t do this film without letting me work on it. I want to cast the children.” And I was very, very persistent. I think I wore him out.

  Alan and Bob specifically said we didn’t want professional children. We saw a lot of professional kids in New York. It was just something about them needing to be Southern. The Southern accent is not that easy to fake for a child.

  And that’s how my journey to the South started.

  I’d never cast a movie before. I didn’t know anything about how to do it. So I called all my friends who lived in the South. I think I covered about eight or nine cities. I started in Richmond and [went] to Charlotte, to Savannah, and to Atlanta.

  I would rent a motel room. The kids would come with their mothers; some of them would be driven for hundreds of miles, and they all knew that this person from Universal Pictures was looking for Scout and for Jem and for Dill. I remember by the time I was finishing in Atlanta, I was exhausted and thinking that I did not ever want to talk to anybody under thirty again. So I called Alan and Bob, and I said, “You really have to get someone else. I just cannot go on. I’m getting brainwashed.”

  Alan made a deal with me. He said, “Go on to Birmingham and finish the meetings you have there, and then I’ll meet you in New Orleans, and you can take the weekend off, and we’ll have a good time. And then we’ll go back wherever you want me, to go meet some of the children.”

  I still had three or four more cities to do. The next morning, I remember getting off a plane in Birmingham at six A.M., and my oldest and dearest friend from Reidsville, North Carolina, which is where I grew up, met me at the airport. She was now living in Birmingham, having married
a man from there. And she said to me, “I think I’ve found the perfect Scout.” I have to give her credit. Her name was Jene-Watt Bagwell. I started interviewing and Mary [Badham] walked in, and she was just adorable. She was wearing jeans and a little striped T-shirt. She had a very short gamine haircut.

  I said, “Mary, you’re just so cute. How old are you?” And she said, “Nine,” [sounding] very Southern. I said, “Well, you look younger and smaller than nine.” And I never will forget, she looked at me and she said, “Well, if you drank as much buttermilk and smoked as many corn silks as I do, you might be smaller too.”

  So I called Alan and I said, “I found Scout.” Mary was not allowed to come and see me in the beginning because her father, who was a [former Air Force] general and very old-school Southern gentleman, forbade it. Mary’s mother was his second wife. She was an English woman, and she’d always wanted to be an actress. And her claim to fame, apparently, was that she had once done Saint Joan on the BBC radio.

  She had to bring Mary to meet me without letting the general know. I had to really play out my Southern heritage with the general. I said, “Please, let your daughter meet with the director.” By this time, we had told him that I had met with her and I thought she would be the perfect Scout.

  I did not think about Truman Capote when I was casting Dill. I didn’t want to, because Truman was not as gracious as he might have been to Harper and the book. Certainly Dill is patterned after much of Truman. I know he used to visit in Monroeville in the summers. At his best, Truman could be a very unhappy, angry, needful person. I never heard Nelle say a word or mention him in any kind of negative way. But Nelle didn’t do that, particularly in public.

  Horton Foote was the perfect person to adapt Harper Lee’s book. She and Horton became the closest and the best of friends and stayed totally, completely in touch until recently when Horton died. Horton was the most amazing writer himself. He was a poet, and he understood those people, and he wrote so beautifully.

  He knew that his job was to adapt the book into a film, not to change the film from the book, which so often happens.

  There are many great books that don’t make great films. And sometimes there are rather bad books that make good films. But this was a real combination. Harper loved what he did; we all did.

  The movie was shot on the back lot of Universal, and I went out for a couple of visits. I don’t know the budget. I think it was no more than three million. It just was an amazing set. I can see those sidewalks and those streets and that house now.

  The other thing that was so interesting was the opening credits, the opening of the cigar box. That was the genius of a man named Steve Frankfurt, who was a great friend of Alan’s. I think they’d gone to Yale together.

  I remember he and I went to [a] couple of schools and he had children draw pictures of mockingbirds, and that was the beautiful scene where it’s torn apart. In the South, you always hear that line. I remember my own father always saying, “You never shoot a mockingbird, ’cause all they do is sing.”

  I first saw the movie in a small screening room at Universal. Bob Mulligan and Alan invited a few people who worked on it. I remember it didn’t have a score and it hadn’t been completely finished. Even so, you just knew that it was a jewel of a movie, that everybody had done their best.

  I can still see Nelle [Harper Lee] sitting in Alan’s living room, when we all used to gather and laugh and talk and drink and have a good time. Nelle worshipped her father. She was this amazing, incredibly talented, fiercely honest woman. She was wildly funny, witty, and smart. She certainly did not suffer fools lightly. And of course one kept hoping and waiting for the next novel. Sadly that never came.

  To Kill a Mockingbird gave me my casting career. After that, Universal hired me to become a casting director on the East Coast. So I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful directors.

  [Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan dissolved their partnership in 1965. Pakula became a director of films, such as Klute, All the President’s Men, and Sophie’s Choice. He died in 1998. Mulligan directed eleven more films, including Up the Down Staircase, Summer of ’42, and Same Time, Next Year. He died in 2008.]

  Rick Bragg

  Rick Bragg was born in Piedmont, Alabama, in 1959. He is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and the author of the memoirs All Over but the Shoutin’ (1999), Ava’s Man (2002), and Prince of Frogtown (2008). Bragg grew up in Trout Possum, Alabama, and was the winner of the Harper Lee Award at the Alabama Writers Symposium in 2009. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

  Like a lot of people, I was in school when I read To Kill a Mockingbird. They were always sneaking adult books into our consciousness back then. And like a lot of people, I was told to read it. And like a lot of people, you start that way, with that kind of grudging, Let’s get this done. And within paragraphs—you hear that over and over again, especially from young men that have been forced to read it, young men who grew up on the wrong side of the issue that dominates this book—they start reading it, and the next thing you know, it’s not just held their interest, it’s changed their views. That’s pretty damn…that’s almost impossible, but it happens.

  I think it means a lot to Southerners. I was born in ’59, grew up as a baby boy in the civil rights movement, and it was as though it was invisible. When I was six or seven, I remember scenes and incidents of violence, but for those of us in the mountains, it was as though it was invisible. And then you read this book, and you retroactively tug back into that time and that struggle, and you ask yourself, “How in the world did I miss this? How did I not know this was happening?”

  There’s a south Alabama feel to the book. There’s a much more parochial feel to that place than where I grew up, which was predominantly white. I grew up in the mountains. There was a whole different dynamic going on there. I grew up in the industrial South. I grew up in the steel mills and pipe shops and textile mills, cotton mills. I grew up in a more hillbilly, for lack of a better word, culture than in any kind of south Alabama, agrarian culture.

  I’ve read it twice, three times. Probably, like a lot of people, I’ll read parts of it to reaffirm or recondition [myself].

  The first time I read it, it was pretty cut-and-dried. It was do right or don’t do right. Then you begin to see other themes, like tolerance and kindness. Boo seemed like a much smaller kind of subplot to the book the first time I read it. It was all about the court case, it was all about the attack, and it was all about the wrongdoing of sending that man to jail. But Boo took on a bigger role as I read it down the line.

  The writing—it’s just wonderful, and to get a six foot three, 280-pound man to say wonderful is hard enough, but Harper Lee did the thing you gotta do to make people care about something, which is to keep them in the story. And the phrases were beautiful. The descriptions were beautiful. The most clichéd, worn phrase from the whole book, when Atticus is talking to his children about the mockingbird, you know, that is beautiful.

  My people never knew about the mockingbird. We knew it was a sin to kill a dove, because a dove had a biblical significance. It was a sign of hope in a world drowned for its sins in the great flood. But the feeling was the same. It was so real, it was so true to the dirt and the trees and the houses and the dusty streets and the mad dogs, and the sheriff who wants to do right if he can just figure out how, and the mean-spirited neighbor and the kind people in town, and the racial prejudice and the handful of people who just didn’t fall in step. All that, it wasn’t just true; it was beautifully, beautifully done.

  I don’t even think I can get my head around whether it’s literature or not. I’m probably not smart enough to have that discussion. I think pretensions kill and smudge more good writing than just about anything else. I would have loved for there to have been one more book, and that’s the most I can say—[but] we have that wonderful cliché, “Go out with a win.”

  I have been told that Harper Lee liked my work, she liked my writing. She and my wife hav
e exchanged notes. I never wanted to be—and I don’t care if this sounds bad—I never wanted to be one of those Southern writers sucking up to this legendary figure. If she wanted her privacy, then I should give it to her. So I was never one of those people. I’m like everybody else down in my part of the world—I feel like I know her. You hear things she says. You hear, “Well, she likes to be called Nelle.” Before you know it, you’re thinking about her as Nelle. And then there’s just the book, there’s always the book. If you want to know what’s in her heart, in her consciousness, then go open the book. The truth is, you just open that book and you just start pulling things from it that you spent a lifetime thinking about. They just get stuck in you, notions and ideas, and, for lack of a better word, these moralities get stuck in you and may not save you, may not make you do the right thing, but at least you know when you’re doing the wrong thing. Sometimes down here we have to settle for that.

  I think it was very brave to write it. I also think it was one of those books where the people down the road might shoot you a dirty look or say mean things about you as the car rolls by, but people a thousand miles away love you and admire you and think that you’ve done something decent and grand.

  I finally did meet her. The spring I won the Harper Lee Award, I asked a friend of hers, the writer Wayne Greenhaw, if I could just say hello and shake her hand. My wife, Dianne, went with me. She was kind and gracious and funny, and it was one of the nicer moments of my life. I would have hated not to have done that, I believe, in my old age.