The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (3 page)

On page 5, I had underlined one of the novel’s most-quoted passages.

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turn to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. . . . Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

The grown Scout is looking back at the world of her childhood. She is in no hurry to tell the story. Right away, we hear her warmth, her wit, and a subtle wistful quality. She invites us to the events that changed everything one summer when she was a young girl, events set in motion, her brother reckons, long before either of them was born.

Horton Foote selected the passage to begin the film adaptation of the book. He grew up in a small town in Texas, not Alabama, but he said Lee had captured a place that he knew intimately from his own childhood. Lee called Foote’s film one of the best adaptations ever made. Gregory Peck won an Academy Award for what he called the role of a lifetime. Horton Foote also won an Oscar, for his screenplay. Lee had not wanted to write the screenplay. She trusted Foote. As he put it, “It was just like we were cousins. I just felt I knew this town. It could have been a replica of my own.” So began a decades-long friendship, not only with Foote but with Peck, who met her father in Monroeville to prepare for his role.

Robert Duvall made his debut as a young film actor playing the reclusive Boo Radley, seen only at the end of the film. Elmer Bernstein’s haunting score is recognizable from the first notes. They evoke a child’s simple tinkering on a piano. As the title sequence begins, we
see a young girl’s hands opening an old cigar box. She sings to herself as she pokes around the box of treasures. There are a few Buffalo nickels, a set of jacks, some marbles, a harmonica, a whistle, and a pocket watch. It’s a childhood of roaming free, of unbridled imaginations using those simple props to conjure up stories of high drama and death-defying feats.

When the film came out in 1962, Monroeville had a downtown movie theater. A young Harper Lee, her dark hair cropped short, smiled broadly for a photo below the marquee advertising
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Not long after, the theater burned. It was not rebuilt.

—

T
he next morning, I stepped out of my motel room and into the furnace of Monroeville in August. The Best Western is on Highway 21, which becomes Alabama Avenue. To reach the courthouse, according to the clerk at the motel, all we had to do was follow the road about five miles. It ended right at the town square. We passed an unremarkable stretch of auto parts places and assorted businesses. Next we came upon the Monroe County Hospital, up a short, steep hill to our left, then a strip mall with a Winn-Dixie supermarket, a Rite Aid, and a dollar store. We passed Radley’s Deli, a weathered gray building, named for Boo Radley. We drove the generic stretch you find anyplace in America—McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC—before we spotted the low-slung Vanity Fair building. Pete’s Texaco, a classic, cluttered old gas station, looked like it hadn’t changed much over the decades. On the corner where Alabama Avenue crosses Claiborne Street was Lee Motor Company, also no relation to the author. I had read she didn’t like the mural of a giant mockingbird painted on the side of the brick building. Across the street, on another mural, Scout and Jem stand by the neighborhood tree. The snug 1930s post office
anchors the southeast side of the town square. We parked in one of the diagonal parking spaces across the street, in front of the Old Courthouse. Adjacent to it is what everyone calls the new courthouse. It was built in 1963.

Seen from the north, Lee wrote, the Maycomb County courthouse was early Victorian and looked all right. “From the other side, however, Greek revival columns clashed with a big nineteenth-century clock tower housing a rusty unreliable instrument, a view indicating a people determined to preserve every physical scrap of the past.” Monroeville once had such an unreliable instrument, a problem addressed with a modern solution. Now when the bell tolls the hours, it is a recording that rings out from the clock tower.

We made our way up a short flight of steps and through the pair of tall, heavy doors that welcome
Mockingbird
tourists. The courthouse is a magnet for people from around the country looking for a connection to the novel and the movie, those seeking a glimpse of the real world that inspired that fictional one. A small gift shop sold
To Kill a Mockingbird
T-shirts and key chains, and posters of the town’s annual production of the play.

Terrence and I ducked our heads into the large courtroom that served as the basis for the one in the movie. It was large, with a curving balcony, painted white, along the second floor, and tall windows overlooking the square. Terrence began taking pictures and I climbed slightly uneven wooden steps to the stuffy second floor.

I heard Kathy McCoy, the director of the museum and its annual
To Kill a Mockingbird
production, before I saw her. Behind a closed door, she was having a loud, animated phone conversation. Her accent was Southern but not the same kind you heard around here. She was from Kentucky.

I wanted to know what McCoy could tell me about the community,
the play she directed each year here at the courthouse, the Lees’ role around town, and who might remember the old Monroeville and be willing to speak with me. I asked her about the tourism here, and what she could tell me about Harper Lee, knowing that tension has simmered for years between the Lee sisters and those looking to capitalize on the book’s fame.

“Harper Lee doesn’t want us to commercialize the book,” McCoy told me, “but we feel what we’re doing is a service to the community and to the rest of the world.” She and her staff put together a guidebook titled
Monroeville: The Search for Harper Lee’s Maycomb
and published a guide for tours of the town. On the town square, fans of the novel can peer at the redbrick building where Lee’s father maintained his law office and where Harper Lee wrote part of the novel. On Alabama Avenue, they can see the spot where Lee’s childhood home once stood, the spot that now is home to Mel’s Dairy Dream, a white shack with a walk-up window for ordering ice cream cones and burgers. Gone, too, is the home next door, where a young Truman Capote lived for a time with his aunts. A plaque and a little bit of an old stone fence mark the spot.

That day, several people from out of town were looking around the centerpiece of the courthouse, the wood-floored courtroom, where a young Harper Lee had seen her attorney father in action, the one replicated in the movie. Visitors sit in the “colored” balcony, just as Scout did during Tom Robinson’s trial. The bolder ones approach the judge’s bench and lift the gavel, letting it drop with an authoritative rap. Simple props, such as a period calendar, hang on the wall to re-create the Maycomb of the novel for playgoers.

Once you step outside, though, finding the contours and flavor of the Monroeville of that era is harder. Even when the book came out in 1960, Monroeville had changed drastically from its Depression-era
days. The size of it, the look of it, the feel of it, all were dramatically different.

When producer Alan Pakula and director Robert Mulligan set about bringing the novel to the movie screen, they considered filming on location in Monroeville. But they decided against it. It didn’t look enough like the town of the 1930s they were trying to re-create. The town still had some of its charm, but it was too modern to stand in for 1930s Maycomb.

Instead, they replicated the courtroom in which a young Nelle had watched her father argue cases, and went to work creating Maycomb on set in Hollywood. For exterior shots, they incorporated some old California bungalows that could be made to look like homes in Nelle’s Maycomb.

The film’s art director, Henry Bumstead, wrote producer Alan Pakula from Monroeville. He abbreviated Monroeville as “Mv” and
To Kill a Mockingbird
as “TM.” The letter is dated November 1961.

Dear Alan,

I arrived here in Mv this afternoon after a very interesting and beautiful drive from Montgomery. . . . During my drive, I was very much impressed by the lack of traffic, the beautiful countryside and the character of the Negro shacks that dot the terrain.

Harper Lee was here to meet me and she is a most charming person. She insisted I call her Nelle—feel like I’ve known her for years. Little wonder she was able to write such a warm and successful novel.

Mv is a beautiful little town of about 2,500 inhabitants. It’s small in size but large in Southern character. I’m so happy you made possible for me to research the area before designing TM.

Most of the houses are of wood, one story and set up on brick piles. Almost every house had a porch and a swing hanging from the porch rafters. Believe me, it’s a much more relaxed life than we live in Hollywood.

I also visited the old courthouse square and the interior of the courtroom Nelle wrote about. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am by the architecture and the little touches which will add to our sets. Old pot-bellied stoves still heat the courtroom. Beside each one stands a tub filled with coal. Nelle says we should have a block of ice on the exterior of the courthouse steps when we shoot this sequence. It seems that people chip off a piece of ice to take into the courthouse with them to munch on to try to keep cool. It reminded me of my “youth,” when I used to follow the ice wagon to get the ice chips. Nelle is really amused at my picture taking and also my taking measurements so that I can duplicate the things I see. She said she didn’t know we worked so hard. This morning she greeted me with “I lost five pounds yesterday following you around taking pictures of doorknobs, houses, wagons, collards, etc—can we take time for lunch today?” Nelle says the exterior of Mrs. DuBose’s house should have paint that is peeling. Also the interior should have dark woodwork, Victorian furniture and be grim. Her house would be wired for electricity, but she would still be using oil lamps—to save money, so Nelle says. Boo Radley’s should look like it had never been painted—almost haunted.

Warmest regards,

Henry Bumstead

When readers of
To Kill a Mockingbird
first come to Monroeville, they want it to be just like the town they know from the novel and the movie. They want to see the place where the characters they love—
Scout and Atticus, Jem and Dill and Boo—live and play, work and dream.

“People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.”

So visitors in search of Maycomb just assume they’re not looking hard enough or in the right places. Maycomb must be here somewhere. It must exist.

“The form of a town changes, alas, more quickly than the human heart,” Charles Baudelaire once wrote. Monroeville, like any town, has been altered in manifold and important ways since the 1930s. Those who love the novel, however, haven’t budged. Their expectations are steadfast. Two decades ago, McCoy told me, Monroe County drew about two thousand visitors a year. Now the annual tally was closer to twenty thousand and climbing, and a good four-fifths of those folks say that the novel is what brought them.

The museum’s annual spring production of the play
To Kill a Mockingbird
draws visitors to a stage only Monroeville can offer. The first act unfolds on the lawn of the Old Courthouse Museum, where the breeze carries the scent of pink azaleas and mockingbirds sometimes alight on tree branches. The second act, the infamous trial, takes place inside, in the old-fashioned courtroom familiar to anyone who has watched the movie. Every year, the performances sell out.

McCoy directed me to walk out the door of the Old Courthouse
and across a bit of lawn to the new one to interview Otha Lee Biggs, the county probate judge. Biggs was a powerful figure here who was involved with the annual play and
Mockingbird
matters generally.

Judge Biggs operated out of an office piled to the rafters with books and papers. He was an older, dark-haired man and he played his part with a certain theatricality. His official duties had to do with running the county. His unofficial duties included gleaning information from journalists who thought they were the ones interviewing him. We spoke very generally about the town, the book, and the Lees, whom he had known for a long time.

I would come to learn that Biggs was one of the ways the Lees often knew who was in town and why. It was an early warning detection system. When they especially wanted to avoid someone likely to come knocking on their door, they occasionally would hit the road for their sister Louise’s home in Eufaula or, closer to home, a motel over in Evergreen, the neighboring Conecuh County seat.

My next visit, per McCoy’s directions, would be to Charlie McCorvey, an educator and county commissioner who played the role of Tom Robinson every spring. At Monroeville Middle School, McCorvey greeted me warmly and asked who I had been to see so far. McCorvey was a large man with silver-rimmed glasses. Once a year, to play Tom Robinson, he would trade his button-down shirt and tie for worn overalls.

Local people constitute the cast every year: lawyers and doctors, preachers and plumbers, businessmen and shop owners. And educators. In one particularly difficult scene, Bob Ewell berates Tom Robinson, spitting out the
n
word in his stream of racist vitriol. Hard to be the white actor saying it. Hard to be the black actor hearing it. Occasionally, African American friends would ask McCorvey if it made sense to depict the humiliation and violent end that his character
suffered. But McCorvey’s instincts as an educator told him this was another form of teaching. “Some of these kids think the days of segregation and ‘yessuh,’ ‘nossuh’ are ancient history but they are not. This makes it more real to them.”