INTRODUCTION
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
—Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird
The two most important aspects of my father’s life were when he met my mother and when, in 1961, Alan Pakula and Bob Mulligan sent him the book To Kill a Mockingbird. That became the defining role of his career.
—Cecilia Peck at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tribute to her father, Gregory Peck
On the late afternoon of April 8, 1963, exactly six days after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a new nonviolent campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, and four days before the future Nobel Peace Prize winner was arrested for leading a protest march, Gregory Peck stood in front of his mirror, dressing for the thirty-fifth annual Academy Awards ceremony. Nominated as Best Actor for his role as attorney Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the just-released film based upon Harper Lee’s bestselling novel of the same name, Peck found himself at a once-in-a-lifetime juncture unusual even for a film star of his stature: Acclaimed by both critics and audiences for a role that managed to meld an already beloved fictional character with basic aspects of his own essential personality, he was starring in that rarest of films, one that had actually caught the zeitgeist.
To Kill a Mockingbird, it seemed, had tapped into a fervent national desire, at least outside of the Deep South, for a better, more egalitarian America, and, in the figure of Atticus Finch, presented a man Americans of every stripe wanted to believe reflected their own essential decency. It wasn’t true, of course—no one outside of Gandhi himself actually possessed such rock-ribbed moral certainty—but that representational ideal had clearly and unequivocally begun to cast a longer and more powerful shadow with each passing week.
If, a scant seven months earlier, James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old black air force veteran, had tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi only to find the door blocked by Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, and if, five days after that, Meredith arrived again, this time with 536 U.S. marshals as escorts/protection, then how and why had a slim novel and its small black-and-white film adaptation taken ahold of the national consciousness in a way few, if any, previous novels had managed? The furthest thing from epic, and the antithesis of Gone with the Wind’s romanticized view of southern cavaliers and genteel ladies as guardians of civilization, Mockingbird’s deceptively gentle, seemingly nostalgic evocation of a long-vanished southern childhood had ultimately proved nothing less than an indictment of the American character. Yet far from being put off, readers and viewers alike had embraced the material with a fervor that kept the novel at the top of the bestseller lists, floored Harper Lee, and infuriated several high-toned critics. What, exactly, had Harper Lee wrought?
For starters, a multigenerational national discussion of race in a way no one—publisher, author, and filmmakers alike—had ever anticipated. A discussion that seemed to gain, not lose, power with each passing week that Mockingbird continued to spend on the bestseller lists. A conversation that also slyly upended traditional notions of femininity, regionalism, and the very idea of what constitutes a “real” family. All this from a book that took Harper Lee the better part of a decade to write, found only one eager publisher, and initially elicited no interest from any of the major Hollywood studios.
Any such thoughts that might have flashed through the racing mind of the courtly, avowedly political Peck on this most important night of the year in Hollywood were quickly banished. Instead, the handsome actor adjusted his elegantly tailored tuxedo, called out to his beautiful wife, Veronique, that it was time to leave for the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and grasped the most important finishing touch of all: the gold pocket watch that had belonged to A. C. Lee, Harper’s father and the unquestioned inspiration for the character of Atticus Finch. Glancing once more at the inscription on the back of the watch—“To Gregory from Harper”—Peck walked down the stairs and out to his waiting car.
A mere four hours later, his life would never be the same again, nor, in a not so insignificant way, would the discussion of America’s original national sin: slavery. A change in the country’s consciousness because of To Kill a Mockingbird? The ever-practical Nelle Harper Lee would have laughed at the mere idea back in the late 1950s, when her noticeably different, wildly uneven novel bore the name Go Set a Watchman. Back when she wanted to write—had to write—her way out of her small, beautiful, and stifling hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
Copyright © 2018 by Tom Santopietro
