Film remains this Scout’s honor badge

By Mary Alice Blackwell

Published: April 24, 2008

The University Theater was still showing movies on the Corner in 1989.
None, however, was more exciting, for me, than the 1962 classic that flickered across the screen at 4 in the afternoon on Nov. 3.
“To Kill A Mockingbird” was one of my favorite movies of all time. I loved Atticus Finch. Change the dark hair to blonde and I wanted so to be his daughter, Scout.
“Mockin-gbird” was one of eight Peck movies that was being shown at the Virginia Festival of American Film in ’89. But the story of Atticus Finch — a single father, a lawyer who defended an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama — was special.
Even the Oscar-winning actor had said that he “identified emotionally with everything that happened in that story. There was something eerie about it, as if I were born to do it.”
I knew that Gregory Peck was coming to the University Theater to introduce the film. So I grabbed a seat, waited and smiled. A murmur filtered through the room as Peck walked in. But he didn’t just come to speak and leave, as some stars have done. As the lights dimmed in the old theater, Peck sat down in the audience … a row right behind me. I tried not to stare.
Look forward. Look forward.
It was easy to do, once the film started. But I did sneak a peek as Gregory Peck reached across the isle and took a woman’s hand.
It was Scout, all grown up.
“What you saw on the screen was what we got,” said Mary Badham, who is preparing to come back to Charlottesville for another screening of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Thursday at the Paramount Theater.
“He was so well read,” she said. “He was so knowledgeable. He had lived so much. That was the way my dad was. He was so open and tried to help people.
“I have been so blessed I have had super-good role models. I am so honored to have those types of people be interested in me. And take part in forming the person I turned out to be.”
Although Mary Badham was a child, barely 10 years old, Gregory Peck maintained a relationship with his young costar throughout his life. To this day, she still refers to him as Atticus.
“It is unusual,” she said.
After completing a film, most actors go their separate ways, unless they happen to work on another project together, she explained.
“Other than that, you are just busy with your own lives and you don’t get back together,” Badham said from her home in Virginia.
But the love she felt on that set carried over in real life, not only with Peck, but with the other cast and crew members, including Brock Peters, who played the accused Tom Robinson, and producer Alan Pakula.
“I think part of it was I lost my parents so early in my life and those guys were real good about picking up the phone and going, ‘How you doing, kiddo? What’s up?’ They would check on me and make sure everything was OK,” Badham said.
“That’s a wonderful psychological support, especially when you are living in a trailer in the middle of a field in Alabama. Then it’s like ‘OK, I can do this.’ It just gives you a real uplifting feeling that they cared.”
At the time the movie was being filmed, however, the pre-teen Badham said she didn’t know about its social significance.
“Oh, heavens no,” she said. “People would get all serious, but we [the children] were just having fun.”
Even seeing the finished project for the first time didn’t have much of an impact, even though she was youngest person ever nominated for an Academy Award. (She held that record until 9-year-old Tatum O’Neil won a statue in 1973.)
“I think it is like any child watching home movies,” she said. “You get embarrassed. I knew what was going on in my head at the time and what was going on behind the camera.
“When you are a little kid, you don’t understand that stuff. You don’t have any idea about the meaning.”
Even Oscar night didn’t sway her thinking.
“My mother was excited,” Badham said. “I had no clue what was going on. I was sitting there in the audience. … What am I going to say? All these people had these wonderful speeches.
“I was the happiest person in the room when Patty Duke won.”
Duke was a much older 16 when she took the Oscar for her role as young Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker.”
“I was just playing,” Badham said, “and she really worked at it.”
Although acting ran in her family, it wasn’t Badham’s dream.
“It wasn’t anything that I chose to do,” she said. “It was something that happened to me.”
Her mom had been an actress. Her brother was in college studying to become a director.
“I was just a dumb little kid in Birmingham … being a kid,” she said. “A cattle call went up at the theater. My mother thought that would be great fun. So she took me down there. I auditioned, and got the part.”
Her brother was probably more than a little surprised.
“John was beating his brains out at Yale trying to get a degree in drama,” Badham said, “and he gets a phone call from my mother. ‘Guess what? Baby Sister is going to be in a movie.’ Then he gets another call. ‘Guess what? Baby Sister has been nominated for an Academy Award.’ He is ready to pull his hair out.”
Older brother did OK. He went on to make “Saturday Night Fever,” “War Games” and “Blue Thunder.”
“He is very happy,” Baby Sister said. “He teaches now, and he is a great teacher.”
But film was her brother’s ambition; it wasn’t hers.
She made a couple of other films, including “This Property is Condemned” with Robert Redford and Natalie Wood. She even came out of retirement last year to do “Our Very Own” with Allison Janney and Keith Carradine, but the industry wasn’t her industry.
“I enjoyed it,” she said. “It was one of the greatest jobs in the world … but it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. What I really wanted to do was be a large animal veterinarian, specializing in horses.”
Unfortunately, back in the day, that wasn’t considered a suitable profession for a young woman. When she went to talk to the head of the department at Auburn, she was told “good day, young lady” and told to forget it.
“It just wasn’t meant to be,” she said. “It was just a dream …
“I met my husband, and we became best friends. We went to the University of Arizona, and we have been together ever since.”
She was working at a Virginia college, but that film that she made 40 some years ago has changed her path once more.
“I am busier now than I have ever been,” she said.
Since Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been selected as this year’s book for the Big Read, demand for Badham as a lecturer has skyrocketed.
This month, she flew to Texas, then Alabama, then back to Texas — before heading off to Russia.
“I met a dozen librarians in Alabama studying the Big Read program,” she said. “They were impressed with the program and they wanted to take it back to Russia.”
When she talks about the novel, her voice rises with excitement.
“It’s fun,” she said, “especially if I get to go into the schools, and talk to the kids, because then I get to relate it to their lives … and how it reflects on our lives today.”
She has come a long way since the day when that little girl sat in the theater and hoped that she wouldn’t win an Oscar.
“I don’t think I realized what an impact it had on other people until about 20 years ago,” she said.
She had been asked to speak at Randolph Macon, when the professor asked her, “What is your favorite part of the book?”
“Well, I hadn’t read the book,” she said.
She did. And now the Big Read is putting the 1960 Pulitzer winner back in the hands of other readers across the world.
“The Big Read has just exploded all over the country,” she said. “It has kept me so busy.”
Thursday, it brings her back to a familiar town, but a different theater. Although she will be on hand for a panel discussion after the 7 p.m. screening, she said she won’t be in the audience this time.
Sometimes memories are just too painful.
Peck passed away in 2003. Peters died two years later.
“I don’t watch the film,” she said. “It’s too upsetting.”
But it doesn’t stop her from traveling across country to discuss the film — and Harper Lee’s novel — and their social significance.
“It is funny how life works out,” she said. “I am very happy.
“I have a beautiful life and I can’t be thankful enough for the opportunity, thanks to Miss Lee, that I have been given. I have been all over this country I have been able to go to different parts of the world. Travel, talk to people and get to know other cultures through the book and that has just been an invaluable education.”
It was an education that started back when she was young enough to sit on the knee of an old friend.
“When Atticus was traveling in what he would call his one-man dog-and-pony shows, people would tell him that they had become lawyers because of him,” Badham said. “Law schools use Atticus Finch as a role model.
“My cousin is a lawyer. He said that book had such an influence on him it was the reason why he became a lawyer.
“So we got that a lot. I get ‘I named my cat, my dog, my horse after you.’ And Atticus, he would get ‘Our son is now a Supreme Court justice because of you,’ ” she said with a rich full laugh.
“But it’s all fun. I have enjoyed the whole ride. I really have. If I die tomorrow in a plane crash, I have been very thankful for everything that I’ve got.”