by Glenn Lovell

San Jose Mercury News

16 November 2006

Mary Badham says she’s ready to get back to work after a hiatus of 40 years. The former child actress, best known as Scout in the 1962 screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” never wanted to be a movie star. She was more interested in horses and veterinary school. So, with the blessing of her parents, she bid bye-bye to Hollywood after only three years—at the age of 13.

“Some kids have the life dream of being an actor—I never did,” Badham, 54, begins from her home outside Richmond, Va. “I just wanted to be a kid when I was growing up in Alabama. ... I’ve never been a pretty person, a Hollywood person. Know what I’m saying?”

Badham is now guardedly considering a comeback in independent films that are suitable for the family. Last year, she did a cameo in a Tennessee-set heart-tugger called “Our Very Own.” That led to another offer, to play a Texas social worker. She’s still waiting to hear back about that one.

But don’t worry about Badham. She’s resilient, like Scout. She divides her time between her home art-restoration business and the speaker circuit, where she reminisces about making “Mockingbird” with Brock Peters, Robert Duvall and Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar playing Atticus Finch, everybody’s pick for perfect father.

Q. Tell us about the “Mockingbird” speaking tour.

A. I go around to high schools and colleges after they’ve read the book and seen the film. I do one or two of these a month, as many as 24 a year. It seems to have escalated the last three or four years. I’m basically living out of a suitcase.

Q. A sample reaction at one of these visits?

A. One of the brightest moments I’ve had goes back five years to a visit to Kansas. A man came up to me and said, “I want to thank you for my family.” He explained he had married this woman who was divorced, but he couldn’t get close to her young daughter because she was jealous of his relationship with her mother.

Then the mother got cancer and died, and they were forced to live alone together. They were like opposing magnets moving around the house. They didn’t take meals together. He suggested they read a book that epitomized what a father could be to a little girl. They took turns reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a few chapters a night. And by the time they finished, they were completed bonded. “It’s ridiculous,” the girl told me. “We call each other three or four times a day. This book did that.”

Q. There must be a million such testimonials ...

A. Yes, if kids find it on their own and make it through that first chapter, they can’t put it down and it becomes a starting point for family discussions. It’s not confrontational. It allows parents to show the kids what they believe in.

Q. Hard to believe that it was banned in schools as recently as the 1980s.

A. It was considered a naughty book, one that we weren’t supposed to read. It was passed around in a brown paper bag. We handed it around in pieces.

Now it’s much beloved. I know someone who reads it once a year.

I think it’s remained popular because it’s a very simple little book, a one-night read. But its impact went beyond anything that anyone could have imagined. It speaks to what’s going on today. Hatred, bigotry, racism haven’t gone anywhere. Just changed their clothes. It’s a book of hope.

Q. What about the father character, Atticus?

A. Atticus is every child’s dream of what a father should be. He listens, he’s firm but gentle, he’s kind and open.

Q. The sequence in which you, Jem and Dill sneak into the courthouse to see your father defend Tom (Peters), who’s accused of rape, is a favorite. Were you on the set during that racy cross examination?

A. No, we were not privy to any of that. I’m not sure our scripts were complete scripts. Not sure we knew all the ins and outs of the plot. That’s one of the things that was really good about filmmaking in those days. There were subject matters that were not to be discussed in front of children, words they should not hear. Kids are exposed to entirely too much today, not allowed to be kids.

Q. You’ve talked a lot about your lifelong relationship with Peck, who became something of a surrogate after you left the business.

A. He was a true gentleman in every sense of the word. One the greatest men this world has produced. What an honor to have him as my pretend daddy for a while. Later, when I left Hollywood, he would call me, I would call him. We’d visit back and forth. That’s unusual in movies. Usually when the work is done, if you ever see someone again, you’re lucky. We were really a family on that film—Brock Peters, (composer) Elmer Bernstein, (producer) Alan Pakula ... Atticus.

Q. You still refer to Peck as Atticus?

A. Well, that’s who he was. We really became so close. I couldn’t call him “Mr. Peck.” Too formal. And I couldn’t call him Gregory, for goodness sake. He was just Atticus.

Q. Have you been watching Turner Classic Movies’ tribute to child actors? They seem to split into two categories: the bitter and the hopelessly naive.

A. I’m not in either camp. I really had a very normal life. I had a loving family, a good support crew.

Q. What did your parents want for you?

A. They didn’t want to see me exploited. This was in the 1960s, when movies were beginning to get so bizarre. All these drugged-out, sexually explicit, vulgar kind of scripts. The movies my parents approved had to have a good, hopeful outcome, be morally based pieces.

Q. But you appeared in the racy “This Property Is Condemned,” opposite Natalie Wood.

A. Daddy fought over that one. He did not want me to do it because it was a Tennessee Williams piece, and they thought Williams was degrading to the South.

Q. How did that shoot go?

A. We were on location in Biloxi, Miss. It was summer, when there’s no oxygen. It was very uncomfortable, and there were people who really did not want us there because we had black crew members. I didn’t hear about it until years after, but one of the crew members was warned to stay out of a particular part of town. Later, he learned this black guy had been lynched, and they didn’t want anybody to witness what they were doing.

Q. I know you auditioned for “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” which went to Sondra Locke. Were there other offers?

A. Walt Disney wanted me to come over there, sign a seven-year contract. My parents said no because they wouldn’t have script approval. I also heard they wanted me for “The Sound of Music.”

Q. The year “Mockingbird” was nominated for Oscars, you were up against Patty Duke as Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker.” Some competition.

A. Oh, I just thought it was an honor to be in the same category with Patty. She deserved the Oscar; she really worked at that role. I was just out there having a good time, being me.

Q. So Mary Badham is Scout Finch?

A. Yes, the character was so close to who I was. I was very Scout-like, very much a tomboy. I’d rather be outside riding my horse than being inside, wearing a dress or learning table manners.

Q. What if things had been different, and you instead of Duke won?

A. I don’t know that it would have been that much different. It could be that my career would have stopped there if I’d won. I was heading into my teen years, remember, and difficult to cast. You’re not a child, you’re not an adult.

Q. Still, for a while you were, at 10, the youngest person to be nominated for an Oscar.

A. Yes. I was beat out by Tatum O’Neal, who was a few months younger when she won for “Paper Moon.” If you watch her in that film, she’s so Scout-like it’s funny.

Q. Your advice to today’s crop of child actors?

A. If you’re going to do it, you have to take it seriously. Like anything else, you have to work at it. You don’t get there halfway; you have to come prepared, know your lines, be flexible. ... And watch your morals, because there will be those who will try to hurt you.

Q. Much luck on your second-time-around movie career.

A. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to cry over it. I have my life, I have my family. I’ve done twice what most women my age have done. It’s been fun.

© 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).