The Butler: A Witness to History (9 page)

Much has been made about the actors who wanted to work on the film, but those behind the scenes were just as interested in the project.
The Butler
covers
time across nine decades and many presidential administrations. (Even though the real-life Eugene Allen worked for eight administrations, the movie only covers five of them.) Such a movie is often referred to as a “period” film and it requires a great deal of historical research. Artists, craftsmen, and designers will work months ahead of filming, coalescing their ideas and suggestions around the director’s ultimate vision. The look of the Eisenhower administration is different from the look of the Kennedy administration, and as well with the Nixon and Reagan years. Those different looks have to be conveyed in the furniture, cars, music, and clothing of each era.

Ruth Carter has a highly respected reputation in Hollywood. She earned Oscar nominations for her costume design on Spike Lee’s
Malcolm X
and Spielberg’s
Amistad.
But she was not taking her acclaim in the industry for granted when she heard about
The Butler.
She was so passionate about getting the job of costume designer that she made her own booklet of clothing designs and shipped it to Lee Daniels. “I fought hard to get the movie,” she told me on a short break from her round-the-clock duties on the film set. “The first time I saw a picture of Eugene Allen, I felt like I knew him. I felt like I knew his wife.” Carter and dozens of others—cinematographer Andrew Dunn, sound mixer Jay Meagher, graphic artist Kristin Lekki—were all working to shepherd Daniels’s vision to the screen.

And what a complex vision. There were days on
The Butler
sets when it
felt like you were walking backward through a time machine. There were the
COLORED
and
WHITES ONLY
signs in buildings. There were segregated stores and students protesting inside them. There were civil rights marches across bridges and down the middle of streets. There were Klan rallies, and those yelping German shepherd dogs that tore into the clothing of women and children as they protested in the sixties. “People need to capture this before it’s gone from everyone’s imagination,” Tim Galvin, the movie’s set designer, was saying about the film’s myriad set pieces. Less than two weeks into the production—re-creating the vast tone and texture of the American civil rights movement—he was already feeling it was going to be special. “This movie is so distinctive and meaningful,” he acknowledged. “It has such worth to it.” There were times, he said, when his crew, along with Daniels, would scout a location. And they’d be told that the bridge they wanted to film on was a bridge where Klansmen had actually attacked blacks. They found a slave cabin that the state of Louisiana had kept restored and used it in the film. “There was another place, the St. James AME Church, where we filmed. Well, it was actually part of the Underground Railroad. Somehow we’ve been pulled to these places,” he said. “There has been a lot of good karma.” He goes quiet for a moment. “This is beyond showbiz,” he finally uttered.

Still, there were hurdles and endless problems that had to be solved—yesterday, now, first thing tomorrow.
The Butler
faced an
enormous one in those early days as the director and production crew first descended upon New Orleans: how to make a movie epic in scope and size on the limited budget they had been able to put together. But Pam Williams and her coproducers knew they had to figure it out. They were all but ready to commence filming, and the movie was too important to turn back now. Williams had even posted a sign in her production office that referenced getting to the finish line:
THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.
But finally, while number-crunching the budget again, Williams realized that they simply did not have enough money for the movie Lee Daniels himself had envisioned. The production involved huge set pieces, and Lee, in his meticulousness, had added more production days. That would require more hours of filming, which would require the hiring of more extras. The fear might have brought Williams to her knees. Instead, she took her staff out for shaved ice, a New Orleans delicacy, a summertime treat on a sweltering day. And while out, she thought of the movie, and Laura Ziskin, and the eleven years she had spent at Ziskin’s side, and she told herself that this movie had kept Laura alive and fighting. And that she wasn’t going to let Laura down. She’d be damned if she was going to pack up the whole crew and return to California. So she swallowed her pride and decided to go back to the investors and ask for more money. “I couldn’t deal with her loss,” Williams confided to me about Laura Ziskin. She was sitting in a makeup room filled with extras who would be in an upcoming Oval Office scene. “It
was way too wide, too immense. I decided to live in a world of denial and keep pushing to get this movie made as if Laura were still here. Instead of grieving, I put everything into this movie.” As did the actors.

Filming bus boycotts, Klan attacks, sit-ins, whites pelting blacks can be viscerally unsettling. Actors appeared emotionally drained after the filming of many such scenes. Even the director wasn’t immune. Sometimes it seemed as if every tear that had been dropped from tired eyes by every praying Negro church woman during the civil rights movement in the South was welling anew inside Lee Daniels himself. He’d sometimes sit in silence in his director’s chair after an excruciatingly emotional scene. It was as if he had transported himself back to Birmingham or Selma or some Mississippi shack. Then he’d bolt from his chair quick as a cobra because he wanted to tell the actor about something else he wanted in the scene. Later, as he stood in his trademark pajamas, forehead beading with sweat as he watched the scene wind down, a smile would form on his face. He had good reason. He was getting the movie made he had promised Laura Ziskin he’d get made.

It seemed to frighten no one when news came that a hurricane was approaching the city and the production would have to shut down for a spell. The two weeks away provided everyone with needed rest, and when cast and crew returned, filming picked up with the same high energy as before.
The Butler
may have arrived in New Orleans
without a distributor, but it would not leave town without one. Harvey Weinstein—who has produced quality film after quality film, many of them Oscar-winning—had been following the trajectory of the movie since it was announced. Word had started to seep out before filming wrapped: Harvey was going to acquire the movie for distribution. “What struck me most about this story,” Weinstein told a Hollywood publication, “is the perspective it comes from, which in this case is the butler—a man who was a fly on the wall for decades in the world’s most powerful home.”

In the end, the story took a nearly five-year journey to the big screen. But it had begun long before, with a black child born on a plantation in Virginia who made his way to the White House: a man who lived long enough to reach his ebony-colored hands inside a voting booth to vote for the man who became the nation’s first black president. It involved investors who allowed their conscience to be touched. It found a producer and director who wouldn’t give up.
The Butler
became a movement itself.

So here was the movie—made by virtue of a collective and valiant effort—that would lift and carry Laura Ziskin on her way. She flies high above the Hollywood Hills now, her last, final, jubilant wish of a movie dream fulfilled.

S
INCE THE FOUNDING
of the nation, few American presidents have escaped the crucible of race. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves; Abraham Lincoln died for the very elimination of slavery. Harry Truman—the first of eight presidents Eugene Allen worked for—came of age in Missouri when lynchings were not at all uncommon there. It was nine children in Little Rock who forced Dwight Eisenhower’s administration to unleash federal troops—the first time since Reconstruction—on behalf of black America’s plea for equality. Camelot may stylishly swirl in our imaginations, but President John F. Kennedy, tie loosened, was surprisingly introduced to a new kind of movement—civil rights. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was quick to allow that the bloodshed of the 1960s stretched back to the Civil War, and he met resistance with legislative dynamism. Richard Nixon seemed visibly uncomfortable discussing black issues, though he had a peculiar fondness for the black song-and-dance man Sammy Davis Jr. And who would have imagined Ronald Reagan cornered by a black man imprisoned in South Africa, an ocean away? The five presidents portrayed in
The Butler
—script decisions sometimes have to be ruthless about characters being cut, even if they are presidents—all claimed headlines over the issue of race during their presidencies. During most of those epochal days, the Virginia-born butler of our story was never far from the drama.

L
ITTLE
R
OCK.

Those two words would nearly come to define the Eisenhower presidency. The crisis grew, of course, out of the 1954 nation-shaking
Brown v. Board of Education
desegregation ruling. The Supreme Court ruled that America could not continue to discriminate against its black citizens when it came to their educational pursuits. It decreed segregation unlawful. White school districts, however, took their mighty fine time to implement the ruling. Some said they simply would not abide.

Three years later, in the fall of 1957, nine Negro children ascended the steps of Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. A mob set upon them; the epithets stung like poisoned darts. They were forced to retreat. President Eisenhower was aghast that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had provided no protection for the children; he had in fact ordered his National Guard to stop them. Ike, military-trained, WWII–tested, dispatched federal troops.

Who knows the depth of scarring the children carried into adulthood? Some have written memoirs, where the pain is evident.

After he had left the White House after his second term, Ike would sometimes stroll the Gettysburg battlefield. He had a companion: his onetime butler Eugene Allen. Eugene had a lot of vacation days, and sometimes he’d go see the president. Ike’s servant would serve the both of them. They genuinely seemed to have missed one another.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

I
T WAS SEPTEMBER
30, 1962, and the hooligans were on their way to Oxford, Mississippi. They swore, by God, that “the nigger,” James Meredith, would never integrate the University of Mississippi. Federal courts had ordered the school to comply. When President Kennedy was told that Meredith wouldn’t be protected, he grew angry. The state of Mississippi was defying a federal court order. The rioting that erupted was furious. The riotous crowd—both students and outsiders—tossed bricks and bottles at the federal troops Kennedy had sent to the school. Two people, a photographer and a bystander, were killed. But Mississippi would not win this battle. James Meredith successfully integrated Ole Miss, one of the so-called citadels of higher education in the Deep South. Meredith, an Air Force vet who possessed a steely resolve, received sacks of hateful mail and telegrams. There were also kind words. A telegram from the great chanteuse Josephine Baker arrived:
GOD IS GOOD JUST AND SURE. WE ARE ALL HAPPY FOR THE RIGHT OF MAN—JOSEPHINE BAKER AND HER CHILDREN WHO REPRESENT THE FIVE CORNERS OF THE WORLD.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves,” Kennedy said on national television on June 11, 1963. “Their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.” The next day, on June 12, 1963, voting rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in the driveway of his home. Kennedy invited Evers’s widow, Myrlie, and the Evers children to the White House for a visit, where Eugene Allen first met them.

Then came the river of tears following that trip to Dallas. In the years to come, a picture would appear in many Negro homes, right there on the mantel. It was a picture of three who had troubled the waters—Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy—and who were assassinated because of it.