Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which opens Friday, is loosely based on the life of Eugene Allen, a butler at the White House for 34 years and through eight administrations. So loosely based, in fact, that it’s hard to determine which parts of the story are based on Allen’s real life — and which parts are added for dramatic effect. Throughout his tenure at the White House, Allen quietly witnessed presidents make a series of monumental decisions impacting his civil rights as a black American. Daniels’ film replaces the real Eugene Allen with the fictional Cecil Gaines, using the unique perspective of a White House butler as a jumping-off point to explore questions of race in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The result is a largely fictional film, rather than a biopic. With the help of several sources, including a 2008 article in the Washington Post that chronicled Allen’s life and inspired the film, we’ve laid out what’s fact and what’s fiction — all of it spoiler-free. (PHOTOS: Eugene Allen, the Man Behind The Butler) Allen grew up in a cotton field in Macon, Ga. Ruling: Fiction Allen was born on a Virginia plantation in 1919, not in Georgia. He arrived in Washington during the Great Depression. In the movie, Cecil Gaines grows up on a cotton field in Macon, Ga., where his family comes into conflict with the white farmers for whom they work. What befalls his parents on the cotton field was added for dramatic effect. Allen had a wife and two kids Ruling: Part fact, part fiction Allen met his wife, Helene, at a birthday party in Washington. (He was too shy to ask for her number, so she had to track him down.) The couple had only one son, Charles Allen. In the movie, Gaines meets his wife, Gloria, at the Washington hotel where both work before Gaines gets his job at the White House. The fictional Gaines family has two sons. Allen was recruited for the job as a butler after serving an administrator of the White House … Continue reading The True Story of The Butler