Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  That evening at Francesca’s, I sat for hours on the floor near the fireplace going through the materials in that box, reading those letters aloud, and listening to Francesca flesh out accounts of events that were mentioned in the letters. When she began to describe her first visit, as a shy young bride, with the Atlanta Marshes, newlyweds themselves in 1927, I felt as if I had actually been transported to the Marshes’ Crescent Avenue apartment. She had a clear memory of events that had occurred over fifty years earlier, and as she spoke John and Peggy came alive for me. The kind of exceptionally personal detail and first-hand knowledge I was getting from the letters and from Francesca indicated that the Marshes had a remarkable and unique relationship. By the time I rose to leave that evening, I had gained a much clearer understanding of this man who, mysteriously enough, has been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed, and yet played such a vital role in Mitchell’s life and work. I knew that the full story of Margaret Mitchell had not yet been told. As my husband and I drove home that night, I was fascinated with what I had discovered and frustrated by what I did not know.

  On my next visit, I asked Francesca if there were other family members who had letters and recollections that they would share. With a resounding “Yes,” she introduced us, through letters and long-distance calls, to Rollin Zane, the widower of Frances Marsh Zane (John’s youngest sister) and to his son Craig Zane. More important, she also introduced us to Mary Marsh Davis and her husband Edmund, nicknamed Jim.

  The Davises, gracious and friendly, opened their home to my husband and me in 1987, and I am eternally grateful to them. Mary Davis is the daughter of Henry Marsh, John’s oldest brother. After her parents divorced in 1919 when she was only three years old, her father’s mother gave up her position as the principal of a grammar school in Maysville, Kentucky, sold her home, and moved into Henry’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, where she looked after Mary until Henry remarried in 1927. Thus, Mary was reared primarily by her grandmother Mary Marsh, after whom she was named. While she was growing up, she and her grandmother visited her uncle John and aunt Peggy in Atlanta, and she also saw them at some family reunions and when they visited her father and grandmother in Wilmington, Delaware.

  After Mary and Jim married, in their teens, the two of them continued to exchange visits with the Atlanta Marshes throughout the years. As a result of this close association, the Davises were able to give me information and valuable insight into the Atlanta Marshes’ personalities. In his modest but firm manner, Jim quickly shattered many popular misconceptions about the Marshes.2 He also gave me a copy of the extensive Marsh genealogy that took him years to research and complete.

  Most important of all, Mary Davis gave me access to 184 personal letters. This collection includes 43 letters Peggy wrote to Mary, her grandmother, and her father; and 141 letters John wrote to his mother, Henry, and Jim Davis. Not one of Peggy’s 43 letters has been published before, and only portions of two of John’s 141 have been published previously. This treasure, which spans over thirty years, had never been shown to anyone else outside the family.3 It was a thrilling experience for me to read these letters for the first time. What I found so compelling was those first-person voices emanating from the letters, voices that give John Marsh and Margaret Mitchell a real presence, a physical reality, a flesh-and-blood humanness.

  Because of their mother–daughter-like relationship, her grandmother gave her letters from John and Peggy to Mary. Because of her closeness to John and Peggy, her father also gave Mary some of his letters. Peggy’s letters to Mary’s father are most revealing because Henry and Peggy were close and, too, she felt she could trust him. These letters were written long before she became famous, and thus long before either she or John had become inhibited in their correspondence. They provide fascinating insight into the Marshes’ relationship, the times in which they lived, and the passion Mitchell inspired.

  The information I gained from all these letters and from members of the Marsh family allowed me to look closer at Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh than any other writer has ever been able to look, and what I saw confirmed my initial impression that the true story of this marriage had not yet been told. By the time we left the Davises, I could clearly see that John Marsh had not only been an exceptionally devoted husband but had also played a vital role in the making of his wife’s great novel. The evidence I was accumulating demonstrated that John Marsh had not only nurtured Margaret Mitchell’s imagination by providing a constant environment of creative stimulus, but he had also given her precisely the kind of help she needed to do what she had always wanted to do—write a blockbuster of a book. Not just an extraordinarily supportive husband, he was an editor who lovingly provided the kind of editorial expertise Mitchell needed throughout the entire time she worked on the novel. An excellent writer and editor, John offered her ideas and advice, and at night and on weekends he patiently read and edited every line of her manuscript as she produced it. As John himself explained in his December 18, 1949, interview with Medora Field Perkerson for the Atlanta Magazine:

  I started reading right from the time she started writing and we would talk about it. As you know, talking things over sometimes makes an idea come clearer. In trying to write it out beforehand, the mechanical labor may get between the writer and the idea. I was always more confident than she was that she could write a good book. She didn’t have enough confidence in her own ability.

  In the ordinary sequence of publishing, an editor comes on board after a manuscript has been completed and helps improve the finished product; editors are not involved in the creative process, are not around when the writer sits staring at that blank page. Thus, Margaret Mitchell enjoyed a unique advantage—she was married to her editor, who also adored her. With this new understanding of the Marshes’ relationship, I felt obliged to write this book.

  From the Davises’ home we went to Washington, D.C., to visit Craig Zane and his father Rollin Zane, the widower of John’s youngest sister. Rollin Zane permitted me to use his wife’s collection of forty-six letters; of these, Peggy wrote twenty-nine, and John wrote seventeen.4 We then drove from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, where we met our next major source of information—Joe Kling. An Atlantan, Joe worked as a reporter with Peggy and John at the Journal from 1925 to 1926. Although he was a few years younger than they, he socialized with them and their newspaper crowd. After John left journalism and went to work in the public relations department at the Georgia Power Company in 1926, Joe Kling followed him there in 1928. The two men worked side by side from 1928 to 1945, and when John retired in 1945 after having a major heart attack, Joe took his place as the chief of the public relations department.

  A few years after the death in 1938 of his first wife, Evelyn Lovett, Joe married Rhoda Williams, who was John’s personal secretary for many years, including those critical years before, during, and just after the publication of Gone With the Wind. Rhoda helped John prepare the manuscript and proof sheets for Macmillan, and she typed numerous letters that John wrote in the process of managing the book’s business. No one—except Peggy, her father, and her brother, Stephens—was closer to John or knew more about his private business than Rhoda Kling. Joe and Rhoda talked to John almost daily for over twenty years, and they associated with him and Peggy on a very personal level as well as on a professional one. They all remained friends until death separated them. A quiet-spoken, learned man, Joe showed infinite patience in answering all of my many questions and in helping me clarify my perceptions. He was an invaluable source of information.

  Our next trip took us to the far northeast mountainous corner of Georgia, to Dillard, where we talked with Mary Singleton, the first female editor of Georgia Power’s magazine. John appointed her editor at a time when it was unheard of to place women in such executive positions, and she worked with him for many years. Like the Klings, Mary Singleton associated with John and Peggy socially as well as professionally. They were all friends who had much in common. After Peggy’s death
, John often went out to dinner and to the opera with Mary and Susan Myrick, another old friend who had served as an arbiter of southern manners and speech for the film.

  An excellent writer herself, Mary had a remarkable memory for the kinds of details biographers need and love to hear. Fascinating to listen to, she recalled some of her conversations not only with John and Peggy but also with her coworkers Rhoda Kling and Grace Alderman, another Georgia Power employee who typed almost all of Peggy’s manuscript to send to Macmillan. As a result, Mary was able to recreate for me some memorable scenes from those harried Gone With the Wind years, and she also gave me first-hand information about the premiere, John’s major heart attack, and Peggy’s fatal accident and funeral. She contributed significantly to my understanding of the Marshes’ relationship as she talked about the intensity of the love John had for Peggy; the sympathetic understanding he had for women’s issues; the exactness he as an editor demanded from himself and from others; and the dedication he had to upholding moral principles without ever appearing self-righteous.

  On another trip to Atlanta in the late summer of 1987, I talked with Deon Rutledge, a pleasant, attractive woman who worked along with her mother cooking and cleaning for the Marshes. Her mother, Bessie Berry Jordan, started working for the Marshes shortly after their marriage, and because she was their full-time housekeeper and cook for years, her daughter Deon practically grew up in the Marshes’ apartment.

  As Deon and I sat in the lobby of a downtown Atlanta hotel, I was impressed by her modesty and affection for both Marshes. She showed me the big brown scrapbook on Gone With the Wind that her mother had started over fifty years ago and kept adding to until her death. With great pride, she pointed out the Sunday Magazine article that her mother had written as a tribute to Peggy shortly after Peggy’s death. As Deon fondly turned the pages of the scrapbook and reminisced, she thrilled me with some glimpses of the past and made me feel as if I were actually back there in the Marshes’ apartment. When she came to a picture of John, whom she obviously respected and loved, she laughingly told me how frightened of him she was at first because, she said, “He was so tall and big and had such a deep, low voice.” Shaking her head, she exclaimed, “He was so different from Miss Peggy.” When we both suddenly realized how late in the afternoon it was, we laughed about how quickly our time together had flown by. Just as she rose to leave and was gathering her things, she looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “Folks don’t know it, but he helped her write that book!”

  Over the following years, I talked to a number of other people who gave me insight into the Mitchell-Marsh relationship and the times in which the Marshes lived. These included Sam Tupper, the Marshes’ neighbor and friend; Richard Harwell, the University of Georgia archivist who was the first to work with the collection of Mitchell-Marsh letters that Stephens Mitchell donated to the University of Georgia Library in the late 1960s; and Franklin Garrett, Atlanta’s foremost historian.

  Like Margaret Mitchell, I have a special affection for librarians and a reverence for libraries. Five major archives opened their doors to me and gave me access to letters and information. For three summers, my husband and I made trips to the University of Georgia in Athens, where he and I spent all day every day for weeks examining the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Papers, well over fifty-seven thousand items, as well as numerous papers in the other related files. In addition, we researched all the Mitchell papers and interrelated files in the Atlanta History Center Library Archives. I found information about John’s college and journalistic careers in the Margaret I. King Special Collections Library at the University of Kentucky, where John earned his bachelor’s degree in 1916, and we visited Maysville, Kentucky, where the Mason County Museum provided information about the town as it was when John grew up there. While in Maysville, we talked to Martha Comer, a local newspaperwoman, who told us about her interview with Peggy at Traxel’s Confectionery in November 1940, when John brought his wife to Kentucky for the first time. From the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, I obtained copies of fourteen letters that Peggy wrote to Harvey Smith from 1927 to 1944. I spent most of one summer reading over twelve thousand frames of microfilm from the Gone With the Wind–Margaret Mitchell–Macmillan File at the New York Public Library.

  By 1991, I had finished all of my research and completed my manuscript, which I was in the process of revising and editing, when Oxford University Press published Darden Asbury Pyron’s Southern Daughter. This Mitchell biography contains far more information than its two predecessors do, and I read it with great interest. However, my sources had given me a new and different view of John Marsh and his role in his wife’s life and career, a fresh understanding of the Marshes’ relationship and of them as individuals. My exclusive access to the Davises’ letters and my long talks with the most reliable witnesses—the family, the close friends, and the coworkers who knew the Marshes well throughout their marriage—enable me to provide new and important insight into a marriage that has never before been accurately described.

  Thus, in writing this book, my first objective is to focus on Mitchell’s private life in order to provide the reader with new information. In doing so, I want to make Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh come alive. Both were complicated, talented, warm-blooded human beings who had strengths and weaknesses like all of the rest of us, but who experienced a rare relationship full of astonishing success and heart-wrenching tragedy. In a world where ephemeral or traitorous relationships abound, a long union filled with loyalty, love, trust, and humor deserves a comprehensive reexamination.

  My second objective is to show that John Marsh’s deep attachment to Margaret Mitchell was pivotal to her work and to her life. Without a doubt, she had all the fiery imagination, all the hardy attachment to her environment, and all the raw material that a writer needs to create an epic like hers. But she did not have the technical skills, the self-discipline, or the confidence to transform her ideas into a completed manuscript of the quality of Gone With the Wind; her deep-seated insecurities hampered her in many ways. With his intellectual depth, maturity, education, and writing ability, John provided whatever she lacked. Her dedication of Gone With the Wind “To J.R.M.” is only a hint of the significance of their relationship and the influence it had on the origin and fruition of her great Civil War novel.

  I have tried to be as objective as possible, not glossing over her weaknesses or overemphasizing her strengths—or his either, for that matter. The conversations I quote are not fictionalized, but are transcribed as they were related to me by the participants.

  Emerging now from my long study, I must confess that I feel conflicting emotions. I am happy to complete my work on this book but am also a little sad to part from my subjects, for I agree with John Marsh: Margaret Mitchell was a lot of fun for me, too. But then, so was he.

  NOTES ABOUT THE LETTERS

  In typing her letters, Margaret Mitchell, a poor typist, rarely hit the apostrophe key; she generally either omitted the apostrophe or hit the “8” key instead. For the sake of clarity, I have replaced “8’s” with apostrophes. I have also added some punctuation. Otherwise, I have not edited any of these original letters. The letters reproduced here are, with the aforementioned exceptions, as they appear in the original sources. In a few instances where quoting an oddity in the original letters appears to be an overlooked printer’s mistake, I have used “[sic]” to make clear to the reader that the mistake is in the original material. Some of these letters were typed; others, handwritten. Some had envelopes, others did not.

  Before she became famous, Mitchell rarely dated her letters to the family; she usually scribbled only something like “Sunday afternoon” or “Monday night.” Because she wrote many of her early letters while she was at work at the Sunday Magazine from 1922 to 1926, but did not want her editor to know that she was using his time for her personal business, most of these letters do not bear the name of the recipient or the date; they have only “slug heads,” newspaper ja
rgon for instructions temporarily inserted at the top of copy. I have been able to assign dates to these letters, sometimes a day, month, and year, sometimes only a season and a year.

  I have gathered a total of 230 personal letters that John and Peggy Marsh wrote to members of the Marsh family. I have quoted major portions of 80 out of the 184 letters from the Davises’ collection, and have used information from the remaining 104. I have also quoted several passages that have never been quoted before from Margaret Mitchell’s 46 letters to Frances Marsh Zane. In addition, I used information from two of John Marsh’s unpublished handwritten letters that Joe Kling gave me.

  All other letters quoted here are originals or carbon copies of originals housed in the Margaret Mitchell Papers in the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library; in the New York Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Division; in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University; and in the Atlanta History Center Library Archives.

  Some information and a few of the quotations are from letters to which I had no access to the original. These are from Finis Farr’s Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (Morrow, 1965), the first Margaret Mitchell biography, which was authorized by Stephens Mitchell; and Jane Bonner Peacock’s Margaret Mitchell A Dynamo Going to Waste: Letters to Allen Edee 1919-1921 (Peachtree Publishers, 1985), a valuable collection of twenty letters Mitchell wrote to a beau from 1919 to 1921. Mrs. Peacock edited these letters and researched this period of Mitchell’s life. Also extremely useful were Richard Harwell’s “Gone With the Wind" as Book and Film; Richard Harwell’s White Columns in Hollywood: Reports from the GWTW Set by Susan Myrick; and E.I. (Buddy) Thompson’s Madame Belle Brezing.