Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In writing this book, I consider myself blessed with the privilege of drawing from primary material unavailable to others, and for that privilege I am indebted to the Marsh family, particularly to Francesca Marsh and her son Renick Marsh; Mary Marsh Davis and her husband Edmund “Jim” Davis; and Rollin Zane and his son Craig Zane. I am equally grateful to Joseph and Eugene Mitchell, the Mitchell heirs, and the Trust Company Bank as Executor and Trustee Under Trusts created by Stephens Mitchell, who gave me permission to quote from the Mitchell letters. I thank Paul Anderson, the Mitchells’ attorney, who has been most helpful and kind. I also thank the Macmillan Company for allowing me to quote and use information from the Gone With the Wind Macmillan file.

  My warm thanks go to Joe Kling, who was a valuable source of information. Through the long process of my writing this book, my husband and I have grown close to Joe, and we value his friendship and his patience with my endless questions. My special appreciation goes to Deon Rutledge and Mary Singleton, who also furnished important information.

  I have been fortunate in other ways, for the University of Kentucky Community College System granted me a sabbatical leave from Henderson Community College for the academic year 1988-89, enabling me to devote myself full-time to research and writing. During the course of that year, my husband and I traveled several thousand miles collecting material.

  Librarians have been most helpful to me. Laura O’Keefe, Melanie Yolles, and Francesca Pitaro at the New York Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Division responded quickly and pleasantly to my urgent requests. Others just as courteous and efficient were Thomas Camden and Mary Ellen Brooks and their staff at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library; Anne Salter at the Atlanta History Center; Beverly Allen and Linda Matthews at the Emory University Robert W. Woodruff Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Dr. Frank Stanger and B. J. Gooch at the University of Kentucky Margaret I. King Library Division of Special Collections and Archives; Donald Wathen, the director of the Henderson County Public Library and his staff, especially Retta Zollinger, who patiently and frequently solves my word processing problems; and Lynda Sinnett, a librarian at Henderson Community College who has over the years secured more inter-library loans for me than I can count.

  Others who have helped me are Mary Rose Taylor and Thomas Weesner, who gave me information about the Marshes’ residences and other places in Atlanta; Dr. Virginia Grabil, professor emeritus of English at the University of Evansville, who read portions of my manuscript in 1991; and Dr. Marshall Arnold, who secured for me a copy of John Marsh’s academic transcript from the University of Kentucky and information about the university as it was when John was there.

  For their help in gathering photographs, I thank Ted Ryan of the Atlanta History Center, Janice Sikes of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, and Peter Roberts of Georgia State University’s Pullen Library.

  The contribution made by Betty Koerber, my friend and my husband’s secretary, is immeasurable. Supportive and encouraging, Betty organized and reorganized my hefty collection of letters and notes into folders, worked on the genealogy charts, typed the endnotes in proper form, and printed my numerous revisions of the manuscript—more revisions, in fact, than I care to admit.

  My wholehearted appreciation goes to Julie Bookman for her initial and continued enthusiasm for this biography and for all her hard work; and to Margaret Quinlin and her staff at Peachtree.

  For Emily Wright, my editor and mainstay throughout, I have great appreciation, respect, and admiration. Her advice helped me to improve many oversized chapters.

  I thank John Wiley, Jr., for his valuable assistance in revising sections of this book, especially those describing the premiere of the movie.

  And, finally, my greatest gratitude is for my husband, to whom this book is dedicated. He helped me every step of the way.

  CHAPTER

  1

  A MAN OF CHARACTER

  All my life I have been beset with Mitchells. My college sweetheart was named Mitchell; my new sweetheart, wife and eventually my widow is named Mitchell; my washerwoman for the past twenty-five years, who regards us as her children and during the period of the war scarcities, gives us presents of kleenex and other rare items, is a Mitchell; the company where I work has at least a dozen Mitchells in prominent positions; the firm of accountants who handle Peggy’s bookkeeping is Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Co., and the man in their organization who works on her books is a Mitchell, but not related to their Peat, Marwick, Mitchell. And now my new boss is a Mitchell who was born in Maine almost on the Canadian line, moved to South America in his young manhood, but was inevitably and unerringly drawn to Atlanta by the destiny which surrounds me with Mitchells. I might add that most of them are pretty fine folks. I’m just curious as to why I should collide with them at every turn of my life.

  —John Marsh to his mother, spring 1945

  1

  IN ATLANTA’S OLD OAKLAND CEMETERY, after the funeral service for Margaret Mitchell on August 17, 1949, family members urged her husband to go home and rest. But John Marsh, frail from a major heart attack three years earlier, insisted on staying until his wife’s body had been lowered into its final resting place. Calm but pale, he sat leaning forward, head bowed, arms outstretched with his elbows resting on his knees. His fingers restlessly reached out and tapped the support of the canopy over the grave as he stared at the freshly dug mound of red Georgia clay. In a low voice full of emotional resonance, he said to a friend: “When you think of all the serious illnesses I have survived, I guess you can say there’s a reason I outlived her. So I could do a few things for her.”1

  Those last few things John Marsh did for Margaret Mitchell were a measure of his dedication to her. Performing what he knew to be her wishes, he burned nearly all of the original manuscript of Gone With the Wind along with its corrected proofs and related papers.2 In the backyard of the Marshes’ apartment, at the corner of South Prado and Piedmont avenues in Atlanta, he set the priceless pages afire in a tall wire basket, the one the janitor used for burning leaves.3 Except for Bessie Jordan, who had been the Marshes’ faithful housekeeper since they were newlyweds, and Eugene Carr, the janitor, who stood back and watched, John was alone.4 “I didn’t want to see him working at it,” said Stephens Mitchell about the destruction of his sister’s papers. “The job made John feel sad, and me too. And I was glad he had to do it instead of me.”5

  After watching his employer sit staring for a long time at the contents of three cardboard boxes that he had emptied into the wire basket, Eugene Carr handed him a box of kitchen matches and asked softly, “Mr. Marsh, don’t you want me to do this for you?” Without looking up, John sadly shook his head no, rose from his chair, and began his mission. As the papers burned and quickly turned into ashes, he became overwhelmed with sorrow, and he wept. Alarmed at seeing him so distressed, Bessie, watching from the kitchen window, telephoned Margaret Baugh, the Marshes’ secretary, who lived nearby. When Miss Baugh arrived, John asked her to finish destroying the papers. “The janitor offered to do it for me,” she recalled, “but John said ‘This is a trust,’ and I stayed there until every scrap was consumed.”6

  Later, in her notes, Margaret Baugh explained:

  You see it was this way: Margaret wanted her papers destroyed, manuscripts, and letters. After her death he [John] took on the job—destroyed the clothes she had on at the time of the accident, the manuscript of GWTW, maybe ’Ropa, and maybe the novel of the 1920s. This was such a distressing experience that he turned over to me the destroying of the correspondence. After we had burned a lot of letters, we found some of them would have been useful in carrying on. So the burning stopped. (To my relief, for it was distressing to me too.) Then, after John’s death Steve had the responsibility, and he had me burn the remaining manuscripts and some more letters.7

  Fortunately, Stephens did not have Margaret Baugh destroy all of Peggy’s material; thousands of letters and papers were sp
ared. In the late 1960s, after publication of the Margaret Mitchell biography that Stephens had authorized Finis Farr to write, Stephens donated to the University of Georgia Hargrett Library the bulk of his sister’s papers—over fifty- seven thousand items—which include not only her and John’s letters and papers but also some of Stephens’s, along with his extensive family genealogy, portions of his memoir, and many letters written by his parents and grandparents. Margaret Baugh’s notes are also in this valuable collection.

  It is not difficult to imagine the sadness John Marsh felt as he destroyed the papers that represented his life with Margaret Mitchell. The Marshes’ entire domestic life—twenty-four years—centered on Gone With the Wind. During the first and happiest decade of their marriage, a lot of their lovemaking went on while they were working on the manuscript.8 Perhaps Gone With the Wind is not the only novel that resulted from the link between creativity and sexuality, but it is one novel that did. And after the book was published, something that neither of them ever expected, the remainder of their lives was spent in taking care of the complex international business that emerged from its phenomenal success. The book was their only child, and it was one that needed constant supervision. It had consumed their lives just as the fire consumed the papers.

  Margaret Mitchell loved her manuscript, which she often spoke of as her “first baby.”9 She could not destroy it, nor would she sell it or give it away to a library. When the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick and financier Jock Whitney asked her in 1937 if they could borrow or buy the manuscript for film advertisement purposes, she declined, saying she thought she had destroyed the manuscript, knowing full well she had not. Her feelings about having others see the manuscript are emphatically expressed in a letter she wrote Selznick’s assistant Katharine Brown, who also attempted to purchase the manuscript on Selznick’s behalf: “The whole truth of the matter is that I do not care where my book, as a book, goes, but I do not want even one sheet of manuscript or one line of notes to survive.”10

  In late 1948, she began to put her house in order, and on several occasions she discussed with John and her brother what was to be done if she died before Stephens and if John were unable to carry out her wishes, or if she and John died at the same time. She made it clear then, as she had done many times before, that she wanted her manuscripts, her notes related to them, and her personal papers destroyed; she was also adamant about not wanting sequels, comic strips, and abridgements.11 Then, too, she wanted the Mitchell family home on Peachtree Street torn down if neither she nor Stephens lived in it. In her five-page will, which she wrote in her big, scrawling handwriting on Sunday afternoon, November 21, 1948, only nine months before she died, she left the manuscript, all rights and royalties, all of her papers, letters, childhood writings, and, with a few minor exceptions, all of her possessions to John.12 But she wrote nothing in her will about wanting anything destroyed because she did not need to do so. John and Stephens not only knew her wishes but also felt as she did about them. Stephens said, “Margaret once told me, ‘If John and I die together’—and that almost happened in her accident—‘you see that my papers are torn up.’”13

  The fact that she felt so strongly about wanting her material destroyed and yet did not destroy it herself but left the job for John to do was characteristic of Peggy; it followed her pattern. She was not subordinate to him, but she was dependent upon him to take care of everything for her. And he did. As one of their journalist-friends put it, John was everything to Peggy—“husband, father, business manager, friend and watchdog.”14

  In his own will, written only eleven days after Peggy died, John left portions of the manuscript that he had decided to keep, the copyrights, royalties, and all the other materials related to Gone With the Wind to Stephens Mitchell.15 Then, in July 1951, he wrote a codicil to his will. The first line of the codicil states:

  My wife, Margaret Mitchell Marsh, wanted her private papers destroyed. She did not wish them to fall into the hands of strangers. She believed that an author should stand or fall before the public on the basis of the author’s published work. She believed that little was ever gained from studying an author’s manuscript and private papers, and that, more often than not, this led to false and misleading conclusions. Knowing the uncertainties of life, she placed upon me the duty of destroying the papers if she should die without having done it. She did so die, and I have tried to fulfill the obligation. As a part of the painful job, I have destroyed the original manuscript of her novel Gone With the Wind and all related papers, proof sheets, notebooks, notes, et cetera, except as described below.

  He then lists what he had saved of the Gone With the Wind papers “as a means of authenticating her authorship of the novel.” He explained, “If some schemer were to rise up with the claim that her novel was written by another person, it would be tragic if we had no documentary evidence and therefore were unable to beat down the false claim. So I am saving these original Gone With the Wind papers for use in proving, if the need arises, that Peggy and no one else was the author of her novel.”16

  He included two or three drafts of chapters; several proof sheets that he described as “carrying her handwriting and mine”; samples of other related papers such as chronologies, lists, and notes she made in collecting information; and a few of the large manila envelopes in which she kept the chapters. He concluded: “With this material, I am confident it can be proved not only that my wife Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, but that she alone could have written it.”17 Without showing the material to anyone, not even Stephens Mitchell or Margaret Baugh, he sealed it in a large manila envelope that he marked in his bold hand, “Do not open.”18 On July 26, 1951, he locked the envelope in his safety deposit box in the vault of the Citizens and Southern National Bank on Marietta Street in Atlanta.19 He ordered that the papers were to remain sealed “unless a real and actual need for them arises for the purpose stated. If such a need never arises, the envelope and contents are eventually to be destroyed unopened.”20 In the early 1960s Stephens wrote in his memoir, “Those things are still sealed in the envelope, the ones John selected and put there. The rest are burned.”21

  Peggy’s desire to have the original manuscript destroyed and John’s codicil raise many questions. What—if anything—would the contents of that envelope prove? How did he go about deciding which manuscript pages to burn and which to save?22 Why did she want the manuscript destroyed? It is difficult to understand why he—a prudent man with intellectual depth and maturity—did not simply leave all of the material of incalculable literary and monetary value to one of the many universities or libraries that sought it so that scholars and lay people alike could examine it. Only if he had done so could there be no question of Margaret Mitchell’s authorship. So why did he burn the entire proof? Or, did he carefully burn all that which he thought may have suggested something other than proof?

  The question of her authorship was just one of the many tales that snaked out soon after Gone With the Wind became an unexpected sensation.23 But of all the many rumors, the “most persistent,” Stephens said, “were the stories that Margaret had not written the book at all.” Stephens explained, “Many fool people claim that John Marsh wrote the book…. John and I decided that we were going to save enough of the notes and the manuscript to prove that Margaret wrote this book.”24 A sensitive person who had great pride but little confidence in her own ability, she was devastated by this one rumor that John had written the novel or had helped her write it.25

  Ironically, Peggy had unwittingly given rise to this rumor herself. When her popularity was at its height, immediately after Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, she allowed the Atlanta Public Library to exhibit two pages of the original manuscript in an enclosed cabinet with a glass top. This exhibition, shown for several weeks in the library, was viewed by thousands. The notes and liberal editing on the pages were in John’s handwriting, which was easily recognizable to anybody who had seen it.26 Some of the people who
knew the Marshes well had taken for granted that John, an established journalist and an editor, had contributed significantly to his wife’s work. And they were convinced after glancing at the pages that he indeed had helped her because the pages appeared in the book exactly as John had edited them in the manuscript.27 When rumors about his collaboration emerged, Peggy realized what a mistake she had made in letting manuscript sheets go. In December 1936, she wrote her friend Herschel Brickell, a reviewer for the New York Post: “I want my manuscript and do not want it floating around for I intend to burn it just as soon as I get those leaves back which the MacM co. inveigled out of me when I was too exhausted to argue. . . . The proof sheets are going to be burned, too. . . . I don’t want anyone to see them just as I did not want anyone to see the ms pages but couldn’t help myself. Don’t ask why. I dont know.”28

  Exquisitely sensitive to criticism, Peggy could never ignore gossip and lies. She spent an inordinate amount of time tracking down misstatements and rumors and writing long responses to them, as well as to questions and to praise. But this questioning of her very authorship seared her soul; she was never able to dismiss it privately or to confront it publicly, as she had done with other rumors. The codicil to John’s will proves that he, too, took it seriously and did not consider it mere local gossip. More important, it underscores his enduring effort to protect her, even in death.

  Just three years after her death, the respected southern journalist Ralph McGill wrote an article based on his friendship with Peggy and John and on the knowledge of fellow journalists who knew her in her early years. Although the article compliments Peggy, McGill explains that all her friends were surprised by her achievement.

  Not one of the merest handful of persons who knew she had written a book had seen it or had the faintest idea of what it was about. Candor compels one to say that the most loyal friend would not have believed that even by rubbing an Aladdin’s lamp she could have written the book. She hid herself completely, inwardly, and in many things, from her best friends.29