Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  In late 1921, the editor of Kentucky’s Lexington Leader wrote John asking, for the second time, if he would return to work on its staff and be its highest-paid reporter at thirty-five dollars a week—a high salary in the newspaper world in those days.55 Although he was proud of the invitation, he declined. He wanted to stay in Atlanta to be near Peggy, who had changed his life in wonderful ways—at first.

  CHAPTER

  2

  1895-1919

  OPPOSITES ATTRACT

  I spent the Sunday afternoons of my childhood sitting on the bony knees of Confederate Veterans and the fat slick laps of old ladies who survived the war and reconstruction.

  —Margaret Mitchell to Julia Collier Harris,

  28 April 1936

  As I get older and see other people who have grown up in other families, I come more and more to appreciate my own.

  —John Marsh to his mother,

  Thanksgiving Day 1923

  1

  BY EARLY 1922, JOHN AND PEGGY WERE DEEPLY INVOLVED, seeing each other daily. But no pair ever looked more mismatched. Although she was exquisitely built, she was barely five feet tall and weighed scarcely ninety pounds. She looked even smaller standing next to John, who was slightly over six feet tall. She held herself erect and walked energetically, with quickness and grace. He was lean, nonathletic-looking, and slightly stoop-shouldered. He had the habit of walking slowly, head down, vest buttoned, suit coat opened, hands thrust into his trouser pockets. His round, metal-rimmed glasses made him look scholarly. Handsome with classical features, he had an oval face with a high, wide brow, a straight nose, pale blue eyes, and a fair complexion. His blond hair was thick and straight; he wore it without a part, brushed straight back from his forehead. He was always dressed in dark, three-piece suits, plain ties, and starched, white, high-collared shirts. She dressed expensively in the latest fashions and favored greens, aquas, and blues, which brought out the color of her eyes, the feature that first attracted people’s attention.1

  Her friendliness and warmth won her an impressive following of friends, mostly male. His reticence and self-reliance did not win many close friends.2 However, as she would soon learn, he was fiercely loyal to the few he had. Both had keen senses of humor, but his was subtle and whimsical; hers, garrulous and ribald. She frankly enjoyed not only hearing but also telling shocking stories. Good at uttering one-liners unexpectedly, he was not a joke teller but was a great audience for one. He was the one who laughed loudest at Peggy’s stories and always egged her on to tell them. He was quiet and mannerly; she was noisy, usually creating a lot of laughter around her. He was prudent; she was daring. He spoke carefully; she said whatever popped into her mind. Her whole person seemed to shout, “Hey! Everybody! Look at me!” He did not care whether anyone noticed him or not and preferred that no one did.3 While she loved to shock the older generation, he went out of his way to be respectful. Like a mischievous child, she frequently used obscenities; he used them sparingly, but more effectively. Most comfortable around men, she worked at being “one of the guys.”4 Because he was such a good listener, women liked to talk to him.5 Other, more subtle differences were also noticeable. Observant and appreciative of beauty, he was sensuous; but she was sensual. He was noted for his veracity; she, for her verisimilitude.6

  Although she was twenty-one when they met, she was still immature and irresponsible in some ways. Not having a real sense of herself, she played various roles as if she were continually searching for an identity. At times, she would be the rowdy, fun-loving flapper who took enormous pleasure in shocking Victorian dowagers—the joke-telling gin-drinker who could hold her “likker,” dance all night, and still be able to see to it that all the drunks got home safely. Sometimes, she played the dedicated, social-conscious reformer; at other times, she was a nonconformist without a clue as to her cause. Her personae included a vampy seductress; a modest, quiet southern lady; a fervent feminist protesting male power; a devoted daughter nursing her aging father; an amateur author writing only for her own amusement; a serious writer of serious fiction. One other role she consistently played, or maybe actually endured, was that of a sick person who suffered from mysterious illnesses that baffled her physicians.

  In contrast, John’s ego was always in place. Having defined his values in early childhood, he behaved in a consistent manner throughout his entire life. He had a staunch sense of responsibility and personal deportment; he embodied the noblest characteristics of chivalry and was self-reliant—almost to a fault. In spite of his calm exterior, he exhibited some compulsive behaviors. For example, he was fiercely competitive, determined to excel at whatever he undertook; he was rarely without a cigarette either in his hand or drooping in the corner of his mouth; he was excessively hard working and impatient with those who were not; he did a job himself rather than asking someone else to do it, particularly whenever he believed that the job had to be done right. He did not always trust his employees to do certain things correctly, and this habit did not endear him to some of his colleagues. Not a sportsman, not a card player, not an athlete, he was never one of the good old boys. Working among men who loved to fish and hunt, he was outspoken about his belief that it is wrong to kill animals.7 Although he despised incompetence, he overlooked weaknesses in people and often went out of his way to help those who lacked confidence and strength. He had genuine concern for his colleagues and subordinates.8 John was the type that people would go to when they were in trouble or needed advice. He was the type of person who needs to be needed, and Peggy leaned deeply into this need.9

  She was the type people wanted at their parties. Three traits made her the center of attention at any gathering she attended: first, her perceptive ability to find something remarkable about each individual, particularly anyone who was shy or young, and to make that person feel special; second, her humor, which she was careful never to use at the expense of another’s feelings; and third, her ability to tell anecdotes, oftentimes rowdy or scary ones.10 Stephens, her brother, said that she demonstrated this talent for storytelling even when she was a small child. Before she learned to read for herself, Stephens read fairy tales, mysteries, and adventure stories to her. With her incredible memory and imagination, she could, at an early age, enthrall her playmates by dramatically retelling these stories. According to Stephens, one little boy was afraid to walk home alone after an evening of Peggy’s spine-tingling tales.11 As a grownup, she could embellish any ordinary event, tell anything in such a funny way that her companions would break up in laughter. Annie Couper, one of her friends from childhood, explained how Peggy could take the most minor incident and retell it in such a way that the participant in the incident could hardly recognize herself. “You can meet Peggy in Rich’s basement when both of you are dog tired and feeling mean and scuffed and later that same evening hear Peggy tell of the encounter and not even recognize yourself in the two happy, carefree and glamorous witty people she describes.”12

  Peggy radiated spontaneity and enthusiasm, the qualities that John found most appealing, probably because he lacked them. Realizing that he was too cautious, he told his mother shortly before he met Peggy: “Unfortunately, I always think about things too long to do anything unusual.”13 His self-effacing modesty was not a sign of insecurity; his self-confidence was evident too. Having earned his own way since he was about twelve years old, he knew that he had control over his circumstances, and he knew how to weigh his options and estimate the consequences of his decisions. He was also more realistic and confident about what he could achieve. And he was always more optimistic than Peggy. He approached projects and problems far more reasonably than she did. Just like her father, she had an excitable, nervous temperament and, early on, she looked to John to shoulder some responsibilities for her. Reared with the notion that any sign of negative emotions, such as fear, jealousy, or disappointment, was unmanly, John concealed his anxieties and always appeared outwardly calm, self-assured, and unflappable. After their marriage, he was always i
n charge of their domestic and business matters.

  Despite all their differences, the Marshes were compatible. Everyone who knew them well said that they were. Even George Cukor, the first director of the Gone With the Wind film, remarked after meeting them in 1939 that John Marsh was “the ideal husband for Margaret Mitchell.”14 And indeed he was. It was evident to all who knew them that John always wanted what was best for Peggy and did all in his power to bring about the best for her. She knew that too. Margaret Mitchell could have married any man she wanted, but she chose to spend her life with John Marsh because she loved and respected him. Had he fallen in love with a less spectacular woman, perhaps he would not have paled, so to speak, in the minds of others looking back across the years and writing about Margaret Mitchell. Almost any man would probably appear nondescript in the company of a woman who, like the brightest star in the evening sky, dominated every scene in which she appeared.

  Perhaps what made their companionship ideal was the confluence of their differences, for each supplied what the other lacked. They were bound by their mutual dependence and desire to please each other. They were of equal rank in their relationship, and until their deaths, they were faithful to each other and to the roles they tacitly understood each was to play in their union: she, the writer; he, the editor. Except for the facts that they had both been influenced at a critical age by the death of a parent and that both had been profoundly influenced by their mothers, everything else about their childhoods, families, and hometowns was different. The distinct differences in their upbringing had everything to do with their personalities as adults and with the way they interacted with each other.

  2

  To begin with, Peggy came from the womb of the deep South Confederate establishment. All of her ancestors were prosperous landowners with fervent sentiments for the South. She was of the fifth generation of her family to live in Atlanta, and she was enormously proud of the fact. Her great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Mitchell, was the first Mitchell to come to Georgia in the mid-1700s. As a lieutenant in the Georgia Brigade in the Revolutionary War, he was granted land in Georgia.15 Nearly all of his descendants remained and prospered in Georgia. Her father’s father grew up on a farm at Flat Shoals, about fifteen miles from Atlanta. Her mother’s people—the Fitzgeralds and Stephenses—came from Ireland in the early 1800s and settled around Fayetteville, Georgia, in what is now known as Clayton County. In that beautiful county, far out on the old Jonesboro Road, her great-grandfather Fitzgerald established a huge cotton farm and peach and apple orchards, and he built a large, rambling farmhouse that Peggy loved and idealized as Tara in her novel. This Fitzgerald land, stained with the blood of Confederate and Union soldiers, was precious to her.

  Peggy was profoundly affected by her mother and her mother’s people. Although she was more like her father and his people in her looks and temperament, she was more influenced by the Fitzgeralds. Born on January 13, 1872, in her parents’ large Jackson Street home, Maybelle was the first of the eleven children of John and Annie Elizabeth Fitzgerald Stephens. She was christened Mary Isabelle but was never called that. A lovely woman, small with delicate features, Maybelle had red, curly hair, fair skin, and purplish blue eyes. Until she was thirteen, she and her two younger sisters, Annie and Estora, were taught by their mother’s spinster sister, “Aunt Sis,” how to write and to read the classics. Aunt Sis also taught them music and painting, “gentleness of demeanor, dignity of carriage, kindness of heart and gaiety of temperament,” wrote Stephens in his memoir. He added, “Their mother, having twelve children, was a little too busy to bother about such fine points.”16

  Unlike her own mother, who cared nothing for literature, religion, and social issues, Maybelle inherited her love for those things from her father and her maternal grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, and also from her mother’s sisters, Mamie and Sis. In her early teens, Maybelle attended the Bellevue Convent school in Quebec, where she learned to speak French fluently. But at her own insistence, she returned to Atlanta to finish her studies at a secular school. Intelligent, serious minded, and studious, she graduated with honors from the Atlanta Female Institute. In 1892, when she was twenty, she married Eugene Muse Mitchell.

  3

  Peggy’s father was born on October 13, 1866, in Atlanta. He was the first of Russell Crawford and Deborah Margaret Sweet Mitchell’s eleven children. Because his mother was pregnant every other year for twenty years, Eugene learned to be self-reliant at an early age, and he helped his mother by looking after his younger siblings. When his mother died, he was only twenty, about the same age Peggy was when her mother died. A perfectionist, he was highly disciplined, well organized, and studious. He was also inflexible in his views and sensitive about his short stature, which he inherited from his mother’s people—the Sweets. Like all the other Mitchells when they were young, he was scrappy; at Means High School in Atlanta, he was always getting into fights. Stephens described his father as “intensely reserved, with a great deal of pride. . . . He did not like to fight, but fought because pride drove him to it.”17 In this respect, Peggy was exactly like her father; she had great pride. But unlike him, and much to his regret, she did not excel in school. In 1885, Eugene graduated from the University of Georgia, receiving both the A.B. and the B.S. degrees. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he was honored for earning the highest grade point average ever earned by a student at the university—99.6.18 In 1886, he received his law degree, also with honors, from the University of Georgia.

  Although his nickname at the university was “the long-haired, short-legged genius,” he modestly wrote, “I never had any genius unless an unlimited capacity for work be such.”19 If he had been left to choose his career, he would have been a historian, an author and a teacher of history. He knew the history of the Civil War and of Atlanta thoroughly, and he was an excellent writer. But, instead of doing what he wanted, he studied law at his father’s insistence. Other lawyers said that Eugene Mitchell’s legal papers were models of clearness and conciseness and that it was impossible to misinterpret a will that Eugene Mitchell had drawn. In discussing this phase of the practice of law, Eugene instructed his son, “In drawing a Will, just look after the grammar, and the law will look after itself.”20

  In 1893, a year after he married Maybelle Stephens, he established a law firm with his brother, Gordon Forrest Mitchell. Twenty-six years later, after his son Stephens graduated from the University of Georgia Law School and joined him in practice, he renamed the firm Mitchell & Mitchell.21

  Eugene and Maybelle’s first child, Russell Stephens Mitchell, died in infancy in 1893; their second child, also christened Stephens, was born in 1895; their last child—Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell—was born on November 8, 1900, on their eighth wedding anniversary. All three children were born in a two-story, six-room frame cottage, 296 Cain Street, which was on the north side of Cain Street between North Boulevard and East Jackson Street. Their home was in a pleasant part of town, in a neighborhood of well-off families who had known each other for generations.22

  4

  Maybelle’s mother, Annie Elizabeth Fitzgerald Stephens, lived a few doors away in a big, rambling house full of kinfolks. Her house was headquarters for the entire family.23 Preceded in death by her husband, John Stephens, Annie inherited from him a whole block on Jackson Street. John Stephens had given all eight of his children property on this block, and they built homes and raised their families there. Thus, Peggy grew up literally surrounded by grandparents and relatives of every degree and age, as well as swarms of visiting kin, spanning three generations.24 All were steeped in the history of the South and the Civil War, and all were great talkers—especially the Fitzgeralds and the Stephenses, who were gifted storytellers.25 None was a more powerful storyteller than Grandmother Annie, who told Peggy endless tales about the Civil War, bloodthirsty Yankees, freed slaves, scoundrelly scalawags, cheating carpetbaggers, and the importance of behaving well in the face of either defeat or prosperity.

&nb
sp; Every Sunday afternoon the Mitchell family would visit with the older generation of relatives. “I spent the Sunday afternoons of my childhood sitting on the bony knees of Confederate Veterans and the fat slick laps of old ladies who survived the war and reconstruction,” Peggy wrote in a letter in 1936.26 “And I heard them talk about friends who came through it all and friends who went under. They were a pretty outspoken, forthright, tough bunch of old timers and the things they said stuck in my mind much longer than the things the people of my parents’ generation told me.”

  One Sunday they would visit her father’s people, who all gathered at the home of Russell Crawford Mitchell, her paternal grandfather, who lived in town on Ivy Street. The next week they would go out to the country to visit her mother’s folks—aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived on her maternal great-grandfather’s farm on the old Jonesboro Road, near Orrs Crossing. Peggy loved this farmplace, and she loved her grandmother’s saintly spinster sisters, Mary (called Mamie) and Sarah (nicknamed Sis or Sadie), who lived there and ran the cotton farm and the fruit orchards until they died in the 1930s. At all these family gatherings, the two favorite topics for discussion were the Civil War and the family history. Years later, Peggy described the old folks’ genealogical sessions as “climbing up and down the family tree and venturing out onto limbs and twigs which will hardly bear any weight.”27

  Grandpa Russell Crawford Mitchell left a strong impression on Peggy, although she was only five years old when he died. She remembered him well, with his jet-black eyes and his great swooping side whiskers shaped like porkchops. A colorful personality—wiry, tough, and shrewd—he had a stockpile of Civil War stories, for he had fought in eleven battles, including the ones at Seven Pines and Bull Run. In the bloody Antietam campaign, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, he was severely wounded when he was struck twice across the head with a couple of minié balls; the bullets tore through his skull, making two long grooves in it but not destroying any part of his brain. He was left for dead on the battlefield until a soldier picking up rifles noticed his faint breathing and loaded him onto one of the wagons. Several days later, after a long, bumpy journey to south Georgia, he was taken to an army hospital.28 He fully recovered, and in the process fell in love with one of the volunteer nurses, Deborah Margaret Sweet. After the war, they married and moved to Atlanta, which was emerging from Sherman’s ashes.29 A shrewd realist just like Rhett Butler, he went into the lumber and real estate business and quickly amassed a fortune.30 After his wife died when she was only forty, he remarried and had two more daughters.31