Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  I used to have an elegant time in my early youth (for which John says I should have been shot) by giving a life-like imitation of a modern young woman whose blistering passions were only held in check by an iron control. It frequently succeeded.18

  Although John exhibited no jealousy, he was bothered by the fact that his competitors were, or appeared to be, better off financially than he was. They all had their own automobiles and, as college students from well-to-do families, they had much more free time than he did. Trying to improve his station in life and thinking about marriage in the future, he had been looking around for a better job, for his was becoming more demanding. He regularly worked eight to ten hours six days a week, usually had assignments two nights a week, and on Saturdays he often worked late into the night. On the evenings when he had to work late, Peggy went out with others, and he had no choice but to accept that. He may have figured that if he waited patiently she would finally grow up and realize that he was the best man for her. However, the following passage, which he wrote to his sister Frances, suggests that he feared Peggy might not change:

  I am not contemplating matrimony, as much as I would enjoy it. Peg and I are indulging in a form of liberal platonism that would require a detailed and elaborate explanation that I don’t propose to go into here. Enough to say that we have made a solemn promise not to fall in love with each other. Peg has made a success at that sort of relationship as she has the largest and oddest collection of men friends, real friends, pals, of any girl of twenty I have ever encountered. I am proud to join the circle. And I suppose eventually like the others I will be secretly in love with her, covering up an apparently hopeless passion.19

  His use of the phrase “a form of liberal platonism” is puzzling. One of the meanings of the word “liberal” is loose or approximate, or morally unrestrained.20 Given her attitudes about sex and about how a girl could stay virtuous while still having fun, John’s phrase could very well mean that he and Peggy were not always able to transcend their physical desires and maintain a purely spiritual relationship—that they took liberty with the philosophy of platonic friendships. To get some insight into Peggy’s coquetting, we can turn to her novel, where she incorporated her own attitudes into Scarlett’s. When Scarlett is reflecting on her mother’s and Mammy’s training, on the rules that they have said all “ladies” must observe, Scarlett thinks that she has obeyed those rules except in her dealings with bachelors, with whom she worked out her own code of ethics:

  But with young bachelors—ah, that was a different matter! You could laugh softly at them and when they came flying to see why you laughed, you could refuse to tell them and laugh harder and keep them around indefinitely trying to find out. You could promise, with your eyes, any number of exciting things that would make a man maneuver to get you alone. And, having gotten you alone, you could be very, very hurt or very, very angry when he tried to kiss you. You could make him apologize for being a cur and forgive him so sweetly that he would hang around trying to kiss you a second time. Sometimes, but not often, you did let him kiss you. (Ellen and Mammy had not taught her that but she learned it was effective.) Then you cried and declared you didn’t know what had come over you and that he couldn’t ever respect you again. Then he had to dry your eyes and usually he proposed, to show just how much he did respect you. And then there were—Oh, there were so many things to do to bachelors and she knew them all, the nuance of the sidelong glance, the half-smile behind the fan, the swaying of the hips so that skirts swung like a bell, the tears, the laughter, the flattery, the sweet sympathy.21

  Peggy was indeed an expert in the use of feminine wiles, and little did John realize the extent to which she used them.

  4

  Despite uncertainties in his relationship with Peggy, John entered the new year in high spirits. In early April 1922, he gave up his job at the Georgian and went to work as the assistant manager in the public relations department at the Georgia Railway and Power Company (later known as the Georgia Power Company). He was appointed editor of the company’s magazine. The pay was much better and, as Joe Kling said, “the work was much more respectable.” Working for a newspaper in those days, Joe said, was “a raffish job,” and most of the staff were heavy smokers and drinkers; the soot covered the office buildings inside and out. “The place was grimy, stale-smelling, and freckled with dead roaches. The power company was different; all the men were always clean shaven, dressed neatly in suits, white shirts, ties, and the offices and the building itself were clean and very nice. Getting that job was a step up for John, and for me, too, because I went to work for him there in 1928.”

  On March 9, 1922, John wrote his mother,

  Naturally I am just bound to write to you all since the new stationery with my name on it has just come up from the printer…. Having been a newspaper man for a few years I believe I am inoculated against any high and mighty airs in my present exalted position, but I shan’t deny my childish pleasure in seeing my name on the letter-head of a responsible business organization.

  Enclosing copies of the magazine he put out, he added: “Being editor is interesting work. I can turn myself loose and write anything I want to write. That’s fun, after being under a city editor for many years, and it’s still more fun when I ride downtown on our street cars in the morning and see the people laughing at the jokes in my paper and sometimes reading the more serious and weighty articles.”

  In earlier letters, he had talked about helping Frances find work in Atlanta, and in this letter, he spoke of wanting to bring her to Atlanta in April if he could manage it financially. “About a job for her this summer—that’s one of the reasons I wanted her to come down. If she can talk to some of the newspaper people down here, and they can have the chance of looking her over she has a much better chance than if it had to be handled indirectly. I am hoping that I can get her in with me. We are going to have to enlarge the department, and I would prefer to have her if it can be arranged.” He mentioned another reason he wanted his sister to visit: “I want Frances to meet my new sweetie.” The opera season was to begin the last week of April, and he wanted to take her and Peggy to some performances. Peggy was visiting Augusta Dearborn, her best friend, who lived in Birmingham, Alabama. Pursuing a career in opera herself, Augusta was planning to return with Peggy to spend a week in Atlanta during the opera season. John went on to say, “Peg will have a visitor at that time and has asked to entertain Frances also.” Wanting others in his family to meet Peggy, he said he wished his mother and Henry would also arrange a visit to Atlanta soon. Sounding happy and optimistic, he closed saying that he was planning a few trips to get acquainted with the company property. Obviously, he was looking forward to enjoying his new job and his life with Peggy.

  What started out as a wonderful spring turned into a troubling time for John, and, for different reasons, it was no easier for Peggy.

  5

  All the young, well-to-do girls who had attended Washington Seminary were trained for nothing more serious than making their debuts and getting married. After graduation, they automatically became members of the Debutante Club. During this period the Atlanta debs received a great deal of newspaper publicity, which at that time was a very modern notion; as Peggy pointed out, according to “the old Southern way. . . a lady’s name appears in print only when she’s born and buried.”22 The Journal’s Sunday rotogravure section regularly printed pictures of the debs, and Peggy’s pictures were often included. One Sunday a photograph of her seated on the cowcatcher of a locomotive and waving a trainman’s hat was featured with the caption: “Miss Margaret Mitchell believes that driving a locomotive would be next to skimming the clouds in an aeroplane.”23

  The debs were usually accepted, later, into the Junior League, the highest-ranking women’s social organization in the South. But for some reason that is not clear, Peggy was not invited to join the Junior League; this omission was made more noticeable by the fact that many of her relatives and friends were members. Tha
t she was not invited to join shocked and infuriated her family and generated gossip in her social set. However, at this time, Peggy never seemed to care what people said about her, and she viewed affectation and smugness as challenges that only spurrred her to see how far she could go in shocking and annoying her elders. Some rumored that her unconventional behavior and her noticeable popularity with men created her poor image with the senior League members.

  Others claimed that their disapproval stemmed from the scandal she created at the benefit ball sponsored by the Debutante Club in early March 1921. At this ball, she and A. Sigmund Weil, her partner, who was a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, performed their sensual l’Apache dance—a dance they learned after much hard practice. Peggy loved to dance and was a very good dancer. She put her heart and soul into this dramatic performance. The dance itself was daring enough for its day, and the newspapers had a good time reporting it and carrying photographs of it. The Constitution pointed out: “One other debutante offering herself and all she was on the altar of charity was constantly hors de combat because of the strenuosity of the Apache dance—Margaret Mitchell, you know.”24 The Journal stated that the most striking feature of the ball was “the Apache dance by Miss Margaret Mitchell, one of the prettiest of the debutantes.” However, some of the older ladies present at the ball expected to see an Indian dance, not a Parisian hoodlum spectacle, and they considered the dance obscene. As if her swiveling hips, seductive glances, and thrashing about on the floor were not enough to send the elders’ blood pressure soaring, there were those tiny, tinkling brass bells Peggy wore on her red and black garters, under her short, skimpy costume. But it was that long, lewd kiss her partner gave her at the end of their sensational performance that really sent the ladies’ heads reeling. Gasping, they asked each other, “Did you see how he kissed her?” and “What can Eugene Mitchell be thinking of to allow it?”25 The Debutante Club was shocked that one of its new members had offended the older members’ sense of propriety.

  Then, the club was further annoyed when Peggy led a small group of girls in arguing that the Junior League ought not to say where the money earned from the charity ball was to be given. The League won, and the five hundred dollars the ball produced was donated to the Home for Incurables. According to Farr, who heard Stephens Mitchell’s first-hand account of this event, “Without question, at this time Margaret fell from favor with many of the city’s ruling dowagers.”26 Her grandmother was furious with Peggy, and their differences now were irreconcilable. Eugene Mitchell was gravely disturbed but, without Maybelle, he did not know how to handle his wayward daughter.

  Whatever the reasons, Peggy’s name was not included in the December 1921 Junior League roster, something she and her father were to resent for the rest of their lives. “In my gone and forgotten deb days,” she wrote Frances in 1926, “I was a probationer of the League, did a year’s work in the hospital among what is laughingly referred to as Social Diseases and never made the League because I was a wild woman.”27 The truth is she wanted to belong to the high-society set, but she did not want to conform to its standards. Peggy nursed a grudge against the League for eighteen years. When the premiere of the film based on her novel was celebrated in Atlanta, the Junior League sponsored a big, fancy Gone With the Wind banquet and ball for the Hollywood producers, directors, stars, and Atlanta’s most elite society. Of course, Peggy was invited to attend as the guest of honor. But, to show that she still remembered, she refused their invitation, feigning illness, and did not attend the ball given in her honor.

  6

  Around the end of March 1922, Red Upshaw returned to Atlanta and joined the debutante crowd’s scene. From the moment he watched Red slide onto the cushioned seat next to Peggy in the corner booth where they were sitting at the Rabbit Hole, John knew things were going to be different. And they were.

  Red was everything that John was not. Sexy and self-indulgent, he was as unruly and undependable as John was mild-mannered and dependable. At twenty-two, four months younger than Peggy, Red had never completed anything he had started. After an unsuccessful year at the University of Georgia, he dropped out. Then, through his father’s good connections, he was awarded admission to the United States Naval Academy, but he flunked out in short order. He returned to the University of Georgia for one semester and failed again. Somehow he managed to get readmitted to Annapolis, where he barely lasted a term. The University of Georgia allowed him to reenroll, but he never completed his work there.

  Tall and handsome with red, wavy hair and blue eyes, he had a rawboned look and a dissolute air. He came from a well-to-do family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father, William Upshaw, had a successful insurance business. In fact, for many people, his family background was the only point in his favor. Although he had no steady employment—he was bootlegging when John met him—he had a new car and money that he was always ready to spend. John did not own a car; he did not even know how to drive one, nor did he have the free time that Red had. By the time he got around to seeing Peggy in the evenings, he had put in a full day as a reporter and was often tired. He had to be conservative with his money because he was helping Henry support Frances, their youngest sister, until she got established and also their mother, a retired elementary school principal relying largely on what her sons gave her.”28

  When Red came on the scene, Peggy was particularly vulnerable to making mistakes. Her extended adolescent streak of rebellion was at its peak. She had created the Junior League Charity Ball fiasco and the enormous rift with her mother’s family; now she seemed bent on creating another disaster for herself and those who loved her. Later, she drew from her own painful experiences when she wrote about Scarlett, who created a mess for herself too: “Scarlett had made too many enemies to have many champions now. Her words and her actions rankled in too many hearts for many people to care whether. . . scandal hurt her or not.”29

  And so it was with Peggy. Her friends’ sympathies lay with John and her father and brother. Mr. Mitchell and Stephens knew that if they protested her relationship with Red, they would only propel her more directly to him, for she resented their criticism and rejected their advice with such vigor that she always did the direct opposite of whatever they wanted her to do.30 As an almost maliciously staggering blow to John, she suggested that Red, who was looking for an apartment, room with John. Always more than willing to do whatever she asked, John permitted his competitor to share his room—an uncomfortable arrangement to which he sorely regretted consenting.31 Much to John’s further discomfort, Red told others that John Marsh was his best friend in Atlanta.32

  Among the papers that Frances saved is an undated, yellowed news-clipping that John sent her from the Atlanta Journal sometime during the summer of 1922. It confirms the gossip about the trio: “Inseparable friends for a long period and equally under the spell of a certain charming Atlantan, they have served her hand and foot for many months, have continued in their friendly appreciation of each other and successfully hidden every trace, if trace there be, of any small pangs of jealousy which her smiling too often in first one direction or the other might have occasioned.”33

  For John, loving Peggy meant living on an emotional roller coaster. Even though she had talked about cherishing “the childish ideal that somewhere there is a man who will love and respect me far more because I have kept above the cheapness of passing passion,” she rejected such a man when she found him. And her words about playing “square . . . and being faithful and conservative” and wearing a “Reserved” sign around her neck when she became involved in a serious relationship were empty words.34 She did not play fair. She saw nothing wrong in letting both John and Red court her. They were her most devoted escorts; she had no time for others now. They took her out separately or together, whichever way she preferred. Their friends observed the steady trio and thought it was a “crazy arrangement.”35 Those closest to her, like Stephens and Aggie Dearborn, knew that she loved John, not Red, even thou
gh she did not seem to know it. Although he played the role of the nonchalant romancer and behaved as if he were confident that she was merely going through a phase, John suffered silently. It was against his nature to show any weakness such as jealousy, anger, or disappointment. Perhaps he was afraid to let her know how much he loved her; perhaps he thought as Rhett did when he told Scarlett just before his last departure, “I loved you but I couldn’t let you know it. You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”36

  The first mention of Upshaw in any of John’s letters comes in late March 1922, when John introduced his rival to Frances by sending her a photograph of Peggy and writing:

  I am enclosing a picture or two which may be of interest. The dramatis personae are Miss Peggy Mitchell, Mr. Red Upshaw, one of her lovers and my roommate, and Mr. Marsh. Scene—The Mitchell front porch. Time—any Sunday morning or afternoon and any other afternoon or evening. Theme—I could love the one or the other if either dear charmer were gone. Moral—Don’t weaken.37

  This photograph of Peggy’s smiling profile, with her dark, glossy hair piled on the back of her head and her sweater collar rolled up around her neck, was John’s favorite picture of her even though the person she is smiling at is Red Upshaw.