Bill Howland, who was writing for the Journal at that time, recorded his first impression of Peggy:
It was in May, 1 924, when I had just come to the Journal’s busy but dingy city room as a very wet-behind-the-ears cub, slightly exposed to professional newspapering for a few months in Nashville. Along with other cubs I was being put through a pretty rough course of sprouts by City Editor Branch, a super trainer of reporters. While we went through the often dreary daily grind of writing—and re-writing again and again and again—obituary notices, civic club reports, police items—all the minor bits of news that fall to the lot of the cub reporters—a tiny, reddish-haired, electric-eyed sprite from the Sunday Mag department from time to time would come in to look up words in the big dictionary beside the city desk. She was so small that she would have to stand on tiptoe and lean over the big book, often exposing an inch or so of white skin above the tops of her rolled stockings. When that happened, in those days when legs were not the public ocular property they are today, there would be considerable mis-typing and slowing down in production on the part of young reporters. This soon caught Mr. Branch’s alert eye. He stopped it by calling our visitor to his desk, and saying, in the most fatherly fashion: “Miss Peggy, I’ll have to ask you to stop using the dictionary—you’re upsetting my young men.”23
3
Her first assignment was an easy one, having to do with whether skirts were going to be shorter. In 1922, women still wore rather long skirts although World War I had introduced the raised hemlines. Perkerson sent her to interview the socialite Mary Hines Gunsaulas, who had just returned from Europe with her new Parisian wardrobe. During the course of the interview Mrs. Gunsaulas, who posed for photographs in her Paris dresses, casually mentioned that she had been in Rome the day that Mussolini and his black-shirted Fascisti marched into Vatican City and took over the government. Not abreast of world events, Peggy said:
Mussolini was not even a name to me then, but it sounded interesting and I listened and asked questions while Mrs. Gunsaulas told more. I came back and wrote my story about skirts and tacked all this other incident onto the end. Mr. Perkerson—I did not call him Angus then—turned the story hindside before, and started it off with the eye-witness account of Mussolini taking over the Italian government.24
Although her first story, “Atlanta Girl Sees Italian Revolution,” is easy to read, it is amateurish. It is mostly a series of direct quotations strung together, and on the whole it is a little disconnected and unorganized. Also, it noticeably fails to describe what Mrs. Gunsaulas looked like or even what she wore.25 However, her second article shows marked improvement. By the time it was written, John had finished his fundraising drive for the University of Alabama and had moved back to Atlanta to be near her and to begin another big campaign for Legare Davis.
In the first week of February 1923, Atlanta had a bit of winter; sleet and ice were frozen on the trees and wires, and a raw wind and freezing temperatures made going outside uncomfortable. John had been working night and day helping Davis inaugurate a national campaign named “Save the South,” a movement to fight the boll weevil. In a letter to his mother on February 5, 1923, he talked about his work and Peggy’s; he also enclosed one of Peggy’s stories, titled “Graveyard Dirt Is Newest Conjur Charm.” Indicating that even in those years he was not only lending his editing skills but also giving her ideas about characterizations, he told his mother: “You may recognize an old friend (the name at least) when you read Peggy’s story in this week’s Journal Magazine which I have mailed to Frances.” He explained that Peggy was assigned to get a feature story on blacks who did voodoo magic. However, after an extensive search through Atlanta’s “Darktown,” she and John failed to find one, and so he told her about Omie, an interesting old black woman he and his family admired in his hometown. After listening to his description of this old woman, Peggy used her imagination, he said, and gave the name of Omie to the woman in her story. He thought his mother would enjoy reading the piece for that reason.26
Not wanting to remain a full-time freelance publicity agent for Legare Davis because that job required him to travel, John started looking for work in Atlanta now that Peggy needed him there. In April 1923, he went to work for the Journal, not as a reporter but as a copyeditor, so that he could remain in the building, be near her, and be available to help her with her work. He had an excellent reputation as a reporter, and as a copyeditor he became known as “a stickler for correctness.”27
It was common knowledge at the Journal that John helped Peggy in every way he could, including proofing her drafts whenever he got the opportunity. Helping her with her work gave John a valid reason for spending time with Peggy. Although Red had disappeared, she was still married to him, so she and John, well aware of the gossip about her, tried to keep their courtship a very quiet one.28
The original drafts of Peggy’s articles have long since disappeared, so there is no way of knowing how much work John did on them. However, his handwriting is on some of the galley proofs of her articles saved in the Hargrett Library. Then, too, it is possible to distinguish two different styles in Peggy’s articles for the Magazine: an informal, energetic, loose style that sounds like Peggy’s speaking voice; and an objective, factual, straightforward style that suggests John’s editing. Having made his living for five years doing hard-news reporting, John had a clear, smooth, logical, and effective style of writing. Some of his articles are available also, and it is noticeable that some of Peggy’s early pieces have the more professional tone and style of John’s articles. For example, the contrast between her first and her second article, “Plant Wizard Does Miracle Here,” which appeared on January 7, 1923, demonstrates obvious improvement. This second piece gets to the point much more quickly than her first article, and it closely follows the fundamental principles of good newspaper writing. For another example, her article “Police Station 31 Years Old and Shows It,” in the August 12, 1923, issue of the Magazine, is more objective, direct, noticeably less turgid than some of her other pieces. Years later, Angus Perkerson remarked that Peggy “wrote like a man.”29 Surely, John’s influence and his editing to some extent account for the direct, “masculine” style of some of her articles.
In the margins of some of Peggy’s galleys, John wrote comments about avoiding shifts and spelling inconsistencies; in one place, he had marked three different usages—“going,” “gwine,” and “goin’” in her quoting of the same speaker.30 He struck out adjectives, which she tended to overuse, replaced words, and reconstructed phrases or sentences. His corrections did indeed improve her writing by making it fluent and clear. For one example, her article “Atlanta Subdebs Pass Up Tutankhamen,” published March 11, 1923, is about a group of Atlanta girls who had just returned from visiting Egypt, where the excavations of the mummified remains of Tutankhamen were creating world news but little interest for the Atlanta debs. On this one-page galley proof, John made five corrections.
His reactions to her writing were by no means always critical and correcting. When she scribbled, “This here is mine—and its rotten!” on her article “When Mrs. Bell Ruled the ‘Bell House Boys’” (June 24, 1923), he scribbled back: “I can’t see what makes this story eat on you. It shows good reporting in the historical data collected and the number of prominent men interviewed. I also like it because it does not rave, but gives the facts and lets them sell themselves.” Another time he wrote, “You have an ability to make your people lifelike which is seldom an accomplishment of newspaper reporters. This is very well done.”31 Although he helped her with organization and development and corrected her grammar and punctuation, John recognized that she was excellent at writing descriptions and dialects, and he told her so. In the margin near her description of One-Eyed Connelly, a person who managed to attend many public events without ever buying admission tickets, John wrote “Good!” next to this passage: “Connelly is a thickset, short man, with a bullet head set on a short, thick neck. His eagle nose is crisscros
sed with scars, his face full and placid, and his one green eye shines with the quiet confidence acquired only by one who is convinced in his own soul of the laudability of his life work.”32
When she and John were together going over her mistakes, he would often gently rub the back of her neck and softly insist that she be accurate not only in gathering her facts but also in writing them down.33 Always trying to dismiss her fears, he regularly praised her work. On one occasion, he wrote, “I hope my pleasure over your ability to write so much more smoothly than you used to won’t have the effect of making you ‘flowery.’ That would be too bad. Oh my yes!”34 Through her relationship with John, she learned her trade rapidly, and her self-esteem grew immeasurably.
In a letter on June 11, 1923, he wrote his mother about his “two pupils,” one of whom was his sister Frances, who was sending him copies of her manuscripts for advice. “My other ‘pupil,’ Peggy,” he wrote, “is making good progress, and now in addition to her newspaper work she is writing ‘the Great American Novel.’ Knocks off a page or two at a time when she has a few minutes to spare.” Then he added this eerie prediction: “There are places in it which show signs of being good stuff. We may have a famous friend some of these days.”
All the virtues of a lover, a friend, and a doting father were combined in John. He offered Peggy adoration, protection, and all the help she needed to do what she wanted to do—write. He nurtured her creative imagination and gave her the confidence she lacked, asking nothing in return. By early 1923, her dependence upon him was fixed permanently.
Although she never learned enough about grammar, punctuation, spelling, and trimming to read copy well, she made herself useful as a member of the magazine staff in other ways. Because she was charming and pretty, she was often sent as a representative to welcome visiting celebrities and to act as their Atlanta tour guide. Also, Perkerson gave her the special task of returning to disappointed mothers all of the rejected baby pictures sent in for the newspaper’s frequent pretty baby contests. In addition to getting out the magazine, the staff was responsible for the Sunday rotogravure picture section, known as “the Brown Section.” She helped with selecting pictures and writing captions for them, a task she enjoyed.
Working for the Sunday Magazine gave Peggy a sense of independence, confidence, and purpose that she had never known. It gave her self-respect. By the end of February, she looked prettier and healthier than she had looked in several months. Although she was still married to Red, whose whereabouts were still unknown, she and John were seeing each other as often as they could. Everyone who knew them could tell that they loved each other very much.35 Gradually, she resumed her social life, but now her new friends were mainly John’s newspaper friends at the Journal: O. B. Keeler, Allan Taylor (who had an obvious crush on Peggy), Bill Howland, Frank Daniel (who dated the much older Frances Newman), Joe Kling (who was then courting Evelyn Lovett, whom he later married), and Roy Flannagan and his wife, whose place Peggy had filled at the magazine. The only friend from her old crowd whom Peggy still cared to see was Augusta “Aggie” Dearborn, who by this time had married the Georgia artist Lee Edwards.
This group, along with a few others like Anne Couper, Peggy Porter, Frank Stanton, and Kelly Starr (the head of the publicity department at Georgia Power), made up what was known as the Peachtree Yacht Club, although yachting had nothing to do with their friendship activities. (There are no yachts in Atlanta, and even if there had been, the group collectively could not have afforded one.) Howland remembered a hilarious party one night at the Mitchells’ Peachtree home when the group suddenly decided they wanted to have a costume party. Searching the house for whatever they could find, they decked themselves out in ridiculous-looking outfits, went downtown, found two strangers, and brought them back to the house to judge which costume was the best.36 Indeed, they were a rowdy group of practical jokers who knew how to have a good time.
4
When Peggy entered the newspaper world, it was a rugged environment. “The staff was composed entirely of men—most of them about equally proud of their ability to drink hard as to work hard,” wrote Howland.37 Riding the streetcar every morning, she had to cross town to get to the Journal, an old, dingy, five-story, red-brick building alongside the railroad tracks. Its entrance was on the Forsythe Street viaduct, in a run-down section of Atlanta. A young copyeditor at the Journal while Peggy was there, Joe Kling described the Journal building as “hopelessly dirty inside and out, partly from breathing train smoke day and night and partly from benign neglect.” On the first floor was a small café where, Kling said, “You could get a glass of milk and two slices of bread (no butter) for a dime. But you had to keep a sharp eye out for cockroaches. This spartan diet suited the copyreaders (of whom I was one) partly because we were under strain to get back from lunch in fifteen or twenty minutes and partly because we all had some form of stomach trouble from the working conditions.” He added, “The cockroaches did not confine themselves to their natural habitat, the café, but made themselves at home wherever their fancy led them. They were more than ordinarily fond of the glue pots (actually mucilage which was used for pasting up copy).”
Because the locomotives back then burned soft coal and belched thick, black smoke, the side of the Journal building facing the tracks was continually enveloped with dark, smelly clouds of smoke from the puffing engines. Howland said that when the windows were kept closed during the winter, breathing got to be a problem for everyone inside. During the summer, when the windows were kept open, he claimed it was not unusual “for a red cinder to fall on one’s desk. And it required iron concentration to take news over the phone or to write news, with locomotive whistles bellowing, engine bells clanging, just outside the window.”38
In spite of their poor working environment, long hours, and low wages, the staff believed that they put out the best paper in the nation, and they had an esprit de corps that is rarely found in any workplace. Everyone, from the elevator man to the editor in chief, knew each other by name.
At lunchtime, reporters, editors, top executives, pressroom men in overalls and sweaty shirts, and every other variety of Journal worker, crowded into the little café on the first floor, sat at rickety tables or milled about at the counter, shouted back and forth, told jokes, ate the rugged fare. . . . If you were ever accepted as one of them, you became part of a hard working, hard hitting team. Not everyone made it; simply being hired was no guarantee of your acceptance into the Journal fellowship. Peggy Mitchell did make the team.39
When Peggy joined the staff, the Magazine was only ten years old. Its office, which she nicknamed “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” was on the third floor, along with most of the executive offices, the society department, and the stereotyping equipment.40 Describing the layout of the building, Kling explained that on the first floor, all the principal business (bookkeeping, advertising, subscription, accounting, etc.) was conducted. On the second floor were the photographic departments, morgue (or files), and more offices. On the fourth floor were the linotype machines; and on the fifth and top floor were the news departments, local and wire (telegraph) news, sports, and also the Associated Press, which occupied leased space. He pointed out,
Because women worked on the third floor, their offices, although still gloomy, looked a little better. The magazine offices had curtains on the windows, but just as in all the other areas which were disorderly and dirty, anything that could be in a state of disrepair was. Cockroaches scampered around as much at home as reporters, and crusty brass spittoons and dirty ashtrays were everywhere. Soot-dust covered everything. Furnished with only one telephone with one extension, beat-up looking, old wooden desks, a couple of tables laden with newspapers, and several old typewriters, the magazine office was cluttered.41
Peggy was given a desk right across from Medora’s, and she was also given a straight wooden chair that was much too high for her short legs to touch the floor when she sat down. The janitor trimmed the legs off the chair until he
got them even and short enough for her to sit in the chair comfortably. Her typewriter was old and did not have a backspacer, but that did not matter. She made so many mistakes, using the two-finger-hunt-and-peck system, that a backspacer would have slowed her down. Even when she was given a new typewriter, she never used the backspacer.42 Her typing never improved. To the end of her life, she rarely hit the apostrophe key; her apostrophes consistently appear as “8’s.”
She worked for the Sunday Magazine for nearly four years, and she wrote one signed article, and maybe one unsigned one, nearly every week except during her two three-month leaves of absence. The articles were approximately twelve to fifteen hundred words each. She also wrote some book reviews and while on leave wrote the “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip” column. She wrote on a variety of topics. Some of the titles of her stories were “Laundry List Sung by Atlanta Sub-Deb,” “Through the Cave of Lost Indians,” “No Dumbbells Wanted, Say Atlanta Debs,” “Atlanta Man Just Missed Tutankhamen,” “Bridesmaid of ’87 Recalls Mittie Roosevelt’s Wedding,” and “Valentino Declares He Isn’t a Sheik.” Two of her favorite pieces were interviews: one with the movie idol Rudolph Valentino and the other with Tiger Flowers, the great black prize fighter. Always a good sport and a daredevil, she agreed on one occasion to be photographed in a rather dangerous stunt. While she was getting the story on sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who attempted to carve a Confederate memorial on one side of Stone Mountain, she was placed into a sling that swung out of a window on the top floor of a tall downtown office building.
The editor of the Journal was Major John S. Cohen, who had as his managing editor John Paschall. Both were excellent newspapermen. How-land described Harlee Branch, the hawk-eyed city editor, as a man who was able “to spot a tipsy reporter or an error in a story seemingly a block away, and who could think of night assignments with almost demoniacal perception for a reporter who had a date. He kept his staffers on their toes by continually bellowing at the top of his very adequate voice.”43 Hedley B. Wilcox was the business manager who first entered Peggy’s name and salary in his ledger for the week of January 22, 1923.44 These men and all the others on the Journal staff were John and Peggy’s loyal friends. They were highly protective of the Marshes after Peggy became famous. In fact, in Atlanta and in other places in the South, nothing was printed about her that she did not want printed.
Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh Page 15