Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  On September 7, 1924, he wrote his first letter in two years that reflects any true happiness and also a little abandonment of his conservative manner. He had always wanted an apartment instead of a boarding room, but never could afford one. Now he “took the fatal step” and leased a small apartment (one room, plus a kitchen and a bath) because he and Peggy needed more privacy than boarding houses provided. This apartment was Number A-3 of the Langdon Court Apartments, 111 East Tenth Street, between Peachtree and Juniper streets. He wrote that in helping him move, Peggy had been“invaluable,” for she added a “note of refined elegance to my bachelor quarters.” She made curtains and brought over a bridge lamp and a couple of pictures from her father’s house. John added that she was also “active as my field representative in the arrangements for the surprise [housewarming] shower.”

  As a result I am a changed man. Life has disclosed new aspects to me, I am interested in things that formerly I scorned. I read advertisements of the department stores avidly and rush down to join bargain sale crushes, by chance an old Ladies Home Journal fell into my hands and I carried it away to study surreptitiously its hints to the home-maker, and when I have dates with my lady friends, no longer do I play the sheik—I am too much interested in getting their advice on such weighty matters as draperies, furniture arrangements and household economy.

  You have no idea how many things I have learned about Atlanta in these two weeks. I have lived here nearly five years now but when I started out to furnish my apartment I didn’t know where people bought things, except men’s clothing, cigarettes, and corn whiskey. Now I can discuss learnedly which of the department stores have good furniture, which of the furniture stores charge too much, where one goes for draperies of the right sort, and where one can pick up perfectly good pieces in second-hand stores for next to nothing. When I was here before once or twice, I was dragged into the department store section by girl friends who had bits of shopping to do in the course of dates with me. Always I entered these feminine establishments blushingly, felt like taking my hat off as soon as I entered the door and was in a fever of embarrassment unless some of my friends should see me there. Now, after these two weeks, I feel perfectly at home in any store in Whitehall street, feel no embarrassment in walking right up to a girl clerk and saying brazenly, “I want to look at some SHEETS AND PILLOW CASES!” (Fancy that!), and regard the discovery of a bargain as a distinguished achievement. It has been quite an education for me.

  He and Peggy celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday on October 6 by having dinner in his new apartment. His next letter, dated October 15, 1924, the day before Peggy’s divorce was granted and her maiden name officially restored, is more candid about his love life.

  I hope you haven’t disowned me, though I am fully aware I have given you legal grounds for checking me off the books as a prodigal son who has expired under the statute of limitations. I’ve not really forgotten you, and I hope you remember me as a member of the family. . . .

  I believe in course of time I will settle back to a somewhat normal existence. For the past month and fifteen days I have been on a spree, and such things, of course, can’t continue forever. Eventually they wear themselves out. After trying three or four times to get this one under control by the use of will power, I decided the common sense course was to let it run wild until it ran down. Meanwhile my correspondence and other things have suffered, but all things have an end and until then I crave your indulgence.

  The new regime, in fact, has already been ushered in. Peggy has agreed to give me two nights a week off. Witness this letter on the first one. I haven’t had dates with her, I might say, every night since I reached Atlanta, but one has to sleep occasionally, has not one?

  Being a trifle more serious—I’m awfully sorry I have been so slow in writing to my family, but I have let my work and Peggy completely occupy my time. Both are highly interesting and each of them deserves and rewards attention. With Peggy, six months’ absence may or may not have made our hearts grow fonder, but it certainly did stack up an awful stack of things that have had to be said and done since I got back. We aren’t caught up yet, but I think we are making progress.

  Then, in answer to his mother’s question, “What is a Murphy bed?” he explained:

  A Murphy bed, My Dear Mother, is a door-bed. You open an innocent looking door, and in a’trice transform your staid and sober library into a scandalous bed room. It is the Jazz Age descendent of the Mid-Victorian folding bed, and has the advantage that it doesn’t fold up on one’s self in the middle of the night.

  News Item—Peggy is in much better health now than any time since I have known her. Except for a sprained ankle, she hasn’t been sick at all. She is even gaining weight. I think my being here is good for her.

  8

  On January 20, 1925, John announced to his mother that he was going to marry Peggy. The previous night, he had gotten Mr. Mitchell’s approval and now was writing for his mother’s. He was especially relieved by Mr. Mitchell’s reception of the idea, for “the old man” not only consented but also seemed pleased; he opposed only one thing, and that was their intention to live in their own apartment. Grown accustomed to having Peggy home and John frequently around the house, Mr. Mitchell felt as if John was taking Peggy away from him and he wanted them to stay. But John insisted that they start their married life in privacy. “It would be nice to live at the Mitchell home, but I would rather live in a one room apartment with Peggy than in a big house on Peachtree Road with in-laws.”

  All the anguish that he had been through in the previous years had vanished. Relaxed and happy at last, he wrote:

  Having lost her once and now regained her, she is doubly attractive, and the troubles we have been through have given me an insight into her character which makes me respect and admire, as well as love, her more than any woman who has come into my life since I grew up. . . . I have been in love with Peggy for a long time, as I said, but it wasn’t nothing like this here.

  So, we have decided to toss our several distastes for matrimony into the lake, and give the ancient and honorable institution a trial. We are even going to live in my little one room bachelor apartment exclamation point. I am sure I must be in love with her, to be willing to give her half of my already limited quarters or to feel any confidence that the close confinement won’t have us snapping at each other’s throats within a week. She’s a very thoughtful, considerate, unselfish, sensible sort of person, and I shall try to be the same, and I believe we will be able to make a go of it. . . . We haven’t had time yet to talk about definite plans. Personally, I can’t see any good reason for waiting any great length of time. If we had married today, it couldn’t be called hasty, because we have known each other so long and so well. . . .

  We may even elope. It would certainly save a lot of trouble and fuss and unnecessary excitement that seems to be preliminary to most weddings. Peggy doesn’t want the unnecessary preliminaries, and I am opposed to her being subjected to that unnecessary strain, now that she is at last in good health and building up, after years of almost constant sickness. Have I told you how well she is doing? For the past several weeks, she has been getting better and better, putting on weight until she now weighs 115 pounds and is positively beautiful. . . . I don’t want her to lose what she has gained by having to go through the usual wedding preliminaries.

  So here beginneth a new chapter. It looks interesting at the start and I believe I shall like it. She is a daughter I am proud to bring to you, and I hope all of you will love her as much as I do.

  9

  The “new chapter,” which promised such long-awaited happiness, was delayed by a dramatic turn of events on January 21, 1925. It was a turn that prompted Peggy to admit, “John has been so very good to me that it’s a by word among our friends—they all say that ‘turn about is fair play’ now that I’m the one who sits by and holds the hand.”61 What ended up as a life-threatening condition began benignly enough one afternoon shortly before Christ
mas when John started having the hiccoughs. At first, Peggy and friends at work laughed and teased him. They offered all kinds of home remedies, but nothing worked. In an effort to help him, Peggy researched and wrote her article “What Causes Hiccoughs” for the Magazine, December 28, 1924.62

  The hiccoughs did stop for a couple of weeks but then suddenly started up again in a more forceful form. As the days passed and he continued to hiccough with every breath he drew, the situation was no longer funny to anyone. Peggy was terrified. John could not eat or sleep, and after having these spasms intermittently for two weeks, he was exhausted, unable to go to work or even to leave his room. Because she could not leave her job until four in the afternoon, she made the janitor in John’s apartment building promise that he would check on her patient regularly and get him coffee and soup from the corner restaurant.63

  By early February, she felt unable to handle the situation alone any longer. She had Kelly Starr, their friend and John’s boss, help her take John to St. Joseph’s Infirmary. While at work Monday morning, she realized that she had to let the Marsh family know what was going on. “Please excuse this slug head,” she wrote Frances, “but I am at the office and Angus thinks that there is no crime so black as to use office hours for letter writing. But if I dont write you now, I dont know when I’ll get a chance.”64 She explained that immediately after John had obtained her father’s consent to the nuptials, he got sick with the flu, “a brand new type, the ‘hiccoughing flu’. . . . He hasnt been seriously or painfully ill—I dont want you to be worried—but as it has interfered with his eating and sleeping and he has become very weak. His doctor pumps out his stomach every day and that seems to help some.”65

  Relieved to have him in the hospital, Peggy went on to say, “He was pretty apathetic when we got him there Saturday night but I noted with - pleasure when I called Sunday morning that he seemed interested in life and even confided to me that he had circumvented my schemes to give him a shiny-nosed day nurse and a billowy Jewish night nurse and had lured in from the hall a pretty nurse who was ‘Sex Conscious!’ By this I knew he was getting better.”66

  They had been planning to be married on Valentine’s Day, “the only date on the whole calendar,” she said, “for which I unashamedly cherish a sentimental weakness (Probably because John has always sent me violets with long purple streamers on that day!).”67 Now those plans, she moaned to Frances, had been “knocked galley west” by his present illness.

  How ever, I do know that we’ll just have a little wedding with a few of the gang present. There are quite a few of our friends who have committed the unpardonable sin of marrying people who either didnt like me or didnt like John. And John and I have decided that we wont have any one at our wedding who doesnt like both of us. Of course if we can induce the very proper Courtenay Ross MacFayden to leave her prissyfied husband (who disapproves of me) at home and come with the rowdy Frank Stanton—and Kelly Starr to leave his wife at home and bring the equally rowdy Anne Couper, we will have a wedding to our taste. But I’m afraid such a wedding would cause a scandal as the folks that dont like us would be madder at not being invited than the ones who do like us.68

  On February 14, John showed no improvement. Annoyed because the doctor handling the case for three weeks had not been doing much other than letting nature take its course, Peggy and Kelly Starr called in another physician, Dr. Arch Elkin, who, she assured Mrs. Marsh, had already been able to diminish the violence and the frequency of John’s hiccoughs. Continuing to make her wedding plans, Peggy explained that she and John were planning a very small, quiet wedding—“not more than a half dozen or dozen at the most”—and they wanted her and Frances to come to Atlanta for it. Suspecting how uneasy Mrs. Marsh must have felt about her, she searched for the right words. Her sincerity rings through here:

  Frankly, I’m not bothered so much about the wedding or trousseau or parties as I am about marrying John. I want to marry him so I can look after him as he has looked after me for the last three years. He’s worked and worried himself thin and sick and now that the happy ending has come he’s in the hospital! So I want to get him out and marry him and make him rest up and get fat.

  You and Frances were so sweet in your letters to me, welcoming me into your clan. . . . I appreciated your letter so very much, especially when I know that most mothers have violent misgivings at hearing that their sons are going to marry women who are divorced. How ever, I can only say that I love John most sincerely, first as a friend who I had learned to trust and lean on because of his honor and his strength and next, as a sweet heart because he was ever so considerate and loyal. I don’t think I can say more for a man, even to his mother! I know pretty well, I’m not all the wonders he thinks I am but to date I have succeeded pretty well in keeping him fooled and if I can just keep him that way the rest of our lives, I think we will be very happy.69

  On Friday, February 26, Peggy was encouraged because John was, at last, showing little signs of improvement. “I go down and fill him full of gossip and scandal (I’m a regular receiving station when it comes to picking up both of those) and jokes and it seems to help him—if he doesn’t laugh too much for that always starts him off again. He’s discovered a way of inhaling cigarette smoke that effectually stops the hiccoughs as soon as they begin.”70 When one of his elderly lady friends called offering to take care of him while he recuperated at her home, Peggy wrote Frances, “I am going to have to marry him to protect him. . . . There’s various and sundry ladies, both married, single and divorced, who cherish sentimental feelings and yearnings about John, mainly because he has such lovely manners, knows how to appreciate a misunderstood wife in a well nigh Jurgenesque manner, to make discreet love with his eyes and to kiss hands with just the proper degree of restrained emotion.”71

  10

  Every time it looked as if he were getting well, John would get sick again with high fever, abdominal pain, sore throat, and the hiccoughs. It was the unpredictability of his condition that frightened Peggy most of all and made her obsessively concerned with anything that remotely resembled a symptom in him or her. On the day of one of John’s setbacks, she wrote that he “looked like Hell and that simply broke my heart as I had thought he was on the way back to being well. . . . I so hated to see it happen. Seems to me that the road back from 119 pounds to 160 is going to be endless and I only wish I had John’s guts so I wouldnt get tired or discouraged.”72 Beginning to fear that the spasms would never stop, Peggy thought that he had the perfect right to develop a fear complex about recurrences; she admitted that she had one. But he had not been afraid “and he isnt afraid of them,” she wrote Frances. “He has been remarkably patient through out all this. I know I would have worn out myself, two doctors and three nurses cursing and howling.”73

  Although his medical records are not available and, unlike Peggy, he did not record his every illness, ache, and pain, John apparently had had an ulcer and a bad gallbladder for some time before the spasms began. Never one to talk about his health, much less complain about it, he worked hard and long hours no matter how bad he felt. When Dr. Misel, whom Peggy identified as “a stomach specialist,” finally discovered that part of John’s problems stemmed from “a cardiac ulcer,” she informed Henry: “He [Misel] says from all indications that this one has been there since 1917. . . . John has been in the reportorial habit of eating all hours in weird places. Greek joints and the like, so dear to journalists that the ulcer had no chance to heal. I dont know if thats all that is causing the hicking but it no doubt has much to do with the aggravation of it.”74 But because Dr. Misel failed to diagnose the diseased gallbladder until later, John’s condition continued to worsen. The letters Peggy wrote to the Marshes at the beginning of his long illness show that some of the medical treatments administered at first, such as emptying his stomach daily and feeding him rich foods that he could not digest, were unfortunately as damaging to his health as the mysterious spasms were.75

  Peggy wrote Frances, “See
ms that Johns stomach was inflamed clear through the walls before they finally found out what ailed him and changed his diet. Seems as if some of the many doctors who tramped in and out, pulling their whiskers and uttering wise saws during those terrible two days might have figured out what was wrong but they didnt.”76

  When the specialist recommended neurological testing, which also failed to show the cause of the hiccoughs, Peggy began to wonder if John were not experiencing some psychogenic problems. Even though she never attributed any of her own ailments to psychogenic reasons, she was beginning to wonder, as John’s condition continued for so long, if there really were not some underlying psychological cause. After the medical tests failed to show any organic disturbances in his nervous system, she confided to Henry: “The idea had been formulating in my mind that a large part of John’s trouble must be psychic. . . . I’ve seen lots of women turn to sick head aches and hysterics in a perfectly unconscious effort at mechanical protection—or in subconscious protest against some thing that was offensive to them—I know I’m too bitten on the psychoanalytical stuff. . . . Isn’t it a funny mess?” she asked Henry.

  Although Frances and Mrs. Marsh never gave an indication that they disapproved of her, she suspected that they did. So she never mentioned to Frances or to Mrs. Marsh any of her beliefs about John’s subconscious mind causing his problems, fearing such remarks might irritate them. In her letter to Frances, she said she took “an instant dislike” to one consulting physician, who was “not worth a hoot in Hades.” She explained,

  I suppose I took a dislike to him when after poor John had been sick as a dog for a week and unable to eat or digest anything this poor ass of a medico remarked to Kelly Starr that there really wasn’t anything wrong with John except a “A touch of the nerves.” . . . I yearned to swat him for his diagnosis. How ever there is no use criticising a doctor to a patient’s face as it dont do much good and only makes them feel uneasy.77