Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  On March 7, he suffered yet another serious setback, and the underlying sadness in Peggy’s letter to Frances four days later is evident:

  Yesterday when I tiptoed into the hospital room, John was sleeping—and hicking right along. He continued to do so all during my visit which was rather short yesterday. He had been doing it since the night before. He said that Miss Tuggle [a nurse] had objected to his stopping the attacks by inhaling his cigarettes so deeply that his lungs absorbed all the smoke—It was beginning to irritate his throat. So he stopped doing it and the hiccoughs kept up intermittently. . . .

  I had so set my heart on seeing him step right along the uphill road that it rather knocked the pins from under me to see him at it again yesterday. . . . I havent been sleeping at all well lately or eating any too much. . . . I look a wreck.78

  The next day, his fever soared and could not be brought down; the physicians advised her to notify his family. Frantic with worry, Mrs. Marsh asked Henry to go to Atlanta and, if possible, to bring John home to her. Later, Henry said his greatest fear was that he would have to bring his brother’s body home for, at that time, the only patient on record for having hiccoughed as long as John had died. That evening in early March, when Dr. Elkins told Peggy that John might not survive the night, she broke down sobbing.79

  Not knowing how to treat his condition, the physicians, as a last-minute effort, decided to sedate him to the point of unconsciousness. They figured that if they could halt the spasms long enough to give him several hours of peaceful sleep, he might regain his strength. At that point, nothing could be lost. After he was asleep, Peggy went into his darkened room to see him. As she stood quietly by his bed, staring sadly at him, she thought how serene and handsome he looked and what a good and brave man he was. Without disturbing him, she lightly kissed him and slipped out of the room. She walked downtown, went to a movie alone, and was home by eight, frightened and sad.80

  Henry Marsh arrived in Atlanta on the ninth of March, but because the doctors stood firm about John’s having no visitors during this critical period, he did not see his brother until three days later. Nervous and angry because even she had not been allowed to see John, Peggy wrote thanking Frances for having not only one brother with whom she could fall in love, but two. “I never felt so relieved in my life as when I saw Henry coming up the steps—he looked so much like John that I knew every thing was going to be alright.” Standing in the “etheriodiform atmosphere” of the hallway, listening to Johnny, as she called him, tell the nurse “plainly what a damned ass she was and how much he wanted me,” she fumed as she nervously waited for Henry to finish talking to the physicians.

  Oh, I was in a bad way by the time Henry blew in. He cocked an attentive ear to my vituperative remarks about the doctors and life in general, sucked on his pipe and said, ‘Well, lets eat.’ I think hes an infinitely sensible person! . . . I like your family. They don’t get hysterical or emotional.81

  Feeling an immense sense of relief when Henry took charge of the situation and insisted that she rest, she grabbed a taxi and arrived home before her father and Stephens had come in from work. She went straight upstairs to her room, fell across her bed fully clothed, and cried herself to sleep. Around two, she woke up enough to remove her shoes, but not her clothes, stockings, or hair pins, and crawled under the covers. She slept from 5 P.M. to 6 A.M., when sunlight streaming through her bedroom window woke her up. That day she “felt like million” for the first time in a long time; she knew everything was going to be all right. When she went downstairs that morning, she found the lights on. “Poor father and Steve must think I stayed out all night . . . probably they sat up wondering whether I had been kidnapped or was just being modern and leading my own life, like the girls in the magazines that father condemns but reads religiously. I’ll have to do some tall explaining tonight.”82 Her contribution to the Magazine that Sunday, March 15, 1925, reflects what must have been uppermost in her mind. Her article is titled “Marriage Licenses That Are Never Used.”

  The enforced sleep helped John, and by the end of the next day he looked better. Peggy remarked that she had never realized the value of sleep:

  If he can just grab off ten hours sleep he looks as if nothing had ever happened to him and if he misses it, he looks like a fatal accident looking for an unhealthy place to happen. Yesterday, his unfeeling nurse pulled down the covers and insisted on displaying John’s “shameful condition” as he called it—his thinness—and I was stunned. He doesnt look so thin in the face but he looks like a famine victim in the body. I could have wept over it but he seemed very chipper.83

  11

  The only interesting distraction Peggy had during John’s long ordeal came one day in a letter addressed to John and postmarked Cuba. It was from Kitty Mitchell, his college sweetheart, who had disappointed him by not responding to the letter he had sent her before Christmas, announcing his engagement. Peggy thought the reason for Kitty’s silence was that he had gone overboard about “his over weening passion for me and his desire to make me his’n.”84 Always thinking that she was expert in matters of romance, she wrote Frances,

  I rated him for telling her how much he cared about me, as there are few women who can bear with equanimity the spectacle of a lover they have turned down, finding solace and happiness with another woman. John was rather hurt about it all, saying that he thought it was rather small of her because the poor darling didnt know that it’s only one woman in a thousand who is generous enough to be sincerely glad in the happiness of her old flame.85

  In Peggy’s view, the letter from Kitty was “a peach,” and she said it made him very happy. Actually, it was only a moment’s distraction for him, but a delightful one for her, giving her something to think about for days and to write at length about to John’s sister. “Kitty is a sort of beloved legend to him and men have so few really beautiful legends that I hated to see it ruined in any way by a touch of reality and human nature creeping in.”86

  By the end of March, signs of spring were beginning to peep out of the earth and appear in the bright blueness of the sky. Life was a little less strenuous now. She took the time to have her tonsils “painted with silver nitrate,—they were choking me to death—and also time to hang out in a beauty parlor for three hours (and $5) as John had peered at me worriedly and said I looked like an advance agent for a famine.”87 Starting to get back into her old routine, she ended a letter to Frances by describing herself, not as “a wild woman,” as she had done earlier, but as “an old and decrepit lady, past my hot-blooded youth and all that jolly sort of rot and so thankful to the bon Dieu that I have the One Man that I’m willing to fore swear all most all the others.”88

  She added that John has “roses on his cheeks that put to shame the ones in my little brass box and a vast eagerness to talk and hear news but those damnable hiccoughs keep on just the same.”89 He had the honor, she recorded, of being the only case on record where a patient hicked thirty-one consecutive days and did not die, and she wished he had not picked such an exclusive disease that doctors knew nothing about. “It would have been so much easier to treat if he had gotten delirium tremens or some thing fashionable.”90

  John spent nearly three months in the hospital before the hiccoughs stopped completely. The source of his spasms was never discovered; they went away just as mysteriously as they had come. One cannot help wondering whether the ultimate source of his condition in early 1925 was the release of the emotional pain that he had suppressed up to that point, all that disappointment and grief that he had stored tightly inward.

  Once the physicians were certain that the hiccoughs had stopped—this was in May—they removed his diseased gallbladder. After the surgery, he began to improve rapidly as he recuperated in the Mitchells’ home, where Mr. Mitchell and Stephens welcomed him. During his convalescence, Peggy and John started a pattern that they were to follow for the next decade. After their supper, they talked and worked on her assignments and on a story that she had b
egun earlier. This work was probably her novella “’Ropa Carmagin.” According to Stephens Mitchell, “[John] would read Margaret’s articles and take them to her with suggestions for improvement in usage and style pencilled in the margins. And he was always right.”91 During this period, they established their roles: he the editor, she the writer. They also established the basis for a mature and loving relationship.

  John’s steadfast devotion and his illness changed Peggy in significant ways; they matured her. If she did not know in the beginning of their relationship that she loved him, she knew now. Indeed, she had become as devoted to him as he had always been to her. Although they were of equal rank in their relationship, it was always she who, in talking or in writing letters, quoted John, not the reverse. She was forever saying or writing: “John says. . . ” or “John thinks. . . ” or “John did. . . ” or “I’ll let John read this. . . ” or “I’ll ask John what he wants to do about. . . .” Joe Kling said that there was never any question about John’s being the “boss in the Marshes’ household.” Their friends and family described her as “hero-worshipping John,” and with her tendency to exaggerate, they added that she “sometimes made him larger in life than he really was.”92 If this was the case, perhaps it was because she had once come so close to losing him.

  12

  In June 1925, thinking their troubles were over, they planned their wedding. Then, one pleasant evening while they sat talking and looking at one of her drafts, John suddenly became quiet. She looked up at him and gasped. His head had fallen back slightly; his eyes remained opened but rolled back so that only the whites showed. He was motionless except that his left hand, which held the cigarette he had been smoking, was trembling vigorously. Although he somehow managed to hold the cigarette, it slipped down behind his fingers and burned them, though he appeared not to be aware of the burning. Terrified, she thought he was dying, and she screamed for Steve and her father. Suddenly, John was back to normal again. He appeared not to know what had happened to him or even to be aware that anything had happened. He stared perplexed at his burned fingers. He had completely lost consciousness for a few seconds, and then regained it without ever realizing he had lost it.93

  For the rest of his life, John periodically suffered from these seizures, a mild form of epilepsy that may have been a residual effect of the more serious spasms and the high fever that had nearly killed him earlier.94 Whatever their cause, they were a source of concern and embarrassment to him. Because they came without warning and for no apparent reason, day or night, he never drove an automobile. Peggy always drove their car, and she did not like for him to be alone. She feared that someday the seizures would intensify and render him helpless. Friends and coworkers got used to seeing them, and merely did their best to remove that ever-present cigarette from his hand.95 Mary Singleton remembered the little burn spots on his fingers. She and Joe Kling said that John’s spells came more often when he was under severe stress.

  After he returned to work in early summer, he made a heroic effort to give up cigarettes entirely, but it was not an easy matter for him as the office in which he worked was nearly a madhouse, and the nervous strain was often heavy. Kelly Starr, a likeable, charming man but a known alcoholic, unloaded his responsibilities as head of the department on John. Thinking about Kelly’s problems, Peggy wrote,

  If ever I needed any thing to make me thankful that J isn’t a drinking man, it’s the spectacle Kelly Starr has been making of himself for the last six months. Every morning he’s “never going to touch another drop,” he tells the assembled staff, meanwhile thanking them for their touching loyalty to him during sprees. And by ten o’clock in the morning he’s kite high. Some times he’s away from the office for a day or two—during which time the office gets some work done. When he returns, approximately sober for a hour, he insists on upsetting and changing all the work in his absence and then totters off again before deciding what ought to be done about it all. He’s certainly in awful shape and if he belonged to me I’d shoot him and put him and his office force out of their misery. Naturally, this state of affairs, coupled with the heat, doesn’t make John feel any too good at times and the added strain of cutting down cigarettes is very uncomfortable.96

  13

  On June 15, 1925, Peggy and John used their lunch hour to run to the courthouse to get their marriage license. He gave his correct age, twenty-nine, but she, who was twenty-five, gave her age as twenty-two. It is highly probable that at that time even John did not know exactly how old Peggy was. Always reluctant about telling her age, she either shaved off a few years or refused to give it at all.

  At five o’clock on the evening of July 4, 1925, at the Unitarian-Universalist Church on West Peachtree Street, they were married. Augusta was the bridesmaid and Medora, the matron of honor. The best man was Frank L. Stanton, Jr., son of the Georgia poet who wrote “Mighty Lak a Rose,” “Jes a Wearying for You,” and other lyrics. Medora recalled that it was a traditionally hot July 4. In a cool, high-ceilinged, upstairs bedroom of the Mitchells’ white-columned house, she helped Peggy dress in a knee-length, pansy-purple georgette gown, a high style in 1925. “That afternoon she had the glow that makes all brides beautiful. Hers was a beauty with an elfin touch, a Puckish smile and that incalculable quality called charm. She was very happy and very gay.” Medora added, “Peggy didn’t want a slow-drag wedding and we stepped lively down the aisle to a speeded-up Loehengrin. . . . We practically fox-trotted down the aisle. Afterwards we all raced to their small apartment.”97

  That night, their friends catered the simple wedding reception in John and Peggy’s apartment on Crescent Avenue. All had a happy time. The next day the newlyweds boarded a train that took them to the north Georgia mountain region, to the lovely but isolated Linger Longer Lodge, a cabin owned and used by Georgia Power’s publicity department to entertain executives and editors.

  From that time on, nothing and no one ever came between Peggy and John or ever threatened the deep bond between them. They would have no children and virtually no social life or interests away from each other, nor any separate aspirations.98

  CHAPTER

  6

  1925-1926

  A WRITER IN PROGRESS

  I won’t ever believe [Frances Newman’s] novel is a failure, because it has had the good effect of getting Peggy roused up again over her novel, and we are at work on it again. I might write more except that I am going to take a stab again at the opening chapter of the fifteenth revision of the Adventures of Pansy. Peggy has promised to work on it if I’ll help her get started again, so here goes.

  —John Marsh to Frances Marsh,

  8 December 1926

  1

  THE MARSHES STARTED THEIR LIFE TOGETHER in a midtown apartment so tiny, unattractive, and dark that they nicknamed it “El Dumpo.” Joe Kling, who visited them there often, recalled, “That place was a dump!”

  The Dump was located in a neighborhood that had been labeled “Tight Squeeze” after the Civil War, when the road was very narrow and crooked and inhabited by a rough lot of criminals. That name was abandoned in 1887, when the road was straightened, but Eugene Mitchell appears to have revived the term, at least among the family. In 1931 he wrote an article for the Atlanta Historical Bulletin that included information on the history of the “Tight Squeeze” area, and he found it amusing to use the old name to describe John and Peggy’s new neighborhood. According to Peggy, holdups and purse snatchings were still common, and Tight Squeeze was certainly an appropriate name for an area inhabited by many struggling young couples like John and Peggy. It may be, too, that the name fit the appearance of the neighborhood, which was made up of a section of Peachtree Street extending about three blocks from Peachtree Place to Eleventh Street. Tenth Street was the principal cross street, and at its intersection with Peachtree a fair amount of commercial development had taken place. The office buildings and stores were built as close to the street as it was possible to put them, in contrast to the origin
al residences, with their yards, lawns, trees, and shrubbery in front. According to one source, the general appearance must have made Peachtree seem narrower than it in fact was and suggested a tight squeeze. The greater-than-normal amount of traffic at that time, created by the Tenth Street shopping area, may have added to the optical illusion.1 The Marshes thought that the neighborhood was convenient, for the post office on Tenth Street was only two blocks away and the grocery store only a block away.

  Their apartment, Number 1, was on the ground level on the northwest side of what was known as the Crescent Avenue Apartments. A three-story, dark red-brick building with a steep, green, sloping roof, 17 Crescent Avenue (now 979 Crescent Avenue) was located at the corner of Crescent Avenue and Tenth. It was originally a single-family home built in 1899 on Peachtree Street by the Cornelius Sheehans. Then, in 1913, it changed hands and its new owners pushed it further back on its deep, sloping lot toward Crescent Avenue and remodeled it into a ten-unit apartment. The Marshes’ apartment, only two rooms plus a kitchen and a bath, had dark woodwork, dark, faded wallpaper, dark hardwood floors, and an unpleasant, musty odor.2

  They had no money for wallpaper, but they did paint some of the woodwork white.3 The only attractive feature in the entire place was a triple set of tall, leaded, beveled-glass windows with beveled mirrors on each side in an alcove of the front room. It was into this alcove, about a year after their wedding, that John—in an effort to lift the depressed spirits of his bride—brought home a second-hand Remington typewriter and a very wobbly, golden oak table, just large enough to hold the typewriter and a stack of paper.4 In this alcove and on this typewriter, nearly all of Gone With the Wind would be written.