Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  After typing six full pages, she closed, saying she was returning the contract and asking him to return her manuscript. “I am very anxious to work, as I have no carbon copy, I can’t do a thing. I hate to see the days going by when I could be working. You see, I do not feel like a human being until the thermometer registers at least ninety. It’s now at one hundred degrees and I feel fine and could probably work from cant-see till cant-see.”

  Expecting a signed contract so he could wrap things up before he left that weekend for his month-long vacation, Latham was taken back when he received her long letter full of questions. Disappointed, he showed the letter to Lois, who took a high hand in the matter, pointing out to Peggy that she was not dealing with some “fifth rate” publisher but one of the most esteemed establishments in the publishing world.

  The contract came from us and it was the regular printed form which some twelve thousand Macmillan authors have signed without a qualm—in fact I signed one myself. The additional clauses are worded in the same way that thousands of similar clauses and similar contracts have been worded.

  I do want to tell you, too, that if the Macmillan Company goes bankrupt you and no one else will be in any state to worry about what becomes of any novel. Gibraltar itself is no more firmly founded and we will go only with the last stage of the revolution.

  Mr. Latham and I are both somewhat exercised about the whole matter. We are both leaving for vacations on Friday and most anxious to have it settled before we go. Won’t you put our minds at rest and say yes so that we hear by Friday morning?6

  On the heels of that letter came Latham’s reassuring one, answering all of Peggy’s questions, he hoped, to her satisfaction. Because he would be vacationing for a month and his hopes were that she would accept the contract, he asked that she sign his letter signfying her approval of the contract and return the letter to him immediately. Later, at her convenience, she could mail the contract to Macmillan. At the moment he just needed to know if she approved the contract.

  Reading Lois’s letter and then Latham’s, both of which arrived on August 6, Peggy was embarrassed and terrified that she had offended the Macmillan editors. She immediately wired Latham: “Please take this telegram as acceptance of contract signed contract in the mails today thanks for your courtesies and patience hope you have a nice vacation. Margaret Mitchell Marsh.”7 That same day, she wrote a letter apologizing for holding him up and for bothering him.

  After I got Lois’ letter, I got the idea you all might think I suspected you and your company of bad faith or double dealing. That upset me for that idea hadn’t occurred to me and I hasten to beg you to put such an idea out of your minds. I thought the contract ought to be binding on me as well as on you and there were three swell loop holes through which I could have crawled should I have lost my mind and taken such a notion.8

  She concluded by saying: “You said in one of your letters you’d write me occasionally to prod me along. Please do it! Between your prodding and John’s driving I ought to finish in a hurry.”

  Little did John know that morning of August 1, 1935, when he and Peggy sat huddled together in his office, happily and excitedly reading the Macmillan contract, how much law he would have to learn from that day on and how much law he and she would affect in the next twenty years. From that morning on, he managed every aspect of the book’s business, even to the detriment of his own health.

  But at the time of the contract they had not the faintest idea that they were embarking on a literary and financial adventure of Gone With the Wind’s magnitude, much less one that would still be thriving—on an international level—over a half-century later. All they could think as they read that contract was how wonderful it was to have such a prominent and respectable publishing house as Macmillan publishing Peggy’s book. Although they did not know it, the contract was a standard one, with the author’s royalty to be 10 percent of the retail price of the first ten thousand copies sold and 15 percent thereafter. Peggy was to receive a five- hundred-dollar advance against royalties, half on signing the contract, and half on receipt of the completed manuscript. Their main concern that day shows their sincerity and innocence. They hoped that the book would sell enough copies so that Macmillan would not lose money. At that point, the idea of their making money had not even occurred to them.

  2

  On August 13, Latham sent Peggy her manuscript, identified then only as “A MS of the Old South.” Two days later, he sent back “’Ropa Carmagin” because he said it was too short for book publication. Suggesting that she hold it until after her novel was published, he thought she could then easily sell it to one of the better magazines. “It confirms my very high opinion of you as a writer . . . the novel is the big thing just now, so don’t worry about this or any other short material you may have.”9 She was thrilled and grateful with such unexpected praise, and happy to see the envelopes again for the first time since they had left with Latham in April. The Marshes’ 4 East 17th Street apartment looked like home again, for even Bessie had earlier commented about how different and empty the place looked without all the papers scattered about. When John came home that evening, Peggy shrieked with delight as she pointed to the stack of twenty-seven bloated envelopes piled on the dining room table and waved Latham’s message in his face. John was to say later that he never forgot that moment or the positively euphoric look on Peggy’s smiling face.10 Both sighed at the thought of the big job ahead of them, and then burst into laughter.

  Several days later, as he was working in his office, John received a breathlessly excited call from Peggy saying that she had just received a duplicate copy of the signed contract and a check for $250.00 and that she was so nervous, she told him, “I’m going to take a luminal and put a cold towel to my head and go to bed.” John replied, “Move over, baby, I’m coming home to get in bed with you!”11 Somehow, that first check, even more than the contract, made the book a reality to them. For days, Peggy walked on air.

  Anyone reading the letters in the Macmillan file and also the ones to the Marsh family during this period can tell that at this stage in the development of Gone With the Wind, John was in complete charge. Even though he and Peggy had to realize that the editing work would be a full-time job, and John already had a full-time job, they were not about to turn that manuscript over to some copyeditor in New York. Nor did Macmillan ever request that they do so. By now, Latham had to have been aware of the Marshes’ unique relationship and of John’s role as Peggy’s editor. After all, she had mentioned his role in her letters to Latham and, no doubt, in conversations with him when he was in Altanta, and his assistant, Lois Cole, knew the Marshes well and understood how they worked together. Joe Kling said emphatically that the Marshes’ relationship was simply no secret: “Everyone knew that he helped her do everything. That was just their way of life. John would have been the only person she trusted with her work. That was just a given.”

  Some of his coworkers described John as “meticulous and exacting,” and his close attention to detail became very useful at this stage of the book’s life. Mary Singleton, who worked on the Georgia Power magazine with him, said outright, “He was the best editor I’ve ever seen…. I think his know-how was one reason Gone With the Wind was so good.” Joe Kling agreed with her.12 And she was right, for much of the success of Gone With the Wind is a result of John’s keen intelligence, uncompromising standards, and careful scrutiny of the manuscript and the proofs. Important to remember too is that he was not only emotionally involved with Peggy, wanting her to be happy and successful, but he was also emotionally, intellectually, and creatively involved in producing the manuscript. He had a thorough understanding of the characters and of their story. After all, the book had been conceived in love and nurtured throughout the entire first decade of their married life.

  The kind of urgency required at this point in the preparation of Gone With the Wind was exactly the kind that challenged John but devastated Peggy. Unlike her, he was a goal-oriented
thinker; he liked to progress in an orderly fashion toward an end, and he had the discipline to stay with a task until it was finished to his satisfaction. Although it was to take them almost six months to complete the manuscript, John optimistically believed at that time, late August, that with both of them working together hard and steadily they could get the thing into a finished form and to a typist in less than six weeks. Although proofing the typist’s copy would take careful scrutiny and yet more time, he still believed they could get the complete job done in six to eight weeks.13 When Peggy told Latham that she expected to have the manuscript finished by Thanksgiving, he was delighted because that would mean publication in the spring.

  John’s first task was to find a typist. Although he and Peggy had decided not to mention the contract to anyone except her father and brother, they had to confide in Rhoda, John’s secretary, because they needed her help now more than ever. Busy handling his Power Company business, Rhoda suggested Grace Alderman, a discreet young single girl who had just come to work as a stenographer for the company. Grace happily consented, and for the rest of her life, her claim to fame was typing the manuscript of Gone With the Wind.14

  On September 3, Peggy wrote Latham:

  I am hard at work and, for the first time in my life, working is comparatively easy. Here to fore, it has been the most anguished of struggles to get anything at all on paper and rewriting, though I rewrite everything thirty times at least, has been a task too disagreeable to go into on paper. Things go more easily now, thank Heaven.

  As John says there’s nothing like signing a contract, having a conscience about delivering the goods and burning your britches behind you.15

  She wrote that there was “an awful lot to be done on grammatical errors alone.” With honesty, she admitted, “Here to fore I’ve never bothered about grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. as long as I was struggling merely to get things on paper. And there’s an awful [lot] of loose ends to be hitched up and repetitions to be eliminated. And I’m trying to condense and to—well, it would take pages to tell you.”16

  In this same letter she talked about her need to check some historical records. Because it had been two years since she took notes on the Dalton-to-Atlanta campaign, she was rereading the memoirs of Generals Johnston, Hood, and Sherman. “Although that campaign is only one chapter in the book I want it air tight so that no grey-bearded vet could rise up to shake his cane at me and say ‘But I know better. I fit in that fight.’” She closed by saying that John, who was to get his two-week vacation at the end of September, had promised “to help me out with that damned first chapter and anything else I need.” She said that if she did not come down with her “annual September 15th case of dengue fever,” she expected to be finished in six weeks.17

  3

  “When the Macmillan Company bought my book my emotions were compounded of pleasure and horror, for I realized that I had not checked a single fact in that long manuscript,” Peggy wrote in 1937 to a fan. Thus, her most compelling immediate concern was checking all the historical references. Because she had never intended to publish the manuscript, she said later that she had seen no reason “to plague” her brain studying military matters that she could not comprehend.18 She had, of course, read reference books and used material from them but certainly not with the idea that anyone besides John would be reading her work. Lots of fact-checking needed to be done, for she had written all the military facts and phrases by relying on her memory of what the old veterans of the campaign had told her, not on any actual authoritative military records. Now, the thought of not having such documentation horrified her.

  A year later, she wrote in regard to the military strategies and tactics: “Honesty forces me to admit that I do not know anything about them and have long been the despair of my military-minded friends. When they talked about ‘enfilading’ and being ‘bracketed’ . . . I can only suck my thumb.”19 The part of the novel that had to do with the military was the most arduous and time consuming for her to write and caused the most delay in getting the manuscript completed. As she explained later in a letter, she knew well the country between Atlanta and Dalton where the Sherman-Johnston campaign was waged. “Many of the old entrenchments are still there if you know where to find them, and to anyone interested in history the sad tale of that retreat is plain in these earthworks. . . . So I fought that campaign from memory and wrote it at far greater length than it appeared in print.”20

  The only way to make sure all the facts were correct was to check them off one by one, and that is exactly what John and Peggy did. They agreed they were not going to be embarrassed by errors they could avoid, for they already knew some people who would read the book only to search eagerly for errors. Too, it was vitally important to them that southerners like the book and find it to be true.21 Peggy later wrote, “Before Gone With the Wind was published, I felt that I would curl up like a salted slug if the people in the South turned their faces from my book. Of course I wanted the Northern reviewers to like it and humbly hoped that they would, but the good will of Southerners was what I prayed for.”22

  Later she explained that she had documented at least four sources for every historical event and for every nonfiction statement in the book, and that she had written an “hour-by-hour schedule of every recorded happening in Atlanta and around Atlanta for the last twenty-four hours of Sherman’s campaign.”23 She studied Cox’s Atlanta campaign harder, she boasted, than she had ever studied Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and “if there was even a sergeant who wrote a book about that retreat, I read it. I know it sounds like bragging, but I do not mean it that way for the credit is only due an exceptionally good memory.”24

  A year after the novel was published, she acknowledged with great pride that there were only two errors in the entire novel, and only she and John knew what they were. “I placed the Battle of New Hope Church five miles too close to the railroad, and I had the final fortifications of Atlanta completed six weeks too soon.”25 In thanking Henry Steele Commager for writing a splendid review of Gone With the Wind for the New York Herald Tribune Books, she wrote, “You speak of my book not ‘ruffling your historical feather.’ Thanks for that. I positively cringed when I heard that you a historian were going to review me. I cringed even though I knew the history in my tale was as water proof and air tight as ten years of study and a lifetime of listening to participants would make it.”26

  In order to get that novel “air-tight,” she and John began their editing process by working out a schedule that required Peggy to spend all of every weekday either in the library or in the courthouse records room or interviewing old veterans.27 Her job was to find authorities for every factual statement in the novel. She spent countless hours checking references on such things as clothes, hats, hairstyles, flowers, crops, hymns, names, furniture, wallpaper, medical treatments, and literally thousands of other things. She knew the history of Georgia, the history of the Confederacy, the history of the southern blockade, and the history of the Reconstruction as well as any historian.28

  While she was checking the section of the book that had to do with the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta, she even tried to find out what the weather had been like at that time. Some of the old veterans had told her that it had rained for twenty days at Kennesaw, but she wanted to be certain. She turned to Mary Johnston’s Cease Firing, that old book that her mother used to read to her when she was a child. “Mother was strong minded but she never failed to weep over The Long Roll and Cease Firing and I always bellowed too, but insisted on her not skipping sad parts…. I knew it to be the best documented novel ever written so I consulted it to see about the weather.”29

  Because she was confident about the correctness of her historical facts, she welcomed questions about the historical angle of the book. In 1936, when a fan asked her about the troop movement before the battle of Chickamauga, she answered, “I labored a long time over my background, and my bibliography runs into the thousands of volumes.” That is pr
obably no exaggeration. After the book came out, she complained about eye strain that was caused, she said, from reading so much of the “agate type in old time newspapers, which I read by the hundreds in checking the historical accuracy of my book.”30

  When Lois Cole wrote her on March 4, 1936, saying that someone who was reading the galleys “with excitement and enjoyment” believed he had found an anachronism and wanted to know if she were sure there were toothbrushes in 1868, Peggy proudly answered that she had three references in her notes on the toothbrush and one of her authorities was the Oxford English Dictionary.31 She added: “I remember Grandma telling me how the blockade cut off whale bone stays and tooth brushes. They used split oak for the stays and for tooth brushes used a twig (willow twigs were popular) chewed till it frayed into fibers. Something like a present day snuff stick or did you ever see a snuff stick? Dearie, someday I must give you my imitation of a negro cook with a lip full of snuff and a snuff stick. It’s my only parlor accomplishment.”32