Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Lois cherished this letter. She shared it not only with Allan but also with Latham, Hale, Putnam, and Brett, and then passed it around to others in the building. A month later, she passed it around at a conference held for Macmillan editors, many of whom asked for copies of it. When she and Latham, in a telephone conversation with Peggy, happily told her what a hit her letter had made at the conference and that some people wanted copies of it, Peggy went into what Lois called “a screaming fit.”

  She even wrote Lois that very day, saying, “I beg, implore, entreat, and supplicate you not to let it out of your hands. Either destroy it or let me have it back. I would have perished if I had known it was going to be read. It is just the kind of personal thing I don’t want anybody else to hear, and I wouldn’t have written it to you if I had ever thought you would show it to anybody. If any of it ever got back to Macon, garbled as it necessarily would be, I would be gone. I’ll never write to you again if you let anybody see it.”6

  Not wanting to upset her any further and afraid Peggy would stop writing her personal letters, Lois apologized. In writing to Charles J. Trenkle, an editor in the Chicago office who had requested a copy, Lois explained her friend’s reaction and said that perhaps later on she would try to copy some of the letter for him—after Peggy “had gotten used to being an author”—but at present she and Latham thought she had better not.7

  3

  The news that Gone With the Wind had been selected as the Book-ofthe-Month Club adoption for either July, August, or September caused a joyous celebration at Macmillan, for it meant an extra edition of over forty thousand copies for club members. When the final decision was made that the novel would be the club’s July selection, Macmillan delayed the trade release date to June 30, rather than May 5.8 No longer worried about sales, since the financial potential of the book had manifested itself abundantly, George Brett, Sr., president of Macmillan, authorized full-page advertisements in all the major magazines and in all the newspapers in the largest cities. When he instructed Lois that he wanted hundreds of copies of the novel given to reviewers and booksellers, Lois called Peggy asking her to autograph an additional five hundred copies for promotional purposes. All the stops were pulled and plans were set to make Gone With the Wind’s debut a stunning event.

  While all this excitement was going on in the New York office, momentum for the novel was building in England. Editors at William Collins Sons and also at the London Macmillan Company were reading the proofs of the novel with the same enthusiasm with which their colleagues in the United States had read the manuscript.9 The managing director of the London office was Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister. Wanting to get an American reader’s opinion of the book, he shared his copy with his mother, who had been born and reared in Indiana. Mrs. Macmillan liked what she read and gave her son the thumbs-up sign of approval.10 By the time the London office cabled the New York office its acceptance, Brett had received a letter from W. A. R. Collins, who thought he had the first option to buy and was eager to close the contract.11 Although the Marshes never knew about it, Collins’s offer was higher than the London Macmillan Company’s. However, for business purposes, Brett closed with the London Macmillan instead of Collins—though not before a few unpleasant words were exchanged among him, Collins, and Latham.12

  By now, all the major film companies were anxiously requesting copies of the novel, and two international publishing bureaus had written Brett wanting the translation rights. When she received a letter from Marion Saunders of New York informing her that she was “handling the Continental rights for Macmillan,” Peggy asked Lois, “What in the world are Continental rights——the English edition? This confuses me as I know that Mr. Latham handled that. . . . Does she mean translation? God forbid. How can dialect be translated?” Reading Lois’s one-word wire—“Yes!”—Peggy said to John, “Translating dialects! Who’d ever thunk such a thing?”13

  While Peggy, muttering and groaning, was still signing a few of the end papers each day, Lois wrote her that the movie agents and the movie companies were pursuing her “with their tongues hanging out.” But she advised, “Don’t do anything yet—and if anybody writes you direct keep on stalling.”14 She explained that Latham had just decided that he might be able to sell the rights directly to a movie company on the West Coast while he was in Los Angeles in about two weeks.15

  No one was more determined to get the movie rights to Gone With the Wind than Annie Laurie Williams, a big, blond woman from Texas who had become a successful literary agent in New York. She worked for such luminaries as John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. In spite of the fact that the only film rights sold for Macmillan books had been the ones that Annie Laurie had sold, Lois described her to Peggy as someone who had made everyone at Macmillan “sick by going around saying that she was their official movie representative when was she not.”16 Lois reported that the agent had “a vicious tongue and isn’t the sort of person a publisher can row with. However, it’s entirely different for you,” she explained, assuring Peggy that she could reject the agent all she wanted.17

  Consequently, Peggy thought of Annie Laurie as a pushy, obnoxious woman trying to make “a fast buck” instead of viewing her as the astute businesswoman that she was, one who was fully capable of negotiating a profitable film sale for her. If there were any single type of person that both Marshes would grow to despise, it was the kind of person who tried to make easy money off their novel, and in their unenlightened view, agents fell into this category.

  Not having any luck working through Lois at Macmillan, Annie Laurie decided on April 25 to call the author herself. Unfortunately, she selected an afternoon when Peggy’s paranoia was riding high. Tired and jittery now that her exhilaration from the Macon talk had faded, Peggy was in no mood to deal with the film rights. All the good news had overwhelmed her, and she, never an optimist, suspected that bad reports would surely pop out soon. Her mounting tension manifested itself in insomnia. Unable to eat or to relax, she kept losing weight and complaining of dizziness. In spite of Bessie’s and John’s warnings to slow down, she accepted every invitation, answered every call, and entertained every visitor. On the day Annie Laurie telephoned, Peggy had been especially besieged with unexpected requests.18

  Before he left for work that morning, John had instructed her to rest all day because he had tickets for the opera that evening. But one thing after another prohibited her from resting at all. The first interruption came that morning from an unexpected visitor who, after writing a most favorable review of an advance copy of Gone With the Wind, wanted to see what the author looked like. “Needless to say, having had no coffee, I looked like Hell,” Peggy wrote Lois. “Really she was very nice but I missed my breakfast. And while she was still camped here there came a call from Dot Bates that her mother had broken her hip and her child was into something or other. Would I look after mamma?”19

  Although her friend’s call rescued her from the visitor, she missed lunch and spent the afternoon in the hospital wheeling Dot’s mother around for x-rays and “threatening to castrate several nurses.” It was supper time before she finally returned home, where she had to listen, incredulously, to Bessie tell her to go rescue an indigent old lady friend, slowly dying of heart failure, from being evicted from her house. “Well, that took till after supper. I had twenty minutes to eat and dress and get to the opery when who should phone but Annie Laurie. Hunger and weariness had taken toll on my good manners.” Instead of telling the agent the truth, she said she was ill.

  Annie Laurie quickly got to the point, saying that she understood Peggy wanted her to proceed as her agent in the matter of the movies. “Well, I blew up then. It was just the last straw of a day full of straws,” Peggy wrote Lois.

  And I said coldly that she was in error. That I had given her no such authority. . . . Well, she backed water quite hastily and said she wanted to come to Atlanta to see me and talk the matter over. By this time, John was doing a fandango to ge
t me away from the phone and Bessie was changing my stockings for me and I saw all chances of a meal disappearing.

  By the time they got to the opera, Peggy was so tired and hungry that she sent John out between the first two acts to get her a hamburger. “It wasnt till after midnight that I began to get good and mad about her saying that she understood I wanted her as my agent.” Lois wrote back: “I am glad she called when she did, because you might have been too nice to her otherwise.”20

  A day or so later, Peggy was still muddling over the incident. She telephoned Latham, who agreed with her decision not to have an agent and left her with the impression that he was taking care of everything. On the advice of her father, Peggy wrote Annie Laurie a letter saying again that she had not authorized anyone to act as her agent, “either tentatively or temporarily, in handling the movie rights of Gone With the Wind.” She reported this letter to Lois, who surely reported it to Latham.21

  Peggy forgot all about the movie rights after Brett’s letter came informing her that her novel had been selected for the July book of the month. She called the Macmillan office to be sure that it was really Brett’s signature and not a forgery.22 She had to tell someone this wonderful news, and since John was in Savannah on business, she went to her father’s office. “He was as flabbergasted as I was. Being not only my father, but my severest critic (he says frankly that nothing in the world would induce him to read the book again and that nothing in the world except the fact that I was his child induced him to read it originally) he said it was very strange that a sensible organization should pick this book—an idea in which I heartily concurred.”23

  Knowing that this news was safe to broadcast, she then went around to the Journal building and showed Medora the letter from Brett. A couple of Sundays later, Medora ran her first big story in the Sunday Magazine on Peggy and the selection of her novel as the book of the month.

  4

  In late April, Lois reported to the Marshes that she had never seen anything like the money Macmillan was spending on advertisement for Gone With the Wind. Macmillan purchased huge advertisements in fourteen newspapers in the nation’s five largest cities and bought space in many of the literary weeklies and monthly magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. The publisher planned a media blitz for July. In August, advertisements were going to be in all the newspapers of cities that had big bookstores. This kind of investment in the book made Peggy even more uneasy about Macmillan’s getting its money back. But John pointed out that publishers generally use an old trick of spending the most money advertising those books that they know are going to sell the best. Not wanting to miss a word printed about the book or about his wife, on the first day in May he engaged the Romeike newsclipping service, which also worked for the Power Company. It was a service that he thought he would use for only a few months but ended up using for sixteen years—the remainder of his life.24

  When Peggy and John saw the full-page advertisements of Gone With the Wind in Publishers Weekly and in the New York World Telegram, they must have been thrilled, and when they read the reviews, they must have been ecstatic. The New York World Telegram stated, “The forthcoming Civil War novel, Gone With the Wind, will undoubtedly be leading the best seller lists as soon as it appears.” Publishers Weekly had a three-page advertisement, but Peggy was so distracted by the picture of her that she did not pay much attention to the advertisement. “My face looks so long and pointed instead of square and I have a loathsome, ratlike, Levantine look. I have become hardened to looking like a cat but never a rat,” she wrote Lois.25 Enclosing a picture of herself that she had taken shortly after she and John married, she told Lois she wanted it used in future publicity material. Sounding unnecessarily frugal, she also wanted that copy back if Lois had a duplicate of it. “I have to pay three bucks every time I get a slick print for an out of town paper. . . . Yes, I know this picture looks fifteen years younger than I am and furthermore is the most witless looking thing I’ve ever seen but at least I dont look squinched and mean.”26

  From Arizona, Latham called Peggy saying that he would be in Atlanta Friday evening, May 1, to present her with a copy of the first edition of her novel. Not only did he want to see if she had any further corrections to make, but he also wanted to report, in person, all the wonderful news he had about her book. He liked the South and southerners, and the very southern Mrs. Marsh intrigued him with her childlike enthusiasm and her honeyed drawl. He was always so complimentary that Peggy wrote, “It’s lucky Mr. Latham doesnt come to town often. My head swells enormously under his words and I spread my tail feathers like a peacock.”27 She often said “what a happy, lucky day” it was for her when Medora invited her to have lunch with Latham.

  Although Peggy knew that the Perkersons and many others would love to be entertained at a party for the vice-president of Macmillan, she was determined to have him all to herself.28 Only John and Bessie knew that he was coming for supper Friday evening.

  With genuine pleasure, Latham showed the Marshes what the influential syndicated literary critic May Lamberton Becker had written after reading her advance copy: “The Civil War and Sherman’s march to the sea crash right through the middle of this book and leave you quite breathless. I meant to save my advance copy for steamer reading; I dipped into it before dinner, and it cost me the rest of the night, and now I can’t forget the thing. It is the shortest long novel I have read in a good while.”29 He was certain that when the book was published at the end of June, the critic would write a rave review, but her few favorable introductory words here for her national audience had already helped sales. Latham was also pleased to report on the arrangements Macmillan had made for the sale of her book to the London house.

  Although this would have been his opportunity to talk about the movie rights, he did not do so, nor did he suggest that they hire Annie Laurie Williams as an agent. Instead, he left the Marshes with the impression that Macmillan would handle all her film, dramatic, and copyright business. It is difficult to understand Latham’s position on this matter, and it is even more difficult to understand why he did not convince the Marshes, as he easily could have, that Annie Laurie had the skill to handle the motion picture rights better than anyone else he knew. Nevertheless, he did not say a word on Annie Laurie’s behalf. Because making a movie of the novel was not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything that either Peggy or John could visualize, the movie rights did not really concern them and nothing much was said about them.

  The two most exciting bits of news that Latham had to relate that evening as they enjoyed their coffee and pecan pie was that A. J. Putnam had confirmed that full-page advertisements of the novel would appear on July 4 and 5 in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Saturday Review of Literature, that Stephen Vincent Benét was going to review Gone With the Wind for the Saturday Review, and that Henry Steele Commager would review the book for Herald Tribune Books. The news about Benét overshadowed the rest and took Peggy’s breath away. Her eyes widened as she turned to John and whispered, “Benét?” She admired him more than she admired any other contemporary writer, and his John Brown’s Body was her favorite poem. She told Latham about that afternoon in 1928 or 1929 when Allan Taylor arrived with a copy—fresh off the press—of John Brown’s Body, demanding that she stop work and listen as he read it to her. “When Allan began at the point ‘This is Georgia,’” she said her heart sank, and she begged him not to read any more, for Benét had captured “so vividly and so simply everything in the world that I was sweating to catch, done it in such a way I could never hope to do and with a heartbreaking beauty. And just listening to it made me realize my own inadequacies so much that I knew if I heard more I wouldn’t be able to write.”30 What in the world, she wondered aloud, would Stephen Vincent Benét have to say about her book?

  5

  With the anxiety of a candidate waiting for the polls to close, Peggy hunkered down and waited for those reviews. Her tension spil
led over into Bessie too. One evening when John came home looking forward to supper, he found his cook upset, babbling about Peggy and all those other “folks” making her so nervous that she had burned two batches of lemon custard and scorched the turnip greens. Although he was just as anxious to see the reviews as Peggy was, he remained outwardly calm and suggested that he take his celebrated little author out to dinner and a movie and let the cook have the night off.31

  Their situation was getting chaotic. Letters, papers, and telegrams were stacked everywhere, along with those end papers that Peggy loathed signing. Every kind of request and disturbance one could imagine occurred on a routine basis, and the telephone rang continually all day long. But the most annoying problem they had on a day-to-day basis was the increasing number of visitors, generally total strangers, knocking on their ground-level apartment door, which was the second on the right at Four East Seventeenth Street. Their apartment house had no doorman, so when the doorbell rang, either Bessie or Peggy or John answered it. Peggy wrote Latham:

  I am appalled at the inability of the average person to get an interview. Having gotten them myself in taxi cabs, through bars of jails, and in the cabs of locomotives, it would seem like Heaven to me to catch a victim in the home, and have hours with her. People who interview me come and practically spend the day, talk my ear off, go home and write me nice letters telling me how much they enjoyed themselves and finish by saying, “And Mrs. Marsh, will you please write me 5000 words about yourself and your book and its aims? I really didn’t get an interview with you while calling on you. . . .” Then I moan “Godalmighty.” For it takes me days to write a page and anyway I’m busy and I didn’t know I was expected to handle my own publicity. What discoveries one makes when one becomes an author.32

  It was around this time that John made arrangements with their landlord to lease the first available apartment adjacent to theirs to use as an office for Peggy to hide or to work in.