Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  8

  By June 11, Macmillan had printed ninety-eight thousand copies, of which forty-eight thousand went to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the printers asked Mr. Putnam if he did not think it would be a good idea to make a duplicate set of electrotypes for Gone With the Wind at this point. From all indications, it was clear that they were going to have a really big sale with this book, and if they waited until the plates were worn they would have to reset, and the composition alone would be costly. They wanted to be ready for the demand they felt was coming.58 This demand would largely be determined by the early reviews, which John and Peggy were eagerly awaiting.

  If the reviews were the Marshes’ biggest worry, selling motion picture rights was Macmillan’s. On June 14, from Bangor, Maine, Latham wired Lois, saying that a wire had been sent to the Marshes—owners of the film rights—notifying them that Macmillan was employing Annie Laurie Williams, who wanted the Marshes’ approval of a possible fifty-thousand-dollar cash offer for the movie rights. He wanted Lois to handle the matter as he was going to his vacation home in Onteora Park, New York, that weekend.59 However, because of all the confusion that occurred later on about Annie Laurie’s role as Peggy’s agent, it is doubtful that Latham’s telegram was ever actually sent to the Marshes.

  Annie Laurie had been talking the book up, doing her best to get the film companies competing with each other for the rights. At one point, she had written to Lois that she almost had RKO ready to buy the rights because Katharine Hepburn and RKO’s president were all pepped up about the story. However, Pandro Berman, the producer, was afraid that Miss Hepburn would not be sympathetic enough in the part and so vetoed the sale. This was the second time Annie Laurie had had RKO right to the buying point because Hepburn wanted so badly to play Scarlett.

  Around the middle of June, the Marshes went to Milledgeville on their annual outing to attend the convention of the Georgia Press Association. The first thing they learned when they arrived at the hotel was that the Press Association was hosting a banquet for Peggy and had arranged for a presentation to honor her. As John wrote later to his mother, Peggy was the belle of the ball, the center of attention at every gathering the entire time they were there.60 This was Peggy’s first real experience as a celebrity, and she loved every minute of it. The Associated Press put out a good story and a good picture of her, which was printed all over the South. “If I were a publicity man for Macmillan, I would expect a raise in salary for getting an advance write-up of the book and picture of the author on the AP. But no publicity man could or did get it done. The AP did it,” John said, “because of Peggy and because it knows how popular she is with all the newspaper people.”61 Being treated as royalty by many of the very people who had often teased her earlier about writing a book filled her with pride. No one would ever again tease her about not being a serious writer. Just from the reviews of the advance copies alone, it looked as if she had written not just a book, but a blockbuster of a book.

  Left out of the limelight entirely, John had time to savor Peggy’s success. In a long letter to his mother on June 26, he reviewed the recent events in a philosophical vein. “It seems that the best way to enjoy the pleasures of being famous is to have your husband or wife, not yourself, achieve greatness. Then you can sit back and revel in the acclaim, while they carry the burdens of it.” He wrote that Peggy was kept on the go from morning to night, attempting to handle a steadily rising stack of mail from all parts of the country, getting her first experiences at being interviewed, and “being partied, teaed and receptioned.” Describing her as being “worn to a frazzle,” he added, “and it seems such a pity, as this ought to be a very happy time for her.”

  Knowing his mother would enjoy hearing Peggy’s voice on the radio broadcast, he told her that the most aggravating burden for the past ten days was writing a radio script for her interview with Medora on the Journal’s “Editorial Hour” on July 3. Perhaps because Peggy was too caught up in the whirlwind of activities, she no longer used the word “dream” as a metaphor for her life. Now John did. “But even if she is too tired and rushed and bothered these days to enjoy her fame, I am getting a tremendous kick out of it. The reception the book thus far has gotten not only exceeds our fondest expectations, but surpasses anything we might have dreamed of in the wildest of dreams.”62

  The day he wrote this letter, the book was in its third printing and was said to have had the biggest advance sale of any book in years past. Of course, Macmillan had had other bestsellers: Owen Wister’s Virginian, Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and James Lane Allen’s Choir Invisible.63 Prior to Peggy’s novel, one of the most notable sellers was Richard Carvel by the American novelist Winston Churchill. Published in 1899, it sold two hundred thousand copies the first year it was in print. Following it was Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, one of Macmillan’s greatest successes with a sale of 250,000 copies. Astonishing the entire publishing trade, Gone With the Wind sold 201,000 copies the first month it was in print.64

  All of which makes life a fantastic dream for the two of us (a nightmare perhaps for Peggy). I am enjoying the situation but in a somewhat detached and impersonal way. I haven’t yet taken it in that all of these things are happening to the Atlanta Marshes. And the book continues to be, to me, not “the greatest historical novel of modern times,” etc., etc., but the same old stack of dirty and scratched up MS that lay around the house for years.

  The most gratifying aspect of the whole adventure, he felt, was the reaction of the “home folks, especially the Georgia newspaper people” who made up 90 percent of their friends. In a philosophical mood, he wrote:

  There are two things that test the strength of friendships. One is a terrific scandal and the other is a tremendous and sudden success. I believe the latter is a worse test than a scandal. So many people are inclined to be envious, spiteful toward any acquaintance who suddenly leaps into prominence. If something of that kind had happened with Peggy, I wouldn’t have been surprised, and it may happen yet. But the attitude displayed by our newspaper friends is proof that Peggy has got the qualities that have won their genuine liking. They seem to be just as happy over her success as I am, which is a lot, and there is a wholeheartedness and sincerity in their expressions of pleasure over the book, in their papers and in person, which is all that anyone might ask.65

  John pointed out that by the time his mother received his letter, many of the big papers would have published their reviews, and “even if all of them should say it was terrible, we nevertheless have gotten enough praise of it already to last us for two or three lifetimes.” So far, out of the dozens of reviews that had been exclamatory in their praise, only two had been slightly uncomplimentary: one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher for the Ladies’ Home Journal, and the other by Henry Siedel Canby in the Book-of-the-Month Club circular. Of Fisher, John wrote that she had displayed her lack of understanding of southern people by saying that Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, and Ashley were “literary abstractions.” He added: “I am pointing that out particularly because it is about the only thing that anybody has said that wasn’t high praise.”

  About the other reviewer, John wrote: “He [Canby] said Peggy wasn’t Dostoievsky, wasn’t even Galsworthy, and wasn’t Tolstoi. I wouldn’t have her if she was anyone of the three, and I thought it rather flattering that he had to pick out three such notables to describe what she wasn’t.”

  He went on to say that the Atlanta papers were “shooting the works in their editions of Sunday.” In addition to the radio interview, the Journal folks had already had a reception for Peggy and had presented her with a silver vase in token of their pride and affection. “I know I am bragging inexcusably but I don’t know anything you can do to stop me.”

  Stephens and Eugene Mitchell were excessively proud of Peggy and often talked about how thrilled Maybelle would be for her. But what Grandmother Stephens would be saying about the triumph, they all wondered.66 One uncle who had not been seen or spoken to for many years
called Peggy to extend his congratulations and invite her and John to visit him on his farm.67 When the Atlanta Historical Society had a reception for her on June 28, some of the relatives who had not spoken to Peggy in years showed up.

  But more important to John was the fact that nearly every pioneer family in town was represented at that reception. With his habit of close observation, he told Peggy as they were driving home how interesting it was for him to watch the faces of these guests and see the difference between them and the average Atlanta face. “There was a quiet strength about them that was startling—and they all looked a trifle alike!”68

  John was immensely pleased with everyone’s reactions to the book. And nothing intrigued him more than the mail Peggy was receiving from all over the country. Every evening when he came home, he would remove his coat and loosen his tie and head straight for the dining room table to where the day’s stack of letters was always spread. “Perhaps we will get very tired of fan mail in time, but now one of the pleasantest parts of the day for me is after supper when I pick up the day’s stack and read through them,” he wrote his mother, adding, “(I don’t have to answer them.)”69

  9

  By the end of June, the Marshes’ quiet world had been completely shattered. Based on the reception of advance copies alone, the book had taken on life of its own, a demanding, unrelenting kind of a life that was snatching and pulling Peggy into national prominence. Totally unprepared for the deluge of people pressing against her from all directions, she was physically exhausted. She wanted to be gracious, friendly, and appreciative to everyone who wrote her or spoke to her. But her innate willingness to respond to people was creating a difficult situation for her. She felt as if she were being “gobbled up by clubs and exploited by this and that person.”70

  Then, too, hearing about rumors that were springing up overnight like weeds made her irritable. The “muckhills” (her word for rumors) were about everything from her having a wooden leg, to her having to support an invalid husband, to her having written a final chapter that Macmillan refused to publish, to her having already earned over a million dollars. Instead of merely ignoring them, as John urged her to do, she tried to track them down. For many reasons, John was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that what was happening was not all good for them, and he feared that what they had seen so far was only the tip of the iceberg. Even though he kept assuring her, “All this ballyhoo won’t last once the book gets out,” he silently braced himself for a gale storm.

  When Julia Collier Harris, writer of a weekly column for the Chattanooga Times, wrote Peggy saying the book would be a tremendous success and suggesting that Peggy save her privacy, energy, and time before the floods of publicity attempted to drown her, Peggy sighed with relief at hearing from someone who understood what was happening to her. She wrote,

  I did not realize that being an author meant this sort of thing, autographing in book stores, being invited here and there about the country to speak, to attend summer schools, to address this and that group at luncheon. It all came as a shock to me and not a pleasant shock. I have led, by choice, so quiet and cloistered a life for many years. John likes that sort of life and so do I. Being in the public eye is something neither of us care about but what good does it do to say it? No one believes a word of it or if they do believe it they get indignant. I have been caught up between two equally distasteful positions, that of the girlishly sly creature who keeps protesting her lack of desire for the limelight but who only wants to be urged. And that of a graceless, ungracious, blunt spoken ingrate who refuses to let people do her honor. It has all been very distressing to me.

  I’d rather never sell a book than autograph in department stores, other than those of Atlanta. I see no way of escaping those. This is my hometown. Everyone has been so kind and helpful that I can never repay them enough. And I would seem an eccentric and ungracious person if I refused, here in Atlanta. But it has made me very unhappy.

  It is not that I think myself such a wonderful and precious vessel of genius that I do not wish to expose myself to public gaze. It is only that I don’t especially like the public gaze and would like to continue my life, which has been a happy one, in its old tenor. And I intend to do it, if there is any way possible.71

  When the book was officially published for trade release on Tuesday, June 30, 1936, Peggy said, “All hell broke loose then!” The phone kept ringing and telegrams kept coming. All of her friends at Macmillan sent telegrams of congratulations. In her message, Lois included the news that fifty thousand copies had already been sold. Latham wrote expressing his appreciation of her for letting him have a role in her success, and Brett sent her a further advance of five thousand dollars, giving a her total of $10,500 the day following publication of the novel. That amount did not include the advance for the British edition, for that was yet to come. The check arrived on July 3, the day of her first radio interview and the day before the Marshes’ eleventh wedding anniversary. Getting to like money as much as her penny-pinching Grandmother Stephens had, Peggy neatly folded the envelope and put it in her pocket and drove downtown to John’s office. Looking frumpish wearing her hornrimmed glasses, white socks, orthopedic shoes, and a loose-fitting, sleeveless, bright green sundress, she strolled past Rhoda, smiling broadly, and dived directly onto John’s lap, wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing him loudly all over his face. Watching them through the open door, Rhoda and Mary heard John exclaim: “What the hell’s happened now?”72

  10

  “The book continues to be the most engrossing subject of interest and conversation,” John wrote his mother on Sunday, July 19, 1936. Without any doubt, he and Peggy were especially pleased with the reception the book was getting in the South.73 Peggy had been somewhat apprehensive, he explained, “as to the reaction of our Southern die-hards to her frankness over the fact that there were some deserters from the Confederate army, etc., but there hasn’t been a single unfavorable review in any Southern paper and the almost universal attitude is that Peggy has done the South a service in telling its story in a way that has never been done before.” He went on to say,

  That fact and the information Macmillan gives us that orders for two, five, and ten copies are coming in from bookstores in little Southern towns where Macmillan is not accustomed to sell any books at all, pleases Peggy far more than the news you may have seen in the New York papers that the book had gone to the top of the best-seller list in eight out of ten cities the first week it went on sale.

  Because they had so many friends in the newspaper business, he said he and Peggy had “discounted the very flattering reviews” the book got from the Atlanta and other Georgia newspapers. “But since the reviews began coming in from other Southern states, we are beginning to believe that the South must really like the book.” He told his mother that “the prize item” in their collection of newsclippings came from Selma, Alabama, “about as ‘deep South’ as any place gets to be. It told how everyone in town was reading it, how enthusiastic they all were, said it was the answer to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and pictured an old lady reading the book, laying it down with a bang and saying ‘I hope every Yankee in the whole world will read that book and BUST.’”74

  In this same letter, John also described all the “excitement stirred up by the book’s success,” and he warned his mother:

  If you happened to see the picture of her the AP sent out—the Lillian Gish looking picture—don’t let it alarm you. She really doesn’t look that bad. Physically, she has stood up under all the strain in a way that pleases me very well, all things considered. The trouble has been the unremitting excitement, the invasion and upsetting of our placid existence and the need to attempt to adjust herself to her new and unexpected position of prominence in the world. The latter is something that is hard for both of us to grasp. At present, it is not like something happening to us but something we have read about as happening to total strangers.75

  Throughout recent years, apocryphal accounts ha
ve claimed that Gone With the Wind was popular only with the masses and that it was ignored or assailed by the important literary critics writing for the most influential newspapers. With the exception of a handful, those first reviews, and nearly all that came out on June 30 and on Sunday, July 5, 1936, gave the novel an excellent rating. Because the placement and length of reviews are often considered as important as what the reviewer has to say, Gone With the Wind was considered the most valuable book published in 1936. It received far more attention than any other book published that year. Sunday literary supplements in most of the prominent newspapers gave the novel front-page coverage.

  On June 30, two gentlemen, southerners from Mississippi, gave the novel its most glowing welcome to the literary scene. Herschel Brickell, who was a respected veteran reviewer for the New York Post, wrote a lengthy review. He began by saying, “I can recall a few books out of the thousands I have read since I began to write a daily column that left me feeling I’d much rather just go on thinking about them, savoring their truth and treasuring the emotional experience that reading them was, than to try to set down my impression of them. This is the case with a novel you will hear much about in the months that are coming. . . .”76

  The other critic, Edwin Granberry, writing for the New York Sun, a paper slanted toward highly educated readers, stated: “The history of criticism is strewn with the wreck of commentators who have spoken out too largely, but we are ready to stand or fall by the assertion that this novel has the strongest claim of any novel on the American scene to be bracketed with the work of the great from abroad—Tolstoi, Hardy, Dickens, and the modern Undset. . . . In its picture of a vast and complex social system in time of war, Gone With the Wind is most closely allied to Tolstoi’s War and Peace . . . Gone With the Wind has a center if ever a novel had it, which in great part accounts for its superb climactic tension.”