Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  The New York Times Book Review gave the book front-page coverage and J. Donald Adams, its chief staff critic, wrote 1,350 words of sheer praise, concluding with: “This is beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best. In sheer readability, it is surpassed by nothing in American fiction.”

  In her July 12 Washington Post review, Julia Peterkin called the novel “a great book . . . without a dull page.” The New York Herald Tribune also gave Gone With the Wind front-page coverage, and the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote two thousand words of warm approval. He said: “It is dramatic, even melodramatic; it is romantic and occasionally sentimental; it brazenly employs all of the trappings of the old-fashioned Southern romance, but it rises triumphantly over this material and becomes, if not a work of art, a dramatic re-creation of life itself.” Ellen Glasgow, author of Battle Ground, a fine Civil War novel, described Gone With the Wind as “a fearless portrayal, romantic yet not sentimental, of a lost tradition and a way of life.” In Los Angeles, Paul Jordon Smith judged it “the most convincing, the most powerful presentation of that tragic period that has ever been put into fiction.”

  The Saturday Review of Literature bore Peggy’s picture on its cover and carried Stephen Vincent Benét’s full-page review of Gone With the Wind. Although the review was a positive one, much to Peggy’s relief, John thought Benét “hedged by describing it as ‘a good novel rather than a great one.’”77 Benét wrote many favorable things, such as “Miss Mitchell paints a broad canvas, and an exciting one . . . the book moves swiftly and smoothly,” but when Benét compared her book to Vanity Fair, Peggy winced. “And there is, to this reviewer, perhaps unjustly, the shadow of another green-eyed girl over Scarlett O’Hara—as Rhett Butler occasionally shows traces both of St. Elmo and Lord Steyne and Melanie’s extreme nobility tends to drift into Ameliaishness here and there.”78 But Benét went on to say, “Nevertheless, in Gone With the Wind, Miss Mitchell has written a solid and vividly interesting story of war and reconstruction, realistic in detail and told from an original point of view.”79

  Franklin Pierce Adams, in the Herald Tribune, gave it his approval when he wrote: “You start that book, and unless you neglect everything else, the first thing you know it’s day after tomorrow.” Praise came from other influential writers, such as Damon Runyon, author of Guys and Dolls and many popular short stories; Alexander Woollcott, known for his sharp tongue, famous wit, and membership in the Algonquin Round Table; and even the amateur columnist Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  But not all the critics liked the book. Those antagonists who favored novels calling for social justice had not only negative but downright sarcastic comments to make about Gone With the Wind. Part of their dislike for the book stemmed from the fact that the masses loved it. As John wrote years later: “Almost unanimously, they labeled the book as ‘purely escapist,’ meaning a book to be read for the pleasure of it and not because it would do you good. They said it was lacking in ‘philosophical content’ and had no ‘sociological import.’ They complained that the author had no ‘social consciousness’ and was totally uninterested in ‘mass movements.’ Those were the serious-minded thirties, remember?”80

  Demonstrating just how wrong prominent critics can be, Heywood Broun thought it was “a very unimportant book that would soon disappear into oblivion where it belonged.” Novelist Evelyn Scott, in The Nation, wrote that the book was “sprinkled with clichés and verbal ineptitude . . . the author had failed to master the wide significance implicit in her own material.”81 With much snob appeal, Louis Kronenberger, a young aesthete writing for The New Yorker, started off his review by saying: “Miss Mitchell proves herself to be a staggeringly gifted storyteller, empowered, as it were, with some secretion in the blood for effortlessly inventing and prolonging excitement.” He ended by saying that the book “deserved to be extravagantly praised as a masterpiece of pure escapism. It provides a kind of catharsis, not, to be sure, of pity and terror, but rather of all the false sentiment and heady goo that even the austerest mind somehow accumulates.”82

  In The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley wrote a scathing review criticizing Gone With the Wind for promoting the “plantation mentality” and called it “an encyclopedia of the plantation legend.” He added, “Miss Mitchell writes with splendid recklessness, blundering into big scenes that more experienced novelist would hesitate to handle.”83 But Cowley’s editor, Stark Young, a drama critic and novelist who only a couple of years earlier had written the Civil War tale So Red the Rose, wrote Peggy an apologetic and laudatory letter, making it clear that he did not share Cowley’s opinion.

  Appreciating his sensitivity and kindness, she answered:

  About the review . . . I sent out and bought it as soon as I got your letter. It was a joy, wasn’t it? I had had a cheerless day and that review brought cries of joy from me. A number of friends called during the day and each one read it aloud with joy equal to mine. When they’d read the part about the legend of the old South being “false in part and silly in part and vicious in its general effect on Southern life today” they’d throw themselves on the sofa and laugh till they cried.

  I suppose I must lack the exquisite sensitivity an author should have. Otherwise, I should be upset by such criticism. But the truth of the matter is that I would be upset and mortified if the Left Wingers liked the book. I’d have to do so much explaining to family and friends if the aesthetes and radicals of literature liked it. Why should they like it or like the type of mind behind the writing of it? Everything about the book and the mind are abhorrent to all they believe. One and all they have savaged me and given me great pleasure. However, I wish some of them would actually read the book and review the book I wrote—not the book they imagine I’ve written or the book they think I should have written. They have reviewed ideas in their own heads—not ideas I wrote.84

  Those “Left Wingers” Peggy mentioned included the American Communist press, who labeled the novel “fascist.”

  But then admiration for the novel came from influential writers and educators like Dr. William Lyon Phelps, who enjoyed immense popularity as a professor of English at Yale University and who helped shape American literary taste during his day. Phelps declared Gone With the Wind his choice for best book of 1936, quite a compliment when the competition is considered. Other books that year, some by popular and seasoned writers, were Walter D. Edmonds’s Drums along the Mohawk, Pearl S. Buck’s Exile, Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, Corey Ford’s My Ten Years in a Quandary, John Gunther’s Inside Europe, MacKinlay Kantor’s Arouse and Beware, Granville Hicks’s John Reed, Dorothea Brande’s Wake Up and Live, Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, and John Dos Passos’s Big Money.85 But the biggest money-maker in 1936, besides Gone With the Wind, was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which sold more than 1,300,000 copies.

  By the end of September, the total number of copies printed was 526,000. By the end of October, the total had reached 700,000 copies. Six months after publication, in December 1936, one million copies of Gone With the Wind had been printed. For Christmas 1936, every employee at Macmillan got a generous bonus, the first bonus in years. At three dollars a copy, the three million dollars that Gone With the Wind brought into bookstores transfused life into dying retail bookstore businesses all over the nation.86

  The book was not just a literary phenomenon but a social and economic one as well, for it created jobs for people who had been out of work. The book literally helped the nation rise out of the ashes of the 1929 Depression. All over the country, young women began wearing Scarlett O’Hara hairstyles and clothes because the fashion industry began producing dresses, hats, petticoats, underwear, gloves, purses, blouses, and coats in the Gone With the Wind style and in colors named “Scarlett Green” and “Melanie Blue.” Haberdashers began advertising Rhett Butler’s style of hats, trousers, shirts, and jackets.

  Interior decorators designed wallpaper, d
raperies, lamps, and fabrics with Tara and Twelve Oaks pictorial scenes for upholstery materials. Dolls, plates, jewelry, and music boxes, ashtrays, sheet music, pictures, greeting cards, novelties of all kinds were on sale in department stores. Babies, streets, recipes, flowers, restaurants, theaters, pets, and other things were named after the characters in Gone With the Wind. Finis Farr described the situation best when he wrote: “A social historian would not have needed to visit decorating establishments to realize the permeating ubiquity of Gone With the Wind. He need only have picked up a newspaper and read the advertising columns, for the nation’s copywriters, alert as always to whatever occupies the public mind, had recognized, the moment the book appeared, that they could use its characters and title in extolling almost any product or service in the world.”87

  By the second week of July 1936, the New York Herald Tribune flatly stated: “Gone With the Wind has come to be more than a novel. It is a national event, a proverbial expression of deep instinct, a story that promises to found a kind of legend.”88

  11

  When rumors started flying that Peggy had gotten $5 million for the film rights, practically everybody wanted money from her. She grew to revile the telephone and the telegram. She was continually being asked to donate cash for memorials, scholarships, awards, orphans, private schools, indigents, and many other purposes. Only she, John, Stephens, and her father knew about Latham’s wire of June 30 stating that the movie rights were being sold for fifty thousand dollars; so she knew the word about the sale got out in Atlanta through the telegraph office. But how did it get out elsewhere? The euphoria she experienced earlier when she received the big check from Brett dissolved into hostility when she was handed a telegram from Annie Laurie. On that same afternoon, Peggy angrily scratched out a letter to Lois Cole. Her words yell off the page: “Feebly I take my typewriter in hand to ask just what the hell Annie Laurie means by jumping on me about rumors that Fox Films had bought the book. At present I am hunting for some one to jump on about all the damn movie rumors which are driving me nuts.”

  People are driving me crazy, folks on the relief rolls asking for a hundred because I wont miss it out of my many millions. Friends wondering why in Hell I persist in driving a 1929 model car and wearing four year old cotton dresses and fifty cent stockings and calling me an old Hetty Green to my face. None of these rumors started from me. . . . Finally they got so bad I had the newspapers here deny the rumors in large print.

  The newspapers did print a denial for her, but the rumors still kept dropping like bombs from all directions. She told Lois,

  It isn’t confined to this section. My ex room mate at Smith (now in N.Y. with United Artists films) wrote me that her book seller had told her that a Macmillan salesman had told him I had refused “forty thousand smackers, and dearie-lamb, that’s a heluva lot of smackers to refuse.” A friend in Chicago wrote about the same thing, saying that in a round about way they had heard it from someone at Macmillan.89

  After listing all the other accounts that she had heard as coming from Macmillan salesmen, she wrote, “I believe the book trade gossips back and forth worse than the newspaper people though that hardly seems possible. . . . I just came to the end of everything yesterday and blew up with loud explosions and went to bed and have the tired shakes so bad this a.m. that I can hardly hit the keys.”

  Before she closed her letter, she exclaimed about the movie stars’ roles:

  Dear God, Lois. NOT Janet Gaynor! Spare me this last ignominy or else tell Bonnie Annie to hold her up for a million. May I ask which part she intends to play—Belle Watling? Miriam Hopkins has been my choice from the beginning but I knew what I had to say wouldnt matter so I said nothing. She has the voice, the looks, the personality and the sharp look. And I wish that lovely creature (I think her name is Elizabeth Allan) who played David Copperfield’s mother could do Melanie. And I wish Charles Boyer didnt have a French accent for he’s my choice for Rhett. Next to him, Jack Holt is the only person I can think of.

  That day she was especially tense because she was not looking forward to that evening, when she would have the radio interview on the Journal’s “Editorial Hour,” for which John had prepared the script. She ended her letter by telling Lois, “Tonights my last appearance as Margaret Mitchell unless they come after me with a rope.”90

  Referring to “the unremitting excitement” that had invaded their lives, John wrote his mother, “The result is that neither of us is particularly happy about the situation, when we should be overwhelmingly happy.”91

  CHAPTER

  10

  JULY 1936

  UNBELIEVABLE DAYS

  For the present, I get my chief pleasure out of small things. Hearing people say that they can’t put the book down, after they have started reading it. And that they wished it had been twice as long. I worried so much about it being too long that remarks of that sort give me a bigger kick than reports of sales passing the 200,000 mark.

  —John Marsh to Frances Marsh,

  1 August 1936

  1

  ON TUESDAY, JULY 7, 1936, PEGGY WOKE UP exhausted. When John reminded her of the interview that morning with the Associated Press reporters and photographers, she said she did not want any more pictures taken of her. She had lost so much weight that she thought photographs taken at this time made her look old and wizened, “like Margot Asquith.”1 The receptions, the long autographing sessions at Davison’s and at Sear’s, the interviews, the bags of mail, the national radio broadcast, the steady stream of uninvited visitors wanting autographs, money, answers to trivial and often impertinent questions, the friends dropping in unexpectedly for visits or wanting to entertain her at teas and dinners, the rumors about the money she was making off the movie rights, the telephone ringing continuously—all had created an unreal environment that brought her nearly to a breaking point that morning. Whenever she had not been able to sustain pressure before, John had always been able to cover for her. But now there was nothing he could do, and he felt angry about losing control over their lives.

  What contributed to Peggy’s bad mood that morning was learning the night before that Bessie, of all people, had written a letter about her and John and had sent it to Medora asking that it be printed in the Atlanta Journal. Peggy was furious when she learned about it. Although the letter was well intentioned and lovingly written, it was highly personal. She did not want to hurt Bessie’s feelings, but she did not want that letter published. Then, when she discovered that Margaret Baugh had used even less judgment than Bessie in thinking that the letter could be used as publicity and had sent a copy of it to Macmillan without asking for approval, Peggy flew into a rage. The idea of having their privacy invaded by outsiders was bad enough, but for the insiders to do it really stuck in her craw, as southerners would say.

  Later that morning, John took care of the matter, for Lois and Medora understood and cooperated with him.2 While he had Lois on the phone, he also asked that Macmillan not send them any more telegrams because the telegraph company folks downtown had gotten to know Peggy during the past few months and were taking an active interest in all her affairs that passed over the wire.

  Thus, instead of the situation quieting down after the book came out, it was becoming progressively worse. Peggy felt as if she were crashing on a speeding roller coaster that would not stop. Concerned about her, John made arrangements for her and Bessie to spend the rest of the week at the cabin near Tallulah Falls, which was less than two hours away from Atlanta. It was a perfect hideaway because fewer than a dozen families, who all worked for the Power Company, lived in the little village near the cabin, and they knew Peggy only as Mrs. John Marsh. The village, named Saw Tooth, had no telephone lines to it at that time and was isolated in the northeastern mountainous tip of the state.3 Georgia Power had a private line connecting the Terrora Plant with the hydroelectric plant at Tallulah Falls, and all messages to and from the outside world were communicated through this private line.4 So, for a few day
s at least, she would not hear a phone ringing. But, the best thing, as she told a friend, was that no one in Saw Tooth “reads anything but the Bible.”5

  By the time John returned home at noon, Peggy was sitting at the kitchen table looking small, forlorn, and tired. The three men from the Associated Press gave her what she described “a brisk work out that lasted three hours.”6 As John placed the suitcases, several mystery books, a little bag of mail, a big bag of groceries, and her typewriter in the back of the car, he told her he hated to see her go but assured her, “Once you are far from the haunts of man, you will feel better.”7

  After settling down in the cabin later that afternoon, she walked up the hill to the power plant where she called John to let him know that she had arrived safely. She was relieved to learn from him that Lois had promised to return Bessie’s letter and so had Medora. But that was not all; Lois had also said that Herschel Brickell, the veteran reviewer for the New York Post, was coming south in a couple of weeks and wanted to meet her.8 Inspired by the thought of seeing this New York critic who had praised her work, she wrote Brickell an effusive but sincere letter in which she described herself as a fugitive on the run and her success almost as if it were a misfortune:

  I am Margaret Mitchell, of Atlanta, author of Gone With the Wind, and I want to thank you so very much for the marvelous review you gave me on June 30. It was my intention to write you the kind of letter that would show you just how much I did appreciate all your kind words. But I’m afraid I can’t write that kind of letter tonight.