Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  “It takes practically nothing to start a rumor, I’ve found. John and I collect rumors and see who can collect the most in one day,” she wrote a friend.

  My yesterday’s crop were (1) That I had a wooden leg. (2) That I’ve had a suite at the Piedmont Hotel for weeks and have been drunk the entire time and throwing my money away. (3) That I am dressing dolls like GWTW characters and selling them for twenty five dollars a doll and making millions. (4) That I have purchased the old General Gilmer home near Clarkesville, Ga. (that’s up by Tallulah Falls) and have restored it and the movies will use this place for a background. (5) I am to play Melanie in GWTW.5

  When his brother came for a brief visit, John told Henry, “The gossips have gotten to be a real pain in the ass because Peggy cannot ignore them.” He was referring to her recent outburst about a newsclipping that stated she turned to writing in an attempt to support herself and her husband, a shell-shocked invalid, unable to work regularly and in and out of hospitals for years. Peggy screamed, “I would rather have never written a book, never sold it, never made a cent or had what passes for fame in these parts than have one one-hundredth of such a lie published.”6 When she first heard that story, she immediately thought that the Granberrys or the Brickells had either carelessly or deliberately betrayed her because they were the only ones she had opened up to after the book was published. Although she wanted to track down the source of this lie, John shrugged it off, saying, “Forget about it. I don’t give a damn. Besides, the story is old in coming to us and if you demand any retraction you will only stir up more trouble and spread the lie.”7 Peggy silently disagreed and secretly persisted in her course of action.

  Without John’s knowing, she sent Brickell the clipping and asked that he return it. Growing increasingly suspicious and revealing that her paranoia included even the loyal Margaret Baugh, Peggy announced that she was writing the letter herself: “I didn’t trust the secretary. People so dearly love to repeat dirt about people who are on the front page and in twenty four hours the story would be all over Atlanta.” Neither Brickell nor Granberry was to write to the editor of the paper because, she emphasized, John wished to let the matter drop, and his wish was the one to be considered. With an almost pathological antipathy for rumors, she wrote, “I’ve got to know how wide spread this is and how it all started… have you any suggestions as to how such a story could have started?” After reviewing what she had told them about John’s illness before they married, their medical debts, and his chronic ulcer problems, she could not see how anyone could say he was “shell shocked.” In this letter dated September 10, 1936, she confided to Brickell:

  In these ten days when my eyes were so paralyzed with bella donna that I could see nothing at all, I’ve been wondering a thousand things. The most distressing one was—could I have some how given you and Edwin such an impression of John? It does not seem possible, but it is a possibility. . . .

  The whole affair has put me in a helpless frenzy which hasnt done me much good. . . .

  She claimed to have become hardened to whatever people said about her, and except for attacks on her personal integrity, which she would not allow, she planned to take the lies about herself with good grace. But as for her husband and family, it was not their fault that she was “fool enough” to let Latham leave with her manuscript, and she did not want to see her loved ones suffer or be embarrassed in any way. Showing passionate feelings for her husband, she ended her letter by saying:

  If John were any other type in the world, it wouldn’t be so bad. But he is such a swell person, a positive genius in his own line, has held down a responsible and delicate job brilliantly for years I just get in a killing rage at the very thought of any one anywhere reflecting on his mental ability. I have become outwardly hardened to what ever people say and write about me, the perverse twistings of my casual words, the out right lies, the stupid rumors, the gossip, malicious and otherwise. After all, I was asking for it when I published a book and it was only right that I take it. And short of any reflection on my personal integrity, I intend to take it with as good a grace as possible, hoping to God that this miserable period will end quickly. But I cannot take with any grace any lies about John or my family.

  Ten months later, when Brickell finally found out that the rumor had gotten started by a woman at Blowing Rock, Peggy threatened, “I’m going to crucify that lady if I have to travel all the way to her hometown to do it.”8 Rashes of other outlandish rumors about John broke out regularly.

  The most popular one had to do with his not being able to handle his wife’s fame and her fleeing to Reno to get a divorce. This rumor began to circulate because of the confusion in the public’s mind between Peggy and Caroline Miller, another Georgia writer, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for her novel Lamb in His Bosom. When Miller divorced her husband, the rumor spread that Margaret Mitchell had flown to Reno to get a divorce. “But when will it stop?” Peggy asked Brickell with great frustration in her voice:

  The problem resolves itself around whether I can last till the book stops selling. At first I thought I’d go to Europe till it all blew over. But I realized that I couldn’t do that. In the first place I loathe travelling and have no desire to see Europe and would be miserable away from John. In the second place, if I did go away a terrific load would descend upon John and he is already carrying far more of my load than I want him to.9

  Undisturbed by the gossip, John urged her not to worry about such stupid stories and tried to console her by saying: “This is something that people wanted to believe, but not necessarily with malice. It excites their imaginations because it has an element of drama in it, whereas our quiet and happy devotion is stodgy and dull.”10 When the British newspapers announced that he had died, he was amused and wrote his mother, “Up to now, I have not been able to think of any retort as good as Mark Twain’s that the report of his death was greatly exaggerated, but an occasion of this nature calls for something as special as an answer and I am hoping that I can succeed in producing something which will be a credit to myself and family.”11 Then another story started circulating, and this one John took more seriously.

  Regularly reporting Kentucky’s reaction to the book, Gordon and Francesca, who lived in Lexington, said that bookstores in Maysville, Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati, across the Ohio River and a few miles northwest from his hometown of Maysville, could not keep enough copies of Gone With the Wind in stock. Practically everyone who was even remotely connected to him or to his family took pride in knowing him or in claiming to know him. Because of his work with the newspapers and his affiliation with the university, many people in Lexington remembered him and took a personal interest in the book. One day he received a disturbing letter from Frances in Wilmington, Delaware, saying that there was a lot of talk about his writing the book. Later, when Gordon and Francesca came to Atlanta in October to attend the University of Kentucky-Georgia Tech football game, they told him that they had heard that rumor too.12 Francesca remembered how much he hated to hear that news.

  In Lexington, the talk stemmed from the remarkable similarities between Belle Watling, Gone With the Wind’s queen of the red-light district in Atlanta, and Belle Brezing, the Lexington woman who owned one of the most lavish brothels south of the Mason-Dixon line. Although practically every southern town had its share of madams and “’hor houses,” Brezing—like Watling—was no ordinary madam, and she managed no ordinary “house.” As the thoroughbred horse-racing capital of the world, Lexington was the host for wealthy visitors, many of whom frequented Brezing’s establishment.

  John must have cursed himself when he realized how deeply he had slipped in letting Watling resemble Brezing. But a decade earlier, when Peggy was developing the story and she and John were talking about the characters, they were not talking and writing with readers in mind. Peggy had a rich mental storehouse of people from which she could select bits and pieces to create her characters, but she had never been inside a brothel and ha
d never known a real-life madam. When it came to creating an understanding woman who would befriend Rhett Butler when Scarlett spurned his love, it was John who had the perfect model.

  After Macmillan accepted the manuscript, John and Peggy believed the book would have only local interest and would sell, at best, a couple of thousand copies to libraries in Georgia and to relatives. Peggy’s primary goal in researching Fulton County court records was to make certain she did not use any real Georgian’s name, not even for the completely admirable characters like Melanie Wilkes.13 She even checked with Franklin Garrett, Atlanta’s official historian, for the name Watling.14 But she was not concerned about the Watling character because Lexington, Kentucky, was many miles away from Atlanta, where people had never heard of Belle Brezing or, even if they had, they would not know any details of her life. Besides that, Brezing had been put out of business primarily by the Good Christian Government League in 1917, around the same time John left Lexington, and by the time the book came out, she was a 76-year-old, morphine-addicted recluse. After all that time, John must have thought, who would have heard of her? He never dreamed that anyone would infer that Brezing served as Watling’s prototype.15 Yet people did. The simplest action for him to take was to deny the connection, and that is exactly what he did.

  In his intriguing biography of Belle Brezing, a book filled with interesting old photographs, E. I. Thompson says that by the time Gone With the Wind appeared on the scene, “Belle Brezing had already reached the status of a local folk legend, and no one could be convinced that Marsh had not furnished his wife with the name and some of the attributes of the character that became Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind.”16 The similarities between the two women, as Thompson points out, are just too obvious to pass as mere coincidence.

  In Gone With the Wind, the description of Watling and her house is an accurate and complete description of Brezing and her house. Both places were large and elegantly furnished and paid for by rich admirers: Watling had the generosity of Rhett Butler, and Brezing had William M. Singerly, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman who came to Lexington each year for the trotting horse meet.17 Both houses welcomed army officers, and both had black orchestras and a downstairs barroom.18 Both women delivered engraved invitations to special events.19 Both women catered to men of means; men who did not have a bankroll to spend had to go to the smaller houses, not Brezing’s.20 Both establishments were operated in a quiet, unobtrusive manner, seldom attracting the attention of police. Just as Belle Watling “presented a prosperous appearance when glimpsed occasionally in her closed carriage driven by an impudent yellow negro,”21 so, according to Thompson, Belle Brezing rode about Lexington in “the finest phaeton to be had, with a matched team of chestnuts” driven by a liveried black dressed in a black suit and a tall, black hat. Each woman had a child who had been sent away to a boarding school.

  Both women had the same first name and both had last names with the same number of syllables and ending in “ing.” And both had flame-red hair and similar personality traits. Thompson points out: “Lexington men who had known her ‘personally’ felt, too, that their Belle was just the kind of good ‘ole’ whore who would have befriended the likes of Rhett Butler. . . . Her [Brezing’s] strength had been in her understanding of the weaknesses in others.”22

  Some people got downright belligerent in asking how John Marsh could deny providing the scene in which Belle Watling approaches Melanie wanting to give her some money for the hospital. Because of the manner in which the money had been earned, Watling’s offer is rejected. During the time John was in Lexington, it was commonly known that Belle Brezing offered to contribute to the building of a hospital and that her generosity was rejected for the same reason.

  Every time John received letters asking him outright if Brezing was the prototype of Watling, he fired back “No!” But the rumors only escalated with his denial. Months later, when they were still flourishing, he wrote Frances:

  Sister, please step on the rumor that I collaborated in Peggy’s book, if it shows its ugly head again. It will interest you to know that I am in distinguished company in such rumors, for other stories have credited the book to Peggy’s father, her brother, Sinclair Lewis and several other literary celebrities. No, a man who works as hard as I do at my own job doesn’t have the time to write 1037 page novels or to collaborate in them. I did help in the mechanics of getting the thing to press—proofreading, checking facts, etc—but that was all.23

  That was his story, and he stuck to it.

  Later, when the Gone With the Wind film came out, more talk about the Watling-Brezing similarities spread like wildfire. A Lexington newspaperman, Joe Jordan was fascinated with Brezing and had been collecting information on her for years. He, too, wrote John pointing out the similarities. John telegrammed, “Neither Belle Watling nor any other character in the book was taken from any real person. All are fictional creations and any similarity of names was accidental. My regards to the Leader folks. John Marsh.”24 Jordan said he and the others just figured that the Marshes were afraid of being sued by Brezing.25

  2

  A similar misunderstanding soon cropped up, and this one also involved John. This time the unsettling news came from Washington, D.C., where Harry Slattery, Under Secretary to Secretary of the Interior Harold Le Clare Ickes, was said to be extremely upset about Peggy’s use of the name “Slattery” for “a pillaging, house-burning carpetbagger” in Gone With the Wind. After sending him a carefully worded apology, Peggy also telephoned him and, in her most charming manner, apologized, saying that she intended no malice toward him or anyone. She explained that she had picked the name Slattery out of a New York telephone directory. Originally she had named the character Satterwhite or something similar and changed it to Slattery, purely by chance, when she decided that Sat-terwhite was too hard to pronounce. The call ended cordially with his accepting her apologies.

  After she received from Slattery a little narrative that his mother had written about growing up in the South, Peggy wrote Slattery again, complimenting his mother’s writing, which she said had “a high degree of charm and true literary quality.” Then she went on to tell him once more how sorry she was that she had inadvertently offended his mother, him, and his entire family. In her letter, dated October 3, she explained how hard she had worked to avoid using actual names of anyone living in Clayton or Fayette counties, or in Savannah, Charleston, or Atlanta during the period between 1840 and 1873—the time frame of her novel. “I did not wish to embarrass anyone now living or make it appear as though I were writing about their kindred, long dead. . . . I never knew another writer who bothered about this,” she told him.

  But I went to infinite pains, first to choose names that while Southern were not peculiar to Atlanta and its surrounding rural territory. Second, I spent weeks and weeks in county court houses checking the names of my characters against tax books, from 1840 to 1873, against deed books, against militia muster rolls, against a Confederate muster rolls, against lists of jurymen, against wills and titles. Wherever I found a duplication of names, even if it were only the surname of one of my characters, I changed the character’s name, chose another name and started checking all over again. It was, as you can imagine, a wearisome job. In one instance, the name of “Hilton” was changed about a dozen times, necessitating trip after trip to the Jonesboro court house until I was absolutely certain as far as written legal papers could prove it, that no one by the name of Hilton had lived in Clayton County in the period covered by Gone With the Wind.

  So you see why I am so sorry that the matter embarrassed you.

  Thinking that she would finish this letter and mail it the next day, she laid it aside. However, the first thing the next morning, Margaret Baugh brought in the mail, which contained a clipping from the Washington Post, dated September 29, with headlines reading: “Slattery Drops His Plans to Sue Author of Gone With the Wind—Ickes’ Aide Embittered over Use of Name in Novel, Becomes Friend of Miss Mitche
ll after She Explains ‘No Harm Intended.’” Although presumably Peggy was relieved to see this headline, the contents of the article chafed her horribly.

  The article stated that Slattery, who was from an old, respected family of Greenville, South Carolina, rice planters, “had been incensed at Miss Mitchell’s delineation of a villainous carpetbagger named Slattery,” and until he and the author had talked and exchanged letters, he had been thinking about suing her.

  Slattery explained in this interview that at first he had concluded that the name had been maliciously and deliberately selected for the “white trash” character because he, as a former conservation commissioner, had been involved in some heated court battles with a Georgia Power Company advertising executive named John Marsh, who he assumed was Margaret Mitchell’s husband. The Washington Post stated: “Linking the fact that John Marsh, co-author of the book, is an advertising man for the power company with the fact that Slattery had had some sharp encounters with a former promotion man for the same firm, the family concluded that the selection of the name was malicious.”26 The article went on to say, however, that when Slattery learned that “Marsh and his erstwhile power-fight opponent are two different advertising men, although employed by the same utility company,” Slattery decided to drop his plans for legal action and he wanted to forget all about the matter. Where he got the wrong idea that there were two John Marshes working for Georgia Power is still a mystery.

  Slattery was also quoted as saying: “She still cooks breakfast in her little flat in Atlanta for her husband and he keeps on working at his job, in spite of the fact they suddenly came into a fortune. Atlantans have tried to fete and exploit them—they wrote the book in collaboration over a period of seven years—but they keep their heads and decline all the invitations.”