Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

I’ll gladly tell you where I was born. I was born here in Atlanta, Ga. But I am not telling when I was born. I have never felt that a person’s age was the concern of anyone except herself and her family. And my feeling on this matter has been considerably strengthened since Gone With the Wind was published. The day seldom passes but that seven complete strangers either phone me or call at the door and ask point blank, “Just how old are you?” The newspapers, news services, biographical reviews, etc. have been in a lather about the matter, too. The effect has been to arouse my stubbornness. My age is my own private business and I intend to keep it so—if I can. I am not so old that I am ashamed of my age and I am not so young that I couldn’t have written my book and that is all the public needs to know about my age.42

  Trying to tone down her haughtiness, she closed her letter apologetically: “I am not, of course, finding fault with you for asking me the question, for you are one of the very few with a legitimate reason for seeking the information. But the others, the curiosity seekers, have made me stubborn on this point, and, if my reticence knocks me out of the nominations, then I guess that’s just too bad.”

  The question about her age kept popping up regularly, but she steadfastly refused to give it. On June 25, Brickell wrote her about how amused he was when he picked up the New International Year Book for 1936 and turned straight to the fiction survey. He said, “It begins with this marvelous remark: ‘The year’s sensational success was Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, a Southern belle before, during, and after the Civil War’!!! All I can say is that for one who has been a belle for so many decades, you are remarkably well preserved.”

  Peggy replied that the item was not so remarkable as he may have thought. “For a long time the rumor has been afloat that I am far advanced in years and that Gone With the Wind was really a verbatim account of what happened to me in my youth.”43 Then she added that the strangest thing she had encountered during the past year was the inability of the public to conceive of creative writing. “People cannot or will not believe that a story and characters can be manufactured from whole cloth. The story must have been the author’s life or that of someone the author knew, or it must have been taken from old diaries or letters.”44

  6

  With the news about Gone With the Wind being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, more people became interested in meeting the author. However, by late fall, when the nomination was announced, Peggy was in the midst of redecorating the entire apartment in her favorite colors: apple green, moss green, pink, deep coral, and ivory. All of the furniture had been hauled out to be refinished and upholstered, and walls were being replastered, painted, or wallpapered. “I believe I told you once of the excellent word our family used to denote the condition of our house when painters, paperers and upholsterers were ravaging about it—’choss,’” Peggy wrote Brickell in October 1937. “We have been in a state of choss for some time, and the smell of newly painted woodwork was so bad that it gave both of us colds and bronchial coughs and sent us to the Biltmore for a week until the house dried out.”45

  They could well afford the Biltmore, or any place else in the world for that matter. On September 3, 1936, Macmillan had announced that 330,000 copies of Gone With the Wind had been printed up to August 30, only two months after publication. Five days later, Macmillan stated that another large printing of the novel was going through, bringing the total up to 370,000.46 By the end of September, the total was over 525,000 copies, and by the end of October, 700,000. In late September, George Brett sent Peggy a check for $43,500 and in early October, another check for $99,700.47

  On October 10, many national newspapers carried a statement from the Macmillan Company reporting that “one of the pleasurable troubles connected with the success of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is the impossibility of making the advertising keep pace with the fast moving sales figures. By the time an advertisement comes out announcing that Gone With the Wind is in its 21st printing—525,000 copies, a 22nd printing has started, making 551,000. At the present moment the book is in its 23rd printing, bringing the total to 576,000 copies.”48

  The end of the book’s sales was nowhere in sight. Inquiries from one country after another were coming in requesting foreign translation rights. Such reports would surely bring joy to other authors, but not to the Marshes. Peggy wrote to Brickell:

  If the pressure doesn’t let up soon, I do not know what will happen to John and me. . . . When you say the book will go to 600,000 I am appalled. That will mean that this present misery will keep up till after Christmas, at least. Things have gotten so bad that I never say anything but “yes” and “no,” knowing I’ll be quoted and quoted wrongly. You must realize what a burden it is for me to keep my mouth shut and only open it to make completely innocuous remarks. I wasn’t cut out to be a celebrity, and as you have probably gathered, I don’t like it worth a damn.49

  Practically every distinguished person who visited Atlanta insisted on meeting Margaret Mitchell and getting her autograph, and according to John, these strangers had their local hosts put every sort of pressure possible—company, family, personal—on him and the Mitchells to get Peggy to see them. In the middle of her redecorating project, Peggy complained in her letters: “Never was there a worse time for visitors. The apartment is bare as a cabin and while I don’t give a hoot what people think it does get under my skin to have guests arrive and have no place to sit. I don’t see why they can’t wait until such a time as is convenient to me—but they don’t or won’t.”50 However, she was somewhat more tolerant of her literary admirers. Because she would not go to New York, some notable writers and editors came from New York to visit her. Late in November, while the decorators were still renovating the apartment and the upholsterers still had their furniture, Peggy got a bit of pleasure from entertaining some writers and editors in her bare apartment, instead of the Biltmore, where she and John had a suite. This kind of thing, of course, added to the rumors about her eccentricities.

  The first guests to visit the Marshes in their newly decorated apartment were Mabel Search, an editor from the Pictorial Review, and Faith Baldwin, a novelist who wanted to write an article about Peggy for the Review. The Marshes took an instant liking to these two women and, feeling confident that Baldwin would write a favorable piece, Peggy consented to an interview. In her article, Baldwin wrote that on the afternoon of her visit she and Peggy talked about “books, people, dolls, children, houses, and what happens to those to whom Fame comes as an army bearing banners. And we laughed a good deal.” Baldwin described the setting: “The living room walls were painted peach color, a very lovely old Persian rug in tones of peach and pastel lay on the floor, and there was a deep rocking chair which I loved and appropriated, and some old carved furniture upholstered in green.” She also described John and her perception of his relationship with Peggy:

  And at six o’clock John Marsh, who is not “Margaret Mitchell’s husband”—Margaret Mitchell is John Marsh’s wife—came in and handed me the evening papers and went off to wash up for dinner. And Bessie was frying chicken in the kitchen and I hoped that in addition there would be turnip greens. And there were.

  John Marsh sat at the head of his table. He is tall, blond, and a little stooped. He is young and his hair is thick and graying. He is soft-spoken. He is a person and this is a marriage. It has been a marriage for eleven years, a unity of tastes and complement of personalities, and to see this and to recognize its stability and verity was satisfactory nourishment for my spirit, just as Bessie’s fried chicken was satisfactory nourishment for my body.

  A few days after Search and Baldwin’s visit, Stuart Rose, from the Ladies’ Home Journal, came to Atlanta, bringing with him Kenneth Littauer of Collier’s. Both editors politely pressed her to write articles for them. Although she refused just as politely, she and John respected both men and soon became good friends with them. Having lived in the racehorse capital of the world, John found much to talk about with Rose, a distinguished
horseman who had served in the calvary, and also with Littauer, who had been awarded a medal of honor during World War I.

  The Marshes decided that they might be able to squelch some rumors if Peggy gave a couple of interviews to a few influential writers whom they trusted to write favorably and truthfully about her. So, although Peggy refused to write an article for Collier’s, she and John liked Littauer so much that she consented to his second request that she permit Edwin Granberry to write an article about her for Collier’s.

  In addition to talking with Granberry and with Baldwin, Peggy agreed to an interview with Lamar Q. Ball, who wrote for the Atlanta Constitution. The Marshes had known Ball for years, and Peggy felt comfortable with him. She enjoyed answering his questions about her method of writing, and she candidly told him how difficult it was for her to write. At one point in her interview with Ball, she gave specific information about how she developed Scarlett’s flight from Atlanta to Tara.

  This part of the story worried me. I struggled with it in my mind. I prowled around it mentally for a long time, looking at it from all angles and not getting anywhere. I could never write a line of it and never made a try at it, on paper.

  I didn’t seem able to capture the smell of the cedars; the smell of the swamp; the barnyard odors, and pack them into those chapters. I was in the Ritz Hotel at Atlantic City when it all came to me. I can’t explain why. The Ritz is nothing like Tara.

  I can only tell you this. I was not even thinking about the story when all this came to me very simply and very clearly how dusty and stifling a red clay road in Georgia looks and feels in September, how the leaves on the trees are dry and there isn’t any wind to move them, and how utterly still the deep country woods are. And there is the queerest smell in the swampy bottom lands at twilight. And I suddenly saw how haunted such a section would look the day after a big battle, after two armies had moved on. So I came home and wrote it. . . .

  Writing is a hard job for me. I don’t have the facility for just dashing along. . . . Those chapters that I wrote as soon as I returned home from Atlantic City are about the only ones in the book that I did not rewrite at least twenty times. As they appear in the book, they are substantially as they were first written. . . .

  Persons who have read the book have told me it must be marvelous to be able to sit down and dash off sentences that read so smoothly. I have a hard time convincing them that the sentences I consider the easiest to read in the book are the ones that I labored over and rewrote and rewrote before I was satisfied I had made my meaning clear.51

  Although she continued to write several hundred words in letters nearly every day, Peggy steadfastly refused all requests from magazine editors. For example, the Saturday Review of Literature wanted her to write an article on the sources of Gone With the Wind for its Christmas issue,52 but she refused, and in telling Harold Latham about the author, wrote: “I have been sick again, minus a secretary and everything in creation has come down on me like an avalanche. . . . I am crazy about it and flattered to death. . . . But I just can’t do it. . . . At present, I am just not well enough to do any writing.”53 Edwin Balmer of Redbook and Graeme Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post invited her to write anything she liked for their publications. Lorimer wanted her to do a regular column for fifteen hundred dollars a week. Balmer wrote Peggy that her refusal letter caused more excitement at Redbook than any other document ever had, as the staff from all over the building clamored to see her signature.54 By the end of November, when she wrote to thank John’s mother for sending her a birthday present, she said that she and John had run through all the big-name editors and most of the editors from all the “True Confession type of magazines” too. She added that when she and John got over the “hump of the movie people’s invasion,” which would end around December 15, they would finally be able “to breathe.”55 She and John had mercifully been given a little peace and quiet since the Atlanta newspapers, realizing how many people were bedeviling her and John about auditions for the movie, were kind enough to publish pleas to the public not to bother the Marshes, but to bother the Selznick company instead.56

  Although she had given permission for interviews and articles to only three writers, Granberry, Baldwin, and Ball, that did not keep others from writing about her as if they had had personal interviews with her. When Herschel Brickell wrote in the New York Evening Post on October 22 that he would not be at all surprised to see that Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies in the United States alone by Christmas 1936, Peggy wrote to thank him and mentioned another article that was not nearly as flattering as his—James T. Street’s “‘Gone With the Wind,’ a Woman’s Way of Telling the South’s True Story” (New York World-Telegram Week-End Magazine, 3 October 1936). She told Brickell:

  About the Jimmy Street—John says I am improving. He brought the article and I was all prepared to sit on my head while he read it to me. It was a stupid affair, wasn’t it? But I managed to laugh even though I was irritated. What irritated me the most was his bland assumption of an intimacy that never existed. . . . I only saw Mr. Street three times in my life and the conversations he wrote never existed, except in his own mind. He never even knew I was writing a book. He was too busy telling me about the book he was going to write.57

  7

  When the word got out that Peggy was never going to write a sequel, Gone With the Wind fans were distraught. Some would-be novelists wrote asking if she would let them write the sequel. The answer, of course, was always “No!” One of the replies to such a request remains among the materials saved in the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Papers in the Hargrett Library. It is an undated draft of a letter that John wrote for Peggy. Penciled in John’s handwriting, the letter reads:

  Dear Miss Hazel:

  You paid my book a number of very fine compliments in your letter. None of them was as fine as your desire to write a sequel to “Gone With the Wind.” I regret, however, that I cannot give you my permission to write such a sequel. Scarlett, Rhett and my other characters are solely and exclusively the creations of my own mind. If you or anybody else should attempt to use my characters in a book, they would unavoidably be twisted and changed from their true personalities. It would be impossible to prevent that, as every writers knows, and I would not like to see that happen. Also if you published such a book I would certainly be given some of the credit for it, simply because my name and the names of Scarlett and Rhett are so closely linked up in the public mind. Naturally I would not like to be given credit to which I was not entitled, for work done by somebody else.

  I am not contemplating a sequel to my novel, but if one should ever be written, I feel, very naturally, that I should be the one to do it.

  8

  In her interview with Lamar Ball, Peggy spoke frankly, entreating him to help her get the public to understand that she wanted to be left alone.

  I know that the public interest in my book is inextricably tied up with its interest in me. There is no separating them, I suppose. I do believe, though, that my private life is my own. After all, I’m not trying to sell my own personality like a moving picture actress or a candidate for public office. I have merely sold the book I’ve written. I don’t like to have women storming into a department store while I am standing there in my petticoat. They actually did this to me. They questioned me like a crowd of hard-hearted district attorneys. They wanted to know the size of my intimate wearing apparel. They screamed at each other about me as if I were an animal in a cage. One of them said, “Ain’t she skinny?” Still another said, “I expected her to look more middle-aged at the hips.” And I don’t like them to comment that I have no lace on my petticoat. If I go down the street with my petticoat hanging a fraction of an inch below my skirt it becomes a city-wide scandal. If I make no excuses, I hear, “With all this success, she’s certainly got the swelled head!” or “She’s certainly gotten stuck up!” I want the quiet life I’m accustomed to.58

  But the quiet life never returned. Gone With the Wind
continued to have a mysterious appeal to nearly everyone, no matter what age, profession, color, nationality, or sex. It had enormous appeal to old people who had lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction days. Peggy received hundreds of letters from old men and women who, in shaky handwriting, thanked her for writing the book. Sometimes, some of them related memories and family traditions of their own and sent her old diaries and letters. Some asked about being her distant kin. She politely answered each letter, responding to all questions and comments. “There are scores of grandchildren whose voices are rasping and hoarse from reading aloud to them,” Peggy wrote to a friend, “and Heaven knows how many indignant grandchildren have told me that they had to sit up all night reading because the old folks wouldn’t let them quit till after Scarlett was safe at Tara again.”59 A few of the older people who could read the novel for themselves had to cut the book into five or so parts because their weak wrists could not hold the heavy book.60

  School-age girls also loved the novel, and grade school children enjoyed it as part of their American history assignments. But then so did millions of others from all walks of life. About her readers Peggy wrote to Brickell on October 9, 1936:

  File clerks, elevator operators, sales girls in department stores, telephone operators, stenographers, garage mechanics, clerks in Helpsy-Selfy stores, school teachers—oh, Heavens, I could go on and on!—like it. What is more puzzling, they buy copies. The United Daughters of the Confederacy have endorsed it, the Sons of the Confederate Veterans crashed through with a grand endorsement, too. The debutantes and dowagers read it. Catholic nuns like it. Now, how to explain all this?

  I sit down and pull the story apart in my mind and try to figure it all out. Despite its length and many details it is basically just a simple yarn of fairly simple people. There’s no fine writing, there’s no philosophizing, there is a minimum of description, there are no grandiose thoughts, there are no hidden meanings, no symbolism, nothing sensational—nothing at all that made other best sellers best sellers. Then how to explain its appeal from the five year old to the ninety-five year old? I can’t figure it out.61