3
As the beautiful February weather brought out the spring flowers, John continued to improve, and the Marshes’ preoccupation with illnesses and doctors’ visits faded. Even though the commotion about the book had ceased in Atlanta, manifestation of Gone With the Wind’s influence on public policies and regulations began to emerge in two ways in early 1937. The first of these had to do with price-maintenance laws. In New York City, department and book stores, trying to outsell one another, ignored the existing price-maintenance laws and started reducing the retail price of the novel, which Macmillan had fixed at three dollars. Some stores were selling the book for less than they had paid the publisher for it. With sales skyrocketing everywhere, stores could not keep enough copies of the novel in stock. Even though Macmillan gave a discount for large orders, it could not sell wholesale at the low price some big department stores, like Macy’s, were retailing the novel. Instead of purchasing new books from Macmillan, merchants started buying copies from whoever was selling at the lowest price.
On March 29, 1937, the New York Herald Tribune’s lead article in the business section had to do with New York State’s newly legalized fair-trade laws.10 According to the Tribune article, which is titled “Macy’s Resells 35,940 Copies of Best Seller to Macmillan Co,” this action was the first taken under the fair-trade law, and it was the first instance of a retail merchant selling back goods already purchased to the distributor of such merchandise. A long-standing opponent of the price-maintenance laws, Macy’s had sold 170,000 copies of Gone With the Wind since its publication date. While the price of the novel fluctuated with competition, Macy’s had been selling the book for $1.51 a copy. George Brett explained that Macmillan had to act to establish its resale price under the law in order to stop the price wars on the book and added that no other publisher had ever had to act to maintain prices on their books. Other industries, such as drug and cosmetic firms, wanted resale prices maintained, and supported Macmillan’s efforts to get the price-protection act passed. In August 1937, President Roosevelt signed into law the much-debated and delayed Tydings-Miller bill, known as the Fair Trade or Price Protection Act. Those who had argued for the bill used Gone With the Wind as an important example of the need for such a law, which covered food, drugs, cosmetics, perfumes, tobacco, and many other goods aside from books.11 But the single product that propelled the act into a law was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.
The second influence of Gone With the Wind on federal regulations resulted from the enormous taxes Peggy had to pay in 1936 and 1937. A revenue law—Code Section 107-C, popularly known as the “Margaret Mitchell Law” because her experience initiated debate on it—was passed by Congress in 1952, three years after Peggy’s death. This legislation acknowledged the injustices that authors such as Peggy had endured and called attention to the unfairness some taxpayers experienced when they had to pay huge taxes on the lump sum they received in one year for work that took them several unpaid years to complete.12
4
Other than trying to figure out a legal way not to pay huge sums in taxes, the Marshes’ major concern in the spring of 1937 had to do with the reports from the foreign editions, which were just now beginning to materialize. In England, by the end of January, the book had sold thirty-eight thousand copies and was in its fifth printing. In early February, Peggy wrote Brickell: “The reviews have begun to come in from South Africa and India and, Herschel, I give you my word, if they’d been written by unreconstructed Rebels they couldn’t be better. I get cold chills up and down my back reading the Indian ones.” She added: “About the translation rights, everybody except the Chinese and Albanians have put in a bid. We’ve been working on them for some time and they ought to be closed up within a couple of weeks if we don’t hit any more snags. And, good grief, the number of snags we have hit!”13
While John took care of the book’s business, Peggy continued writing letters, not in the apartment but in her new office. When Eugene Carr, the janitor in their apartment building, informed the Marshes that the apartment adjacent to theirs was available, they rented it as an office for Peggy and Margaret Baugh, who was now working full time for them. Close enough so that Peggy could run home for meals and answer special calls, it was far enough away for her to hide. Because it had no telephone, Bessie screened the calls at home. Every day, while Margaret Baugh got out the mail and worked on bookkeeping matters, Peggy read, took naps on the sofa, or wrote letters.
Editors had stopped asking her to write articles and stories; interviewers had given up trying to reach her; and autographs seekers had almost vanished. Her days were spent quietly doing whatever she wished. Nearly every morning, she visited her father, who was often ailing, and then she spent the rest of her day in her office doing whatever she pleased. Bessie and Margaret Baugh answered all telephone calls during the day and John, at night. He handled all their business. She did not have to talk to anyone but friends and family. Occasionally when she went out to shop or to the library, she said she would get “nabbed, but I do not mind that so much now that I am feeling better. The nabbers are all very kind and polite people, and now that I feel well, they don’t bother me as much.”14
In writing to Brickell in February, she said:
Things are quieting down a little or if they aren’t I don’t know about them because I stay at the office till very late and let poor Bessie wrestle things. But I think I’m through with the invasion of editors. They’ve all come down here and gone away with their minds made up that I’m probably crazy because I won’t write short stories or articles for them. When I say with fervor that I wouldn’t think of doing anything that would add to the present public interest in me or accept one penny that would run my income into a higher bracket—they just look at me.15
By early April, Peggy was in a wonderful frame of mind and health. In none of her other letters throughout her entire life did she ever express the happiness and wellness that she expressed in the letters she wrote in April 1937. “Everything is marvelous here in the country now,” she wrote Brickell. She had two sound reasons to be happy: she was confident that a splendid film would be made from her book, and she had heard from numerous sources that she would win the Pulitzer Prize. “I feel perfectly wonderful these days, and have for the last couple of months. As a matter of fact, I am looking for a wildcat so that I can offer the wildcat the first bite before we mix up.”16 Peggy’s high spirits at this time come through in her correspondence with Mabel Search about a “wildcat” of her own.
As a result of Faith Baldwin’s interview for Pictorial Review, Peggy developed a warm friendship with Baldwin and with her editor, Mabel Search. Aware of the Marshes’ problems with the nosy Western Union office workers broadcasting all of her telegrams even before she had read them, Mabel sent Peggy a message that she signed “Wish-Wish and Napoleon,” the names of her cats. The telegraph operator called Peggy in disbelief, asking, “You don’t know anybody in New York named Wish-Wish and Napoleon, do you?” In relating the incident to the editor, Peggy said, “Fortunately, the old Mitchell memory clicked and I said with dignity that of course I knew them—they were old and dear friends. ‘Then they sure must be foreigners,’ said the operator. ‘And does anybody named Old Timer live at your house?’”17
Old Timer was a stray cat that Peggy adopted right after John came home the hospital. Describing him as “a tramp and dirty as a stoker,” she wrote Mabel that he was “a fine, old striped animal, a great ladies’ man, who has been dropping in for a dish of milk every other night.” The neighborhood children were not especially nice to cats, and Peggy felt sorry for this one when he appeared on her back door step. Her account here shows how she could spin and weave little scenarios from wisps of everyday occurrences:
A couple of weeks ago he came calling with all his rear end chewed and mangled and as fine an infection in his equipment as you ever laid eyes on. I put him in the cat hospital and the veterinarians and I labored vainly to save the above menti
oned equipment. We saved Old Timer, but, alas, the equipment is gone with the wind. He is at home now being fed on yeast and cod liver oil, for I cannot turn a sick animal out. I fear I will never be able to turn him out for he adores the silk brocade of my rocking chair as it makes such a delightful sound when his claws rip into it. Adopting a cat is a serious matter and apt to change one’s life as it means becoming a slave to the creature’s insistent desires to get out when he’s in and in when he’s out. But John and I are rapidly succumbing to his charms. He has the most beautiful stand of whiskers you ever saw.18
Since her childhood, Peggy had loved cats, and she fell in love with this one because of his crusty personality. She enjoyed telling anecdotes about Old Timer, and in this letter to Mabel, she wrote: “Poor Old Timer, who has spent his days in coal cellars and garbage cans, had never heard of catnip and he practically lost his mind. I never saw such antics in all my life, and we finally had to put the catnip mice away for fear that in his weakened condition he would have apoplexy.” With her earthy sense of humor, she added: “He is doing very nicely but there is still some infection in his twickey. If I put ointment on the twickey he licks it off, or else wipes it off on the brocade chair. John has refused to let me put a diaper on him. John says it is shocking enough for a male creature to be bereft of his dearest possessions without having to suffer the final ignominy of a diaper.”
5
The one thing that bothered Peggy during this otherwise pleasant time was the increasing number of reports stating the blacks’ objections to Selz-nick’s making a film of Gone With the Wind. With great concern, she had followed the course of articles that David Platt wrote for the Daily Worker, a newspaper that despised her novel and condemned it every chance it got. However, it was only one of the many African American newspapers and magazines harshly criticizing the novel. The staff at the Daily Worker went so far as to write to David Selznick forbidding him to produce the picture and threatening to boycott it, or worse, if he proceeded to make the film.19 Other individuals and influential African-American organizations supported the Daily Worker’s stand and vigorously protested the making of the film to the point that Selznick, who was certainly no bigot, worried about it. He wrote Jock Whitney, his friend and chairman of Selznick International’s board of directors: “I feel this particularly keenly because it might have repercussions not simply on the picture and not simply upon the company and upon me personally, but on the Jews of America as a whole among the Negro race. . . . I think these are no times in which to offend any race or people. . . . I feel so keenly about what is happening to the Jews of the world that I cannot help but sympathize with the Negroes in their fears, however unjustified they may be, about the material which they regard as insulting or damaging.” Selznick emphasized: “I am most anxious to remove any impression (which I am sure is very widespread) that Gone With the Wind, this company and I personally are enemies of the Negroes.”20
Although Selznick did not hire a black technical advisor, as the protestors suggested, he did call a group of influential black reporters to the studio and assured them that he would remove all offensive material and name calling from the script and that they had nothing to worry about as far as the proslavery issue was concerned.21
In writing about the issue to Brickell, who had been sending her clippings from New York, Peggy said: “They [the Daily Worker] referred to the book as an ‘incendiary and negro baiting’ book. Personally I do not know where they get such an idea for, as far as I can see, most of the negro characters were people of worth, dignity and rectitude—certainly Mammy and Peter and even the ignorant Sam knew more of decorous behavior and honor than Scarlett did.”22
6
Except for these and other activities beginning to emerge from the filmmakers, Peggy’s life had indeed quieted down remarkably, while John’s had not. Because of his unending work schedule, his health was declining, while hers was steadily improving. Since Congress had created the Tennessee ValleyAuthority in 1933, and had designated as its director David Lilenthal, whom John called a “two-faced-son-of-a-bitch,” Georgia Power crackled with tension.23 John and other Power Company people believed that the underlying purpose of the Tennessee Valley Authority was to put the huge utility monopolies out of business. As the chief of public relations, John had worrisome problems dealing with Roosevelt’s propaganda about power companies. He especially despised Lilenthal’s utilitarian ethics, saying: “If he would fight fair, I might enjoy the scrap, but his whole philosophy is that the end justifies the means. As his end and aim is the creation of an electric power business over our dead bodies, it is, at the least, annoying when he makes use of unethical and unfair tricks to damage us, while at the same time wearing the mask of a great humanitarian and advancer of the social well-being.”24
In addition to these pressures at work, John had taken on the exacting job of handling the foreign contracts, which called for endless correspondence and more hard work than he thought, was warranted by the small amount of money they brought in. Only two of them, the German andSwedish, had been definitely closed at that time and about a dozen others were in the works. “I think I can see the beginning of the end on that job,” he wrote his mother, “but no doubt there will be another tough job arising before that one is definitely cleared. That’s the way things have been going for more than a year now, and Peggy and I both yearn for the time when it will all be over. Of course, if she should get the Pulitzer prize, that would merely stir things up again, so it won’t hurt our feelings a bit if she doesn’t get it.”25
As summer approached, he made up his mind that he was going to do something about his health and happiness by becoming a golfer again. But every weekend, there was something that had to be done right away. “This week, I’ve got six urgent jobs that ought to be attended to before Monday,” he wrote his mother. “If I work real hard, I may be able to handle three of them. And that’s a fair sample of other weekends, and of the reason why I work instead of playing golf.” He assured her that life was pleasanter for them than it had been at its worst even though they were “still on a treadmill.” In spite of working harder than he had ever done before, he never seemed to get caught up, “with emergency matters demanding immediate attention on an average of three times a week—sometimes on an average of seven days a week—and even getting to see a movie is a rare experience.”
7
Toward the end of April 1937, the Marshes received word that Peggy had won the American Booksellers Association Annual Award. Brickell and some of the others had been telling her all along that she would win the Pulitzer, too, but she and John feared that maybe the award committee would believe that someone else should get it because she had already had a lion’s share of good fortune. In addition to Gone With the Wind, the Pulitzer jury had three other books in 1937 from which to choose: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, John Dos Passos’s Big Money, and George Santayana’s Last Puritan, which was high on the bestseller list. Although Gone With the Wind was, by far, the most popular book of several decades, the Pulitzer jurors saw something more important in the novel than its commercial success. They chose it, they said, because they viewed it as an important historical romance that was “wholesome, powerful, and fundamentally American.”26
During the 1930s, as the effects of the Depression spread over the nation, the Pulitzer jurors selected books that reflected a new kind of rugged individualism. “Many persons [in the 1930s] found themselves fighting as bitter a battle for survival as Scarlett O’Hara herself after the Civil War. It was exhilarating to watch Scarlett fight and win; even if she did not always employ the most genteel means, at least she did not lie down and die,” explains Edward Wagenknecht in his Cavalcade of the American Novel.27
Harold Latham came to Atlanta on May 3, ostensibly to visit the reopened Macmillan branch office there. The actual purpose of his visit was to be with Peggy when she received the official word that the Pulitzer Prize Committee at Columbia University had select
ed Gone With the Wind as its 1937 prize-winning novel. Giving Peggy a warm, welcoming hug when he greeted her, Latham said nothing about the award, and Peggy had no idea that she had won. Excited about his visit and stirring about making arrangements for dinner and the evening’s entertainment, she had forgotten about their disagreement over Macmillan’s handling of the film contract.
On Monday evening, May 3, 1937, she was not at home when the telegram announcing that she had won arrived from Frank D. Fackenthal, the head of the Pulitzer Committee in New York. She was at her father’s house on Peachtree Street, where she and John had taken Latham to have dinner with her family before going to Bessie’s church to hear the choir sing. On one of his earlier visits, Latham had mentioned his fondness for spirituals, and Bessie, fond of Latham because he lavished such praise on her culinary talents, had arranged a special concert that evening for the editor.
When Lamar Q. Ball, the city editor of the Atlanta Constitution, got the Associated Press news flash on the award, he immediately started searching for Peggy. When he found her at her father’s home, she agreed to let the photographer take a picture of her, after having refused pictures since September. Dizzy with excitement, she said she did not know what impressed her the most—winning the award or having the city editor leave his desk. Later, she wrote how nervous she got when it came time for them to leave for the choir concert because she did not want “the old blood hound” Ball to know where they were going. “He would have with great pleasure, shot forty pictures of us and the colored choir and written a hell of a story about where Miss Mitchell went to celebrate winning the Pulitzer Award. . . . I was uneasy all during the singing for fear he was lurking somewhere in the back of the church and I was afraid to pick up the morning paper.”28
Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh Page 48