Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  The memorable night that Peggy won the Pulitzer Prize, she sat, trembling with excitement, between John and Latham, in the Little Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, listening to the choir until one in the morning.29 With the exception of her father, who did not stay up late at night, all the important people in her life—her husband, her brother and his wife Carrie Lou, Harold Latham, Deon, and Bessie—were present. The packed little church was warm, and to allay the heat, they each were given a paddle-shaped cardboard fan with a picture of a grim-faced Jesus on one side; and on the other side, a grim-faced undertaker and an advertisement for a funeral home. “The choir was marvelous. . . . The whole affair was so sweet, so simple and dignified and in such good taste,” she wrote Brickell. “Bessie presided and introduced us all, and we all made little talks. The colored folks were pleased to have us but they didn’t slop over us. They just took for granted that naturally Bessie’s Madam and Bessie’s Madam’s publisher wanted to hear them sing and oh, how they sang! One old sister got to shouting and I thought Harold Latham would have a spasm he enjoyed it so much.”30

  The next morning telegrams, telephone calls, friends, family, delivery boys with bouquets of roses, photographers, and reporters stormed the apartment. Peggy agreed to make a statement over the air because she wanted to thank everyone who had helped make her book a success. Because she said she needed his moral support, Latham rode with her and John to the radio station. In the cab on the way, she figured out what she wanted to say, and John wrote it down on the back of a deposit slip that Latham had handed him.31 In this nationally broadcast program, she read from that slip of paper, saying humbly that she had expected so little of Gone With the Wind when Harold Latham took her manuscript with him to New York two years earlier. In her soft southern drawl, she said:

  Since that day I have watched its career with steadily growing amazement, wondering if that book with my name on it could be, in reality, the enormous stack of dusty copy paper which lay around our apartment for so many years. So perhaps you can understand that I was genuinely surprised, and most happy and proud, when the Pulitzer Award Committee gave the prize to Gone With the Wind. It is an honor far beyond any I ever expected for my book and I thank you.32

  Afterward she wrote: “I have sense enough to know that speaking is not my strong point . . . and that is my last radio appearance.”33

  When they returned to the apartment, Bessie handed her a bundle of messages and a beautiful corsage of orchids that George Brett had sent her to wear to the dinner celebration Latham was planning for her that night at the Athletic Club. “I never saw so many or such big, gorgeous ones except perhaps around the neck of a Kentucky Derby winner. Perhaps that’s an apt remark for I felt as wild and full of prance as a Derby winner when I wore them out to the party Mr. Latham gave,” she thanked Brett. “I still could not convince myself that I had actually won the award but I kept slewing my head sideways and looking at the corsage and telling myself that certainly I wouldn’t be wearing those orchids if I hadn’t won something.”34 John told his family that Peggy looked positively radiant that day.

  The most outspoken critic of Peggy’s receipt of the Pulitzer was Hey-wood Broun, who wrote nastily: “I do not think Gone With the Wind is an enduring work of literature, and I not only believe but ardently hope that it will emulate its title in another twelve months.” It is not hard to imagine what he must have thought when the novel was placed in a time capsule, along with other contemporary artifacts, and buried fifty feet deep in Flushing Meadows, at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.35

  But hundreds of other literary critics agreed with the New York Daily News editorial that stated: “Looking back along the list of Pulitzer Prize novels down the years, we think this is the best novel that has ever won…. We’ve taken Gone With the Wind from its regular place in American fiction and parked it alongside Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”36

  8

  By the next weekend, the furor about the Pulitzer had died down, and life in the Marshes’ apartment was relatively quiet. On May 7, Peggy wrote John’s family: “We were afraid that the Award would serve to stir up public interest in me personally again and were all set for another awful siege. But, fortunately, it worked just the other way, and from the date of the announcement the mail, phone calls and tourists have fallen off sharply. Life is beginning to wear its old face again, and for the first time in months, I have sat down and sewed, and I have been swimming twice.”37 Their friends took seriously her requests for solitude and quiet and no longer made calls on the phone or in person. “None of my friends ever invite me any where,” she wistfully wrote Brickell.38 She spent her days alone, reading and answering letters.

  That summer, the Atlanta newspapers made no more mention of her or her book until one day in June, when the papers carried pictures of the four lion cubs in Atlanta’s zoo. In honor of the hometown author, the cubs were named Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melanie. Also, this was the summer of 1937, when “the Communists’ hoopla” about Gone With the Wind gave them much pleasure. “We were all very thankful that they did not endorse the book,” Peggy wrote Herschel Brickell on June 11, “because I could never hold my head up if they had.”39 What she and John found amusing, she said, was that there was “nothing anti-Communist in the whole book, nothing controversial, nothing of a propaganda nature. Yet the Radicals unerringly sensed behind those 1037 pages a Conservative, a Tory die-hard.”

  Of course, the radicals were right. The Marshes started out in favor of Roosevelt, but as he pushed his New Deal further and further into the South and tried to control Georgia’s politics, they got to the point where they loathed him. Peggy called Roosevelt “a traitor to his kind.”40 As a cautious, prudent, solid businessman who had earned his position by hard work, self-discipline, and self-denial, John was set in his ways about certain principles. He was not about to accommodate the new industrial and social programs that Roosevelt wanted to implement. Those programs, he thought, were ruining the country and developing a nation ruled by a bureaucracy, or worse—a dictator. Later, when John heard the news of Roosevelt’s death, he told Joe Kling, “The son-of-a-bitch got off without paying for what he did to this country!” Peggy and her friend Edna Daniel, the editor of the Quitman, Georgia, newspaper, had many lively arguments about Roosevelt’s policies and about “whether or not the world owes people a living—or, for that matter, owes people anything.”41

  Peggy’s political views popped out in many of her letters, such as this one she wrote to Brickell. Calling their friends Willie Snow and Mark Ethridge “Radicals or Liberals” after she read Willie’s new book, Mingled Yarn, she said:

  They are strange bedfellows for such Tory Conservatives as John and me. Willie does not like the paternalism of the cotton mill she wrote about. This dislike is contradictory to her violent espousal of the New Deal, which is, God knows, paternalistic. But Willie does not see her contradiction. She wanted to be completely fair to both sides in her book and to give that old davvle, Capitalism, its due. We wouldn’t like to tell Willie this because we don’t want to hurt her feelings, but we are finishing the book with a much higher opinion of mill owners than we had before and a far greater approval of paternalism.42

  A few years later, after reading Henry C. Link’s works on American individualism and conservatism, she praised his philosophy of self-reliance and wrote him, saying:

  I am old enough to recall the time when little children were taught to recite “Invictus” and to believe in it. But when I grew up it was fashionable for the intellectuals and sophisticates to cry down this poem and its implications and to point the finger of laughing scorn at Kipling’s “If.” We are in a period now when no man is expected to be the master of his fate and the captain of his soul but as you expressed it, a mere helpless pawn of circumstance. I hope I live long enough to see us come out on the other side of this strange country in which we have been wandering.43

  Years after his sister’s death, Stephens, in an interview wit
h Keith Runyon for the Louisville Courier-Journal, denied that Peggy was a conservative but then went on to suggest that she was. He said he thought his sister would not like the Atlanta of the 1970s because things had changed so much since she had known the town. Stephens explained:

  The basis of Atlanta, the people who own the town, are descendants of the reconstruction “nobility” that she wrote about, that assembled in the town then. She made a historical misstatement in the book, giving the idea that most of them left town. Most of them didn’t leave town. They live in town, they ran the town and they still run it. They call themselves “old families” but the people who are really old families are those who were here sixty years before [Reconstruction], like mine. . . . Our family was always an extremely reactionary family. And I would say that Margaret was also a reactionary. Now by that, I don’t mean a conservative. We are not conservative. She believed that there are certain principles we’ve always got to go back to. In any era, until the second coming of the Lord, there will be things that are bad. So you’d better go back and look for the things that were good in the past.44

  As an aristocrat born into a family of wealth and tradition, Peggy was a conservative. Although she would never have admitted it, she was unable to accept the manners of those from different social and economic backgrounds than hers. And the sentiments she expressed in her letters, as well as in her novel, show that she was willing to stand up and fight for traditional values.

  9

  For the rest of that summer in 1937, the Marshes were busy entertaining out-of-town guests. After Herschel Brickell came for a short visit, John’s mother came for a two-week stay. In August, Gordon, Francesca, Henry, and Mary Hunter came to Atlanta to celebrate Henry’s promotion to lieutenant colonel. (With his expertise as a chemist, Henry’s chief responsibility in the Pentagon was regulating gun powder in ammunition used by the armed services in World War II.) Also, John’s cousins Robert, Greta, and Roberta Nute visited them briefly on their way to Florida. One of the main reasons Peggy insisted that she and John live in a small apartment was the convenience of not having room for overnight guests, which she deplored with a passion. She enjoyed having guests for dinner, but not for overnight. John usually rented a furnished apartment in their building, if one was available, and if not, he got rooms at the Biltmore for all their guests.45

  His family remembered that it was around this time that John had begun to look noticeably thinner and decidedly ill. His smoking habit gave him a rasping cough and shortness of breath, and although Bessie did all she could to fatten him with her good cooking, his old ulcer problems robbed him of his appetite. His coworkers said that he appeared to be tired all the time and that his petit mal seizures were more frequent and of longer duration. Attributing the intermittent, stabbing chest pains he experienced to indigestion, he ignored his symptoms and maintained his hectic schedule. For a brief period he had managed to take a couple of hours off on Wednesday afternoons to go swimming or to play an occasional game of golf with a business partner, but now he no longer felt able to take that time off from work. While he worked, his heart and blood vessels paid the price.

  His only form of relaxation was going with Peggy, on weekends, to the movies. Both were wildly fond of the Marx Brothers, and if a Marx Brothers’ picture were showing, they would go to see the same movie two or three times. That year they enjoyed Lost Horizon and Captains Courageous more than any of the other films they viewed. “But,” John wrote to his mother, “my baser nature awards the crown to the Marx Brothers’ latest, ‘A Day at the Races.’ I don’t know whether you are a Marxian. If not, you may actually dislike them. Many people do, poor wretches. But I hope you are one of us superior folks who can appreciate what true geniuses the Marxes are.” While the picture was in Atlanta, he and Peggy saw it three times in one week.46 But opportunities for such recreational activities were rare for John.

  No matter how bad he felt, he never complained. The best description of his stoic attitude is found in one of Peggy’s letters to his mother, written in 1933 when Georgia Power was going through its most difficult period with Roosevelt’s rural electrification drive through the Tennessee Valley Authority. Because the company’s problems went along simultaneously for years with Gone With the Wind’s foreign copyright problems, John must have felt as if he were carrying a load of bricks that he could not set down. In this letter describing her husband, Peggy portrays the classic candidate for a heart attack.

  The typewriter on which Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind is now on permanent exhibit in the lobby of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, locaied downtown at Margaret Mitchell Square. About the time of publication, in 1936, the author posed for this picture with a portion of her manuscript. At his wife's request, John Marsh burned most of the manuscript after her death.

  When Gone With the Wind received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937, Peggy, decorated with orchids, was celebrated at a dinner given by Harold Latham, the editor who delivered her massive manuscript to Macmillan. Newspaper colleague Medora Perkerson completed the trio.

  Upon winning the Pulitzer, Peggy agreed to a radio interview with Medora Perkerson.

  Peggy Mitchell basked in the company of other writers, and serving on the faculty at a creative writing seminar in Blowing Rock, N.C., gave her such an opportunity. Peggy is seated between longtime friends and colleagues Herschel Bricketl, veteran New York book reviewer, and novelist Edwin Granberry (far right).

  In a less formal setting, the Marshes joined literary friends for a retreat. Peggy is in the background at left, while John gazes at her from a rocking chair, far right.

  Before filming began on Gone With the Wind, Peggy (shown left) and historian Wilbur Kurtz took a scouting trip for the “Selznickers,” as she called them. The author wanted to prove to the filmmakers that most authentic Georgia homesteads lacked white columns.

  Peggy's pal, Macon Telegraph reporter Susan Myrick, worked as a technical adviser on the picture. Myrick coached cast members such as Fred Crane (left) and George Reeves, who played the Tarleton twins, on southern dialect and customs.

  Between takes, Gone With the Wind photographers created this on-the-set joke with Olivia De Havilland reviewing the scene in which Peggy described Melanie in childbirth during the siege on Atlanta. When Peggy received a copy of this picture, she wrote to Sue Myrick: “John says that the expression on Miss De Havilland's face is precisely the expression I wore during the time I was writing the book.”

  During the filming of the movie. Peggy delighted in receiving progress reports from California. These telegrams from the picture's stars recall a Hollywood that is itself “gone with the wind.”

  Peggy Mitchell created the characters and the dramatic story of survival against all odds. Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler helped the movie version of Gone With the Wind set a record in garnering thirteen nominations and eight wins on Oscar night.

  “She is the most fascinating woman I've ever met,” said Clark Gable, after his private meeting with Peggy in the ladies' room of Atlanta's Piedmont Driving Club. And Peggy's reaction upon meeting the screen idol at the Women's Press Club tea: “He's grand, perfectly grand!”

  No one was more baffled than Peggy Mitchell when her tale of the Old South created such frenzied excitement among the general public. It seemed that all of Atlanta turned out for the parade welcoming David O. Selznick and the stars of Gone With the Wind to town for the world premiere.

  Atlanta went wild when film stars Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Olivia De Havilland arrived for the world premiere of Gone With the Wind. But to the actors who played Scarlett, Rhett, and Melanie, Margaret Mitchell was the star they finally got to meet. Here, the author is flanked by those luminaries, as well as film producer David O. Selznick.

  On Friday, December 15, 1939, the national spotlight was on Loew's Grand Theater in Atlanta, for the premiere of Margaret Mitchell's lush Civil War epic.

  The Marshes experience
d a dose of celebrity on the night of the premiere. John chatted with Clark Gable as Gable's movie star bride, Carole Lombard, looked on. Jock Whitney and Olivia de Havilland are at Peggy's right.

  John toiled over the foreign copyright business of Gone With the Wind from the couple's home at Della Mania apartments, 1268 Piedmont Avenue, where they moved in 1939.

  The close-knit Marsh family gave Peggy a sense of a loving, extended family. Henry Marsh snapped this picture of a Marsh family reunion in Wilmington, Delaware, about 1940. John is second from left, and Peggy is immediately left of Mother Marsh, who is seated at center.

  Following World War II, Peggy and her longtime maid, Bessie Jordan, organized care packages for war-torn Europe.

  Lounging on the homefront: A rare moment of relaxation for John Marsh, seen with a Czechoslovakian edition of Gone With the Wind.

  left: It's tea time for Peggy.

  inset: First edition (May 1936) of Gone With the Wind autographed by Mitchell to Rhoda Williams Kling, John Marsh's secretary who helped type the original manuscript and prepare it for release to Macmillan Publishers. This book was also signed by John Marsh and it is the only known copy of the novel containing his signature.

  A rare evening out in the late 1940s is captured at this holiday gathering of Georgia Power advertising staffers. The gang included John's secretary, Rhoda Williams Kling, standing left, with her hand on John's shoulder. Peggy's hand rests on the shoulder of Joe Kling, who worked under John and later became advertising manager himself. The Klings were close friends of the Marshes before, during, and after the publication of Gone With the Wind.