Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  She caviled over minutiae, wasting extraordinary amounts of time and energy in trying to track the source of rumors, and yet more time and energy in responding to them and then again in repeating them in her conversations and letters.

  A few of these stories were humorous, such as the one about the northern organization “The Society for the Dissemination of Correct Information about the Civil War,” which, she said, had been sending all over the country volumes of mimeographed material “about what a horrible and unladylike person I am and how utterly false is the picture I presented in my book. This outfit never had the courage to send me any copies, but they had been circulating them sub rosa.” Eventually she was sent a copy and, much to her surprise and dismay, she learned, among other things, that she had been referred to as “the Atlanta midget.”78 Although Peggy pouted over this epithet, John threw his head back roaring with laughter every time he told one of their friends about it.79

  After receiving much weird mail, she commented to him that insane people had beautiful, clear handwriting and showed him such handwriting in a letter from a British fan, who had a fetish for lady’s underwear; this fan had written asking her to write a novel about lingerie! Another abnormal mind requested from Peggy the fifteen thousand dollars he said he needed to finish his epic poem and included passages of complete gibberish as examples of his work. Many more people wrote begging for money or help with their manuscripts.80

  The book continued to bring them varied and interesting experiences. One day, Peggy received a letter from Germany addressed to Captain Rhett Butler. As John laboriously translated it, it became apparent that the lady was upbraiding Butler, telling him it was his own fault that he had made a mess of his life. She wrote that he got just what he deserved, and she wished she could take him by the shoulders and shake him through and through (“durch und durch”). At the end of her letter, she revealed that she was writing more in sorrow than in anger and bade him a farewell full of compassion. The fact that the letter came from a convent in Germany really intrigued them. In relating this incident to his mother, John added that a mother superior of a Catholic institution in the South, “a lady with the appearance and regal manner of a medieval abbess, is one of Captain Butler’s most outspoken admirers.”81

  14

  Although Gone With the Wind was off the bestseller list by March 1938, it continued to create new and harder problems for John. Earlier Peggy had written to John’s mother explaining why he had not written her recently; she said Stephens and John had been working with a batch of papers about the French translation rights, which had to be attended to immediately and gotten in the earliest mail. She realized that John was working too hard and that he was not feeling well, but she did not know what to do about it.

  For nearly every night for two years John has worked on business matters arising out of Gone With the Wind. For a year it involved the correcting of typescript and the reading of proof. For the last year it has been the handling of contracts and an endless fight to keep people from exploiting me for their own ends. We never get a chance to go anywhere or see anyone and, instead of work slacking, it seems to get heavier. I feel very depressed about this, as I had hoped that all work and worry would be over by this summer so that John could get some rest and relaxation. As it now stands I do not think we will even get much of a vacation this year. But I suppose it cannot keep up forever, even if it appears at present that it will.82

  Indeed, John’s work on the book had gotten heavier while his job at Georgia Power continued to demand great energy. The effects of holding down two difficult jobs steadily for almost three years were physically manifesting themselves as he began to look much older than his forty-three years. The most obvious change in his appearance was his hair. Although it was still thick, it had all turned white. Peggy worried about him constantly and did her best to persuade him to stop smoking. She knew that now it was her turn to see to it that he got away for a while to rest. So, after much insistence on her part, they set out in the spring of 1938 on a three-week vacation, drifting about small Florida towns. No one knew them or recognized them, and so no one asked for autographs or photographs.83 At each of their stops, they visited friends, stayed in small hotels, and dined in the best restaurants. When they returned home, she wrote Brickell that she had gained weight and was up to 120 pounds. “I have to unzip all my dresses to breathe. I am breaking ground for my third chin and I never felt better in my life. . . . I am as hefty as a hog at killing time.”84 Actually she had gained twelve pounds, too much for her small frame.

  John, too, felt much better, telling his mother, “My weight is now up to 156 pounds stripped, which is nine pounds above my previous normal and the most I have weighed since I got out of the army. It’s very encouraging as I have been trying unsuccessfully to put on weight for many years.”85 The extra pounds were due in part to the fact that he had tried to cut out smoking. He boasted, “Just before I went back to the office I had gone twelve days with no cigarettes at all. Then I broke over, but not too badly.” Once back to the routine of Georgia Power and the foreign copyrights, he resumed smoking, unable to kick the habit when under stress.

  For their vacation, John brought along two books, Northwest Passage and Of Mice and Men, but the papers in his briefcase got most of his attention. While he worked, Peggy read his books and whatever else was available in the hotel lending libraries where they stayed. She still liked popular fiction that she could read “in gulps.”86 After reading Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade, and Imperial City, “and dozens of others,” she complained in a letter to her friend Brickell on April 14 that she was having “a bad case of emotional indigestion.”87 She thought if she had stretched out the reading over a long period, she would not have felt as depressed about the novels as she did. But reading one right after the other, she felt that their “impact was too strong” for her and explained to her friend:

  I hope you will understand that my emotional indigestion did not arise from any sense of shock or disapproval at the goings-on of these characters. What depressed and bothered me was the tiredness of everyone concerned. These characters did not leap gaily in and out of strange beds as did the characters of the jazz age, nor did they commit murder, forgery, etc. with passion, enthusiasm or regret. They did all these things—for what reason I cannot say. Certainly, they got no pleasure from any of their sins, nor did they have any sense of remorse. We came home slowly, visiting our friends in the small towns of Georgia and Florida, and I looked upon my friends and their friends with new eyes. . . .

  For I could see that the old morals persist and the old ways of looking at sin and such have not changed. Remorse for ill-doing is as strong as ever and social pressure toward ill-doing as strong as it was a hundred years ago. There is a vitality and enthusiasm for life in both its good and bad aspects in these small town people.88

  Thinking about the contrast between the modern fiction she had been reading and the real lives of average people, she was seized with a strong desire to write a story about a girl who went wrong and certainly did regret it. This idea occurred, she said to Brickell, because she did not find in any of the stories she had read “the perfectly normal feminine reaction of fear of consequences, of loss of reputation, of social disapproval or of that good old-fashioned Puritan institution, conscience.” She thought that her desire to write such a book put her back into the Victorian period but added, as an afterthought, that Gone With the Wind was “probably as Victorian a novel as ever written.”89 This was the only time that she ever mentioned wanting to write another book.

  Since their return from Florida, she wrote, “Life has almost reverted to its pre-War Between the States status—the phone does not ring, the tourists come no more, the mail has dropped off. . . . I only hope the movie does not cause a recrudescence.”90 With the return of her “quiet and normal and very happy” life, Peggy was back into her old habit of reading a book or two a day.91 Writing fewer
letters and those mostly to her friends, she often mentioned the books she was reading. The one novel that she and John named as their favorite book of 1938 was The Yearling. This was a book, she said, that did not fit into any category and she supposed that fact would “annoy people who like to paste labels on literature. Books like this are just what they are and we can only be grateful that they come to us.”92

  Because her book had been criticized for lacking social consciousness, she wondered when she finished reading The Yearling what might have happened to such a simple story if it had been written by “a writer bitten with ‘social consciousness’ and ‘have-and-have-nots’ feeling. Can’t you see what an underprivileged child Jody would have been? And what wouldn’t a socially conscious writer have done with those gorgeous bewhiskered Forrester boys? That scene where the boys get up early and, stark naked, tune up and have a ‘hoe down’ is something I will cherish.” Then she concluded this letter to Brickell by saying: “To everyone who, as a child, has run wild in the woods it must bring back a thousand memories, even as it did for me. My memory for smells is very strong and this book brought back smells years old so strongly.”

  She kept up with other writers of less importance than Rawlings. To Helen Dowdey, another writer friend who worried about lying fallow and asked if Peggy had ever had a compulsion to write during the last two years, Peggy answered: “I am in favor of bigger and better fallowing. . . . The exact opposite has been my problem. I loathe writing and will go to any lengths to keep from writing. Having a definite antipathy for putting words on paper, the only reason I ever wrote any was because I had nothing to do at that particular time and, having started something, was goaded on by the Puritanical adage that one should finish what one had begun. John’s large shoe placed on the metaphorical seat of the pants of my soul accelerated some of my efforts.” Because Helen and Clifford Dowdey were going on a vacation soon, Peggy added, “It would be grand if you could go West with nothing on your minds except your hair.”93

  After she and John attended a tea for Willie Snow Ethridge, whose new novel Mingled Yarn Macmillan had published in the spring in 1938, she got a good dose of what it meant to be out of the limelight. The wife of Mark Ethridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Willie was a native of Macon, Georgia. Now that the spotlight had finally been removed from her, she wrote her friend Brickell, “Everything is in a stew, as we do not have bushels of authors in this section as you do in New York. . . . I cannot tell you of my heartfelt pleasure that it was Willie and not me who was having to undergo all of this. She has unbounded energy and enjoys bushels of teas and parties and she is never at a loss for ‘a few words’ and she makes those words very charming ones. This is a gift—and one I do not possess.”94

  CHAPTER

  13

  1936-1939

  MAKING THE MOVIE

  If we live through December, we will feel that we have scored a triumph, for Atlanta has gone plumb crazy.

  —John Marsh to his mother,

  22 November 1939

  1

  DURING THE YEARS WHEN JOHN AND PEGGY WERE CAUGHT UP in the aftermath of the publication of Gone With the Wind as a book, Peggy’s masterpiece was being born as a movie. While John was becoming entangled in complex copyright issues and Peggy was answering letters and reading reviews about the book, dealing with rumors and lawsuits related to the book, and winning awards for her great novel, they were also affected by the excitements and irritations involved in the creation of Gone With the Wind as a film. It took David Selznick over three years to make his most famous film—from 1936, when the book was first published, through 1939, when it premiered in Atlanta. During this time, while John and Peggy were “reaping the whirlwind” of her book’s publication, Selznick was creating a whirlwind of his own.

  The initial publicity about the movie generated a kind of turmoil that—at first—was fun for Peggy. Because she had said loudly, clearly, and repeatedly that she was having nothing to do with making the film, writing the script, or selecting the cast, she believed that the monkey, so to speak, was off her back and onto that of the filmmakers. So she looked forward to enjoying the excitement from a distance, without suffering the personal intrusions that had deluged her after the publication of the book. She liked all of the “Selznickers” that she had met at the July 1936 meeting in New York and thought they were exciting and smart. She particularly admired Kay Brown, the attractive young woman who worked for Selznick in his New York office and who had convinced him to buy the film rights to Gone With the Wind.

  In her first letter to Kay in October 1936, Peggy revealed that her hopes for an armchair view of the movie-making process were already dashed. She wrote, “Life has been awful since I sold the movie rights. I am deluged with letters demanding that I do not put Clark Gable in as Rhett. Strangers telephone me or grab me on the street, insisting that Katherine Hepburn will never do. It does me no good to point out sarcastically that it is Mr. Selznick and not I who is producing this picture.”1

  But the Marshes’ real nightmare did not begin until late fall, 1936, when Selznick launched publicity on his nationwide search for an entire cast of new faces. It was then that Peggy told her brother-in-law Henry and others that she was up to her “rump with folks wanting to get in the movie.”2 Several years later, she recited a long list of interruptions that she endured after Selznick began his search, complaining to the producer on January 30, 1939: “My life has been bedlam . . . very largely because of thousands of people who thought I was producing Gone With the Wind single-handed in my back yard and who believed that I, and I alone, could give them parts in it.” She was not exaggerating. Many people did call her asking for minor parts in the picture or offering to sell their grandparents’ furnishings to be used in the film, and hordes of people bedeviled not only her and John but also her father, brother, and sister-in-law about getting personal letters of introduction so that they could go onto the lot and watch the filmmaking. For awhile, it was not unusual for the Marshes to open the door of their apartment in the mornings to find hoop-skirted, would-be Scarletts, Melanies, and Mammys, begging to see Miss Mitchell.3 They often got late-night telephone calls from people who had been arguing about the cast and “probably drinking about it too since dinnertime,” Peggy wrote Kay. “John is patience itself and soothes indignant ladies who just can’t bear Mr. Gable’s dimples. He tells them that Mr. Selznick would dearly love to have a letter from them on the subject.”4

  The nation of Gone With the Wind fans took a personal interest in casting the roles for the major characters. When a Hollywood reporter announced that it was a cinch the roles of Scarlett and Rhett would be played by Norma Shearer and Clark Gable, Peggy warned Kay that Gable was not popular in the South as he was in other sections of the country. Southerners thought he was a fine actor, “in the tough and hardboiled roles, yes, but in other roles, no.” He did not look or act southern and, she wrote, “he in no way conforms to their notion of a Low-Country Carolinian. In looks and in conduct Basil Rathbone has been the first choice in this section, with Frederic March and Ronald Coleman running second and third.”5 About Norma Shearer, Peggy wrote that southerners thought she was a wonderful actress, but would be “sadly miscast in the part of Scarlett. . . . She has too much dignity and not enough fire for the part.”6

  No different from everyone else, John’s family also speculated about a cast. In answering a letter from his sister, John said:

  You are engaging in what appears to a popular game. But, as a friend, please don’t urge Clark Gable. A great many people have picked him for Rhett, but he is persona non grata to the Marsh-Mitchell family. In our opinion, his he-man stuff is synthetic. He just doesn’t ring the bell. I liked him a lot, years ago, when he first appeared in a picture which I think was called Night Nurse. His socking of ladies on the chin in that picture stirred me greatly, but I have never liked him since. He was good as a tough guy but he has never gotten over with us in parts where the force and violen
ce are more subtle.

  Then he added, “But I suppose it would be difficult for any movie actor to please us in any part, because the people in the book are so much like real people to us.”7

  Contrary to the opinion of southerners, the national favorite for Rhett Butler was Clark Gable, who was without question the greatest sex image and the biggest film star in the entire world.8 But Gable, at that time, was under contract to MGM, who would only loan him to Selznick for 50 percent of the net proceeds for the next seven years. Chary of paying such a price, Selznick considered Gary Cooper, the other great sex symbol of the age, who was under contract to Sam Goldwyn. Although Goldwyn refused to negotiate a deal, by then it did not matter what the producers thought because the public demanded that Gable play Rhett. Uncertain about his ability to meet the public’s expectations of Rhett Butler, Gable did not even want the part. He later said, “Rhett was simply too big an order.”9 Merian Cooper, a member of the Selznick International Pictures board of directors and an old friend of Selznick’s, said flatly: “We couldn’t make the picture and satisfy the public without Gable.”10 It took almost two years of debate and anguish before Selznick finally announced that Gable would play the role.

  A creative genius with manic energy and a passion for excellence, Selznick loved making movies. The confluence of his reverence for the past and his love for classics had been manifested at MGM, where he made splendid films from three long novels—David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Anna Karenina.11 He knew what hard work it was to turn big books into good films. Wanting to capitalize on the public’s consuming interest in what he was about to do with its favorite book, he pleaded, and he got Kay to plead, with Peggy to let him use her manuscript, or parts of it, for promotional purposes. She adamantly refused, claiming she had burned it. So he milked the talent search gimmick for as long as he could—nearly two years.