Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  The Atlanta newspapers during this period are full of examples of the press’s interest in Mitchell minutiae. For example, on December 14, 1936, Peggy got a parking ticket for the first time in her life. She had not parked illegally, but rather than take the time to argue the case, which she believed would cause headlines, she had Stephens go down to the courthouse and pay the three-dollar fine. Despite her efforts, however, news of Peggy’s traffic ticket was published in the newspapers and broadcast over the radio.

  Newspapers carried stories about the kinds of gifts the Marshes sent as wedding presents. Sometimes, casual remarks Peggy had made to supposedly good friends were spread all over town or printed in the newspapers, “with the result,” John wrote his mother, “that she now keeps her mouth shut or talks in platitudes except when she is with very dear and trusted friends . . . she is being forced into two-facedness, into talking one way before her ‘dear public’ and being herself only when in the presence of the family or friends who can be relied upon.”38

  John was rightfully frustrated, for he was losing all control over their lives. No one annoyed him more than the clerks in the Atlanta Western Union office, who got positively euphoric every time Peggy received or sent a telegram. They repeated publicly every word that went across the wire from or to her. Without her knowledge, much less permission, they even reported her telegrams to the newspapers, including her telegram from Leslie Howard. When Howard wired Peggy on January 13, 1939, the telegraph operator, instead of calling Peggy first, called the Atlanta Constitution notifying the city editor that Miss Mitchell had received a wire from the British actor. The editor showed Peggy the courtesy of calling her. “I feebly told the newspaper editor that yours was a personal wire, but little good that did,” Peggy wrote Howard. “Now I am not sorry that it was published for everyone thought it amusing and charming. I suppose you know that from the beginning you have been the choice of this section for the part of Ashley. Here in the South a sigh of relief went up when the announcement about you was made. . . . I look forward to the time when I can see you as Ashley Wilkes.”39 Peggy was not exaggerating when she wrote Howard, “I have little privacy these days and whether I like it or not, almost everything that happens to me becomes public property.”

  5

  When she visited the Marshes for the first time in December 1936, Kay Brown emphasized Selznick’s determination to maintain the authenticity of the dialects and of every other aspect of the novel. When she returned in late 1938, she repeated Selznick’s urgent, sincere request that Peggy please come to California, as a well-paid advisor, to oversee the filming and to act as a historical consultant. Even though Peggy cared about the film as much as Selznick did and was surely more curious than anyone else about the filmmaking process, she refused the offer. “I don’t mind being obliging and I am hopeful that the picture will be accurate as to the background, costumes, etc., but I can’t and won’t take on the responsibilities of serving as an adviser and we might as well understand each other on that point before we go any further.”40 It was around this time that she and John seriously started thinking about whom they could recommend to go to Hollywood on her behalf.

  Meanwhile, she sympathetically answered many questions for the “Selznickers,” for as John pointed out to her and to his family, the kinds of things Selznick’s research department asked proved the dedication the producer had to achieving authenticity in details.41 The Marshes were eager to assist in this important matter. Above all else, they did not want history distorted, for, as Peggy told Selznick, “Southerners get indignant when our history is portrayed improperly.”42 The diligent research department, managed by the highly competent Lillian Deighton, was having a difficult time finding visual information on Atlanta during the period of the novel because so much of Atlanta’s past had been destroyed in the 1864 fire. They desperately needed old pictures, photographs, and other tangible evidence of the period.43 Some of Deighton’s questions were forwarded to Peggy through Assistant Director Eric Stacy:

  How many house servants at Tara? How many people would be seen at prayer and the nature of the group? What type of orchestra played at Belle Watling’s establishment? Trio? Quartet? What instruments? Were there sheep on lawns of some of the big houses? What type of music would they play? How many people attended the barbecue at Twelve Oaks? Proportion of adults and children? Proportion of old and young? Were colored children and white children playing together? How many slaves would be seen at one time at Tara? How many men in artillery Battalion. Did the convicts working at Scarlett’s mill wear uniforms or rags? Could a hospital in Atlanta during wartime be located in a church? Was the symbol of the Red Cross used on ambulances in the Civil War?44

  Peggy answered every question as thoroughly as she could. For instance, she wrote that she did not believe the Red Cross insignia was in use in the South at that time, and about the sheep on the lawns, she answered no. “It was hard to grow grass, except Bermuda grass, and people were very proud of their lawns. They did not even want chickens to scratch there. The sheep would have been in the sheep pasture, perhaps next to the cow pasture, but not a part of the cow pasture as sheep cut the grass so much shorter than cows. On some plantations the sheep were rotated through several pastures in order to give the grass time to grow again.”

  She explained that black and white children did play together. “It was the custom then for each white child to be given a colored child as a ‘play child’ and the children were inseparable. (As the ‘play children’ of the little girls grew up they became maids to their mistresses. Many of the ‘play children’ of the boys, when they grew up, went off to the War with their masters.) White children frequently went into tantrums if their ‘play children’ could not accompany them to fetes such as the barbecue.”

  The wardrobe department had its own problems with research and wanted to know such things as, “Was Mammy’s headkerchief tied with knots showing or knots tucked under?” Truly impressed with this question, Peggy rooted around in her files for hours searching for some old photographs of women wearing such kerchiefs but was unable to find any. Disgusted, she told John, “Hell if I know, and I’m not going out on a limb over a head rag.”45

  Whenever Sidney Howard asked her questions about such details as blockaders’ stores, names of ladies’ charitable societies, refugee centers, signs on churches calling for iron, cast iron balconies in prewar Atlanta, crops, and medical treatments, Peggy went out of her way to answer. What she did not know, she researched thoroughly. Her letters answering these questions are interesting and informative and prove her in-depth knowledge of the Civil War period and the vast amount of oral history she had collected. About the iron balconies, she said that she had never heard of them nor seen any pictures of them. She explained that that type of architectural decoration was found in the coast section, 250 miles away around Savannah, and that it had reached its glory in New Orleans. She pointed out that “most of the iron in Atlanta had been donated for muni-tion purposes long before Gettysburg because the pinch of the blockade was felt before the summer of 1863.”46

  None of the old people with whom she had talked remembered a single iron balcony in Atlanta during the war period. “Nor did any of them recall any signs on churches calling for iron or, for that matter, calling for anything. The churches did not ever have such signs upon them. Any appeals of this type would have appeared in the Atlanta papers,” she explained. Because of the serious paper shortage, she doubted if there would have been any handbills bearing such appeals, and as best she could determine, General Beauregard’s last appeal for old iron came some time shortly before March 27, 1862, when the general asked for church bells. The original appeal she found in the Beauregard Collection of the Confederate Memorial Museum in Richmond, Virginia.

  I do not know about the general response to this appeal. I only know that the Methodist Protestant Church in Atlanta, of which my great-grandfather was a minister, gave their bell in 1862.

  The memories of ol
d timers agree with what I had heard about there being no charitable centers for refugees. The best help I can give you on this matter is as follows. Adjoining the railroad tracks and the depot was the city park. It would be in this park that refugees who came by train would pause. Here they would wait with their baggage until friends and relatives came in their carriages to get them . . . or until some kind-hearted citizen offered them shelter, or they would sit until they started the weary tramp around the town to find what already overcrowded boarding houses could take them in.

  About the blockaders’ stores—blockade goods was sold in several ways. Many storekeepers went to Wilmington [North Carolina] and bought goods on the docks at auction and shipped them back to Atlanta to their stores. Others had large warehouses in Atlanta. They had their agents in Wilmington ship the goods to the warehouses and they held auctions in these warehouses. . . . Men engaged in blockading cotton to England had offices here in Atlanta for the purpose of purchasing cotton from the rural districts around the city. These establishments—wholesale, retail and cotton offices—would probably have borne no other signs than the names of the proprietors . . . the stores usually announced the arrival of new blockade goods by advertisement in the newspapers, although I have seen a handbill which ran vaguely like this, “Blank & Blank beg to announce that they have just received a consignment of goods through the blockade—toothbrushes, ladies’ merinos, fine tarlatans, etc.” I am still hunting for one of these ads so I can send you a photostat.

  She provided Howard with names of all the ladies’ charitable societies and explained that those organizations corresponded to the ladies’ canteen workers during World War I in that they met all troop trains with such items as baskets of food and socks. These volunteers also assisted the doctors in getting the wounded off the trains and into hospitals and even took some convalescents into their own homes. And she said the closest thing that she could find to a refugee center was the “Calico House,” where all garments, packages, bandages, and food for soldiers and their needs were assembled.47

  6

  As swarms of people continued to seek roles in the film, swarms of others insisted that the actors in the leading roles be southerners, with southern looks, manners, actions, and accents. For a while, during the time the cast for the movie was still being selected, chain letters circulated around the South asking that southern accents be used in the film. Peggy wrote Herschel Brickell this amusing evaluation of southern accents.

  The political races are on and the air thick with campaign speeches. Yesterday, Mr. Roosevelt invaded Georgia to try to swing the senatorial election from the Conservative Democrats. I listened to the speaking and I hope sincerely that the Selznick company was not listening. The reason is this—many Southern newspapers have been running campaigns urging Mr. Selznick to use real Southern accents in GWTW. They’ve raved about the beauty of Southern voices, the accuracy of pronunciation and enunciation; they’ve threatened to boycott the movie if the Southern accent isn’t right. Yesterday, after listening to a vast number of Southern accents, I thought how bewildered Mr. Selznick would be. I don’t believe Southerners realize how they sound. Those on the air yesterday were not illiterate country folk—they were college graduates and the flower and chivalry of our dear Southland—and they said: “Sarroldy” for Saturday, “yestiddy” for yesterday, “neye-eeece” for nice, “guh-munt” for government, “intehdooce” for introduce, “instuhment” for instrument, and “puhzuhve” for preserve.

  If the bewildered Mr. Selznick made his puppets speak like this the South, suh, would secede and declare that we had all been insulted.48

  So many people had expressed their wish to Selznick that he not have his actors use “imitation” southern accents that he became sensitive to this request. He insisted that his staff be sensitive too. In fun, some of them started practicing such expressions as “Good mawning!” or “G’mawning!” or “I heah yo’all down thar,” or “I’ve never bean in Georgia befor’.” Even Cukor started talking southern, and by the time filming began, he pronounced all words containing “R’s” just as any Georgian would.49

  While Kay was testing the Wisconsin-born Ona Munson in the studio for the role of Belle Watling, she telephoned Peggy asking her if Belle’s accent would have been different from Scarlett’s and Melanie’s and in what way. Peggy tried to explain that the accent did vary “as it always does between the educated and the illiterate,” that “the voices would be flat and slightly nasal,” and that “they generally changed e’s and i’s—calling a pen ‘a pin,’ men ‘min’ and accenting such words as settlement and government on the last syllable, ‘settlemint’ and ‘governmint.’” Kay got confused listening to her and asked if there were any southerners in New York who could sit in on an audition for Belle and help out with the accent. Peggy recommended Elinor Hillyer or Norma and Herschel Brickell. In telling Brickell what she had done, she said:

  Knowing the movie people and their ways, I would not be at all surprised if they had dispatched Rolls Royces with couriers and outriders to Ridgefield last night to kidnap you and Norma. . . . My modest and old fashioned family have become accustomed to anything in the last year and a half and, like the queen in “Alice in Wonderland” get up every morning ready to believe six impossible things before breakfast.50

  Even her father was convulsed at the idea of someone telephoning from New York to discover how the madame of a Confederate bordello talked.51

  Early on, a possible solution to the problem of ensuring southern authenticity had been suggested by W. T. Anderson, the editor and publisher of the Macon Telegraph. Anderson wrote that Sue Myrick, one of his writers, had told him about how Peggy had refused to go to Hollywood to see that her book was correctly filmed. He suggested: “If you don’t think of anything better I should like to see Sue Myrick deputized to supervise. She has studied stage business, knows Southern dialect, has a Southern background and understands the characters and the qualities every foot of the way. I think you would do the best job, and think Sue would do the second best job. She’d fight to keep the picture off the rocks.”52

  A tall, plain-looking, blond-haired woman, Sue Myrick sparkled with genuine enthusiasm for people and for life. Witty, intelligent, and popular, she had never married and lived all of her life in Macon, where she wrote for the newspaper. Although she was forty-five years old in 1938, she looked and acted much younger, and she and Peggy had the same sense of mischief and fun.53 Peggy had this to say about her: “Unfortunately, she is full of dialect stories about Negroes and Crackers. She inspires John and me to similar stories. After an hour of this we are unable to talk grammatically in normal social intercourse. For days after Sue has been here we sound like a group of Erskine Caldwell’s characters having a reunion with the characters of Joe Chandler Harris.”54

  After talking it over, John and Peggy decided that Anderson’s idea was a good one, especially since Sue would surely share with them all the “graveyard secret stuff” about the filmmaking that a stranger would never share. So Peggy replied to Anderson, “I will certainly beat the drum for her.” But for some reason, she said nothing about the matter to Kay Brown until two months later after she met Sue again, in Macon, at the funeral of their mutual friend Aaron Bernd. It was at that time that Peggy became convinced that Sue could be trusted and would indeed be the ideal person to go to Hollywood. The next day, February 14, 1937, Peggy wrote a long letter to Kay praising Sue’s qualifications and wisely omitting the part about Sue’s study of “stage business” for fear that might destroy her chances of being selected. Peggy concluded her letter by saying, “Now, Katharine, please don’t think you’ve got to consider her seriously just because I suggested her or just because she’s a friend of mine. If the idea doesn’t seem good to you, just tell me so. It won’t bother me and Sue will never know that I’ve written to you so there’ll be no skin off anyone’s nose.”55

  The other person Peggy recommended as a possible advisor for the film was the well-kn
own Atlanta architect, writer, and painter Wilbur Kurtz, originally from Indiana. As a young man he had talked with Civil War veterans and walked over the battlefields with them, and he knew the Atlanta campaign like the back of his hand. Peggy said, “He knows where every battery stood and where every mule got its ears shot off.”56 In recommending him to Kay on March 8, 1937, Peggy explained that Kurtz was one of the greatest authorities on the Civil War in that section and “had mapped out the position of the troops. He has a fine collection of early Atlanta pictures . . . if you wanted an honest to God expert on the War part of the picture you couldn’t do better than kidnap Mr. Kurtz and take him to Hollywood.”57

  Kurtz really wanted to go to Hollywood, and he even campaigned for the job by writing to the president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. Early in 1938, he was hired as the historian for the film, and his wife, Annie Laurie Fuller Kurtz, was also hired as an authority on rural Georgia accent. They went to Hollywood for three weeks in late January. Although he thought the movie people would ignore him, Kurtz found just the opposite to be true. They were pleased to have his assistance and respected him. Not long after he reached Culver City, Kurtz assured the Marshes that Selznick’s desire for authenticity was genuine and described one of his first conversations with the producer:

  Mr. Selznick asked me, “What did Atlanta look like in 1862?” “Well,” I said, “it had a population of something like ten thousand in 1860. It had a city hall of some architectural pretensions.” The question I was answering was this: In what manner did Atlanta differ from any other Western town? He was thinking about the same kind of movie sets that are used in Wild West things. “A city hall of architectural pretensions. Three churches with tall spires pointing heavenward. Gaslight street illumination. Three-story buildings. And a car shed built to accommodate the four railroads of Atlanta. A huge structure. . . .” “You say that’s the car shed that is mentioned in the novel?” “Yes sir.” “Well, I thought it was one of those little butterfly sheds that you see at railroad stations today.” “No,” I said, “it was one hundred feet by three hundred feet long. It had four railroad tracks running through it.” He slammed his fist on the table and said, “We’ll build it.”58