Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Although she never wrote about Selznick’s demanding personality in any of her newspaper articles, Sue told the Marshes about the time he insisted that Scarlett’s hair hang down about her shoulders, and Hazel Rogers, the hairdresser, got so angry she threatened to quit if she had to make “Scarlett look like a floozy.” Sue wrote, “She would have, too if I had not told George I thought the hair-do was terrible and not of the period and that Mammy and Ellen would have killed Scarlett before they’d have let her go out like that. So George made David change the hair dress and Hazel withdrew her resignation.” One day in early April, Sue wrote Peggy that Walter Plunkett wanted her to know that he was doing his “damndest to have the costumes” as Peggy wished them, but that Selznick, determined to make the picture a sex affair between Rhett and Scarlett, demanded that Scarlett looked pretty no matter what.91

  Always obliging about passing titillating gossip on to the Marshes, she wrote that Leslie Howard was “a tireless Ladies’ man” whose current mistress was a pretty redheaded English girl, Violette Cunningham, whom he introduced as his “secretary” so that Selznick could not complain about her following Howard to the set every day.92 About the makeup artist Monty Westmore, Sue wrote:

  He swears with every breath and knows all the stars and tells their worst points. Like all the other folks out here, he hates the guts out of the actors and actresses and adores talking about their private lives and washing their very dirty linen for us while we roll on the floor with laughter. He told the other day about going to Mae West’s apt to take measurements to make some wigs for her when he worked at Paramount. Mae’s bed, he told us, is wide enough for six men to sleep in—then without a change of countenance he added ‘no doubt six men had slept in it’ and con’d the tale. . . . I’ll tell you more that he told if I ever get back to Georgia.93

  Sue’s opinion of Russell Birdwell, Selznick’s publicity man, who had irritated Peggy two years earlier, delighted the Marshes. Sue wrote, “Well, Birdwell is the revolving bastard if there ever was one. (The Revolving Bastard, in case you don’t know, is a bastard any way you turn him.)” Referring to a draft of her newspaper column about the filming, she explained, “He kept my copy four days and edited the hell out of it.”94

  However, Sue liked all the stars and all the film crew. Laura Hope Crews, who played Aunt Pittypat to perfection, was one of her favorite people, and she adored 73-year-old Harry Davenport, who played Dr. Meade. He made all kinds of fun of the movies and of Selznick too and kept Sue giggling whenever she was around him. She told the Marshes: “He sounds just like a Confederate Decoration Day orator when he talks.”95 But Gable refused to talk “So’thern” and that was that. Although Leslie Howard picked up pronunciations of words quickly, he was not consistent in his usage. Olivia De Havilland had lots of trouble learning certain sounds in Georgia speech. Sue had her practice saying, “I can’t afford a four-door Ford,” and “I can’t dance in fancy pants.”96

  Sue had much to say about Vivien Leigh’s beauty and intelligence. In her diary, she recorded other, even more personal impressions, such as this one on March 3, 1939: “Vivien is a bawdy little thing and hot as a fire cracker and lovely to look at. Can’t understand why Larrie Olivier when she could have anybody.”97 George Cukor agreed. Impressed with her, he thought Vivien fit Margaret Mitchell’s description of Scarlett perfectly. “She was Rabelaisian, this exquisite creature, and told outrageous jokes in that sweet little voice.”98

  12

  For all her blustering bravado about not wanting anything to do with the filmmaking, Peggy plied the Kurtzes, Myrick, and Brown for information about it. At one point Wilbur Kurtz’s wife, Annie Laurie, casually mentioned something in a letter that, Peggy said, “turned my few remaining hairs white.” She wrote a long letter to Sue on February 10, grousing:

  She spoke of the bazaar scene with Scarlett and Rhett dancing together, and mentioned that Scarlett had on a bonnet and veil. In the name of God, what was she doing with a hat on at an evening party where everybody else was bareheaded and wearing low-cut gowns? My temperature jumped seven points at the news. I cannot imagine even Scarlett showing such poor taste.99

  Five days later, the thought of that bonnet and veil were still festering in her mind, and she wrote Sue again: “The more I look at the picture of the bonnet and the veil that Scarlett was wearing at the bazaar the worse it gets. I suppose this must be one of the things that comes under the head of ‘pictorial.’” And then a few days later, she wrote about it again, pleading with Sue, “If they do re-shoot the bazaar, I hope you get the bonnet off Miss Leigh.”100

  With great disdain, Sue replied, “The fools paid John Frederics of NY a hundred bucks for that bonnet and they are bound she’ll wear it.”101

  Peggy’s temperature soared again when she heard about Selznick’s putting columns on Tara, making it and Twelve Oaks far too elegant to be historically authentic. North Georgia houses during the prewar period were not white-columned mansions. Over and over, she explained that the South was not a land of white-columned plantations surrounded by thousands of slaves humming and hoeing cotton as the plantation owners, dressed in white suits and broad-brimmed hats, sat on the porches watching and sipping mint juleps. She mused:

  When I think of the healthy, hardy, country and somewhat crude civilization I depicted and then of the elegance that is to be presented, I cannot help yelping with laughter. God forbid that Scarlett’s Reconstruction house should be a poem of good taste. That would throw out of balance the whole characterization of the woman. Hurrah for George [Cukor] and Mr. Platt [designer for interiors] for standing up for a bad-taste house. Hobe Erwin [interior decorator] had some swell ideas on that house and we had a hot correspondence on wallpaper and many other details, including a perfectly ghastly gas lamp fixture which stood at the bottom of the stairs (my own idea), a large brass nymph, discreetly draped and bearing aloft the gas fixture.102

  The Tara she had described in her book was a square house, built of whitewashed brick and set far back from the road, with an avenue of cedars leading up to it. It was built on a hill a quarter-mile from the river. Peggy had made certain that no such actual house existed, and said she located her Tara on a road that she found on one of General Sherman’s maps of 1864. “This road no longer exists and it has fallen to pieces and I had to travel it on foot.”103 She shuddered to think what Hollywood was going to do with her beloved Tara. A few days later, she read in the Constitution that the State Commission was building a replica of Tara to house the Georgia exhibits at the World’s Fair. She was pleased and excited but also fearful that the commission would build a southern colonial house of the Greek Revival type, such as those in Milledgeville. On February 16, she wrote to Jere Moore, a member of the World’s Fair Commission, thanking him and telling him her concerns. She pleaded with him not to call the house “Tara” if it were not a typical Clayton County house—“ugly and sprawling but comfortable looking.” She explained: “This section of Georgia was so much newer than Middle Georgia and it was cruder, architecturally speaking. I wrote about hardy, hearty country people, whose civilization was only a few years away from the Indians.”104

  In closing, she added, “‘Tara’ was very definitely not a white-columned mansion. I am mortally afraid the movies will depict it as a combination of the Grand Central Station, the old Capitol at Milledgeville, and the Natchez houses of ‘So Red the Rose.’ I fear they will have columns not only on the front of ‘Tara’ but on the sides and back as well, and probably on the smokehouse too. But I can’t do anything about that.” Tara was real and dear to Peggy because in her mind it was the old Fitzgerald farm place, and she was sensitive to what others did to it. But despite Selznick’s insistence on historical accuracy, he refused to have Tara look like a rustic farmhouse.

  This was the only disagreement he and Kurtz had during the entire project. They finally compromised about Tara; instead of round columns on three sides, Selznick agreed to square columns, and in the front only.
But Selznick refused to tone down Twelve Oaks, even though Kurtz told him and the production designer William Cameron Menzies, who had a genius for technicolor and composition, that such a house would not be found in Clayton County.105

  13

  In March, Peggy received a letter stating that Smith College, her alma mater, wished to bestow on her an honorary master of arts degree. Thrilled by the honor, she promised to attend the ceremony on June 12 in Northampton if no one asked her to make any speeches. “I have never been a speechmaker, I have made no speeches at all since July, 1936, and I do not accept invitations even to ‘say a few words.’”106

  As early as February 1938, organizations and individuals, convinced that the world premiere of Gone With the Wind would be in Atlanta, had started hounding Peggy and John for seats. “I really dread the months ahead until the picture has actually been produced,” Peggy had written. “With interest already so high, this coming year may even be harder on us than 1936 was.”107

  By April 1939, John and Peggy had had about as much as they could stand hearing about the filmmaking business, the copyright pirates, and the mounting requests for seats at the premiere. He decided that they needed to get away for a few days. Although they preferred traveling in their own car, Peggy was too nervous to drive, so John made arrangements for them to go by train to the Gulf Coast, where they had never been before. On the day of their departure, a dozen interruptions at John’s office, everything from a sudden downpour of rain to a traffic jam on their way to the station made them fear that they would miss their train. Away only a week, they returned to Atlanta because the weather turned so cold. Nevertheless, after the trip, Peggy felt much better. What they enjoyed the most, John wrote his mother,

  was the blessed relief of never hearing the telephone ring except two or three times when we asked the hotel to wake up us up in the morning, and of spending days at a time just being lazy. . . . We decided some time ago that we must learn how to mix rest periods into our work here in Atlanta, but we haven’t succeeded at it, and it is only when we sever physical connection with our problems and get out of town that we can enjoy a real let-down from the never ending pressure of things that must be attended immediately. That is why our vacation journeys to places where we know nobody and nobody knows us mean so much to us these days.108

  In this letter he did not mention anything about the movie, but he said that their collection of foreign editions had increased with the recent arrival of the Latvian translation. “Steve Mitchell says their language is nearer to Sanscrit than any modern language, so we are not likely to read it. Peggy’s name on the jacket is ‘Margreta Micela.’” He added, “I think I told you that the book had also been published in Japanese—without Peggy’s permission. She had a letter a few days ago from the translator saying he was mailing her a copy. That also will be interesting, but not to read.”

  14

  The Marshes loved getting glossy still pictures from Selznick, who was generous about sending them often. On February 15, Peggy wrote Sue: “The picture of Melanie in labor, with Gone With the Wind clutched to her and Scarlett anxiously cooling her brow, was wonderful. 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.”109

  During the filmmaking, keen attention was given to the actors’ southern accents, and after each take the director would look at Sue and ask, “Okay for Dixie?”110 Clark Gable and Leslie Howard were, according to Sue, the “worst offenders.” Vivien Leigh and the other actors picked up the accent quickly. After awhile, Sue thought things got ridiculous when she received a memo from Selznick saying: “It is probably superfluous for me to remind you that the Yankee officer in the jail scene is not to be coached on Southern accent.”111 When she related this to the Marshes, Peggy responded: “John begs me to ask you not to lose the memorandum…. He says that he and I will believe such a thing but no one else will without documentary proof. We laughed about that all day too.”112

  The Marshes also laughed about another Selznick memorandum saying he understood that Miss Mitchell very strenuously objected to having blacks in the background singing. “He is utterly wrong about this,” Peggy wrote Sue, “and I am so glad that you set him right by stating that I did not want the field hands to suddenly burst into song on the front lawn of Tara.”

  John, not I, was the one who made this objection, but he spoke my ideas. He told George Cukor that everyone here was sick to nausea at seeing the combined Tuskegee and Fisk Jubilee Choirs bounce out at the most inopportune times and in the most inopportune places and sing loud enough to split the eardrums. And even more wearying than the choral effects are the inevitable wavings in the air of several hundred pairs of hands with [their] shadows leaping on walls.

  She thought this kind of thing was appropriate in “Porgy but pretty awful in other shows where it had no place. I feared greatly that three hundred massed Negro singers might be standing on Miss Pittypat’s lawns waving their arms and singing ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home’ when Rhett drives up with the wagon.” As an afterthought she added, “By the way, speaking of musical scores—I hope they keep the music soft.”113

  Although the film crew was working under intense pressure long hours every day, they were a good-natured group with a sense of humor. The Marshes enjoyed reading about the pranks pulled on the actors to keep them from not taking themselves too seriously. One time, the cameramen hid percussive caps under boards that were to be nailed down; when the caps exploded, the grips yelled, “The Yankees are coming!” On April Fool’s Day, when they were to shoot the scene at Aunt Pittypat’s house where Rhett carries the sick Melanie downstairs to put her into the wagon for their flight to Tara, the laugh was on Clark Gable. When the star went to lift the small Olivia De Havilland in his arms, he was shocked because he could barely move her. Batting her eyelashes demurely as she looked up at him, Olivia asked, “Am I heavy?” Gable was dumbfounded until the crew started giggling, and he realized he had been tricked. When Olivia stood up, the several thirty-pound weights that had been hidden in the blanket wrapped around her dropped to the floor.114

  15

  It is ironic that the Golden Age of Hollywood (1931-40) coincided with a national economic depression. During this period many elaborate, expensive period films, or “costume epics,” attracted a populace eager to escape from the Great Depression into such fantasy worlds as that of Gone With the Wind. Certainly, no one seeing Selznick’s sets would have suspected the country was burdened as it was. Referring to Selznick’s friend and business partner, Sue exclaimed: “May God have mercy on the soul of Jock Whitney and his money for I swear these fools are spending enough to make ten movies.” She described the lavish castle the filmmakers had built for Twelve Oaks and the throng of extras they paid to decorate the lawn, the hall, and the piazza for the set. “There were 250 extras at the outdoor shots we made in Busch Gardens in Pasadena (incidentally the barbecue setting looked like the palace at Versailles) not including the twenty colored waiters and the cooks, the ten maid servants and five Mammys and ten little nigger chillun and fifteen white chillun! And that ten acre field of the Anheuser Busch gardens was stinkin with people and horses and tables and benches. And I bet Queen Mary hasn’t as much royal silver [as] the Wilkeses had at that barbecue.”

  Knowing how the Marshes felt about such excesses, she went on to say,

  You’d have died laughing if you could have seen my face when I went to inspect a plate they brought to show in a close up for Scarlett. I must have looked some of my disgust. On the plate was a bone about the size you’d feed a mastiff or a St. Bernard with a bit of meat clinging, a serving of potatoes that would have been bit of meat clinging, a serving of potatoes that would have been enough for the Knights of the Round Table and a huge slice of cake—about the size of which you’d serve guests. I persuaded the prop man to remove the bone, put on a slice of meat, take off half the other stuff and then walked off
the set and frowed up. I can’t decide whether to bust into a sort of wild insane laugh about it all or to walk off the lot.115

  Sue was “sticking it out” because she knew she was “stopping lots of mistakes and gross errors so the few score I can’t stop I’ll just try not to think about.”

  16

  On February 11, the day director George Cukor walked off the set, Sue gave the Marshes the inside scoop. She explained that the problem resulted from the script, or lack of script. In May 1938 screenwriter Sidney Howard, weary of Selznick and the job, had left for New York. Selznick then hired a variety of other writers to work on the script—or rather, to write what he told them to write. Sue said that when Cukor compared the new version of the script to Howard’s, “He groaned and tried to change some parts back to the Howard script. And Peggy, I swear on my word of honor that we often get a scene (say about 2 and half pages script) at five in the afternoon that we are to shoot tomorrow morning. . . . And how can George study scenes and plan out action when he doesn’t know what he is to shoot some days until he comes on the set at 8 o’clock?” She went on to describe how Cukor told Selznick that he would quit if the script were not improved and that he wanted the Howard script back. “David told George he was a director—not an author and he (David) was the producer and the judge of what is good script (or words to that effect) and George said he was director and a damn good one and he would not let his name go out over a lousy picture [and] if they did not go back to the Howard script (he was willing to have them cut it down shorter) he, George, was through. And bull-headed David said ‘O K get out!’”116