Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh
Page 57
After Clark Gable’s good friend Victor Fleming took Cukor’s place, Sue wrote the Marshes, “Fleming seems a bright chap though he is a sour puss if I ever met one.”117 Although she grew to like and respect him too, Cukor remained her favorite.
The problems with the script continued as they all worked fourteen and eighteen hours a day. The arduous schedule made Fleming ill, and on April 27 he collapsed on the set. Sam Wood took over for a few days while Fleming recovered.
The script had been a problem from the start because Selznick was so enamored with the book that he wanted to use everything in it “just as Miss Mitchell had written it.” On January 24, 1939, just two days before the principal filming began, he wrote Peggy asking for help with an important scene introducing Melanie at the barbecue. He asked if she would write dialogue for that scene because he wanted to bring “Melanie to life with the graciousness and sweetness and charm which we hope this character will possess.”118 In a long letter, Peggy answered “No…I can see your problem clearly. I am very sorry that I cannot help you with this problem.”119
As late as May 1938, after Sidney Howard and Selznick had written several drafts, the script was far too long to film. The major problem with editing was Selznick’s desire to keep everything in. He insisted on using Peggy’s dialogue whenever possible.120 Whenever her dialogue was cut out, he would put it back in. At this point, Howard left for New York. Then Selznick asked Hal Kern, his supervising film editor, to tell him how he thought it should be cut. After Kern’s attempt, he got F. Scott Fitzgerald to work on a few scenes for a couple of weeks in January 1939. Having no patience with Selznick’s insistence that only Mitchell’s dialogue be used, Fitzgerald told Selznick that the script had too much of her dialogue in it already and pointed out, among other things, how the actor’s expressions took the place of dialogue. When Peggy learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on the script, she wrote: “If anyone had told me ten or more years ago that he would be working on a book of mine I would have been stricken speechless with pellagra or hardening of the arteries or something.”121
Sue had explained that screenplays are written much the way chefs make soup. “The chef gets an idea from a soup he ate. He spends days making a stock that is just right. He tastes, adds seasonings, tastes again, adds again. Then he adds more things to it until he has the finest soup in the universe. Whereupon, he calls in other chefs and they all stand around and pee in it! And this, the treasonable ones of us seem to agree is what happened about GWTW.”122 It was little gems like this one that prompted Peggy to tell Sue what a great joy her letters brought her and John. “I know you’ll have a crown in Heaven. . . . Your last one, which announced that Sidney Howard was back on the script, kept us laughing all day.”123
But for Sidney Howard the script was no laughing matter. For two weeks in April, Howard was brought back for five hundred dollars a day, and he found the job as difficult as ever. “I have been working very hard and very long hours,” he wrote his wife Polly on April 8.
My job was to lay out the end and put it back in shape for shooting. Selznick is the same. He is obdurately refusing to cut the story or to condense and combine. . . . My difficulty in breaking away is not going to be leaving the script unfinished because I can finish it easily and may even get it OKed. The jam I see ahead is the hypersensitive state of everything connected with the picture. I have never been placed in quite this position of having everybody come to me to take their trouble to David because I am the only person around who doesn’t upset him. And he feels that and calls me in to listen to all manner of problems with which, as writer, I have nothing whatever to do. And I want to get home.124
Several days later, he described to his wife what he called “a miasma of fatigue” engulfing his environment. About Fleming, who had already collapsed from exhaustion on the set once, Howard wrote: “Fleming takes four shots of something a day to keep going and another shot or so to fix him so he can sleep after the day’s stimulants. Selznick is bent double with permanent, and I should think, chronic indigestion. Half the staff look, talk and behave as though they were on the verge of breakdowns. When I have anything to say I have to phrase it with exaggerated clarity. I can stay on here almost indefinitely at $500.00 a day. Nothing would please Selznick more in spite of the fact that I persuaded him to let me go this Wednesday.”125
Before Howard left, he told Sue the script was finished, adding that no doubt Selznick would rewrite it and would probably call him back from New York in a few weeks to rewrite it again. However, that was the last time Howard worked on the script. He did not live to see the film. He died in August 1939 in a tractor accident on his farm near Tryingham, Massachusetts.
Although their names are not listed in the screenplay credit, more than a dozen other gifted writers, including John Van Druten, Ben Hecht, Barbara “Bobby” Keon, Oliver H. P. Garrett, Charles MacArthur, Donald Odgen Stewart, John Lee Mahin, Val Newton, Jo Swerling, Winston Miller, Edwin Justus Mayer, and F. Scott Fitzgerald contributed to the script. It is impossible to distinguish the work of each writer, and only Sidney Howard’s name appears as the writer of the screenplay.
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On June 27, 1939, five months and one day after the filming of Gone With the Wind began, it ended—except for some final shooting with bit players. It was completely finished on November 11, with 160,000 feet of film printed out of the 449,512 feet shot. The total cost was more than that of any other film in the history of Hollywood movie making—$4,085,790. Selznick’s wife, Irene, described the film as “the longest running emergency on record.”126
When Annie Laurie Kurtz returned to Atlanta, she brought Peggy a gift from one of the young women in the wardrobe department. Thinking that Miss Mitchell would like to have a memento of the film, the studio worker, after being told that Peggy had a predilection for little pillows, made her one by sewing together scraps of Scarlett’s costumes.127 Peggy was moved by the girl’s thoughtfulness and kept the pillow in her rocking chair by the window in the living room.
By August, the news had come that the premiere of the movie would be held in Atlanta and also that Macmillan was getting ready to put out a paperbound motion picture edition of the book on the market coincidentally with the showing of the movie. John wrote his mother that Atlanta was as excited about the premiere “as if America was about to be discovered again or the San Francisco earthquake was about to take place or something else of equal magnitude.” He wrote that if it were possible to show the picture at the Georgia Tech stadium, he was confident it would be filled to its thirty-thousand-seat capacity.
We spend our time telling people that we have ab-so-lute-ly nothing to do with the premiere, because we don’t intend to stand the grief of placating all the folks who won’t be able to get in, but a considerable part of the troubles are bound to roost on our doorstep anyhow. Tasmania or Tibet are the places where we would like to be for a month before and a month after the premiere, but the old sense of duty, the thing that has already caused us so many of the past troubles, will hold us here, I suppose, and I hope we live through it.128
Another thing that temporarily disrupted their lives was their move into the Della Manta apartments at 1268 Piedmont Avenue, apartment 3. For a long time they had needed more space, particularly, as John said to his mother, “ever since Peggy’s book made it necessary for me to work here at home nearly seven nights a week and all weekends and holidays.” This new home gave him the extra room he needed for an office, and it also gave them a sort of separation between their living and working quarters. He wrote, “That’s pretty important after years of trying to live in a clutter of papers, file cases, typewriters, and other mess.” This apartment looked out on the woods north of Piedmont Park, Atlanta’s biggest park, about eight or ten blocks from where they were living and “Over thataway,” John said. “And so for the first time in our married lives we will be out from under the eyes of neighbors and can parade around in our bvd’s at any hour of the day or nigh
t we please.”129
All of the letters John wrote to his mother in 1939 reveal that he was under a tremendous strain. While Peggy fastened on all the minutiae about the filmmaking, John struggled with the foreign copyright problems and his work at the Power Company. On September 1, 1939, the day World War II began when Germany overran Poland, all he had to write was,
I suppose I should be saying appropriate things about the war, but I am sorry to say that I haven’t been able to get excited about it. This is partly because I have felt for a long time that a war was inevitable, that unless God struck Hitler down we mortals would have to pitch in and do it. But the principal cause of my disinterest is a phenomenon Peggy and I have noticed many times before and which we call “making molehills out of mountains.” We have taken such a battering, emotionally and otherwise, it is difficult for us to get worked up about anything.130
When Mayor William B. Hartsfield received a letter from Selznick in November 1939 confirming that Atlanta would host the premiere on December 15, the incredible, city-wide enthusiasm that had been reigning for months intensified. It seemed as if just about everyone wanted to attend the first showing. Loew’s, parent company of MGM and distributor of the motion picture, decided to show the movie on a reserved-seat basis at Loew’s Grand Theatre, which seated about 2,050. A special box office opened on November 18 to handle sales of tickets for the regular run of the movie, scheduled to begin the day after the premiere. By December 11, advance sales totaled almost $47,000, for two shows a day at $1.50 a ticket.131
The problems for Peggy also intensified, as many people thought that all they had to do was to ask her or John to get them tickets for the event. A few tickets had been set aside for the Marshes, but these went to family members and to those closest to them, such as Margaret Baugh and Rhoda Williams Kling. Nevertheless, no one seemed to believe that Peggy could not get extra tickets.
In another letter to his mother dated November 22, 1939, John announced: “The theater where the picture is to be shown has only two thousand seats, whereas several times that number are determined to see the film on the first night. That has been one of the principal causes of our trouble. By telephone, telegraph, letter, and personal pleading, we have been importuned to get seats for friends, relatives, and total strangers.
He concluded, “If we live through December, we will feel that we have scored a triumph, for Atlanta has gone plumb crazy.”132
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Always an observer, John liked to stand back and watch people, and the line of people waiting to buy tickets to the movie fascinated him. A couple of times during the days before the premiere, he walked around to where the line had formed and followed it completely around the four sides of a large city block and down the next block. He wrote his mother, “It’s interesting to see the expression of relief on their faces when they actually get the tickets in their hands.”133
Peggy declined George Brett’s and Macmillan’s invitation to give her a grand party the night of the premiere. In a six-page letter, she described the hundreds of other invitations she had refused, and the one she accepted. Having joined only one organization, the Atlanta Women’s Press Club, because the members were all active newspaper women and old friends of hers, she was only going to attend the club’s small, informal party. No gaudy Hollywood affair with spotlights, champagne, and ballyhoo for her. All of her family, the managing editors of the three papers, the mayor and the governor, Selznick, Kay Brown, and any members of the cast who wished to attend were invited. She asked, “Cannot you and any others of the Macmillan folks who come to Atlanta be the guests of the Press Club party?” Assuming her modest southern lady persona, Peggy wrote Brett:
I accepted it…partly because of old friendships, partly because of my obligations to the members of the club, but chiefly because of the nature of the party they were planning—one that would be simple, unpretentious and in good taste.… If they had been planning a Hollywoodish kind of party I would not have accepted, even for my oldest and dearest friends.
About Atlanta’s feelings, she said:
I do not believe that you or anyone outside of Georgia can realize how strongly Atlanta feels about this whole situation. In your letter, you referred to the premiere as “Selznick’s show.” I don’t believe Atlanta people feel that way about it all. Mr. Selznick will put on the show, of course, but the premiere will be Atlanta’s night, not Selznick’s. Long ago, I gave up thinking of Gone With the Wind as my book; it’s Atlanta’s, in the view of Atlantans; the movie is Atlanta’s film; and the premiere will be an Atlanta event, not merely the showing of a motion picture. From the way things are shaping up, my guess is that it will be one of the biggest events in Atlanta’s modern history.134
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Scheduled for Friday, December 15, at Loew’s Grand on Peachtree Street, the premiere caused a tidal wave of excitement that was without precedent. Clubs and organizations, most businesses, even schools and churches, had some kind of GWTW event planned. In speaking with Sel-znick by telephone in early December, John advised him to be prepared for the worst—for “‘a kindness and hospitality that could kill’ and a city for which the premiere would be ‘the major event of modern times.’”135
The celebration began on Wednesday, as the stars and celebrities started arriving by plane and train. City officials greeted each guest. The first to arrive were the director of advertising for MGM, Howard Dietz, and his wife, along with Howard Strickling, the director of publicity on the West Coast. They came to help Selznick’s team convert Atlanta into one huge, live advertisement for Gone With the Wind. Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett’s sweet youngest sister, was the first actress to arrive. Wednesday afternoon, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, David and Irene Selznick, and Laurence Olivier arrived by plane also. Mayor Hartsfield gave them a warm greeting and presented huge bouquets of roses to each lady. Then, they were whisked off to the Georgian Terrace hotel. Later that day, Ona Munson, who played Belle Watling, and Atlanta’s own Evelyn Keyes, who played Suellen O’Hara, also came in by plane.
The Hollywood people were friendly and gracious but curious, asking when they could meet Margaret Mitchell.136 That night, the Selznicks, de Havilland, Leigh, and Olivier met John and Peggy in a private visit at the Marshes’ apartment. All were as thrilled to meet the author as she was to meet them and they spoke of her modesty and generosity. One of the little-known thoughtful acts that Peggy did was to have azaleas placed in the hotel rooms of all persons associated with the film. She also sent a telegram to Hattie McDaniel saying how sorry she was that “Mammy” was not there for the premiere.
On Thursday morning, Laura Hope Crews, “Aunt Pittypat,” stepped off the train at Union Station in an appropriate state of palpitations because the train in which she was riding had been in a slight accident. That afternoon, Claudette Colbert, who was not in the movie, arrived by train. An enormously popular star at the time and a close friend of the Selznicks, Colbert wanted to come along for the fun. Later that afternoon, all the celebrities left the hotel for Candler Field to wait for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Once “Rhett Butler” arrived, everyone piled into automobiles again for the motorcade back to the city. Watching for the thirty convertibles carrying the stars and the celebrities, people were standing six deep at the curb for the full nine miles from the airport in Hapeville to Five Points downtown. One source estimated the crowd as around 650,000. In 1939, the population of Atlanta was 300,000, and it more than doubled for this event. The motorcade ended in front of the Georgian Terrace at the corner of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue, less than a mile from the business district.
The downtown crowd was estimated at more than 300,000, and the crowd crammed tightly in front of the hotel, straining to see the celebrities assembled on the platform, at more than 20,000.137 Dressed in a ten-gallon hat and jimswinger coat, Lambdin Kay, manager of Atlanta’s first radio station, WSB, announced the names of the guests for this program that was nationally broadcast.