Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Later, when the picture was in its fifth week in Atlanta and still playing to sold-out houses, John noted that he had never been past the theater when there was not a line of people at the ticket window. The booksellers told him that film lovers were buying the newly published, 69-cent motion picture edition of the book as quickly as the volumes were placed on the bookstore shelves.10

  3

  On Saturday, January 13, 1940, Peggy entered Piedmont Hospital for surgery to remove abdominal adhesions; it was surgery that she had been putting off for nearly a year—until after the premiere. Her surgery went well, but while she was on her way to recovery, John came down with a severe case of the flu that he could not seem to shake. After three weeks of running a persistent but low temperature and feeling so ill that he could not keep up with his work, he entered St. Joseph’s Infirmary. Tests showed that he had high blood pressure. Living on a treadmill that spit out one deadline after another, plus plenty of nicotine, spelled coronary heart disease.11

  Although his fever vanished after he rested a week in the hospital, his vitality and strength did not return. Peggy told his mother, “I think rest will do wonders for him, and I wish so fervently he could have a long one.”12 Knowing how intensely driven John was, his physician, Dr. W. C. Waters, urged him to cut back on his fifty-to-sixty cigarettes a day and to play some golf. He was convinced that John’s present problems were largely due to physical exhaustion and emotional strain. He reminded him that two years earlier he had warned him to cut back on his smoking and his work because his body was pointing out in more than one way that it was being pushed too hard. This time, Dr. Waters told him and Peggy outright that if John did not take radical steps to slow down, the consequences would be dire.13

  John’s thinness, listlessness, and the depression that showed through his pale blue eyes as they both listened to the doctor made Peggy weep. She knew now for certain that he could not continue his late-night and weekend work on the foreign copyright business and keep up with his daytime job, too. As she explained to his mother, for four years he had worked all day at the Power Company and most of the nights and weekends at home. They seldom had time to go to the movies or have friends in because “visitors at night mean that we have to start our work after they leave, and frequently John works till four o’clock.”14 Drastic changes had to be made in their lives. After Dr. Waters left, Peggy sat on the edge of John’s bed and told him she wanted him to resign from Georgia Power so that he could concentrate solely on his Gone With the Wind business. Taking care of the foreign copyrights was clearly a full-time job that only he could do, but others could do his work at the Power Company.

  A few days later, in explaining his situation to his mother, John wrote:

  The story is briefly this—For four years I have been working day and night, almost literally seven days a week. It hasn’t broken me yet, but the doctors say it is certain to break me if I keep it up much longer. So I am taking the only step open to me. I can’t quit my “M. Mitchell job.” So, I am quitting the one I can quit. I will still have a full-size job; I merely won’t be trying to do two men’s work, won’t be breaking my back trying to do the impossible, will have enough to keep me busy but with sometime left over for recreation and diversion and for getting my health built up again. And for seeing my folks, too!15

  He and Peggy had always kept thinking that his “M. Mitchell job” would end. “Always we think that if we can get over the top of the hill we are climbing, our troubles will be over and always there are more hills beyond.”16 He did not now need Dr. Waters to tell him that he was on a timetable of destruction; his chest pains told him eloquently enough. For the first time ever, he admitted to his mother that he was seriously sick: “In the past several months, I have been getting pretty discouraged about the never-endingness of the ‘M.M.’ job, but it was the mysterious temperature of recent weeks that finally brought things to a head. . . . Any rate, I reached the state of mind where I was ready to quit, resign, give up my job entirely, anything to get a little rest.”17

  Then, he went on to say that Mr. Arkwright, who “took a fair and generous view,” refused to let him resign and, instead, offered him a year’s leave of absence. John accepted this offer only on the condition that he would not be on the payroll. Feeling as if he had imposed enough on the company, he wrote:

  Home work has interfered with my Company work for some time and has taken time and energy which my regular job would normally have gotten. So I wouldn’t have felt right about taking such a long vacation on pay. I am happy enough to know that the job is there waiting for me when I am in shape to go back to it, for my thoughts about resigning were not because of any desire to cut loose entirely. I felt definitely nervous about the possibility of having no job, and it was quite a relief when Mr. Arkwright offered me the leave of absence.”18

  Oddly enough, John never considered his work on the book as a real job; he always viewed it as just a way of helping Peggy. In his mind, his real job was at Georgia Power, and his identity was so intricately tied into his work there that he found it painful to let it go.

  4

  Peggy had John as buffer between her and the world, but John had no such protection. As the months rolled into years and the book’s business increased instead of diminishing, he had a pervasive feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. Although he always seemed calm—everyone spoke of his calmness—he was in a constant state of vigilance, always challenged by the fear that he was going to lose all control of their lives.

  His illness in early 1940 was precipitated by a run-in he had with George Brett that began a few months before the film was released. The trouble started when Brett asked Peggy to make concessions on her royalties. He felt as if he were taking a huge risk publishing the 69-cent paperback and also a two-dollar hardback, especially since Selznick was refusing to let him use movie stills, which he believed would enhance the book and make it more marketable. Therefore Brett asked that she agree to a 50 percent cut in her royalty. John thought that Brett’s request unfairly violated Peggy’s contract, and he was only willing to trade on any proposition that would be to the advantage of both parties—Macmillan and Mitchell.19 If Brett wanted to deviate from the contract and ask Peggy to make concessions in order to help him out with his gamble, then Brett should make concessions too, and should offer to make them. John scolded the publisher: “It is not right for you to put me in the embarrassing position of having to ask for them each time.”20

  Several very frank and angry letters shot back and forth between them. In his last letter to Brett, John explained, “The whole thing is a matter of principle with me, a point of honor, in fact.” He pointed out that he had no idea if Macmillan were going to sell ten million copies or one hundred thousand, but he had serious doubts that any really big volume could be sold. After all, the book had been on sale for a long time. So, he stressed, the amount of money involved, either way, was not enough to quarrel about. “But the principle is,” he thundered. “And it becomes a point of honor.… Briefly and bluntly, your proposition is the sort that a grown person might offer to a child, according to my way of looking at it.… If my sacrifice makes it possible for you to make big profits, then you placed yourself under an obligation to reward me for my sacrifice.” Brett had said that if the venture proved successful, they would reinstate Peggy’s usual royalties as stated in the original contract. But John pointed out that a return to “the straight royalties is not a reward. Unless there is something extra, no reward has been paid. You have gotten the benefit of my sacrifice without compensating me for it.”21 And that, in John’s mind, was grossly unfair.

  His position seemed so simple that he could not see why Brett did not understand it. After all, he pointed out, he had never asked Brett to increase the royalties when the novel turned out to be such a phenomenal success. Nevertheless, he said he would accept Brett’s terms because he believed that failure to have the two-dollar edition or some other edition on the market soon would cr
eate an embarrassing situation and, while he would not be to blame for it, he would be involved in it. “I am too weary these days to get into any embarrassing situation which I can avoid, so if you insist . . . I agree to it.”22

  Fortunately, the situation eventually reached an amicable solution. When Brett received the final cost reports, he was pleased to find that his original figures were slightly inaccurate. He sent the Marshes a sample of the new edition, which he called “a gorgeous thing,” and said these new costs indicated that Peggy could continue to receive her usual 15 percent royalty. He was “mighty happy” that costs had worked out so as to make this scale economically possible. By March, a very happy Brett told the Marshes that Macmillan had only about three hundred thousand copies left out of the 1,050,000 copies they had printed. He and Alec Blanton, his business manager, were betting that they would sell them and more of what he called “your remarkable novel. What a history it is writing in the annals of American publishing.”23

  5

  Since Gone With the Wind had become such a phenomenal commercial success, a few literary critics began panning it on the obvious assumption that literary and commercial value were mutually exclusive. Loathing that kind of superficial logic, John wondered aloud if such critics realized that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dickens were both commercial and literary successes. He and Peggy were delighted when a woman in North Carolina sent them a review of the movie that criticized such critics. In her column, “Scarlett Materializes,” for the February 18, 1940, edition of the Raleigh News, Nell Battle Lewis began:

  The high brow critics make me laugh. It is not comme il faut, you know, to consider Gone With the Wind a very good piece of literary work. It’s really not so much of a book, it seems—except in the minds of several million readers with whose low-brow opinion no real critic could agree. But, regardless of such an estimate, Scarlett is not going down in literature any more than in life. Hear me turn prophet: Scarlett is going to survive the high brow critics. For as long as life is a challenge which men must have courage to meet, the fighting O’Hara who wouldn’t say die is going to live.24

  In her letter thanking Lewis, Peggy provides insight into a reaction exhibited by the moviegoers. She mentioned how especially interested she was in what the reviewer had written about the lack of applause when the Confederate battle flag was shown flying over the acres of wounded Confederate soldiers at the car shed. At the premiere in Atlanta, Peggy explained, there was a great deal of applause early in the picture, and later on, when “Scarlett shot the Yankee deserter on the stair the tense audience practically yelled. But during the scene you mentioned there was a deathly stillness, just as you noted in the Raleigh theatre.” She, John, and some others had talked about the audience’s reaction to that same scene. “One man summed it up this way—‘Have you ever felt like applauding in a Confederate Cemetery on Memorial Day? No, you haven’t; you feel something too deep for applause.’ I think he was on the right track. Had the Confederate flag been shown for the same length of time over a crowd of charging soldiers or even going down a dusty road in retreat, I think audiences would have yelled themselves hoarse.”25

  6

  As spring rolled into summer 1940, the world news was unsettling. Things changed almost overnight when France surrendered to Germany in June, placing England in serious danger. As increasingly tragic events unfolded daily, it became clear that the United States was going to have to enter the conflict. On the same June day when the Germans invaded Holland, the Marshes started their automobile trip to Wilmington, Delaware, to attend John’s family reunion. “For our peace of mind, it was fortunate that we could not and did not listen to the radios. Reading the papers was bad enough. It’s no fun having a ringside seat for that spectacle, the collapse of Europe,” John wrote his mother. “Within just a few weeks, one phase of the world’s history has definitely ended and another has begun. Everybody is an old timer now who can say ‘I remember when people thought Hitler was a joke.’ Times have changed, almost overnight, and I hope that all of us, and our country, can survive the change.”26

  Remembering the fervent patriotism the boys of her generation had felt at the start of World War I, Peggy resented the attitude held by many of the young men in Atlanta now that it looked as if the United States was headed into a second world war. One such young man wrote her that he and his college classmates felt as if they were being deprived, “cruelly cut away,” from a good and secure future in a safe world. He complained that he and his friends found it hard to look ahead to any kind of decent world for themselves, that they cried out for security. He wrote, “We have yearned for it more than any other blessing. And we have been constantly warned that, of all things, security was the one we were least likely to find.”27

  The youth’s comments stirred Peggy’s fervor. She wrote him a long letter that she never mailed, perhaps because she believed it to be too harsh. Many years later, her brother Stephens found it among the papers John had left him. Nowhere else does Peggy so spiritedly define her values and philosophy as she does in this letter. Shrugging philosophically, she wrote: “I arise to ask, in a loud, hoarse voice, ‘Who the hell ever promised you and your generation security? And, most important of all, why should any youth want security?’” What bothered her about some of young people was that, to the best of her knowledge, they were the first younger generation she had ever heard about “who not only yearned for security, but confidently expected it as their lawful right and were bitter and disgruntled when it was not handed to them on a silver platter.” She pointed out:

  There is something very frightening about the young people of a nation crying out to be secure. Youth has been, in the past, thrusting and willing and able to take chances. If the youth of today wants to be safe and secure and leave to the older people the tough job of fighting and taking the hazards, then we are all in a bad way.

  Peggy described the anecdotes of her ancestors, who had been in the gold rush of 1849, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Seminole Wars. “I do not recall a single instance where any of these old timers ever expected security or even thought they might attain it. In fact…if you had discussed the matter with them, they would have been as angry as if you had accused them of the rankest cowardice.” Looking back to the Revolutionary War era, to “the 1812 time,” and to the time when “Andy Jackson wrecked the banks,” she observed that the youth of these generations “expected nothing except the opportunity to work like hell and not get anywhere.”

  As for what young people faced in the South after Appomattox, not even half of the horrors have been told. There was no money, no opportunity, and hardly as much hope as the Belgians under Hitler now have. I personally knew that generation very well. They were a tough and hardbitten lot; they knew there was no safety anywhere in the world; I doubt if it ever occurred to them that they merited security; they knew that the race was not to the swift nor the battle to the strong; they knew they could break their backs working and give their lives to rebuild their section and yet in the end lose everything, even their lives. But the ones I knew certainly enjoyed scrapping, and they rebuilt our section with no more security than their own guts to build on it.

  Referring to her mother’s generation, who married during the panic of the 1890s and brought up their children in the successive panics of 1907 and 1914, she said her mother “would have laughed if you had talked about security for youth.” As for her own generation, “if someone had been silly enough to talk to us about security or to tell us that we merited it, we would not have been silly enough to believe them. Furthermore, we would have been furious because doubts would have been cast upon our courage and our capabilities. I recall the worst insult which could be flung at my generation was, ‘Oh, so you want it safe.’” Asserting that her generation had fought against safety, she added: “Even the girls who came from sheltered homes wanted to get out and take their chances, and most of them did. The ones who didn’t were looked upon as weaklings.” Her generati
on saw the Victorian age crash about their feet, “and, far from feeling disgruntled or bitter that life was not going to be what we expected, we were pleased to death, for here was something new, a land without landmarks, a country to be pioneered—spiritually, at least.”

  Peggy blamed the new generation’s demand for security on the New Deal, which told young people “they were God’s chosen creatures, that the world not only owes them a living but a good living and an awfully good time. Granted that your generation has been told this, why on earth have you believed it?”

  Peggy concluded this long letter by saying that people of her generation rarely express the feelings she had expressed, for “the young persons we are talking to will not comprehend what we are saying or having comprehended, will say indignantly that we are Tories standing in the way of the more abundant life. But these are things we think.”

  Probably by now you have forgotten what you wrote in your letter and will wonder at the length of my reply to one small item you wrote, but I had it in mind and I like you, so I had to write it. Come to see John and me when you are in Atlanta next. We will make a large pot of coffee and talk till dawn if you like.28

  7

  The Marsh family reunion at Henry’s home in Wilmington, a gathering that brought all of John’s siblings, their spouses, and their children together with their mother, was a happy occasion. It was the first time since the publication of Gone With the Wind that they had all gotten together. The children always enjoyed John, whom they called “Uncle Mouse” because he amused them by making mouse puppets out of his handkerchiefs. As for Peggy, the children were enthralled with her dramatic ghost stories, her mischief, and the attention she lavished upon them. Her little nieces and nephews adored her. Instead of talking to the adults, she would sit on the floor and play jacks or romp with them in the yard. They jabbed at each other, arguing about who would have her on a team and who would sit next to her at the table. One afternoon while Peggy was playing baseball in the front yard of Henry’s home with her young nephews, Renny, Craig, and Sandy, a reporter tried to take photographs. As she hid from view, he interviewed the little boys. When he asked what impressed them the most about their famous aunt, they answered in unison, “Her size! She’s no bigger than we are.”29