Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Now that John was no longer working at the Power Company, he and Peggy had more time for vacations. Several months after the family reunion, on October 25, 1940, the Marshes set out on another long automobile trip with Peggy driving all the way in their new green four-door Ford. First they went to Chattanooga, then followed the valley up through Tennessee and Virginia all the way to Maryland to the battlefield of Sharpsburg, where Peggy saw, for the second time, the place where her grandfather, Russell Mitchell, had been wounded. From that point, they turned back into Virginia, where they spent three days in Richmond visiting with the Clifford Dowdeys.

  Always impressed with other authors, Peggy did not realize that she sounded no different from the thousands of fans who wanted to meet her when she asked the Dowdeys to please make arrangements for her to meet Douglas Southall Freeman, James Branch Cabell, and Cabell’s aunt, Ellen Glasgow. Not willing to wait for Dowdey’s intercession, she went ahead and telephoned Glasgow’s house the next morning, asking the nurse who answered if she could please visit Miss Glasgow for five or ten minutes that day. Her wish came true when later that afternoon she was admitted into the bedroom of the aged author, who was suffering from a heart condition.

  Later, in thanking Glasgow for the visit, which lasted over an hour, Peggy said: “My husband hopes that if we make another visit to Richmond he may have the pleasure of meeting you. . . . John has long admired you, not only for your books but for the way you have carried success and public acclaim—not just a brief grassfire flare of notoriety but solid success that grew from year to year, which was based on true worth of character and back-breaking work. It is no small feat to carry success with dignity that has no stuffiness and with graciousness that has no condescension.”30 When Glasgow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life the following year, Peggy sent her a telegram of congratulations. On May 27, 1942, Glasgow wrote back, “I have a charming recollection of your flitting in and spending an hour by my bedside.”31

  The high point of their stay in Richmond came when Douglas Southall Freeman, author of a biography of Robert E. Lee, invited the Marshes to Sunday dinner. When they arrived at the Freemans’ home, they were pleasantly surprised to learn that the other guests were Mr. and Mrs. James Branch Cabell and Dr. and Mrs. John Bell Williams. Mrs. Williams was Rebecca Yancey Williams, the author of The Vanishing Virginian, and Dr. Freeman had written the introduction to her book.

  The best part of their trip for Peggy was that dinner party, but for John it was seeing the Shenandoah Valley for the first time and thinking about one of his great-uncles, Samuel Kercheval, who had written a history of the Shenandoah a hundred years earlier.32 He and Peggy drove a hundred miles out of their way to visit Kercheval’s grave in the Hite family burial grounds in Long Meadows. He wrote his mother about the scene: “It is really beautiful. I don’t believe I have ever seen any place more beautiful unless perhaps it is Kentucky. And the comparison is an apt one, for the valley is a bluegrass section and in many ways is similar to Kentucky, not only in appearance but in the people and in the type of prosperous agricultural civilization. Everywhere I went in that section I was surprised to note how many of the names were Kentucky names, and I imagine that Kentucky people are closer kin to the valley people than to the people in Richmond or the tidewater.”33

  In giving his mother a handsome account of his visits to the towns and counties where his ancestors had lived, he laughingly wrote, “When I am narrating some interesting event to Peggy, she says, ‘Now, tell it like a woman,’ meaning give the details, not just the broad facts . . . but fill in the small items that together create the picture and enable the listener to participate in the event.”34

  This trip exhilarated Peggy; she felt more relaxed than she had felt in years. When she returned home, she found no huge stack of mail piled on the dining room table; no long list of telephone messages; no newspapers carrying pictures or articles about her; and no significant news about the book. Margaret Baugh’s messages were all about their foreign business, and all of those were for John. On the afternoon of their arrival home, Peggy wrote her friend Brickell about her vacation and described how quiet things were.

  I think the war, of course, had something to do with the cessation of public interest in me, and the election naturally diverted attention. However, Atlanta has become such an enthusiastic literary center that I have spent most of my time during the past six months (when I wasn’t making bandages at the Red Cross) galloping about meeting authors. . . . It’s fun getting back into circulation again after so long. I had not realized how much I missed normal life and parties and seeing friends and meeting attractive strangers. It must be good for both of us, for John had gained fifteen pounds and I am bursting the seams of all my clothes. I never felt better in my life and do not care how fat I get.35

  8

  On October 6, 1940, John turned forty-five. Peggy gave him a quiet birthday party at home with a few friends. Her gifts to him were “two pairs of alleged silk pajamas of gaudy hues” and a birthday cake. As John remarked later, “Before I passed forty, nobody could have paid me to wear a red necktie. Now I like them as bright as I can find and preferably red. Passing forty seemed to release me from the compulsion to be dignified which had tightly gripped me during my twenties and thirties.”36

  In late November 1940, the Marshes took another long train ride. This time John took Peggy home to Kentucky for her first visit. Although his mother had moved away years earlier to Wilmington, Delaware, to be near Henry and help him rear his child Mary, she went to Kentucky to meet them along with Gordon and Francesca, who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. Also, Miss Anna Frank and her brother George, who owned the retail clothing store downtown where John had worked as a teenager and who had meant so much to him while he was growing up, were still in Maysville, as were many other old friends and neighbors. The freezing rain that had fallen steadily all day and the night before suddenly stopped just as their train pulled into the Maysville station.

  Seeing his hometown for the first time in twenty years and the crowd that had gathered at the station to greet them deeply stirred John’s emotions. He was also totally unprepared for the warm homecoming he and Peggy received when they arrived at the old homestead of Miss Anna Frank and her brother George on East Second Street, where they were to spend the night. Peggy exclaimed that it looked as if all of Mason County, not just Maysville, turned out to see them. The visitors kept coming until nearly midnight. Early the next morning, John slipped out of the house while everyone else was asleep and walked over to Forest Avenue to see the house where he had grown up and the house next door where his grandmother, aunt, and uncle Bob had lived. He ended his solitary tour of the little town in Traxel’s Confectionery on Main Street, where the men had already gathered for their morning coffee and exchange of news, just as they had done when he was boy. Nothing had changed, except him, he thought.

  In an interview for the Daily Independent, the newspaper that grew out of the one John’s father had edited and published years earlier, Peggy looked pretty as she sat in Traxel’s wrapped in her new, full-length, dark mink coat. As a growing crowd gathered around her listening, she told the reporter, “I feel that I know every house on Forest Avenue. For fifteen years John and the Marsh family have talked about Maysville and Kentucky.” Making everyone laugh, she boasted: “Just to prove to you how well I know the townspeople and their business, recently when Mother Marsh wanted to know the maiden name of a married friend in Maysville, I was the only Marsh who remembered the name.”37 Yet, moments later, when she was asked to address the similarities between Belle Watling and Belle Brezing, who had just recently died in Lexington, Peggy replied that the name “Belle” was common and that there “were a number of ladies of that profession in Atlanta.” She refused to comment any further on the issue.

  The next day they crossed the Ohio River and went to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit John’s relatives the Charles Nutes, who lived there in the Kennedy Heights section. On
the third day they went to Lexington on a little one-car train that was heated by a coal stove. Peggy wrote,

  We stopped at every wide place in the road and at some of the stops both old friends of John’s and perfect strangers came aboard. The telegraph operators up and down the line had been gossiping with the Maysville operator and they spread the news. After hanging over the back platform for three and a half hours, I did not know whether I felt more like a fugitive from justice or Mrs. Roosevelt. At one stop, just as the train was pulling out, a girl dashed frantically out of a house and jumped on the platform, crying breathlessly, “Is Clark Gable really darling?” I assumed as rapturous an expression as I could under the circumstances and said, “He’s simply divine. Get off the train before you break your neck.” She said, hoping for the worst, “Is it true he’s in love with his wife?” I assumed an expression of complete dejection and said, “My dear, I never saw a more devoted couple.” “Oh, my God,” said the young lady, and fell off backwards. It didn’t hurt her, and she waved good-bye from a pile of frost-covered rocks.38

  In Lexington the next afternoon, the reporters asked about Belle Brezing’s resemblance to Belle Watling. Peggy insisted that she had never heard of Belle Brezing until after her book had been published.39 And that was all she or John, who did his best to avoid reporters, would say. That evening, they were the guests of honor at an informal gathering at the University of Kentucky’s student center. The following day, she and John toured the campus with Dr. L. L. Dantzler, head of the English program, who introduced them to the journalism and the English departments. In her charming manner, she spoke modestly to the students and professors about the difficulties of being a writer. Later that evening, they, along with Gordon and Francesca, had dinner with Dr. Frank MacVey, the president of the university, and some other state and local dignitaries.

  As soon as they got back to Atlanta, they discovered that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in its efforts to pull off a “second premiere,” was trying, John said, “to steal Peggy’s stage dramatization rights.” Two weeks of wrangling and letter writing ensued before John had the matter straightened out.40

  About this same time, David Selznick asked for permission to produce a Broadway musical version of Gone With the Wind. They were hard pressed to turn him down because Selznick was one of the few people they admired and respected. He had consistently tried to be fair with them, and they knew he would do a superb job with whatever he chose to do, but they were horrified by his casual remark about a nationwide talent search for new faces and voices. John wrote Kay Brown that they did not feel like making the trade on the basis Selznick proposed. He explained:

  What you said about a talent search wasn’t the only reason for the rejection of the offer but it was one reason, and I am going to make one more effort to explain our position. Apparently we did not succeed in doing that before, judging by your statement that you understood Peggy’s objection was only to a talent search in Atlanta.

  No amount of money would ever induce Peggy to go through another experience like the one she was subjected to by the talent search for the movie. It was a fine buildup for the movie, it got publicity for the movie which you might not have gotten otherwise, but it was hell on earth for Peggy. I doubt that Mr. Selznick has ever gotten the faintest conception of what it did to Peggy.

  Your idea that Peggy might escape a similar experience simply by not having a talent search in Atlanta disregards the fact that the United States mail and the telegraph and telephone lines are still operating. Even if there were no publicity about the search in Atlanta at all, Peggy would still have to deal with a swarm of pitifully unqualified humans demanding her assistance in obtaining roles in the show.

  It is the fact that a talent search stirs up the pitifully unqualified—and is intended to do so—that makes it offensive and distasteful and a burden to her. . . . It also uses up innumerable hours of time, and time is the only working capital of an author, by still further postponing the time when she can begin writing again, as she ardently wishes to do.41

  9

  John’s reference to Peggy’s desire to write is intriguing. Only once, in her letter to Herschel Brickell of May 3, 1938, did Peggy ever express any desire to write another novel, but here, and also in a later letter to Dr. Dandy about Peggy’s back surgery, John indicates that Peggy was enthusiastic about getting back to her writing. There is no evidence that Peggy wrote anything—except letters—after Gone With the Wind, but it is quite possible that when her and John’s life returned to relative normalcy during World War II, they discussed ideas for a next novel. John’s remarks during this period strongly suggest this possibility, but in addition to her active involvement in the war effort, Peggy was too ill herself, and too busy attending her dying father, to carry out any ideas she and John may have discussed.

  As the war heated up, John continued to receive news of foreign piracies. At the end of March 1940, Marion Saunders informed him that a Bulgarian publisher had translated Gone With the Wind from the French and was publishing an unauthorized edition in three weeks. After Saunders, following John’s instructions, demanded the publisher sign a contract, print the United States’s Macmillan copyright notice in all future editions, and pay a royalty, John received a letter from him. The publisher asked to be excused from paying royalties, saying that it was not the custom of famous American writers to charge the Bulgarians for translations.42 The war interrupted John’s correspondence with the publisher. Finally, in 1945, the publisher reported eight thousand copies sold before he had to flee the country. He stated that he had deposited the advance payment in a bank in Sofia, but no royalty money was ever received by the Marshes.43

  Pirates in Chile and Cuba were more difficult to deal with. After writing Peggy that he would not pay or acknowledge her rights, the Chilean publisher, for some unexplained reason, did a sudden about-face, signed a contract, and sent one hundred dollars in royalties to Macmillan.44 The Cuban publisher did not sign a contract and paid no royalties. In July, John attempted to extract a contract from a Greek publisher of a newspaper in Athens, which had started serializing Gone With the Wind without permission. Not long after the Russians took over Estonia, a publisher in that tiny country was translating the novel. “I never thought when I finished the last galley proof of my book and sent it off to the press that I would be skirmishing in so many foreign countries,” Peggy wrote Dr. Wallace McClure in the State Department.45

  When they received news that the Japanese were pirating the movie Gone With the Wind, the Marshes were relieved, thinking that problem belonged to Selznick. Peggy wrote McClure that she would like to see a Japanese version. “If they placed it back in the sixties, the Japanese Confederates would doubtless be marching forth to defend Atlanta in Samurai armor and Scarlett would be dashing about in a ’rickshaw instead of a buggy.”46

  McClure wrote regularly to the Marshes to share what little news he was able to obtain. Generally his letters brought only more reports of pirates in other places. From 1937 through 1939, he had the Marshes come to Washington several times to meet with various congressmen who were working on the copyright agreement. International copyright had long been one of McClure’s assignments in the State Department. After he had sent them some paragraphs on copyright infringement in the early days of Ireland’s history, Peggy wrote him: “It was fascinating reading and I found it interesting to see how laws began. I think the King of ancient Tara must have been a just man and I wish, like you, that I could meet with similar justice in Holland. . . . Before we have finished my difficulties in the Netherlands my brother and my husband will have become the leading Southern authorities on international copyright. Both of them find this subject very interesting and they study any material they can find upon it.”47

  As World War II progressed, John was unable to communicate with the foreign publishers and seldom heard from Marion Saunders. So there was little for him to do with the book’s business. For the first time in his adult life, he rested during
his one-year sabbatical from Georgia Power. In addition to his leisurely travels with Peggy, he did a lot of reading. He wrote to his mother about reading The Late George Apley, a book that Peggy recommended to him, and said he knew the Apleys well. He thought it was remarkable to see how closely that Boston family resembled southern families, including the Mitchells and the Marshes, in viewpoints and traditions. “I suppose there is a fundamental similarity among all folks raised up in a certain tradition that goes back to England . . . and is deep-rooted in American life, both Southern and Northern.”48

  He especially enjoyed Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s When the Whippoorwill, a collection of short stories, which he recommended to his mother. “Some are very funny and some very moving,” and he liked everything about the book except the title, which he thought was “lousy.”49 The more works by Rawlings he read, the more she amazed him. He thought that there was something genuinely American in her stories and that she often displayed “some of Mark Twain’s better qualities.” He regarded her as one of the superior writers of his time.50