Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Not easily impressed with writers or celebrities, or anyone else for that matter, John was taken with Rawlings. When he and Peggy went to Florida for Christmas in 1941, the highlight of the trip, for him, was meeting Rawlings and having her take them on an all-day tour through the Cross Creek “scrub country,” the scene of The Yearling. They had never before seen anything like that area, where the soil was covered with a tangle of scrub oak, scrub pine, and saw palmetto, and the soil made up almost entirely of sea shells. Except for a few rutted roads, the whole section was as primitive as when it was created, and during the several hours they were in the scrub, they saw only two automobiles and four or five people. It was not the kind of place they would have gone alone, but they felt safe with Rawlings, who knew the section well.51

  When lunchtime came they were surprised when the author went out in her side yard and chopped down a tree from which she served them a hearts-of-palm salad. She told them that it was something “nobody ever ate except the richest people in the Waldorf or the Ritz and the poorest crackers in the Florida scrub.”52 Rawlings introduced them to the people upon whom she based the characters in her book, like old Martha and a number of her brood, and Norton Baskin, whom Marjorie married. She showed them Jody’s homeplace in The Yearling. The actual home of a family she had met a decade earlier on a hunting trip, the house had been abandoned for years and had fallen into ruin, but MGM, making a movie of her novel, had restored it, using worn and weathered timber gathered from other old houses and split-rail fences collected from the surrounding area. “When we rolled up to it, we recognized it immediately from Marjorie’s description in the book. From the faithfulness of the restoration, it appeared that MGM did not plan to turn the book either into moonlight and honey suckle romance or another ‘Tobacco Road’ but were trying to show the Baxters for what they were, a self-respecting, prideful family, even though they did happen to live in primitive surroundings.”

  In discussing her copyright problems with the Marshes, Rawlings did not express much disturbance about the Dutch, who had also pirated The Yearling. Although she did not pursue her foreign copyrights as aggressively as the Marshes did theirs, she did have the excellent assistance of a Florida senator, Claude Pepper, who was a member of the Senate’s International Copyright Agreement Committee. Ironically, the Dutch publishers ended up sending Rawlings a check for one hundred dollars but until 1947, they sent nothing to Peggy.

  “Everytime I think that the two best selling American novels of recent years have been pirated by one of the smallest countries in the world I get mad all over again,” Peggy wrote Dr. McClure. “Of course, the passage of the treaty will not help The Yearling or Gone With the Wind either now, but I will feel proud indeed if I have had even a small part in helping to get protection abroad for other authors coming out after me.”53

  10

  By 1941, Eugene Mitchell had multiple health problems, including kidney stones, kidney infections, and prostate disease. While enduring a nearly fatal bout of uremic poisoning in 1940, he converted to Catholicism, something that his wife had wanted desperately for him to do years earlier. However, his conversion did nothing to sanctify his temperament. The older he got, the more irascible he became, driving all his servants away and demanding more and more of Peggy’s time.

  Francesca remembered some of the exasperating things he did that annoyed Peggy, such as insisting on eating sardines from the can, and then, much to Peggy’s dismay, turning the empty can up to his mouth and drinking the oil.54 Although he staged some remarkable comebacks, after 1941 he was never well enough to return to his office or to his home on Peachtree Street. Until his death in 1944, he remained in St. Joseph’s Infirmary, which was operated by the Catholic Sisters of Charity. Peggy visited him there at least twice every day and had a frustrating time finding nurses to look after him. By 1943, he had gotten to the point where he was a difficult and helpless invalid. Because of the war, male hospital orderlies were not readily available, and the blacks whom he had always depended upon to care for him had all gotten better jobs in factories or had joined the armed services. Unable to stay with him every day, all day, she wrote Mrs. Marsh that her problems were complicated by her father’s lack of comprehension of the changed labor markets. “It is difficult for him to understand how desperate is our struggle to keep three colored orderlies a day for him.” Even though she was paying good wages, she could not keep the workers because “when Father is feeling well he spends a good deal of time happily quarrelling with his attendants, so that they either quit or are on the verge of quitting.”55 Oftentimes he would get so cranky and belligerent that Peggy would find his nurse-aides in tears.

  “Even at death’s door, Father is just as easy to handle as a wildcat in his prime,” she wrote Mother Marsh. “He does not like hospitals, to put it mildly, and resents the ministrations of nurses. He dozes all day and is awake all night bothering the orderlies on the night shift who expect to sleep most of the night. Two months ago he reached the point where he would not even take an aspirin unless I administered it. And I suspect this was done only to harass the nurses and put the doctors in their places.”56

  11

  When his year’s leave of absence was up, John went back to his office at Georgia Power, where his workload had tripled. Peggy wrote: “War, defense work and matrimony have made vast inroads on John’s staff, while at the same time his work has gotten heavier. . . . It’s almost impossible to get replacements for John’s type of work.”57 After the man who edited Snap Shots, the company magazine that was circulated over the nation to other companies and customers, went off to officers’ training camp, Mary Singleton asked John if she could have the job. At that time, women had not been given such positions, but John hired her on the spot. Mary Singleton not only got out a good publication, but she also became a close friend of both Marshes.

  In addition to the manpower shortage, work at the Power Company was made more difficult by the fact that in 1941 Georgia suffered from the worst drought it had had in years. As a result of the low water levels in its dams, Georgia Power faced the most severe power shortage it had ever experienced. John had to go before the public requesting that everybody cut down on the use of electricity. The power companies, like the railroads, already had tremendous loads thrown on them by the war, and the drought made things far worse. Peggy wrote: “Life on the civilian front is toughening up—at least as far as our family and friends are concerned. I am not talking about the gas and tire and sugar shortages, for they should not bother anyone in their right mind. The civilian problem at present is that so many men have gone into the service the few men who are left behind have to do six men’s work.”58

  In the evenings, John, along with Angus Perkerson, Frank Daniel, Joe Kling, Ralph McGill, and other friends, was actively involved in the civilian defense programs. He served as a sector warden, and Peggy worked right along with him as an air warden for the Piedmont Park section. In fact, the war crisis brought out the best in Peggy, who became the quintessential volunteer. She organized paper, scrap, and salvage drives; and she worked several hours every weekday as a member of the Red Cross, making surgical dressings and packing boxes of food to ship overseas. Able to attract huge crowds, she sold more war bonds and saving stamps than anyone else in Georgia. She wrote Lois Cole:

  If anyone had told me a year ago that I’d be gallumphing about the countryside making speeches and selling bonds, I would have fallen on my rear screaming with laughter and kicking my heels. But, oddly enough war brings out the best and the worst in one (take your choice, dearie) and that’s what I’ve been doing. The other day Rich’s department store busted loose with a full-page ad announcing that I’d be selling bonds in their booth and would not give autographs. By now I’m convinced that no one ever reads anything right. Shoals of people decided I was going to autograph, and so we had quite a crowd—$212,000 in four hours. Many mothers brought their two-year-olds to buy their first ten cent stamp, and held the babies up to the
counter to lick the stamps I was holding. Abjured to “Now lick, sugar,” they enthusiastically and obediently licked me on my cheeks. Several infants reached delightedly for the stamps and swallowed them. I was kept busy running my hands into infants throats and retrieving stamps. One little boy licked, and pasted the stamp on my hand. God knows how many children I kissed. I had started in high-heeled slippers, but seeing that it was not a sit-down job, telephoned Margaret Baugh to bring my oldest and largest pair of shoes. This she did, arriving with all the celerity of the marine corps, but by that time the crowd was so thick I couldn’t change. Fifty or sixty comfortable matrons were loafing about determined to see whether I was going to pull off my shoes then and there.59

  Her old-fashioned pride in the South and her patriotism were of the highest rank. She wrote George Brett that enlistments were higher in the South than in any other part of the United States, and that the South appeared less frenzied but more unified. She said there was a “calm and resigned determination as if everyone thought a war inevitable and intended to do their share. . . . I suppose the Southern people still have the memories of what it feels like to be defeated and they don’t aim to be defeated again.”60

  12

  In June 1941, Lieutenant Commander E. John Long invited Peggy to the navy shipyards in Kearny, New Jersey, to christen a new cruiser, the U.S.S. Atlanta. This invitation thrilled her more than perhaps any other she had ever received. She accepted immediately. Her excitement and anxiety is evident in the letter she wrote the commander on June 23, 1941, giving him the biographical information he requested. In this amazing eight-page, single-spaced letter full of trivial questions, she “talked” the poor man’s ear off. This letter demonstrates better than anything else available how Peggy focused on insignificant details, and it give us a good idea of the kinds of worrisome questions she must have inflicted on John regularly.

  She began by explaining that since she had spent her entire life in an inland city and had never had any intentions of launching a ship, she needed much information. Using her old technique of drawing a man into her confidence, she wrote, “Some of my questions may seem ingenuous, so I hope that you will keep this part of my letter confidential.”61 No one recorded the commander’s reaction to her letter, but the poor man must have been dumbfounded when he read it. She asked him everything from what she should wear for the occasion to how many changes of clothes she should bring. After telling him how small she was, she asked that if the navy had any intention of presenting her with flowers, would he please see to it that the flowers were small ones? She wrote a long paragraph about the bouquet and her concern about where she was going to put it when the time came for the launching. She wanted to have both hands free to “take a good two-handed swing with the bottle.”

  She needed his advice about the best technique of “smashing bottles on battleships,” because she did not want to miss or fail to break the bottle. She worried about flying glass and asked if the bottle had any kind of covering to protect her. “Does the champagne usually spray on the sponsor as well as the battleship, so that I can expect to christen a dress as well as the U.S.S. Atlanta? And will you please ask the proper person to see that the platform is constructed with consideration for my size, so that my smallness will not prevent me from getting a proper swing?”

  She wanted directions to the shipyard and wondered who was going to escort her and, if no one was, how she was to present herself in Kearny. She wanted him to tell her what sort of gift she should make to the ship she was to christen, and if bringing gifts was customary. She was thinking of bringing some after-dinner coffee cups that the Atlanta Historical Society had had made by Wedgwood in England, and went on for three paragraphs describing these cups. She worried that they might be too “small and delicate” for navy officers and asked him to please tell her if these cups were appropriate.

  After several postponements, the launching date was finally set for September 6, 1941. Because of business complications, John could not accompany her to New York on September 4. Upon her arrival the next morning at her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she was greeted by the Macmillan publicity officials and the New York press corps. In the Constitution the next day, she was described as “dauntless, composed, and scintillating” in her interview, which lasted an hour.

  When asked about the status of Gone With the Wind, she answered: “Well, there is still a lot of business connected with the book. It is published in nineteen foreign countries including Canada and England and that means working under nineteen different copyright laws, nineteen different financial setups, nineteen different sets of unwritten customs. It all takes a great deal of time.”

  One reporter asked her if she had an agent. “A foreign agent, but I have no American agent. My husband is my business manager. My father and brother are lawyers.” When asked why she had filed suit against the Dutch for copyright infringement, she replied bluntly: “So that American books would be safe anywhere.”

  Many other questions about the film, the talent search, and the pre- miere were asked also. Finally, someone asked her whether, if she wrote another book, it would be about the South. “Sugar,” she answered, “I don’t know anything else.” As they were leaving, the newsmen were laughing, for she had charmed them all. The next day, the launching was a tremendous success, and Peggy hit the battleship with her first swing.

  13

  In December 1942, two thousand soldiers were camped in Piedmont Park, right across the street from the Marshes’ apartment. When the Red Cross set up a canteen for an army show in the park, Peggy joined the other Red Cross ladies serving the soldiers’ meals and mending uniforms and gloves. “I went down there yesterday,” she wrote a friend, “all dressed up in white uniform and veil, and spent the day changing chevrons, sewing on buttons and stitching up rips in soldiers’ pants. I do not mean to criticize the army, but there must be something wrong with soldier’s pants because the seams always bust out at the same place—and a most strategic place it is.”62 In describing to John’s mother just how active the Atlanta Marshes were in civilian defense, Peggy wrote on October 6, 1942, that during the first daytime air raid practice, “I galloped forth, in helmet and armband, to assist in patrolling this block. . . . I had a fine time stopping traffic on Piedmont Avenue and urging people to take cover in buildings. After I had galloped a long block, I was so winded that I couldn’t speak. Fortunately, people were very cooperative and when I jerked my thumb they left their automobiles.”63

  Because she was so famous, Peggy cut across the bureaucratic red tape to do special favors for soldiers. For instance, when one young man was forbidden to take his guitar, named “Betsy,” overseas with him, Peggy got permission to send it in a special shipment. The soldier wrote back thanking her and saying that Betsy was going through Italy with him. When she learned that certain managers of the marine post exchanges in the South Pacific refused to stock snuff and chewing tobacco for the southern soldiers, she shipped abundant supplies straight through to the marines on those islands. To many others, she sent individual gifts, like tobacco and pipes. With Bessie’s help, she sent a continuous flow of food packages, clothing, and medicine to war victims abroad. She served in every possible way that any private citizen can serve its country during a war.

  She was an active Red Cross volunteer. She did not work regularly at the Red Cross canteen in the Habersham DAR house on Fifteenth Street, close to Piedmont Park, as other writers have stated; she did her regular Red Cross work in the sewing unit on West Peachtree across from the Biltmore Hotel, where she operated an electric cutter, like those used in factories, cutting a dozen surgical dressings at a time. On the occasions when she worked at the Red Cross canteen, she made many friends among the soldiers, who later wrote letters to her. She answered every letter, hundreds of them. She corresponded with so many soldiers overseas that Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning soldier-cartoonist, drew a cartoon of a tired, dirty combat “Soldier Somewhere in Italy,” licki
ng his pencil as he wrote a letter to “Dear, Dear Miss Mitchell.” This cartoon appeared in newspapers all over the nation in May 1945.

  When Peggy first saw the cartoon in the Constitution, she laughingly wrote,

  Dear, Dear, Sergeant Mauldin…I am so flattered by that drawing.… It has done me a great deal of good here in Atlanta, for it has raised my stock with the small fry to extravagant heights. I have been out ringing door bells for the Seventh Bond Drive and have met any number of children. I cannot tell you how respectful they are to me because my name appeared in your cartoon, and they believe I really did get such a letter. … Your cartoons are so wonderful and so astringent. They have made many people safe at home realize what war is like. Your soldiers are so real that we feel cold with them and hungry and feet-itchy, too, and unillusioned. Thanks for mentioning me in the same breath with them.64

  Yet when Al Capp, creator of the popular cartoon “Li’l Abner,” used the names of Gone With the Wind characters in his cartoons without asking her permission, she had John zap him with legal papers. Not only did Capp have to apologize publicly to her, but he also had to transfer to Peggy the copyrights of those cartoons bearing her characters’ names. People like Al Capp, Billy Rose, Sam Goldywn, and others, whom Peggy identified as “slick Nawthum gempmum,” had no idea of how far she and John would go to protect their copyrights. But they soon found out. The older the Marshes got, the more of like mind and character they became. Together they doggedly pursued their course of holding on to what belonged to them, regardless of the cost in worry, energy, time, and money.

  14

  On rather short notice, Peggy was invited back to the navy shipyard to attend the ceremony, on December 24, commissioning the Atlanta to wartime service. Because Christmas Eve was an inconvenient time for her to leave town, John urged her not to go.65 But she told him that at the risk of sounding sentimental, she felt “that the Atlanta should not put out to sea without someone from this town present to say ‘good luck.’”66 As the sponsor of the ship, she felt she had to go, but would be back home by 4:00 P.M. on Christmas day. Even though this was a rushed trip, she had a marvelous time. After the luncheon aboard the Atlanta, the captain arranged for her to shake hands with all the sailors who had lined up on deck to greet her. For this occasion she wore her Red Cross uniform because John told her she looked beautiful in it. But to the officers, she said, “All my clothes (both dresses) were at the dry cleaners.” Always conscious of outward signs, she wore that uniform proudly because she said it “seemed to fox everybody, especially the New York reporters.”67 The ceremonies were so “impressive and solemn” that she considered this experience one of the major highlights of her career.