Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Truly perplexed and concerned, Dr. Dandy continued to write her and insisted upon seeing her again. In fact, he came to Atlanta in early December 1943 to examine Peggy. At that time her X rays showed so clearly that the second disc was indeed the source of her problem that he urged her not to waste any more time.82 He wrote early in January 1944, suggesting that they go ahead and schedule her surgery, but the Marshes did not answer his letter. By this time, they were preoccupied with Eugene Mitchell, who was seriously ill. Then, on April 29, Dr. Dandy wrote again, asking her or John to send him a note about her condition and saying, “I do so want to see you well.” Margaret Baugh sent him a brief note in May at Peggy’s request. Tired of hospitals and illnesses, Peggy ignored Dr. Dandy’s notes. Persistent in his efforts to get the Marshes to reply, the physician wrote again on September 26. Thinking that his letter had miscarried, he sent her another on December 7, 1944, almost pleading with her to tell him how she was, saying he hoped that she would return for the second operation. Apparently neither she nor John ever answered. Dr. Dandy died of a coronary occlusion on April 19, 1946, at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

  Peggy never recovered from that first surgery and never had the second operation. She consulted with some Atlanta physicians, who were able to help her regain some measure of her former mobility, but she was never well enough to participate fully or regularly in social engagements or public work after this time.

  17

  As the war continued, Gone With the Wind’s foreign copyright problems became murkier because communications with foreign publishers were nearly impossible. As far as John could tell from the reports he had received, nearly every European country had its own translated edition of the book. Yet he was receiving only sketchy reports from Marion Saunders. At that point, he had their international accounting firm—Peat, Marwick, Mitchell, and Company—investigate Marion Saunders’s records. It was through this audit that they learned Saunders had stolen several thousand dollars of the royalties paid to Peggy by foreign publishers.83 They got rid of her as their agent but did nothing about prosecuting her, fearing involvement in unpleasant publicity. The problems with Saunders created a nightmare for John. Trying to find an honest agent with knowledge of international copyright laws while writing to publishers all over the world during wartime was the most frustrating activity he had ever had to perform.

  The Marshes kept encouraging Wallace McClure to pursue the international copyright treaty. On May 12, 1943, Peggy wrote him that although it was too late for such a treaty to help her now, she and John remained interested in it because it would help all future American authors. After telling him about her slow recovery, she wrote: “As yet I have had no company and see no one except John and my secretary.”84

  By the end of May, she could walk about the apartment fairly well and could climb the stairs a few times, but she had not ventured out. They had no visitors anymore except Medora, who stopped by occasionally, and if Bessie or Deon had not been there, she would have been left alone in the apartment after John went to work.85

  Because her friendship with Brickell and Granberry had fallen away over time, she corresponded mainly with John’s family and with Leodel Coleman, their war correspondent friend from Statesboro, Georgia. In one of her frequent letters to him composed while she was in a reflective mood, she wrote:

  In a way, it’s been an interesting experience, for this is the first time since Gone With the Wind was published, in 1936, that I’ve had time to just sit. My friends have mercifully let me alone and the general public has done likewise, so the phone rings but seldom and letters from strangers are few. I do miss not being able to do work at the Red Cross or on bonds and I felt very peculiar when an alert went off the other night and the town blacked out and John grabbed his warden’s helmet and galloped out, leaving me here alone. I felt I should be galloping out too, if for no other reasons than to harry first aiders and stretcher squads. Still, I think it’s doing me good physically and mentally just to sit and have a little time to think without the phone and door bell ringing all the time. However, as I do not see anyone, I have no news of interest to pass along to you.86

  With gas rations as scarce as they were, she saved as many as she could by riding the buses whenever she went downtown shopping. Her first real visitor in more than three months was Susan Myrick, who came up from Macon to see her. Peggy had been saving her meat ration points to buy a ham for some special occasion and decided that this was it. Showing what changes the war had brought to everyone, Sue, more impressed with the ham than anything else, declared she could no longer doubt the Marshes’ affection, for she knew exactly how many ration points that ham had cost.87

  In another letter to Coleman, Peggy urged him to write about everything he observed so the “homefolks will know what a war is really like.”88 The need was great, she explained, for good writing to bridge that almost unbridgeable gulf between soldiers and the civilians at home. Thinking about the past, she mused that such a gulf did not exist in “our Confederate war,” nor would it exist in England after the war either. But in the United States, where the fighting was so far away, it was different. She and John had had many conversations about the disappointments of soldiers in the last war when they returned and found how little the civilians understood about war and about the terrible things it did to soldiers. So she urged the correspondent “to write in such a way that the true sensations of men who have fought will be made as vivid to us as they can possibly be made. So, when you write things remember this gulf and try to bridge it.”89

  In July, when the Georgia Press Association met in Atlanta on the hottest day of the year, Peggy had her first real outing and her first opportunity in months to see many of her friends. She was not well enough to attend any of the meetings with John, but she did go to the reception Governor and Mrs. Arnall gave for the editors at the Governor’s Mansion. Although the mansion, built on a hill, had wide rooms and tall windows, it was suffocatingly hot and jammed full of editors. She wore a new white silk suit with a man-tailored jacket that hid her back brace and her “treasured three-year-old pair of nylon stockings.” Nylon stockings were, as she remarked, “scarce as frog’s hair in those days,” and women were painting their legs with tanning lotions. At the reception, she observed: “Nearly all the female guests were stockingless and had their legs painted varying shades of tan. These leg lotions are guaranteed to be moisture-proof but the girls ought to get their money back, for you never saw such streaked and spotted and mottled legs in your life. At any rate, they were cooler than me.”90

  That outing was pleasant, although the main topic of discussion was the problem of getting volunteer part-time workers to harvest the crops. Planting was no problem at this time, but harvesting was, and in some small towns everything closed up two afternoons a week and the inhabitants, from bankers to butlers, volunteered to help with the crops. Prisoners of war were sent to south Georgia where they were used to harvest crops, especially the bumper crop of peanuts that year. Peggy noted in a letter, “The presence of prisoners in Georgia is something that is hard for me to believe.”91

  With regard to the serious labor shortage, she sent her friend a clipping from the Constitution about Ralph McGill and the Constitution cotton pickers, writing,

  There isn’t a person in this state who will not brag that they picked cotton when they were a child, and could manage a hundred pounds by the time they were seven. Even people who have never been off hard pavement tell outrageous lies like this. So all the people on the Constitution who have been big-mouthed were sent out to pick cotton and prove whether they could do it. John had lunch with Ralph McGill yesterday and Ralph was so sore he didn’t know whether to sit down or stand up. In fact, it nearly killed the Constitution staff members.92

  Although Peggy sometimes found the energy to spend days at the Red Cross, she was not always able to be very active in Red Cross work. So, she found other ways to contribute. She did many generous and thoughtful things for young women
in the Florence Crittendon Home for unmarried mothers. Not only did she encourage them to go on with their lives, but she also paid for them to have permanents, manicures, new clothes, and shoes when they went out to look for jobs. She also started a fund at Grady Hospital for such things as medicine, crutches, braces, corsets, and wheelchairs for poor patients. She saw to it that there was always car fare for their families to visit the hospital. Devoted to the children at the Formalt Mission, she made sure that they had clothes and toys and whatever else they may have needed. Then she got involved in helping prisoners.

  After the Red Cross asked her to thank the inmates in the Atlanta federal penitentiary for their contributions to the war effort, she became interested in the plight of the prisoners there. Many of them, she learned, were volunteers in the malaria experiments and regular contributors to the Red Cross, as well as bond buyers and supporters of the Welfare Club. On January 7, 1942, in the prison auditorium, twenty-four hundred inmates assembled to receive Peggy’s thanks for their gift of $1,225.50 to the Red Cross. When she finished her brief talk, the audience gave her a standing ovation. Back home that afternoon, she told John she wanted to do something for the prisoners, but could not figure out what. In talking about it, they came up with the idea of sponsoring a creative writing contest for the prison’s publication, the Atlantan.

  In explaining her idea to the warden, she said she wanted to involve as many people as possible in the contest. Although she hated to dictate how the money she was donating should be awarded, she asked that not just the most polished writers be selected as winners. She wanted those men whose mechanical writing skills were not so good but whose ideas were uniquely expressed to be winners also. This annual writing contest was a tremendous success. Years later, G. M. Kobernate, the associate warden, said that he could not speak from a literary point of view, but from the standpoint of personality improvement and constructive mental exercise, the project was invaluable.93

  In addition to the cash prizes, she sent five copies of Gone With the Wind, with five personal notes, to the award-winning writers. She did not autograph the books but wrote the notes so that they could be pasted on the flyleaves if desired. Through the years Peggy received many sincere letters from prisoners thanking her for giving them “something to think about . . . something to break the mental sluggard out of almost any man.” One wrote, “You have carved a deep niche of admiration for yourself in the hearts of all the men who participated as well as the officials of the institution.”94 Because of this pleasant experience, she was impressed with many of the prisoners and with the remarkably humane manner in which the Atlanta federal prison was managed. She was outspoken about wanting Georgia’s entire penal system managed as well as the federal one was. She got angry whenever news reports went out about the brutalities of Georgia’s wardens and guards in some of the isolated prison camps. It is ironic, in view of how her own life ended, that in this same letter, she wrote so sympathetically, “Some of these men were only doing a year for reckless and drunken driving.”

  18

  In August 1943, Jock Whitney and David Selznick, whose health had been wrecked because of the energy he had put into his filmmaking, decided to dissolve Selznick International Pictures. After dividing the profits from Gone With the Wind and Rebecca, they each had nearly $4 million. In 1943, Whitney bought Selznick’s share of Gone With the Wind for four hundred thousand dollars and subsequently sold it to Metro-Goldywn-Mayer.95 When he did this, he and Selznick sent Peggy a check for fifty thousand dollars in appreciation of her courtesy and helpfulness. Because this gift was unsolicited and unexpected, the Marshes thought it was remarkable. They greatly appreciated it, for it was the only instance of someone giving freely to them rather than taking or trying to take away. In writing her appreciation, Peggy said:

  I came home from a long day at the Red Cross, too tired to take my shoes off, and . . . found your letter and the very generous check. . . . I had to read it twice before it made any sense and then it almost made me cry. You two and I and hundreds of others have been associated in the most phenomenally successful event in motion picture or theatrical history. I have seen the picture five and a half times now and have examined it from many angles—musical scores, costumes, bit players, etc., and I like it better each time. And each time the film reaches out and takes my hand to lead me down paths that seem ever new, for I forget in watching that I was the author of the book and am able to view the film with fresh eyes. At the Grand Theatre here in Atlanta, they play the theme music from Gone With the Wind when the last performances of the night are over. Frequently John and I and many other Atlantans remain in our seats to listen to it…. I never hear this music without feeling the strange mixture of emotions that I experienced on that night nearly three years ago when I sat in the same theatre and saw the film for the first time. I doubt if I could describe those emotions, but they did not include fear that it would not be a great picture. Years before I had seen your picture David Copperfield and I realized that here was a producer of . . . integrity who was breaking all the Hollywood rules by producing the book the author wrote . . . adding to it his own color, firing it with his own imagination, heightening effects with his own genius. So on the night of the premiere, I knew before the film began to roll that it would be a great picture and before many minutes had passed I knew it was even greater than I could have expected. I have always thought myself fortunate that Selznick International produced GWTW.96

  19

  As time passed, Peggy no longer got fan mail, but still received a few crank letters. No matter how often John begged her to ignore them, telling her, “You don’t get anything out of kicking a skunk except a very bad smell,” she persisted in wasting time answering such letters, which she filed under “Curioso.” A good example of her obsession with minutiae is a “Curioso” from a woman who described herself as a “clairaudient and clairvoyant—strongly psychic . . . and not one of Margaret Mitchell’s fans.”97 Nevertheless, this lunatic claimed that Gone With the Wind was a little like her own story. Whether Peggy knew it or not, Peggy was evidently so psychic that her work was practically done through “automatic writing,” and the trouble with her eyes stemmed from departed spirits inhabiting them and enabling her to write the book she wrote. “Godalmighty!” Peggy exclaimed. She set about writing this woman a long letter that began, “I am afraid you have been misinformed, for there is nothing at all the matter with my eyes, and so there cannot be any ‘departed spirits’ bothering me. . . . I am the least ‘psychic’ of any living human being and, far from having written Gone With the Wind through ‘automatic writing,’ I labored over it for ten years. . . . I doubt if any ‘departed spirits’ would possess that much energy. Someone has evidently given you misinformation about me and my writing.”98

  Although John found amusing many of the trivial things that incensed Peggy, he found nothing amusing about a woman who impersonated her and charged accounts in department stores all over the country. He hired the Pinkerton National Detective Service to help him locate the imposter. Reports about this woman described her as being “very fond of men,” and the Marshes found the stories about her sexual behavior embarrassing. John wanted to put her out of business as quickly as he could. He also had this detective service track down a falsehood about Peggy’s writing part of the novel in the Albert’s French Restaurant on University Place and Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. Later he was even more disturbed when another such rumor cropped up about her writing the novel at Brickell’s Acorn Cottage in Connecticut.

  20

  In February 1944, John and Peggy went to Washington, D.C., to visit his mother and his sister Frances, and then on to Camden, New Jersey, for the official launching of the new Atlanta, one of two destroyers that had been built with the money Georgia raised and had been unofficially launched a few months earlier in Charleston.99 John worried whether a person with a bad back could launch a ship without fresh injury to herself, but Peggy assured him that she could.<
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  During the first half-hour of their arrival, John was thinking more about Peggy than about the ship. But then his attention shifted to where a group had formed into a tight knot on the launching platform. Watching intently, he stayed down on the ground until a minute or two before the ship was launched. He had always been thrilled to see the moment when big power plants were put into action for the first time, and now he was fascinated with watching the workmen getting things ready for this event. He knew it was a job that had to be done exactly right or it could be a terrible failure. When he saw that the preliminary signals were being given, he climbed the steps to the platform for a better view.

  He wrote his mother,

  Less than a minute later, the final signal was given, the ship slowly at first began to move, Peggy swung the champagne bottle with a mighty smash—and I was no longer calm. It is an experience that takes aholt of you clear down to your toes. Whether you are, or wish to be, calm on such an occasion, you can’t be calm. I had never realized before what a “climactic” event a launching is. It is an ordinary piece of land construction turning into a sea animal, it is the culmination of the work of many men for many months, more stirring than the dedication of any land building could be, and it is the final crucial test of engineering and physical labor that built the ship. The wives of the company officials who had lunch with us said that they always said their prayers before the launching of any big ship, that no matter how many others they had launched successfully they could never feel certain that this one wouldn’t turn over when she hit the water or suffer some other catastrophe. . . . But “our” ship moved off like a lady and everything went just right.100

  In a letter to her friend Leodel Coleman, Peggy wrote,

  I think if I swung a champagne bottle at a ship every day of my life the queer excitement would never diminish. There is a feeling that cannot be put into words when the first small shiver of tons of steel is felt. Then when she begins to slide slowly and picks up speed like a greyhound and finally hits the water with a crash and a splash it is impossible not to be torn between Rebel yells and tears. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. The captain of the other Atlanta, Sam Jenkins, who was badly wounded in that fight when his ship was lost, was standing near me at this launching. My naval aide, DeSales Harrison, formerly an Atlanta Coca-Cola official, was beside me, too, and I discovered that I was not the only one whose face was wet, and it was not from splattering champagne.101