After her tomcat Old Timer vanished, Peggy adopted a kitten and named him Count Dracula, not because he looked like a vampire but because of his ability to fly through the air and climb up the side of perpendicular surfaces. After observing him leaping distances several times his own length, with all four legs outstretched, Peggy told John she suspected that the Count’s mother had been friendly with a flying squirrel. Count Dracula did not waste time slowly pulling himself up to the windowsill—he just ran up the back of their best and tallest upholstered chair, much to Peggy’s dismay. And even though the kitten chased all the birds away, John wrote this vivid description:
I have become very fond of him and the principal reason is that he is a healthy extrovert. I would not say he is highly intelligent, but he is completely lacking in the introspective, moody, self-conscious, withdrawn, inferiority-complex characteristics which I have observed in so many other people’s pets. The effect of modern civilization on so many dogs and cats is to make them neurotic and even psychotic. This kitten apparently never heard of such things; all that interests him is a romp, a fight, things to eat and not being bothered when he is asleep. He is a rowdy element in our sedate household. He frightens the birds which we have laboriously attracted to our window sills. He attacks the potted plants to which I have given so much care and attention. He sleeps all day and wants to play all night and in general he does what he pleases whether it pleases us or not. But the simple fact of his disorderly nature makes life very appealing in a family which has been compelled to be orderly, and perhaps he will set us an example and aid us in breaking some of our chains.60
Not as tolerant as John of the kitten’s antics, Peggy gave the rowdy Count Dracula away. In no time at all, Mrs. West, one of their neighbors and something of a cat collector, brought to the Marshes’ back door one afternoon a little stray calico kitten that she had rescued from a sewer. She thought that a pet might be good company for John. After listening to Mrs. West’s funny description of the animal’s behavior, John accepted the gift and named the kitten Maud. In talking to Mrs. West’s husband, John told a risqué story about a woman named Maud who worked in a house of ill repute, saying he thought “Maud” was a funny name for such a woman. The kitten turned out to be a wonderful companion for John. She entertained him with her playfulness and curled up next to him in bed, where she took long naps. Peggy adored this kitten and mentioned her in letters. After a picture of Peggy cradling Maud in her arms appeared on the cover of the Sunday Magazine on December 14, 1947, along with a little history of the kitten’s name, the Victorianly discreet Miss Baugh told the not-so-Victorian Mr. Marsh that she thought it was far more appropriate to explain to the Journal that “our Maud, the cat, was named after Tennyson’s Maud, rather than that other Maud.”61
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Although there were still many problems extracting royalties from other countries, particularly Romania and Germany, many European publishers were now paying royalties. The best news in early 1947 came from Fruin telling them that the Dutch lawsuit against the pirate Z.H.U.M. was finally coming to a successful close. The Dutch publisher had paid Fruin a certain sum in royalties; had printed in the Dutch newspapers a statement confirming the copyright; and promised to insert the United States copyright in every future volume he printed.62 Because of Wallace McClure’s valuable assistance in this case, Peggy sent him a copy of the World Trade Law Journal in which Edward V. Saher discussed the Z.H.U.M.-Mitchell case. She said the article was not as complete as she would have liked it to be, but at least it presented Gone With the Wind’s problems with its foreign copyrights.63
In August 1947, John had another heart attack and had to be hospitalized again for two weeks. His condition worsened when he learned that his eighty-year-old mother had fallen again and broken her hip. Always generous to his mother, he wrote to her from his hospital bed offering to hire a secretary for her so that she could continue writing to her children and friends and have assistance in taking care of her business.
The new tests that John had undergone showed that the damage to his heart was far more serious than they had earlier believed. “This was not news to me, as I had always thought him in pretty bad shape and had treated him accordingly with very excellent results,” Peggy wrote on September 4, 1947, to Helen Dowdey. “The doctor said John must not ever go back to his job at the Power Company, or any similar job where deadlines had to be met and where John would have to keep working regardless of how tired he was. . . . We had been expecting this news and it did not bother us. I was very happy and relieved, for I would never had had an easy moment if he had gone back part time, as we sometimes thought he might.”
In many ways, Peggy made remarkable strides during John’s illness. With the help of Stephens and Margaret Baugh, she accomplished much. “Miss Baugh and I have certainly had a hot time this year. I never dreamed I’d learn as much about such business matters as international banking.”64 About her achievements, she proudly told Helen: “I think Miss Baugh and I have done wonders, for I am casting modesty to the four winds when speaking to you. We’ve cooked up more foreign contracts and got more money out of places where nobody expected to get money than seems possible. But I will be happy when John can do some of the foreign stuff and let me hold down the domestic line. The doctor said it would be very good for him to do this work if he could. Really, the work seems to get heavier and heavier as time goes on instead of getting lighter.”65
John did not want to resign from Georgia Power. To him, that was a sign of the end. But after he received the results of yet another electrocardiogram, he decided that there was no point in delaying the decision any longer. In September, he wrote his mother, “I have finally crossed my Rubicon and have handed in my resignation.” Knowing how ill she was and how much she worried about him, he assured her:
I’m not bad off at all, only feeble. I don’t want you to think my condition has taken a bad turn, which it has not, or to think I am in any pitiful or depressed situation. I am really enjoying my situation. As to mental “shape,” I am really enjoying this new experience of being a man of leisure. My situation is that I am doing all right except that I have such a small amount of strength. I must lie down and rest several times a day, the doctor has prescribed a drink of whiskey in the late afternoon, and then there is another medicine I take now and then, namely a Hershey bar. I don’t have any pain or discomfort of any kind, except that it is annoying to tire so quickly.66
In this same letter he described how his attitude toward his illness had changed. Referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, which he had read in high school and reread in recent years, he said that the two essays that impressed him the most were “Compensation” and “Self-Reliance.”
As you recall, his thesis in “Compensation” is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and that this principle laid down by Mr. Newton applied to human affairs as well as physical matters. In unpleasant experiences there is quite often something of interest and something of value, and often something which is quite pleasant. In this particular experience I have found many interesting and pleasant and quite valuable things, and I have no doubt that I will find many others as time goes on. It is not what I would have chosen, but I have already learned a lot of things from it which I did not know before and it might be that I will, by reason of this experience, round out my life in a pleasanter and more valuable way than I could have done by continuing the never ending drive of my old job.
Then, he closed this letter with this observation:
Among the interesting experiences I would not otherwise have had is our cat. Even though she is shut up here in our apartment with old people, never even touching her feet to the ground or the outside world, she finds life endlessly interesting—a fly buzzing on the ceiling, a piece of string on the floor, the mystery of her own reflection in the mirror, my slippers or Peggy’s stocking, a dancing pattern of sunlight on the wall when the leaves on the trees outside are blowing. She is ne
ver lacking in something to interest and entertain her, and I know that I am smarter than a cat.
John developed new insights about himself, learned new ways to cope. He continued to grow intellectually by exploring new ideas in philosophy that helped him to live better. His letters and his advice to his friend who had suffered a heart attack show that he believed that if negative emotions had made him sick, positive ones could make him at least reasonably well. Although Peggy learned some practical things about taking care of their business, she essentially remained the same high-strung, dynamic person, bogged down in minutiae and her concern about her fading public image.
In May 1948, when John had recovered enough to travel, he and Peggy went to Augusta for a week and planned to go on to Sea Island for another week. But about the time they were getting ready to leave Augusta, she developed one of her skin allergies and had to go to the Augusta city hospital for emergency treatment. With the medication and the condition, she felt so bad that they returned home. Occasional flareups of hives troubled her nearly all that summer.
Toward the end of 1948, their social life in Atlanta had picked up again slightly, and occasionally they went to dinner and concerts with a few close friends. But Peggy’s correspondence had slackened so that she received and wrote few letters. She was finally and completely out of that glaring, limelighted fishbowl that she had complained about for the past decade. With the foreign business coming under control now and managed well by Margaret Baugh, and with John getting stronger every day, she should have been happy. But she was not. She did not adapt to her quiet life, her confinement, and her illnesses as well as John had adapted to his. Although he tried to help her by listening to her and sympathizing with her, she could not seem to pull herself up out of her mental slump.
John’s philosophy of treating another person’s pain is beautifully explained in a letter he wrote to his family in 1949: “If a person is in pain, it does not matter whether it comes from a broken leg or from cracker crumbs in the bed. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about the broken leg, but you can brush out the cracker crumbs, and if the sum total of the pain is reduced the sick person is better off.”67 So he continued trying his best to brush those metaphorically painful “cracker crumbs” from his wife’s bed, but without much success.
Stephens, too, noticed the odd changes in his sister’s behavior, appearance, and attitudes and recorded them in his memoir. Although he did not realize it, she was undergoing her most serious bout with depression. One of the strangest things she did in May 1949 was to have their telephone number removed from the directory.68 Much to Stephens’s bewilderment, she got an unlisted number. After all those years of having the number listed and complaining incessantly about the number of calls interrupting her, Stephens could not figure out her reason for getting an unlisted number now when she received so few calls. In his memoir he wrote: “People called me and asked, indignantly, why Margaret had done this, or they tried to get her number from me. All of this was wearing on Margaret. She was tired, she was nervous, she was irritable. I had never known her to be like that in all her life. The worry told on her, and she began to look older and a strained look came into her face.”69
On November 21, 1948, she wrote her will in her big, scrawling longhand and called three of her Red Cross coworkers—Mary Young Grayson, Kathryn Polhill Mason, and Ethel Blankenship—to witness the will. After they left, she phoned Stephens to come over and read what she had written and discuss some business with her and John. A decade earlier, at the peak of success, she had had Stephens draw up a will for her. Now she told him she wanted that one replaced with this new one.
In this new will, one quarter of her estate was to go to Stephens, three-quarters to John. She left five hundred dollars to Bessie and two hundred to Deon, and she wanted the house they occupied on 446 Ripley Street to be given to them. The first call on her estate was to pay the sum of an annuity that she had been buying for her secretary Margaret Eugenia Baugh, and in addition, she wanted Margaret Baugh to receive five thousand dollars. She left a modest amount to all of her nieces and nephews on her and John’s side of the family, and also to her three godchildren, Mitchell Gibson, Turmay Taylor and Josephine Guidici. To Stephens’s two sons, Joseph and Eugene, she also left her share of the old Nesbit farm on the Chattahoochee River. She wanted one thousand dollars to go to the Atlanta Historical Society and one thousand to the library at Fayetteville, Georgia. She made a list of furniture and silver belonging to her family and wanted Stephens to have them if he wanted them. She wanted all Gone With the Wind rights of all kinds—domestic and foreign—to go to John, and she left him all her papers and written matter of all kinds, as well as all her household furnishings and personal belongings. She stipulated that if her executors found that the proportion of the residue of her estate to be given to John was less than two hundred thousand dollars, she wanted them to abate all legacies—except Bessie’s, Deon’s, and Margaret Baugh’s—equally until such a sum was realized.
She and Stephens went over some business files together and discussed what should be done if she died before Stephens and if John were incapacitated, unable to carry out her wishes. Although she wrote nothing in her new will about destroying her papers and manuscripts, she apparently discussed this wish, for Stephens later told Finis Farr that “She wanted her manuscripts and notes destroyed.”70 As they talked late into the night, she asked him about his law practice, concerned that her business had taken so much of his time. Even though she paid him well for her work, she hated that it had interrupted his own career. He told her his practice was gradually growing. When she, who had hoped to make him rich, asked him why he felt compelled to put what she had paid him for doing her work into the firm’s account, he said he had done so because that was the only fair way. He told her, “I have never taken any pride in the work I did for you, nor in the money I made from it. I have taken pride in my specialty—real estate law—and that’s the thing on which I want to base my reputation.” And he proudly told her that he had even completed a 776-page book, Real Property under the Code of Georgia and the Georgia Decision, which he hoped would be the definitive authority in its field.71
After awhile, their serious discussion about what would happen to her property after her death turned to religion. Stephens, who had remained a devout Catholic, wrote the essence of their conversation in his memoir. He wrote that when he asked her if she were turning back toward the religion of their youth, she made this intriguing remark: “That’s something I don’t want to talk about. I’m just going to say one thing about it. When you make a bargain with the devil, you had better stick to your bargain. I may have made one, but whenever I give my word on something, or whenever I take a course of action, I am not going to try to crawl out of that course of action because I may have made a mistake in starting it. It is not the fair thing to do.”72
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After the unseasonably warm, springlike weather during December and January, which had caused the camellias to bloom all over Atlanta, winter finally arrived on the morning of January 31. When John got out of bed and looked out the window, he saw that the trees and wires were covered with ice. During the night the electric lights had flickered occasionally, indicating that the big power lines leading into the city were breaking, or otherwise in trouble, but it was not until about nine o’clock that morning that the lights finally went out and stayed out. The apartment was heated by electrical radiators, so the only heat they had was what was left in the house from the night before. Peggy stayed in bed the rest of the morning hidden under blankets while John wrote a long letter to his mother about his first big outing—a dinner for the presentation of awards to Atlanta’s Women of the Year.73 After describing the awards, John wrote: “I think that I was just about the Mister Man of the Year. . . . Practically everybody there came up to speak to me, including many I did not know, and my hand tingled from the numerous handshakes. The next day, I was very tired, of course, but otherwise suffered no ill effe
cts so I believe I have toughened enough to stand a lot of things which I could not stand even a few months ago.”
John also included an interesting description of the big new building into which the Atlanta Journal had just moved.
The Journal building doesn’t have any murals, but we old-timers who worked in the crude, cracked and dirty quarters of the old building find it hard to adjust ourselves to the brightly lighted, spacious, clean and sound-proofed quarters of the new building. I can’t help wondering whether they can get out as good a newspaper in the new building as they did in the old. The old one was dirty, dark, crowded, with trash on the floor and big rats dashing from one trash heap to the other as soon as the working people had begun to clear out in the afternoons. The typewriters had to be coaxed to make them work and more often than not the desk drawers wouldn’t open. It offered very little to make the reporters’ work easier. One result was the development of individuality and personality. I keep wondering whether the folks will be overawed by the new building, whether its many comforts and conveniences will discourage them from working things out for themselves, whether its clean and quiet atmosphere will make the reporters tame. It’s certain they weren’t tame in the old building, but they got out a mighty good newspaper and many of them achieved fame in other fields—Don Marquis, Grantland Rice, Jacques Futrelle, Lawrence Stallings, Ward Morehouse, Ward Green, Margaret Mitchell and several others.
He closed nostalgically: “Such thoughts have brought back recollections of the Maysville Daily Bulletin, which certainly was crowded, cluttered and dirty enough to produce genius, if my theory is correct.”
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In early January 1949, Peggy received a letter from Red Upshaw’s stepmother saying that Red had died in a fall from a fifth-floor window in a hotel room he had been sharing with three other men. The police suspected suicide. He left a nineteen-year-old son and he had had three other wives, all of whom divorced him. He also had some sisters and brothers. An alcoholic who had been in and out of mental institutions for years, he had led a tragic life. Years later, when Lois Cole asked Margaret Baugh, “Did Peggy really keep a gun by her pillow always until Red died?” Baugh replied: “Steve says he doesn’t know. All I know is there was a pistol on her bedside table for years. She never explained why. Once when I asked whether she could shoot it, she said of course, her mother had taught her or had seen to it that she learned to shoot. In January 1949 Red’s stepmother wrote that he had died. I didn’t notice at first, but a while afterward I realized that the pistol was no longer there, and it never reappeared.”74
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