Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh
Page 72
63. Peacock, 136.
64. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 Sept. 1922.
65. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 Sept. 1922.
Chapter 5
Love Regained
1. Interview with MS.
2. UGa. SMP. Also, interview with MS.
3. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 57.
4. UGa. SMP. Also, interview with MS.
5. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 30 July 1923.
6. This gun belonged to John. It was the one given to him when he went with the federal agents into the Georgia mountains to hunt bootleggers. Interview with FM.
7. Farr, 55.
8. Interviews with JK and MS. JK’s letter to the author, 8 Nov. 1988, speaks of Peggy looking up to John and turning to him for advice. MS and others remembered how his colleagues at Georgia Power used to tease John about his supporting Peggy before they married.
9. Nearly all of the information about the newspapers was provided by JK.
10. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 27 March 1922.
11. Interview with MS.
12. AHC. William S. Howland, “Peggy Mitchell, Newspaperman,” AHB 9, no. 34. 47.
13. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, (New York: Basic, 1978), 98-99.
14. Interview with MS.
15. Farr, 58-59.
16. AHC. Howland, AHB, 48.
17. UGa. MM to Mrs. Julia Collier Harris, 28 April 1936.
18. AHC. Howland, AHB. 54. Hedley B. Wilcox was the business manager at the Journal when Peggy worked there.
19. AHC. Howland, AHB, 55.
20. AHC. Howland, AHB, 62.
21. Farr, 65-66.
22. AHC. Howland, AHB, 61.
23. AHC. Howland, AHB, 62-63.
24. Farr, 59-60.
25. The weaknesses in Peggy’s first article are also pointed out in Howland, AHB, 56-57.
26. Blacks in Atlanta who did voodoo magic were called “conger niggers.” Omie was an elderly black woman who lived in John’s hometown. John and his family admired her.
27. Interviews with MS and JK.
28. Interviews with JK and MS. Also in Farr, 69-70.
29. MFP, “When Margaret Mitchell Was a Girl Reporter,” in “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film. Ed. Richard Harwell (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 39.
30. Farr, 70.
31. Peggy’s articles are in a scrapbook in UGa.
32. Farr, 70.
33. Interview with FM.
34. UGa. Mitchell scrapbook. Note in JRM’s handwriting on “Camping Out on $7 a Week,” Peggy Mitchell, Atlanta Journal, 8 July 1923.
35. Interview with JK.
36. AHC. Howland, AHB, 64. Also Farr, 69.
37. AHC. Howland, AHB, 53.
38. AHC. Howland, AHB, 49.
39. AHC. Howland, AHB, 54.
40. AHC. Howland, AHB, 49.
41. Interview with JK.
42. AHC. Howland, AHB, 49.
43. AHC. Howland, AHB, 50.
44. AHC. Howland, AHB, 54.
45. Letter from Thomas Weesner to the author, 28 May 1993.
46. UGa. MM to Norma and Herschel Brickell, 4 Sept. 1938.
47. MMD. JRM to his mother, 11 June 1923.
48. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 30 July 1923.
49. Interview with MMD.
50. Peggy filed for divorce 14 Nov. 1923. She testified before two juries, once on 17 July 1924, and another time on 16 Oct. 1924. Her divorce was granted 16 Oct. 1924. Records are in Atlanta’s Fulton County Courthouse.
51. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 30 July 1923.
52. GWTW, 819.
53. Farr, 163.
54. Interview with FM.
55. MMD. JRM to his family, 9 May 1924.
56. MMD. JRM to his mother, 21 May 1924.
57. Interview with FM.
58. Later to be named the Georgia Power Company.
59. MMD. JRM to his mother, 7 Sept. 1924.
60. Interview with FM.
6. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 14 Feb. 1925.
62. UGa. Nearly all of Peggy’s articles are preserved in her scrapbook.
63. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
64. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
65. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
66. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
67. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
68. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday [Feb. 1925].
69. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 14 Feb. 1925.
70. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Wednesday 3 p.m. [Feb. or March 1925].
71. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
72. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Sunday morning [March 1925].
73. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 7 March 1925.
74. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Thursday afternoon [Feb. or March 1925].
75. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 7 March 1925.
76. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Wednesday 3 p.m. [Feb. or March 1925].
77. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Friday, 26 Feb. 1925.
78. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
79. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
80. FMZ. MM to FMZ, 26 Feb. 1925.
81. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday a.m. [Feb. or March 1925].
82. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
83. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [Feb. or March 1925].
84. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
85. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
86. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Thursday, 11 March 1925.
87. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Thursday afternoon [Feb. or March 1925].
88. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [Feb. or March 1925].
89. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Thursday afternoon [Feb. or March 1925].
90. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday a.m. [Feb. or March 1925].
91. Farr, 70.
92. Interview with JK.
93. The medical term for these seizures is “absent seizures.” Interview with FM. Peggy reported this incident, not long after it happened, to Henry and Ben Gordon Marsh, who had gone to Atlanta to see how John was recovering. In those days, epilepsy was a dreaded, mysterious disease, which unfortunately and falsely was associated with insanity by some people. The brothers never told their mother and sisters that John had a mild form of this condition. For a long time, this secret was well kept in the family. It was not until years later when John himself, explaining to Frances why he refused to drive an automobile and disliked traveling alone, told her the truth. But his mother never knew, and fortunately, he never had an attack while in her presence.
94. Darden Pyron in Southern Daughter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) incorrectly leads his readers to think that John suffered from narcolepsy, a condition characterized by sudden and uncontrollable attacks of deep sleep.
95. Interviews with JK and MS.
96. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 28 Aug. 1926.
97. UGa. MFP File.
98. Interview with JK.
Chapter 6
A Writer in Progress
1. Interview with JK; a letter from Thomas Weesner, 28 May 1993. Weesner explains, “From an early period there was a cluster of small houses along the bend in the road, and just about the present Tenth Street crossing there was a wagon yard, a blacksmith shop, and several small wooden stores. This settlement became a stopping place for wagons from north Georgia. A rough lot lived along the crescent and right after the Civil War, when the suburbs of Atlanta were infested by criminals, the area became a ‘hang-out’ for robbers. The road was very narrow and crooked, and it became a common saying that it took a mighty tight squeeze to get through with one’s life. Thus arose the name of ‘Tight Squeeze’ for the neighborhood.”
2. Interview with JK; telephone interviews with Mary Rose Taylor and with Tommy Jones of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation.
3. UGa. MFP’s Narrative. 11.
4. Interviews with JK and FM; also found in UGa.
MB’s Notes.
5. Male reporters were paid only thirty-five dollars a week.
6. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [late 1925 or early 1926].
7. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday Mrg. [late spring 1926].
8. MMD. MM to HM, n.d. [early 1927].
9. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Tuesday a.m. [May or June 1926].
10. Interview with FM.
11. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 26 June 1933.
12. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [late 1925 or early 1926].
13. UGa. MFP’s Narrative. 12.
14. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Monday [fall 1925].
15. UGa. MB’s Notes.
16. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Monday [fall 1925].
17. UGa. MFP’s Narrative. 11-12.
18. Interview with JK, who said Allan Taylor’s “crush” on Peggy used to annoy her but amused John and their friends.
19. UGa. MM to Stephen Vincent Benét, 9 July 1936.
20. UGa. MM to Stephen Vincent Benét, 9 July 1936.
21. UGa. John’s limerick and pun are in MMMP.
22. UGa. MB’s Notes. 6.
23. EU. MM to Harvey Smith, 15 March 1933.
24. MMD. MM to HM, n.d. [early 1926].
25. Interview with MMD and FM.
26. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Sunday night.
27. See Darden Pyron, Southern Daughter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
28. Edmund Davis’s telephone conversation with and letter to the author, 3 Oct. 1991.
29. EU. Harvey Smith’s note attached to MM’s letter. March or April 1933.
30. Interview with JK.
31. EU. Harvey Smith’s note attached to MM’s letter. March or April 1933.
32. Anne Edwards, Road to Tara (New York: Dell, 1983), 265 and throughout the text.
33. Interview with JK.
34. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Saturday, Jan the something [1926].
35. MMD. MM to HM, n.d. [early 1926].
36. AHC. Peggy Mitchell, “Georgia Generals: For the Stone Mountain Memorial.” AHB 9, no. 34. 66-99.
37. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Tuesday afternoon [early 1926].
38. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Tuesday afternoon [early 1926].
39. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Tuesday afternoon [early 1926].
40. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Tuesday afternoon [early 1926].
41. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Tuesday afternoon [early 1926].
42. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Bennet 14 ems 8pt sun mag [early 1926].
43. Interview with JK.
44. MMD. JRM to his mother, 7 Jan. 1926.
45. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Sunday night [1925].
46. Wade H. Wright, The History of Georgia Power, 1855-1957 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1957), 221.
47. MMD. JRM to his mother, 7 Jan. 1926.
48. Interview with FM.
49. Peggy’s scrapbook in the Hargrett Library contains her articles. Information about Peggy’s dislike for her job came from interviews with JK and MS.
50. Interview with FM.
51. Interview with FM.
52. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Saturday, Jan the something [1926].
53. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Saturday, Jan the something [1926].
54. GWTW, 246.
55. Pyron in Southern Daughter (185) takes Peggy’s remark about John’s needing “more sleep than any white boy I know” out of context. Without quoting any of the information that Peggy gives Frances about John’s schedule and without mentioning anything about John’s circumstances at work, where he was virtually holding down the workload of three men—as Peggy says and Joe Kling verifies—Pyron gives his readers a false impression of John, wrongly stating that John was narcoleptic. As everyone who ever knew him knew, John suffered from petit mal seizures, not narcolepsy. The petit mal seizures did not interfere with his work, and everyone who knew John Marsh said he was an extremely hard-working man. A person suffering from narcolepsy could not have accomplished all that John Marsh accomplished.
56. Jane Bonner Peacock, Dynamo Going to Waste (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985), 129. MM to Allen Edee, Dec. 1921.
57. MMD. MM to HM, n.d. [spring 1926].
58. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
59. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
60. Interview with FM for Peggy’s frequent expression of ill health.
61. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 28 Aug. 1926.
62. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Monday [early 1926].
63. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 28 Aug. 1926.
64. UGa. MM to Clifford Dowdey, 29 July 1937.
65. Interviews with JK and with MS.
66. John’s boosting Peggy’s confidence and his anger about her lack of it was common knowledge among family and close friends.
67. MFP’s interview with John Marsh, “Was Margaret Mitchell Writing Another Book?” Atlanta Journal, 18 Dec. 1949. Interviews with John’s family and coworkers.
68. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d. [late 1925 or early 1926]. Darden Pyron in his Southern Daughter quotes several passages from this five-page, double-spaced letter but he noticeably omits Peggy’s comments about John’s role in getting her this work and in helping her write it. He also assigns different dates to the passages he quotes. Pyron quotes two passages from one page of this letter and documents the passages as coming from two different letters. One passage that he quotes on page 211 of his book he documents as coming from a letter he dates “April to June 1926.” On page 212 of his book, he quotes from the same page of the same letter and documents it as coming from a letter dated “March to April 1925.”
69. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Monday [early 1926].
70. Interview with FM.
71. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, n.d., Monday [early 1926].
72. FMZ. FMZ’s Narrative. 16. This narrative is a personal account of Frances’s recollections of various events.
73. Interview with FM.
74. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
75. AHC. William S. Howland, “Margaret Mitchell: Newspaperman,” AHB, 9, no. 34. 55.
76. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
77. Peacock, 84. MM to Allen Edee, 26 March 1920.
78. MMD. MM to HM, n.d., Tuesday a.m. [May or June 1926].
79. MMD. MM to HM, n.d, Tuesday a.m. [May or June 1926].
80. FMZ. MM to FMZ, 28 Aug. 1926.
81. Interview with MMD.
82. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
83. FMZ. MM to FMZ, 23 Aug. 1926.
84. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
85. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
86. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
87. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [latespring 1926].
88. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Monday morning [late spring 1926].
89. FMZ. MM to FMZ, Saturday, 28 Aug. 1926.
90. Peacock, 104. MM to Allen Edee, 31 July 1920.
91. JRM’s interview with the Lexington Herald Leader on 23 Oct. 1936.
92. MMD. JRM to his mother, Sunday, 1 Aug. 1926.
93. MMD. JRM to his mother, Sunday, 1 Aug. 1926.
94. FMZ’s Narrative. 7. JRM to FMZ, n.d. [1926].
95. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 16 Oct. 1926.
96. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, Sunday, 1 Aug. 1926.
97. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Saturday, Jan the something [1926].
98. Interview with FM. Francesca and Ben Gordon Marsh, as newlyweds themselves, visited John and Peggy in their Crescent Avenue apartment in the spring of 1928, shortly after Peggy started work on the novel. John described to Henry this evening when he removed the cast.
99. MMD. JRM to his family, 15 Oct. 1924.
100. Finis Farr, in Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 76, states that MB read both of these manuscripts before destroying them at John’s and Stephens’s instruction. Interview wi
th FM.
101. According to MB, who read this manuscript, it was later destroyed in the fire that burned all the Marshes’ other papers and most of the Gone With the Wind manuscript.
102. Peggy finished “’Ropa Carmagin” in the form of a novella and submitted it to the Macmillan Company when she submitted the Gone With the Wind manuscript. The Macmillan executive Harold Latham read and praised it but rejected it because of its length. Latham gave it to his assistant editor, Lois Cole, who also praised it, saying, “It sent an authentic chill up the spine.” Farr, 77, 103. John destroyed this manuscript in the fire. Also, interview with FM.
103. Interview with FM. Sometime during that fall of 1926, John’s mother and Henry’s little daughter Mary made their first visit to Atlanta to see John and Peggy; they heard talk about Peggy’s book, which at that time was a Jazz Age adventure story about a teenage girl. Then John’s brothers, Henry and Ben Gordon, came to visit in 1927. By spring 1928, when Ben Gordon brought his bride Francesca to see the Atlanta Marshes, Peggy had written many chapters of what was later to become known as Gone With the Wind. In those early days, John and Peggy talked enthusiastically about their writing project. John always boasted to his family about Peggy’s work. There was no secrecy about what they were doing. The secrecy that shrouded all that Peggy wrote came about much later.
104. UGa. MM’s scrapbook.
105. Interview with FM. Francesca remembered precisely the talk about Mrs. Benning because of the analogy that John made between his mother and Mrs. Benning. When she and Ben Gordon visited John and Peggy in 1927, she said the couple was “enthralled and engrossed in the novel—and we were too!”
106. Interview with FM. Francesca said Peggy appreciated that typewriter in the same manner another woman would appreciate being given “a full length mink coat!”
107. Interview with FM.
108. JRM’s interview with MFP, Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
109. Peggy often said she wrote in this manner. This fact was well known among family and friends.
110. Interview with JK.
111. EU. Harvey Smith’s note attached to MM’s letter. 23 July 1927.
112. Pyron, in Southern Daughter (289ff), makes several incorrect statements concerning John’s involvement in Peggy’s writing of Gone With the Wind. Here is one example: he refers to a letter John wrote in 1931, in which John mentions his and Peggy’s visiting scenes that he says are “of big events in the Civil War and in Peggy’s novel.” Pyron incorrectly states, “This reference is John Marsh’s first recorded notice of his wife’s novel. In all of his detailed correspondence to his sister and mother throughout the twenties he had never mentioned it before. This supports the impression that only now was Mitchell sharing her writing, even with her husband” (290). And Pyron says that “she [Peggy] dragged John off to nearby points of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and Lookout Mountain” (italics mine).