Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh
Page 73
Chapter 7
In the Wake of a Masterpiece
1. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 79.
2. UGa. Bessie Jordan’s “My Dear Employer, Miss Peggy.” Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine, 12 Aug. 1951.
3. Farr, 82.
4. Interviews with FM and MMD.
5. Farr, 87.
6. UGa. MM to John Macleay, Liverpool, England, 23 Nov. 1936.
7. Farr, 84. Stephens’s essay appeared in 1927 in the Bulletin, a journal published by the Atlanta Historical Society, an organization that Eugene Mitchell helped to establish the previous year.
8. Farr, 84.
9. MMD. JRM to his mother, 6 May 1927.
10. Interview with JK.
11. Interview with JK.
12. Interview with JK.
13. UGa. MM to Clifford Dowdey, 29 July 1937.
14. This is an example of the kind of important information that only Stephens Mitchell could provide when John and Peggy did not. Stephens talked to Finis Farr about Peggy’s reaction to Boyd’s novel. See Farr, 83. Also, Peggy mentioned her reaction to Boyd’s novel in her letter to Clifford Dowdey, 29 July 1937.
15. UGa. MM to Clifford Dowdey, 29 July 1937.
16. UGa. MM to Clifford Dowdey, 29 July 1937.
17. MMD. JRM to HM, 4 Aug. 1927.
18. MMD. JRM to HM, 4 Aug. 1927.
19. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
20. Interview with MS.
21. Farr, 82.
22. Farr, 82.
23. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
24. Interviews with FM and MS.
25. UGa. MM to Harriet Ross Colquitt, 7 Aug. 1936.
26. Kitty and her young son were to spend only one day in Atlanta before continuing their train journey, but the child became ill and had to be hospitalized; he and Kitty stayed for nearly a month.
27. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
28. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
29. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
30. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
31. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928]. Renick Marsh was born 4 Feb. 1929.
32. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
33. FMZ. MM to FMZ, n.d., Friday [Oct. 1928].
34. Interview with JK.
35. Interview with Deon Rutledge.
36. Interview with Deon Rutledge.
37. Interview with JK.
38. Electric Railway Journal 74, no. 6. 348.
39. MMD. JRM to his mother, Sept. 1931.
40. Richard Harwell, White Columns in Hollywood (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982), 3.
41. NYPL. MM to HSL, 9 July 1935.
42. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Sept. 1931.
43. Interview with MS.
44. Interview with JK.
45. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Sept. 1931.
46. FMZ. JRM to FMZ, 20 Sept. 1931.
47. MMD. JRM to his mother, 16 June 1934.
48. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 19 June 1934.
49. Interview with JK.
50. Interview with JK.
51. MFP, “Was Margaret Mitchell Writing Another Book?” (interview with John Marsh), Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
52. Interview with FM.
53. MMD. JRM to his mother, 2 Dec. 1932.
54. Interview with MMD, who visited in this apartment as she was growing up.
55. Peggy often spoke sympathetically about Scarlett. For examples, see MM to Astride K. Hansen, 27 Jan. 1937 (UGa.), and FMZ’s narrative for “My poor Scarlett.”
56. Interview with FM.
57. Interview with Edmund Davis.
58. Interview with MS.
59. Richard Harwell, ed., “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 58-59.
60. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 58-59.
61. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 58.
62. Lois Cole’s brother was a president of Amherst College and also an ambassador to Chile. Farr, 81.
63. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 57.
64. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 57.
65. Interview with JK.
66. Interview with JK.
67. Interview with JK.
68. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 57.
69. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 57.
70. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 57.
71. MMD. JRM to his mother, 15 July 1934.
72. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 19 June 1934.
73. MMD. JRM to his mother, 16 June 1934. Francesca said that she and the others knew that John and Peggy took the typewriter and sections of the manuscript, as well as some of John’s business matters, with them on some of their trips home to family gatherings. John and Peggy, she said, worked on the manuscript during their leisure. She also said that is the reason why the family asked about the book regularly for so many years. They all saw evidence of the book, but they did not know much about it except that it was a Civil War novel.
74. UGa. MM to Alexander L. May, Berlin, Germany, 18 Nov. 1938.
75. UGa. MM to Alexander L. May, Berlin, Germany, 18 Nov. 1938.
76. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 6 July 1936.
77. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 6 July 1936.
78. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 6 July 1936.
79. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 6 July 1936.
80. MMD. JRM to HM and MMD, 29 Sept. 1934.
81. Wade H. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 1855-1957 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1957), 181. In the early 1900s the expanding Georgia Power Company started building five dams and five lakes on the Tugalo, the
Tallulah, and the Chattooga rivers to provide water for new hydroelectric plants. After nearly two decades, when the project was finally completed and the construction workers gone, the company refurbished some of the workmen’s cabins and converted the dwellings into summer retreats for its executives. The company also maintained little company villages for its employees at each plant. In 1925, after the Terrora development was completed near Tallulah Falls, the president of Georgia Power, P. S. Arkwright, gave one such cabin to John to use for entertaining editors and others in the line of business and also to use for his personal business.
82. MMD. JRM to HM and Mary Hunter, 29 Sept. 1934.
83. MMD. JRM to his mother, 20 Jan. 1935.
84. Peggy gave Caroline Miller’s Lamb in His Bosom to John for Christmas 1933.
85. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 58.
86. UGa. Harold Latham, “How I Found Gone With the Wind,” Atlanta Journal Magazine, n.d. 20- 22.
87. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 58.
88. Latham, 81.
89. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 59.
90. JRM’s interview with MFP, Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
91. JRM’s interview with MFP, Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
92. MMD. MM to Mother Marsh, 17 April 1936.
93. Latham, 22.
94. Latham, 20.
95. Latham, 22.
96. Latham, 81.
97. Farr, 94.
98. Latham, 22.
99. Farr, 95.
100. NYPL. MM to HSL, 16 April 1935.
101. NYPL. MM to HSL, 16 April 1935.
102. NYPL. MM to HSL, 16 April 1935.
103. Interview with FM.
104. NYPL. MM to HSL, 16 April 1935.
105. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 59.
106. NYPL. MM to HSL, 9 July 1935.
107. NYPL. HSL to MM, 15 July 1935.
108. NYPL. HSL to MM, 15 July 1935.
109. NYPL. MM to HSL, 17 July 1935.
110. A writer from Como, Mississippi, Stark Y
oung was for over twenty years an editor for the New Republic magazine and also for Theater Arts. He translated several of Anton Chekhov’s plays and edited A Southern Treasury of Art and Literature. He is best known for his Civil War novel So Red the Rose, published in 1934. He died in 1963 at the age of eighty-two. After Gone With the Wind came out in 1936, So Red the Rose faded quickly into oblivion.
111. Farr, 101-2.
112. NYPL. HSL’s memorandum, 15 July 1935.
113. NYPL. HSL to MM, 17 July 1935.
114. Harwell, “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film, 59-60.
115. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
116. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
117. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
118. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
119. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
120. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
121. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
122. NYPL. HSL to MM, 30 July 1935.
123. NYPL. HSL to MM, 30 July 1935.
124. NYPL. MM to HSL, 27 July 1935.
Chapter 8
Midwife to a Novel
1. Interview with MS.
2. NYPL. MM to HSL, 1 Aug. 1935.
3. NYPL. MM to HSL, 1 Aug. 1935.
4. NYPL. MM to HSL, 1 Aug. 1935.
5. NYPL. MM to HSL, 1 Aug. 1935.
6. NYPL. LDC to MM, 5 Aug. 1935.
7. NYPL. MM’s telegram to HSL, 6 Aug. 1935.
8. NYPL. MM’s telegram to HSL, 6 Aug. 1935.
9. NYPL. HSL to MM, 13 Aug. 1935.
10. Interview with FM.
11. This check arrived 21 Aug. 1936. Personal interview with JK, whose wife Rhoda Williams was in John’s office at the time Peggy called and heard what John said.
12. Georgia Power Citizen, “John and Peggy, Rhett and Scarlett,” May 1984. 4. Interviews with JK and MS.
13. NYPL. MM to HSL, 3 Sept. 1935.
14. Georgia Power Citizen, “John and Peggy, Rhett and Scarlett,” May 1984. 3.
15. NYPL. MM to HSL, 3 Sept. 1935.
16. NYPL. MM to HSL, 3 Sept. 1935.
17. NYPL. MM to HSL, 3 Sept. 1935.
18. UGa. MM to Captain Achmed Abdullah, 14 April 1937.
19. UGa. MM to Captain Achmed Abdullah, 14 April 1937.
20. UGa. MM to Captain Achmed Abdullah, 14 April 1937.
21. Peggy often said and wrote in letters to friends that she wanted southerners to like her book and to find it correct.
22. UGa. MM to Sara Helena Wilson, 3 Nov. 1936.
23. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 104.
24. UGa. MM to Sara Helena Wilson, 3 Nov. 1936.
25. UGa. MM to Captain Achmed Abdullah, 14 April 1937.
26. UGa. MM to Henry Steele Commager, 10 July 1936.
27. Interview with Deon Rutledge.
28. In answering a request from Alexander L. May, from Berlin, Germany, Peggy wrote, on 22 July 1938, the titles and authors of seventeen history books she used in writing her novel.
29. UGa. MM to Paul Jordan-Smith, 27 May 1936.
30. UGa. MM to Douglas S. Freeman, 13 Oct. 1936.
31. NYPL. LDC to MM, 4 March 1936.>
32. NYPL. MM to LDC, n.d., [1936].
33. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 6 Feb. 1936.
34. Interview with JK.
35. Interviews with MS and JK.
36. Interview with MS.
37. Interview with FM.
38. Farr, 109.
39. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 13 Feb. 1936.
40. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 9 July 1936.
41. UGa. MM to Donald Adams, 9 July 1936.
42. Ralph Thompson, in his review of Gone With the Wind for the New York Times, 30 June 1936, wrote this positive comment also. “The historical background is the chief virtue of the book, and it is the story of the time rather than the unconvincing and somewhat absurd plot that gives Miss Mitchell’s work whatever importance may be attached to it. How accurate this history is is for the expert to tell, but no reader can come away without a sense of the tragedy that overcame the planting families in 1865 and without a better understanding of the background of present-day Southern life.”
43. UGa. MM to Julia Collier Harris, 8 July 1936.
44. UGa. MM to John McLeay, 23 Nov. 1936.
45. UGa. MM to Frances Scarlett Beach, 19 Oct. 1936.
46. UGa. MM to Harry S. Slattery, 3 Oct. 1936.
47. UGa. MM to Frances Scarlett Beach, 19 Nov. 1936.
48. Farr, 105.
49. Farr, 108. Irish Brigades helped Maurice de Saxe defeat the Duke of Cumberland in 1745 in a Belgian village named Fontenoy. Legend has it that Tara in County Meath, Ireland, was the seat of ancient kings.
50. UGa. MM to Stark Young, 29 Sept. 1936.
51. NYPL. MM to LDC, Sunday, 3 Oct. 1935.
52. NYPL. MM to LDC, Sunday, 3 Oct. 1935.
53. Farr, 115.
54. Farr, 115.
55. JRM’s interview with MFP, Atlanta Journal Magazine, 18 Dec. 1949.
56. UGa. MM to Michael McWhite, 27 Jan. 1937.
57. Richard Harwell, ed., “Gone With the Wind” as Book and Film (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 60.
58. Farr, 108.
59. NYPL. MM to LDC, 31 Oct. 1935.
60. NYPL. MM to HSL, 30 Oct. 1935.
61. NYPL. LDC to MM, 7 Nov. 1935. Rachel Field, an American author published by Macmillan, is best known for her books for children. Hitty, Her First One Hundred Years (1929) won her a Newberry medal in 1930. Calico Bush (1931), a story of a French servant girl in Maine, is considered her best work.
62. NYPL. HSL to MM, 11 Nov. 1935.
63. NYPL. HSL to MM, 4 Nov. 1935.
64. NYPL. HSL to MM, 4 Nov. 1935.
65. NYPL. HSL to MM, 4 Nov. 1935.
66. Interview with JK.
67. Interview with JK.
68. Interview with JK.
69. Interview with MS.
70. Interview with MS.
71. Interview with FM.
72. NYPL. MM to LDC, 18 March 1936.
73. NYPL. LDC’s telegram to JRM, 19 Dec. 1935.
74. NYPL. JRM’s telegram to LDC, 19 Dec. 1935.
75. NYPL. JRM’s telegram to LDC, 19 Dec. 1935.
76. Farr, 111.
77. NYPL. MB to LDC, 7 Jan. 1936.
78. NYPL. MB to LDC, 16 Jan. 1936.
79. Interview with MS.
80. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 30 Jan. 1936.
81. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 31 Jan. 1936.
82. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 31 Jan. 1936.
83. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 31 Jan. 1936.
84. NYPL. LDC to JRM, 3 Feb. 1936.
85. NYPL. LDC to JRM, 3 Feb. 1936.
86. MMD. JRM to his mother, 7 Feb. 1936.
87. Interview with MS.
88. NYPL. LDC to JRM, 13 Feb. 1936.
89. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 9 Feb. 1936.
90. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 9 Feb. 1936.
91. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 9 Feb. 1936.
92. Interview with FM. JRM told this to HM in explaining the agony that went into getting the manuscript ready for publication.
93. NYPL. JRM to LDC, 13 Feb. 1936.
94. NYPL. LDC to JRM, 15 Feb. 1936.
95. NYPL. LDC to MM, 20 Feb. 1936.
96. UGa. LDC to Miss Hutchinson, 9 March 1936.
97. NYPL. LDC’s telegram to JRM, 19 March 1936.
98. NYPL. JRM to Mr. Putnam, June 1936.
99. Farr, 126.
Chapter 9
A Fantastic Dream
1. MMD. JRM to his mother, 22 March 1936.
2. John’s mother lived with Henry Marsh and his family in Wilmington, Delaware, where Frances and Rollin Zane also lived. His oldest sister Katharine Marsh Bowden and her family lived in California. Ben Gordon and Francesca lived in Clays Ferry, Kentucky.
3. MMD. JRM to his mother, 22 March 1936.
4. Interview with FM.
5. Although Lois Cole’s letter to Charles J. Trenkl
e (Macmillan Company, 2459 Prairie Ave., Chicago, IL, 10 June 1936), referring to Peggy’s Macon letter, is in the Macmillan File, NYPL, Peggy’s famous Macon letter is in UGa. Lois Cole sent Peggy’s Macon letter to Stephens Mitchell on 10 Dec. 1964 so that he could include it in Farr’s biography. It is now in UGa.
6. NYPL. LDC to Charles J. Trenkle, Macmillan Company, Chicago, IL, 21 June and 26 June 1936. Lois quotes Peggy’s letter.
7. NYPL. LDC to Charles Trenkle, Macmillan Company, Chicago, IL, 10 June 1936.
8. NYPL. A. J. Putnam to HSL, 15 April 1936.
9. The London Macmillan Company was an old and highly respectable publishing house founded by the brothers David and Alexander Macmillan, who built the firm in 1843, from a bookstore they had purchased in Cambridge. Although closely connected with the parent firm, the American Macmillan was a separate business
started in 1896 by George Brett, Sr. Although it had grown successfully and had published such bestsellers as Richard Carvel, The Virginian, The Call of the Wild, and The Choir Invisible, it was experiencing in 1936 the economic depression from which the entire nation was suffering.
10. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta (New York: Morrow, 1965), 120.
11. NYPL. Collins’s cable to HSL, 6 May 1936.
12. Collins’s letters expressing his offers and his disappointment in not being able to acquire GWTW, as well as his letters regarding the misunderstanding that he had with Latham are in NYPL.
13. Interview with MMD.
14. NYPL. LDC to MM, 9 April 1936.
15. NYPL. LDC to MM, 9 April 1936.
16. NYPL. LDC to MM, 29 April 1936.
17. NYPL. LDC to MM, 29 April 1936.
18. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
19. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
20. NYPL. LDC to MM, 29 April 1936.
21. NYPL. MM to LDC, 5 May 1936.
22. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
23. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
24. NYPL. MM to LDC, 14 May 1936.
25. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
26. NYPL. MM to LDC, 27 April 1936.
27. NYPL. MM to LDC, 5 May 1936.
28. NYPL. MM to LDC, 5 May 1936.
29. Farr, 122.