“A woman who can merge the best qualities of Scarlett and Melanie within herself will be perfectly adapted for modern life,” Ms. de Havilland told me in 1980.
She wasn’t my first choice for a sixth-grade project on a living person I admired, and based on how smart she is, I now guess she realized this. She probably discerned by reading between the lines of the letter I scrawled on college-ruled paper that I would have rather written Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett, if she was still alive.
But Ms. de Havilland was as gracious as Melanie Wilkes herself to my pushy requests for autographed pictures of Ms. Leigh or Clark Gable. I used the lame excuse that I wanted a tangible piece of the movie, which was the epicenter of my life at age twelve.
“I hope these few words will serve as a palpable souvenir of something you love so greatly,” she wrote to me on thick, cream-colored stationery with a watercolor print of a volcano on the front.
I was truthful, at least, about being obsessed with Gone with the Wind, having read the 1,037-page book twice that year after seeing the movie on the Turner Broadcasting System channel. When my teacher, Ms. Corey, told the class we were writing a letter to someone we greatly admired, I knew my choices were within the pages of the 1936 book or the reels of the 1939 movie.
I wasn’t going to write to a relative, because that was just a normal person, and I didn’t care a single bit about local, state, or national politicians. Classmates who felt the same opted for former first ladies, astronauts, or Olympians. Not me. I wanted to write to someone who had a connection to Gone with The Wind.
My parents were pleased I was reading so much, but also concerned I was idealizing the pre-Civil War South. They reminded me of the heartbreak and abuse we watched in Roots, two years before I saw Gone with The Wind. The familial relationship between slaves and their owners that was depicted by Margaret Mitchell and movie producer David O. Selznick, was the exception to the rule, if it was even somewhat factual at all, they said.
As a pre-teen I grasped this serious misrepresentation somewhat, but what stood out to me the most at that naïve age was the romance, the passion, Scarlett’s grit, and, of course, her clothes.
I couldn’t do my project on author Margaret Mitchell, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her one-hit wonder, because she was killed at age forty-eight by a drunk driver in 1949. Ms. Leigh, who won an Oscar for playing the beautifully flawed Scarlett, died in 1967 at age fifty-three of tuberculosis. And Gable, who was the dashing Rhett Butler, whom I would judge all boys and men against for years to come, died at age fifty-nine of a heart attack in 1960.
So that left Olivia de Havilland. It was probably a note that my father included along with my letter to the actress that prompted her to respond to me at all. I don’t know exactly what he wrote, but I can tell from her response to him that he acknowledged my preference for Scarlett, but said he was buoyed by the fact that I also loved Melanie.
“That Katherine Victoria, a Scarlett by nature, should regard so highly Melanie is a grand sign. . . . Scarlett’s vigor, resourcefulness, and perseverance are such splendid qualities in their positive expression. And Melanie’s compassion, generosity, and lovingness are gifts very precious indeed,” she wrote to him in a letter separate from mine.
(While the letter I received from her home in Paris was on heavy stationery in a thick envelope lined with French stamps, the one to my dad was scripted on much lighter airmail paper. Ms. de Havilland wasn’t about to waste too much money on postage for total strangers.)
My father asked her if it was difficult to play such a patient, forgiving character day after day. “I identified with Melanie out of an appreciation for the values she represented that seemed so threatened when I was growing up and so worth preserving,” she wrote. “One way to keep them alive was to play the role. A real-life Melanie I have once or twice encountered. My own daughter to my joy is not unlike her.”
Along with stupidly requesting movie souvenirs in my letter, I did manage to also ask the actress what it was like to be in what many consider the greatest movie of all time.
“As to the experience of working in Gone with the Wind, it was a wonderfully happy one for me. I was deeply attached to the character of Melanie, who had a rare wisdom of the heart, and I looked forward each day to living her life during the hours of filming,” she recounted.
“Furthermore, I surmised that Gone with the Wind might have an unusual destiny — that it might live longer than the year or two which was the fate of most movies of that day. The thought of being part of something which would endure was very fulfilling, even exhilarating.”
Ms. de Havilland knows something about enduring. Though she didn’t win the lawsuit against Murphy and the FX, she lived on her own in an apartment in Paris well after age 100.
The lawsuit against Murphy, who produced Glee, American Horror Story, and Scream Queens, wasn’t her first strike against the mighty entertainment industry. In 1943, at age twenty-seven, she sued Warner Bros. Studios to get out of extra time tacked on to her seven-year contract because she took unpaid leave when presented with mundane movie rolls. After she sued, the court came out against the longstanding practice of holding actors hostage to long-term contracts.
The ruling, which became known as the “de Havilland Law,” is still cited today in entertainment contract disputes.
It’s clear Olivia de Havilland herself has a strong dose of Scarlett’s “vigor” as she called it in the letter to my father. She also has humor and was known as a prankster in her Hollywood days. Remember when Rhett helped Scarlett escape Atlanta after she delivered Melanie’s baby? He lifted Melanie from the bed and rushed her down the stairs to an awaiting carriage as cannonballs dropped all around them.
Well, behind-the-scene stories reveal that on the first take of that scene, Ms. de Havilland secretly tied a heavy piece of lighting equipment to her waist. When Gable, who was known for his ruggedness, tried to pick up the slight actress, he couldn’t even budge her tiny frame.
If I’d known at age twelve all I know now about Ms. de Havilland, she would have definitely been my first pick above all the others.
18. Never Get A Tattoo
The issues with my heart started at age seventeen and ended when I was forty-six. I’m talking about medical issues, not all those other issues throughout life that weigh heavy on the heart or even break it. I don’t think they ever end.
Living with erratic heart trouble and having a daughter born with heart defects taught me that a lot of medical problems also don’t have exact answers and solutions. Still, our lives were saved several times by amazing doctors and the progress of medical research.
When a doctor told me the pulmonary valve leading to the lungs of my one-day-old daughter’s heart was closed, but it could be opened with a balloon at the end of catheter threaded up through my baby’s leg, I felt like I was watching some science fiction movie. I hate science fiction because it’s not proven. This plan also sounded completely unbelievable. I asked the surgeon how in the world she would accomplish such a feat. She answered very matter-of-factly: “It’s what I do.”
The morning I learned Charlotte needed cardiac intervention I immediately felt guilty for two reasons.
First of all, the night before, I insisted my precious baby sleep in the hospital nursery so I could get as much rest as possible before going home with a newborn to a two-year-old daughter in fewer than forty-eight hours. I saw two nurses raise their eyebrows at each other upon hearing my declaration, because I was the only woman in the maternity ward since Lucy Ricardo who didn’t insist her newborn miracle sleep at her bedside.
Twelve hours later when Charlotte was whisked away to intensive care after our pediatrician found an irregular heartbeat during a routine visit, I saw them exchange judging looks again as I started crying. My newborn daughter had a life-threatening birth defect, and I may have missed my only night with her.
The other reason for my guilt was because I was sure I had passed on a bum heart
to this little baby since I had one of my own. My problems started at age seventeen when I was a counselor at Camp Seafarer on the North Carolina coast.
“I just threw up in the bathroom,” I told a friend from the boys’ camp down the river when I saw him at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, where the women’s restroom no longer lived up to the restaurant’s name.
“Are you hungover or did you eat more than your daily quota of twenty hush puppies?” he teased. Neither accusation was the case. I boarded the Joy Boy, which would take seventy campers and ten counselors back to camp a few miles up the Neuse River. We were returning from Long Cruise, the campers’ one night away from the camp about fifty miles away.
Somewhere in the middle of the two-hour trip, my heart went berserk. I was sweating profusely and couldn’t catch my breath. My co-counselors wrapped ice in towels and packed them around me as I was lying in a patch of shade on the deck of the Joy Boy. My chest grew tighter and tighter as my heart beat faster and faster. The Seafarer nurse was waiting for me at the dock when we reached camp and loaded me into her station wagon. We raced forty miles to the hospital in New Bern.
Within a few minutes of arriving with a heart rate of 220 beats per minute, two doctors shot a drug into my body that reset the pace of my heart.
My parents, meanwhile, weren’t answering their phone at home in Raleigh because they were at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville with no idea any of this was taking place. It was pretty much impossible to be a helicopter parent in the 1980s without cell phones or the Internet or any desire from parents to monitor their offspring on a daily basis.
So, I went through all of this without family at my bedside at the hospital in New Bern, though Seafarer staff visited regularly.
Three days later, I returned to camp with a heart monitor. Every evening when I showered, (I wore a swimsuit as all counselors did with little girls around) the ten-year-olds in cabin fourteen fought over who got to stand two feet beyond the stream of water and hold the recording component of the monitor that was tethered to my chest.
A week later, without any more problems, my co-counselors Ellen and Hilburn took turns carrying the monitor high above their heads on our day off as we waded out to the annual sandbar party at the beach. Yes siree, I had quite the conversation starter with wires attached to my well-tanned upper body and extending through the armholes of my American flag tank suit. Nothing says footloose and fancy free quite like a heart-monitoring device.
By summer’s end the monitor found my heart was beating completely normally. With no other episodes, that tachycardia was blamed on exhaustion combined with mitral valve prolapse, which occurs in 6 percent of all women. I took a blood thinner for six months, checked in with a cardiologist every year for the next decade, avoided caffeine and cocaine, and had no further complications until I was forty-two.
That’s when, on a sunny October Sunday, I joined about thirty of my dad’s relatives at The Depot restaurant in Surry County, N.C. Before the biscuits even arrived, I started pouring sweat and my heart was racing. The hostess couldn’t find a pulse because my heart was beating so fast. Within minutes, an ambulance arrived, and the paramedics decided they had to treat me right there in the parking lot because there wasn’t enough time to make it to the hospital. My dad climbed in the front seat next to my cousin Lynn while every other Snow as well as fifty more diners from The Depot crowded around the ambulance.
The paramedics shot a wonder drug through an IV that made its way to my racing heart.
“This is like when your computer is messed up and you turn it off, then turn it back on, and it starts working fine. It’s a reboot,” one of the paramedics explained.
Lo and behold, my heart stopped for a fraction of a second and then started up on its own at a much slower rate. It was still higher than it should be, however, so I was raced fourteen miles along winding mountain roads to Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital in Elkin. On the way, I looked through the back windows of the ambulance and saw a snake of Buicks and pickups following closely behind. Every one of the Snows from The Depot, plus more who were just getting out of church and had been alerted to the situation, were following the ambulance like a funeral procession. I called Adam, my husband at the time, who was in Florida, to fill him in.
He was worried, of course, but knew the true danger was over, so like any father taking care of three kids under ten on his own for the weekend, he leapt at the chance for a little help.
“I’m about to go to the grocery store,” Adam said. “What should I get to go in their lunchboxes tomorrow?”
“Are you kidding me? I am in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. My heart was just stopped. And rebooted. I am in an ambulance. I am officially off Mom Duty,” I said, but quickly added, “Actually, I think we do need peanut butter. Smooth, low sugar.”
Five of my cousins talked their way into the emergency room to assemble around my dad and me. I was waiting to go through a battery of tests, but was out of danger at this point, so this time at Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital is actually a very fond memory of family togetherness.
“I feel just terrible,” my cousin Anne Marie said. “She spent last night with me and seemed fine. This morning all we did was go for a walk and then have some waffles.”
“Waffles, Anne Marie? Waffles?” my cousin Mike said incredulously, tongue fully in cheek. “Is that what you people in Yadkin County call your uppers, or your downers, or whatever the drug du jour is these days? Waffles?”
Mike hailed from Surry County and like all Surry County residents who claim Andy Griffith and the Blue Ridge Mountains as part of their DNA, he made a point of looking down on neighboring Yadkin County as well as every other county in the state, nation, and world.
My sweet father, who was eighty-six at the time, was probably in more cardiac distress than I was by the time we all congregated in that emergency room. My health was his biggest concern, of course, but being a frugal Snow, he also worried what it was going to cost to change my flight back to Florida since my little stay in the hospital would prevent me from leaving later that night.
“Uncle A.C., I’m going to take care of it. If I have to, I’ll put the doctor on the phone and send the airline Katherine’s EKG. I’ll make sure they don’t charge a big change fee,” my cousin Lynn said. “I know how to get things done. I keep saying I’m going to start a business called Rent a Bitch, so you are my first customer, and I’m going to charge you my friends and family rate.”
A few minutes later she had cancelled my flight back to Florida and was booking a completely different one for $35 less than what I paid originally.
“Uncle A.C., I just need your credit card number so I can make the change,” she called across the emergency room crowded with Snows and nurses but not yet a doctor. He announced the row of sixteen digits.
“Uncle A.C., I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while,” my cousin Tim chimed in. “What’s your Social Security number? And what’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“You rascal,” my dad said, smiling for the first time in hours.
When I did finally return to Florida, I wore a heart monitor for a few weeks, and it found no irregularities. Then I had another tachycardia two years later on a Friday morning while sitting at my desk at the Tampa Bay Times. Then it happened again at my parents’ dining room table three weeks after that.
There was no heart monitor called for this time. My cardiologist said that based on the increasing frequency of the episodes, there was a rogue track in my heart’s circulatory system causing unusual increases in my heartbeat. I needed a procedure to fix it as soon as possible.
A camera went up through an artery in my left leg while a catheter went up the right leg. The doctor watched an image of my beating heart on a TV screen and led the catheter to burn off the imposter pathway.
I really wasn’t that nervous when it was my turn because I’d seen this crazy science fiction at work so many years earlier when Charlotte was a
baby and Dr. It’sWhatIDo opened a valve in her heart, which was the size of a mini Reese’s cup at the time. And again, when Charlotte was five, a different doctor would also thread a catheter and a camera into that same heart and place a Gore-Tex patch in the hole in her septum.
If the hole had been repaired at her birth, she would have needed open-heart surgery. But since it wasn’t life-threatening, the doctor who fixed her valve watched it for a while in hopes the hole might grow together on its own. Five years later, however, the hole was expanding instead of closing, and it was time to fix the problem. The surgery was done at Duke University Medical Center by an acquaintance I knew in high school. The last time I’d seen him, he was buying beer with a fake ID. Twenty years later, he was guiding a camera and a catheter through my daughter’s heart with amazing precision. The surgery was on Good Friday. By Easter, Charlotte was collecting eggs in my parents’ backyard in Raleigh and the only traces of the ordeal were Band-Aids on each of her sturdy legs where the catheters entered her little body.
Shortly after becoming editor of Bay magazine, I met the local marketing director for the American Heart Association and told her why I was forever indebted to all the research and medical expertise in cardiology. Thus, it was hard to say no when she asked if Charlotte and I could be the subjects of a video telling the story of how we both survived multiple cardiac problems thanks to advances in medicine and research. We’d also be the guests of honor at the Go Red for Women luncheon with 500 people who would see the video that tugged at their heartstrings and wallets.
Nothing has ever stood between a microphone and me, but Charlotte took more persuading.
“Your second procedure when you were five left you with a completely fixed heart and just two Band-Aids,” I told her. “If that had been done a couple years earlier you would have had to have open-heart surgery with a major scar and broken sternum. The research that the American Heart Association developed found a way to patch the hole without all that. If telling our stories can help raise money for more progress, we need to do it.”
Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Page 9