by Anne Edwards
Of those prepublication months, John Marsh was later to write:
April, May and June of 1936 saw, first a stirring of suspicion, then a rapidly growing certainty, that something remarkable was about to happen in the book world. A tremor of excitement rippled up, here and there, in far distant parts of the country. It was one of those phenomena that modern communication methods cannot explain. “One-person-tells-another,” the original communications method and still the best, flashed the news along in a manner almost magical. From mouth to mouth, the word spread, and spread still further that a book was coming that you must not miss. Bookstores doubled and redoubled their orders.
Though Peggy was thrilled by the flattering reviews, she found them hard to believe. She waited anxiously for the complete Southern verdict on the book, and even when the good opinion of her “home folks” was forthcoming, she was fearful that the next voice that spoke up would be a dissenting one, for, as Medora was to say later, “Wasn’t her heroine a baggage, with nothing to recommend her but courage? And wasn’t her hero a scoundrel, who profiteered at the expense of the Confederacy? And didn’t her book contain the shameful truth that there were some deserters from the Confederate Army?”
The Marsh household ticked with excitement, but neither John nor Peggy had any real idea of what was to come. Lois and Latham felt certain that Gone With the Wind was going to be a publishing phenomenon and tried again to prepare Peggy. But she still thought it was all a bubble that would burst as soon as the book appeared in the bookstores.
On May 25, the question of a film agent was finally settled. Peggy signed a contract with Macmillan giving them the right to sell the book to the movies. She wrote to Latham that she felt “very relieved about having it in your hands instead of any agent.” If someone was “mad enough to buy the book for films,” Macmillan promised to try to get her final say on the scenario, because she did not want “tough-mouthed Harlem accents in southern negroes’ mouths.” And she asked, “By the way, is your new agency department going to handle dramatic rights too?”
In the one questionable action in the Macmillan staff’s otherwise long and loyal relationship with Peggy Mitchell, not only had they led her to believe that E. E. Hall would now be handling the rights, but they secretly signed an agreement of their own with Annie Laurie Williams assigning their rights of representation of the book to her. George Brett sent memos to Miss Williams, Latham, and Lois Cole, warning them, “Mrs. Marsh is to know nothing of this.” Macmillan was to split the commission (their agreed upon 10 percent) for their role as film agent fifty-fifty with Miss Williams. This meant that she received only 5 percent for her services. And Peggy, whether she sanctioned it or not, still had “Bonnie Annie” representing her.
Bette Davis claims she was about to leave for England in defiance of her studio, Warner Brothers, when Jack Warner called her into his office and told her he was about to buy a book with a marvelous part in it for her.
“What is it?” Davis asked.
“A new novel. It’s called Gone With the Wind.”
“I’ll bet it’s a pip,” the lady says she replied, and walked out of Warner’s office to take the first available boat to England. Gone With the Wind sounded exactly like the kind of melodrama she was willing to take a suspension and loss of salary to avoid.
But, curiously, on May 28, Harold Latham received the following telegram:
DEAR MR LATHAM HAVE HAD OPPORTUNITY READ BOOK GONE WITH THE WIND BY MARGARET MITCHELL AND AM TERRIBLY EAGER TO PLAY THE ROLE OF SCARLET[T] STOP KNOW THAT I COULD DO GREATER THINGS WITH THIS ROLE THAN MY PART IN DANGEROUS WHICH WON ACADEMY AWARD LAST YEAR STOP UNDERSTAND WARNER BROTHERS NEGOTIATING FOR MOTION PICTURE RIGHTS IN GONE WITH THE WIND AND MY PERSONAL DESIRE TO PLAY IN IT IS SO GREAT THAT I AM SENDING YOU THIS WIRE ON A PURELY PERSONAL AND SELFISH BASIS TO URGE THAT YOU DO NOT SELL IT TO ANY OTHER COMPANY AS THIS WOULD MEAN I WOULD LOSE THE PART WHICH WOULD BREAK MY HEART.
BETTE DAVIS
Miss Davis swears she did not send this telegram. That raises the possibility that Warner Brothers sent it, risking an allegation of fraud to get the rights to Gone With the Wind for the $40,000 they had offered and hoping that Miss Davis’s name would soften Macmillan’s heart. Perhaps Miss Davis’s agent sent the telegram without her knowledge. But whoever was the true author of the telegram, its context suggested that Hollywood had changed its tune. Forty thousand dollars had been the price paid for Anthony Adverse, the highest price to that date for the film rights to a first novel. Annie Laurie Williams was determined to get more. Negotiations were going forward with David Selznick, but Lois wrote Peggy that a deal was “far from in the bag”
Annie Laurie Williams had also sent the novel to Katharine Brown, head of the New York office of Selznick-International Pictures, at about the same time that it was being read at Warner. The book instantly excited Miss Brown, and she sent Selznick, who was on the West Coast, the memo: “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” Selznick, to her disapppointment, cabled back a week later: “MOST SORRY TO HAVE TO SAY NO IN THE FACE OF YOUR ENTHUSIASM.” A few days later, after his wife, Irene, had read the book, he revised his opinion, but he still did not think the book was worth a purchase price of over $40,000. His decision now was to wait until publication and see how well the book did.
News of the book’s potential spread throughout the publishing world. European countries were already clamoring for foreign rights. (“Translate dialect,” Peggy wrote Lois, “God forbid!”) And Macmillan’s English office, headed by Harold Macmillan, was competing with W. A. R. Collins for the British rights. At home, orders for the book were exceeding even Latham’s wildest predictions.
Peggy was kept in daily touch with the rush of events, but things were happening too fast and seemed unreal to her. She still harbored deep insecurities about the book and wrote Lois, “I shouldn’t even think about such good things. Something terrible is bound to happen.” But John suspected a measure of what was to come, and engaged Stephens and Mr. Mitchell on a professional basis, with an established fee for their services, so that Peggy would be protected in any further dealings regarding subsidiary rights. Characteristically, the Marshes did not want to bring in outsiders, but the choice of a law firm in Atlanta that knew absolutely nothing about films or publishing and that had never had to deal with the kind of powerhouse legal staffs that large companies employed, was naive. Mitchell and Mitchell had remained patent and real-estate lawyers throughout the years. Stephens Mitchell did have some knowledge of copyright laws and certainly Eugene Mitchell had always been a watchdog of copyright infringement but, because the firm placed such emphasis on copyright matters, it was shortsighted in other matters of negotiation.
The winds of fame were blowing toward Atlanta. Peggy was getting calls from book-page people all over the country, one of whom referred to her as “the latest literary Goliath.” The book buyer at Atlanta’s Davison’s department store told her they had ordered several hundred copies of her book and asked if she would come and autograph them on publication day, now firmly set for June 30. She agreed. Lois reported that the first edition (incorrectly dated May, 1936) of ten thousand copies had all been shipped and Macmillan was now considering a major printing of twenty thousand more, since large orders had just come in from Macy’s and other department stores. Macy’s was also planning a book luncheon on publication day, but Peggy said she could not attend.
Macmillan knew by now that they had a best-seller, and George Brett, acting in good faith, wrote to Peggy three weeks before publication to tell her that they were going to reinstate the terms of her original contract, at least to the extent that she would receive 10 percent on the first twenty-five thousand copies and 15 percent thereafter. She answered him with surprise: “I wasn’t expecting it, and had forgotten all about the original royalty arrangement ... such good news coming like it does is doubly good and exciting like Christmas co
ming twice a year.”
Foreign rights were being handled by Macmillan at this time and the company received 10 percent of all the sales they made, while their foreign representatives received an additional 10 percent. But in the case of the English rights, they were dealing directly with a branch of their own company, and so Gone With the Wind was sold to Harold Macmillan for only two hundred pounds plus the usual royalties — a lower price than Collins had offered Latham when he had been in Great Britain in February. This created quite a stir between the two English publishing companies, but Harold Macmillan held fast to his “rights.”
In the last week before publication, response to the book had reached a fever pitch. Besides the glowing early reviews, expressions of praise came in from literary celebrities Ellen Glasgow, DuBose Heyward, Mary Ellen Chase, Storm Jameson, Julia Peterkin, Constance Lindsay Skinner, and Kathleen Norris. “The best to come out of that generation,” “one of the greatest man-woman stories ever written,” and “unsurpassed in American writing,” were some of these comments.
Due to all this public acclaim, bookstores were sold out of their shipments before Gone With the Wind was officially on sale. There were now nearly 100,000 copies of the book in print. Never before had there been a first novel that had sold like this before publication. In letter after letter, Lois Cole and Latham and Brett warned Peggy to prepare herself for the onslaught of fame. Peggy never took their advice seriously, refusing to believe that their predictions would ever come to pass. As always, she had a “bad sign” to look to — yes, the early reviews had been stunning, but, she wondered, why had not one New York paper published a review yet? Miss Greeve, in the publicity department of Macmillan, explained to Peggy that New York was the heart of the publishing industry and that, because of it, the reviewers were bound to Macmillan’s original request to wait until publication day before printing their reviews.
On publication day, two reviews did appear in the New York papers. Edwin Granberry in the New York Sun, a morning paper, was bold in his praise of the novel and also predicted its impact on American literature in an unprecedented 1,200 word review:
We are ready to stand or fall by the assertion that this novel has the strongest claim of any novel on the American scene to be bracketed with the work of the great from abroad — Toistoi, Hardy, Dickens and the modern Undset. We have had more beautiful prose from American writers; and we have had those who excel in this or that branch of the novelist’s art. But we can think of no single American novelist who has combined as has Miss Mitchell all the talents that go into the making of the great panoramic novel such as the English and Russians and the Scandinavians have known how to produce.
The New York Post’s Herschel Brickell referred to the book as a “striking piece of fiction, which is much too sound and too important not to pass into the permanent body of American literature,” and he said it came “closer to telling the whole story of the most dramatic episode in our history, the War Between the States and the dark and bloody days that followed the breaking up of a culture, than anything that has ever been written or printed.... It is far and away the best novel that has ever been written about the Civil War and the days that followed.”
Peggy did not read these two reviews on publication day. She went to Davison’s early that Tuesday morning, and found herself in the center of mayhem. Even with the several hundred books Davison’s had ordered, the demand was greater than the supply. Customers were tearing books out of each others’ hands. A zealous fan ripped a button from Peggy’s silk jacket for a memento. Another surprised her by snipping off a lock of her hair. Peggy remained remarkably good-natured through it all. “Southerners, especially Atlantans,” she said to Medora, who accompanied her, “consider their folks’ success belongs to everyone.” She left the department store with Medora and Norman Berg, who worked in Macmillan’s Atlanta office, and went over to station WSB, where Medora interviewed her on a live radio show. Although Peggy claimed they were both in “a lather of apprehension” since they had no idea what to do or say, the interview went better than either of them had expected, for Medora led Peggy right into the heart of what she could talk about most colorfully and easily — her youth and the stories she had been told so often about the days of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Peggy arrived home just as John was returning from work, to find Bessie in a state of near hysteria. The telephone had been ringing almost nonstop. Telegrams and special deliveries arrived in a deluge, and people kept buzzing the doorbell and thrusting books at Bessie to have them signed by the author.
Peggy Mitchell had become an overnight celebrity.
Margaret Mitchell, Author
Chapter Seventeen
PEGGY MITCHELL had never had a desire for fame and now it had been thrust upon her with staggering rapidity. Bessie recorded that within twenty-four hours of publication, the telephone rang every three minutes until midnight and about once an hour after that; the doorbell chimed at five-minute intervals throughout the day; a telegram arrived every seven minutes; and a line of at least ten people kept a round-the-clock vigil at the front and back doors of the apartment house, waiting for the author of Gone With the Wind to appear and sign their books. Within a few days of the novel’s publication, the postman was delivering Peggy’s mail in large satchels. She could not go out on the street wihout being instantly recognized and set upon, and once, when she was in a dressing room at Rich’s department store trying on a dress, five women flung back the curtain, to reveal her only half dressed. “She’s small breasted like a boy!” exclaimed one as Peggy grabbed something to cover up her nakedness and demanded that they leave her cubicle at once.
The book, of which she would have been pleased to sell five thousand copies, had sales of 178,000 by the end of three weeks, that number accelerating so steadily every day that Macmillan was soon convinced that close to a million copies would be sold by the end of the year.
Margaret Mitchell had become a folk heroine. Despite her publisher’s warnings, what made the change in her life so difficult for her to grasp was the complete unexpectedness of it. A woman of a conservative and thrifty nature, she had thought it highly unlikely that great masses of people would purchase her novel at the unprecedentedly high price of three dollars when, in such lean times, that amount would buy more than a day’s food for a family of four. Neither Macmillan’s predictions nor the various signs and portents — the Book-of-the-Month Club sale, the large early printings, the first reviews — had mitigated Peggy’s pessimism. For the first few days, she was certain the public acclaim would rapidly subside. When it did not, she began to suffer extreme anxiety.
Reporters plagued her for interviews. Readers by the hundreds called to ask if Scarlett and Rhett ever got together again. Others telegraphed their congratulations or questions. The most trying fans were those who appeared on the front steps of her apartment building to ask advice on personal matters, beg for loans, or leave manuscripts that they wanted her to read. The mail was flooded with requests for her to appear in public, give lectures, and endorse organizations, products, and other books. By the end of the first week, she had been sent more than three hundred copies of Gone With the Wind to be autographed. Most fans expected her to return the signed copies at her own expense.
It had all’come too fast. Peggy Mitchell simply had not had the time to prepare herself for being a literary celebrity even had she wanted that role. “Fame,” Rilke had said, “is the sum of misunderstanding that gathers around a new name.” Peggy did not know how to deal with the image that fame was creating around her. She felt brutally victimized, as though her precious uniqueness as an individual was being torn from her, and she was determined to hold on to it at all costs.
The truth was that she had begun her novel without any grand plan. Although she had entertained hopes that it might someday be published, at no time in the writing had she ever considered that her book was other than an unusually authentic historical novel. Over and over she had
repeated how otherwise “rotten” it was. She never thought of it in terms of its possible relevancy to the 1930S nor as a book that could catch the fancy of the nation. Part of her unpreparedness for the book’s success was due to her lack of self-confidence, but there were other factors.
There had been no outside editor. John had functioned in that capacity and he had been no more farsighted than she. Nor was his intellectual and sociological perspective any more sophisticated. Their personal correspondence after the publication of Gone With the Wind shows their tremendous dismay at the sociological importance placed upon the book by the reviewers. Peggy herself had no intent other than to tell a good story and to describe a difficult period in her city’s history with impeccable accuracy. It is doubtful that either Peggy or John was aware of the novel’s timeliness, and Macmillan’s vice-president, James Putnam, was later to say that they published the book with the “sole and innocent intention of making a few honest dollars.” Perhaps Gone With the Wind succeeded on such a grand scale for exactly these reasons. It had been written sincerely and spontaneously, and it never smacked of clever artifice, jingoism, or social dogma.
In many ways, the devastating effects of the Depression were comparable to those of the Civil War — a fact that made Gone With the Wind seem uncannily contemporary. Scarlett O’Hara’s refusal to be blown away by the winds of change, her impressive strength, her vow that “As God is my witness ... I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again,” strongly appealed to readers who had struggled to keep life and home together during the long Depression. Many of the letters that Peggy Mitchell received from fans said, in essence, that if Scarlett could survive the awesome struggle she had had to endure, so could they. But there was still another, perhaps even more basic, reason for the hysterical fervor the book generated.