by Anne Edwards
Never had America’s self-image been so low. The United States had never been a leader in music, ballet, art, or literature, although, for many years, it had been in the forefront in business and industry. But the dollar had been devaluated, at home and abroad, as one large company after the other had gone into bankruptcy. Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to be floundering, and the public did not know whom or what to believe. Politics had divided the nation almost as critically as the Civil War had once done, and all the average man could concern himself with was personal survival.
And so, in the summer of 1936, the nation hungered for some sign of the reemergence of its former glory, and the people wanted it to come not out of a military victory this time, but out of individual achievement. Peggy could not have guessed it, no matter how prescient she might have been, but the publication of her book marked a real upturn in America — not only in publishing, but in the American people’s pride in their own accomplishment.
Gone With the Wind was instantly seized upon as a harbinger of what might one day be called a national literature. It celebrated the American past in a way that the novels of Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe had not. Unlike the Realist novels of Theodore Dreiser and his followers a quarter of a century before, it dealt with American history on a grand scale rather than dissecting regional American mores. And, though the story took place totally in the South, and specifically in Atlanta and its environs, it was still more national than regional because it dealt with the greatest and most devastating schism the country had ever had to endure, and it did so in a unique fashion — not through men and war and politics and power, but through the women and the hardships they had had to overcome in order to mend the South’s wounds and bring hope, pride, and prosperity back to their men and their homes. And then there was the ending — Peggy had not passed final judgment on Scarlett. It was anyone’s guess as to whether she did or did not get Rhett back, which meant that readers could decide this for themselves according to their own sense of justice and romantic fantasy.
Except for Charles Lindbergh’s overnight celebrity, there had never been an instance of immediate national adulation that was even comparable to that which Peggy Mitchell experienced. It was not only that the book’s sales were so staggering — for there had been other best-sellers — but that the public treated Gone With the Wind as more than just a novel. Its characters almost instantly became folk heroes along with their creator. The book’s fame spread swiftly to Europe. Frank Daniel, Peggy’s friend from the Atlanta Journal, wrote her in a memo after a friend of his had just returned from Europe that the
decks of the Queen Mary were littered with copies of Gone With the Wind, by all odds the most popular book abroad, one in nearly every deck chair.... The demand for the book in London and Paris book-stores is something momentous and ... advance orders for the English edition (to appear October 1, isn’t it?) are record making.... Henry Fonda was on the Breman coming back [from Europe], and he got so excited about the book he radioed Selznick for an immediate interview to discuss his playing Rhett ... an odd notion, perhaps, but it just goes to show that if Macmillan continues to buy large ads in the Atlanta Journal (which, after all, covers Dixie Like the Dew), your little novel stands a fine chance of becoming known.
When the Queen Mary docked in Southampton on its first Atlantic crossing that summer, Scarlett and Rhett were names as familiar to passengers as King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. It did not take long before dinner parties in London buzzed with discussion about America’s new best-seller, perhaps a welcome relief from all the speculation about the king and his mistress.
Peggy often said in those early days of the book’s phenomenal success that she felt besieged, and so she was. All of her press statements mentioned that her married name was Marsh, and John Marsh’s telephone number and address were in the Atlanta telephone directory. The apartment house had no doorman or security system, and when John was at work Bessie and Peggy were left alone to man the telephone and the door. Telephone callers were often shocked to find they had reached Margaret Mitchell directly, and uninvited visitors were taken aback when the door was opened to their urgent rings by a small woman who had to be Margaret Mitchell.
There were also daily news items about the motion-picture rights. Whether the rights had actually been sold to the movies or not did not seem to concern the public, whose national pastime now was casting the movie version of Gone With the Wind. On July 3, Peggy complained to Lois that people were driving her crazy asking for handouts because she “wouldn’t miss the money out of her millions.” Friends, she said, plagued her as to “why in Hell” she “persisted in driving a 1929 model car and wearing four-year-old cotton dresses and fifty-cent stockings.” She claimed someone had even called her “an old Hetty Green” to her face. The day before, she admitted to Lois, she had had “the tired shakes so bad” that she had gone to bed in midafternoon in tears. When John came home that evening, he insisted she had to get away from Atlanta for a few days even if he could not go with her. Her plan was to leave on the next Monday, she told Lois, and “just get in the car and ride.” She intended to go to the mountains, where she thought she would be less likely to run into people who might recognize her, but she assured Lois that if Macmillan needed her they could wire John, for she would be telephoning him each night.
On Monday morning, July 7, a short time after John had left for the office, Red Upshaw telephoned Peggy. Later, she described their conversation to Medora:
“After reading your book I figure you still love me,” Upshaw said.
“Why would you think that?” she asked.
“Because Rhett Butler is obviously modeled after me,” he replied.
She denied it and asked him what he wanted. He promised to tell her someday in person and then hung up.
Peggy was in a terrible panic as she dressed for the interview she was to have in the apartment that morning with three representatives from the Associated Press. Hearing Red Upshaw’s voice had been a shock, but it was the smirky way he had accused her of basing Rhett on him that had alerted her to possible danger.
He could, she suspected, sue her for libel. She had made Rhett Butler a scalawag, had left those incriminating RKB initials on his handkerchief, and had had him expelled from West Point, all of which might give a judge pause. Butler’s profiteering days had something in common with Upshaw’S adventures in bootlegging, as well. She was probably right in thinking that a lawsuit with Red Upshaw would be a scandal, for it could have meant that the court deposition she had made following his assault upon her would be exposed.
Peggy did not have much time to decide what she should do before Bessie ushered the Associated Press reporters into her modest living room. Afterwards, she wrote that they had subjected her to “a brisk workout that lasted three hours.” She fended questions about her past, present, and future with much evasiveness, using her Southern-belle wiles to such good advantage that “the boys from the AP” did not even realize that they weren’t getting straight answers to their questions about the years between her mother’s death and her marriage to John Marsh.
As soon as they left, Peggy had Bessie pack a small bag and, with an air of melodrama to her exit from Atlanta that rivaled Scarlett’s, she got into her car and headed for the mountains. Dramatic, detailed letters describing her escape from “the hell” of fame were written and sent to at least eight well-known writers and newspaper people. In each, she told a vivid, pathetic story that made her trip to the mountains appear to be an act of sudden and total desperation — although she had had five days, since her letter to Lois, to plan it. That evening, from Gainesville, Georgia, the first stop in her “escape,” she wrote to several people about the three-hour press conference that, she claimed, had left her in such a state that she had telephoned John and told him she had to get away and that, if she could get through the lines at the front door, she would drive to the country just to spend the night someplace where she would not
be recognized.
In a five-page letter written that night to Herschel Brickell, whom she had never met, she said that her intention when she left that morning had been to “hide out in the mountains where there are no telephones and no newspapers and no one reads anything but the Bible — and to stay there til my money ran out. Or til my local fame ran out. And from my experiences as a reporter, I recall that local literary celebrities usually last three weeks.”
She had left the house, she wrote in another letter, with a bundle of reviews, her address book, four mysteries, five dollars, and her typewriter, but she claimed she had not taken her toothbrush or even a change of underwear.
The fifty-five-mile trip to Gainesville took her about two hours for, since her last accident, she had gotten into the habit of driving less than twenty-five miles an hour. She checked into a modest motel off the main street of Gainesville, a small town nestled into the foothills of the northeast Georgia mountains. She signed the register “Mrs. J. Marsh, Atlanta” and paid three dollars in advance for the room. Although no mention was made of it in her many “runaway” letters, she also had her checkbook and there was a branch of her bank in the town.
Peggy wasted no time in setting up her typewriter and opening and reading the latest reviews, which had arrived in the mail from Macmillan just before she had left home. After calling John, she wrote the letter to Herschel Brickell, who, John had told her, had called to say he was coming South shortly and would like to meet her.
As you may observe from the postmark, I’m not at home in Atlanta. I’m on the run. I’m sure Scarlett O’Hara never struggled harder to get out of Atlanta or suffered more during her siege of Atlanta than I have suffered during the siege that has been on since publication day. If I had known being an author was like this I’d have thought several times before I let Harold Latham go off with my dog-eared manuscript. I’ve lost ten pounds in a week, leap when phones ring and scurry like a rabbit at the sight of a familiar face on the street.... Utter strangers collar me in public and ask the most remarkable questions and photographers pop out of the drains.
She told him, however, that she would “come home with the greatest pleasure” if he decided to come to Atlanta. “It will be marvelous if I could meet you,” she wrote, “because I have long been an admirer of yours.” Peggy also commented at length on Brickell’s review:
Thank you for going on record that while my story “bordered on the melodramatic” at times, the times of which I wrote were melodramatic. Well, they were but it takes a person with a Southern background to appreciate just how melodramatic they really were. I had to tone down so much, that I had taken from actual incidents, just to make them sound barely credible. And thanks for your defense of Captain Butler and his credibility. I never thought, when I wrote him, that there’d be so much argument about whether he was true to life or not. His type was such an ordinary one in those days that I picked him because he was typical of his times. Even his looks. I went through hundreds of old ambro-types and daguerreotypes looking at faces and that type of face leaped out at you. Just as surely as the faces of the pale, sad looking boys with a lock of hair hanging on their foreheads were always referred to with a sigh as “dear cousin Willy. He was killed at Shiloh.” (I’ve often wondered why the boys who looked like that were always killed at Shiloh.)
In the matter of Captain Butler I am caught between crossfires. Down here, folks find him so true to life that I may yet have a lawsuit on my hands despite my protests that I didn’t model him after any human being I’d ever heard of.
“Good Heavens I am running on,” she wrote halfway down the fifth page, adding, a few lines later:
Well, perhaps you contributed to a practical nervous collapse and are really the cause of me being on the run! I just can’t take it. Come to see me. I’ll give you a party if you want a party or I’ll feed you at home and sit and listen to you talk. My cook’s a good old fashioned kind, strong on turnip greens and real fried Schicken and rolls that melt in your mouth. Personally, I’d rather listen to you talk — and thank you — than give a party.
The morning after she arrived in Gainesville, Peggy wrote Edwin Granberry, who had reviewed the book glowingly for the New York Evening Sun, an extraordinary eight-page letter that was even more revealing than the one to Brickell:
My dear Mr. Granberry:
I am Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, author of “Gone with the Wind.” Your review of my book was the first review I read, and it made me so happy that I tried to write you immediately. I have been trying to write you for over a week, but you can see just how far my good intentions have gotten me!
As soon as I read what you said, I had what I thought was a perfectly marvelous letter to write you, a letter which would tell you just exactly how much I appreciated your kindness. But that letter has gone, disappearing somewhere along the road of this last nightmare week and I find myself tonight here in a hotel in Gainesville, incoherent from exhaustion and from gratitude to you. So forgive this letter its inadequacies.
I didn’t know that being an author was like this, or I don’t think I’d have been an author. I’ve led so quiet a life for so many years, quiet by choice because I’m not a social animal, quiet because I wanted to work and quiet because I’m not the strongest person in the world and need plenty of rest. And all my quiet world has blown up recently. The phone has rung every three minutes, the door bell rings and perfect strangers bounce in asking the most extraordinary and personal questions, photographers arrive with the morning coffee. Reporters arrive too, but I don’t mind them for I used to report myself and I can’t help realizing what a tough go-round they’re having with me. For I’m perfectly normal, not eccentric, had no romantic experiences with the writing of my book. So they can’t find anything hot to write about me! And then teas and parties, the first I’ve been to in years, have about ruined me. Yesterday it got too much and I climbed in the car and set out with no baggage to speak of: a typewriter, four murder novels, and five dollars. When I reached here I was too tired to go on. So I’m staying here till tomorrow and then I’m going back into the mountains where there aren’t any telephones and no one will recognize me from my pictures and ask me if it’s hard to write a book.
I did not mean to fling all my troubles upon you, a stranger, who has been so kind to me. But I’m trying to explain my seeming discourtesy in not writing to you sooner; explain, too, why this letter is such a hash.
I don’t believe I can make plain to you how much your review meant to me unless I tell you something about the background of the writing of my book. I wrote it so long ago. It must have been nearly ten years ago, and I’d finished most of it by 1929. That is, I’d about stopped writing on it both because pressure of illness among friends and family never seemed to let up, and because the thing didn’t seem worth finishing. I know it sounds silly for me to write that I thought the book too lousy to bother with retyping and trying to sell, but I didn’t think it humanly possible that anyone would buy it. It seems silly to write that when I see by this evening’s paper that the fifth printing sold out the day after the publication date, but I know good writing and mine didn’t seem good. So I never tried to sell it.
After Mr. Latham came along and pried it out of me last year and got me to sign the contract, I was utterly miserable. I thought I’d been an awful fool to let a job like that go out where people could see how bad it was, where people could remark on its badness at the top of their lungs and in the public prints. My only comfort was that there wasn’t much criticism they could give me that I hadn’t already given myself. Criticism wouldn’t hurt me (and it hasn’t!) but it would upset my family, especially my father. So you can see what my frame of mind was when I got an advance clipping of your review....
Thank you for your kind words about Scarlett, for saying that she still keeps your sympathy and explaining why. It never occurred to me while writing her that such a storm of hard words would descend upon the poor creature’s head. She just se
emed to me to be a normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could, doing what seemed to her the practical thing. The normal human being in a jam thinks, primarily, of saving his own hide, and she valued her hide in a thoroughly normal way....
You have been so kind, have made me so happy and my family so happy. (My reserved and unenthusiastic father simply purred when he read your review — and why not?) I wish there was some way I could tell you how much I appreciated everything you said. I wish I could see you because I talk better than I write and perhaps I could make you understand what your review meant to me. And I hope I do see you sometime.
Granberry had won the O. Henry Award for the best short story of 1932 and had published a few books of moderate critical success. A professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, he was not the Sun’s regular reviewer. It is doubtful that Peggy knew much about Granberry’s background, and she did not claim to have read his books. But the fact that he had reviewed her book for a major newspaper had impressed her.
She wrote numerous other letters that day — to George Brett at Macmillan; to Gilbert Govan, who had reviewed her for the Chattanooga Times on July 5; to Hunt Clement, who had been lavish in his praise of her in the Atlanta Journal on the seventh; Julia Collier Harris who had devoted a long column to her and the book a few days before; and to a number of others. In fact, she typed out something over seven thousand words — or about the equivalent of an average chapter of Gone With the Wind.
The next day, she left her motel room long enough to go to the bank so that she would have enough money to continue her escape from the public. On her return to her hideaway, she wrote Stephen Vincent Benét this “preface” to a seven-page letter replying to his review of the book in the Saturday Review: