Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  Peggy still relished a good earthy anecdote and had a fund of “indelicate” jokes that she delighted in telling whenever she got a chance to visit with Lee Edwards or other old friends. She was proud of her collections of pornographic French postcards and literature with bawdy passages, and liked to share these with friends she knew well. But she could no longer attend those parties she called “brawls,” and she missed the chances they gave her to be herself — to use her peppery tongue and indulge her taste for “corn likker.” She liked to drink, particularly with good friends, and she liked “drunken brawls” —meaning such gatherings as the Georgia Press Association bashes, where quite a bit of alcohol was consumed. Peggy had always felt that she had “a good head for likker,” but now she was inhibited about attending affairs where it was served. Out-of-state reporters (she always trusted the Georgia press) were bound to get wind of her harmless good times and the next thing she would find was that she was being written about as an alcoholic. In fact, it seems probable that Peggy did have a drinking problem, though she refused to admit it and never seemed to allow it to control her life.

  Peggy was inordinately fond of slapstick movies, and they became her one uncomplicated means of entertainment. There was a movie theatre within walking distance of the apartment, and she and John were friendly with the manager, who was always protective of Peggy when she called to say she was coming. She saw three or four films a week and loved “those movies where people get hit with pies and fish get put down your neck.” She was crazy about the Marx Brothers, never missed a Buster Keaton film, and, as Medora recalled, at a Three Stooges comedy “you could always locate Peggy by her big haw-haw.”

  Although Peggy had insisted she have no hand in the casting of Gone With the Wind, she made a point of seeing the latest movie of any likely candidate for the roles of Scarlett and Rhett. To Kay Brown she confessed, “I’ve even refused as much as five hundred dollars to name the cast I’d like because I thought it might embarrass y’all.” She kept out of the movie production, but she did suggest to Lois that “the Selznick folk” take her friend Susan Myrick, a reporter on the Macon Telegraph, “out to the coast in some capacity while the picture is being made ... to pass on the authenticity and rightness of this and that, the accents of the white actors, the dialect of the colored ones, the minor matters of dress and deportment, the small touches of local color, etc.” Susan Myrick was hired and worked for Selznick throughout the making of Gone With the Wind.

  George Cukor; his assistant, John Darrow; and the set designer, Hobart Erwin arrived in Atlanta the first week in April. Peggy threatened to throw herself “on the mercies of the Atlanta newspapers and ask them to run appeals to the public not to devil me but to devil Mr. Cukor.” In the end, she enjoyed the “Selznickers’ ” visit more than she had anticipated. She wrote to Herschel Brickell that she had driven Mr. Cukor and his technical staff over all the red-rutted roads of Clayton County. The dogwood was just coming out and “the flowering crabs blooming like mad.” Cukor wanted to see old houses that had been built prior to the Civil War and Peggy obliged, but she was sure the film people were disappointed not to see the white-columned mansions that seemed to be Hollywood’s notion of the South. She begged them to “please leave Tara ugly, sprawling, and columnless.” There were, of course, quite a few white-columned houses in Georgia, but Clayton County and Jonesboro had only a few, and Peggy had always thought of Tara as a working farm like the Fitzgerald place.

  This second trip to Atlanta by the Selznick people, who had held auditions in Charleston en route, was even more frenetic than the first. Peggy remained sequestered in her secret office much of the time, leaving Bessie and John to deal with the scores of hopefuls who turned up at the Marshes’ door. But Cukor was, indeed, “bedeviled” from the time he arrived until he boarded a train bound for New Orleans five days later. One Scarlett hopeful — a Dixie belle whom Peggy always referred to as “Honey Chile” — did not receive an audition with Cukor and was so furious that she bought a ticket for New Orleans, planning to corner Cukor on the train and make him listen to her read for the part. Unwisely, the girl telephoned Yolande Gwin at the Atlanta Constitution and announced her plan, whereupon Yolande took it upon herself to warn Cukor. A chase to rival any in a Keystone Kops comedy followed. Yolande got a note to Cukor, who posted his assistant, Darrow, at the door of his railway car. When the determined “Honey Chile” appeared, Darrow jumped down and grabbed the girl by the arm, pulling her away from the train, and promising her he would listen to her read.

  “I don’t want to see you. I have already seen you,” Honey Chile shouted when she saw Darrow. “My God, anybody can see you! I must see Mr. Cukor!”

  “He’s already gone to New Orleans by motor,” she was told.

  But Honey Chile would not be discouraged, and when it looked as if she might storm the train, Darrow drew her toward the front of it, several cars up from Cukor, hoping his boss would have time to hide before she spotted him. Then, as the train began to move, Darrow made a running leap to board it — but only after it had picked up enough speed so that he was certain Honey Chile, in her high heels and slim skirt, could not follow. The indefatigable Honey Chile turned up later at the New York offices of the Selznick company and also at Peggy’s Aunt Edyth’s in Greenwich. She was never to have an audition with Cukor, but Peggy had been right — the search for Scarlett O’Hara was a front-page story across the nation, and it remained news until the film was finally cast.

  Harold Latham arrived in Atlanta on the third of May, 1937, for a three-day visit, once again scouting manuscripts. There had been a driving rainstorm the night before and now a warm sun was drying the streets. Latham was extremely happy to be back in the city where he had first discovered Peggy Mitchell and her astounding book. Now, slightly less than a year after its publication, it remained the best-selling book in America, where, at Macmillan’s most recent accounting, 1,370,000 copies had been sold. Latham suspected its critical and popular acclaim might be crowned by the winning of the Pulitzer Prize, to be awarded the next day. This possibility had influenced the timing of his arrival in Atlanta, but he had not told Peggy because, in all her letters, she had refused to believe that her book stood a chance for such an honor.

  Latham planned to dine early at his hotel, then make a call at the Mitchell home to meet the ailing Eugene Mitchell, and then go to hear the Marshes’ cook, Bessie, sing with her church choir. Latham was a devotee of Negro spirituals and was highly excited about being invited to attend a late-evening choir practice at Bessie’s church. About eight-thirty that evening, Lamar Ball, the city editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and a staff photographer appeared at the Mitchell house on Peachtree Street. Ball announced that he had trailed Peggy “all over town for a statement.”

  “On what?” she asked.

  “Why, Peggy, don’t you know? The Associated Press has already put it on their wire service. You’ve been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.”

  Of course, there had been much speculation about her chances of winning. Brickell and Granberry had assured her that it would happen, and Kenneth Littauer had dryly commented, “Even a Pulitzer committee couldn’t miss that one!” But now that it had occurred, Peggy kept thinking there was a mistake. In all the excitement, she had said yes when Ball asked if his photographer could take a picture, even though she had been refusing all such requests since the previous September. Peggy later said she didn’t know what had impressed her more — winning the award or having the city editor leave his desk at the rush hour on her account. After the photographer had taken his shot, she realized that they were already late for the singing, but, she wrote Brickell afterwards, she “didn’t dare intimate where [they] were going because old blood hound [Ball] would have accompanied us with great pleasure, shot forty pictures of us and the colored choir and written a hell of a story about where Miss Mitchell went to celebrate winning the Pulitzer Award.”

  The Marshes, Stephens, Carrie Lou, and Latham finally mad
e their escape, but Peggy was uneasy all during the singing for fear that Ball was lurking somewhere in the back of the church. Bessie presided and the guests all rose from their bench seats and expressed their pleasure at being there. The congregation was pleased to have them, but, according to Peggy, they “didn’t slop over. They just took it for granted that naturally Bessie’s Madam and Bessie’s Madam’s publisher wanted to hear them sing and oh, how they sang! One old sister got to shouting and I thought Harold Latham would have a spasm he enjoyed it so much.”

  The fact that she had won the Pulitzer Prize did not seem real to Peggy even when she arrived home at 1:00 A.M. and found a telegram from the committee chairman, Frank D. Fackenthal at Columbia University, telling her the public announcement would be made the following morning, a Tuesday. Although forewarned, she was not prepared for the clamor at her door at 8:00 A.M. when Bessie arrived for work. Flashlights from cameras blazed their way into the living room and, Peggy said later, reporters were “slithering out of cracks in the floor.” Peggy had always claimed that public speaking was not her strong point, but she drummed up her courage that day and, supported by John, Medora and Latham, went on the radio to express her gratitude for the award. She had had little opportunity to prepare an adequate statement and she said afterwards that she must have sounded “awfully dull” and swore it would be her last radio appearance.

  By noon, Latham had managed to put together a party in her honor for that night. All day the telephone “rang off the wall.” There were telegrams and flowers from all over the country, and the house was filled with family and friends. She went to the party — where “barrels of champagne” were served “ decked out in big, gorgeous orchids, and feeling, she said, like a “Kentucky Derby winner.” She arrived carrying a small footstool, which she explained to the guests, she needed to keep her legs from dangling when she was sitting down.

  Peggy wrote to George Brett that even at the party she still could not convince herself that she had actually won the award, but that she kept glancing down to look at the corsage, which he had sent to her, and telling herself that she certainly would not be wearing this massive orchid display if she had not won something. But it was not until May 8, when she received the check that went with the award, that she confessed to Brickell, “The $1,000 was sure proof that I had won.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  GONE WITH THE WIND went off the best-seller list for the first time in twenty-one months on April 8, 1938. Over two million copies had been sold in the United States, and a million copies abroad. Yet, Peggy did not consider herself a professional, but a lucky amateur. Letters still consumed a monumental part of her days but, except for those times when the Selznick publicity department issued a release about new casting developments, she was getting something of a respite.

  She now allowed herself the luxury of redecorating the apartment, and hired a painting contractor to strip off all the old wallpaper and paint the rooms in cheerful shades of apple green and Georgia peach. The old couch was re-covered to match, and Peggy’s one household purchase — a sumptuous Aubusson carpet in muted greens — pleased her.

  John, however, continued to handle both his daytime job at Georgia Power and the late-night work on Peggy’s foreign publications, and the strain was sapping his strength. By the following autumn, his weight had dropped to a low 132 pounds, he had little energy, and his breathing was often labored.

  Certain that a holiday would revitalize him, Peggy arranged for them to spend Christmas with the Granberrys in Winter Park. After the holiday, they drove through the small towns of Florida and Georgia to Blowing Rock, for a visit with novelist Clifford Dowdey and his wife, Helen, whom Peggy had recently met through the Granberrys. From there, they traveled to Wilmington to see John’s mother, and then down to Washington, D.C., where they tried to convince the State Department to help them in fighting the Dutch piracy case.

  Along the way, the Marshes stayed in small hotels, and Peggy used the time away from home to catch up on some of the popular fiction she had not had time to read since the publication of her own book: John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Serenade, Elmer Rice’s Imperial City, and others. “Reading them so close together,” Peggy wrote to Brickell, “the impact was strong. What depressed and bothered me was the tiredness of everyone concerned. These characters did not leap gaily in and out of strange beds as did the characters of the jazz age, nor did they commit murder, forgery et cetera with passion, enthusiasm or regret. They did all these things — for what reason I cannot say. Certainly, they got no pleasure from any of their sins, nor did they have any sense of remorse.”

  An urgent desire to write “a story about a girl who went wrong and certainly did regret it” overcame her, and she told Brickell, “I think it would be colossal and sensational. I could not find in any of the books I read the perfectly normal feminine reaction of fear of consequences, of loss of reputation, of social disapproval or of the good old-fashioned Puritan institution, conscience. I suppose my desire to write such a book puts me definitely in the Victorian era. But then ‘Gone With the Wind’ was probably as Victorian a novel as was ever written.”

  This urge to apply “her rear to a chair” before her typewriter was short-lived. With Gone With the Wind off the best-seller list, the Marshes’ life had quieted down a bit — the telephone did not ring as often, the tourists were more discreet in their interest, and the mail dropped off to a level that, with the help of Margaret Baugh and her staff, was manageable. Unless the film caused a resurgence of interest in Peggy, it looked as though the Marshes could look forward to a normal life again — except for the lawsuits that Stephens was handling, the tax problems, the business correspondence that no one but Peggy or John could deal with (or rather, that they preferred not to delegate to others), and the fact that, in their present financial circumstances and with their new position in the community, they no longer knew what normal meant. Gone With the Wind might no longer be a best-seller, but the book remained a demanding business. A second book that might add to all these pressures was too much for Peggy to consider, and she quickly abandoned any ideas of attempting a novel about a woman with a moral dilemma.

  Though she wouldn’t have admitted it, Peggy’s interest in the progress of the movie was as avid as that of her fans. She wrote Kay Brown frequently for the latest news and was pleased to have a personal letter from David o. Selznick (they had not yet met) telling her that the movie would positively go into production before September. She went to see the Warner Brothers film Jezebel, starring Bette Davis and, despite all the publicity it was receiving on this count, saw no similarities between it and Gone With the Wind, except for period costumes and some dialogue about the approach of the war. For once, she found no need for legal action, as she did not feel she had “a copyright on hoop skirts or hot-blooded Southerners.”

  “He ought to be a landslide,” Peggy commented to the press when it was announced on June 23 that it appeared Clark Gable and Norma Shearer would be cast as Rhett and Scarlett. Never keen on Shearer in the role, Peggy hedged her opinion by saying obliquely, “She’s a good actress.” A new onslaught of press interest in Peggy began with this publicity release and, fearful that all the old hoopla was to start up again, she telephoned Herschel Brickell to ask if she might come to Connecticut for a brief escape. He cordially invited her to Ridgefield, and she remained in Connecticut a week, not traveling into New York to see Kay Brown or Lois Cole, who was pregnant. Only after she returned home did the Brickells tell her the shocking news that they were divorcing.

  On August 1, Peggy was relieved to read that Norma Shearer was not going to play Scarlett O’Hara after all. Miss Shearer said she was convinced that the majority of fans “who think I should not play this kind of character on the screen are right.”

  A few days later, Gable was officially signed by Selznick to play Rhett Butler. Filming was now set to begin on February 1,
1939. Georgia historian Wilbur Kurtz, recommended by Peggy along with Sue Myrick, had been in Hollywood for nearly a year as the film’s official historian, and Sue had arrived a short time later to help the performers with their dialects and accents. Through her two close friends, Peggy was kept up to date with what was happening at the Selznick studio. She had thought that Sidney Howard’s screenplay was finished and in final form, for as far back as February of 1938 Wilbur Kurtz had written her that Howard had ended his stint. In his own diary entry for February 2, 1938, Kurtz had written:

  Well, over the [drawing] boards Sidney Howard walked in. He said this was his last day. His manner of being preoccupied never deserts him. But on his way out, he wheeled, threw back his large shoulders and with incisive speech somewhat on the sardonic side, orated, “Yes, I’m through. It’s not a movie script. It’s a transcription from the book. But what else can I do? I just used Miss Mitchell’s words and scenes.” All with an air of talking down his trying efforts and the results he got. No one seemed to agree with him. “See you later.” And he was gone.

  Howard was, in fact, to be called back to rewrite a number of scenes and finally, as late as October 12, not satisfied that he had a shooting script, Selznick turned to Peggy for help. An invitation was extended through Kay Brown for Peggy to join her, Selznick, and his wife, Irene on a boat trip to either Sweden or Bermuda so that she could go over the script with him in the most relaxed atmosphere. Peggy flatly refused. A counter suggestion was made — Selznick would meet her near Charleston or any place she designated. Again Peggy refused, using her social engagements and her father’s ill health as excuses. Selznick now had Kay Brown explain that he was planning to cut scenes from Howard’s script and needed “bridgeovers,” or transitions, and if she would only consider assisting in this one thing, he would be happy to keep her involvement a private matter. He also offered her a large sum for her time.