by Anne Edwards
The premiere and the adulation she had received during that week in December had been the apogee of her sudden and meteoric rise to fame. It was not just her fans, but all of Atlanta who had paid her homage. It seemed doubtful that anything further could occur in her life that would equal the sense of accomplishment she had felt as she stepped out of the Selznick limousine before the Loew’s Grand Theatre, unless it had been the moment when she had stood alone, front and center of the Grand’s stage, waiting for the ovation that was being given her to subside. At that moment, she later confessed to Medora, she felt assured that Atlanta was proud of the film and proud of her, and that she never again need worry about losing the esteem of her hometown folk.
To an old friend living in California, she wrote, “The crowds on the streets were larger than those which greeted Lindbergh and President Roosevelt.... I was so proud of the town I nearly burst.”
John’s comment to the Dowdeys was, “Whatever else might be said about the picture it certainly made a splash.”
Chapter Twenty-three
IN JANUARY, 1940, Peggy went into the hospital for the abdominal surgery that she had been putting off until after the premiere. She spent three weeks recuperating in the hospital and expected it to be at least a year before she felt fully recovered. However, when she arrived home it appeared that John’s condition was even more precarious than her own. He had been running high fevers and feeling listless. The doctors suspected undulant fever and put him in the hospital, but none of the tests were positive. He came home in a few days, but for six weeks he was extremely weak, with no one seeming to know what was the matter. As the Georgia summer pressed in upon him, John wrote to his mother:
Have I written you that we did acquire the bookkeeper I told you we were thinking about? ... And from the first evening when he started to work, I have had a great feeling of relief. Keeping books on Margaret Mitchell, Author, isn’t an especially onerous job in and of itself, but trying to keep them on top of doing all the other work that’s had to be done around this house the past three years is the most onerous thing imaginable. I have been the bookkeeper — after a fashion — and one of my most nagging bothers has been the ever-present thought that I was from two to ten months behind on entering up expense items, etc.... Now that burden is off my shoulders from now on, and I feel like kicking myself for not having turned the job over to somebody else long ago, for the cost of it is surprisingly small. The man can handle the work on one or two evenings a month, and as we pay him by the hour the expense won’t be great. But what a relief it is to know that that’s one job Peggy and I can be free of in the future!
Of course, I find myself rolling on the floor, metaphorically, screaming with laughter at the thought of the firm of Mitchell and Marsh having a bookkeeper. It’s one of the droll incongruities of this strange situation that will always seem strange to me. But I can put up with an incongruity or two if they help me to get loose from working day and night, seven days a week. The idea of even one more summer of continuous sweaty night work is something I dread and I don’t aim to do it if there’s any way to avoid it.
It was now diagnosed that John did have undulant fever, and he took a leave of absence from Georgia Power that lasted for several months. “Trips are a pipedream,” Peggy wrote the Granberrys, “but I keep dreaming.” However, that summer, although John was not well, the Marshes had their first real respite from the rigors of fame. The bookkeeper handled their accounts; Margaret Baugh took care of the other office matters; and Bessie oversaw the rest of the household. Although Mr. Mitchell was ill, Carrie Lou helped Peggy keep an eye on him. And her fan mail had taken a sharp decline. All of which should have given Peggy time finally to do some of the things she claimed she had been deprived of doing for several years.
But, she wrote Granberry, now she could not go out on the street because people stopped her and asked about the rumors of a sequel to Gone With the Wind called, she joked, Back With the Breeze, and which she humorously described as a highly moral tract in which everyone, including Belle Watling, underwent a change of heart and character and reeked with sanctimonious dullness. Because she had been in the hospital and then back and forth to see John while he was there, rumors had circulated that she had an incurable blood disease and she told Granberry she was “forced” to write innumerable letters disputing this. She also wrote several of her friends to tell them not to believe the rumor that Selznick had given her a fifty-thou sand-dollar bonus. “Not true!” she insisted.
Financial security still worried Peggy, despite the fact that the book remained a fast-moving title in bookstores across the country and, even with the troubles that had beset Europe, foreign royalties were sizable. As well, there were the royalties from the Selznick film book that Macmillan had published and the revenues from the commercial tie-ins, which Selznick had finally agreed to share. John had invested their money well and they lived on a modest scale. Peggy’s one extravagance, a fur coat, had been stolen from the apartment during their last trip to Winter Park, and she had not replaced it. The Marshes still drove their nine-year-old Chevy. In September, 1939, they had moved to a new apartment, at the Della Manta at 1268 Piedmont Avenue, a few streets from their old one. The block was more residential, however, and the building faced the Piedmont Driving Club with its lovely gardens. The apartment had an extra room and rented for $105 a month, a sum still affordable on John’s salary, especially since they now gave up the office at the Northwood and used the additional room on Piedmont A venue as an office for Margaret Baugh during the day and for the accountant on the evenings he was there. But piracy cases in several countries continued to plague Peggy, and with John’s ill health and her own propensity for “disaster,” she claimed she could not help but be concerned. After all, no one knew better than she that when she said she would never write another book, she truly meant it.
Peggy would always be a celebrity, but the attention paid her had tapered off somewhat as the excitement over the film and its stars also began to flag. In June, the film was withdrawn from road-show houses, the plan being for it to remain inaccessible until Christmas, when it would be rereleased at popular prices for the first time. Gone With the Wind had won nine Academy Awards in February — including Best Film, Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Best Supporting Actor (Thomas Mitchell), and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel) — and taking it out of the movie theatres for six months and before the average film-goer had a chance to see it was expected to result in a tremendous publicity boost.
On the morning of October 25,1940, the Marshes took off in a brand new Mercury to see their friends the Dowdeys in Richmond, Virginia. Before they left, Peggy had made arrangements to meet Richmond residents James Branch Cabell and his wife, as well as Rebecca Yancey Williams, author of The Vanishing Virginian. Literary stars still very much intrigued her, and since the publication of Gone With the Wind she had made a concerted effort to meet those writers who had been her favorites. Quite contradictorily, she did not consider that her own desire for privacy might well be shared by other literary luminaries. She had tried to start correspondences with such writers as Stark Young, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hervey Allen, Julia Peterkin, and others, but her gestures had not been picked up as they had by Brickell, Granberry, and the Dowdeys.
At the back of her mind as she set off for Richmond was the hope that she might be able to meet Ellen Glasgow, who was now elderly and ill. Cabell was Glasgow’s nephew and a friend of Herschel Brickell. A meeting between the author of Gone With the Wind and the distinguished Virginia writer whom she had always idolized was finally arranged, but not without difficulty. Glasgow was so frail that Peggy went to visit her without John.
This meeting, which took place in Glasgow’s bedroom, was considered by Peggy to be one of the few great things that came to her because of the book (the rest, John explained to Frances, were the friends she had made through its publication). Ill as she was, Ellen Glasgow was working on a book, In This Our Life, and Peggy w
as in awe of the woman’s dignity that, as she wrote later, “has no stuffiness and ... graciousness that has no condescension.” Peggy gave her homely advice about “taking things easy,” and commented on how well the prolific and revered writer had carried success and public acclaim, “not just a brief grassfire flare of notoriety but solid success that grew from year to year, which was based on true worth of character and back-breaking work.”
After winning the Pulitzer Prize the next year and receiving a congratulatory telegram from Peggy, Miss Glasgow wrote to her, “I have a charming recollection of your flitting in and spending an hour by my bedside.”
By the time she got back from this trip, preparations were underway for a “second premiere” of Gone With the Wind, to be held December 15, one year to the day after the first one. Although Peggy was not directly involved in the plans, she fretted over each new development and complained to Helen Dowdey about the “furore” the film people were creating in her life. The term “second premiere” was a ridiculous contradiction in terms, but Selznick had thought it would add a note of glamour to the film’s switch from a reserved-seat, raised-price policy to a regular run. Selznick oversaw the publicity campaign himself and high on the list of directives he sent to his underlings was the instruction, “DON’T write publicity stories about Margaret Mitchell.” Still, when news of the premiere came to the Marshes, Selznick was surprised at the support they gave the plans. In the month of October, only 1,600 domestic copies of the original three-dollar book had sold, and the film book had been temporarily withdrawn during the six-month film hiatus. John Marsh wrote the Dowdeys that the second premiere probably would not put the book back on the best-seller list, but that it certainly would not “hurt sales” either.
Proceeds from the second premiere were to go to British War Relief. Therefore, it seemed fitting that Vivien Leigh be the honored Gone With the Wind star. But Selznick, conscious of the publicity two Academy Award winners would produce if they were on stage together, announced that Hattie McDaniel would come to Atlanta, too, and that she and Miss Leigh would recreate the famous corset-lacing scene live, on stage. Furious that Selznick would impinge on her stage rights, Peggy raged to Lois, “Of course I could have sued the hell out of them and I would have done it except for the unfortunate and innocent ladies of the Atlanta British Relief.”
Her concern was unnecessary because Hattie McDaniel, claiming she was otherwise committed, declined to visit segregated Atlanta. Miss McDaniel, the first black actress to win an Academy Award, had been born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised in Denver, Colorado, and, though Sue Myrick had coached her meticulously on the dialect and ways of a Georgia black woman, she had no desire to go to Atlanta, where she would have to stay in a substandard room in the city’s black ghetto.
This time, there was none of the “whoop-to-do” that had prevailed at the first premiere. There were crowds, but none to equal the first. Vivien Leigh came, but her heart was not in it — her country was at war, her home in London had just been destroyed by the Germans and, in ten days, she and Olivier were to board a boat to return to England so that Olivier could serve his country. Storms brewed the day of the “premiere” and the wind and rain were so strong that Miss Leigh’s plane was late and Peggy had to be the official hostess to the press. The attending crowds walked through the Grand’s portals — Tara’s facade having been dismantled — with a different attitude than the one they had had at the original opening night. In fact, all through the week before the event (referred to as “the second coming” by some of the Marshes’ more irreverent friends), Peggy had noticed a diminishing of excitement.
The tidal wave she had expected had not come this time and, rather than feeling relieved, she felt let down. At this time, as Peggy began to fade from the limelight, the contradictions in the Marshes’ attitude toward her fame became more apparent. She wrote almost plaintively to Herschel Brickell, “I think the war, of course, had something to do with the cessation of public interest in me, and the election naturally diverted attention.”
This statement seems to imply that Peggy had begun to believe that the furor over Gone With the Wind would go on forever, and that she was even a bit resentful that the election in November, 1940, of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to an unprecedented third term and the threat of the United States being drawn into the war in Europe had intervened to make that no longer possible. If that was the case, and her letter to Herschel Brickell leaves little doubt of this, then it would seem that the false conceit of fame had claimed Peggy Mitchell its victim.
Chapter Twenty-four
LIKE SCARLETT O’HARA, Peggy Mitchell was never able to endure a conversation of which she was not the subject. From early in 1936 to the spring of 1940, either she or the book or the film or the “chiselers” who were all out to rob her had been the center of conversation and correspondence. This was no longer the case, but she was reluctant to place that part of her life behind her. In July, 1941, George Brett wrote and asked her if she would be one of twenty-five authors to write a few words for the National Endowment for the Arts redefining “The American Way.” She asked Brett several pages of questions as to who might be behind this organization and who the other writers were — for she didn’t want to find herself “waking up in bed with fifth columnists and pinkos,” but in the end, she confessed that since his letter came she had not been able to think of a single idea to put down on paper for him. “My rustiness amazes even me,” she admitted, “but then for four years I have neither written nor thought about writing. Everything has conspired to crowd ideas out of my mind.” No, was her final answer. She felt she was rusting away, but, even if she did not want to write again, handling the business affairs of “Margaret Mitchell, Author” did not have to be her only alternative.
She could have ventured into something that would have used her talents — fund raising (which, indeed, she was later to do), historical preservation, newspaper work. She could have concentrated on just being Mrs. John Marsh, as she had always insisted was her aim. But with several dozen editions of Gone With the Wind displayed in a newly purchased bookcase, and twenty oversized scrapbooks stuffed with clippings gathered from all over the world by three clipping services as constant reminders, it does not seem she was ready to retire Margaret Mitchell to the role of housewife. The truth was that Peggy now had a new image of herself, an image perceived as much through the eyes of others as through her own. The fortifications she had constructed to stave off change had been dismantled from the inside.
Peggy had always disliked Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies, not because she thought the New Deal was doing too much for the blacks, which was the opinion of many Southern politicians, but because, as she wrote a young man who feared he might be called to fight, “ever since the New Deal came into being the young ones have been told that they are God’s chosen creatures, that the world not only owes them a living but a good living and an awfully good time.” Forgotten, obviously, were her own salad days with the Peachtree Yacht Club. Though she did not support the New Deal, Peggy applauded the president’s indications that he planned to help the Allies; but, at this point, the war in Europe held little interest for her. She had no husband or sons or brothers to lose, and Stephens’s sons were too young to go to war. And what had she chosen for herself but a warm chimney corner and a sense of security?
In fact, Peggy marched through 1941 battling in the service of her own interests — her rights on Gone With the Wind. The Netherlands was occupied; the fate of the Dutch agent and the publisher, unknown, but Peggy persisted in her fight to overturn a first court decision in their favor — that her copyright did not cover the publication of Gone With the Wind in the Netherlands. This suit turned out vears later to be a landmark copyright case and did, in the end, help to win protection abroad for American writers. But at this time her fight was not a popular cause, and even Latham and Macmillan thought she should desist. Nor did she allow the war in Europe to cut her off from publishers of
her foreign editions in countries not directly under Nazi occupation. John kept ledgers on all of them and Peggy was proud to say in the late forties that almost all had paid the revenues owed her. She seldom turned down requests for loans from close friends or associates, but she kept businesslike records of them and photostats of all checks that had been exchanged.
The rest of Peggy’s time was spent nursing her father, rolling bandages, and answering every letter that came to her. All of her out-of-town friends were involved in their own personal problems. The Dowdeys were still in financial straits, and the Granberrys, whose son, Edwin, Jr., had been nearly blinded in a freak accident, were struggling through hard times.
Herschel Brickell had reunited with his wife and, as the Marshes had sided with him during the period of the incompleted divorce proceedings, their relations with Norma were strained. Jealousy on Norma Brickell’s part could have added to this problem. Her husband had been known to wander from time to time and was presently involved with another woman — a situation much discussed in the letters that passed between Peggy and the Dowdeys. It is doubtful that Peggy ever had an affair with Brickell, but she was, as close observers have said, “taken with him,” and her letters to him are more revealing than to anyone else. Seldom did she discuss Norma or direct more than cursory regards to her in their early correspondence. After the Brickells’ reconciliation, Peggy wrote a chatty letter to the two of them, but she later confided to the Dowdeys that she “never heard from Herschel anymore.”
In Atlanta, the Marshes had a dwindling social life. Peggy was called upon for autograph parties for local writers and teas at the Atlanta Historical Society, but when it came to friends as close as the Dowdeys, the Marshes had few in Atlanta. There were Stephens and Carrie Lou, but the two women had never had much in common. Medora and John still bore their old grudges toward one another, and Augusta was eternally involved in playing hostess to visiting opera companies and attending concerts that Peggy found boring. Frank Daniel came by occasionally, but he had published an article about Peggy in the Journal that she had not liked and their friendship had cooled. The Marshes had so thoroughly convinced people that they must leave Peggy alone so that she could have some peace and privacy that most old friends were afraid that by inviting John and Peggy for dinner they would appear to be “celebrity showers-off” and would be committing a transgression of their friendship.