by Anne Edwards
She confided to Lois in July that she did not think John would ever again be able to carry the double load of the job at the power company and her foreign affairs. “To be frank,” she wrote, “at present I do not know if he will ever be able to carry any load at all.” To her mind, his illness could not have happened at a worse time. There was a “four-cornered dog fight of a piracy suit” in Yugoslavia, another one in Belgium, her Spanish publisher was misappropriating funds (she subsequently regained them), there was a “mad rush” to get money out of France before the devaluation of the franc, there were three new contracts to sign, and on top of all this, there was still the unresolved piracy suit in the Netherlands.
She had won her case at the retrial, but the war had intervened and settlement had not been made. The payment was finally delivered in the summer of 1946, and Peggy felt elated by it for, in her opinion, the lawsuit and settlement was of international importance and touched directly or indirectly “the rights of every author in this country.” She wrote to George Brett, “I don’t know of any other author who has made such a fight to establish the legality of the copyright and I do not know of any publisher who has taken the trouble as you did to test it.”
Without question, Peggy was a terrific fighter. Just give her a cause she believed in, and she stuck it out to the bitter end. When her battles were not in her own interest, they were usually on behalf of close friends or family. Bessie and the Marshes’ laundress, Carrie, who had been with them for over twenty years, figured in that category. Carrie was dying of cancer the week that John came home from Piedmont Hospital. The Holbrooks were proud people who had never taken charity, and they appealed to “Miss Peggy” to try to find a noncharity hospital bed in which Carrie could die more comfortably than at home. Peggy tried every paying hospital in the Atlanta area, but none of them would take Carrie. Finally, Peggy threw herself upon the sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and begged them to violate their rule that patients should be friendless and without money. Carrie was taken in and a “donation” was arranged. Three days later, she died.
Peggy now took up the cause of Atlanta’s “Negro problem” — mainly, the need for a paying hospital to afford better medical care for those blacks who could pay and did not want charity. As soon as John was able to move from his bed, Peggy began to raise funds to build a pay hospital for blacks. She helped to sell the plan to the trustees of the Fulton–DeKalb Hospital Authority and to the Fulton County Medical Society, and she gave them their first pledge, of one thousand dollars.
Before Christmas, 1946, with John not well and his future looking bleak, Peggy set out to try to buy a one-story house in their general neighborhood, so that John would not have to climb steps. She found a perfect house, but she felt the price was too high and she decided she would not make a move until the following spring, when, she predicted to Lois, prices were “bound to come down.”
The Marshes’ domestic situation had been difficult that summer. Bessie had been out ill, and her daughter, Deon, had come to cook and clean for them. Then Deon had left to have a mastectomy performed. The young orderly had quit too, and there had been nothing else for Peggy to do but to put John back in Piedmont Hospital until Bessie was able to come back to work in September. On John’s return home, a sixteen-year-old orderly was hired and, from that time, John’s progress was steady but unspectacular. By Christmas, he could sit up for several hours at a time, an improvement that gave Peggy an idea.
The Marshes had always loved movies, so Peggy now rented a sixteen-millimeter movie projector and sent the janitor to town every day to get them films to show. They especially liked the old films, and within a few months they had seen all the vintage Chaplins, as well as such movies as The Last Mile, Scarface, and Hell’s Angels. To Helen Dowdey she wrote, “Machine guns rattle every night here and the tom-toms of ‘South of Pago-Pago’ awake the echoes.”
Peggy hardly went anywhere except to the grocery store, and she seldom saw anyone other than Medora Perkerson and her old friend, Sam Tupper, who would sit and watch films with them. It was not a satisfying life for Peggy, but she was thankful John was alive and she wrote Helen Dowdey, “As God is my witness I have never had so much business, domestic and foreign, and as some [letters] include checks [that] I never expected to see ... I know I should not kick.” Still, tending John and handling all their domestic and foreign affairs left her no time for anything else. She was, she confessed, almost as confined to the house as her patient.
The revival of foreign interest in Gone With the Wind that had begun with the war’s end continued as war-torn countries overseas went through their own reconstructions. And, with the book’s reappearance on American best-seller lists, there was a small resurgence in 1946 of the “rubberneck” autoists, the bus tours, and the stacks of mail. Peggy now wrote to Edwin Granberry that she had made a revolutionary change in her life — she would no longer be hauled out to lunch to see “visiting firemen,” she did not care if she ever spoke publicly again, she would not be an “unpaid Chamber of Commerce greeter,” she would not be on public display “like Stone Mountain and the Cyclorama,” and there would be no more lunches with “the President of the Daughters of I-Will-Arise of Opp, Alabama.” Peggy Mitchell would once again be her own woman. Rather late in the game, she decided to remove her name from the Atlanta telephone directory and get an unlisted number.
This “revolutionary change” seems to have been more of a trade-off, however. With John incapacitated, Peggy was now the protector and the collector general for “Margaret Mitchell, Author,” and she scrapped in her own behalf with amazing tenacity. All the “chiselers” were back, “anxious to turn a penny.” She wrote to George Brett, “Even some of the hotels and boarding houses have glibly pointed out this or the other place as where Aunt Pittypat lived and I have forced them to desist.” There was a professor at Western Reserve University in Cleveland who had tried to copyright a detailed map of the Atlanta of 1861, including possible locales of homes and incidents in Gone With the Wind. Peggy forced him to “desist,” too, writing the professor that she had gone to a great deal of trouble and had spent much time mixing up the topography of Atlanta so that no house could be located, and that she had done this purposely to avoid embarrassing anyone and encumbering herself with legal battles. Did he realize, she inquired, that a perfectly respectable family had lived in the house he ascribed to Belle Watling?
Peggy handled the complicated business of foreign rights with equal competence. Her head for business had always been good, but she had resisted running her own affairs in the past because it had seemed “unfeminine.” The war and John’s illness had changed her thinking about that. Women had always been able to take over the running of things during wars, when men were out fighting, and they were seen as “stalwart,” not unfeminine, at such times.
By September, the Marshes knew John would never go back to his job at the power company. They had been expecting this news, and it did not disturb them unduly. He was able to be helped across the street to the Piedmont Driving Club every afternoon, have a drink, and stay about forty minutes. In the evening, Peggy often sent over to the club for champagne cocktails and dinner to be brought over and served by one of the waiters in their living room. It was an “extravagance,” she felt, but worth the expenditure, as it was one of the few pleasures they could enjoy together.
It had been a little more than a decade since the madness over Gone With the Wind had begun. Peggy was now forty-six years old. Medora, who was older, looked younger and still put in her full day writing. Lois looked surprisingly youthful. But Peggy thought she herself had aged badly. She had gained thirty pounds since John’s heart attack, her hair had begun to thin, and, too, there was the puffiness about her face and under her chin. But more distressing than her matronly exterior was the fact that she was beginning to feel old, and it nagged at her that she did not have many years ahead of her. Intimations of these feelings appeared in her letters to the Granberrys and the Dowd
eys during this period. People in Atlanta stopped Stephens on the street and asked if everything was all right with Peggy because she looked so weary.
Her scale of living had certainly not altered much since pre-Gone With the Wind days. She lived only a few streets from where she had been raised and twice married. Over the years she had fought obstinately to hold on to the past, to anything and everything that made up her history, to those things and people who were part of her sphere. Matters to do with the book she treated the same way — possessively. But change had come nonetheless, as it has a habit of doing as one ages. A unique mixture of Southern belle, young tomboy, and crusty woman had always dominated Peggy’s personality, and the first two had overshadowed the last to give her a distinct charm. But, at age forty-six, the young boy and the coquette were gone.
Chapter Twenty-seven
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH once said that fame is a kind of death. That was certainly true in Peggy’s case. From the summer of 1936, when Gone With the Wind had been published and fame had intruded upon the Marshes’ world, all of her energies had been spent in either barricading herself against it or in coping with its entrapments. And so determined was she that fame would not change her way of life that she ceased growing emotionally and intellectually from the time of the publication of Gone With the Wind — and what is that but a kind of death?
Time that could have been spent writing, or at least in exploring new avenues of thought, had been given over to the stultifying task of maintaining a correspondence with thousands of strangers on two subjects only — Gone With the Wind and the minutiae of protecting her rights in it. That is not to say that if Gone With the Wind had not been such a grand success, Peggy would have written a second book, or anything more at all, for that matter. But she might have been a happy woman. Reading her personal letters to the Granberrys, the Dowdeys, Herschel Brickell, Lois Dwight Cole, and Ginny Morris, as well as John’s letters to his sister, Frances, one is struck by the unhappiness that pervades their pages. Delight in anything is a rare occurrence, and when it does appear, it is of a curious nature — the wild goings on at a Georgia Press party, a “chiseler” stymied, a Southerner who approves of the book. There is a sense of Peggy’s deep love for Georgia and for the city of her birth. But even that was not a living, current thing, but a passion that had been fixed some time long past, in her childhood — before Roosevelt and the New Deal, before Gone With the Wind, before her marriage to John, and before her marriage to Red Upshaw.
In fact, much as she loved her city’s history, Peggy’s feeling toward Atlanta ever since the Junior League matrons had turned their backs on her in 1921 had been one of defiance, an “I’ll-show-you” attitude. And, when all of Atlanta, including the ladies of the Junior League, was at her feet, she chose to remain aloof but visible. There was a knob of retribution in her choice. Except for Medora, and later, Sam Tupper, both of whom she had known since her reporting days, her best friends had not been Atlantans. Of course, she was fond of Augusta and Lee Edwards, and she loved Stephens. But she did not often see them socially. Nor did she encourage her new friends to come to Atlanta; she preferred going to them. Loyal as she had been to her father, she almost always spent Christmas away from him.
A wistful note clings to John Marsh’s letters. It was not he who felt so dedicated to their modest lifestyle in Atlanta nor, for that matter, to his job at Georgia Power. But he did think it would be bad for Peggy’s image to have gone “high-hat,” and he did believe that any change in their lifestyle would give that impression. Peggy’s fame was a kind of death for John Marsh too. Not only did it take its physical claim on him, but it put an end to his ambitions and dreams as well. To leave his job for any reason but ill health, he feared, would have started tongues wagging. As far back as 1936, Marsh had felt he had gone as far as he could at Georgia Power. That same year, a major railroad had offered him a public-relations position with a chance for national prestige. But, by then, Gone With the Wind had been published, and he had put aside his own considerations.
By 1948, the Gone With the Wind fan letters had fallen back down to a trickle. Since the war, there had never been a time when the film was not being shown somewhere, and the book had never been out of print. But a curious thing had happened, perhaps because of the war’s intervention. Both book and film had become legends in the matter of one generation and, due to this, new readers and viewers of Gone With the Wind assumed the author must be legendary as well and, if still alive, quite elderly. The best-seller lists were crowded with books about the Second World War and its survivors. The popularity of Gone With the Wind right after the war was attributed by many book people to have been due to its relevancy — war and its aftermath. But there were many new readers now who thought the book had been written by a woman in the nineteenth century. Sales rose each year and, with the appearance of an inexpensive edition as well, the book had more circulation than ever. But Peggy no longer had to worry about protecting her privacy from the invasion of the curious.
In the fall of 1948, however, she felt she did have cause to worry about Red Upshaw. After more than a decade of silence, news had reached them of his activities. The story was that he had spent the war years in the Merchant Marines and was now an incurable alcoholic and a bum, that he had been in several Southern cities, and that he had written mutual friends of the Marshes and asked them what Peggy was doing and why she had suddenly disappeared from the pages of the Atlanta telephone directory. The friends had written to the address he had given, telling him the Marshes were still in Atlanta, but their letter had come back marked “addressee unknown.”
On a cold, windy Sunday in November of 1948, Peggy decided to make a new will to replace an earlier one made in 1936. A five-page document, the will is written in longhand in a simple, unlegalistic style, almost like a letter, with heirs referred to by their nicknames. According to Stephens, she had called him to come over a few days before this, and they had had a series of in-depth discussions about her finances as well as his own. She was surprised to learn, he said, that all her payments to him for legal services had gone into the family law firm in which their uncle was also a member, and that he had not accrued any personal wealth due to her. The money he did have had been earned from knowledgeable real-estate investments. He also said that at this time Peggy told him she wanted all her personal papers destroyed in the event of her death, as well as all her writings and manuscripts. She did not, however, mention this wish in her will.
Peggy’s greatest concern was Bessie, and a house that she held the mortgage on and that Bessie was paying off. There was eight hundred dollars left on that mortgage, and Peggy wanted to make sure that Bessie got the house free and clear upon her death, and that the debt would then be cancelled. She said this twice in the will. Her bequests were not generous, except perhaps, in the case of Margaret Baugh, to whom she left a small annuity for life. Bessie, Bessie’s daughter, Peggy’s nephews and John’s nieces and nephews, her godchildren, and Augusta Dearborn’s son were all left token amounts of between one hundred and one thousand dollars, as were the Atlanta Historical Society and the Margaret Mitchell Library at Fayetteville. The rest of her estate was to be divided so that three-quarters went to John and one-quarter to Stephens. All rights to Gone With the Wind, all her personal papers, all the household furnishings, and her own personal possessions went to John. The names of three witnesses appear on the last page below her own, but as the will was drawn on a Sunday, it seems unlikely that it was witnessed that same day.
What is important about this will is, first, that Peggy said nothing in it about a wish to have her papers destroyed (a major issue later), and, second, that she left all rights to Gone With the Wind to John Marsh, a man even then at death’s door, without specifying who should succeed him when he died. For a lawyer’s daughter — as she was proud to boast she was — who had spent her entire adult life living the letter of the law, it is a confounding omission. As John had not made a will at that time, it mean
t that if the Marshes had died together, that “unscrupulous chiseler” Peggy was always fearing could well have stepped in and claimed to be Margaret Mitchell’s child (perhaps from the first marriage), holding up the estate in a costly fight that would have created great problems for her legitimate next of kin — Stephens or her two nephews.
In January, 1949, Peggy received a newspaper clipping in the mail. Margaret Baugh had opened the envelope and debated whether she should show it to John first, but as he had not been well that day, she decided to give it to Peggy, warning her that it was about her first husband. Peggy’s hand trembled as she held the clipping.
“Are you all right?” Margaret Baugh asked when Peggy put the clipping down.
Peggy did not reply. She sat there not moving for a moment or two. “Did you read it?” she asked Margaret Baugh.
“Yes,” the secretary answered.
“What a terrible way to die,” Peggy said quietly, and then she got up and went into her room and did not reappear for the remainder of the day.
Margaret Baugh wasn’t sure what to do with the clipping, but she finally pasted it on a piece of paper and filed it in the four-drawer file of clippings that Peggy had collected over the last thirteen years, under U — for Berrien Kinnard Upshaw.
January 13, 1949 - Galveston, Texas
The possibility that Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, killed Wednesday in a drop from the fifth floor of a downtown hotel, was ill was voiced Wednesday night by a Salvation Army worker who had talked with him shortly before his death.