Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Margaret Mitchell did not need an Aladdin’s lamp; she had John Marsh. And it is no exaggeration to say that just as she dedicated Gone With the Wind to him, so he dedicated his life to her. His burning their beloved manuscript was a fitting end to a relationship marked by his burning devotion to her. Without that devotion, it is unlikely that Gone With the Wind would ever have been written. If love is defined as an intrinsic good, full of mutual pleasure—physical and intellectual—friendship, loyalty, trust, humor, and, as Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric, “as wishing for someone what you believe to be good things—wishing this not for your own sake but for his—and acting so far as you can to bring them about,” then Gone With the Wind is not a love story; it is a novel of failed romances. Ironically, the true love story lies behind Gone With the Wind, in the lives of the author and her husband.

  2

  Their first meeting in late September 1921 was the result, like nearly all things in life, of a circumstance of fate. Ironically, it occurred just a few days after John had written to his mother on September 18, 1921, that he was thinking about making some changes in his life. He assured her: “Don’t feel that I am going to do anything wild and daring. I wish to goodness I had in my past record just one thing wild and daring. I haven’t and I don’t suppose I ever will.” Little did he know then that the most wild and daring person that he would ever know was about to enter his life and change it forever.

  John met Peggy one night at the March Hare Tea Shop, better known by its frequenters as “the Rabbit Hole.” A popular downtown Atlanta gathering place, this “tearoom” was located in the basement of the Haynes Building at 2 1/2 Auburn Avenue, just a block from Peachtree Street but in a shabby neighborhood.30 Just getting over the flu, John had almost not gone there that night. He went only because he was pressed to go by his best friend, O. B. Keeler, a sportswriter at the Daily Georgian where John worked as a reporter.31

  With its bohemian atmosphere, the Rabbit Hole was the favorite gathering place for aspiring, out-of-work writers, a few college students, charming young women known as flappers, and young newspapermen who would drop in between assignments or after deadlines. In the dim candlelight they would dance or sit around the red-checkered, oilcloth-covered tables, talking and sipping their drinks (bootleg gin or corn whiskey mixed with Coca-Cola). This was an era when cynicism spread like prairie fire across the country, when many lost their faith in traditional values that had long been taken for granted. Then, too, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women full suffrage had just been passed in 1920 and had brought with it a cascade of changes in the roles of women. Known as “the intelligentsia,” coveys of young people, like the Rabbit Hole crowd, disillusioned with traditional values and materialism, gathered in Greenwich Village-like places across the nation to discuss the problems the older generation had left for them to straighten out. The young people who met at the Rabbit Hole had high ideals and expectations and great books in their heads. In a letter to his mother in the late fall of 1921, John described them as “a sort of almost-intellectual society set, young revolutionaries after a fashion who actually have ideas, though some of them are far from certain as to what those ideas are.”32 He had been to the Rabbit Hole only one time before that fateful night, for it was not the type of place or group that attracted him. Individualistic and disdainful of trivial social pursuits, he was self-made, having earned his present position by hard work and self-denial. Busy making a living, he had no time to sit around being disillusioned and, besides that, he upheld the traditional values scorned by the Rabbit Hole group.

  Margaret Mitchell, then twenty-one years old, not only fit right into the Rabbit Hole crowd but was the leader of the pack. More than anything else in the world, she wanted to be a writer. Although nothing she had written had been published, she nevertheless thought of writing as her profession, so on the evenings when she was not dancing with her fraternity boyfriends at such elegant places as the Georgian Terrace, she sought the company of other aspiring writers in the charged atmosphere of the Rabbit Hole. On the night when John walked into the place, Margaret Mitchell was already there, and she captured his attention instantly. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.33

  She was sitting, like a fragile centerpiece, on top of one of the tables, her back held straight and her legs daintily crossed at the ankles. She looked strikingly beautiful, young, and small. She was wearing a dark green woolen dress with a cream lace collar that circled high around her slender neck. With its long, straight skirt and tight-fitting bodice, the dress emphasized her tiny waist and shapely little body. Her long, auburn-tinged dark hair, piled high on the back of her head, made her creamy complexion look luminous. Her green eyes sparkled with merriment as the young men, circled about her, listening to her tell an anecdote, burst into laughter.34 In many ways, she was not different in personality or appearance from her heroine Scarlett O’Hara, although she violently objected to such a comparison.35 But her friends said that reading the description of Scarlett on the first page of Gone With the Wind is reading a description of Peggy herself.36

  Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm. . . . In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin.

  As John was soon to learn, she was a master storyteller, noted for her extraordinary ability to dramatize and embellish ordinary events. When he asked someone who she was, he was told that she was a rich debutante and the most popular girl in town. To get a date with her, he was advised, “Get in line!” He did not reply to that remark, but he was challenged by it.

  Although Peggy looked demure during this high-flying period that John later named her “flapperoty era,” there was nothing demure about her.37 She even categorized herself as the “Vamp de Luxe.”38 In responding to an old beau’s remark about her being “a devil and a flirt” and not playing “square with men,” she answered saucily, “When a girl knows the male psychology as thoroughly as I do—when she knows the thousand and one small tricks by which a girl can ‘innocently’ run a man wild or sweep him off his feet—when she knows these things and is small and helpless looking, to boot, and she doesn’t use these aforementioned tricks—well, I’d say she played fair!”39 But Peggy did not always play fair.

  Before she became aware of his presence, she had already swept John right off his feet. As he stood in the background, watching and listening, he found her irresistible. His interest in Ruth Gimbel, an Ohio girl whom he had been dating steadily for a year, vanished.40 Within a few days of his meeting Peggy, he wrote his sister Frances about what he called “an ardent young revolutionary with a helluva lot of common sense as well. You’ll like her, I’m sure.” Then he added, “If you don’t, I promise to choke you on the spot.”41

  3

  At that time Peggy was attracted, much to her father’s regret, to rebels, gamblers, and dashing playboys who flaunted their reckless and arrogant attitudes. John Marsh fit into none of these categories. Twenty-six years old, he was an old young man, conservative and quiet. There was nothing daring about him; his thoughts and behavior were deeply conventional. He was highly principled, but not self-righteous, and he cared nothing for organized religion, a view appreciated by Peggy’s father, Eugene Mitchell, who shared the sentiment. John had supported himself since his early teens, paying for his own college education by writing for the Herald and the Leader, newspapers in Lexington, Kentucky. And he, along with his oldest brother, was helping to support his mother and his youngest sister, who at that time was in college. Born and reared in a small town in northern Kentucky, he graduated with a degree in English from the University of Kentucky in 191
6. While on a fellowship doing graduate studies at the university, he taught two classes of English composition and continued to write for the newspapers until World War I broke out. Then he joined the service. After his two-year stint in the army, he returned to newspaper work in Lexington for a few months and then moved to Atlanta, where he landed a job as a reporter for the Georgian. About returning home to Kentucky, he wrote his mother, “I may move back there when I become a famous writer.”42 By the time he met Peggy, he had been working in Atlanta on some interesting assignments for over a year. He was an established journalist with an excellent professional reputation.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that he was different from all the other men that she found attractive, Peggy was drawn to John. She found his blond, patrician handsomeness appealing, and his maturity comforting. Because he was more intellectual than any other man she had ever known, she felt reassured by his attention to her. Because she was the prettiest, the friendliest, and the most sought-after girl he had known, he took pride in her interest in him. They became immediate friends. The chemistry between them, from the start, was profoundly reciprocal, but perhaps not identical. Like all those other young men, John was enchanted with her beauty, warmth, and personality. And just like all those others, he was stimulated by her sexuality. He fell in love with Peggy at first sight and claimed that his falling into such a love was “a soul-shaking, terrifying experience.”43 He wanted physical intimacy but was too shy, too much of a gentleman to act on his desire. He was afraid he would lose her. Just the reverse may have been true of Peggy who, in searching for psychological intimacy, wanted John as an intellectual companion, as a protector and a teacher. At that time, she desperately needed approval from someone she regarded as wise and sensible, someone she trusted. As he began to fulfill all those roles so admirably and generously, she became attracted to him sexually. Soon, each became irreplaceable to the other.

  In the beginning of their friendship, she took the initiative by inviting him to escort her to several debutante balls during the Christmas holidays. Having grown up in a small town in a large family dependent upon the limited income of a school-teaching, widowed mother, John had no experience attending such social functions. Also, although he was older than she, more educated and experienced in many ways, he was also conspicuously more naive about romance. His mother and his sisters were models of virtuous womanhood, and all the girls John had dated were more of the conventional type, not like the tantalizing little chameleon Peggy was at that time. John had had no experiences with a woman like her. One of her friends, William Howland, described her best when he wrote, “At times, she looked like a very good little girl—which she was. At other times, she looked like a very bad little girl; which she could be. But never a dull little girl. Or a mean little girl.”44

  Just a few days after meeting this woman who would dominate the rest of his life, he wrote his sister Frances:

  An Atlanta girl is the only girl who interests me. She is one of last season’s debutantes, lives in a beautiful house way out on Peachtree Street, is very small and is named Mitchell. She has a beautiful long name, Margaret, which has been shortened to a pert “Peggy.” To counteract the effect of that word “debutante,” I have been to see her twice and both times have spent the entire evening in conversation, without any stimulation, erotic or otherwise. She is the first girl I have met in Atlanta with whom I have been able to enjoy sensible conversation.45

  By Thanksgiving, anyone with half an eye could tell at a glance that the tall, quiet newspaperman from Kentucky was deeply in love with the quirky little debutante. At times, she appeared to be in love with him. But no one could be sure because she continued to go out with other men and to play—to the hilt—her role as southern belle.

  What soon separated John from her other admirers and made him the object of her serious attention was his recognition of her burning desire to be a writer. He listened to her and validated her intellectually. No one else, except her mother, had ever done that. She had not excelled in her schoolwork or in any other area and had the reputation of being a party girl, one who was lively, unconventional, sexy, and funny. No one appreciated or even saw the serious side of her. Even though her own life thus far had no direction, was unproductive, wasted in social trivia, and dependent upon her father’s income, Peggy admired people who were independent, who worked hard and who had, as she put it, “the courage to take it on the chin” as John was doing.46 From the time she first met him, she knew intuitively that he was “buckwheat,” a term she always used to describe people who had integrity and character. This metaphor came from her childhood when she often heard her grandmother and great-aunts, who were farmers, say that there were just two kinds of people: wheat people and buckwheat people. One day not long after she met him, Peggy nicknamed John “Buckwheat.”47 She then explained the analogy to him, as she did to many others later: “Take wheat, when it’s ripe and a strong wind comes along, it’s laid flat on the ground and it never rises again. But buckwheat yields to the wind, is flattened and when the wind passes, it rises up just as straight as ever. Wheat people can’t stand a wind. Buckwheat people can.”48

  Because of her sense of adventure—her favorite books were boys’ adventure stories and mysteries—she loved John’s work. She envied his trek with revenuers into the Georgia mountains on a stormy day to chase bootleggers and the shiny little pistol he had been given to keep as a souvenir of the trip. She was more than impressed with the national attention he received just about the time they met for his controversial interview with the new leader of the Ku Klux Klan. His long interview with Imperial Kleagle Clarke won him praise from the Georgian and also from the New York World, who called John “one of the most capable and painstaking journalists in Atlanta.”49

  His life was different from that of her fraternity boyfriends. She admired not only his work but also his education. Because of his use of the language and his vocabulary, anyone who listened to him for a few moments knew that he was intelligent and well educated. In contrast to her southern drawl and lapses of grammar, his clear diction made every syllable distinct. Her voice had a lilting, soft but high pitch to it; his was deep and low. Although he had a keen sense of humor, which delighted her, he also had a kind of no-nonsense air. From the beginning of their friendship, she looked upon him as almost an authority figure. She respected and valued his judgment.50

  4

  Before John met Peggy, his letters to his mother are all about his work. But after November 21, 1921, when he announced that he had just met the “introducingest person” he had ever known, his letters are all about Peggy and their social life. He wrote enthusiastically about the formal balls that he and his “new Sweetie” had been attending at the Georgian Terrace and the fun they had been having. His happiness is evident in this letter to his mother:

  I suppose right at the start you want to hear a report on the present condition of my health. It’s great—I’m fat and getting fatter. I am beginning to fear double chins. . . . The day before I went to bed with the flu, my doctor stuck me on the scales and weighed me in at 134 pounds. A couple of days ago I was in his office, got on the same scales and I weighed 145 pounds. I can cheerfully say that I have become much better satisfied with Atlanta and with life in general during the month past. I honestly feel great, physically and mentally.51

  Perhaps the most obvious sign of his involvement with Peggy was the change in his workaholic habits. “I am by a great effort of will power not working so hard at the office that I am too tired to go out in the evenings occasionally,” he told his mother. Also, he said he was trying to cure some of his other bad habits; he had stopped “drinking coffee and coca cola” and had become a “sweet milk fiend.” He added: “I don’t stay up late every night, stopped drinking cocktails, using cocaine, heroin and opium, dipping snuff, chewing tobacco, bootlegging whiskey and chewing my fingernails, etc.” A chain smoker since he was sixteen, he wrote: “Of course, I am still smoking ciga
rettes, of course. ‘They never stop,’ . . . but if some one will invent a substitute for that I promise to give it a trial.”52

  By mid-December, he and Peggy were seeing each other nightly. Having looked forward to spending all of his Christmas vacation with her, he was furious when, two days before Christmas, the Georgian sent him, its star reporter, to cover Eugene Debs’s release from the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta. A colorful Socialist who ran for the presidency five times, Debs was always making national news, first for organizing a union for railroad workers who went on strike the following year, then for making an antiwar speech during World War I. He was convicted under the Espionage Act for his speech and given a ten-year sentence in the Atlanta federal prison, but his sentence was commuted on Christmas Day 1921. Because none of the newspapermen knew exactly when Debs would be released, John angrily spent Christmas Eve “sitting in a hard chair in the prison front parlor wishing Debs was in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”53 Christmas Day he described as “darn cold . . . and the warden wouldn’t even let us inside the gate, so we marched up and down outside, about 40 of us, including the motion picture men and Socialist delegation” until late Christmas afternoon when Debs was finally released. John got his interview with Debs, hurriedly wrote his story and lined up photographs to go with it, and then tried to reach Peggy. But she had already gone with another date on a round of holiday parties. So he sadly returned to his room in Mrs. Prim’s boarding house on Peachtree Street and sat alone in his rocking chair in front of the fire with nothing more entertaining to do than play with the family’s new kitten. By eight o’clock, he was in bed, exhausted and disappointed, wondering where Peggy was and missing her badly.54