Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  It would be difficult to overstate John’s patience with Peggy during their courtship. The strength of his love and of his desire to be loved made him willing to accept whatever part of the relationship she was willing to give him—even if it meant sharing her, for a while at least, with Upshaw.

  7

  During this period, when she was secretly leading each man to think she loved him more than the other, Peggy displayed a feature of Scarlett’s exploitative personality. At twenty-two, Peggy had mastered the art of flirting, and lacking any other focus for her energies, she needed the attention of men—the serious attention of several men at the same time—to bolster her self-confidence. Always candid about how she viewed romantic relationships, she wrote Frances, “Really there’s nothing in the world to boost a girl’s morale like the knowledge that there’s a gempmum fren’ all ready to seduce her if she gives him one half the chance. This knowledge was all that kept me going lots of times when I wanted to slump. . . . I think a man who makes improper proposals is a positive necessity in a girl’s life—just as much of a necessity as a man whose intentions are honorable and who believes you the personification of ignorance and innocence.”38 With this attitude, she enjoyed the best of both worlds with John, the gentleman, and Red, the rascal.

  But by now, John was deeply in love with her. “Peggy has become a habit with me by this time,” he wrote his mother in April 20, 1922:

  Red Upshaw, my roommate, and I are the most consistent rushers of the young lady and between the two of us we scarcely let a day get by without seeing her. The other night between 5 and 7 o’clock neither one of us knew where she was and as this was an unprecedented situation we did some tall scrambling about until we found her. It happened that she had been trying to locate one of us so she could report. . . . She is an odd type but has lots of remarkably fine qualities. . . . She has [a] . . . boyish expression and whimsical twist to her mind. I am making no plans to marry her but if things continue to develop satisfactorily it is a possibility to be considered at some time in the future when both of us get in the proper frame of mind. I believe I am the favored suitor, but it hasn’t reached the point where it is worrying either of us yet.

  Immediately after she arrived in Atlanta and met the cast of characters, Frances worried. During this first visit with her brother in Atlanta in April 1922, Frances was Peggy’s guest in the Mitchells’ home. Although she was far more conservative than Peggy in every way, Frances liked her well enough and easily understood why her brother found her so captivating—but she did not approve of Peggy’s behavior. She did not at all like the manner in which Peggy was treating John. After Frances returned to her own home, she told her mother about what she had learned and said that she was afraid their John was headed for a big fall. She explained that this triangular courtship Peggy was promoting was destined to break John’s heart, and he did not seem to realize it. When Frances met Red at one of the parties they all attended, he told her outright, “John thinks he is going to win but I’m pulling the big guns.” Frances assumed that he meant he was using his sex appeal, which she admitted “he had lots of.”39 She described the following incident: John brought Peggy home from a date about 10:00 P.M. Red was already at the Mitchells’ house waiting for his turn. John bent over Peggy’s hand, kissed it, and said, “Red, I now surrender to you the woman we both love.” Frances added, “Being John, this mock gallantry became him, but I was afraid that Peggy would laugh with John and marry Red.”40 And that’s exactly what she did.

  While John was naively thinking he had the edge in Peggy’s affections and was, in his characteristically thoughtful manner, working up the nerve to ask her to risk his uncertain future in advertising, the impulsive Peggy decided to marry Red. Playing a variety of games was her technique, and perhaps she thought that such an announcement would force John into a commitment, make him realize that he had to speak out for her if he wanted to win her. Her decision shocked her family and friends—and it devastated John.

  Instead of showing his emotions, he acquiesced quietly and retreated. Concealing what he described as his “shattered nerves,” he behaved like a gentleman and even agreed, after she asked, to serve as Red’s best man.41 But he was so distraught that he resigned from his good job at Georgia Power so that he could get out of town fast. After calling Henry to tell him what had happened and what he had done, Henry immediately traveled to Atlanta to be with him and to lend him some money.42 Having gone through a painful divorce that he had not sought, Henry understood something about John’s loss, and he knew that John was handling his grief the only way he knew how—by quickly leaving the Atlanta scene. John wanted to avoid all the prenuptial parties because he could not bear to see Peggy clinging to Red the way she had once done with him. The fact that he quit his new job at Georgia Power and took a lesser, more unstable one with Legare Davis, a freelance publicity agent, is significant proof of his grief. John was far too conservative and responsible a person to do such a thing under normal circumstances.

  Davis sent him to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to head the University of Alabama’s campaign to raise funds for its new building project. This fundraiser was an enormous undertaking that John organized and directed successfully; it turned out to be a healthy distraction for him because it demanded all of his energy and attention. On July 30, 1922, the day when his first story on the campaign appeared in all the big Alabama papers, John wrote a long, wistful letter to his mother telling her, “Your wandering boy is farther away from home than he has been for a long time.” Easing his way into talking about what was uppermost in his mind and also trying to reassure his mother that he was all right, he wrote that he was living in an old southern home about half a mile from the university and within walking distance of town.

  It is owned by a Mrs. A. F. Buck, a charming little woman with snow white hair, who has little to do but dig around her flowers as a corps of negro servants handles the work under the supervision of a fat, very black ‘mammy. . . .’ I get my meals here, and for the first time since childhood, and very early childhood, I am eating dinner at noon and supper at night. Everything is very leisurely and quiet and peaceful. The folks take their time, and an hour and a half for lunch seems to be the usual rule. Some of the stores close up entirely at noon. But it wouldn’t be possible to hurry, as the weather is so warm. Tuscaloosa is in the Alabama plains and some days the air scarcely stirs.

  His letter is a long, informative one—two full, single-spaced pages. But the most important item he saved for the very last paragraph.

  You may be interested in knowing that Peggy’s engagement to Red was announced in today’s papers in Atlanta. It wasn’t a surprise to me, as the three of us have known about it for some time. I naturally regret that I couldn’t get her myself, but it didn’t work out that way and the three of us are still good friends. They are to be married in September and I am to be the best man.

  Please don’t write that I am better off for not getting her. . . . That’s a blunt statement for a man to make to his mother, and I don’t suppose you would make it. But it wouldn’t be pleasant for me to be given that sort of consolation, so I am making the blunt statement to prevent it. You’ll pardon me and take into consideration that I have a few sore spots today.

  To have been cast aside for a man as irresponsible and unstable as Red Upshaw made John’s disappointment and loneliness all the more painful. None of Peggy’s close friends liked Red and said they could not understand what she saw in him. Feeling sorry for John, they had been on his side all along. Stephens said one of his sister’s friends told him: “I saw the announcement of Margaret’s engagement. It’s a great mistake. She’s in love with John Marsh and doesn’t know it.”43 Augusta Dearborn, Peggy’s closest friend and John’s, too, later tried to explain Peggy’s decision by saying that Peggy had a need “to mother people” and had even tried to mother her at times. Augusta thought that with his selfish and wild behavior, Red stirred Peggy’s immature mothering instincts in a way th
at John did not. Peggy may have believed that she could change some of Red’s bad habits after they married, an explanation that is supported by passages in some of her letters to Allen Edee, where she mentions helping her boyfriends give up bad habits such as “likker and wild women.”44 Augusta also believed that Peggy may have been vulnerable to Red’s sensuality.45

  Francesca gave another and even more plausible explanation. She thought that Peggy wanted to see how far she could go before John did something to stop her.46 Without doubt, it was always the chase, not the catch, that stimulated her. She had acknowledged earlier to Allen Edee that leading “a stolid, unemotional existence” was no easy task for her, that sometimes she just did not care about anything and did whatever she felt like doing with no thought for the consequences. When John failed to display any anger or jealousy upon learning of her decision to marry Red, she had to go through with the plans that she had put in place. John did not rescue her at the last minute as she expected he would. Incapable of creating the kinds of emotional scenes that she was accustomed to and found exciting, he just turned and walked away—even though he adored her. Joe Kling said, “John always kept himself under tight control regardless of circumstances or provocations. You got the impression of iron self-restraint. He never shouted or ranted; neither did he seem indifferent to stressful situations. He was simply a person on a strong leash.”47

  8

  This temporary triangular relationship was the inspiration for the fictional one that Rhett endured with Scarlett and Ashley. Many of those who have tried to identify the real-life models for the characters in Gone With the Wind have suggested that Rhett Butler was drawn from Red Upshaw.48 However, with the exception of Belle Watling, Peggy based none of her characters on specific real-life models. Instead, she scrambled appearances and personalities, taking bits and pieces from various real people to draw her characters. For example, she made Ashley’s fondness for books and music and his blond countenance resemble John’s; and she made Rhett’s appearance like that of her black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned, handsome grandfather—Russell Mitchell. And although she gave Rhett Butler some of Red Upshaw’s characteristics, in developing Rhett and his relationship with Scarlett, she endowed him with many of John’s personality traits.

  Rhett has John’s self-control, confidence, and independence. Like John, Rhett is a loner; he functions independently of the other southerners. He has John’s disdain for “imitation gentility and shoddy manners and cheap emotions.”49 He has John’s cool-headedness and ability to take charge and deal with any situation. Rhett has a red-haired female friend who runs a fancy bordello in Atlanta; John knew the red-haired Belle Brezing, who ran a fancy bordello in Lexington. And Rhett’s loyalty to, love for, and patience with the vain, selfish Scarlett, while she frittered her time away waiting for the idealistic Ashley, strongly resemble characteristics in John’s personality and behavior, not Red Upshaw’s by any stretch of the imagination.

  But the most striking similarity between John and Rhett lies in their fatherly attitudes toward the women they loved. Rhett wants to do everything for Scarlett, and he always treats and speaks of her as if she were a child to be “petted and spoiled.” John was extremely protective of Peggy, and he treated her as if she were his child; he took care of everything for her, and she had no responsibilities except those she elected to assume. His nickname for her was “Baby,” and in conversations with close friends and family and in his letters to his family, he often referred to Peggy as “that child.” In Gone With the Wind, Rhett often treats and speaks of Scarlett as if she were a child. After they marry, Rhett gives her many extravagant gifts and Scarlett thinks, “Yes, as Rhett had prophesied, marriage could be a lot of fun. . . . Now she felt like a child, every day on the brink of a new discovery.”50 While on their honeymoon in New Orleans, Rhett dismisses the maid and brings Scarlett her breakfast tray himself, and he “fed her as though she were a child, took the hairbrush from her hand and brushed her long dark hair until it snapped and crackled.”51 At another point in the novel, Rhett picks her up in his arms “like a child and held her close.”52

  The experiences that Red, Peggy, and John had are recreated in the drama of the Scarlett-Ashley-Rhett romance. The words that Rhett speaks to Scarlett here are words that John may have spoken to Peggy after she made her fateful decision:

  Did it ever occur to you that I loved you as much as a man can love a woman? Loved you for years before I finally got you…. I wanted to take care of you, to pet you, to give you everything you wanted. I wanted to marry you and protect you and give you a free rein in anything that would make you happy…. No one knew better than I what you’d gone through and I wanted you to stop fighting and let me fight for you. I wanted you to play, like a child—for you were a child, a brave, frightened, bullheaded child. I think you are still a child. No one but a child could be so headstrong and so insensitive.53

  Near the end of the novel, when Rhett is getting ready to leave for the last time, he tells Scarlett what John may well have thought about Peggy as she prepared to marry Red: “You’re such a child, Scarlett. A child crying for the moon. What would a child do with the moon if it got it? And what would you do with Ashley? Yes, I’m sorry for you—sorry to see you throwing away happiness with both hands and reaching out for something that would never make you happy. I’m sorry because you are such a fool because you don’t know there can never be happiness except where like mates like.”54 John makes a similar point in a letter to his sister written shortly after Peggy’s marriage to Red. He wrote: “It is my observation that it takes more than love to make a successful marriage.”

  The only real difference between Rhett Butler’s devotion to Scarlett O’Hara and John Marsh’s to Margaret Mitchell is that Rhett got tired of waiting for Scarlett to grow up.

  9

  Less than a month before Peggy was to marry Red, John, in Tuscaloosa, wrote the following letter to his sister Frances:

  Your first letter in reply to mine telling of the Peggy misfortune pleased me no end. It made me proud of you when you stood up and talked back to me. After trying a year or so to train you to do your own thinking, it is gratifying to me that the training has been so completely successful. After your lecture I shall continue to hold on to my Third Person Impersonal attitude and may you do the same. I admire the success of people who are of the Red type (well characterized by you, by the way), but I prefer myself. I have found my attitude brings a certain amount of success also.55

  What he meant by those last two lines is not clear, but he may have thought he would eventually win Peggy if he waited. Perhaps he felt, as her family and so many of her friends did, that her marriage was destined to fail. In this same letter, he added the following cryptic lines, which reveal that Peggy was no more ready to give John up entirely than he was willing to give her up, even though she had decided to marry someone else.

  Peggy and I are quite romantic these days. Friends though divided and all that. Write to each other frequently and interestingly. While I write this letter I am waiting on a long distance call to her. She has been sick again and I have decided she has lived long enough without me. I am going to run over to Atlanta Sunday and be the Kind Doctor if she will let me. We are a funny couple. Sometime within the next five years I may tell you the full account of the affair. It is intriguing and in spots dramatic.

  John went on to convey Peggy’s advice to Frances about Frances’s current romance and her invitation to visit Peggy in Atlanta, thus indicating that Peggy planned to remain on intimate terms not only with John but also with his family.

  10

  Despite John’s disappointment and her family’s opposition—her grandmother, father, and brother could not stand the sight of Upshaw—Peggy married him at 8:30 on Saturday evening, September 2, 1922, in a formal wedding at her father’s house. Atlanta’s “best and truest society were present,” John reported to his mother four days later.56 Peggy made all the arrangements herself. Other than ta
king a hiatus from their hostilities to attend a bridal tea on September 1, then the wedding itself, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens refused to have anything to do with helping her granddaughter prepare for the event.57 Peggy’s aunts on her father’s side assisted her. They also stood in the receiving line, but none of the Stephenses did, except two aunts and their daughters and, of course, her grandmother, who did it for appearances only.

  With a heavy heart, John arrived in Atlanta on Thursday morning. Taking a cab out to the Mitchells’ house, he found Peggy, dressed in overalls, looking prettier than ever with her hair pulled back and tied with a pink ribbon. After nervously chattering on about how the three extra servants she had hired failed to show up, she put John to work within half an hour after he arrived. He wrote that he moved furniture, buffed the waxed hardwood floors and woodwork, arranged some presents in the display room, and “wrote the stuff for the newspapers.”58 After a couple of hours, she sent him around to Red’s apartment, where he said he found Red “as wild and nervous and helpless as a bridegroom is expected to be.” In checking Red’s “clothes and equipment,” John discovered that the groom did not have a dress suit to wear after the ceremony. John wrote, “I stuck him into his car and we spent a hectic two hours shopping before I turned him loose, and then I had to dress him, and push him up into the line at the altar when it came time for him to say ‘I do.’” He added, “I was by the house for a few minutes two hours before the wedding and she was still in her overalls. Went from them to her bridal gown.”

  The wedding took place in front of an altar, constructed in the large front hall and covered with palms, ferns, and lilies. The altar faced the stairs so that the guests watched the ceremony from the parlor and from the library on either side of the hall. The reception was held in the dining room, where the receiving line was formed. She had the entire house bedecked with baskets of pink and white roses, gladioli, lilies, and ferns; garlands of smilax embroidered the chandeliers and doorways and were entwined on the wide stairway down which she and her father walked to the altar. So many white candles in silver candelabra glowed profusely throughout the house that night that her father worried during the entire ceremony that the house was going to burn down.59