Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Because he had to borrow money to pay all of his medical expenses, John was deeply in debt when they married. Shortly after their marriage, Peggy had trouble with her left ankle, and her visits to specialists added to their debt. Even though he was making more—seventy-five dollars a week—at the Georgia Power Company than he had made at the Journal, which paid him only forty dollars, he could not get all of his bills paid, and he loathed being in debt. He was used to being poor but not to being in debt. Mr. Mitchell offered to lend him some money, but John refused his help. Angus Perkerson gave Peggy a couple of raises so that her salary was now thirty dollars a week, the maximum amount paid to female newspaper writers.5 By 1925, she had agreed to write, in addition to her regular features, the Journal’s “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip,” a column that Frances Newman, a librarian and book reviewer, had created in 1921 and written for four years until she launched her career as a novelist. The column contained no gossip, just breezy little anecdotes about Atlantans, and it was easy to do, though gathering the material was time consuming. Peggy wrote Frances, her sister-in-law: “I once told John that the Elizabeth Bennet Colymn [sic] was going to keep the wolf away from the door, and he brutally asked if I was going to read it to the wolf.”6

  Knowing that the next five or six years would be lean ones did not bother Peggy. She told Frances, “I hope you get tied up some day to a man who means so much to you that you dont give three whoops about money as long as you have enough to eat, a last years over coat and money enough to see Harry Langdon and Ben Turpin [actors] . . . and if I can just keep John fascinated by my brightly colored beauty, my brilliant wit, and my otherwise charming personality, all will be well.”7 A year later, her attitude had not changed. When Henry, whose first marriage had failed, was hesitating to remarry a young woman with whom he had fallen in love, Peggy advised him:

  If its just a matter of money, I’d say, go ahead and point with pride at myself and J. J is paying one third of his money to the Company, and one third to doctors. I regularly pay out all but five a week of my monumental salary on doctors bills and last years clothes. (Yes, five a week is what I wrote. I have a credit account at the quick and dirty here where I breakfast and lunch.) We are poorer than Hell ever was and yet we make out very well . . . and are visited by all timorous couples contemplating matrimony who want their morale boosted by the sight of two poor but happy people.

  Really, it is possible to get by on an amazingly small amount providing you have some affection for your poverty partner—and some hope of things picking up some time or other. I know I sound Pollyannaish but I dont mean it that way. I was poor with one man and it was unmitigated Hell because he was a poor sport and bellyached eternally and wasnt willing to put out to better himself financially.

  I guess it would have been a mess even if we’d have had a million. But in this, my latest matrimonial venture! I am as happy as if I had five pairs of silk stockings and a couple of new dresses—which is my idea of wealth. As Mary Hunter seems to be a very sensible girl I imagine she could be pretty happy with out having a million—as long as you ladled out soft soap as tirelessly as J does.8

  2

  The Marshes’ early life was sweet, serene, and filled, Peggy told Henry, with much “thoroughly improper lovemaking.”9 With no money for theaters, dining out, or travel, they entertained themselves by working on Peggy’s writing projects, reading aloud to each other, and doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles.10 About those “nerve-wracking” puzzles, she wrote her mother-in-law, “John and I go at them like we were paid to do it and sit up past midnight on some of them, sweating and wailing aloud.”11 In an almost childlike manner, she enjoyed being read to. One night after finishing James Branch Cabell’s latest story in the American Mercury, John read to her the Book of Revelations from the Bible. When she told him she had never heard of Revelations before, he said that was doubtlessly because of her Catholic upbringing. The next day she was still thinking about what John had read when she wrote Frances:

  I had read all the Bible, I thought, including the Begats, but I never had heard about the beasts with eyes in their behinds who guarded the throne of the God of Israel nor of the Heavenly horses who toted their tails in their mouths. I was fascinated by it all because it was so much like the hallucinations of acute alcoholism and paresis.12

  Although she was now more sedate than she had ever been, she still loved to shock. The first thing she did in their apartment was to tack on the front door two calling cards: one read “Miss Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell” and the other, “Mr. John R. Marsh.” A day or so later, a masculine caller, who was brought along by some friends for a visit, read the cards on the door and misunderstood the marital status of his hosts. When he tried to outsit John that evening, Peggy decided that the joke was on her and the cards came down that night. The new card read “Mr. and Mrs. John R. Marsh.”13

  A few months after their marriage, she reported to her mother-in-law: “John and I are making out very well in our new roles and havent had but one row yet and that was over whether lima beans and butter beans were one and the same. Having spent my summers on a plantation, I knew they were different and he, with his superiority said they were the same, only one was the debutante and the other was the dowager. But that’s our only trouble so far—unless you take into consideration the herds of visitors who plague our lives.”14 Their unmarried friends, who all worked within walking distance of The Dump, as they called it, ignored the fact that the newlyweds needed a lot of privacy, and in those early days made the Marshes’ apartment their meeting place.15

  They generally come between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. and those are sacred hours devoted to the preparing of supper. Once, John got supper in an hour and forry five [sic] minutes but the strain nearly killed him. But when five or six people blow in at 8 and find us in the throes of supper, its very inconvenient. . . . Its also inconvenient when Frances Newman calls on us at early dawn (12:45) on Sunday mornings and expects us to receive in bed. We have a sign on the door now with visiting hours on it. Maybe that will stymie them.16

  Young reporters and impoverished writers enamored with her would stop by in the afternoons, sometimes before John came home. But he never seemed to mind that she had more male friends than he did or that they visited her during his absence. He was never jealous; she gave him no reason to be. Every one of them knew that she was committed to her marriage and completely loyal to John. She was warm, friendly, and fun; according to Medora, she was “such good company, that the Marshes’ apartment was a pleasant place to visit.”17 During these visits, she and her guests would often read aloud to each other from the works of southern writers such as James Branch Cabell, whom they all greatly admired for his interest in preserving the aristocratic ideals of the conservative South. When Stephen Vincent Benét’s long poem John Brown’s Body came out, Allan Taylor, one of the Marshes’ friends, rushed over to the Marshes’ apartment with a copy that he had purchased.18 As he read parts of it aloud to her, Peggy said she wept because it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. In 1936, she wrote to Benét telling him, “I never had anything in the world take hold of me more swiftly, more absolutely. He [Taylor] read all afternoon and when he went home that night he went without the book for I bought it from him and sent him home protesting. And I sat up all night to finish it. And then it was months before I could bear to try to write again. After reading what you’d done nothing I wrote sounded above the ‘Rover Boys’ or perhaps, to be kinder, ‘The Little Colonel.’”19 She memorized most of Benét’s poem and would recite passages from it when she and John took long Sunday-afternoon drives on the backroads around Atlanta.20

  John good naturedly went along with whatever plans she made. She and the others frequently organized potluck suppers where everyone would chip in, supplying whatever was needed. After these suppers, the group would often sit around until the early morning hours having serious conversations or, depending on their mood, playing charades or writing dirty limericks. Acco
rding to Mary Singleton, Peggy was by far the best at pantomimes and imitations, but John was the best at writing limericks. Penciled on bits of paper, some of his limericks are in the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Papers in the Hargrett Library. One reads, “A shapely fan dancer from Wheeling / Performed with remarkable feeling / Not a murmur was heard / Not a sound, not a word / But fly buttons hitting the ceiling!” He also enjoyed writing absurd mixed-up maxims like “Don’t hide your wolf under a bushel of sheep’s clothing.”21

  3

  The group that gathered at the Dump in 1925, 1926, and 1927 was much like the earlier Rabbit Hole crowd. These young intellectual men and women saw themselves as the vanguard of the social revolution later called the Roaring Twenties, an era right after World War I when Americans, weary of reforms and crusades, renounced puritanism and busily engaged themselves in having fun and making money. Automobiles, electricity, radios, “talking” motion pictures, neon lights, Coca-Colas, dances like the Charleston, and orchestras like Duke Ellington’s and Paul Whiteman’s—all popular items on the American scene—gave great pleasure. Although religious fundamentalism took an aggressive form, most Americans resisted Prohibition and any infringements on their personal liberties. This was a period characterized by nonsense, light-heartedness, and a revolt from the Victorian principles of sexual morality. Freed from the constraints of social disapproval, the gang that gathered at the Dump reveled in their new-found freedom to discuss sexual matters. And they discussed everything from Freudian case studies to erotic literature to dirty jokes and limericks. However, it would be wrong to say that Peggy, John, or any of the others had a morbid interest in nudity or sexuality or the kind of pornography available today that depicts explicit injury or violation. In the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, pornography has become vastly different from the erotica of Peggy’s generation, which, by comparison, seems harmlessly mild now. After all, in her day, “pornography” was the label given to the works of such writers as Lawrence, Balzac, Flaubert, Havelock Ellis, Freud, and Aristophanes. All forms of sexual expression were open territory for discussion in 1925 among the Marshes’ flamboyant group—and Peggy, who had been a rebel since childhood, was perhaps the most flamboyant of all.

  The Dump was furnished with some fine Victorian pieces from her father’s house and with some treasured mahogany pieces from her grandparents’ farmhouse, but much of John’s “mission” furniture remained, including a bed from what Peggy called “the early Rutherford B. Hayes era.”22 Peggy hoped eventually to replace this “plain” bed, she said, with “a walnut one that towers up with carved acorns, squirrels, obese cupids and perhaps an angel with a flaming sword on it.”23 Meanwhile, to make the bed more interesting looking, she cut the most titillating picture from an elaborate brochure advertising an expensive set of books on the adventures of Casanova, placed it in a dimestore frame, and hung it above the bed. Surprising her husband when he came home one afternoon, she pointed to the illustration. Later, Peggy wrote to Henry about the Casanova set, explaining that it was a collection she coveted but could not afford, and boasting to him about the picture snipped from the brochure:

  It now hangs on one side of our bed—one of our most obscene and highly prized possessions. The back ground is black—there’s a medieval looking bed, a lady in it so nude as to make the word nude seem pale, and in a position which defies description. Then there is Cassy himself, minus clothing standing beside her with an expression on his face that also defies description. It horrifies all our purer friends but they dont dare mention it. However they cant seem to keep their eyes off of it.24

  For their Christmas present that year, Henry sent John and Peggy that $150 set of The Adventures of Casanova.

  Peggy had a number of close men friends, but none were as close as her brother-in-law Henry, for whom she felt special affection. Henry saw in her what had attracted his brother: the delicate quality of her physical beauty combined with her earthiness of spirit. In addition to exchanging “forbidden” books, such as Havelock Ellis’s seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Shiek Nafzouia’s The Perfumed Garden, and the Casanova set, they wrote each other letters, and whenever she and Henry were together, they talked and laughed like intimates.25

  After she let Harvey Smith, her youngest, most ardent admirer, borrow one of those “censored” books Henry sent her occasionally, she related the following incident:

  Henry, some thing dreadful has happened. My priceless “Perfumed Garden” is in the hands of the Philistines! Like an idiot I lent it to an intelligent young man who is interested in things erotic, as are all young men intelligent or other wise. I shouldn’t have done it, of course. I’ve never let anyone but you get hold of it. This young college lad hid it in an old hat box and as luck would have it his mother did spring cleaning and found it. Poor Lady. I hate to think what she went thru when she read it. And my name in the front and her darling in the habit of spending four afternoons a week at our apt! “What huzzies these young married women are!”

  She still has the book. Harvey is still in disgrace and I still have jitters for fear she’ll burn it—after she’s memorized it!26

  In connection with Peggy’s enthusiasm for erotica, it has been alleged that John lacked libido, that Peggy was disinterested in sexual intercourse, was perhaps even frigid, and that she channeled her sexual energies into an obsession with pornography.27 However, individuals who knew the Marshes well disagree with this assessment. When confronted with the notion that Peggy and John had a sexless, platonic marriage, Joe Kling, among others, laughed and said, “I doubt that!” Mary Marsh Davis, Henry’s daughter, and her husband Jim Davis, who also knew the Marshes well, consider the allegations false and irresponsible. Jim Davis explained:

  Peggy and John appeared to have a normal husband and wife relationship—sexually and every which way, and maybe, better than most. How would anyone possibly know about the most intimate aspects—the sexual life—of anyone else, and at this late date? There was never any question in any of our minds about Peggy’s and John’s enjoying their connubial bliss. But, about the pornography business, I do know for sure. Henry had a small collection of books which he found artistically amusing. They were not especially erotic, certainly not what we now call “porno,” but books such as The Decameron, Jurgen, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, some stories by Balzac, and other such tripe. He would send them to Peggy now and then for her amusement; she was a daredevil and, I suppose, wanted to be “one of the boys.” I think this doesn’t tell us much about either one of them. This was the “flapper” period, remember, and drinking and smoking and reading erotica and wild dancing and driving fast were all a part of the times.28

  4

  As part of her effort to be “one of the boys,” Peggy liked to give the impression that she could “hold her likker.” As Harvey Smith said, “She was so true a product of the prohibition days that she dearly loved the idea of being a great drunk (not a habitual one but a bender type) but didn’t actually like the experience of feeling drunk, drank seldom and little but got quite unheard of reactions to a given amount of alcohol.”29 Even during her debutante days, when she attended lots of gin-drinking parties, she was the one who stayed sober to drive the others home and to nurse their hangovers. She liked to give the impression she was more daring and tough, in every respect, than she actually was.30 Smith explained, “She dearly loved to tell of the great drunks she had been on some years before we knew her. John was usually spared these accounts but would have backed her up if she had said she swallowed the Titanic with nothing but a lemon for a chaser.”31

  Her flair for dramatically calling attention to herself and her need to be provocative and entertaining made her claim to be a big drinker. But there is no evidence to support that she ever had “a drinking problem,” as one biographer has stated.32 In fact, she was very critical of those who had drinking problems. When she and John went out for dinner or to parties, they would have a couple of drinks, but they nev
er kept alcohol in their home until years later, after John had his first major heart attack and his physician prescribed a drink of whiskey in the evening. No one saw them more often over a long period of years than Joe Kling, and he said, “The Marshes were abstemious.”33

  In thinking about the sprees John’s boss, Kelly Starr, indulged in, Peggy wrote Frances in 1926, “Thank the Lord, John doesn’t drink. I dont see how he escaped it as every reporter I have ever known, except one, drank like a fish. That one had a weakness for cocain.”34 It is doubtful that Peggy ever tried cocaine, though John, when he first moved to Atlanta, may have done so. However, she loathed the idea of being denied the freedom to choose whether to drink or not, and she was as strongly opposed to Prohibition as she was to censorship. She went on to tell Frances:

  All this Prohibition stuff makes me sick and I’m organizing my little playmates to admit they are twenty-one so that Atlanta can poll a big drinking vote when the likker question comes up to the people’s vote again. I feel very strongly upon this subject because every one in this office drinks bootleg corn and the smell in a close steam heated office is beyond description. Lets all get together, girls, and bring back the good stuff!

  On this account, she enjoyed writing Henry about the night she “blanked out” from having too much to drink on an empty stomach. When Augusta Dearborn, who lived in Birmingham, came to spend the Christmas holidays with them, they all decided to go out on the town. Because Peggy and John had not been out socially since they married, they were looking forward to this outing with friends. Afterwards Peggy described the night to Henry in a cocky manner:

  Aggie cares naught for likker. John cant and dont drink and I’ve been doing precious little this last year. How ever most of my little playmates are accomplished rum hounds and the parties they gave Aggie were wet. I had not been drinking at all until New Years night when I gave a party at the nigger theatre down in our slum district. Rye was up to 18 a quart and corn to 20 a gallon. I refused to let John pay so much for it—no use spending that much on people who dont care whether they drink rat poison or picric [sic] acid was the way I felt. So John finally got some for 10 a gallon.