Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  As ill luck would have it, I felt very low that night. Wasnt used to staying up so late and all the parties and funny food had worn me out so I decided to brace with one drink before going to the show. The gang welcomed me back to the fold with cheers and I had had three before we started. Alas. I had been pure for so long—and the stuff was this here mean stock yard likker and before we even reached the theater, I had started leading the gang in my exceptionally tuneless contralto in “The Bastard King of England” which some how seemed the very thing to sing. John evidently thought so too for he abetted me.

  She did not remember much about the show “except that it was punk” and that at intervals in the Charleston she stood up and shouted “‘Gal, shake that thing!’ which was the only thing John made objections to.” Apparently, she got too loud, and John asked her to sit down and be quiet for awhile. Once seated, she blanked out. The next thing she knew it was morning. John and Augusta were pouring black coffee into her and horrifying her with their description of her behavior the previous night at a new hotel “whose interior,” she said, “I have no memory of ever seeing.” Here’s her account:

  I found a blue paper cap, danced the Charleston (and I havent been able to dance in a year on account of my bum ankle) sang “Two Little Girls in Blue” with truly telling affect and showed my new garters amid plaudits of the audience. Well, John didnt know I was out as he knew in ye olden days that I always carried alcohol like a lady and he thought I knew what I was doing. Well, I didnt and I suppose I’ll never get through hearing about other things I did. I hate to think that I ever drew a blank—it seems that I was an animated and perambulating vaudeville and that the gang enjoyed me to a marked degree. I’m off for another year. The smell makes me ill. It certainly doesnt pay to drink if you are out of training.35

  5

  Those first few months of her marriage, Peggy continued to work hard on her assignments, which mainly dealt with superficial topics. Describing her writing as “rotten,” she was never satisfied with her work. Then, in the late fall, she received a special assignment that delighted her.

  Throughout the late summer and fall of 1925, a group of Georgians made plans to have five Civil War generals from each southern state represented in the memorial to be carved by Gutzon Borglum on Stone Mountain. Although the ambitious plan failed, Angus Perkerson decided to let Peggy, because of her interest in the Civil War period, write two articles on two of Georgia’s generals. As it turned out, her first article, which appeared on December 6, 1925, was so successful that the editor and the readers wanted more. She ended up writing four articles about five generals: John B. Gordon, Pierce M. Butler Young, Thomas R. R. Cobb, Henry Lewis Benning, and Ambrose Ransom Wright.36 These articles are her best and, by far, they were the most satisfying for her to research and write. This project prepared her for what she wanted to write about later, although neither she nor John knew that at the time.

  She was pleased with herself as the holidays approached. And in spite of their poverty, Peggy described her and John’s first Christmas together in 1925 as the “loveliest Christmas of my whole life.”37 Still basking in the praise she had received for her articles on the Georgia generals, she got back to work on her own book. The only blot on her entire holiday period occurred when her father fell down the cellar stairs in his home and had to be hospitalized. Then, later, in helping him turn in his bed, she sprained a muscle and for several weeks complained about her “bum shoulder” and her inability to write.38

  Healthier and happier than he had ever been, John wrote his mother that he was “inordinately proud of himself” because he had finally gained weight. “He weighs 153 now,” wrote Peggy. “A month ago, he began to slyly loosen his belt, when ever he sat down. Then he began unbuttoning the top button. Now he is in anguish if the second one isnt open when he sits down. I’ve drawn the line at the second button for I cant have him arrested and so we’ve compromised by his promising to buy a new suit. He said if I’d been a good wife I could have put a godet or a gore in the back of his trousers!”39

  John asked that his mother and the others not send Christmas presents because he could not handle the additional expense of buying them presents. So rather than send presents, the Marshes sent Peggy and John a barrel of delicacies, which they received a few days before Christmas. “When your barrel arrived,” she wrote the family, “my first horrified thought was that you had run amuck and broken all prohibition laws and sent us a gallon of shine or home made wine. The truckman who unloaded it gave me a comradely nudge and said, ‘Here’s your Christmas likker, lady.’ He evidently expected to be asked in by the way he hung around.”40 As John pried open the barrel, Peggy’s friends Peggy Porter and Annie Couper watched. Peggy went on to say that “the two of them have a sweet tooth the size of the Woolworth building” and to describe how they squealed with delight when they saw that the barrel was filled with homemade breads, cakes, jams, jellies, preserves, summer sausage, cheese, and nuts. Seeing this bounty prompted John and Peggy to make their first and sudden plunge into social life since their marriage. They had open house on New Year’s Day, inviting fifteen guests; forty came. “Every thing was so jammed,” Peggy wrote in this same letter, “that it reminded me of that verse of Horatius about ‘Those behind cried “Forward!” And those in front, cried “Back!”’”

  Since the apartment was so small they used every bit of space. They served tea, coffee, cakes, nuts, and four kinds of sandwiches that Peggy herself made early that morning. They decorated with white candles, red velvet ribbons, magnolia leaves, and branches of pine, holly, and mistletoe that they gathered from the countryside. All of their wedding presents, she told Mother Marsh, were displayed, except Henry’s books (this was the year Henry sent them the Casanova set). “Henry’s books I locked up, as I did my other valuable books for I never trust literary people alone with our collection. They have no souls where it comes to lifting books and I’ve lost too many at parties.”41 On the coffee table in the front room, she placed the hammered silver tray that John’s oldest sister Katharine had sent them, and the silver tea spoons that came from his Uncle Bob. She put the lovely lace scarf that Mother Marsh had given them on their bedroom dresser, which she said “must needs be a buffet in times of stress.” The dainty boudoir pillow that Gordon and Francesca had sent was placed on their blue silk and lace bedspread. Above the handmade guest towels with the filet inlets that Katharine had made for them, Peggy said she tacked “a warning” saying “just for ornament.” In the candle glow, the place looked lovely.

  A few days later, in thanking Henry for his gift, Peggy explained that she and John liked to give each other books for Christmas and that they had “made it a practise of giving each other low, vile or suppressed books on holidays and on other sech occasions,” but that year she and John could not give each other anything if they wanted to entertain their friends during the holiday and pay the rent too. Therefore, Henry’s gift was especially appreciated.42

  6

  Starting in January 1926, John received a raise, making his salary as assistant to Kelly Starr one hundred dollars a week, good money in those days.43 “We are still in debt over our heads,” he wrote his mother, “and this won’t do any more than take the chill off the water, but that’s something, and maybe we will really get paid up on our doctor’s bills some day. It doesn’t seem hardly possible, but it may actually happen in the course of time.”44

  Running the public relations department in an unofficial capacity because of Kelly Starr’s disruptive problems and absenteeism, John was earning recognition and respect. With pride, Peggy sent Henry and Mrs. Marsh samples of his work, saying they were “departures from the Power Co styles of advertising. . . . They seem to have gotten results. More over they’ve been picked up by the Ry [railway] and Electric magazines and given favorable comment—and John’s received nice letters from other companies about them. I’m real proud of him and of them.”45

  In the short time he had been managin
g the publicity, John had successfully managed to improve the public’s attitude toward the company. With his friends in the press, he was able to get newspapers to adopt an attitude of friendliness in handling news about the company. For example, the Georgian, his first employer in Atlanta, had in previous years been the Georgia Power Company’s bitterest foe. But after John took charge of publicity in 1926, the Georgian presented Mr. Atkinson, the president of the company, the silver cup given annually by that paper to Atlanta’s first citizen.46 “I have never had a job which was more interesting and it becomes more interesting every day,” John told his mother. “I am becoming as solicitous about this big, sprawling, awkward Company and its standing in the community as if it were my own child, and the other day when our big boss was selected for the annual award as Atlanta’s most valuable citizen in 1926 I was as happy about it as if the award had been given to me.”47

  While John’s professional life was productive, interesting, and satisfying, Peggy’s was not. Even though she realized the Journal was giving her a liberal education that she could never get any place else and was forcing her to learn some things about writing, she was bored churning out weekly articles on banal topics. She was too intelligent to enjoy writing about such questions as “Could a girl be virtuous and bob her hair?” “Could a woman have a home and husband and children and a job, too?” “Should a woman roll her stockings, park her corsets, be allowed a latch key?” “What made girls pretty?” “Do working girls make the best wives?”48 Occasionally, she would have an exciting assignment, like the articles on the Civil War generals and her interview with Harry K. Thaw, who in 1906 at Madison Square Garden shot and killed the well-known architect Stanford White for having an affair with his wife. And nothing, she thought, was more fun than her visit on a “wild and rainy day” with Mrs. W. E. Baker, the last surviving bridesmaid of Mittie Bulloch, mother of Theodore Roosevelt.49 But then there were a few other assignments that frightened her, although she told no one but John. Neither he nor she liked the idea of her being sent, along with a group of geologists, into Salt Peter Cave near Kingston.50

  Now that John was making more money, she began to chafe at the restraints of her job. She began to complain to his family, and no doubt to everyone else who would listen, that writing for the Magazine, meeting “one god-damn deadline after another,” was putting too much pressure on her.51 Nervous strain, she kept telling them all, was never anything she handled well. In what appears to have been her only piece published outside the Magazine, she hinted at her weariness with her job. Her article “Matrimonial Bonds” appeared in the March 1926 issue of the Open Door, an Atlanta publication put out by the downtown Hart Building. She wrote about a young couple, Nancy and Bill. Like herself, her fictional character Nancy is a smart young working woman who will make a good wife.

  Nancy has been through it all—been through the long hours of office work when employers were grouchy and she was tired, been through the long strap hangings on smelly homebound cars. She’s learned how much a dollar means. A dollar is not just a shining silver disk or a crackling bit of paper. It’s so many hours wait when you want to be out swimming, so many hours of making tired fingers fly. And she won’t be quite so eager to say airily, “Charge it!” After she is married, she’ll think three times about buying chiffon stockings by the dozen. For if she loves Bill she can’t help thinking how much of his sweat went into those dollars.

  After her experiences with Red and with that brief period when the bottom fell out of her father’s business, Peggy feared financial insecurity. She equated money with freedom and by now had learned to manage money wisely. No matter how much she and John made, she never felt financially secure. Despite his salary increase in 1926, John still could not whittle their medical debts down to a comfortable figure, and her concern for money kept her at her job for a while longer. In fact, by this time, she began to see herself as a veteran journalist capable of tutoring others as John had once tutored her.

  In one of her letters to Frances in early 1926, Peggy marveled at the incompetence of the newly hired female writers, whom she described as “Little Elsie Dinsmores.” According to Peggy, every time the son or daughter of one of the Journal’s advertisers or political allies appeared in the city room looking for work on the newspaper, the city editor sent them upstairs to the magazine department. She complained that all of her spare time at work was taken up

  trying to whip cubs into shape; rewriting their hashed up stuff, gently, oh, so gently explaining the elements of grammar and rhetoric and harshly, oh, so harshly cursing when they turn in “I” stories.

  And just when I’ve taught one the rudiments of proof reading (oh, yes, we have to read 39 pages of proof) and explained about pasting up copy and how it cost five dollars every time they cut the copyright line off Milt Gross or Will Rogers, they commit some dreadful sin against journalism and get the gate. Then another, equally dumb, equally excited about the romance of being a girl reporter, equally certain she’s going to scoop the world, and equally ignorant of how leads should be written, is thrust upon us.

  And so my days are taken up with teaching and with trying to find a moment to write my own stories and my nights with trying to get out the line of chatter that pays enough to cover the rent. Then, ever and anon, I get a chance to earn a dishonest penny by writing articles for poor woiking girls magazines at ten bucks a throw, which buys supper on Sunday nights, at horsey hostelries which we could not other wise afford. But, after all this is done there aint much time for nothing else.

  She supposed that this kind of work was good training, but it was “certainly wearing.” In this five-page typed letter, she complained to Frances that she never had any time or energy to write anything for herself or hardly to see John. “If it wasnt for Saturday afternoons off I wouldnt even know I was married.”

  7

  In January 1926, in another long letter, Peggy related to Frances an incident that she described “as one of the most interesting things I’ve run across in a long time.” One of the Journal’s newest cubs, whom she designated as “one of those pretty short haired children just out of Journalism class,” was sent out to get a story about a woman who had left her money to have her ashes scattered over the deep blue sea “instead of being buried or parked on someone’s mantel.” To Peggy’s dismay, the cub ambled back somewhat aghast by the fact that the lady who now owned the ashes, “a sturdy Methodist, had told her that the ashes were those of a woman who had lived high, kept an assignation house in the days when Atlanta was ‘open,’ drunk her fill of champagne, lent and borrowed money from Atlanta’s most prominent and finally cashed her checks at the ripe age of sixty.” Apparently, the Methodist lady had taken her in when she was sick, not knowing who she was, and did not learn her identity until after “the rowdy soul’s departure, when a diary had been unearthed.” Peggy wrote:

  Of course, the cub hadn’t gotten the diary. I shrieked at the lost opportunity. Ever since reading “Madeline” which I believe to be one of the most moral and helpful books ever suppressed, I’ve wanted to locate a real one. And right here is one, covereing [sic] the years between her coming to Atlanta from Australia, how she got her house started, who came, how she barred much drinking and kept it respectable—in other words, one of those honest to God “human documents.” If I had been on the story I’d have been carried out dead before I’d have left without it. But the cub murmured that the Methodist lady was intending to burn it. Oh, the mental processes of the godly!52

  As she thought about trying to persuade the Methodist lady that publishing the diary, “minus names,” would keep the “faltering footsteps of many a pure girl from etc. etc.,” she continued:

  And I really mean it. I’m not moral, myself, thank the Lord, but I do think a few more books published about the sordidness and lack of romance in prostitution would do a lot for the counter jumpers who fancy it an improvement on their honest professions. So I’m working the Methodist thru the moral end of it and
she’s conferring with her husband. Even if they didn’t give me the right to publish it, I’d like to read it over the week end. I imagine it involves nearly every well known person in Atlanta. John and I could enjoy a quiet Sunday at home with Blanche Betterouse’s diary!53

  Later, Peggy wrote of Scarlett, “Like most innocent and well-bred young women, she had a devouring curiosity about prostitutes.”54 Peggy seems to have had a similar curiosity, and it must have been around this time that John told her about Belle Brezing, the famous madam of Lexington, Kentucky, whose resemblance to Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind is too extraordinary to be coincidental.

  In this same letter, which is dated “Saturday, Jan the some thing, [1926],” Peggy explained that John was trying to get compensation from the government for the ptomaine poisoning he and three other soldiers had gotten from eating contaminated army food while they were in Beaune, France, during the war. She wrote, “It would be great if the benificent Govt would put out a little on the Mitchells and the Marshes.” She also talked to Frances about the problems John was having at work. “The office he works in is such a mess. The boss is a good egg but goes on periodical sprees (the period being every four days) and insists on taking the other boys with him—then it takes them two days to get over it and two days to be remorseful. And during that time they dont do any work and John does most of his [Starr’s] jobs and his, too.” Given his arduous working conditions, John was often tired, as Peggy points out: “John can use more sleep than any white boy I ever saw. . . . As I try to turn him in by eleven every night, we don’t go many places and all that Sunday means is a chance to sleep till three o’clock in the afternoon and eat breakfast at four.”55