Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  John won the award that year. It was no secret that he also did the work that earned Kelly Starr the Forbes magazine’s national award for the best publicity and advertising work done by a public utility company.11 Another of his achievements around this time involved the new one-man streetcar, in which the operator who ran the vehicle also collected the fares. The public was accustomed to having two-man cars, run by a motorman and a conductor, and John was responsible for making the change acceptable to the public. When labor unions first heard about this new program, they rose up in wrath, and he had the first of one of his many union skirmishes. His skill as a mediator and his ability to appear calm under heated pressure enhanced his position in these frays, but did little for his ulcer.12

  3

  However, the busier he stayed, the more dejected Peggy became. Whenever she would get bogged down or frustrated with her writing and have no John around to talk to, she would turn to reading. The more reading she did, the more depressed she became. In the spring of 1927, after she read James Boyd’s new Civil War novel, Marching On, she was convinced that her “life was ruin.”13 The reason why Boyd’s novel devastated her so totally was that it was the first Civil War novel up to that time that dealt with romance, jealousy, and passion. It did almost exactly what she was trying to do—create a love story as well as a fictionalized account of the war’s history.14 As John had pointed out to her the night they had their long talk about the book she was going to write, she had to stop imitating the works of other writers. She had to develop her own strategies, and as he told her repeatedly, she was fully capable of doing that if she would just believe in herself. Proudly thinking that she had actually come up with a new strategy about a self-centered heroine full of human needs and passion, she felt defeated when she learned that someone else had already written something similar. She thought that her writing would never measure up to Boyd’s—or to anyone else’s, for that matter. She was wasting her time. She later wrote Clifford Dowdey, “My life was ruined for three months about ‘Marching On.’”15

  She actually got to the point where she and John believed she would be better off if she stopped reading entirely. But she could not do that and do her research too, because she secured much information from well-documented novels written about the war. In her letter to Dowdey, she went on to say,

  My husband took me in hand brutally at that point and extracted from me a promise that I would not read any books on the subject except reference books. But in the course of my reference work it became necessary for me to discover on exactly what day of Johnston’s retreat the rain began to fall. I knew where I could find it, although I had not read the book in twenty years. It was in Mary Johnston’s Cease Firing. If I had contented myself with merely reading the item about the rain I would have escaped. But I am a weak vessel and before I knew it I had read the whole book and was down with another bad case of humbles. I could go on indefinitely about people who ruined my life.

  When she finally turned back to her own novel, she swore she would never read another book on the Civil War until she had finished her own. “Then,” she said, “Mr. Stephen Vincent Benet struck me a body blow…. The result was that I wondered how anybody could have the courage to write about the War after Mr. Benet had done it so beautifully. Recovery was slow, and scarcely had I tottered to my desk when Mr. Stark Young arrived, terrible as an army with banners, and annihilated me with So Red the Rose.”16

  The high spirits with which Peggy began 1927 certainly did not last. As her spirits fell, her health began to decline drastically again, and she stopped writing. The letters to John’s family indicate that the spring and summer was a most difficult time in the Marshes’ life because John’s work load was so heavy, and he had to take frequent trips. However, he did not always leave Peggy home alone; he frequently took her with him even though she had to spend her days alone while he worked. In late July, on their return home from a brief business trip in New York, they went to Wilmington, Delaware, for an overnight visit with his family. Although he and Henry did not get enough private time to talk, Henry knew right away that John was troubled, especially after Henry had explained that he wanted to remarry and was hoping that John could increase the amount of money he was sending his mother, and thus leave Henry with more for his new household.

  After their mother retired and moved to Wilmington, John and Henry supported her; and they also supported their youngest sister, Frances, until she married in 1927. (Ben Gordon, who was so much younger, could not help much; he was just out of college and getting started with his new married life in 1927 and needed help himself.) Because he was older, Henry considered himself the head of the family. Too, as a chemist he always had a better-paying job, and because his mother lived with him after his divorce and looked after his little daughter Mary, Henry contributed the most to their mother’s income and had done so all along. Not as fortunate financially as his older brother, John had earned smaller salaries as a newspaperman and just about the time he was getting established at Georgia Power, he had become sick and been unable to work for nearly six months. In fact, he had to borrow money from Georgia Power to live on. Since his illness and marriage, he had reduced the amount that he sent his mother every month.

  That August 1927, he felt so bad at being unable to contribute the increased amount that Henry had requested that he wrote his brother saying: “My failure to contribute to Mother’s expenses has been bothering me for a long time and I would have been doing it all along if I hadn’t had such a fight to make a go of things myself.” He went on to explain that although the government had paid him a disability compensation for the ptomaine poisoning he contracted in the army, his financial situation was still very tight.

  I wouldn’t want to do anything to interfere with your plans. If my small contribution will be too small, so that you will have to delay the wedding, write me and tell me so frankly. I am writing to you with considerably more frankness than usual, and I would like for you to do the same.

  The situation I am up against is this. Before the government came through we were in actual poverty. My very expensive illness was still unpaid for, and Peggy has been continuously under the care of doctors since we were married. We had been forced to reduce our expenditures to actual necessities, but in spite of everything, my debts were steadily increasing. Fortunately, the government came to the rescue and pulled us out of that hole. The compensation check enabled me to pay off all of the back debts, with the exception of the Power Company, which I still owe more than a thousand dollars. We are in considerably better shape than we were a few months ago, but doctor’s bills are still taking a large share of my salary.

  At his wit’s end, John confided to Henry that Peggy was going to one doctor three times a week and had been doing so for months. Two other specialists had been called in for consultation twice and, he said, she had “to make several calls on the eye doctor, the ear doctor, the dentist, and others.” About the only thing wrong with her that anyone had found was that she had two impacted wisdom teeth. “The expense of having them attended to won’t be so very great,” he wrote, “but this newest development is typical of what has been going on for months. As soon as one trouble was fairly well under control, another developed and so on.”17 John felt as if he were in a spiraling descent into debt. Distressed, he told Henry:

  Peggy’s condition is most discouraging. There is something wrong with the kid that the doctors haven’t been able to find. That is my opinion, though I may be wrong. It may be that she is just damned unlucky and each of her various troubles is not connected with the others. . . . Until we can locate the trouble and eradicate it, she will probably keep on being sick more or less, with the possibility always that she may become seriously sick.18

  It was some time during that terrible summer of 1927 that Peggy began complaining about soreness in her breasts; one side, especially, caused her much discomfort, she said, after she “carromed [sic] against the sharp point of the bed one evening.�
��19 She was in so much pain, in fact, that she said she could not type. Although her physician must not have thought that she had breast cancer (he did no breast biopsy), she was convinced that she had cancer or would have it, and she had John nearly convinced too. The possibility of serious surgery loomed before them always; if not the breast, as John wrote Henry, then perhaps an exploratory abdominal operation. “Due to her condition, however, we can’t go into her for an exploratory operation, so that if the operation has to be performed, it may be an emergency operation.” They seemed perpetually on the brink of disaster. “Peggy has been sick so much she has become very sensitive about it, and how she has stood up under all her pain and suffering and the even worse worry and suspense is more than I can understand.” Concluding his letter, John wrote, “I might have written about other more pleasant things if it hadn’t taken so long to recite my tale of woe. Let me hear from you, and I will try to write more entertainingly next time. Both of us are grateful to you for helping to make our visit pleasant. Come to see us some time.”

  A feminist in her day, Maybelle Stephens Mitchell nurtured her only daughter's love of southern history and her desire to write. This portrait was taken when Peggy was three and her brother, Stephens, was eight.

  John Marsh inherited his literary talent from a father he had barely known. Newspaper editor Millard Fillmore Marsh died in 1904, when John, right at age three, and Henry, left, were still children.

  In the fall of 1912, the Mitchells moved into this colonial-style mansion at what is now J401 Peachtree Street. Eugene Mitchell had it built to fulfill his wife's dreams but unfortunately, Maybelle Mitchell died only seven years after moving into the stately home. Because Peggy Mitchell and her brother Stephens wanted only Mitchells to live there, Stephens had it demolished in 1952.

  When John was born in 1895, the Marsh family lived in this house on Forest Avenue in Maysville, Kentucky.

  “She was a lot of fun.” John Marsh said of his wife. In front of the Mitchell home, Peggy clowned around with her good friend, Augusta Dearborn Edwards.

  In her youth, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an athletic type, as revealed in this candid shot.

  Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. University of Georgia. Stephens Mitchell Trusts.

  In his youth, and as a student at the University of Kentucky, John Robert Marsh was a confident and easygoing fellow.

  A portrait of youthful exuberance: Peggy Mitchell bound for home aboard a ship in July 1919, after her year at Smith College.

  Sailing in another direction at about the same time: John Marsh enlisted in the Barrow Unit of the Armed Services at Lexington, Kentucky. In 1918 he served for seven months in England, and later in France.

  (full page) Peggy Mitchell on a camping trip, age twenty. Atlanta History center.

  (inset) Corporal John Marsh, probably on his way to France in 1919, where he was stationed at the French village of Savenay. Photograph courtesy of Gordon Renick Marsh.

  Peggy hams it up with her suitor, Berrien “Red” Upshaw, who happened to be John's roommate.

  This profile was John's favorite picture of Peggy, age twenty-two. Ironically, the picture originally included Red Upshaw, who became her first husband. Peggy also admired this image of herself, and upon her divorce found a way to get Red out of the picture: with a pair of scissors.

  John was in love with Peggy from the moment he met her, but patiently waited in the wings until she realized she loved him, too.

  Peggy Mitchell did not like to be reminded that on September 2, 1922, she married the wrong man: Berrien “Red” Upshaw. The wedding party included the bride's brother, Stephens, far right. Augusta Dearborn, third from left, was maid of honor; her hand is on the arm of John Marsh, who hardly looked his happiest as best man. Peggy's marriage to the bootlegger Red lasted 10 stormy months.

  As her marriage to Red fell apart, Peggy threw herself into her job as a features reporter for The Atlanta Journal. She proved quite able to hold her own with Georgia Tech seniors who towered above her.

  Peggy honed her storytelling skills writing for the Journal's Sunday Magazine in the early 1920s. Staffers include Medora Perkerson, seated, who became a lifelong friend. Peggy is third from right.

  Silent screen idol Rudolph Valentino must have been charmed by the feisty reporter.

  Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. University of Georgia.

  Mary Marsh Davis, daughter of John's brother, Henry, kept many letters the Atlanta couple wrote to members of the Marsh family. She has fond memories of visiting her Uncle John (shown here with young Mary) and Aunt Peggy in the early days of their marriage.

  Peggy adored Henry Marsh, John's older brother, who was also the recipient of many spirited letters.

  Throughout their marriage, both John and Peggy wrote affectionate letters to his mother, Mary, known to her brood as “Mother Marsh,” shown here about 1925.

  Peachtree Street façade as it was restored in 1997.

  Inset: Peachtree Street façade in 1991.

  Originally built in 1899 as a two-story, single-family home with a Peachtree Street address, twenty years later the house was moved back forty feet, elevated to add a ground floor, divided into ten apartments, and given a Crescent Avenue address. The newlywed Marshes moved into apartment No. 1 (bottom floor, left) in 1925 where Peggy penned most of her epic novel.

  In 1989 the Margaret Mitchell House was awarded historical landmark status and restoration was begun. After the house was struck by fire in 1994 and 1996, the restoration was finally completed in 1997.

  Crescent Avenue façade as it was restored in 1997.

  Inset: Crescent Avenue façade in 1991.

  Peggy called it “The Dump” because it was dark and dank. She worked on Gone With the Wind at this window alcove, which provided the only good light in the apartment.

  Photograph courtesy of Boyd Lewis / Atlanta Htetory Center.

  As fall approached, things got a little better, perhaps because John was more sympathetic and did more to comfort her. He prodded her to write because he knew that writing—and especially doing research for her writing—was a wonderful diversion for her, particularly when it went along well. So now, when Peggy accompanied John on trips to north Georgia, where his company was building hydroelectric plants to furnish the impatient demand for more electricity, they took the typewriter and a part of the manuscript along, and she worked on the manuscript during the day in the hotel room while he went about his business. At night, they talked about it. Because of the Marshes’ custom of “carrying” parts of the manuscript and the typewriter around with them, people who worked with John and went on those business trips with them knew that Peggy was “engaged on a piece of writing,” but they did not know what it was and thought it might be a cookbook or an account of an historical incident about Atlanta. Then one day John admitted to coworkers that Peggy was working on a bit of fiction, and that was how the word first got out at Georgia Power that she was writing a novel.20

  4

  All during the winter and spring of 1928, the novel progressed rapidly. Peggy sank deeply into her private world, writing quickly and without any idea that she was in the wake of a masterpiece. According to her brother, when she worked, she worked furiously from early in the morning until John came home in the evening; then he would read what she had written.21 But there were spells when she never touched the typewriter.22 On those days, she would take the used car that John had purchased for her from an employee at Georgia Power in February 1928, and drive the backroads to small towns, where she unearthed treasures that she incorporated into her writing. In a letter to Frances in 1928, she said: “There seems to be such a wealth of characters quaint, curious, and interesting in smaller places that are not to be found in larger towns with out digging.”23 She loved doing this kind of research.24 From her earliest days, she had been a rapt listener to stories, and the best storytellers, she knew, were the old people in small country places like Jonesboro and Fayetteville,
where she has her Scarlett attend the Female Academy just as her Grandmother Stephens had done as a teenager. Peggy was always nostalgic for a way of life that had passed. “I have always loved old people,” she wrote in a letter to a friend, “and from childhood listened eagerly to their stories—tucking away in my mind details of rickrack braid, shoes made of carpet, and bonnets trimmed with roosters’ tails.”25

  5

  The Marshes spent most of the summer of 1928 entertaining outof-town visitors. In May, John heard from Kitty Mitchell again. She and her young son stopped for a three-day visit with John on her way to her parents’ home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It turned out that she had to stay for nearly a month after her son became ill and had to be hospitalized. Although the thought of seeing his college sweetheart after ten years did not appear to rekindle any romantic notions in John, the news jarred Peggy. Having led an inactive life for two years, she had gained a little weight, wore what she called ugly “Minnie Mouse” shoes, the orthopedic kind that supported her weak ankle, and dressed as plain as a Quaker. She was feeling a lot less like her previous “Vamp de Luxe” self. Kitty had been living in Latin America since her marriage to a wealthy businessman with whom she traveled around the world; she was coming from a far more prosperous and sophisticated environment than Peggy had ever known. This was during that period when the Marshes had no money for new clothes, so on the night they met their guest for dinner at her downtown hotel, Peggy wore a blue dress that John’s sister Frances had sent her.26

  The moment she saw Kitty—meticulously groomed, expensively dressed and jeweled—Peggy felt more than a little dowdy. A day or so later, she wrote Frances about this “legend’s visit”: