Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Firmly believing that a published picture of the two of them would make it easier for the public to identify them when they were out and about, John and Peggy took great care never to be photographed together. Snapped without their knowledge at a Woman of the Year banquet in 1945. this is a rare image of the couple.

  Throughout her life, Peggy loved cats. Taken only weeks before her tragic death, this is believed to be the last picture of her, at the age of 48.

  Peggy Mitchell Marsh was the light of her husband's life. After her death, John spent a great deal of time in the quiet emptiness of the apartment. His sister, Frances, recalled John telling her that he always liked to look at Peggy when she was alive, so why shouldn't he like to look at her — in photographs — once she had gone?

  A devoted couple, Peggy and John treasured their few moments alone together.

  People tell me, as they invariably do—“How bland and unruffled your husband is! Nothing ever bothers him. Now my husband is so nervous!” I look at John with great admiration because he never makes any parade of his disabilities even in the privacy of home. Yet if any one ever had nerves and a good reason for having them, he is that person. Anything that upsets his routine of food, rest, exercise upsets his food apparatus and that reacts on his nerves to the point that he can’t eat. And anything that upsets his nerves, like being mad and having to wait under a strain… shoots his nerves. I don’t mean the surface nerves that people show when they have the fidgets, jitters, but the deep buried nerves, over which no one has any control, those that control digestion, heart action, kidneys, breathing, sleeping. My job has been to keep things at home going so smoothly that it isn’t even obvious that they are going, to make a contrast with the outer world and to make home—and me—a place and a person devoid of “alarms and excursions” and to think of diversions to divert, practical first when he needs it and strength for his weariness when I’m frightened half to death. His job will never be a quiet one, it will always be full of fights, emergencies and surprises, and if we are to continue eating, there’s nothing I can do about it. All my energies go to the home end. . . . I do not know why I should burden and worry you, at long distance. . . . You see, there’s no one else to whom I can talk, for John as well as I have pride and he, wanting to appear as a normal, healthy mortal, does not wish to talk of his troubles or even have them known.47

  Peggy’s remark “if we are to continue eating” brings up an interesting question. At the time the letter was written, John had to continue working to support them. But once she saw what kind of returns she was getting from Gone With the Wind, why did she not urge John to give up his Georgia Power job? By 1937, they had more money than they ever dreamed they would have, and they were investing it wisely and making even more money from royalties. Therefore, John could have resigned in 1937 from the Power Company and spent all of his time taking care of the book’s business, and that is what he should have done for his own well-being. However, something about his inherent makeup, perhaps a certain masculine pride, prohibited him from giving up his job and living off his wife’s earnings. Mary and Jim Davis said John never spent a penny of “Peggy’s money,” and perhaps that is why Peggy legally conferred the foreign rights to him and made him her salaried business manager. Still, John never viewed his work as her business manager as a real job. He refused to acknowledge that the book, with a will of its own, demanded the attention of a full-time employee.

  Inwardly, John was a deeply conservative man whose underlying Puritan work ethic emerged in a forceful manner with Peggy’s signing that contract with Macmillan in August 1935. With unyielding principles about certain things, he clung tenaciously to the notion that no one inappropriately was going to make “a buck” off their book. Gone With the Wind had been written when they were poor, during a period when he had struggled to work two jobs just to pay their bills. It had been written for a specific and a loving purpose. That book was theirs—no one else’s. And to the end of his life, he relentlessly pursued anyone who tried to take any piece of it away from them. Upon hearing about the multiplicity of complex legal problems Gone With the Wind created for the Marshes, many people have wondered why John did not turn the whole matter over to some New York attorneys experienced in copyright law and book publishing. Doing so would have spared the Marshes much anxiety, energy, and time, and may have prolonged John’s life.

  10

  When Brickell wrote in September asking them to go on vacation with him and his wife, Peggy answered that things were “in such a stew,” with John and Stephens staying up late every night working on foreign contracts and business matters, that it was impossible for John to get away from the office for any decent length of time. She wrote, “I will admit here and now that I have no intention of going anywhere where I do not have him as a buffer between me and people who want to drag me out to meet their interesting friends.”48

  Indeed, John’s life had changed drastically, for in addition to his problems at the Power Company, his work on the book was enmeshing him in a tissue of complex legal problems. The first lawsuit involving the Marshes, and the only easy one, was brought about in February 1937 by Sarah Lawrence Davis, an elderly eccentric. She accused Peggy of plagiarizing her book An Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877, published in 1924 in New York. “You could have knocked me over with a fern frond when the old lady made her claim, for I had never heard of her or her book either until her lawyers wrote,” Peggy told a friend.49 When Brett sent her a copy of Miss Davis’s 240-page brief, Peggy spent a bewildering afternoon reading it. “When I finished it,” she wrote him, “I figured out that the lady thinks she has an exclusive patent or copyright on everything dealing with the Civil War and Reconstruction and any one who mentions even General Lee is infringing on her book. She also is under the impression that she is the only person who has ever done any research work—therefore anyone who writes about these periods must have copied from her book.”50

  On February 26, 1937, John got a call from Stephens saying that George Brett wanted to know if Peggy had ever seen a copy of Mrs. Davis’s book. John answered Brett in a short letter that very day. Not only had she never seen the book, but she had not been able to find a copy in the public library or in any Atlanta store, and none of the history buffs she knew had ever heard of the book. Therefore, he added, Peggy could not have quoted from it or used it for reference purposes in any way. Answering Brett’s other question about to whom Macmillan should address correspondence regarding this matter, John told him to write to Stephens:

  From the beginning Mr. Stephens Mitchell and I have attempted to relieve Mrs. Marsh of her many burdens in any way we could. As a result, correspondence relating to business matters has frequently been handled by me and correspondence relating to legal matters has been handled by Mr. Mitchell. However, we are a close-knit family who live within a block of each other and we see each other nearly every day so that one or the other of us may write you at times about matters which ordinarily would be handled by another one of the three of us.

  Davis wanted to settle out of court, but Macmillan and the Marshes refused. Peggy said, “We cried, ‘Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.’”51 Davis sued the Macmillan Company in New York, not Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta, for the grand total of $6.5 billion. Her first charge, that Peggy had dared to bind her book in Confederate gray just as she had done, was patently ridiculous, and it set the tone for all her other charges. She accused Peggy of stealing such items as all the Civil War phrases (like “scalawag” and “carpetbagger”) and all the historical events, places, and names of authentic people.52 “It would seem that these phrases and historic events were the product of her own creation and had never been heard of until she wrote her book in 1924,” Peggy told Brickell.53 Revealing some of the paranoia that she was to experience more and more as time went on, Peggy wrote Lois crustily:

  To tell the truth, I was relieved when the letter announcing her claim arrived. I had been waiting fo
r months for the first racketeer to open fire. It had been a marvel to us all that some chiselers hadn’t opened up on me sooner. We didn’t know what form it would take, extortion, attempted blackmail, suits of every kind. It would take, extortion, attempted blackmail, suits of every kind. It seems the natural thing when a person has got on the front page and made a lot of money. We were glad that the opening gun was a pop gun. It might have been one of those bad affairs where some one alleges that you’ve run over them and permanently injured them—on a day when you weren’t even in your car.54

  It was such an absurd case that John and Stephens found it amusing, but not Peggy. She wanted it to be tried so that the details would be widely publicized and her reputation cleared. “If the case is non-suited,” she wrote Brickell, “no one would ever have known anything about it and several million people would think I bought the old lady off quietly.”55

  On account of this lawsuit, they now had New York attorneys as well as Atlanta attorneys, the former being the eminent firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft, 14 Wall Street—“and I suppose,” John wrote his mother, “that gives us even more prestige than winning the Pulitzer prize.” The suit was declared unsubstantiated and thrown out of court on July 30, 1937. But by that time, the Marshes had initiated two important lawsuits of their own, one of international consequence.

  The first litigation the Marshes filed was in September against Billy Rose, a flamboyant showman who, in Fort Worth, Texas, staged a Frontier Fiesta, a song-and-dance show built around four bestsellers, including Gone With the Wind. Rose’s action was definitely plagiarism because Peggy exclusively owned the dramatization rights. Concerned about what would happen if she permitted Rose’s infringement to go unchallenged, John and Steve feared her dramatic rights would be impaired or even lost for good. The fact that Rose was making huge sums of money without having to pay for the right to use the book would only encourage others to do the same. They decided to use Rose as an example to show others that Margaret Mitchell was not going to allow that kind of thing to happen.

  For experienced legal advice in this area, John turned to Lewis Tit-terton, an old friend in New York. The manager of the script division at the National Broadcasting Company, Titterton advised John to talk to Howard Reinheimer, a New York lawyer whose reputation for handling that kind of litigation was widely known and respected.56 The suit was later settled out of court on March 24, 1938, with Rose sending Peggy a letter of apology and paying her three thousand dollars in damages.

  While the Rose lawsuit was going on, Stephens received word from Marion Saunders, Peggy’s agent handling foreign rights, that a serial publication of a Danish translation of Gone With the Wind had already begun—without a written contract—in Politiken, a major newspaper in Copenhagen. Saunders had notified John and Stephens earlier of the offer she had received from Politiken and they had approved it, but she had gone ahead and closed the deal without drawing up a written contract. Unfortunately, Saunders viewed such contracts as mere technicalities and did not understand that the Marshes wanted written contracts on each and every sale of foreign rights. Later, she explained to Stephens that written contracts were practically unheard of in sales of foreign serial rights and ordinarily such transactions were handled merely by an exchange of cables. In his brusque manner, Stephens yelled, “No! None of that damn kind of business anymore.”

  In writing to George Brett a few months later about her legal problems, Peggy said: “I do not believe anyone except John, Stephens, and I can realize what a hellish time we have had over a period of months, and a great part of this hellishness was due to Marion Saunders. We have had to write interminable letters, argue over long distance and in general wear out our nervous systems, trying to get her to do the things she had promised in her contract with me to do.”57

  Stephens’s demand for contracts was wise, as he soon discovered in his correspondence with George Brett about this issue. Brett explained that it was necessary for Peggy to have a contract with serial publishers stipulating that a copyright notice be printed in English and in the foreign language in which the newspaper was printed. Unless such a copyright notice accompanied serial publication of the book, pirates would read the story in a foreign newspaper and then simply translate it into another foreign language and publish it, pretending not to know that the story was an original American copyright. Therefore, Brett advised Stephens to get in writing all contracts with foreign periodicals and to make certain that adequate copyright notice be printed in all periodicals serializing Gone With the Wind.

  Peggy, John, Stephens, and even Eugene Mitchell were shocked to discover that American authors had to do all of this work on their own to protect their American copyrights. Not knowing anything about the intimidating topic of international copyright laws, Eugene and Stephens looked bewilderedly at John, who blanched and said, “Brothers, we are far out in deep, unchartered waters now.”58 The only thing they knew for certain was that if they allowed Denmark to get away without acknowledging the rights and without paying for them, then there would be absolutely nothing to keep other countries from doing the same thing. After conferring with George Brett, they decided to make no sales of foreign serial rights of Gone With the Wind, with the exception of the Politiken serialization; that sale had already been made before they learned of it, because of the misunderstanding with Marion Saunders.59 The risk of inviting more piracy was too great to be offset by the sums received for such rights.

  And money was not the only issue involved. Far more important, they were shocked to learn, was that the publisher of a pirated edition could change whatever he chose in a book. If a publisher did not like the manner in which American life was presented, he could revise the text to suit himself. Peggy worried that foreigners could change her material in conformity with local prejudice and “thereby present a distorted picture of our country to their readers—with the author of the book made an unwilling party to this deception.”60

  Their determination to protect Peggy’s rights and the integrity of her book soon embroiled John in a multiplicity of complicated problems, for the Danish infringement in the spring of 1937 was just the beginning of their myriad troubles with foreign rights.

  11

  By the first of September 1937, Peggy had signed contracts with Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Hungary for Gone With the Wind to be translated and published by the first of the year. She had also signed a contract with a Danish publisher who would bring out the Danish book edition of the novel after its serial publication in the Politiken. France and Italy were the only two large countries where the contracts were not yet completed by that time, and Marion Saunders was working out contracts with publishers in other countries. Peggy received a letter from the Danish publisher, saying that his edition would be out around September 15 and that the name of the novel was Borte Med Blaesten—“Blown Away with theWind.”

  John wrote his mother about this edition: “We are looking forward to it with interest, to express it mildly, because their book will be illustrated. I can’t wait to see the Danish conception of what North Georgia looks like.” The publisher also explained that his firm was arranging a contest to advertise the book and the grand prize was to be a trip to Georgia to see the Gone With the Wind country. “I am thinking of offering a prize to anybody in the family who can pronounce the name of the Polish publisher. On that subject, my child wife came forth with one of her best remarks of recent months. The contract starts off with—‘Wydawnictwo J. Przeworskiego, Sienkiewicza 2, Warzawa, Poland (hereinafter called the Publishers)’ and Peggy wanted to know why they didn’t go ahead and call themselves “the Publishers’ in the first place.”61

  John kept track of the translators’ names and reported them to his mother, who was keeping a huge scrapbook on the novel. He told his mother that in Germany, the novel titled Vom Winde Verweht (translated literally, “by the wind blown away”) had been chosen as the book of the month selection, just as it had been in England and the Uni
ted States. At some point, John must have asked his family not to keep his letters concerning the novel, because his mother wrote asking him if she could place this letter of his about the foreign editions in her scrapbook.

  By the end of October 1937, the “legitimate” Danish edition of Gone With the Wind with its delightful illustrations, along with its rave reviews, arrived at the Marshes’ apartment. By this time, however, John was distracted by another troublesome case of copyright infringement. In July they had heard rumors about a Dutch publisher pirating Gone With the Wind. The first mention of this edition is in John’s July 25, 1937, letter to his mother: “Our agent handling the foreign rights told us last week that a publisher in Holland has announced a Dutch edition to be published this fall, again without a by-your-leave.”62 A few months later, he and Stephens had entered into negotiations with a legitimate publisher in Holland, but by October they learned that the rumors they had heard were coming true, and that now they also had to deal with a pirate in Holland. This straight-out case of piracy involved John and Stephens in an enormous amount of work, correspondence, expense, and worry. As problems proliferated with the unauthorized Dutch publishers, they realized that they not only needed the help of foreign lawyers, but they also needed the help of the United States government.

  The Marshes and the Mitchells had been shocked to discover, in the Politiken case, that American authors’ works could be pirated from serial publications unless the appropriate copyright notice were placed in the serials, and even that was often ignored by pirates. Now they were horrified to learn that in fact there was no reliable overseas protection of any kind for American literature because the United States had not entered into the treaty known as the international Berne Convention Agreement of 1886.63