Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  Later, she wrote the ship’s captain, S. P. Jenkins: “Even in peace times, I would have felt a natural sense of pride at being a sponsor of so fine a ship. Now, in time of war, that pride is increased a hundredfold, and with it is mingled a sense of faith in the ships and men of our Navy, and the Atlanta especially.”68 She asked him if each ship had a seamen’s fund of some type, for she wanted to contribute something to the Atlanta if such a fund existed.

  The following November, Peggy was deeply saddened to learn that the Atlanta had been sunk off Guadalcanal and all its men lost at sea. Remembering the faces of those young men with whom she had eaten lunch and shaken hands at the launching ceremony, she wrote, “I felt sick at my stomach.”69 After her initial reaction of shock, she demonstrated one of her finest traits: her ability to act in a courageous manner in time of need. Although she had been suffering back pain for months and had just been diagnosed in early November at Johns Hopkins as having a ruptured disc requiring surgery, she refused to have the surgery until after she had carried out her plan. She rallied her Red Cross ladies around her and immediately launched a campaign to raise $35 million in bonds to replace the Atlanta. In spite of her back problem, which was aggravated from helping her father turn in his bed, Peggy worked harder than anyone else at raising that money. With evangelical zeal, she put in long hours every day.

  In late January, John wrote his mother about Peggy’s crusade, saying that she was “headed for a real adventure” in her upcoming trip to Blue Ridge, Georgia, in the heart of the Georgia mountains, to make a speech. “Peggy had turned down many an invitation to make speeches before large and distinguished audiences,” he explained, “but she accepted this one because it came from a man whose son was wounded in the last battle of our Atlanta cruiser.”70 Little Blue Ridge wanted to join in Atlanta’s campaign for a new cruiser and invited her to start its fundraiser. The only way to get to that small, isolated spot was by a rickety little train that took several hours to travel a hundred miles. Riding on such a train would not be good for her back, but she felt it was her duty to go.

  The newspapers started carrying pictures of her again as she worked at these fundraisers. One of the outdoor bond sales took place in February at Five Points on the coldest day that Atlanta had ever seen. “The wind screamed down all five of the streets to explode in a hurricane around our table,” she wrote Ensign S. A. Martin on March 18, 1943. “We had Navy and Marine guards present and their main job was holding bonds and certificates down on the table. Every time a thousand dollar bond was purchased the Navy boys fired a cannon and before the day was over I was so deaf that when I got home I yelled things like ‘Please pass the biscuits’ at the top of my voice.”

  She told the young sailor that it was the only time in her memory that she had seen all types of people united behind one movement. For the most part throughout the two-month campaign, she stayed in a corner of the lobby of the Citizens and Southern Bank on Marietta Street, making out certificates for purchasers of bonds, so she said she had a front-row seat throughout the campaign. “There were newsboys who came in every day to buy ten-cent stamps and men in overalls and girls from behind the counters buying a bond a week. There were stout matrons in mink and heads of enormous businesses who bought a million dollars at a time, and housewives in bungalow aprons with money from their sons in the Army in Africa. I knew we’d get thirty-five million but I never dreamed we’d manage nearly sixty-five million. So now we’ll have two destroyers to run interference for the new cruiser.”

  In only two months, she and the Red Cross Ladies had raised nearly $65 million. Busy doing this significant work, she was truly happy, and there is no question that she was the sole reason so much money was raised in such short time. In her honor, a big victory celebration was held in the Civil Auditorium. The visiting naval dignitaries, who were there to receive Atlanta’s check, included the Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Vice Admiral William Alexander Glassford, Jr., and Rear Admiral George Dominic Murray. “There were so many high ranking Navy people present and so much gold braid that I gave up trying to figure out their rank and just called everybody Admiral, which seemed to please everybody.”71 Mayor Hartsfield read Secretary Knox’s letter announcing that Margaret Mitchell was the sponsor of the new Atlanta.

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  With such rousing success as a fund raiser, Peggy was asked by the Red Cross if she would travel around the United States as one of the Red Cross national speakers and sell war bonds. Although she truly wanted to accept this offer, she had to decline. She had overexerted herself during the campaign, and her back pain had become too severe for such travel. Indeed, she had reached the point where she had to get medical help. In mid-March 1943, John took her back to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, where he had taken her several months earlier upon the advice of their family physician, Dr. Waters. One of the most eminent neurosurgeons in the world, Dr. Walter Dandy, examined Peggy and told her and John that removal of a ruptured invertebral disc was the only solution for Peggy’s back pain. With confidence, Dandy predicted that in two weeks after the surgery she would “get up and do the rhumba.”72

  Highly optimistic and confident herself, Peggy had the surgery on March 26, 1943, for the removal of a concealed invertebral disc. However, Peggy remained in excruciating pain long after the operation and she never fully recovered her strength or her mobility. Yet, several days after the operation, Dr. Dandy reported it successful despite the fact that his patient was unable to walk, dress herself, or take care of her personal needs by the time he had said she would. The physician implied that Peggy’s problems, perhaps, were imaginary or psychogenic.73 Well into the third week after the surgery, she still had not improved. In fact, her condition had grown worse. She could barely move for the constant pain. After remaining at her bedside for over two weeks, John had to return to Atlanta without her to take care of business. He worried about leaving her at the hospital, but there was no way she could have withstood the seven-hundred-mile train ride home. Also, she needed to be near the physician who had done the surgery. In their daily telephone conversations, she often cried, telling John she wanted to go home and that the hospital was a nightmare to her. Although he was reluctant under the circumstances to have her so far away from her physician, he brought her home on April 19. Severely disabled, she was unable to either stand up or sit down except for short periods. Her left foot, leg, hip, and her neck and shoulders were the most painful areas.

  Seeing that John was worrying too much about her, she optimistically assured him that she would fully recover in time and good naturedly started answering her letters from servicemen. To the Marshes’ friend Leodel Coleman, a former editor from Statesboro, Georgia, who was serving as a war correspondent overseas, she wrote: “The doctors pried open my spine and took pressure off a big nerve, and I hope eventually I will be able to wear the silliest and highest heeled slippers of any white girl in Fulton County. Of course during these past years I have gotten so in the habit of running around the house barefoot as a yard dog that John is probably going to have to rope and tie me and back me into shoes blindfolded.”74

  To Clifford and Helen Dowdey, too, she demonstrated that she still had her sense of humor: “I got home the day before yesterday and stood the trip very well. I’ve been able to sit up half the day, strapped up in a brace which improves my figure below the waist but does nothing for me above, as thirty pounds below the waist have been displaced to the north. John says with the addition of a few medals I’d be a dead ringer for General Goering.”75

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  As days passed, it became evident that the surgery had placed her in worse shape than ever. Gravely concerned about Peggy’s future, angry and disappointed with the hospital and the surgeon, John went after Dr. Dandy with all the protective instincts of a pit bull. On May 18, seven weeks after the surgery, he typed a six-page, single-spaced letter to Dr. Frank L. Ostenasek, head of Neurological Surgery at Johns Hopkins, explaining Peggy’s condition i
n detail, asking for advice, and requesting a technical statement about the operation so that he could have Peggy examined by another physician.76

  After several exchanges of long letters between John and Dr. Dandy, the surgeon offered to come to Atlanta to examine Peggy, without charge except for his expenses. Because he perceived that the surgeon still believed Peggy’s problems were “nerves,” John answered, “We would hesitate to take you away from your patients. . . . Especially as we might spend your visit in a wrangle about ‘nerves,’ which would be definitely bad for Mrs. Marsh. I won’t waste time arguing our difference of opinion on the subject of ‘nerves’ but I believe I should correct one wrong impression which you apparently have, as indicated by your statement that she should ‘divert her mind’ by becoming interested in her literary work again.”77

  John explained that Peggy had not been “moping and holding her hands” during her lengthy convalescence; she had been busy with her large correspondence, getting new dresses fitted, and other personal matters.

  One job has been trying to get a satisfactory brace made. The one which your expert fitted (?) her with is now being worn with great comfort and satisfaction by a colored friend who is a foot taller and forty pounds heavier than Mrs. Marsh. She needs no more prodding to be “interested in her literary work” than you do in your surgery, for writing is her trade even as neuro-surgery is yours. When she is able, she will certainly write again, but her disabilities are an effective obstacle to that now. Books are not written while authors recline on sofas and dictate to secretaries. Hack work might be turned out that way but not good books. There is a technique to writing just as you have your operating room technique. It consists of perspiration in quarts and the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of a hard typewriter chair for months and years. As I have tried to make clear in my previous letters, it is the seat of Mrs. Marsh’s pants which is the painful problem.78

  As several more weeks passed, Peggy showed only slight improvement. By now, Dr. Dandy himself was more than a little concerned. He offered to remove the second disc from her spine, saying he was convinced that was the source of her persistent problem. He wanted her to return to Baltimore for an examination. John wrote that Peggy would not go back to Johns Hopkins for any purpose at any time because her memories of that place were most unpleasant ones. He composed a seven-page, single-spaced letter, which read in part:

  The trouble was not the pain she suffered—she expected that—but an apparent agreement at Johns Hopkins that she was a neurotic and therefore anything she said was to be discounted or disbelieved. As you remarked in one of your letters, “We felt in the beginning that several of her complaints were of nervous origin.” Her pains were assumed to be imaginary and she was treated on that basis. Anything she said about being in pain was used against her, to support the diagnosis of neurosis, instead of her symptoms being observed and studied to find out what they might really mean. (I was with her during the greater part of her stay in Baltimore and I myself observed this attitude toward her. . . .) She had come to you for relief from bona fide pain and disability. She approached the operation with confidence and hope because of her belief in you as the greatest man in your line. On the night before the operation she talked a great deal about how much happier her life was going to be when you had freed her from the handicap she had endured for many years. I am sure you gave the operation the best you’ve got but, after the operation, she began having the experiences which have made Johns Hopkins an unhappy memory for her.

  She is an adult and a highly intelligent one but she found herself being treated like a bothersome child. She was at first mystified and then intensely embarrassed by the attitude toward her. . . . She wondered if you all did not consider her crazy or a liar when she was even refused simple relief for discomforts—a hot water bottle or an enema for the bad abdominal colic which plagued her, an ice pack or hot water bottle for her painful neck, a dose of soda for a stomach cramp.

  After several experiences at finding that almost anything she said was misinterpreted, she became hesitant about saying anything when she was in pain and, in fact, began to worry whether she had really turned neurotic. In her efforts to cooperate, she walked when she was told to walk, even though it caused her extreme pain. She was ordered to sit up for several hours at a stretch and she did it—and almost fainted from the pain and the strain. (I have never seen her faint in the nearly twenty-five years I have known her, and I have seen her in situations that knocked out 200-pound men.) When she made further efforts to explain things, she was met with as little comprehension as if she had been talking in a foreign language. She got through the experience somehow.

  John wrote that he was convinced that the trouble arose “from the fact that my wife is not only Mrs. John Marsh but ‘Margaret Mitchell.’”

  Because she once wrote a book that sold four million copies, I believe it was assumed in advance at Hopkins that she must be “temperamental.” She was not judged on the basis of herself but on a preconceived notion that if she was “Margaret Mitchell” she must be nervous, queer, neurotic. Certainly, you must have personal knowledge of this sort of thing. Because you are the top man in your line, don’t you find that strangers have preconceived notions about “The Great Dr. Dandy” which are very different from the real Walter Dandy?79

  His letters explaining Peggy’s pain are as detailed and precise as the most meticulous physician’s medical records are, and he was aware that they were. “If you sometimes wonder why I know such intimate details and can see progress from week to week,” he wrote Dr. Dandy, “it is because since her accident [the automobile accident in 1934] I have been massaging Mrs. Marsh’s back. It gives her some relief when pain and muscular spasms are present.” He went on to say,

  For a full month after she returned from Johns Hopkins I could not rub her at all from the back of her head to her toes—the slightest pressure was too painful. Then, for another month, the only massage I could give was little more than “going through the motions.” During the past month or so I have been able to increase the pressure gradually, though not yet up to full strength. By avoiding the too painful areas and handling others gently, I have been able to give her some relief. This is my best evidence of her gradual but very slow progress from widespread, general pain and soreness involving the entire lower half of her body and her upper back, at the time she left the hospital, to a localized area of pain now, especially in her lower back, left hip, left leg, and left foot.80

  Ten weeks after the surgery, Peggy still could not sit on a hard chair at all and could not undertake any activity where the circumstances did not allow her to leave and lie down immediately if the pain became too great. In closing this long letter to the physician, John wrote,

  The noise or sensation which she describes as “grinding, grating and slipping” in her back is present almost always when she walks. She did not have this sensation before the operation, except when she did sitting-up exercises. Her neck vertebrae remain sore and also her old shoulder injury. As the wide area of soreness gradually diminished from her entire back, I discovered a heretofore silent vertebra which is now almost as painful as the lumbar ones. It is slightly above where the lowest ribs hitch to the spine. She can bend very little . . . and still needs help with her left shoe and stocking.

  In addition to all these problems since the surgery, John pointed out, she also had bloating and digestive problems. Before the surgery, she had had a hearty appetite and no digestive troubles at all. John reminded Dandy that when Peggy came to him for the operation in March 1943 she was in her best physical condition of several years. If she returned for another operation, it would only be after a prolonged siege of severe pain. He felt that with all her capacity for endurance, she would be less able to stand another such siege. As the days passed, she grew a little stronger, or perhaps just more accustomed to the chronic pain. Some days she was much more mobile and comfortable than she was on other days, for no discernible reaso
n.

  All during that spring and summer, she wore a lightweight rubber-and-steel brace under her loose-fitting housedresses. The brace was none too comfortable in the Georgia heat, but she believed that it supported her back. If she had realized how long it would take her get well and be strong again, she said she would not have had the operation, particularly at that time, when her father’s health was failing.81 He was not well enough to be left alone unattended, but he was not sick enough to stop quarreling with his attendants, who were always on the verge of quitting, so she was continually called upon at all hours to soothe an attendant’s ego. On July 27, 1943, she wrote to Dr. Dandy, who kept insisting that she return to him for a second surgery. She told him plainly, “The last four months have been the most painful of my life. . . . I have been so bewildered by the oddness of my experiences at Johns Hopkins and the misunderstandings occurring there that mental shrinking is added to physical disinclination.”