Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  On March 22, 1949, John wrote his mother: “Peggy continues not very well but I am glad to say that she is somewhat better.” In his opinion, her trouble was due to allergies and stemmed from her experience in Augusta a year previously. He pointed out that at that time, a vitamin that she had been given as a medicine brought on “a gigantic and colossal” allergic reaction. He thought that this experience had made Peggy more susceptible to allergic reactions for some time afterward. “At any rate,” he wrote, “she is showing improvement. . . . She has had a lot of pains and aches and other troubles in recent years, and I hope we can get her where she can get a little more pleasure out of life.”75

  John understood how hard it was for Peggy to keep her emotions on an even keel. He knew that she was experiencing a letdown now that the Gone With the Wind business had shifted down. Too, his illness had placed such a terrific strain on her. Thinking that she needed a change of scene, he suggested that they visit his mother in Delaware. In June 1949, they went to Wilmington and then to New York. Once in the big city, she went unnoticed. There was no fanfare, no press corp hungry for an interview, no admiring fans clamoring for autographs, no Macmillan reception. When they returned to Atlanta, she sank deeper into her depression. John suggested that she make plans for them to go to Sea Island, but she never got around to doing it.76

  She became increasingly nervous, and the least little thing would send her into a fury. Instead of being pleased that the Dutch case was finally over and that she received her royalties and rights, she blasted the New York law firm of Cadwaller, Wickersham, and Taft for cheating her in the final settlement by giving too much money to Fruin. After all, she said, Stephens and John had done most of the work. After she returned from New York, she blasted Granville Hicks for mentioning in a speech that Macmillan had bought Gone With the Wind after reading only one chapter. His speech was reported in the newspapers and the newsclipping service sent her a copy. She fired off a letter to Hicks condemning him for misleading young writers by making them think that writing “is a very easy type of work . . . it is the hardest work in the world and one serves a longer apprenticeship than at any other in the world.” She fibbed, “I have so many writers and wouldbe writers on my neck, and practically none of them want to do any work because they believe erroneous statements that I wrote a bestseller with no previous experience and sold it on the strength of one chapter.”77

  On the heels of that little episode came another from the Reader’s Digest, which carried a harmless little joke about Ashley Wilkes being killed at Gettysburg fourteen months before baby Beau was born. It was a takeoff on the old rumor about Rhett and Melanie having an affair. When Peggy saw it, she became enraged and acted as if some member of her family had been maligned and another called a bastard. Neither John, Stephens, nor Margaret Baugh could make her understand how ridiculous it was for her to get steamed up over such an absurd joke. As if she had lost her mental stability, she pursued the magazine’s editors, who were bewildered by her complaint. She even wrote to Harold Latham, offering him her generic excuse—that she was “ill from fatigue, over work and indignation” and that she wanted “reparation” from Reader’s Digest.78 Using a chillingly prophetic simile, she fumed to Latham:

  What they did to me was so inexcusable and reprehensible that I do not intend to take it lying down. They appeared to have no comprehension of any damage they had done me, nor did they appear to care. In fact they have acted like a hit-and-run driver that had damaged an innocent pedestrian, and have been trying to get away from the scene as fast as possible.79

  13

  That summer of 1949 was one of the hottest in years, and the Marshes’ apartment had no air conditioning. Peggy always withstood the hot weather better than John. She once told Herschel Brickell that the hotter the weather, the better she liked it. “I must be like Georgia cotton—need red dirt and hot, dry weather.”80 But that sultry evening of August 11, she complained about the heaviness of the air, for the humidity was as high as the temperature, far up into the nineties. They decided to cool off by going to the nearby Peachtree Arts Theatre to see A Canterbury Tale. This theater, torn down years ago, was located at the northeast corner of Thirteenth and Peachtree streets, not far from their first apartment on Crescent Avenue nor from her father’s lovely home where she had grown up.

  Peggy drove them the ten blocks or so and parked their car across the street from the theater. As was her custom since John’s heart attack, she got out and walked around the front of the car to help him out. It was exactly 8:20 P.M. as they started across Peachtree Street. Walking a little in front of him, holding John’s arm tightly, she looked both ways and said the last words she was ever to say to him. “It looks all right now.” When they reached the center of the street, both saw a car come careening down Peachtree at a high speed and veer toward them. After a moment’s hesitation, John ran forward, thinking that Peggy was starting to run forward too. But then suddenly for some reason she turned and ran back in the direction from which they had come and directly in front of the speeding automobile. She was knocked to the pavement and dragged fifteen feet.

  John ran over to her and knelt down. When he looked at her face, he saw she was unconscious. “My poor, poor Baby,” he groaned as he gently gathered her up in his arms. As he lightly brushed her hair back from her face, he stared at an ominous, narrow, steady stream of blood flowing from her right ear. Pressing his cheek next to hers, he whispered, “Hold on, Baby, hold on. I’m going to get you some help.” He asked a bystander who had stepped up close to him to call an ambulance and to get the license number of the car. As a crowd huddled around staring at them, he drew Peggy’s lifeless body even closer to him to shield her from the gawking onlookers, who had no idea who this man and injured woman were. It took the ambulance twelve minutes to arrive. John rode with Peggy, holding her hand all the way to the hospital.81

  Remarkably able to remain calm and to think clearly in a crisis, he asked the ambulance driver to take them to Grady Memorial Hospital rather than to Piedmont Hospital, where they ordinarily would have gone. John knew that Grady, a big charity hospital in the center of the city, was better prepared to deal with emergencies and accident victims.82

  The young intern in the ambulance that night happened to be the son of one of the Marshes’ friends. He was Dr. Edwin Paine Lochridge, the son of Lethea Turman, one of Peggy’s Washington Seminary classmates.83 The young physician knew when he saw her that she was badly injured. She was brought into Grady Hospital shortly before 9:00 P.M. and placed in Room 302 under an oxygen tent and given blood transfusions. Dr. George Bowman, an Atlanta brain specialist, was summoned to her bedside. Doctors W. C. Waters, Charles Dowman, and Exum Walker remained in constant attendance throughout the night. The next day the three of them took their meals in her room to keep her under constant observation. A half-dozen other physicians visited and consulted with each other. They determined that she had suffered a basal skull fracture, as well as injury to her internal organs and her left leg. One bad symptom was her high temperature.

  Stephens, Carrie Lou, Medora, and Angus were the first to come to Grady Hospital that Thursday night. Then Julius of the Piedmont Driving Club, who brought the Marshes their dinners on Sunday and Thursday nights, came in tears and brought Bessie with him. As the word got out, more and more people came to the hospital. Some of the Mitchell family members, trying to offer John encouragement, recalled how Grandpa Russell Crawford Mitchell was run over by Atlanta’s first streetcar. Although he lost consciousness, he fully recovered.

  At 1:00 A.M. on Friday, Dr. Waters insisted that John leave and spend the rest of the night in the physician’s own home rather than in the Marshes’ apartment. Before leaving the hospital, John went back into Peggy’s room to see her one more time. She did not recognize him or say anything. Looking old, crumpled, and filled with despair, he sat in the chair staring at her. No one knew better than he what a spunky little fighter his wife was, but he feared this was one ba
ttle she would not win.

  When the newsboys got out on the street corners screaming “Extra! Extra! Margaret Mitchell in coma! Struck down by drunk taxi cab driver!” and the radio reports went out that the author of Gone With the Wind was lying with a high fever and in a deep coma from devastating blows to her head, the whole world gasped and listened. Years later many people recalled exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

  So many calls and telegrams poured into Grady that a special room had to be arranged to receive messages and flowers. Special lines had to be installed to take care of the calls that jammed the hospital switchboard. Medora Perkerson, Augusta Edwards, and Rhoda Kling organized volunteers into four-hour shifts so that the messages that came from all over the world could be answered. President Harry S. Truman wired his concern and good wishes. Eugene Talmadge, the governor of Georgia, state and church dignitaries, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh—people from all walks of life called expressing their concern. Some people waited in front of the hospital. A news reporter clamored to talk to John and asked him Peggy’s age. Knowing how sensitive she was to that question, he shaved off a few years in hopes that if she survived she would laughingly commend him for “fooling the nosey son-of-bitch.”84

  The messages and the names of the callers were all written down in the hope that if Peggy lived she would know the kind of support she had received. One of the most touching messages came from the Atlanta federal prison, where inmates volunteered to donate their blood to help her.

  On August 13, Peggy showed the faintest sign of improvement, or what some thought of as improvement, when she was given a drink of water. She murmured in a delirious manner, “hurt all over,” and asked that the tube be removed from her arm. Sister Mary Cornile, sister superior and director of St. Joseph’s Infirmary, brought the few remaining drops of water she had saved from Lourdes, the miracle-working spring where Bernadette, the young French girl, claimed the Virgin Mary appeared to her.

  On the morning of August 16, Peggy showed no sign of improvement, and the physicians were prepared, as a last resort, to do brain surgery on her early that afternoon. Around eleven o’clock, Carrie Lou, Stephens’s wife, told John that she would sit with Peggy while he went home to eat lunch and rest awhile. In his memoir, Stephens recorded that as noon approached on that dread day, he walked from his law office, where he had taken care of some business for John, down Edgewood Avenue and on to Grady Hospital. When he went into the press room, he instantly knew some- thing was wrong. Someone asked him Peggy’s full name. As Stephens answered, Frank Daniel, the Marshes’ old friend from the Journal, stood up, reached for Stephens’s hand, and said, “Steve, I’m terribly sorry, but she’s gone.” When Stephens turned away to hurry upstairs to find Dr. Waters, he heard Frank speaking into the telephone to William Key in the newsroom at the Journal. “Margaret Mitchell is dead. Time of death, 11:59 A.M. Margaret Mitchell is dead. Repeating time of death, 11:59 A.M.”85

  Just a few weeks earlier, she and John, on one of their daily afternoon drives, had visited Daniel and Key and others in the Journal’s new building. The city editor had teased her about coming back to work for him. In writing about that moment when they all heard the news, Key wrote: “Margaret Mitchell’s death was a news event of worldwide importance, but the Journal’s people did not react to it as Hollywood might conventionally have pictured it—with confusion, excitement, shouting, and running about. There was, for at least a minute, only this dull and empty and meaningful silence.”86

  Many people knew about her death before John did. He was home dictating a letter to his family to Margaret Baugh. Bessie was preparing his and Baugh’s lunch when the telephone rang. She answered the phone in the kitchen. It was Dr. Waters telling her that Peggy had just died moments earlier, that he and Stephens were on their way over to tell John, and that he wanted her to make certain all the radios were turned off and that no calls were given to John. He did not want him to hear the news from anyone were given to John. He did not want him to hear the news from anyone except him and Stephens. Bravely, Bessie held back the tears and went about serving lunch as if nothing had happened. She recalled later how hard it was to look at John. “I was trying to get a good meal down Mr. Marsh before he saw Dr. Waters and Mr. Stephens. When they came and broke the news to him, I didn’t hear so much as a whimper once.”87

  Flags were flown at half-mast in Georgia as messages of sympathy came from all over the world. President Truman wired: “The nation to which she brought international fame through a creative work of lasting merit shares the sorrow which has come to you with such sudden and tragic force. Great as an artist who gave the world an eternal book, the author of Gone With the Wind will also be remembered as a great soul who exemplified in her all too brief span of years the highest ideals of American womanhood.”

  John granted the physician’s request for an autopsy, which revealed that only Peggy’s indomitable spirit had kept her alive after the accident. Concerned about how to handle politely the crowd wanting to attend the funeral, he and Stephens began making arrangements for a private service at Spring Hill Chapel on August 18. They decided the best thing to do would be to issue admittance tickets to family and friends and explain to others that they could not possibly include all those Peggy would have wanted. John had three hundred engraved invitations printed in a last-minute rush and hand delivered by friends. Joe Kling recalled that scorching hot afternoon that he and a few others spent running all over the city delivering those invitations.

  Neither Peggy nor John cared for any organized religion, but for years they had admired Dean Raimundo de Ovies, the rector emeritus of St. Phillips Protestant Episcopal Cathedral. John asked Stephens to get Dean de Ovies to conduct the service, saying he wanted no eulogy and no digression from the simple rites of the “Service for the Dead” from The Book of Common Prayer. For the music, John selected Bach’s “Come Sweet Death,” Schumann’s “At Evening,” Handel’s “Largo,” and “Crossing the Bar.”

  Instead of flowers, he asked that contributions be sent to Grady Hospital, where someone had already started collecting for a Margaret Mitchell Memorial Pavilion there. But flowers came in abundance. The only ones that he personally accepted were a massive blanket of white roses sent by the prisoners, who had grown the roses in their garden at the Atlanta federal prison, and another blanket of red roses and white carnations, a gift from the organized florists in the city. These blankets covered the casket. The florists also sent the two white orchids that were pinned to Peggy’s short-sleeved, blue silk dress. When he saw those orchids, John remembered how she had happily pranced around their living room wearing the huge white orchids George Brett had sent her the day she won the Pulitzer Prize. He remembered how she dazzled him with her smiling look as she joked about Brett: “He doesn’t know I’m not the orchid type!”

  In honor of Margaret Mitchell, Governor Talmadge proclaimed that all state employees “pause for three minutes as a tribute of respect to this noted Georgian at the ten o’clock hour of her funeral.” Mayor Hartsfield asked that all activity in Atlanta be momentarily suspended as the hour of the funeral struck. In the chapel, just before the service began on that gloomy, overcast August 17, the organist played “The Strife Is Over” from an Episcopal hymnal. The service began promptly and lasted only nine minutes. At the conclusion of the rites, the clergyman prayed: “Let she who brought the past into the present carry the glory of the present into the future.” Under a leaden sky, the cavalcade of mourners began their journey to the old Oakland Cemetery. As the hearse approached Peachtree and Fifth streets, the sun, as if by some divine command, suddenly broke through the clouds as Margaret Mitchell crossed for the last time her beloved Peachtree, the street that she had made so famous and where she had lived, loved, and died.

  All along the way to the cemetery, the streets were lined with people standing quietly, many with handkerchiefs held to their eyes. In the redbrick-bordered cemetery, shady with huge magno
lia trees, John walked steadily from the car to the gravesite. His brothers Henry and Gordon were on either side of him. Stephens, Carrie Lou, their two sons, Bessie, and Deon were close behind. His friends drew a tight semicircle around him. His eyes dry, his face and body heavy with grief, he sat to the left of Dean de Ovies. After the brief service, he refused to leave and sat watching the two khaki-clad workmen lower the casket into the ground and cover it with the red dirt.

  All afternoon and late into the evening on the following days, people who were not present at the funeral made pilgrimages to the cemetery lot to pay tribute. The cemetery office said it was beseiged with calls for several days.

  In his journal the day after the funeral, Stephens recorded:

  The long train of automobiles went to Oakland Cemetery. It is the old city cemetery, set up in 1854. Across the valley loom the great buildings of the new city and the sun bounces back from the ranks of their windows to the country town graveyard near their midst. They buried her there beside her father and her mother and her little brother who died in babyhood. There was a grave space left for John. The flowers were banked high. I forgot to tell the caretakers to give the flowers to the crowd. I did it the next day. There was a crowd there for two or three days. She had said something to her people and they had answered. And when I looked across at the city riding high in the sunlight on the long ridge, crowded with towers, I broke and cried.88