Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  14

  John’s heart had taken a terrible jolt. Many people wondered how and whether he would survive the senseless and shocking tragedy of Peggy’s death. He, no doubt, wondered too; for immediately after the funeral, he started setting his house in final order. He wrote a new will and signed it on August 24, 1949. He left all of Gone With the Wind’s rights of all kinds—publication, copyrights, radio, television, dramatic, and opera rights and all and any others that might come into being—and all royalties to Stephens Mitchell or to Stephens’s two sons should Stephens die before John.

  He willed all of Peggy’s great collection of Gone With the Wind awards and mementos of her literary career to the Atlanta Public Library. His own collection of editions of the novel and his personal collection of pictures of Peggy went to his mother. He also stated that he wanted all of his personal possessions, including furniture and other effects, to go to his mother. He bequeathed one-half of his estate to be divided among his mother and his brothers and sisters; the other half he wanted to go to Stephens Mitchell. He asked that one thousand dollars from his estate be given to Bessie Jordan and Deon Ward, and five hundred to Eugene Carr, the janitor at the Della Manta apartments. To Margaret Baugh he gave $2,500, and to each of his nieces and nephews he gave one hundred dollars. He wanted ten thousand dollars to be given to Grady Memorial Hospital, and a thousand dollars each to the Good Samaritan Clinic, Saint Joseph’s Infirmary, and the Georgia Baptist Hospital—all in Atlanta. He willed one thousand dollars to the Margaret Mitchell library at Fayetteville, Georgia.

  On the afternoon of August 26, John wrote his mother and family for the first time since before the fatal accident:

  I wish you to know something which has been comforting to me. Peggy was probably never in pain. The newspapers referred to partly conscious intervals but I believe she was never nearer to consciousness than a person who has been under anesthesia and is beginning to come out. . . . Peggy made automatic responses sometimes when the doctor spoke to her, such as moving a hand or foot, and she babbled some words now and then but I believe we can say that she did not suffer or have pain. In fact it was quite probable that she never knew anything after the first instant when the automobile struck her.

  Our hopes were based on the fact that she was internally injured and that bodily functioning—her heart, breathing, blood pressure, et cetera—went along in a most functioning way. Our hope was that her body might keep going until it had healed the brain injury. After she was gone, the autopsy showed that the marvel was that she stayed alive as a long as she did, the brain damage was very severe. The doctors say that the chances are that she could never have recovered fully. I could not wish that she had survived if it was only for years of invalidism. . . .

  You may have seen in the newspapers, the driver of the automobile has been indicted for involuntary manslaughter which carries a penalty of one to three years if he is convicted. Involuntary manslaughter is when a person kills somebody without premeditation and malice aforethought while engaged in an unlawful act that carries the risk of killing somebody. I suppose that about describes what happened. It was the high speed at which the automobile was being driven that caused Peggy’s death. We were crossing Peachtree at Thirteenth Street. There is a wide curve in Peachtree that ends at Twelfth Street. Because of the curve we did not see the automobile and the driver did not see us until he had reached the head of the curve at Twelfth Street. The block between Twelfth and Thirteenth is a short one. We were about in the middle of the street. In one of those split second decisions I decided that the safe course was to go forward. Peggy apparently decided the safe course was to run back to the curbing we had just left. I do not think she made a wrong decision. I believe she would have gotten back to the curb safely except for one thing, the speed of the car. Because of the speed the driver could not get the car under control. It swerved further and further to the left and finally went into a skid. That pulled it in the direction Peggy was going until it finally caught up with her.

  Her face was not cut up and torn nor was her body. She had some bad bruises here and there on her body, of course, but her face was not even dirty when we picked her up. In fact, none of the injuries were extreme except the head injuries.

  I hope these details are not too unpleasant, but I thought you would wish to have a first hand account from me. If that part is bad I can also give a first hand account of the amazing and touching outflow of love and affection for her that has come from every class and type of people and from all parts of the world. I have known all along that Peggy had an enormous public following but what has happened has exceeded my expectations many, many times. I have been extraordinarily fortunate in having such a person for my wife.

  15

  On the morning after the funeral, as he sadly looked around the bedroom at Peggy’s personal items, John suddenly wondered what had happened to the clothes she had worn the night of the accident. After calling Frank Wilson, the administrator at Grady Hospital, he and Stephens went to the hospital and picked up the package containing the remnants of her garments. It contained her dress and slip. Both had been cut up while she was being undressed in the emergency room but neither showed much damage from the accident itself. When he returned home, he handed the package to Bessie saying, “I brought her shoes home the night of the accident. Would you please get them?” Together they walked slowly downstairs to the basement where he watched as Bessie placed the package into the roaring fire of the furnace.89

  Then John began going through all their files and separating letters and papers he wanted destroyed.90 This task was so arduous and painful that it took him nearly two years to complete it. Although he even asked his family to destroy all the letters he and Peggy had written to them, fortunately they did not. And they sorely regretted destroying the few they did.91

  As he gradually sorted out a pile of papers, he would burn it himself in a wire basket in the backyard of his Della Manta apartment. According to Margaret Baugh, the first papers he burned, with the exception of those few pages he had chosen to save, were the entire original manuscript pages of Gone With the Wind. Baugh thought that he also burned “’Ropa Carmagin,” the novelette Peggy had written before she and John married, because neither she nor anyone else ever saw it again.92 After he had burned so much precious material, including many letters, he became distraught. Baugh wrote, “This was such a distressing experience that he turned over to me the destroying of the correspondence. After we had burned a lot of letters, we found that some of them would have been useful in carrying on. So the burning stopped (to my relief, for it was distressing for me too). Then, after John’s death, Steve had the responsibility, and he had me burn the remaining manuscript [the thirty-page fragment of the jazz age novel] and some more letters.”

  In describing the outpouring of sympathy he had received, John wrote his mother in September that he had left Margaret Baugh with the job of writing and mailing two thousand thank-you cards.

  But before the cards were put into the mail, my cautiousness got the better of me and I felt impelled to look at the addressed envelopes to see if I noticed any errors. . . . In the course of this, I read some of the letters. They are a remarkable collection. I have mentioned already that many of them came from people who never knew Peggy but there was an unbelievable number from people we did know in some degree and in some manner. Like peeling an onion, you take off a layer, then there is another layer underneath it, and then others. Every phase and aspect of our lives had its representation.93

  In October 1951, John received a request from David Mearns asking if Peggy’s papers could be placed in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. Although he wrote nothing about what he had already done with the papers, he explained that he would rather have them there than any place else:

  But they are not being turned over to anybody and will not be turned over to anybody. Peggy did not wish her private papers to fall into the hands of strangers. She felt
very strongly about this. She put on me the duty of destroying them if she were to die without having done it herself. . . . She talked to me numerous times about not wanting strangers or members of her family, other than me, going through her files. Part of this was her nature and part of it was a belief that an author should stand before the public on the basis of her published work. She believed that attempting to go behind the published work, digging into an author’s private papers, led to wrong conclusions more often than to right ones…. I have tried to carry out her wishes and I will continue to do so.94

  Around this time John’s sister Frances traveled to Atlanta and stayed with John for a month. Later, she wrote that she would never forget sitting with him in the quiet and dark emptiness of the apartment. He always wanted to look at photographs of Peggy, saying that he had liked to look at her when she was alive, so why shouldn’t he like to look at pictures of her now? From a large box of photographs, he picked out his favorites—the one in profile with her smiling up at Red Upshaw, another of her as a girl reporter sitting in the engineer’s cabin of a locomotive, and another of her in a white velvet coat entering the theater on the night of the premiere. Frances wrote, “Then he said, ‘I liked to listen to her talk when she was alive so why shouldn’t I like to listen to her now.’ And he put on the record made at the premiere of Gone With the Wind when she made her little speech, thanking the audience for liking her ‘poah Scahlett.’”95

  After Frances’s visit, Katharine Bowden, John’s oldest sister, came from California for a month, and after she left, Francesca and Gordon came from Lexington to stay with him. They were all afraid to leave him alone. “We all knew he was living on borrowed time,” Frances wrote.96 For the first time in his life, John admitted to them that he was afraid to stay alone. The Marshes’ neighbor Sam Tupper said that John would often ask him to spend the night because he could not bear to be alone in the apartment.97

  16

  Peggy’s death aroused national concern about safety regulations and laws governing drunken drivers. Editorials in newspapers all over the country called for stricter guidelines in granting and withdrawing drivers’ licenses. Atlanta launched an intensive examination into the records and the qualifications of taxi drivers and formed a traffic safety board named the “Margaret Mitchell Safety Council,” which later became known as the “Georgia Safety Council.”

  During the fall of 1949, John had the burden of appearing as a witness during the trial of Hugh Gravitt—the man who had killed Peggy. The county officials were kind to John, who was terribly frail, and they provided a place in one of the rooms for him to lie down and rest whenever he felt the need to do so. Reliving the tragedy was a horrible experience for him.

  After he looked into John Marsh’s face and saw those grieving eyes, Superior Court Judge Walter C. Hendrix refused to permit the state to introduce photographs of Peggy’s body lying crumpled in the street because they were too gruesome. John testified on the stand, “I am afraid I’ll see the rest of my life the vision of my wife and the car running together.” He explained to the court that Peggy chose the crossing near the theater and looked to see if the way was clear because he could not walk fast. “Peggy said, ‘It looks all right now,’ and we walked into the street.” Then, in a low, hoarse voice, John said he saw the speeding car bear down on his wife and strike her as she tried to get back to the curb. He repeated, “I am afraid I’ll see that vision the rest of my life. If he was going less than fifty miles an hour I am very badly mistaken. The paths of the two were going smack together every instant. The curve of this man’s car reached after every step she took.”98

  In writing to his mother about the trial, he said:

  My appearance on the witness stand was not as much of a strain as the oration to the jury on the following day by Gravitt’s lawyer. He employed every kind of demagogy. . . . He told the jury “How many of you have ever driven 40 miles per hour? How many of you have ever driven your automobile after drinking a bottle of beer? If you have, you are just as guilty as this poor boy and you cannot vote him guilty.” He twisted the statements which I made and other witnesses had made and tried to create the impression that Peggy had run in front of Gravitt’s car, and therefore, was more to blame than he was. . . . I was confident the jury was influenced by the defense argument and I was not too certain that they would find the man guilty. It was really hard to take, having to sit there and listen to the lawyer make a speech like that without being able to do anything about it. My only satisfaction was that I helped to convict the man, I believe. I think my testimony registered with the jury and I believe I helped to keep the heat on, simply by being present in the courtroom. If I had not been present, even if I had been kept away by serious illness, the defense lawyer probably could have built up more sympathy for Gravitt. So I have all along regarded my presence at the trial as something that I owed Peggy, regardless of how much of a strain it might be, and when we got the guilty verdict I felt that we had saved her from having a smear put on her by the defense lawyer. . . . In the courtroom was the first time I had ever seen Gravitt. He is a wormy individual, thin, sharp featured, scrawny, a washed out blond. He had been well coached by his lawyer and did not give out with any grins, as he did in that picture of him made while he was in jail. He was very quiet and sober and when he was on the witness stand he talked in such a weak voice you could barely hear him. The defense pictured him as a poor hard working boy who had his living to make and who had been persecuted and abused by the newspapers ever since the accident.99

  The truth was that the 29-year-old Gravitt, a poor boy who came from the tiny town of Cumming, Georgia, to Atlanta, where he had gotten a job driving a taxi cab, had a police record for reckless driving. He had been charged with twenty-two traffic offenses, eight of which were dismissed or suspended. The two policemen who took him into custody after his car hit Peggy that night testified that “Gravitt was thick-tongued, and his eyes did not focus. Perhaps the man was not drunk, but he had certainly been drinking.”100

  The Atlanta newspapers reported that no case in recent years, not even a sensational murder trial, had inflamed the public more than Gravitt’s trial. Gravitt was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to serve one year to eighteen months in prison.

  17

  During the summer of 1950, John purchased something that he had always wanted—a house. It was on Walker Terrace, just a few doors from his Della Manta apartment on Piedmont, and its principal attraction was that it permitted him to live and carry on his business on the ground floor and to enjoy a beautiful wooded backyard. From the outside, this house looks small, but inside it widens out into a spacious dwelling of the kind southerners built before 1918. It has large rooms, high ceilings, tall windows, and beautiful floors of rare old longleaf pine. For his bedroom, he chose the room that overlooked the backyard, which was actually a little forest filled with birds, chipmunks, and squirrels.

  He had the entire house painted and cleaned and the terrace apartment remodeled so that Bessie and her husband, Charlie Jordan, could move in with him. About the time he got ready to move, Maud, the cat, disappeared, much to his disappointment. Her disappearance made the front page in the Atlanta papers, and many people searched for her, particularly after John offered a generous reward for her return. Even though there were rumors of cats answering to Maud’s description being seen around the neighborhood, Maud remained lost. When offers of kittens of every species poured in, John’s response was, “No. I don’t want just any cat. I want that cat.”101

  In September, Henry came to Atlanta for a few days and then took John back to Wilmington with him to visit with their mother. That was the last time John ever saw his mother. She died of a heart condition in December 1950, when she was eighty-four years old, and was buried next to her husband’s grave in the cemetery in Maysville, Kentucky. Unable to watch another loved one placed in the cold earth, John did not attend the funeral. He was grateful that his mother went as quickly as
she did, for he did not want her to have to endure senility or invalidism.

  Once settled in his new house, John organized one room as his office, and each day he worked on Gone With the Wind business with the assist- ance of Margaret Baugh and another lady, Miss Norris, whom he hired to help Margaret. Regularly, John declined offers to write sequels and to make stage plays and musical dramas, and he administered to the overcrowded world market for translated editions. He continued Peggy’s attempt to stamp out rumors, and he scrupulously edited line by line a long article that Robert Ruark wrote about Peggy for McCall’s magazine. He continued to sponsor Peggy’s writing contest for the prisoners in the federal prison, and he contributed to many charities in Peggy’s name. He was even considering letting someone, perhaps Medora, who had asked him, write a biography of Peggy. Even though he knew Peggy never wanted a biography, he realized that someone would eventually write one, and he wanted control over what was written so that the record of her life would be correct.

  He lived quietly, taking care of his business and visiting with a few close friends. On Sundays and Thursdays, the nights that Bessie had off, he dined at the Toddle House or the Piedmont Driving Club or at friends’ homes. Rhoda and Joe Kling often invited him to their lovely home on the Chattahoochee River. He saw Sue Myrick and Edna Daniel whenever they came to town, and he often went with Mary Singleton, Beth Cooper Powers, and Margaret Baugh to the movies and the opera. His brothers and sisters, who visited him frequently, said he was a different man after Peggy’s death. His own words were, “The sparkle has gone out of my life.”102

  From the first anniversary of Peggy’s death well on into the fall, John was in a melancholy mood. On November 27, 1950, John wrote his friend Sue Myrick, whose health was failing: