by Tony Horwitz
Melly sensed another kinship between nineteenth-century Georgia and twentieth-century Japan; both rebuilt themselves after being ravaged by war. “Their symbol of royalty is the phoenix, just like Atlanta,” she said.
It so happened that Melly had a date the next night with a Japanese tour group. So I caught up with her again at a Southern-themed restaurant in Atlanta. Melly stood in the parking lot wearing a hooped taffeta skirt, lace gloves, and emerald-colored earrings that matched her green velvet belt and purse. A bus pulled up and twenty-five Japanese surged toward her, talking excitedly, bowing and posing beside her for pictures. Melly pointed the toe of her white shoe and pulled up her skirts to reveal red pantalets. The tourists laughed and clapped. Then she turned around and looked seductively over her bare shoulder in an uncanny mimic of Vivien Leigh. For the moment at least, Melly Meadows seemed a very long way from Bible school.
The group moved inside to a formal dining room, and Melly sashayed between the tables, making chat in Japanese. I asked the group’s tour guide, a man named Daijiro, to translate her banter.
“You are so handsome, you look like Clark Gable.”
“What is your company?”
“I am very fond of your Emperor and Empress.”
Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and vegetable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. “We want to see the history and beauty of America,” Daijiro explained.
I asked him why Gone With the Wind had such strong appeal in Japan. “You must understand the times,” he said. “In the 1930s we saw American movies, then during the war we didn’t. These movies came back after the war and Gone With the Wind was the most popular. I think it gave people hope to see this woman fighting so hard to build her land back. Also, she stands by her family, which is something we admire.”
He paused. “There is something else, but this is just my idea. I think people watched the movie and thought, ‘This is the real America, a wonderful place, not the one we fought in war.’”
The food arrived and the tourists dipped tentatively into gumbo and cornbread. Daijiro watched Melly for a moment, then added, “Scarlett’s strength fascinates us. But inside we feel more like Melanie Wilkes, who is polite and kind.”
Listening to Daijiro, I sensed another kinship between Japanese and Southern culture; they shared a subtle, mannered code that often seemed contradictory and confusing to blunt, unmannerly outsiders like myself.
As the main course arrived, Melly waved good-bye. “Oh fiddle-dee-dee!” she sang out, swishing from the room and down the restaurant’s grand staircase. Her mother waited out front in a minivan with the engine running. Melly had another appearance that evening and was already late.
I offered Melly my arm so she could hoist her hoop skirt into the van. “Why, you’re a true gentleman, even if you are a Yankee,” she drawled, swinging the van door shut. Her mother sped off, leaving me alone in the parking lot with the faint fragrance of verbena lingering in the warm Georgia night.
MELLY MEADOWS LEFT ME with something else: a curious tip. Despite what I’d heard at the Chamber of Commerce, Tara was still in Clayton County. Melly knew only vague details—“a big old house belonging to a crazy old lady”—but she passed on a name: Betty Talmadge, the elderly ex-wife of former Georgia governor and senator, Herman Talmadge.
Betty Talmadge lived seven miles west of Jonesboro on a narrow lane that dead-ended at a Greek Revival plantation house. By the entrance stood a precise miniature of the mansion, about the size of a doghouse. A sign on the front said “Rabbit E. Lee” and a bunny hopped out to sniff at me. Then a large, one-legged woman appeared across the lawn. “I’m Betty,” she shouted. “Lost my leg a few years ago from a blood clot. Let me show you my house.”
Betty sprinted across the lawn on her crutches, leading me onto the mansion’s verandah. “I’m told they hid grain in here so the Yankees wouldn’t steal it during the War,” she said, tapping one of the columns with her crutch. “Good story. Who knows.”
Betty clumped inside, across wide pine boards covered with a needlepoint rug. “I quit smoking on June 8th, 1970, at 8 P.M.,” she said, admiring the carpet. “My needlework took off after that.” She also showed me a glass case filled with flowers sent to her by Pat Nixon as thanks for a luncheon Betty hosted for the First Lady after her husband’s resignation. “Pat was nice. I liked Dick, too. He got caught, that’s all.”
This casual view of political scandal had family roots. Betty’s father-in-law, Eugene Talmadge, was a long-time Georgia governor who once told voters, “Sure I stole, but I stole it for you.” He also liked to warn political foes, “I’m just as mean as cat shit.” Southern politics didn’t produce characters like that anymore, least of all in Georgia, whose most recent governor of note was a pious peanut farmer from Plains.
Betty led me into another room, adorned with paintings of herself as a young Washington hostess. “Done yesterday, as you can tell,” she dryly observed. “Washington was fun back then. People had wild parties. Drank too much and fooled around.” She shook her head. “Those days are gone. Gone with the wind, you could say.”
Grateful for an opening, I nudged the conversation around to my literary search. Betty laughed. “Oh, this isn’t Tara, it’s Twelve Oaks. I’ve got Tara, too, but that’s another story.” The story of Twelve Oaks (the Wilkes family estate) began with a 1973 New York Times piece, which Betty had carefully preserved in plastic sheeting. It reported that the Talmadge estate was “believed to have been Margaret Mitchell’s model for Twelve Oaks.” The reporter offered no further details. Nor did Betty.
“Margaret Mitchell, like all writers, may have pushed it or pulled it a bit,” she said. “But this is the house. Or that’s what I tell people.” She smiled and put the newspaper clip back in its folio. “The New York Times is the paper of record. If it prints something, it must be true.” I couldn’t help wondering if Betty herself had been the unnamed source of the Times anecdote, but it seemed rude to ask.
Betty had turned the story to good use. In 1975, without warning, her husband filed for divorce. Then he was reprimanded by the Senate for financial misconduct and voted out of office. Returning to Georgia, Betty found herself a downwardly mobile divorcee rattling around an eleven-room mansion in the countryside. Echoes of Scarlett again.
“I was a small-town girl who married at eighteen,” she said. “You were considered an old maid if you got to twenty-two without a husband. The only advice my mother had was this: ‘You just be a lovely complement to your husband.’” She laughed. “I swallowed all that. But my mother never told me what you do when you’re fifty-three and your husband takes off.”
What Talmadge had done was become a hostess again, this time for pay, feting businessmen and foreign tourists with dinners at her alleged Twelve Oaks. Her set-menu “Magnolia Supper” included Scarlett Carrots, Rhett Butler biscuits and abra-Ham Lincoln. “The social secretary for Ladybird Johnson taught me to name dishes,” Betty said. “It’s a conversation starter. You’d be surprised, but a lot of prominent people are ill at ease socially. It loosens them up.”
This cutesy habit extended to her animals; hence Rabbit E. Lee, whom I’d met at the door. Talmadge took me out back and introduced her other farm creatures: Ulysses S. Grunt, Clark Gobble, Scarlett O’Hen, the Honorable John C. Cowhoun. “I’ll do anything to make my Yankee friends smile,” Betty said.
I steered the conversation back to Tara. Betty said that fifteen years ago, she’d learned that the farmhouse owned by Margaret Mitchell’s great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had become vacant and fallen prey to vandals. “I decided as long as I had Twelve Oaks, I might as well have Tara, too.” She bought the derelict house over the telephone for $1,000.
Betty pointed across a field at what looked like a pioneer cabin, perched at the fringe of pine woods. This was the Fitzgerald place, or all of it that Betty had salvaged; she kept what remain
ed of the house’s grander Victorian addition in storage. I gazed at the building and felt a twinge of disappointment. Betty’s home at least was an antebellum mansion, Twelve Oaks or not. But this weatherboard shack looked like it might once have belonged to the Slatterys, the “swamp trash” who lived down the hill from Tara, not to the O’Haras.
But the story didn’t end there. Soon after buying the Fitzgerald place, Betty heard that the facade of the Hollywood Tara was for sale. Its aged owner, Julian Foster, had purchased the movie set twenty years before in hopes of creating an antebellum Disneyland in Georgia. His dream never materialized and the rotting facade had become an albatross. But Foster, a paranoid man, refused to disclose Tara’s location. “He kept saying, ‘I’m the only person who knows where it is. That’s my insurance,’” Betty said.
In the end, Foster took Betty on a circuitous drive that ended at a barn in the north Georgia hills. She bought the set for $5,000, one-fiftieth the cost of Tara’s construction in 1930s Hollywood. But before she could take possession, Foster died. “I contacted his widow,” Betty said. “She said the sale was still on, but I was now the only person who knew where to find Tara.”
Betty had a poor sense of direction, and after a week-long search by car and small airplane she still couldn’t find the barn. It was only through a canceled rent check for the shelter that she finally tracked Tara down. “I got it,” she said, “or it’s got me, I’m not sure which.”
The set was built of plywood, composition board, and papier-mâché (supplies “you could get at Sears,” one of the set’s creators confessed in an interview after the movie’s release). Nonetheless, an appraiser hired by Betty had compared the set to other Hollywood props—the tail from the lion costume in the Wizard of Oz, the piano in Casablanca, the HMS Bounty—and set Tara’s value at $1.2 million. “I guess I should feel rich, but I don’t,” Talmadge said. “At least not yet.”
Betty hoped to peddle Tara, the Fitzgerald House and Twelve Oaks as a package, forming the core of a theme park like the one Julian Foster had dreamed of creating. But she hadn’t found any takers. So Tara remained in storage—where, exactly, Betty wouldn’t disclose. “I’m like Foster,” she said. “I don’t tell anyone where it is. That’s my insurance.”
But she agreed to show me pictures of the set, which was now in pieces: a door, a few columns, a papier-mâché brick. It looked the way Tara might have if Sherman’s men had burned the place down after all. Betty, though, hadn’t surrendered all hope. Seeing me to the door, she smiled defiantly. “Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.”
TOMORROW FOUND ME IN Jonesboro again, still on Tara’s trail. I’d learned that a retired mailman named Herb Bridges had amassed the world’s largest collection of Gone With the Wind ephemera. He was also reputed to know everything about the novel’s fictional and historic landscape—including the true location of the O’Hara estate.
Bridges was a small, gentle man of sixty-five who lived in a brick ranch house along the rural mail route he’d worked for thirty years. His former job was one reason he knew the local landscape so well. Working for the post office had also led to his trove of memorabilia, which he’d begun collecting years ago when he’d spotted a first edition of the novel at a used bookshop. “I don’t know why I bought it,” he said. “It cost twenty-five dollars, which in those days seemed like an awful lot of money.” The book was now worth about $10,000.
Then one day, Bridges visited a library in Atlanta and a strange urge overcame him again. “There was a copy of the book in Czech,” he said. “And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to own one?”
Bridges didn’t know much about publishing, but he knew how to work the postal system and managed to have a Czech edition sent through the Iron Curtain. “Then I got to thinking, what does it look like in Bulgaria?” So he wrote to Sofia. Gradually, as his modest budget allowed, Bridges acquired copies from Vietnam, Ethiopia, and dozens of other countries. “It became a joke at the post office,” he said. “Here I was, a mailman in rural Georgia, getting all these packages from these Communist countries. I think some people thought I was a spy.” He’d even located a copy from Latvia, published in 1938—shortly before the small Baltic state vanished as an independent country for fifty years.
Bridges also began sending away for movie posters and scripts, and kept an eye out for kitsch at flea markets: Scarlett-shaped perfume bottles, plates painted with Ashley’s face, assorted dolls, puzzles, matchbooks, and other tchotchkes. “People think this sort of promotional junk started with Star Wars and Batman,” he said, showing me several rooms cluttered with the stuff. “As you can see, it didn’t.”
Unfortunately, Bridges’s children didn’t share his obsession, and he didn’t want to sell his collection piece by piece. So, like Betty Talmadge, Bridges kept waiting for a wealthy “Windie,” as cultish fans of the book and movie were known, to buy his possessions and put them on permanent display. “I’ll probably be buried in a vault with this stuff, like one of those pharaohs,” he said. “Then a few centuries from now they’ll dig me up, along with all these Scarlett and Rhett and Mammy dolls, and wonder, ‘What weird, idol-worshiping religion did this man belong to?’”
Bridges had also picked up an impressive trove of trivia about the book and movie, which he shared at local colleges and adult-ed programs. So later that week, I went to hear him lecture at an Elderhostel in Jonesboro. Fifty people listened raptly as Bridges exhibited his trinkets and an equally colorful array of anecdotes. Margaret Mitchell was a five-foot-tall, 100-pound flapper who once declared, “Being one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South!” She titled her first draft “Tote the Weary Load” and originally named her heroine Pansy, not Scarlett. And she was only forty-eight when an off-duty taxi driver ran her down as she crossed Peachtree Street to watch a movie. I also learned that the actress who played Prissy ended up on welfare in Harlem; that Nazi Germany banned the film because it romanticized resistance to occupation; and that Clark Gable had false teeth and breath so malodorous that some actresses resisted kissing him.
After the talk, a small white-haired woman with a name tag that said “Peggy Root. Magnolia, Ark.” stared intently at Bridges’s movie posters. “You can’t imagine what Gone With the Wind meant to my generation,” she said in a gentle drawl.
When I asked why this was so, her eyes misted over. “Poverty,” she said. “Ours, I mean. When I was coming up in Arkansas, we didn’t have chairs in both the kitchen and setting room. So the adults dragged chairs from one room to the other while the kids sat on the floor. Life was that bare. Then this book comes out about a rich South we never knew. It was escapism, I guess.”
A small, bald man appeared at her shoulder. This was Peggy’s brother, Ray. “Our father was a sharecropper,” he said. “He had to do a half-dozen other jobs to get by. Cut railroad ties. Kill possums and sell their skins. Pick pecans. And he’d go around to all the sharecroppers who had less than a bale of cotton, put their shares together to make a bale, and take it to market to sell.”
“Remember the man Daddy cut ties with?” Peggy said.
Ray smiled. “Daddy had a partner who would pull off his clothes and cut railroad ties in the nude. He told everyone it was because the mosquitoes made him work harder. But the real reason was that he only had one pair of clothes and didn’t want to ruin them in the woods.”
As children, Ray and Peggy worked six days a week in the fields. On Sundays they went to church. The only entertainment they recalled was listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a neighbor’s radio. “I was in the eighth grade when I first read Gone With the Wind,” Peggy said. “But I hid it from my mother. She was Assembly of God, very fundamentalist. She didn’t approve of risqué literature.” Then came the movie, which was even more romantic. “It was like visiting another planet,” Peggy
said. “And to think our ancestors lived like that. The only one of ours we’d heard about was a grandfather who went broke and lost his mind over the Civil War. He papered his living room with Confederate dollars.”
She went quiet for a moment. “I was a good student, the first woman in my family to finish high school. Sometimes I wonder if there hadn’t been a Civil War, maybe I could have been a Margaret Mitchell.” Instead, Peggy had worked as a telephone operator and rarely traveled beyond rural Arkansas. “This is my first vacation in years,” she said of the Elderhostel program.
Ray glanced at his watch. “One o’clock,” he said, studying the class schedule. “Laughter Therapy.”
Herb Bridges finished gathering his things. “I should have told these folks about the real Tara and Twelve Oaks,” he said. “Or where they would have been.” Caught up like the others in the book’s romance, I’d almost forgotten that this was why I’d sought Bridges out in the first place.
Bridges offered to show me the sites, which he’d found by matching the geography described in the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s own time in Clayton County. We turned down a wooded lane called Tara Road, then parked by a thicket of kudzu-draped cedars. This was the location, Bridges said, of the old Fitzgerald house that Betty Talmadge had moved fifteen years before, and that Margaret Mitchell often visited as a child. Bridges had learned from Mitchell’s brother that the farmhouse was once surrounded by cotton fields. The site now faced a raw subdivision—“Andover at Hawthorne. A Swim/Tennis Community from $79,900”—with duplexes planted around cul-de-sacs so new they hadn’t yet been named.
This spot wasn’t mentioned in the novel, but it provided Bridges with the starting point for his sleuthing of Mitchell’s imaginary landscape. “We know she liked to take long walks around here,” he said. “If you look closely at what she might have seen, it matches awfully closely to the book.”
