by Anne Edwards
The season began in October. With it came new friendships with young women of social standing in Atlanta. It was a chance for a fresh start, and it began quite well. Peggy became friends with two sisters, Helen and Lethea Turman, as well as with several other debutantes who thought she was “terribly amusing and great fun,” and who particularly admired her physical prowess.
Peggy was growing increasingly secretive about her personal life, and no one outside the family knew how serious her leg injury had been — despite the doctor’s orders, she was not wearing the prescribed shoes that she so loathed. The debs of her group considered her a tomboy and, because of Upshaw, they did not think much of her taste in men. But she made a concerted effort not to flirt with their escorts, and that ranked high with them. And, although the members of the Debutante Club did not have the verve and enthusiasm of Ginny Morris, they did satisfy Peggy’s need for female companionship. “A woman who doesn’t like women can’t have much fun,” she claimed, but, as the season progressed, she began to fall out of favor with one girl after another because of her outspoken criticisms of the way the events were run by the older society women who had been debutantes once and who now controlled the prestigious Junior League.
The season consisted of scores of lavish parties given by the debutantes’ parents and close family members at their homes and at various country clubs. Eugene took over the role of host, but most of the parties he gave were planned by Peggy. who kept a cautious eye on their budget, for her father made no secret of the fact that his practice was failing seriously since the bottom had fallen out of the real-estate business. Peggy managed to trim household expenses to a minimum to help alleviate some of the pressures, but the situation made her short-tempered. Unfortunately, she vented her anger on the senior society women.
Many charity affairs, sponsored by various clubs, were given during the season, and the current debutantes were expected to appear. They were celebrities, Atlanta’s own stars, and their pictures appeared in each Sunday’s rotogravure in the Atlanta Journal. Most of the girls took classic, full-face portraits. Not Peggy. She was always caught doing a stunt. One photograph shows her in a trainman’s hat driving a locomotive; another, in a policemen’s uniform. She smoked in public and let it be known that she took a drink from time to time. None of these things set well with the old guard, but they endured their displeasure discreetly until plans were set forth for the Mi-carême Ball, the grandest charity affair of the season. It was Peggy’s contention that if the debutantes were the main attraction, they should be the ones to decide what charity would be the beneficiary. Not only did she speak up on her own account, but she convinced two other girls to join her in her challenge, which she lost ungraciously.
The dance music that season consisted of “cheek-to-cheek” songs like “Whispering” and “The Japanese Sandman,” but the current rage was “The Sheik of Araby,” which had been inspired by a novel of desert passion, The Sheik, by E. M. Hill. Surely knowing what kind of criticism it would evoke, Peggy decided she would highlight this Mi-carême Ball with an exhibition Apache dance in costume, and she chose as her partner a Valentino-type young man, Al Weil, who was a student at Georgia Tech. Her father and Stephens tried to talk her out of this plan, first, because they were fearful of the consequence to her leg and, second, because they believed the dance and her costume were too suggestive and would incur much disfavor. Peggy refused to back down.
Dressed in black stockings, and a black satin slit-front skirt sashed with crimson, and with a pouting red lipsticked mouth to match, she swooped and slid across the dance floor with wild shrieks of simulated terror and passion and, probably — due to her weak leg — pain, as her partner tossed her about, bending her so far back over his arm that her head touched the floor. The athletic Mr. Weil had rehearsed the dance with Peggy for a week, and they put into it all the drama of a Paris hoodlum dancing with his slavish whore. The older women were shocked. Even Polly Peachtree, the gossip columnist for the Atlanta Journal, was embarrassed and commented that Peggy had offered “herself and all she was on the altar of charity.” As far as Atlanta’s society matrons were concerned. Peggy’s Apache dance was the final straw. The fact that she was Annie Fitzgerald Stephens’s granddaughter had gotten her into the Debutante Club, but this blatant display of sensuality had to be censured.
To make it into Atlanta’s high society at that time, a debutante had to be accepted as a member of the Junior League. Invitations went out a few months after the end of the season, and usually all the members of the Debutante Club were invited to join. Peggy looked forward to receiving her invitation with great expectation. When none came, it was a great shock, and the wound went deep. She would never forget this cruel snub and her pain and humiliation. One day, she vowed, she would get back at the ladies of the Junior League.
Chapter Seven
PEGGY MITCHELL celebrated her twenty-first birthday on November 8, 1921, quietly with her family. Grandiose dreams of practicing medicine or going off to Vienna to study with Sigmund Freud had been buried along with Maybelle. The life of a society woman was now barred to her, and she remained adamant about not attending a local college for a teaching degree.
During the queer aftermath of the war, she had harbored the idea of writing and, her feelings for Clifford Henry still unresolved, she had discussed with close friends the possibility of writing about the death of a soldier in the war. But the idea was abandoned before she’d even begun, and the possibility of a literary career was never mentioned in the Mitchell house.
Contemporary literary stars awed Peggy, and she read two, sometimes three, of their books a week: Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, The Girls by Edna Ferber, John Dos Passos’s critically acclaimed Three Soldiers (which she did not like), and E. M. Hill’s The Sheik (which she did). Her favorite novels that year were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of justice. These two writers were what she called “stylists”; they seemed to her to be consummate literary artists, the kind of writer she could never even hope to become. Too, they wrote about women in a way that was daring for the time. Cabell’s novel even managed to be sexy without being pornographic. She read H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and the modern poets — poetry was enjoying a tremendous vogue — like Edna St. Vincent Millay, yearning to meet these poets and authors in the same way that other girls yearned to meet the current matinee idols. She went so far as to write fan letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Vincent Benét, but they did not reply. This seems not to have offended her, but it did deepen her sense of inferiority; she decided that she was unworthy of their response.
There is little doubt that Peggy Mitchell harbored a desire to become a published author, for she gave such an exalted place in her admiration to the authors whose books she read. But the more good literature she read, the deeper she submerged her own creative drive. She had always had to balance her feelings of inferiority with her vanity. By calling attention to herself, by flouting convention, she had been able to feed her ego. The rejection by the Junior League had damaged her confidence so severely, however, that she had momentarily lost her initiative, although she had not shed her daring. She still “hooted at convention” as Augusta Dearborn phrases it, recalling the time they were both invited to attend a bridal shower for one of the previous season’s debutantes. “And to the piles of lingerie in virginal white laid out for the guests to see, Peggy solemnly added her own contribution, a nightgown of violent purple!” Augusta was shocked, as was their hostess, at Peggy’s act of defiance.
Peggy’s friendship with Augusta was of a curious nature. She admired Augusta’s gentle charm and artistic nature, her ability to communicate with old and young. But Peggy was never completely at ease with Augusta, and her friend’s dogged loyalty was at times an irritation as well as a support that she could not do without.
The camaraderie that had once existed between Peggy and Stephens had disappeared with their new
maturity. He was now a member of her father’s law firm and was gone all day, and in the evenings he socialized with his own circle of friends. Stephens appeared to be as troubled as his father about his sister’s future and felt she needed another woman in the house, someone like Grandmother Stephens, who could help her through this difficult stage. But Peggy would not hear of it, even though she was alone in the house most of the day, except for the household staff.
The Mitchell staff kept to the house as much as possible at this time, for, after a hiatus of fifty years, white-robed, masked figures were assembling for midnight conclaves under flaming crosses. The Ku Klux Klan, which had once been active in Atlanta, had suddenly sprung to life again, occupying respectable executive offices in a building just a few doors from the Atlanta Journal, and blacks all over the city were terrified.
Within a few months, the Ku Klux Klan had taken charge of Atlanta, its followers having been either elected or appointed to the major city jobs. Stephens Mitchell has said, “After the folks came back from World War I there was a pretty good difference in Atlanta. There was a growth of people that had a crude agricultural background, which supported [the Imperial Wizard, Colonel William B.] Simmons and his Ku Klux Klan.” A former circuit rider of the Methodist Episcopal church, Simmons said in an interview with Angus Perkerson that, as a child, he had been fascinated by the stories “his old black mammy” used to tell him about the Ku Klux Klan of post-Civil War days, and that one night he had had a vision of white-robed Klansmen going past on horseback. He had gotten down on his knees then and sworn to form a new chapter of the “old fraternal order.”
It sounded almost clubby the way Simmons explained it, but the rebirth of the Klan in Atlanta, which included two bona fide members of the original Klan of the Reconstruction period, created not only a wave of anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-alien demonstrations in that city, but throughout the South, and then swept upward to the Midwest and from there, across the nation. And Atlanta, as national headquarters, was the capital to an alarming six million Klansmen. Blacks in Atlanta were terrified, and rightly so, as the self-styled vigilantes set fire to their churches, farms, and small businesses. The city’s blacks had been brought up on hair-raising Ku Klux Klan stories calculated “to bring terror into the heart of a small black child.” Cammie, upon whom Peggy relied for most errands, now refused to go anywhere near Klan headquarters or to venture out at all after seven o’clock at night.
In the elections of 1922 through 1926, the Klan concentrated its powers at the polls so effectively that it was able to elect in Georgia, as well as in other states, U. S. senators, congressmen, and state officials sympathetic to its cause.
Although she considered herself a conservative Democrat, Peggy had only a superficial interest in politics. She had always had a deep-rooted affection for what she called “our colored population,” who had tilled the red clay of Georgia and had planted and picked the cotton that had brought the state its first prosperity. She felt the “white folk” of Atlanta should be responsible for the welfare of the Negroes and, though this was hardly a liberal viewpoint and smacked of old-plantation mentality, it was a long, scrappy way from the views of the reactionary state government.
Stephens claims he was most influenced at this time by automobiles, music, and dancing. But that was not the case with Peggy. She was affected by what she read and by history, and since her literary preferences leaned toward the fine, liberal writers, and because her roots were so deeply in Atlanta, she was considerably distressed by the racial situation that prevailed in her city.
In the spring of 1922, Peggy rekindled her friendship with Red Upshaw. They both joined the Peachtree Yacht Club, a drinking club that had nothing at all to do with boats. None of the club members criticized her drinking or smoking or her pranks or her love of the theatrical. On the contrary, they greatly admired her ability to hold her liquor and to enjoy a good joke. To amuse her new friends, she began to write short plays, nothing serious or revealing, aimed to display her cleverness and ribald sense of humor. Soon, her Yacht Club friends began coming to the Mitchell house to perform with her in these playlets. One typical offering was a take-off on Donald Ogden Stewart’s Parody of the Outline of History, itself a satire on H. G. Wells’s best-selling book of the previous year. Eugene Mitchell was furious, and reminded her of the licking he had given her when she had plagiarized Thomas Dixon’s book The Traitor. The plays stopped but the pranks continued. Once, she and a group of friends dressed outlandishly in loud clothes and red suspenders and boarded a train coming from New York at the stop before its destination. The “locals” were given quite a shock when this bizarre company stepped onto the platform at Atlanta’s Terminal Station.
A rather meek, amiable man when Maybelle was alive, Eugene Mitchell was growing increasingly cantankerous. These were difficult times in the Mitchell home; the family continued to suffer financial setbacks, and Peggy’s errant behavior only created more tension. Cammie had married and moved to Birmingham, and the household staff now consisted of the wiry young black woman, Bessie, who both cooked and cleaned; Carrie, the part-time laundress; and a yardman. To cut winter fuel bills the house was maintained at a frigid temperature.
Peggy’s new, hard-drinking, wild friends helped compensate for her grim home life. She was going through a period of rebellion and, according to Augusta Dearborn (who, though not one of the Yacht Club crowd, remained a staunch ally), “Many a night she routed Stephens out of bed to get some man out of jail.” Usually it was one of her Yacht Club pals who had not been able to hold his liquor.
Along with her derring-do, shorter skirts, and bobbed hair, Peggy’s sexuality burgeoned forth. She was seen by the young men and women in her crowd as “exceptionally charming but a big flirt and tease,” despite the fact that she was seeing a great deal of Red Upshaw.
Close friends from this time characterize Upshaw as “unstable,” “a wild creature,” “dashing,” “sexy,” and of “low morals”; others recall him as “masterful” and “brilliant.” He was certainly a man of voracious sexual appetites. Several of his contemporaries state unequivocally that, drunk, Red Upshaw had to satisfy his sexual needs, and if he did not, or could not, he became violent. At these times, the age or sex of the nearest body did not matter. Yet, when sober, there was an aura of excitement about him, of sexual magnetism; he was not only handsome, he radiated what one acquaintance called a “razzle-dazzle” kind of charm. He had celebrated his twenty-first birthday on March 10, 1922, and, although he was five months Peggy’s junior, he seemed to her the most worldly man she had ever known.
Red came from Monroe, Georgia, the son of an insurance salesman, William F. Upshaw, and Annie Likhs Kinnard Upshaw. He claimed to have played a secret, dashing role in the war, something to do with espionage and being behind enemy lines. This was obviously fabricated, for he was only seventeen at the war’s end, and, according to his school records, appears never to have been inducted into the service. He did attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where the records state he entered on June 26, 1919, resigned voluntarily on January 5, 1920, was readmitted in May, and resigned again on September 1, 1920. Two weeks later, he enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens. Because his family now lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, he did not qualify as a Georgia resident and paid the full tuition. Later, he wrote in a distinctive, flowing hand on his University Alumni application that he had not been a loan-fund beneficiary nor had he earned his own tuition. Since he admitted openly that his parents had cut off his allowance after Annapolis, one might wonder where he got the money to live as he did — for Red Upshaw liked expensive clothes, drove a flashy car, and always had cash in his pocket. However, it was not exactly a secret at the Yacht Club that Upshaw was involved in bringing bootleg liquor down from the Georgia mountains, for he supplied the club with most of its contraband.
Eugene Mitchell did not approve of Upshaw or of any of Peggy’s Yacht Club friends, and the atmosphere in the
Peachtree house grew increasingly frigid. This did not appear to intimidate Peggy, for she continued to invite her friends home and gave frequent parties. One day Upshaw showed up at the Mitchell house with another young man, about five years older than he, with whom he had just rented an apartment in Atlanta.
Both Stephens and Mr. Mitchell claimed they liked John Marsh at this first meeting, despite the fact that he was Upshaw’s friend and roommate. Peggy seems to have liked him as well, but certainly not in the same way that she did Red. However, Peggy had developed her art of coquetry to a point where she could have several men in love with her at the same time and still manage to keep them all at arm’s length. In the spring of 1922, John wrote his younger sister, Frances:
My new Sweetie may be the reason why I haven’t written to you lately. It is because I have spent about as much time with her as the law allows. I would like for you to meet her and to pass on her. I have a high respect for your opinion. However, I am not contemplating matrimony as much as I would enjoy it. We have made a solemn promise not to fall in love with each other. Peg has made a success at that sort of relationship and she has the largest collection of man friends, real friends, of any girl of twenty I have ever encountered. I suppose eventually like the others I will be secretly in love with her, covering up an apparently hopeless passion. Ah well. Ho hum. The friendship of a girl like Peg is worth having and I value it.
She is an ardent young revolutionary with a helluva lot of common sense as well. You’ll like her, I am sure. If you don’t, I promise to choke you on the spot with my bare hands.
