by Anne Edwards
For the first time, Peggy walked through the doors of Carnegie Library in quest of material on Georgia’s history for a story. Something must have stirred within her as she went about her task in an organized and industrious way, for she reported to Medora that she had not enjoyed any previous assignment as she was enjoying this one. She selected four women to profile for the first article, “Georgia’s Empress and Women Soldiers.” The only one who fitted the ladylike stereotype of the Southern heroine was Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to become a United States senator, although by appointment upon the death of her husband rather than by election. The others in Peggy’s quartet were Lucy Mathilde (“Bill”) Kenney, “large, masculine in appearance, a fine rifle shot and absolutely fearless, who enlisted as a man with her young husband in the first volunteers that went off to the Civil War from Georgia and became a ‘hero’ at the Battle of Sharpsburg but who did not reveal herself until her ‘buddy’ (and husband) was killed in the second battle of Manassas so that she could take his body home”; and Mary Musgrove, crowned empress of the Creek Nation and who “despite her years among the civilizing influences of the colony and her three successive white husbands remained an untamed savage until she died”; and “Cross-eyed” Nancy Hart, “who stood six feet tall, was broad and muscular in proportion, red-haired and cross-eyed. Her neighbors were often given to saying that her disposition was cross-grained, too.”
During the Revolutionary War, Nancy Hart had killed one Tory and had single-handedly captured a marauding troop of Redcoats who had invaded her kitchen, and was quoted afterward as saying, “I wasn’t goin’ to have any Tories eatin’ my pun’kin pie!”
The day after the article appeared, Angus Perkerson called Peggy into his office and showed her a stack of mail the paper had received protesting the contents of the story. She had been accused of everything from defaming Georgian womanhood to bastardizing history in order to sell newspapers. Terribly upset by these accusations, she asked Perkerson if she could write a piece on the authenticity of her research. He refused and, to her great disappointment, cancelled the rest of the series.
Criticism was difficult for Peggy to accept; it set her back and gave her a “writer’s block” for several days thereafter. To shield her from these bouts of insecurity, Medora did not show Peggy any negative responses to her articles, as she was anxious to avoid the loss of a good reporter’s services. Peggy’s sensitivity to criticism, her inordinate need to write lengthy replies to her detractors, and her testiness when her work was attacked, were the reasons Medora and Angus Perkerson so seldom gave her stories with much depth. This kept peace in the feature department, but it also kept Peggy from any significant writing achievement.
Though it was nearly 5:00 P.M., a bold, yellow sun blazed in the summer sky as Peggy stepped off the trolley on July 10, 1923, and started across Peachtree Street. The glare was so strong that she was almost to the curb before she recognized the green sports car parked in front of her house. Red Upshaw, bronzed and trim, got out from behind the wheel and stood barring her path. She had been certain that if they were ever to meet again, she would feel nothing but fury. Reality was another matter. After a short exchange, she asked him to come into the house.
Only Bessie was at home; Stephens and her father were still at work. Peggy and Upshaw talked for a while in the living room about what they had been doing during their six months of separation, though Peggy did not mention that she was seeing John Marsh.
In a sworn deposition taken less than a month later, as evidence for her divorce, Peggy said that after about ten minutes she and Upshaw went from the living room upstairs to the bedroom they had shared. She did not mention that they had been separated for half a year, nor did she state whether or not she went upstairs with him of her own accord. Once in the privacy of their bedroom, she claimed, “Mr. Upshaw demanded his connubial rights after striking me with his fist upon my left arm about the elbow.” The court representative then asked if she had given her husband cause for such violence. “I’ve been very kind and affectionate to my husband ever since our marriage and he has not had the least cause to complain of me,” she answered. She refused his advances, she said, out of fear that he would treat her “in a cruel and inhumane manner.” The counsel added that Upshaw had “jerked her against a bed, causing her to be bruised all over her body,” as she successfully tried to fight him off.
“Is that the truth, Mrs. Upshaw?” the judge asked.
“Yes sir,” Peggy replied, and then went on to explain that her shouts and screams had finally brought Bessie, who appeared in the doorway just as Red was leaving the bedroom, with Peggy crying hysterically as she ran after him, yelling at him to get out of the house. To Peggy’s horror, he turned then and struck her a vicious final blow in the left eye.
Peggy was rushed to the hospital, and it was two weeks before she had sufficiently recovered from the effects of this beating to return home. Her hospitalization was kept secret even from close relatives, for the humiliation was almost more than she could bear. Her bruises and abrasions were still much in evidence when she was discharged, and at home the same veil of secrecy prevailed. Peggy had asked her brother to tell Medora that she had had to leave town to tend to a sick relative and would be away from work for six weeks if that was acceptable. Medora said it was, but did not believe the story, suspecting an explanation nearer the truth.
The truth. It was something that only Peggy and Upshaw actually knew. But John Marsh had once again been placed in the middle. From Peggy’s defiled bed on Peachtree Street, Upshaw had gone directly to Marsh, confessed that he had attacked Peggy, claiming that she had provoked him, and then, after asking for a loan (which Marsh gave him), said he would agree to an uncontested divorce and would not return to Atlanta if Peggy did not press charges. He expected Marsh to act as an intermediary, and, indeed, that is the role Marsh assumed.
In view of the scandal a court case would create, Peggy, Stephens, and Mr. Mitchell thought that Red’s proposal was the best solution. But then he left town before signing a paper agreeing to a divorce. The Mitchells were furious, but nothing could be done. Emotionally and physically battered and bruised from Upshaw’s attack, her eyes blackened and her face swollen, Peggy at first refused to see anyone at all, but John Marsh insisted on visiting her even though, during the first week, he had to do so in a darkened hospital room. The evidence of Upshaw’s brutality so shocked Marsh that he bought Peggy a small pistol, which she kept beneath her pillow as protection in case Upshaw should break his promise not to return.
Peggy and John now shared what she thought was an ugly, horrible secret. Knowledge of it drew them closer together and Peggy felt confident that John Marsh would not reveal what he knew. By the time she left the hospital, Peggy felt more beholden to him than she had to anyone else in her life, and John had never felt as needed or as appreciated by a woman. He showed his gratitude by keeping Peggy’s secret, and she showed hers by tacitly agreeing to be his girl.
Mrs. John R. Marsh
1925–1936
Chapter Nine
BY SPRING of 1924, Peggy was the leading feature writer on the Journal. Not only was she a respected newspaper woman, she had become a well-known local personality, a star reporter, and her name and face were familiar to all who read the Sunday Journal.
The Journal had a host of fine writers on the staff during the time of Peggy Mitchell’s tenure. In addition to Erskine Caldwell there was Grantland Rice, Laurence Stallings (whose play What Price Glory? would soon appear on Broadway), Ward Morehouse, Ward Greene, Morris Markey, Roark Bradford, W. B. Seabrook, and William Howland. Peggy had quickly taken her place among them. Robert Ruark, a future best-selling author who was also on the Journal with her, said, “She walked straight into her stories without a lot of hemming and hawing.”
One story that took her from the feature department downstairs to the newsroom was her interview with Harry Thaw, the Pittsburgh millionaire who had won front-page notorie
ty with his legal fights to escape the gallows and, later, the insane asylum, for the murder of famous architect Stanford White, the lover of Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit.
His hair, still a thick shock which he brushes straight back in a long pompadour, is neither white, [nor] salt-and-pepper, nor iron-gray, but an odd slate color, the even gray of a Maltese cat. His quick, noiseless movements are catlike, too, as if the years of confinement had bred in him a nervousness, an abruptness, bordering almost on suspicion.
Written in the same descriptive style as her features, Peggy’s news stories did not really qualify as hard news, but were judged to be of more timely interest than those pieces that ran in the magazine.
Peggy made it her business to keep up with current fashion, and she wrote knowledgeably about “Society’s darlings and their smart bobs.” She was the Journal authority on the changing styles in slang, as well. In one of many articles on the subject, we learn that, along with “romping hieroglyphics and playful pharaohs” printed on the vivid dress fabrics of spring, 1923, Tutankhamen had invaded current slang. “King Tut” referred to “a well-meaning man who is continually putting his foot into it.” A “mummy” was “a person without personality,” but when “favorite mummy” was applied to a girl, it signified “the highest approval.” And Peggy tossed in her own invention: “sacred ibis!” to replace “hot dog!” in moments of excitement. No one, she insisted, had a “sweetie” anymore, they had a “sheik.” Other vivid phrases included “dizzy frog” (a dumbbell), “Wouldn’t that tweeze your eyebrows?” (shocking), “Wouldn’t that make you tear a toenail?” (unbelievable), “young ineffectuals” (would-be intelligentsia), “slipper-flipper” (someone who scorned serious thinkers), and “the eel’s heels” or “the oyster’s adenoids” (which replaced “the cat’s meow”).
Peggy’s skirts were shorter than most, her language bold, and — in spite of the treatment she had received at the hands of Red Upshaw and her deepening friendship with John — she was still a tease and a flirt. She liked to surround herself with young men and felt a good relationship could stand such competition. She bore many traits of the flaming flapper and was part and parcel of the Zelda Fitzgerald era, of the aftermath of Camp Gordon in Atlanta in 1917 and what troops do to any city, of the rebellion of Southern women against the mores and patterns and restrictions of the past. She frequently suggested stories that involved her interviewing college boys and, invariably, she would win a heart or two along the way. But, she claimed, these “little flirtations were not for John to take seriously.”
Sometimes she posed for the illustrations that accompanied her articles. One story, “Should Husbands Spank Their Wives?” featured a photograph of Peggy draped across the knees of a young art editor, who posed with his hand raised over her backside.
Medora Perkerson said of Peggy’s Journal articles that they “mirrored the flapper era, almost as John Held, Jr., and Katharine Brush and F. Scott Fitzgerald did in their cartoon and fictional media. [Peggy] recorded the changing skirt lengths ... the earliest boyish bobs, the strange slang of the ‘Flaming Youth’ period as reflected in Atlanta.” She wrote hastily, but with care, to meet her deadlines, and Medora considered her a “genius at character delineation” and admired her “gift for sharply differentiating one individual from another so that each article had its special identity.” Peggy had a talent for sketching memorable characters in a few short strokes. Certainly her description of Harry Thaw — with his hair “the even gray of a Maltese cat” and his “quick, noiseless movements” — brings him instantly to life.
On June 17, 1924, Peggy’s divorce was filed in the Superior Court at Fulton County. The deposition she had made following Upshaw’s attack was placed in evidence. She asked for an annulment of her marriage to Upshaw and restoration of her maiden name, but she waived a settlement or any form of alimony.
Peggy’s marriage to Red Upshaw had caused great division in the Mitchell household. Her father had never reconciled himself to the marriage and believed she had demeaned the name of Mitchell by entering into such a union. But the divorce, rather than helping to ease the situation, worsened it. Divorce was unknown in the Mitchell family and was against the Fitzgeralds’ religion.
Neither her father nor Stephens was present as Branch Howard, a family friend who acted as her attorney, presented Peggy’s deposition to the court and she swore to its validity. The foreman of the jury agreed that sufficient proof had been submitted to authorize a total divorce, but not an annulment or restoration of her maiden name. The jury’s verdict did not discourage her and, on October 16, she returned to court before a second jury and underwent the entire painful experience again. This time she won her petition. She was again Margaret Mitchell, better known, however, as Peggy Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal.
Peggy’s closest friend at this time was Augusta Dearborn, who had now moved to Atlanta, but her relationship with Medora was more active simply because they were in daily contact. Peggy admired Medora’s professionalism and the way she had succeeded on her own at a newspaper where her husband was her boss. Not only was Medora a good editor and reporter, she also wrote the successful “Marie Rose” advice column. As Marie Rose, Medora received three or four large wire baskets of mail a week — letters numbering into the hundreds. She could only reply to a few of them in the paper, but she read each one of the others, somehow managing, in spite of her enormous work load, to answer all but the obscene or incoherent letters. Paying the costly postage herself, Medora was a one-woman social welfare team, enlisting the aid of doctors, ministers, and educators and giving, as Peggy noted, “sympathetic but hard-headed and practical advice when needed.” This dedication to her readers, to people for whom she felt some responsibility because her column had provoked their letters, had a great impact on Peggy. In later years, when she was confronted with thousands of fan letters, she insisted on answering them in the same fashion, paying her own postage.
In the fall of 1924, Peggy did a brief stint as entertainment editor, covering “Pictures and Players.” During this period, her by-line appeared on “Movie Stars Who Call Atlanta Home” — Ben Lyon, Mabel Normand, and Colleen Moore, who, as Kathleen Morrison, had been a Jackson Street neighbor of the Mitchells until 1908, when her mother had taken her to Hollywood. Perhaps Peggy’s most famous interview was the one with Rudolph Valentino, in which she reported:
When he turned to bow and grip my hand in a grasp that made my rings cut into my fingers I suffered a distinct shock. Dressed in a fuzzy tan golf suit with tan sox to match and well-worn brown brogues, he seemed shorter and stockier than when on the screen as the Sheik. He seemed older — just a hit tired. His face was swarthy, so brown that his white teeth flashed in startling contrast to his skin, his eyes tired, bored but courteous; his voice low husky, with a soft sibilant accent ... that held me with its well-bred, almost monotonous intonation.
She ended the article by saying that she “registered a world-beating blush” when the Sheik, in his knickers, picked her up in his arms, as he had Agnes Ayers on the desert sands, and carried her over the threshold of the terrace of his hotel suite into the sitting room.
None of this was timeless prose and no one was more aware of this than Peggy. Writing for a newspaper is the most transient of literary endeavors; the printed pages of a reporter’s work last less than a day, ending up as wrapping for a piece of fish, or as a lining for a refuse can. But Peggy had grown good at her craft and had found her own niche in it. Her old friend from debutante days, Helen Turman, had married Morris Markey, and he was leaving the Journal to join the staff of the New Yorker. But Peggy had no high-flown ambitions to go on to a more prestigious newspaper job or to become a staff member on one of the many fine national literary magazines. Her opinion of herself was not much higher than it had been at Smith, and the fact that John could always find so many errors in her grammar and spelling, coupled with her incomplete education, made her feel not only insecure, but something of a literary fraud.
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br /> In December, 1924, John Marsh suffered a severe attack of hiccoughs that lasted forty-two days. During the first few days, Peggy tried all the home cures she had heard about, but John’s hiccoughs persisted. By the end of the first week, he was so weak and exhausted from the seizure that the doctor put him in the hospital. No cause was found; no remedy seemed to help. There was concern that his heart was being overtaxed. Peggy spent every moment she could at his bedside. In what spare time was left, she began a thorough investigation into the causes and cures of hiccoughs, which she turned into an article, “What Causes Hiccoughs?”, for the Christmas issue of the Sunday magazine. She persuaded the doctors to try some of the unorthodox methods she had uncovered, like applying ether to the skin over the diaphragm, which had no effect. Morphine and sleeping drugs were administered, but John hiccoughed as he slept. Finally, when the medics threw up their hands in despair, Peggy applied psychology, doing what she could to distract him and militantly supervising the conversations of visitors and nurses to make sure no one spoke about anything distressing.
And, as she stood vigil by his bed and in the corridor outside his room, knowing how weak and near death he was, she realized the depth of her feelings for him. She was terrified that he might die and did not know how she would cope with such a loss. Her need for his council had grown steadily, as had her dependence upon his editing ability. Before his attack, they had been seeing each other daily and were on the telephone several times during the day as well. It dawned on her at this time that she might well be in love with John Marsh, though this was not like the romantic love she had felt for Clifford Henry nor the passionate love she had experienced with Red Upshaw. With John, there was a sense of familiarity, of comfort, of never having to deal with emotional responses that sent her reeling.
