by Anne Edwards
The job of editing the book was so exhausting to Peggy that, at the beginning of January, 1936, she spent two weeks in bed, turning over most of the final work to John, under her supervision. Rhoda Williams came by before and after work to pick up and deliver the typed pages she was doing for them in the evenings, and Margaret Baugh did what she could during the day. Three-fourths of the manuscript was mailed to Macmillan on January 19, and John, in an eleven-page letter to Lois two days later, reported that “Peggy collapsed as soon as it was sent off.” Word had come to the Marshes that Lois was expecting Peggy to come to New York for the publication of the book, and John had immediately become protective of his wife’s health and privacy. A pattern was forming — one that had contradicting ramifications. On one hand, John would guard Peggy against any and all demands upon her, and then, on the other, he would initiate or encourage a public-relations scheme that would pull her right into a pressured, time-consuming situation, the likes of which he claimed he was trying to avoid at all costs.
John Marsh did have a protective personality and Peggy had always felt she could lean on him. Augusta Dearborn Edwards states that she had felt this protectiveness of John’s for many years, and that he had been equally protective of Red Upshaw during the two years of their friendship. Even so, the odd letter that he wrote to Lois Cole on Peggy’s behalf seems unnecessarily hostile; indeed, he implied that Macmillan was to blame for Peggy’s health problems:
It may be that she will never come to New York and if she comes at all it will be because on the day she gets on the train she feels able to come and wants to come. The reasons are partly financial but chiefly physical. After two automobile accidents in less than a year, she is in no shape to undertake anything that puts a strain on her ... and a trip to New York for the first time in many years would be a major strain. The reason why she has been in bed the past two weeks is the fact that getting the book delivered to you involved the most prolonged strain she has had to undergo in many years. She hasn’t recovered from the injury to her back which she received in the [first] automobile accident and those injuries included injury to the nerves running from the spine at the point where she got the twist. Sitting up for hours at a time, day, after day, over a period of weeks, typing, editing the manuscript, handling heavy reference books, etc. was about the worst possible thing she could have done. She stuck it out until the job was finished, except for checking the typewriter copy, correcting errors, etc., which was work I could do under her supervision and then her ailments got her down and the doctor ordered her to bed.
The doctor thinks she may yet have to have an operation, one which she might have had a couple of months ago except for the book and her whole concern is to get herself rested up and postpone the operation at least until after the proofs are ready and the job is finished. It won’t help her resting a bit if she thinks Macmillan is making plans based on her coming to New York when she may not be able to come....
He promised Lois that the remaining chapters could be finished in a week, which would leave merely a final polishing to be done. With some surprise, he commented that he did not know that publishing houses had copy editors, but that Peggy did not want anyone to do more than change her commas (she thought now she had used too many in the first half of the book), and no one was to alter the dialect under any circumstance because a house Negro talked differently than a field hand. Peggy, he explained, had tried to make the Negroes talk like Negroes without at the same time putting every single word into dialect and thereby making it difficult to read. The dialect was thus a careful compromise between what he called “true nigger talk” and what could be, from a practical standpoint, translated into type. “Please don’t change this,” he wrote Lois.
Lois, understandably taken aback by this letter, replied: “I assure you my remarks were prompted by Southern hospitality I learned from my Atlanta friends. I took it for granted that the author of a first and successful novel would wish to have some of the fun connected with the success.... Had we known Peggy was endangering her health so seriously and drastically by working on the book we would not have asked to have it finished for Spring publication. It could have been put off for a year.... But once publication was set — a deadline was inevitable.”
That deadline was now extended, and the May 5 publication date was set forward to June 30. But now Lois faced an even greater problem — Latham had gone to Europe for two months, leaving her in charge of the project during his absence, and when she received the manuscript from the Marshes, she was taken aback. She had known, of course, that Peggy had written a long book, but as there had been so many duplicate chapters in the first packets Macmillan had been given, no one had been able to project the final page count.
Now, with the arrival of the last package, on February 8, Lois Cole’s fears were confirmed. The book was over four hundred thousand words long. Though she had expected a long manuscript, when she finally received it Lois was shocked by its size. She now wrote Peggy that, because of its length, the book would have to sell for three dollars and not two-fifty as Macmillan had originally planned. Even at that, she claimed, the company could not hope for a penny in profit unless ten thousand copies were sold. She therefore asked Peggy to agree to accept a reduced royalty schedule of a straight 10 percent on all copies, the alternative being to cut the book drastically.
There were runaway best-sellers like Tobacco Road and Anthony Adverse and Lamb in His Bosom that sold into the hundreds of thousands of copies, and Macmillan could hope for that kind of success with Gone With the Wind, but the odds were against any book selling such numbers at the high price of three dollars during those spartan days of the Depression. Realistically, at this stage, Macmillan set a goal of 27,500 copies and planned a first printing of 10,000 to be followed, if warranted, by a printing of 7,500, then 5,000, and 5,000 again. The Macmillan people remained positive in their feelings about the book’s potential, but were not ready to assume it would become a big best-seller. They were at this time waiting for a sign — a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, film interest, something of that sort — and that would not come until the book was in galley proof. In the meantime, they were faced with a much higher manufacturing cost than they had anticipated.
Upon receipt of Lois’s letter about the lower royalty, John again took to the typewriter and wrote her a single-spaced, ten-page reply.
Discounting the duplicate chapters, the manuscript was shorter than before, not longer, he protested. It wasn’t Peggy’s fault that Macmillan had not realized the length of the book, he added, for she had always thought no one would print it at that length unless they did it in two volumes, and she had been in a state of “constant mystification” ever since Macmillan had bought it, because of their insistence that she should do nothing to it but bring it together and deliver it back to them intact. She expected to be told in the beginning that it had to be cut and when nothing was said about it, she had surreptitiously cut to improve the story herself, so the manuscript was now fifty to seventy-five pages shorter than before. According to John, they had now deleted a thirty-page chapter in which Rhett lends Hetty Tarleton some money to buy her mother some horses; a long chapter that went into detail about what happened after Sherman went into Atlanta, because it slowed the action at a time when all interest was focused on what was happening at Tara; a seven- to eight-page section in part five where Mammy finally leaves Scarlett and goes back to Tara, which was condensed to three paragraphs; and several pages describing the education of a young lady in the old South. Peggy also condensed a section in which Miss Pittypat talked at length about how the carpetbagger gentleman got her property away from her, and two long sections on what happened to minor various characters after the war. And the original Reconstruction material, John explained, was concentrated into two rather long chapters, which Peggy had written before she had done all her research, when she had still been under the impression that Reconstruction arrived with a bang right after the war ended. Her furthe
r investigation had shown that conditions were relatively pleasant in 1866 in comparison to the worse horrors that developed over a period of years. This had made it necessary for her to split up the background material and string it out through the chapters dealing with the years from 1866 to 1872.
This last gave the book a slightly different look, John felt, and perhaps because of it it did seem longer, but, on balance, the book was shorter now. He closed saying, “From the length of this and my previous letter you may get the impression that I wrote Peggy’s long novel which I didn’t. I wish I could write as well as she does. Personally I am much more enthusiastic about the book in spite of its length than she is.”
His protestations notwithstanding, Marsh enclosed a letter of agreement signed by Peggy, stating she would accept the lower royalty arrangement. If Latham had been in New York, there is a good chance this arrangement would never have been requested, for a royalty graduating to 15 percent was standard, and Latham, for one, had had a good idea of the book’s length since the beginning, and had even warned his production staff in an early memo that the book would be “about as long as Anthony Adverse and there’s no use trying to trim it down much because it doesn’t seem to have any chapters or characters that aren’t absolutely germane to the story.”
The fact that Peggy Mitchell had a book that would soon be published by Macmillan had become public knowledge following a statement given to the press by George Brett, president of the company, during a short trip he had made to Atlanta in January.
As soon as the Atlanta newspapers printed the news that Macmillan was publishing a book by an Atlanta author, Mrs. John Marsh, the telephone began to ring off the hook at the Marshes’ apartment. Macmillan had asked them to adhere to a “shush-shush” policy on news about the book so that the first major statements would come from the publishing company. But in a place like Atlanta, and with a couple whose best and oldest friends were all members of the newspaper world, that was nearly impossible. Yolande Gwin, at the Atlanta Constitution, was the first one to get a story from Peggy. John described the interview in a letter to Lois: “It wasn’t much. It got the headline but as publicity it was grade x. More social than literary. Yolande referred to her [Peggy] as ‘this clever young writer,’ but Yolande liked it and she’ll say something good later on.”
About this time, the manuscript was put into the capable hands of Miss Susan S. Prink, a copy editor at Macmillan. Just when Peggy thought the bulk of her work was done, a package arrived with the first thirty-five galleys of proof, each page liberally marked with Miss Prink’s queries and punctuation. Peggy was later to say to Latham that “Miss Prink and I went through the war together,” and, indeed, it seems they did, as Miss Prink not only questioned everyone of Peggy’s unorthodox dashes, but asked the weary author to check, once again, all historic dates and give her sources.
After a flurry of furious letters from Peggy to Miss Prink, which were answered with cool implacability, compromises were reached. Most of the dashes were removed from the book and the Negro dialect in some passages was spelled more phonetically for easier reading. But for a while there was a stand-off on the matter of Scarlett’s stream-of-consciousness dialogue that ran through the entire book. Miss Prink felt this should be in quotes; Peggy did not. Scarlett’s thoughts presented the book’s point of view and, as such, were more telling than much of the action. Peggy explained, not too pleasantly, that they propelled the story forward and she did not want any gratuitous punctuation to distract the reader. Four letters passed between them on this point. Miss Prink proved stronger than Peggy and, in the end, when Scarlett says to herself, “I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara,” she does so in quotes.
It was only fourteen weeks before publication when it suddenly came to someone’s attention that, since the manuscript had been submitted without a title page, it was still missing the author’s credit. There was a Mary Mitchell who was publishing a book that spring and Lois asked if Peggy would mind being credited as “Margaret Marsh,” to avoid confusion.
Peggy sent back a title page that read:
Gone with the Wind
by
Margaret Mitchell
And she asked that the book be dedicated:
To J. R. M.
The manuscript contained another set of initials, too. At the end of chapter thirteen, Belle Watling gives Melanie some gold coins wrapped in a man’s handkerchief. Scarlett knows that the handkerchief belongs to Rhett Butler because the monogram on it, RKB, matches the monogram on a handkerchief Rhett had given her to wrap some flowers in the previous day. It is never revealed in the text what the K in Rhett Butler’s monogram stands for. However, RKB were all initials that belonged to Red Berrien Kinnard Upshaw.
Chapter Sixteen
IN FEBRUARY, 1936, when Macmillan announced its spring–summer list, Gone With the Wind was given prominent placement. Inquiries from Hollywood were immediately forthcoming and galleys were sent to several of the story editors of leading film companies. Samuel Goldwyn wrote a personal letter to Harold Latham asking for the Mary Mitchell galleys of the new book, Gone With the Wind, but decided against the book two days after receiving them. The Hollywood story editors, most of whom were women, tried desperately to get their bosses — all of whom were men — to buy the rights, but any fervent enthusiasm for the book as a viable film property seemed to stop at the movie moguls’ desks.
Louis B. Mayer was reported to be somewhat interested, but Irving Thalberg, MGM’s reigning creative genius, was quoted as telling him, “Forget it, Louie. No Civil War picture ever made a nickle.”
Thalberg was right. Stark Young’s So Red the Rose had failed at the box office, as had MGM’s own Operator 13. Exhibitors had been complaining that costume pictures were not bringing in audiences and box office receipts proved this to be the case. Therefore, Macmillan’s first efforts to sell the book to the movies, through E. E. Hall in their own subsidiary-rights department, met with no success. Hall called a meeting with George Brett, Harold Latham, and Lois Cole, and suggested they turn the property over to an agent who could work full-time selling the book. Hall, after all, had the whole Macmillan list to deal with, and not only for movie rights, but all subsidiary sales, and, as Gone With the Wind would be a costume film, expensive, and hard to cast, it needed a hard sell. Lois proposed Annie Laurie Williams, an agent with a company that had often done business for Macmillan in the past and who had sold John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to Twentieth Century-Fox for a tall sum.
Peggy resisted the idea of an agent from the very beginning, but wrote Lois on March 14, 1936, that if taking Miss Williams as her agent would make things easier for Lois, she would agree and would not hold Lois responsible if Annie Laurie Williams didn’t sell the book. Peggy had never thought a film company would buy her novel, for she did not see how it could possibly be cut to film length. With the failure of Macmillan’s subsidiary-rights department to interest Hollywood’s producers, the possibility of Miss Williams doing so seemed unlikely to her. As she understood it, Miss Williams was being employed by Macmillan, and was therefore technically not her agent, so all fees for her services would be paid by the publishing company.
Handed the ball by Macmillan, Annie Laurie Williams ran with it. Short and stocky, a twang of Texas in her cigarette voice, Miss Williams rammed her way into the opposing team’s territory with alarming quickness and then did some clever end running. Within a few weeks, Hollywood began to react. Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth put in an offer of $35,000. Doris Leroy Warner, representing her father, Jack Warner, topped Zanuck’s bid with a $40,000 offer, hoping the purchase of the book with the great role of Scarlett O’Hara would appease their female star, Bette Davis, who was threatening to walk out on suspension.
Annie Laurie Williams now trotted out her trick play. She refused these offers and insisted that she would not take less than $65,000. All this was duly reported to Peggy, who resented terribly the fact that someone had turned down such a fortun
e without consulting her. Had she known of it earlier, Peggy might well have insisted on accepting Warner’s $40,000 offer. It was too late for that now, but she began a barrage of letters to Lois stating in no uncertain terms that she did not want Annie Laurie Williams to represent her any longer. Apart from the fact that Miss Williams was building a momentum that might be costly or even disastrous to interrupt, Lois Cole found it difficult to understand her friend’s reactions. The book’s success was Lois Dwight Cole’s goal, and she found it downright perverse of Peggy to jeopardize a film sale that could help catapult Gone With the Wind to the top of the best-seller list. So she kept on pressing Peggy to endorse Annie Laurie Williams as her recognized agent, while doing nothing to change Miss Williams’s status.
Peggy received a letter from her old Smith friend Ginny Morris, now a free-lance magazine writer, congratulating her and also inquiring about the rumor that she had turned down $40,000 for film rights. Peggy replied, “It seems a very widespread rumor, but there is no truth in it. Now, I ask you, can you imagine poor folks like me turning down $40 — much less $40,000?”
