by Anne Edwards
From the booksellers’ large first orders in March, it began to look as if Gone With the Wind would be more than moderately successful. But what Lois and Macmillan were still waiting for Was some outside spark that would help it make the best-seller lists. Then, on April 15, George Brett received a letter from the editor in chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club, informing him that Gone With the Wind had been chosen as a main selection, to be sent out to subscribers in either July, August, or September at their option. The Book-of-the-Month Club planned to take fifty thousand copies of the book to start, and agreed to pay $10,000 for exclusive book-club rights.
John was away on a trip to Savannah for Georgia Power when Lois called to tell Peggy this news. George Brett sent a confirming letter setting out the terms of Macmillan’s agreement with the Book-of-the-Month Club. For several days, Peggy kept the news to herself. Long-distance telephone calls were considered a great extravagance in the Mitchell–Marsh family, and so she was reluctant to call John to share the news with him. Finally, she took Brett’s letter over to show her father, who, she told Lois, was not only her father, but her severest critic. According to Peggy, Eugene Mitchell said frankly that “nothing in the world would induce to him read the book again and that nothing in the world except the fact that [Peggy] was his child induced him to read it originally.” It seemed to him “very strange that a sensible organization should pick this book,” an idea with which, at least in her letter to Lois, Peggy heartily concurred.
When John returned home several days later, Peggy was in despair. She thought the book would fail miserably as a Book-of-the-Month Club choice and embarrass everyone involved. John told her blandly that she was “a fool.”
As soon as Medora was informed of the Book-of-the-Month Club news, the Sunday Journal ran a story on it. Lois was furious because she thought Macmillan should have been the first to break the story, and she crowed a bit about the three-page advertisement for the book that Macmillan had placed in Publishers Weekly. Peggy was pleased with the advertisement (The characters are people with whom Miss Mitchell has lived, the atmosphere is the same she has breathed since birth), but she thought the picture of her that had been used made her face look “long and pointed instead of square” and gave her “a loathsome ratlike Levantine look,” and she wrote to Lois, “I have become hardened to looking like a cat but never a rat.” Actually, the picture was a flattering one — her eyes look large and alive, and her smile is wistful and charming.
The “ratlike” photograph was to appear in the Book-of-the-Month Club bulletin and Peggy asked Lois to withdraw it and replace it with a new one she sent. She also requested that the bulletin, in describing Bessie, substitute the words “colored maid” for “colored lady” for the benefit of Southern readers.
In April, Publishers Weekly gave the novel its first advance review. “Gone With the Wind is very possibly the greatest American novel,” it concluded, after lavishly praising its character development, story, and historical authenticity. The New York World Telegram said in its book column, “The forthcoming Civil War novel, Gone With the Wind, will undoubtedly be leading the best-seller lists as soon as it appears.”
Peggy was already a star Macmillan author, but she refused to think about the success that might be ahead. Lois warned her to prepare herself, and asked her to please, please reconsider Annie Laurie Williams as her authorized film representative because now, with the Book-of-the-Month Club deal, they had the leverage to demand a high sum for the rights. But Peggy had taken an intense dislike to Miss Williams and to the idea of anyone except the lawyers at Macmillan handling any subsidiary-rights offers she might receive. “I know you, I don’t know any other agents,” she wrote Latham. To Lois she wrote that she had not realized she would have to give Annie Laurie Williams 10 percent of a film sale.
From the start, everyone in the Mitchell and Marsh households regarded Gone With the Wind as a one-shot fluke, which meant that whatever sums Peggy received from it had to be handled well, and the three men in her family intended to watch her investment closely. It didn’t occur to them that Annie Laurie Williams was in a position, and had the expertise, to negotiate a far more lucrative deal for Peggy than Macmillan’s lawyers could have done.
In addition, and despite the fact that Annie Laurie Williams was a Texan and so considered herself a “sister Southerner,” Peggy thought the agent’s tactics pushy, and it did not help matters that Annie Laurie Williams innocently chose the evening of April 24 to call Peggy in the hope of ameliorating their relationship. It was a Friday evening, and the Marshes were to attend the opera. Because of some weakness she was experiencing with her eyes, Peggy had planned to spend most of the day in bed. But there had been one demand upon her after another. Before breakfast, a woman who had read an advance galley of Gone With the Wind and reviewed it for a small Georgia paper appeared at Peggy’s door wanting to meet the author. Flattered by the woman’s praise, Peggy had let her talk most of the morning — until a call came from a friend whose mother had broken her hip and whose child could not be left alone. Peggy agreed to take the injured woman to the hospital for X rays, and so she had not had any lunch either.
The afternoon had proven equally as difficult, for Bessie had reached her at the hospital with the news that a poor and ailing old-lady friend of Peggy’s was being evicted from her house. Attending to this situation took up the rest of the day and Peggy had arrived home with only twenty minutes to eat and dress and get to the opera when Annie Laurie Williams called. Peggy told her she had been ill and could not talk at that time, rather than explaining that she was late for the opera. Miss Williams continued her conversation, saying she was sorry to hear that but she had understood that Peggy had wanted her to proceed as her agent in the matter of the movies and she thought they should discuss how Peggy’s best interests could be represented. At this point, as Peggy told Lois, she “blew up” and told Miss Williams that she had given her no such authority. The indefatigable Miss Williams ignored this, and insisted that she would come down to Atlanta to talk the matter over. Peggy told her she had no intention of deciding anything now because “when sick people make decisions they are always wrong.” Moreover, she declared, if Miss Williams had read the book, she would know it was not good movie material. Annie Laurie Williams had read the book and disagreed, but the call had only worsened the impasse between the two women.
In truth, Annie Laurie Williams’s only mistake was inadvertently calling Peggy at an inconvenient moment. But, strange as it may seem, Peggy never forgave Miss Williams for this call. In letters to Lois, Harold Latham, and George Brett she complained that Miss Williams was the cause of her going to the opera hungry, and she described in detail how she had been forced to miss meals throughout the day. Even in much later letters she referred to Annie Laurie Williams as “the lady who’s bent on starving me to death.”
Harold Latham arrived in Atlanta that Wednesday to discuss the problem with Peggy. She and John were not just resisting Miss Williams, but the whole idea of anyone other than Macmillan working in their behalf. They trusted Macmillan, and they did not know what to expect from a stranger, nor did they see why they should have to hire an agent when Macmillan would have to be present at any negotiations anyway. Latham carefully explained to them that no matter how fine the relationship between Peggy and his company, Macmillan would be looking out for its own interests first, and so should she. But neither of the Marshes could be convinced of this.
Even more distressing to the Marshes was the fact that Peggy was suffering from severe eye strain caused by the months of checking data for the book and proofreading the galleys. She claimed she never counted them, but that her references ran into the thousands. She left nothing to chance or criticism — what time of day the news came of Hood’s defeat at Jonesboro, the weather conditions at the time, the hour the retreat began and the hour the last outpost withdrew, the exact positions of the munitions trains, the exact time they were fired. Then, of course, there were h
undreds of details, such as when hoop skirts went out and bustles came in, the price cotton sold for in Liverpool in 1863 ($1.91 a pound), the way pistols worked, “and, well, hundreds of other unimportant but important things.”
Peggy did tend to exaggerate. It is doubtful that she had to “look through nearly a million old Bibles, old letters and more geneological records” before she found the name “Scarlett” — which had actually been in the text all along as a surname. But, once she knew the book was going to be published, she did reexamine old tax books, muster rolls, land lotteries, hospital records, and old directories and war land grants from Savannah, Atlanta, and Clayton County; she even went through historian Franklin Garrett’s voluminous list of tombstone names in Atlanta and its environs, to make double sure that none of the names she had given to characters in the book had once belonged to a real person. One such name was found. Cathleen Calvert’s husband, who was originally named Wilson, thus became Hilton, a name chosen when the book was in galleys.
Bed rest had been prescribed for Peggy on the day of the opera because of her eyes. But whatever the ailment, it is extremely difficult to judge just how ill she really was. She did suffer a great many injuries due to accidents. She had chronic trouble with her leg and back, a condition that was apparently more painful when she sat at her typewriter than when she tended family and friends, chauffeuring them around the city, handling their most difficult emergencies, doing battle with hospital staffs and civil employees. Her eyes had been strained in the last eight months of work on the book and were to bother her throughout the coming year, but she had no disease of the eye. The fact was, her ill health and the ill health of any member of her family had become a convenient excuse to use at any time and at the slightest provocation. Her state of health was discussed in almost every letter she wrote, no matter how slight her relationship with the recipient. Excuses for tardiness — in replying to a friend or fan, returning an article she had bought, paying a bill — were invariably pinned on her ill health. Those who knew her only through her letters believed that they were dealing with a frail, brave, sick woman. It was due to this impression, which she herself furthered, that rumors of her dire physical condition circulated so often after her book was published.
Anyone who knew Peggy thought of her as a vibrant, vital woman. But from the time Gone With the Wind was published, she propagated a very specific public image, utilizing every opportunity to call attention to her physical condition. In the first publicity release she gave Macmillan she wrote, “I am very small. I don’t feel small. Like most small people I feel myself as big as anyone else and twice as strong. But I am only 4’ 11” tall. By working hard all the time and drinking lots of milk I manage to keep my weight at one hundred pounds.”
She also managed, in the space of less than five hundred words, to explain why she had written about the Civil War (“I was reared on it”), and to deny ever having read Vanity Fair, to which her book had already been compared, until “a year and a half ago after my auto accident,” adding, “I was on crutches for about three years.” She said that she read voraciously and rapidly and had hoped to study medicine, “but while I was at Smith College my mother died and I had to come home to keep house.” Except that she claimed she was fifteen and a half years old when she left Smith, the above statements were probably true. But they underscored her way of relating time and experiences to the “disasters” in her life. References to accidents and crutches and long years of convalescence just before the book’s publication created an aura of sadness about her. Further talk of darkened rooms and bandages and orders not to try to read even a telephone number was certain to create rumors of serious illness and advancing blindness — and so it did. Then, upon hearing or reading these rumors, Peggy would become unaccountably incensed — even though they brought with them warm responses of sympathy and protectiveness.
Latham returned to Atlanta in May, bringing Peggy the first bound copies of Gone With the Wind. He asked her to look for any further typographical errors before the first large printing, a task she could barely face. She wrote Lois that she “nearly threw up at the sight of it,” adding that one should not feel that way about one’s first and only child, but that seeing the book reminded her “of the nightmare of getting it ready.”
These advance copies were being sent out to reviewers and to the film studios, even those who had already received galleys. Annie Laurie Williams was making her grandstand play, and one of Latham’s motives for coming to Atlanta was to try one last time to convince Peggy that she must endorse Miss Williams, as it would give her greater authority in her negotiations. Peggy and John refused to do this and Latham returned to New York disheartened but certain that Macmillan must carry on as they were with “Bonnie” Annie Laurie, who, Peggy complained to Lois, would probably be the cause of “me laying me down and deeing before we get to the end of the row.”
When Latham got back to New York, he put through a request for a five-thousand-dollar advance on royalties to be sent immediately to Mrs. Marsh. It would be months before, under the contract, she would have received any of her earnings and, as the book’s orders were now well over twenty thousand and there was the Book-of-the-Month Club money to come as well, Macmillan agreed. Until this point, Peggy had received only her full advance, five hundred dollars.
Yolande Gwin at the Atlanta Constitution had been sent one of the advance copies of the novel, as had other book people in Atlanta. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone Peggy had ever known in Atlanta wanted to throw her a party, and she accepted them all, but when Latham renewed Lois’s invitation for her to come to New York for publication, Peggy refused because, she said, “I’d hate to land in New York looking like a hag and with my eyes hanging out so far you could wipe them off with a broomstick.”
Since she would not come to New York, Macmillan’s Atlanta office tried to get her to do as much publicity on that end as possible, and, with Margaret Baugh’s prodding, she finally accepted an invitation to speak at an Atlanta Library Club supper before an audience of about fifty people. She had spoken a few weeks earlier at the Macon Writers’ Club Breakfast, but, despite an audience of two hundred and fifty people, that had been “like talking with friends.” This was different and, as she told Latham, she spent “anguished days” going through her bibliography planning to tell the “library ladies just how dull the job of writing was.” Then, on the day of the dinner, Alma Hill Jamison, head of the reference department of the Carnegie Library, introduced her as “an author whose book has been variously compared to Vanity Fair, War and Peace, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” This upset her so badly, she wrote Latham on June 1, 1936, that she drew a blank and forgot even the titles of the reference books she had had in mind and when she “came to,” she realized she was telling “indelicate stories.” And, after a glance at Miss Jessie Hopkins, the head librarian at Carnegie Library, she thought she was perfectly safe from having to address librarians in the future.
However, she did turn right around and speak at a banquet given in her honor at the Georgia Press Association’s annual meeting, held that year in Milledgeville from June 10 to 12, and at which she was treated as a celebrity instead of as John Marsh’s wife, as in years past.
Though the book was still in the hands of only a select few (fifteen hundred advance copies had been shipped at this time), Peggy was already a celebrity, at least in her hometown and to her friends in the Press Club. News of Hollywood interest in the novel and of the Book-of-the-Month Club edition had appeared in film columns and the local papers. Reviewers had read the book, and in some cases had published early reviews, all of which were laudatory and dealt with Gone With the Wind as a literary event.
No one was more overwhelmed by her emerging eminence than Peggy herself, and her shock and disbelief did not decrease with the affirmation each new review brought. From the beginning, she made a point of replying to each review. To Joseph Henry Jackson, whose advance critique appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, s
he wrote:
I suppose you could call my reactions “pleasure and happiness” even if I did have to go to bed with a cold pack on my head and an aspirin after I read your words. God knows I’m not like my characters, given to vapors and swooning and “states,” but I was certainly in a state. I have always been able to bear up nobly under bad news but your good news floored me. I suppose it was because it was so unexpected.
She then went on for several pages telling him about her childhood, and ended by thanking him for his remarks about her style, which he had called “simple and utterly sincere.”
I haven’t any literary style and I know it but have never been able to do anything about it. I am very conscious of my lack in this particular and I was expecting more brickbats about it than any other thing. I wish I could tell you how very happy you have made me! Just saying thank you seems too inadequate!
When she replied to Harry Stillwell Edwards’s glowing review in the Atlanta Journal on June 14, she fell back to being the Southern belle of old:
My dear Mr. Edwards:
Only a very small remnant of decorum prevents me from addressing you as “my very dear Mr. Edwards,” or “you utterly darling person,” or “you kind, kind man.” But I will try to remember my raising and merely address you as —
My dear Mr. Edwards:
May I thank you first for the happiness you brought to my father? You see, he was especially anxious that Southerners and Georgians should like my book and especially afraid that they wouldn’t, although the book is as true as documentation and years of research could make it. He didn’t like the notion of my offending the people of my state, nor did I. And when he read your perfectly marvelous review his mind was set at ease. “If Mr. Edwards likes it — etc.”
