Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  I am not in the best condition to write you the kind of letter I’d like to write you, the kind of letter that would adequately tell you how much I appreciated your review, how happy it made me. I have just made my escape from Atlanta after losing ten pounds since my publication day, after having photographers with the morning coffee, and strangers collaring me at the bank and ladies’ societies at me on the phone all day wanting me to make a “little talk.” ... And now, some fifty miles up the road toward the mountains, I find myself even tireder and more flabbergasted than ever. For I never dreamed the book which I didn’t think worth retyping and trying to sell would ever sell, or having sold, would ever get a kind word from a reviewer. But I want to write you now and thank you for when I do get up to the mountains I know I’ll go to bed and not get up for a week.

  I must admit that when I heard that you were to review me my heart sank. I suppose that needs some explanation.... Your “John Brown’s Body” is my favorite poem, my favorite book. I know more of it by heart than I do any other poetry. It means more to me, is realer than anything I’ve ever read by any poet, bar none, and I’ve read an awful lot of poetry....

  The tone, the length, and naiveté, and the desperation in Peggy’s letters to reviewers she had not met combined to ensnare the recipients into correspondence with her. The recipients of such letters could not help but be flattered, first by her compliments and second by her humility. Here was a lady who had just won praise from almost every respected reviewer across the nation and whose first book was being hailed as a masterpiece, and she was bowing to their own “greatness.” The sense of flattery was followed by sympathy and pity for a woman so ravaged by an adulatory public that she had had to run away and hide out all alone in a small-town motel among traveling salesmen and their temporary companions. It was impossible to turn away from such helplessness without some pang of guilt. After receiving their letters, Brickell and Gran-berry were eager to help this innocent Southern lady whose life had suddenly been uprooted by unsought fame. Benét, to Peggy’s delight, replied in a sympathetic manner and suggested that they meet whenever she was in New York.

  Reading the great body of letters that Peggy Mitchell dashed off during her three-night sojourn in Gainesville, one is stunned by the overwhelming pleas for sympathy they contain. She seemed to be struggling with her own ambivalent emotions. On one hand, she was terrified of the changes fame would bring to her life and her marriage; on the other, fame was making a fantasy come true. Her name was being linked with those of the great writers whom she had admired all her life. Now she actually had good cause to write to literary celebrities and expect that they might reply. Peggy wrote Donald Adams of the New York Times on July 9, “For all I know of literary etiquette an author should keep haughtily silent.” (She doesn’t, of course, her letter to Adams being of even greater length than those to Benét, Granberry, and Brickell.) The fact that she replied to almost every good review, major or not, can be attributed to Southern politeness to a degree, but Peggy had not been much of a letter writer before the publication of Gone With the Wind. For a number of years, John had handled the bulk of their correspondence to his family and their mutual friends. Therefore, to write such long, personally revealing letters to people whom she had never met seems a curious thing for her to have done. But Peggy was in deep emotional water, and the letters were as much calls for help as they were expressions of thanks.

  She had written a book that had dramatically altered the pattern of her life, and she did not know how to cope with the changes. She began to hate the existence of the book while, at the same time, enjoying the personal glory it brought her. The letter to Donald Adams, perhaps the most pitiable of the “runaway” letters, is filled with a list of trials she had survived that nearly equaled Job’s. Toward the end, she vowed that she would never write another book:

  I wouldn’t go through this again for anything. When I look back on these last years of struggling to find time to write between deaths in the family, illness in the family and among friends which lastėd months and even years, childbirths (not my own!), divorces and neuroses among friends, my own ill health and four fine auto accidents which did everything from fracturing my skull to splintering my vertebrae — it all seems a nightmare. I wouldn’t tackle it again for anything.

  Peggy Mitchell’s heroine, Scarlett, was almost completely fearless when it came to plunging into tomorrow, but her creator feared any whisper of change. And, unlike her second heroine, Melanie Wilkes, Peggy did not accept her trials with quiet courage. People would be expecting things of her now that she was a famous author — speeches, comments, appearances, another book — and she knew she could not handle any of those pressures. She had known her greatest security as Mrs. John Marsh, and she did not think she or her marriage could withstand a fame that kept her constantly before the public. Nor did she ever want to write another book. If she was not to be looked at askance by those literary men and women who mattered so to her, then she had to have their sympathy and understanding.

  From Gainesville, she wrote George Brett at Macmillan:

  Life has been so much like a nightmare recently that it was all I could do to stay on my feet.... I finally ran away from town yesterday. A brisk three hour work out with three Associated Press boys and a couple of photographers finally finished me and I left town with practically no clothes and no money. I do think it’s awful when you’ve sent me a check for five thousand dollars that I haven’t had time to buy me a new dress, or have my car overhauled! I didn’t know an author’s life was like this.

  I’ve started for the back of beyond in the mountains and stopped here because I was going to sleep at the wheel and I was afraid I’d kill myself in a ditch. When I reach a place where there aren’t any telephones and no newspapers for my picture to be in, I’ll stop and write you a letter to tell you just how much I appreciate the check and all you and Macmillan have done for me. Good Heavens! With all those ads and the grand publicity the newspapers have given me, Macmillan could have sold Karl Marx up here in these hills!

  However, Peggy did not continue any farther into the hills, for that evening, July 9, when she called John he read her a telegram she had just received: “WE HAVE A WONDERFUL HIDEA WAY PLACE COME AND HIDE OUT HERE. YOU ARE MOST WELCOME NO NEWSPAPERS ONLY OTHER WRITERS EDWIN AND MABEL GRAN-BERRY, BLOWING ROCK, NORTH CAROLINA.”

  Blowing Rock was the summer campus of the English Department of Rollins College. Edwin Granberry and his wife, Mabel, were so moved by the “pathetic note” in Peggy’s letter to him that they had decided to offer her refuge, although they did not think she would accept. They were, of course, total strangers, but Blowing Rock was a writers’ colony and, coincidentally, Herschel Brickell was also due to arrive to give a series of lectures.

  Early the next morning, Peggy called John to tell him that she was coming right home and that he should make arrangements with the Granberrys for her to arrive at Blowing Rock on July 13, with the provision that her visit be kept secret. It seems perverse of her to have run off to stay with strangers in a writers’ colony where the other writers were not to be informed of her presence, but she was driven by desperation. It was true that the number of telephone calls and cables and gushing strangers had not diminished in her absence. However, she could have gone to New York and stayed with Lois (who begged her to do so); Augusta’s sister had offered her shelter at Saint Simons Island; and there was Frances in Wilmington, ready to do anything she could to help her harassed sister-inlaw. The public would not have invaded her privacy in any of those places. But it was not just the public Peggy feared. In her letter to Herschel Brickell, she had revealed the source of her greatest worry. “In the matter of Captain Butler,” she had written him, “I may yet have a lawsuit on my hands despite my protests that I didn’t model him after any human being I’ve ever heard of.”

  There was always the danger of a physical attack in a confrontation with Upshaw, as well, and this possibility terrified her. Blowing
Rock seemed to be a perfect hideaway — it would give her the opportunity to meet two writers who had praised her book; and, while Red Upshaw was clever enough to get through Macmillan’s lines, knew Augusta’s sister’s house at Saint Simons very well, and could easily have tracked down Frances, he would never suspect her of going, without John, to a place where everyone was a stranger to her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE MARSHES had celebrated their eleventh anniversary on July 4, 1936, but, in the brouhaha caused by the book’s publication, they had not exchanged presents. Medora had sent Peggy’s favorite flower, roses, and their arrival had reassured her that a shred of normalcy still existed in her life. She had tried not to let her sudden fame affect her, but it had been impossible to disregard it; it was there and she was conscious of the fact that now, when people saw her name or photograph in the newspapers, they conjured up a strange image of a Margaret Mitchell whom she did not know.

  There was nothing in Peggy’s appearance that would have led one to suspect that they were in the presence of a celebrity. Because of her diminutive size she was forced to buy her clothes in the teen sections of department stores, and her outfits had a curious naiveté to them that often jarred with her choice of flirtatious hats, her rather large pocketbooks, and the heavy orthopedic shoes she wore. Shopping for clothes had long been an unpleasant and unsatisfying experience for her, and dressing for any special occasion was generally traumatic, the choice of what she was to wear often throwing her into panic and ending with her simply grabbing for anything easy to put on, regardless of how appropriate it was for the occasion. She seemed to like to play up the little-girl quality in her appearance, and always dressed as a small child for costume parties. (She attended one of these affairs as Baby Snooks.)

  The marking of more than a decade of marriage to John prompted Peggy to reassess their relationship. For the first time, she discussed her marriage in her personal letters. To Lois Cole, she joked that she and John might have grown like Darby and Joan, so mutually dependent were they upon each other. To a family member, she confided that her marriage was sound because she and John could reveal to each other what they could tell no one else. They both did, indeed, thrive on the secrets they shared about each other’s lives. With Peggy, it was Upshaw; with John, his epilepsy.

  John’s condition had been fairly dormant for a number of years but, during the final year of work on the book, he had had a number of seizures. Most were not severe and none had required hospitalization. However, Peggy was certain the recurrence of the attacks had been caused by the strain of editing the book, and she suffered a sense of guilt on this score.

  Until the wild reception of Gone With the Wind, neither of the Marshes had imagined that the book would change their lives much or that it would be a threat to their diligently guarded privacy. When the three AP reporters had set upon her the morning she had run away to Gainesville, Peggy realized that not only could her life with Red Upshaw suddenly be revealed, but that her place in the limelight could also cause John’s illness to be exposed. She was, as Edwin Granberry had perceived, deeply troubled. The invitation to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, therefore, seemed like a godsend; there, she would have time to think things out, and no one except John would know where she was.

  Not only was Peggy running away from Upshaw, her fans, and the press, but from the need to make an important decision. As far back as June 14, David O. Selznick had made an offer of $50,000 to Annie Laurie Williams for the film rights to Gone With the Wind. Macmillan had passed it on to Peggy, who had telegraphed her acceptance, pending approval of the contract, on July 8 from Gainesville. But no sooner had she done this than she began to have doubts about whether she was doing the right thing. News of her acceptance had not been released to the press. The contract had been dispatched with great haste and had arrived in Atlanta just a few hours before her planned departure for Blowing Rock on the thirteenth. Peggy refused to look at it, leaving it to John to read and explain to her, but she wanted him to be certain Macmillan knew they must not yet issue any statements about its existence.

  Be that as it may, the press had been casting Gone With the Wind for two weeks, with Clark Gable and Janet Gaynor the favorite choices for Rhett and Scarlett. “Not Janet Gaynor! Spare me this last ignominy!” Peggy wrote Lois Cole. It is in this same letter, written the day she left for Blowing Rock, that Peggy — for the first and what seems to be the only time — “cast” the major roles in her book. “Miriam Hopkins has been my choice for Scarlett from the beginning, but I knew what I had to say wouldn’t matter so said nothing.” Hopkins, she thought, had the voice, the appearance, the personality, and the sharp look. Elizabeth Allan, who had played David Copperfield’s mother in the recent movie, was her favorite for Melanie. And she wrote, “I wish Charles Boyer didn’t have a French accent for he’s my choice for Rhett. Next to him, Jack Holt [a Western star] is the only person I can think of.”

  From the contents of this letter, it does appear that Peggy saw her book as a film, fully intended to sign the contract, and already believed that by doing so she was losing her control.

  On Monday morning, July 13, with perhaps even less attention given to her dress than ever, Peggy started off on a railway journey that involved two train connections and ended in the small town of Hickory, North Carolina, forty miles from her destination. John had made the arrangements with Edwin Granberry, who was to be waiting for her at the depot with his wife and brother-in-law to drive on to Blowing Rock. There, she was to stay in a boardinghouse across the street from the Granberrys and their three small sons. As promised, Granberry had told no one but his wife’s brother, who was visiting them, and Herschel Brickell that Margaret Mitchell was arriving in Blowing Rock.

  There were numerous people on the platform when Peggy stepped off the train, and she immediately feared someone might have told the press of her arrival. She had traveled in a rear car, which meant she was a short distance from the station house. Certain that the Granberrys would be waiting inside for her, she left her baggage on the platform and darted around the side of the country depot to the front door and went inside. The Granberrys were not there and, believing she had outwitted the press, she sat down to wait until they either arrived or came back inside to find her. There were, however, no reporters. When the train had emptied, with no sign of Margaret Mitchell, Granberry decided she had changed her mind and was not coming to Blowing Rock, and that somehow the telegram telling them of this had not reached them before they had left to pick her up. The July sun was hot and the three of them stood in the shade of the station house as they discussed what they should do. Out of the corner of his eye, Granberry saw what he was later to describe as “a small, plain, wren of a woman, dressed in a housewife’s cotton” (she had worn a printed calico smock that looked like a housedress) come out of the building, peer around, speak to a man near the tracks, and then walk toward the one taxicab waiting nearby. It never occurred to the Granberrys that this was Margaret Mitchell. They had a published photograph of her in which she looked quite striking but, of course, it did not show her small stature. They had just agreed to call John Marsh in Atlanta when Granberry felt someone touch his arm and he looked down at, as he said later, “this little elf.”

  “Can you be Edwin Granberry?” she asked.

  They insisted Peggy sit in the front seat with Edwin, who was driving. As the car twisted and turned up the steep narrow road to the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Blowing Rock, her conversation, which was highly spirited at first, became sparse. About halfway, she fell silent for about ten minutes and then said in a small, terrified voice, “Would you please stop the car. I’m afraid I’m going to throw up.” He did — and she did — and the rest of the journey was anything but jolly. Once in Blowing Rock, however, she wrote John that she knew she had done the right thing in coming. Not only were the Granberrys delightful people, but the town, which was four thousand feet above sea level and was situated directly on the Park-to-
Park Scenic Highway through the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Parks, commanded a spectacular view and was both cool and charming.

  During the greater part of the ten days Peggy spent at Blowing Rock, she remained aloof from both lecturers and students, spending most of her time with the Granberrys and Herschel Brickell. Brickell had telephoned her the day before she had set out for Blowing Rock, and she later wrote him that she knew he was going to be nice from the sound of his voice. A lantern-jawed Mississippian with the manners of a Southern gentleman, he appealed to Peggy immediately. He had come without his wife, Norma, who had remained at their home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and he and Peggy often joined the Granberrys for meals at their house or at the little hotel on the main street of the village.

  Granberry, a slight, dark man with a trim mustache and a rushed way of speaking, and Brickell, with his soft drawl, were both good speakers, and Peggy enjoyed attending their lectures. For the most part, however, she remained in her room when she was not with the Granberrys or Brickell. It was no use trying to keep her identity secret among the school’s faculty and students, for the news that she was on campus had quickly circulated. But there seemed to be no reporters in town, and people accepted her presence among them in an interested but respectful manner. At the Granberrys’, Peggy felt impelled to talk about herself, though always with great humor and vivacity. Discussion centered on the book, the reviews, and the new pressures in her life caused by the suddenness of her fame; but, because the book was such a success story and the author such an enigma, people liked listening to her and were fascinated to learn what they could about Gone With the Wind and its author.