by Anne Edwards
The only intrusion on Peggy’s Blowing Rock respite was a series of rather disconcerting letters from John about the Selznick film contract. In the first of these letters, written on Wednesday, July 15, he explained that the contract was about ten pages long and was filled with highly technical language. John seemed to feel it was acceptable, except for one point — it was an outright sale and did not give Peggy any right to approve the scenario nor to have any say-so about what Selznick did with the book once she had accepted her check. John told her not to worry about it, however, as he had spoken to Lois, and he and her father would go over the contract and try to get it all settled by the time she returned home.
But then, in his second letter, on July 16, he went on about the problem at great length, although repeating once again that she should not worry about it and that “Mitchell, Mitchell, and Marsh” would handle it for her.
My idea is that there is no need for you to come back to Atlanta while the “lawyer” stuff is being wrangled over — hence the course of action which I outlined above and submitted for your approval. But if it doesn’t meet with your approval, if you rather I would not deal directly with Macmillan without consulting you in advance on each point, just let me know. If the latter course is your preference, you had better wire me or phone me as soon as you get this letter. A wire, “Please submit everything to me before taking up with Macmillan” will be all that is necessary.
My affectionate and husbandly advice is that you enjoy your vacation and let us bother about these preliminary legal technicalities. You understand, of course, that you will have the final say-so on the whole matter. Nothing that we do will be final until you put your name on the contract, and if you don’t like what we have done, you can change it all when you get back to Atlanta.
He suggested that she might want to discuss the issue with Granberry and Brickell, who perhaps could advise her from their own experience or from that of their author friends. Peggy did discuss the contract with Granberry and Brickell, who both told her they did not think she would be able to get approval of the film script. Granberry felt she should not sell at this time, that she could achieve better terms at a later date.
John’s first letter had been extremely affectionate, but, as the letters went back and forth from Atlanta to Blowing Rock, “Sweetheart” became “Darling,” and then just “Dear Peggy.” For, after John’s letter of the sixteenth, she had telegraphed him to make no decisions without her.
Just before she had left for Blowing Rock, Peggy had had an interview with Faith Baldwin. The two women had hit if off extremely well — so well, in fact, that John wrote Peggy on July 17 that she should write to Faith Baldwin for another “expert opinion” on their current problem. Then he added, “It occurred to me that we might insert a clause on this page of the contract stating that the movies would not have an option on your next book unless they did right by you on this one. Of course, the joke is that you don’t intend to write any more books, but the fact that Selznick is sufficiently interested in you to want an option on your future production might prove to be a lever through which you could retain some control over what is done in making a movie out of this book.”
He signed the letter cooly, “John” — no “Love,” “All my love,” or “Best love,” as in previous letters. The following day, he wrote her that Macmillan was waiting for her to sign the contract and was concerned that she might have changed her mind. However, Peggy did not cut short her vacation. She left Blowing Rock on the twenty-second, arriving home that evening. The next morning she received a telegram from James Putnam of Macmillan: “IS THERE ANY DIFFICULTIES [sic] REGARDING MOVIE CONTRACT HAVE BEEN EXPECTING SIGNED COPIES DAILY.”
Everyone, including Selznick, had said no to the high price Annie Laurie Williams had first asked for the book. Selznick had been the only one to come back with a counter offer, and Putnam was nervous about Peggy’s delay in returning the signed contract, fearing that the deal would fall through. Peggy wrote Latham on her arrival home that she had not been able to oblige Macmillan as she was in “a lather of rage about the contract, and ready to throw it in the movie company’s face,” and that she thought it was a contract that no rational person could sign regardless of the amount of money involved, for her father had found that it held her liable “for so many things, such as damage suits.” It was, in her opinion, not only worded “idiotically,” but it was “the stupidest contract” she had ever seen. Latham was considerably upset by this letter and memos flew fast and thick in Macmillan’s offices as the various executives sought a solution. In the end, they decided to wait until they heard from Peggy the specific points in contention.
Life was no calmer after Peggy’s return from Blowing Rock — she was living in a “goldfish bowl”; the telephone jangled constantly; fan mail was still arriving in bags every day; crowds followed her on the street and the interest of the press had not slackened. She wrote Lois Cole on July 25, “The pressures are worse than before Blowing Rock and I’ve hardly had a word with John except about contracts.”
The Selznick contract had created new and greater pressures in their lives. On July 27, Peggy and John and Stephens had a five-hour conference about the various clauses they considered unacceptable. Immediately afterwards, John wrote Lois an eleven-page, single-spaced letter setting forth their reservations, and sent it off special delivery. No sooner was this done than the two men decided Peggy and Stephens must go up to New York the next day to settle the matter in person, and they got on the telephone and told Brett and Putnam at Macmillan that she would not sign anything if they told anyone she was in New York.
Peggy complained to Lois that she had “no clothes, no hats, not even a change of underwear or an extra pair of stockings,” but that it seemed she was coming to New York just the same. This letter to Lois was written at 1:00 A.M. on the night Stephens and John had made plans for her to go to New York. She dared not use her typewriter because John was asleep, and, in a scrawling hand, she told Lois about an interview, supposedly on modern fiction, that she had had that day. The reporter had asked her what kind of uplift brassiere she wore, and when she said falteringly that she didn’t wear one at all, he was “terribly shocked.”
Herschel Brickell had returned to his home in Ridgefield, Connecticut — about an hour’s train journey from New York City — and, the next day, Peggy telegraphed him and his wife, Norma. Her plan was to spend the first night in New York at a hotel with Stephens and then to go the next evening, when negotiations should be concluded, to the Brickells’ for a few days.
Peggy and Stephens arrived in New York early on the morning of July 29 and, after checking into the Grosvenor Hotel, near the Macmillan offices on lower Fifth Avenue, they attended their first meeting. Among those present were two lawyers for the Macmillan Company, two Selznick lawyers, Kay Brown, and Annie Laurie Williams. Harold Latham was on a holiday at his home in Tannersville, New York, and Lois had not been included. This was the first meeting between Peggy and Annie Laurie, and Peggy was cool as they sat facing each other at the table. The meeting went on for several hours, with Peggy initiating most of the discussion. The issue of an indemnification clause that left Peggy open to a libel suit if someone claimed a character in the film was based on a living person and the matter of copyright were settled in Peggy’s favor at the first meeting. That left the controversy over final script approval. Peggy had no desire to be involved with the making of the film itself, but she did want the contract to spell out more clearly what the final product would be. She particularly wanted to protect its historical authenticity, as well as the dialects of the characters. Selznick’s people were not willing to include a clause to this effect and, therefore, at the end of the day they hit an impasse.
That night, Stephens and Peggy had dinner with Lois Cole and her husband, Allan Taylor. Lois and Allan, who were more knowledgeable about such matters, pointed out that Selznick had given her radio, television, and dramatic rights, and that the purchase pric
e of $50,000 was to be paid immediately upon signature. They impressed upon her that no one would pay more than Selznick, that if she pressed too hard, she could lose the deal altogether, and that David O. Selznick was a man of good taste who had successfully brought novels like David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities to the screen. It seemed unlikely that he would not employ experts to assure the authenticity of the background and of the speech. This sounded sensible to Peggy and she went into the meeting on the second day ready to cooperate.
Of that meeting, Peggy wrote Latham on her return to Atlanta, “The Selznick lawyers were mighty nice. So were the pretty young ladies in the Selznick office. They smoothed me down. They made concessions and I made concessions and the contract was rearranged so that it was possible for me to sign it.”
The Selznick company, on their part, had feared that Peggy Mitchell would hold out for better financial terms. Stephens did not raise the issues of either escalating clauses or box-office percentages, and never questioned the fifty-thousand-dollar purchase price. The amount was the highest price ever paid to that date for a first novel and had Peggy not insisted that this figure be kept secret, it would have seemed, at that time, impressive. Later, during the wartime boom, books sold to the movies for as much as two hundred thousand dollars. But when Peggy sold the rights to Gone With the Wind, no one could have predicted that a war would finally end the financial struggles the nation had so long endured.
In addition to the rights for live dramatization, television, and radio, Peggy had rights of approval if a sequel was ever to be made, and a 50 percent share in a shortened version of the book, with photographs from the film. In the area of indemnification, the revised contract was certainly much more protective of the author than the original. But commercial tie-ins — an issue that would cause future problems between Selznick and Peggy — belonged to Selznick International, including the use and license of the title and character names in advertisements or in connection with manufactured items. John wrote Granberry, “Peggy has gone to N.Y. to take Selznick’s skull and has done it.”
As soon as the contract had been signed, Stephens left for Atlanta and Herschel Brickell picked Peggy up in New York and took her to Ridgefield. By the time they arrived, she was in a state, having suffered a sudden and frightening “stroke of blindness” en route that had lasted nearly ten minutes. Brickell put her on the train to Atlanta on August 2 “in a bad way” after his eye doctor had diagnosed a relapse of the eye strain she had suffered as a result of the final eight months of editing the book.
As Peggy’s train pulled into Atlanta’s Terminal Station, John was boarding another one for Wilmington to see his mother, and they hardly had time to exchange more than a few words. Her eye problems did not deter John from continuing his trip and he remained in Wilmington for a week.
Peggy’s Atlanta doctor concurred with Brickell’s, and she was confined to a dark room for ten days and then had to remain in bed for another eleven days of complete rest. Although she had adamantly refused to have a radio before, asserting that the invention was an invasion of one’s privacy, she now allowed Bessie to hook one up next to her bed. Incoming mail was read to her and she managed to dictate a few letters to Margaret Baugh, who had taken a leave of absence from Macmillan’s Atlanta office to help Peggy during what John called “the six weeks that rocked the Marsh world.” From Atlanta, Peggy wrote Lois that she must remain for long hours in “a dark room with a black bandage over my eyes,” but that she was still glad not to have gone blind. She did not see how the vicissitudes of fame could last much longer, and if they did, she said, her disposition would not.
Peggy was hearing from people with whom she had lost touch years before, but there was no further communication from Red Upshaw. Ginny Morris wrote again from New York. Divorced and the mother of a small girl, she was employed by United Artists Film Corporation in the publicity department during the day, and worked as a free-lance screen magazine writer after hours. “Is this the same girl who used to borrow my toothbrush and who left her stockings in a heap in the middle of the room?” she joked.
A lighthearted correspondence began between the two old friends, with Ginny sending Peggy articles about her from the trade papers not covered by Peggy’s various clipping services — and usually adding irreverent comments. In the margin of a publicity release that stated Peggy was born in 1906, Ginny quipped, “What a precocious smallfry of twelve you were when you tumbled out of your Henshaw Avenue bed to celebrate the Armistice!”
Margaret Baugh opened and sorted the mail so that Peggy did not have to read the crank letters and pleas for money. She was given all other correspondence and chose to reply personally to a large percentage of it. She never liked dictating and, once her eyes were better, she managed to answer about a hundred letters a week, always making carbon copies. Replies to fans’ brief hand-written notes were often single-spaced, three-page, typed letters that revealed far more about herself and the book than the correspondent had asked to know. And, although Stephens was her lawyer, she answered numerous legal letters.
To stay on top of this avalanche of mail was impossible, and just attempting to do so involved a shocking amount of work. In the month of September alone, Peggy wrote Macmillan executives sixteen rather complicated letters pertaining to foreign rights, publicity, monies, autographing books, and a clipping service, as well as advice to someone who suffered from arthritis. The shortest of these is two pages long and several others range from seven to nine pages, always single-spaced. John continued the correspondence with his family, but Peggy wrote the Granberrys and the Brickells. She was also still signing books sent to her in the mail. In the same month, Peggy received well over a thousand fan letters and two hundred books. As an apology for her tardiness in replying, she nearly always fell back on her numerous health problems. Literally hundreds of strangers who had written to her were told that she had been confined to a dark room with black bandages over her eyes and that it was still difficult for her to spend more than a few hours writing letters. It was during this time that Louella Parsons reported in her syndicated Hollywood column that Peggy was going blind. “I am not going blind and never intend to go blind,” Peggy replied indignantly.
Now that she was a public figure, Peggy’s personal affairs were grist for the gossip mills. In early September, another rumor flew. John Marsh, it was reported in a Hollywood column, had suffered shell shock in the war and had a nervous disorder. No one knew the genesis of this report, but Peggy and John suspected someone who had seen or heard about one of his small seizures. In a fury, Peggy wrote Edwin Granberry that she could stand anything anyone wrote about her, but she could not stand lies about John or any member of her family. “It isn’t their fault that I wrote a best-seller,” she said. “They were just innocent bystanders. Let them say anything they want about me. Anybody who is fool enough to publish a book deserves anything that lands on them. But not their kin.”
In this, her second letter to Edwin Granberry since “the old eyes blew their fuses,” she discussed a trip that she and John were planning to Winter Park, Florida, where Granberry taught at Rollins College. John’s idea of heaven — rising late and having breakfast in bed — and their “habit of eating at odd hours and singing in the bathtub” were given as reasons why they would prefer not to stay with the Granberrys.
The first weeks in September were happy ones — or, at least, they were less unhappy than any time since the publication of the book. Peggy’s eyes were healing, and the visit in Winter Park was brief but relaxing. Eugene Mitchell, who had not been well, had improved. And, to handle things while they were away, Margaret Baugh was given the assistance of two additional typists.
Peggy had convinced herself that the worst might be about over. She wrote the Granberrys on her return home that she felt sure book sales would taper off in short order, along with the tumult the publication had caused. But Gone With the Wind was not only number one on the New York Times best-sell
er list, it had been reported as the best-selling novel in everyone of seventy leading bookshops from coast to coast. On September 25, Peggy received a check from Macmillan for $45,000, her share of the money from the sale of Gone With the Wind to Selznick.
This was when Peggy learned for the first time that Miss Williams had been acting as her representative at the conference table and that the Macmillan lawyers and executives had appeared at the conference not on her behalf, but solely to protect the interests of the Macmillan Company itself. That same day, she wrote Harold Latham that she considered this a reprehensible action on the part of Macmillan, who knew her strong feelings about Annie Laurie Williams. She ended, characteristically, by saying what a low blow it was to have this dis-loyalty taking place at a time when her eyes were in such a weakened condition that she had been ordered to bed with bandages over them and could neither read nor write.
Lois, in rebuttal to this letter, parried with a thrust of her own, “But my dear child, Stephens, as your lawyer, was also there!” — a point Latham himself had made upon handing the letter over to Lois.
Another problem arose when, after receiving a Scarlett O’Hara doll from a reader who had made it herself, Peggy forwarded it on to Ginny Morris as a gift for her little girl. An alarming letter arrived from Ginny — didn’t Peggy know the vast sums of money that film people like Walt Disney had made on commercial tie-ins, dolls and watches and “God-knows-what else”? Didn’t Peggy have these rights? There followed a list of various profits that could be made from such tie-ins. Ginny’s letter opened up another area that had not been explored — the right to use the title and names of the characters for exploitation that did not tie up directly with the movie. Peggy passed the letter on to Stephens who, in turn, wrote Latham a long legalistic letter upbraiding Macmillan for their deception both in this and the matter of Annie Laurie Williams. Peggy now wanted the tie-ins to be designated as her right, but Selznick felt she had sold him those rights — which, though perhaps inadvertently, she had — and Macmillan felt caught in the middle.
