Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  She had been right; the world looks at new celebrities in a peculiar way. No one in Atlanta would ever treat her in the same manner as they had treated Peggy Mitchell Marsh. The fame that had been thrust upon her was sudden, demanding, unwanted, cruel sometimes, always a burden, but there it was — her load, and there was no magical way in which it would simply disappear.

  Since her marriage to John Marsh and her retirement from the Journal, Peggy had placed great emphasis on what Atlantans thought of her. Maybelle’s daughter, for all her sassy tongue and feisty nature and her former delight in shocking people, believed deep down that her role in life should be subordinate to her husband’s, and that the world she respected would not respect her if she was married to a man whose career was not as important as hers. One would have thought that her fame would have established her self-confidence. Instead, it threatened to rob her of the one thing she thought really mattered — the security she felt in her marriage to John Marsh.

  Chapter Twenty

  JOHN “MUNNERLYN” and his short, unfashionably dressed wife checked into Winter Park’s one small but pleasant hotel a few days before Christmas, 1936. The sun was shining so brightly that Peggy felt dazed when she stepped into the semidarkness of the modest lobby. The first thing she saw when she was able to focus her eyes was a Christmas tree decorated with artificial snow. For some reason, this sent her into a burst of giggles, and she and John were in high spirits as they unpacked. A short time later they arrived at Mabel and Edwin Granberry’s bungalow. For the next three days, they spent their time picking oranges, reading to the Granberrys’ youngest son, Edwin Jr., and talking about Gone With the Wind and a novel that Edwin Granberry was proposing to write.

  Peggy was relaxed and happy for the first time in many months. She felt comfortable with the Granberrys, who treated her with a mixture of admiration and protectiveness. Conversation was lively. Granberry, like Lee Edwards, Augusta’s husband, shared her love for a good story and laughed easily at her humor. Mabel was a good cook and hostess and never showed any resentment at being “on duty” most of the time during the Marshes’ visit.

  It was during this trip that Granberry approached Peggy about the possibility of his doing an article about her for Collier’s. Since Ginny’s aborted request, there had been stories in several national magazines and, just before leaving Atlanta, she had given Faith Baldwin an interview for the March issue of Pictorial Review. But the Baldwin interview had not contained much more than the items generally known. Granberry was suggesting something more in-depth and promised that, if she agreed, the Marshes would have a part in the writing of it as well as final approval. In Ginny’s case, Peggy had been fearful that facts would have been reported that she did not want known — her true age, her poor grades at Smith, Clifford Henry and his death, and who knew what else — for Ginny had been her closest confidante at Smith. But Granberry could only write what Peggy revealed to him. It seemed a perfect opportunity for the Marshes to get certain things into print that would refute all the false rumors and that would present Peggy to her reading public as she wanted to be perceived. They agreed to the plan after extracting a vow from Granberry that no one, not even Collier’s, would ever be told they had had any hand whatsoever in the piece except to approve it. Granberry enthusiastically concurred. For a year he had been submitting pieces to Kenneth Littauer at Collier’s and they had all been turned down. Littauer had intimated that if Granberry could get Margaret Mitchell to agree to an article by him, he would gladly publish it. Littauer could well have had an ulterior motive, for he badly wanted Peggy to write a short story for Collier’s and he knew that the Marshes and the Granberrys had become good friends.

  The Marshes discussed the material Granberry’s article should include and John promised that as soon as the first draft was ready, he and Peggy would make their revisions and suggestions. Peggy was feeling so well when they parted that night that she agreed to a small, impromptu party the next evening, Christmas Eve, with some Rollins faculty members as long as it was “very hush-hush.” She also took Edwin aside and explained to him that John might suffer a small seizure (he had had one en route to Florida), and that if Edwin saw her lean over John, pressing a spoon between his lips, he was to try to distract the rest of the guests. To Granberry’S relief, the party went smoothly and both of the Marshes enjoyed themselves.

  The next morning, an item appeared in the local paper revealing that the author of Gone With the Wind was visiting their town over the holidays as a guest of Professor and Mrs. Edwin Granberry. Alarmed that newspapermen from all over would deluge them shortly, Peggy packed their bags while John telephoned Granberry to announce their departure. Because it was Christmas Day, Peggy was confident that they had a day’s jump on the press. Edwin, terribly upset, came over to the hotel to say good-bye and to make sure the Marshes did not hold him responsible. (Peggy wrote Herschel Brickell, “With the best intentions in the world, Edwin let the cat out of the bag and we had to pack up early Christmas morning and get out of town, one jump ahead of the newspapers and dinner invitations!”) They spent the rest of their vacation in small hotels in small towns and had, she said, “a wonderful time.”

  As soon as they returned home, John was operated on for hemorrhoids, a condition that embarrassed John and Peggy, for, in mentioning the operation to Brickell, Granberry, and even Lois Cole, Peggy did not explain what was wrong, a fact that led to some fear and speculation that his condition might be more serious than it was.

  The seven days that John was in the hospital proved to be a test for Peggy, but, though she spent much of her time with him, their whereabouts and his hospitalization were successfully kept from the press, and even from friends. No visitors ever came. The nurse who was drawn in as a confederate to maintain the secrecy later described Peggy as “not outgoing, but positive in her viewpoint ... almost mannish in appearance — short hair, thick coke-bottle glasses, blue eyes, and her shoes — (I remember them well) heavy, low-heeled orthopedics.” It was the first time that Peggy had worn glasses in public, although she had gotten them when her eye problems began. As the lenses were a strong prescription, it must have been difficult for her to see well without them.

  The nurse, Mrs. Gaydos, recalls that also in the hospital at this time, “there was a retired nun who was quite old. She was a cousin [of Peggy’s] — second or third — named Sister Melanie. Mrs. Marsh would stop in to see her. She told me that was where the name ‘Melanie’ came from.”

  Granberry sent the first draft of his article to the Marshes while John was recuperating. Not able to sit at the typewriter yet, John responded in longhand with a twenty-six page critique, carefully noting the page and line of each of his corrections and inserts. Peggy added only one page of her own comments. The combined document is most revealing.

  Peggy corrected Granberry only in the telling of a certain experience she had had. In one of her “escapes” from her fans during the first weeks of her fame, she had driven out to Jonesboro and had stopped at five different gas stations, asking each attendant if he knew where Tara was. All of the men had given her directions, which, of course, could not be true because there was no Tara. When she told the last man who she was, he did not believe her. Struggling to find some proof, she had finally taken a Confederate map out of her glove compartment, which had convinced him that she was the author of Gone With the Wind. Peggy had Granberry cut all descriptions of the filling-station attendants that made them appear gruff, money-hungry, or stupid, and asked him to say at the end of the story that Tara was entirely fictional and that no such house existed.

  John, on the other hand, insisted on excising the word “sober” because “the word is too easily associated with drinking.” John also wanted to include direct denials of all the most recent rumors — that Peggy was blind, that she had left her husband and her two children, that John had written her book — and he wanted the denials to appear at both the beginning of the piece and again in the text, so that the reader
s would remember the denial and not just the rumor. Peggy should not be described as “unknown to the public” before the publication of Gone With the Wind — that should read “unknown outside of the state of Georgia.” She was not a “very young woman,” he wrote. “She would like to have the word ‘very’ eliminated.” And he asked Granberry to please not “involve me in any scheme [during the writing of Gone With the Wind] to throw the manuscript away. I would have given her a good cow-hiding. (Please don’t mention that in your article.)”

  But the important thing is that John not only corrected grammar, caught errors, demanded deletions, and replaced Granberry’S observations of the Marshes with his own, but that, with a simple “here goes with a suggestion for a substitute paragraph,” he ended up writing long sections that appear to have been published verbatim from his penciled notes. One of his inserts is a 1,200-word preachment on the tortures Peggy had endured since the publication of her book. Yet, in the context of this narrative, he illogically reveals, “There is no secret about Miss Mitchell’s address. Her telephone is listed. It is but part of her determination to continue to live her life as she has always lived it.”

  Numerous other passages in the article were initiated by John, all of them stressing Peggy’s need for privacy and rest. Why, then, did he allow a magazine with one of the largest circulations in the country to print the information about how she could be easily reached, and, further, that she gave no more autographs but was personally answering and signing replies to all the letters she received? And to reveal the intimate confessions contained in some of those fan letters, as he did do, could only work to encourage more confessional letters from Peggy’s reading audience and increase the load of her correspondence.

  Of these letters, Marsh says the majority were

  of a kind that could not be answered with stereotyped politeness.... Many of them, written under the fervency of emotion aroused by the novel, have the note of the confessional about them. Miss Mitchell might perhaps ignore them ... but having unwittingly been the cause of the desperate tone of some of them, she feels an obligation she cannot evade.

  Wives write that the tragedy of Rhett and Scarlett has opened their eyes to similar tragedies under their own roofs and has moved them to correct estrangements from their husbands before it is too late. Husbands write that Rhett’s separation from Scarlett after he had loved her so many years had kept them awake at night, fearful that they might also lose beloved wives.

  The categories of unhappy, possibly disturbed, readers who found salvation in the pages of Gone With the Wind goes on to include “men broken by depression,” “idealists who could not survive change,” and “proud wives whose men have been thrown out of work.” As soon as the article appeared, Peggy was deluged with more calls and letters than she had conceived possible. Whatever John had been attempting to accomplish through the Collier’s article, it had boomeranged. Kenneth Littauer was later to say that he had assumed that, since Marsh was an advertising and public-relations man, the article had been intended by the Marshes for publicity purposes.

  When Littauer received Granberry’s piece, he was not happy. He had hoped for a more personal story, one that would reveal some of Margaret Mitchell’s public and private opinions and that would give an inside picture of her life before, during, and after the writing of Gone With the Wind. But, if the piece was to appear in the March issue as planned, in order to compete with Faith Baldwin’s Pictorial Review interview, due to hit the stands during the same month, there would be no time for a rewrite. The magazine was already half set in galleys, and Granberry had warned him that the Marshes (whom Littauer had heard were extremely tough with magazine and news writers) would never allow any alterations or changes. It was obvious to the Collier’s editor that it was either the article as it was or no article at all; anyway, as he observed to Granberry, “the subject matter was self-promoting and would get itself read no matter what we did short of printing it in Chinese.” Littauer agreed to print the story as it stood, hoping that in return Peggy Mitchell might oblige him one day with that short piece of fiction in demand by every other magazine.

  John had not exaggerated about the emotional letters that Peggy received every day, and he was telling the truth when he said she answered them all. Although the reason she replied personally to such an enormous number of letters might have been, as he said, her sense of responsibility for the book having stirred its readers’ emotions, it is more likely that there were other motivations — some of which she may not have understood herself. The letters — which were much like those Medora had received as Marie Rose, the magazine’s “Advice-to-the-Lovelorn” editor — may well have stirred Peggy’s old desire to be a psychiatrist. Perhaps they also brought her a gratifying feeling of power, and the act of writing them belonged to her as nothing else did anymore. Most important though, the letters kept her from writing anything else. She wrote them in much the same way that she had once written her book. Thoughts poured out of her and onto the page — long, detailed, and sometimes quite intimate. Often she shared her own problems with her correspondents. Although she said she hated making carbon copies, she always typed these letters in duplicate. To see the files containing these copies is an eye-opening experience and visual proof of why Peggy didn’t have time to write another book, at least during this phase of her life. During the first four years following the publication of Gone With the Wind, the author wrote nearly twenty thousand letters with Margaret Baugh’s help, all quite lengthy — an average output of about a hundred letters a week.

  In February, to the Marshes’ distress, it was rumored that they were getting a divorce. “If this is true,” she responded, “I can’t imagine who the gentleman in the pajamas is. He sleeps in my bed and calls himself John Marsh, but I am beginning to wonder!”

  Every time a rumor came back to Peggy — she had a wooden leg, she had taken a room at the Piedmont Hotel and had been drunk for weeks, she was to play Melanie — she agonized over it. The Marshes’ lives were further complicated by a spate of lawsuits. Susan Lawrence Davis, author of An Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865—1877 charged in a 6.5-billion-dollar suit that Gone With the Wind plagiarized her work. Despite Miss Davis’s 261-page brief, in which she accused Peggy of using the same “historical facts” that she had, her case was not only insubstantial, but ludicrous. Nonetheless, the action had to be answered. (It was later dismissed.) Peggy wrote Lois:

  To tell the truth, I was relieved when the letter announcing her claim arrived. I had been waiting for months for the first racketeer to open fire. It had been a marvel to us all that some chiselers hadn’t opened up on me sooner. We didn’t know what form it would take, extortion, attempted blackmail, suits of every kind.... We were glad that the opening gun was a pop gun. It might have been one of those bad affairs where some one alleges that you’ve run over them and permanently injured them on a day when you weren’t even in your car.

  The next suit was initiated by Peggy. Theatrical entrepreneur Billy Rose had included a satire of Gone With the Wind in his spectacular Aquacade, and Peggy sued him for violating her copyright. The case had not yet been settled when a pirated Dutch edition of Gone With the Wind appeared in the Netherlands. Stephens appealed to Macmillan’s New York law firm for assistance on this case, and a suit was initiated to establish Peggy’s right of copyright all over the world. This last legal action was to strain the Marshes’ relations with Macmillan even further and was to remain unsettled for a number of years.

  Authorized translations were now either underway or had already been published in sixteen foreign countries besides Canada and England: Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Romania, Italy, Brazil, and Czechoslovakia. In Germany and Japan, sales had reached nearly two hundred thousand copies. The correspondence that foreign rights entailed kept the Marshes’ hands full, and a secretary was hired to work evenings from six to ten. While John dealt with foreign righ
ts, Peggy wrote as many letters as her eyes and the hour allowed.

  With unusual vehemence, Peggy refused a request from Lois that she allow Macmillan to publish one printing with her rubber-stamped facsimile autograph. “I feel pretty violently about autographs and always have,” she wrote. “When a stranger asks me for an autograph I feel just like he (or she) had asked me for a pair of my step-ins.... If I could buy back every autographed [copy] and destroy it, I would.”

  Not long before this, Peggy had learned that people had been selling her autographed books at a profit, and this had incensed her. In many cases, signing the books had been a chore, and she had paid for the postage out of her own pocket. The retail price of the book was three dollars; autographed editions were selling for twenty dollars the spring of 1937. Including the books whose endpapers she had signed for Macmillan, there were about thirty-five hundred copies inscribed “Margaret Mitchell.” She seldom wrote more than her name unless she knew the owner of the book.

  Despite the continuing pressures and problems, Peggy had regained some of the weight she had lost, and John wrote to Frances, “She looks prettier and is much pleasanter to live with. The battle still rages, but she is learning some of the ways and means for combating it.” Peggy was now allowing herself a nap in the afternoon, and she had acquired a new, secret office.

  Upon their return from Florida in January, the Marshes had rented a room for $32.50 a month in the Northwood Hotel, next door, for Peggy to use as an office. Margaret Baugh was hired on a permanent basis and the lease was made out in her name. Elaborate precautions were taken to maintain the privacy of the office, and the owners and occupants of the residential Northwood Hotel were sworn to secrecy. Peggy would slip out of her apartment after Bessie had reconnoitered and had sounded the “all clear,” then the two women would bolt to her retreat. A couch was installed there, but not a telephone. If an important call came in, Bessie would make her way back and forth through the subterranean bowels of one building to the other, often having to interrupt Peggy’s badly needed afternoon nap.