Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  Fearful that any contribution of her own would not remain secret for long, Peggy replied with an adamant no. At this point Selznick, accepting the fact that Margaret Mitchell meant what she said, employed a series of well-known authors to work on the script. Oliver H. P. Garrett was the first, and Kurtz reported, “The revision seems to be along the lines of condensation .... The Tarleton twins turn up missing and only a few glimpses of Belle Watling are vouchsafed.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Peggy’s great pride, was engaged next. A few weeks later, he was off the assignment and wrote his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, “I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell, that is when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through [Gone With the Wind] and check phrases of hers that would cover the situation.”

  Selznick then proceeded to work on the screenplay himself. Letters and telegrams went to and from Kurtz, Myrick, Brown, and Peggy, making their way back and forth across the country like frenzied hen tracks. Sketches of costumes and even of Mammy’s head rag arrived for Peggy to approve. She answered some of Selznick’s questions — Rhett would not drive publicly with Belle in a carriage, it was “ungentlemanly”; Rhett would not be rude to Belle; Belle must not be familiar with the coachman; Scarlett would converse freely with the coachman, but Belle could not because Belle was “not nice”; a coachman would show disdain for Belle but not impertinence; poor whites hated Negroes and Negroes did not like or respect them; Rhett could never alight from Belle’s carriage in front of Aunt Pittypat’s house as it would show disrespect for Melanie and Scarlett, and no one would be able to receive him after such a social blunder. Peggy made one creative suggestion (not used): if a scene between Rhett and Belle outside of Belle’s infamous house was necessary, then Belle could be seen following Rhett from her front door to his horse. Despite these spurts of cooperation, Peggy still would not comment on the script or okay any sketches.

  Script queries were not the only disruption in Peggy’s life during the fall of 1938. Her father’s illness now demanded a great deal of her attention. Too, she was hounded by a constant flow of reporters hoping for a news break on the casting of Scarlett O’Hara. I t did no good to repeat over and over that she knew no more than they did; the press refused to believe this. Through Sue Myrick, who was coaching all possible Scarletts in their accents, Peggy knew who was the latest actress being tested, but no more, and she seems to have lost interest in her own speculations. During these last frantic weeks before the start of principal photography, the race had narrowed to three contenders, all well-known Hollywood ladies — Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, and Joan Bennett.

  What Peggy did not know about were the financial problems besetting Selznick at this time. In the three years since he and his backer, John Hay Whitney, had bought the property for films, he had spent a fortune of the investor’s money and Whitney had finally lost his patience. Either Selznick must set a definite starting date and stick to it, or he would withdraw his support. Selznick, always a big gambler, took a daring chance. On a clear, crisp December evening shortly before Christmas, he ordered the burning of Atlanta to begin on the back lot of his studio. The scene was to be shot with doubles so it did not matter that he had not cast the female lead.

  A large robust man, well over six feet tall, Selznick stood on a high, railed platform and gave the order to his crew to turn on the gas jets that would start the fire. As seven technicolor cameras began to roll, flames leaped up to devour the false fronts that had been created to simulate the Atlanta of the American Civil War period. Doubles for Scarlett and Rhett jumped on a buckboard and raced alongside the fire. Sweat poured down Selznick’s face and he had to remove his glasses to wipe them clean. An assistant swore his boss had actually shed tears as the shooting of Gone With the Wind finally began with an incomplete script and no Scarlett O’Hara.

  Selznick stood for a moment, squinting, as the flames consumed what remained of the set. The back lot was a maze of men and fire equipment. Suddenly, as he replaced his glasses, he caught sight of a woman, dressed starkly in a black dress and a wide-brimmed black hat, coming up the steps of the platform. Beside her was Selznick’s brother Myron, an actors’ agent. A wind had risen, fanning the flames and making it hard to stand too close to the railing. The woman turned her head to the side and held onto her hat as she approached him, and he could not see her face.

  “Here, genius,” his brother said. “Meet your Scarlett O’Hara.”

  Selznick stared with stunned disbelief as the woman turned to face him, tilting her head back and removing the halo hat so that her dark chestnut hair blew wildly behind her. Here, indeed, was his Scarlett O’Hara — English film star, Vivien Leigh.

  Selznick did not even recall that he had been sent a print of one of Vivien’s films, Fire Over England, in February of 1937, by Kay Brown, who had been caught by Vivien’s ability to project charm and femininity and, at the same time, a duality of personality that she knew her boss had been looking for. At this time, Selznick had telegraphed Miss Brown: “I HAVE NO ENTHUSIASM FOR VIVIEN LEIGH, BUT AS YET HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN PHOTOGRAPH OF HER. WILL BE SEEING ‘FIRE OVER ENGLAND’ SHORTLY, AT WHICH TIME WILL OF COURSE SEE LEIGH.” But Selznick had never run the film because he had been so certain in his mind that an English woman would be wrong.

  A rough test was shot of Vivien. There was an indescribable wildness about her, and when Selznick saw the rushes he was deliriously happy. One hurdle remained to be jumped — whether she could master a Southern accent. Sue Myrick was put to work, and three days later Vivien shot another test. There was no doubt in anyone’s minds when this test was run — Scarlett O’Hara had finally been cast.

  Photographs of Vivien were sent to Peggy, and she was offered a copy of the English actress’s film test. She decided not to view it, fearing that if something should happen and the decision should somehow be reversed, she would be involved. Anyway, she trusted Sue Myrick, and Sue felt Vivien Leigh would be a marvelous Scarlett O’Hara. Peggy did not reply to the question that Selznick put to her — was Vivien Leigh Scarlett O’Hara as she had imagined her? But she did write Lois how shocked she had been when she saw the photograph that had been sent to her — for Miss Leigh bore a remarkable resemblance to Margaret Mitchell in her early twenties.

  Once production of Gone With the Wind began, on January 26, Peggy avidly followed the progress of the film and was disconsolate to learn, less than three weeks later, that the cameras had stopped rolling because George Cukor had been fired. Peggy read about it in Louella Parsons’s column before hearing from Sue Myrick and Kurtz, and she immediately dispatched a telegram to Sue, who replied two days later:

  It is really and actually true; George finally told me all about it.... We sat down and he talked — not for publication he said, but because he liked me, felt responsible for getting me into a mess and wanted me to know the truth.... He said he is an honest craftsman and he cannot do a job unless he knows it is a good job and he feels the present job is not right. For days, he told me, he has looked at the rushes and felt he was failing. He knew he was a good director and knew the actors were good ones, yet the thing did not click as it should.

  Gradually he became more and more convinced that the script was the trouble.... David, himself, thinks HE is writing the script and he tells Bobby Keon [the script assistant] and Stinko [Oliver] Garrett what to write. And they do the best they can with it, in their limited way.... And George has continuously taken script from day to day, compared the Garrett–Selznick version with the Howard, groaned and tried to change some parts back to the Howard script. But he seldom could do much with the scene....

  So George just told David he would not work anv longer if the script was not better and he wanted the Howard script back. David told George he was [a] director — not an author and he (David) was the producer and the judge of what is a good script (or words to that effect) and George said he was a director and a damn good one and he would not let his
name go out over a lousy picture and if they didn’t go back to the Howard script (he was willing to have them cut it down shorter) he, George, was through.

  And, bull-headed David said “OK, get out!”

  The next Peggy heard was that Gable had been asked to choose Cukor’s replacement from a list of three directors. Gable took Victor Fleming, who had directed him the year before in Test Pilot. Selznick had given Gable his choice of directors because he had been sulking under Cukor, who, he complained, had given more directorial assistance to the women in the cast than to him. Fleming’s first comment to Selznick after reading the screenplay was, “David, your fucking script is no fucking good.” Selznick now had no alternative but to call in another writer or see if he could get Howard back.

  Sue Myrick and Kurtz were so embroiled in the machinations of each daily crisis that neither of them had written Peggy of this latest development. Finally, on March 11, Peggy wrote Kurtz asking if they had a script yet, for she had read in a theatrical paper that the last people who had been hired to do the script had refused to do a day-to-day job and had said they had to be at least ten days ahead. This had sounded to her as if the script were not completed yet. She had also heard that Robert Benchley was one of the writers being considered, which, she claimed, had moved her to conjecture that “Groucho Marx, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell would probably be on the script before this business is over.”

  None of these men were employed by Selznick, who had already hired writer and director Ben Hecht. Hecht worked day and night for two weeks, at the end of which he collapsed from exhaustion and was hospitalized. Hecht’s main contribution was to resurrect an idea of Sidney Howard’s that had been discarded, that of connecting the chief sequences of the film with a series of titles.

  On March 12, Sue Myrick informed Peggy that John Van Druten, the playwright, and John Balderston, who had written The Prisoner of Zenda for Selznick, were now working on the screenplay. “We have 60 pages marked ‘completed script,’” she wrote, “but every few days we get some pink pages marked ’substitute script’ and we tear out some yellow pages and set in the pink ones. We expect blue or orange pages any day now.”

  Fleming then turned to Sue Myrick and asked her to write some additional dialogue, telling her, “God knows they’d had fifteen writers,” and that she might as well try her hand at it as it “probably couldn’t be any worse than the others!”

  Filming had resumed on March 3, seventeen days after Cukor had walked off the lot, and Fleming had been shooting scenes without any idea of what was to come or whether the sequence he was directing might be cut when more pages were delivered to him.

  “SIDNEY HOWARD IS BACK ON THE SCRIPT!” Sue Myrick wrote triumphantly on April 9. “I haven’t the faintest idea how many folks that makes in all who have done script ... all I know is that Howard is somewhere around the sixteenth, though he may be the twentieth.”

  Peggy replied, “I would not be surprised to learn that the script of the other sixteen had been junked and Mr. Howard’s original script put into production.”

  Howard reworked the screenplay in five weeks and, when he went to say good-bye to Miss Myrick again, he said that he had no doubt that Selznick would rewrite it and then call him back again to rewrite it once more. Sue also told Peggy that the current scenario was now fifty pages longer than the original Howard draft, and that the film’s running time would be at least four hours. Louis B. Mayer’s comment on hearing the projected length of the film was supposedly, “They’d stone Christ if he came back and spoke for four hours.”

  Selznick did retain most of Howard’s final script, and both Kurtz and Sue wrote Peggy ecstatic letters. Sue informed her, “The street scenes are so fine I think the thing is a Birth of a Nation. And the new script we have for the scene with Scarlett and Dr. Meade in the hospital (Howard’s replacing Garrett’s) for the wounded men is thrilling as can be.”

  During the time of the filming of Gone With the Wind, it was almost impossible to pick up a magazine that did not have an unauthorized story or rumor about Peggy, one of the cast members, or Selznick. In view of this avalanche of publicity, Ginny Morris now thought the time appropriate for the article she had discussed with Photoplay two years earlier. This time, she did not ask Peggy’s permission, but wrote, on March 13, 1939, and told her she had sold the article to the film magazine and that it was not an “intimate portrait” by any means, and that since, following their last exchange of letters, Peggy had done interviews with Faith Baldwin and Edwin Granberry, she did not think that Peggy’s former position was valid.

  Peggy’s reply was to insist Ginny stop the publication of the story because, she said, “I would like to keep my childhood and my girlhood and the rest of my life to myself.” She offered to pay Ginny whatever Photoplay had paid her and warned that “its [the article’s] publication will mean the end of any friendship between you and me.”

  When Ginny received this “ghoulish document,” as she was later to call Peggy’s “shocking attempt to buy off the freedom of the press,” she filed it away without heeding its threat. The friendship was over as far as she was concerned, and she published the piece. Although the article was, as she said, “innocuous enough,” it did record the fact that Peggy went to Smith in 1918, that she had been married twice (a fact not widely known then), that she had read the “gigantic filmscript,” and that she greatly admired George Cukor, “who had come to Atlanta to consult her.” Ginny also stated that Peggy was a millionaire but that “the government has taken half her revenue in taxes,” and she attributed the success of Gone With the Wind to the fact that Peggy “ignored the mothball approach to the past and put 1929–1936 souls into 1865 people.”

  Peggy was furious about the article and wrote Photoplay asking them to retract certain statements made by Ginny, all of which were essentially true, except perhaps for the claim that Peggy had read the filmscript of Gone With the Wind. The magazine printed her letter without a retraction in a later issue, but neither the article nor the letter brought in an untoward amount of reader response.

  Officially, filming was completed on Gone With the Wind on June 27, 1939, but retakes, montages, bridgeovers, and technical effects were still to come. A brief scene was inserted as late as November 11, just after the film had been exhibited at a sneak preview at the Warner Theatre in Santa Barbara. Preview cards indicated an overwhelming success, carrying comments such as, “the screen’s greatest achievement of all time,” and “the greatest picture since Birth of a Nation.” Nevertheless, it seemed to be the general opinion that the film was uncomfortably long. Selznick decided to divide the picture into two sections and have an intermission, a possibility that he had considered earlier. This meant there had to be a new piece of film shot with which to open the second half.

  Selznick’s special effects department sorted through all their existing footage and put together a montage with an ominous, warlike effect — soldiers on the march, caissons churning up the red dust of Georgia’s dirt roads, then the superimposed title, “Sherman.” With this bridge, the filming of Gone With the Wind was complete, although the score, by Max Steiner, was still not recorded. It seemed to be rushing things, but Selznick announced he would premiere the film in Atlanta on December 15, 1939. Peggy’s life was once again under attack.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  AFTER THREE AND A HALF years’ experience with the sudden tides of public interest, Peggy knew in October, when the date of the premiere was announced, that a tidal wave was certain to follow. She spoke on the telephone to virtually no one outside her family and rarely left the apartment except to see her father. Still, as Peggy wrote Lois, the waves came in “steadily, harder, and higher,” adding, “we’re so inundated and battered that we can barely keep our ears above the water line.”

  A false front of tall, white columns was already being erected on the facade of Atlanta’s Loew’s Grand Theatre to make it look like the Tara conceived for the film — which, of course, bor
e no resemblance to the O’Hara plantation in Peggy’s book. Georgia’s Governor Eurith D. Rivers had proclaimed December 15 a statewide holiday, and Atlanta’s Mayor William B. Hartsfield had extended the one-day holiday into a three-day festival and had urged Atlanta’s female population to don hoop skirts and pantalets, and its male citizenry to wear tight britches and beaver hats, and to sprout goatees, sideburns, and whiskers. The celebration was to include a parade with a brass band stationed at every corner for a mile in the center of metropolitan Atlanta. For the entire state of Georgia, having the premiere of Gone With the Wind on home ground was like winning the Battle of Atlanta seventy-five years late.

  Peggy kept Lois Cole apprised of what madness took place in the pre-premiere weeks. All of the stars of the film — except for the blacks — would be in Atlanta for the festivities, along with David O. Selznick and his wife, Irene; Clark Gable’s wife, film star Carole Lombard; Vivien Leigh’s future husband, Laurence Olivier; and Claudette Colbert, who was there because Selznick had heard that she was Margaret Mitchell’s favorite movie star. All the visiting celebrities, governors from five former Confederate states, and anyone who was anyone in Atlanta were invited to a huge costume ball to be held the night before the premiere. Peggy was expected to be the guest of honor but, to everyone’s shock, she declined the invitation, claiming her father was ill and that she could not be away from him two consecutive nights. In truth, refusing to attend the ball was Peggy’s way of squaring an old grudge, despite the fact that it meant depriving herself of a great personal tribute. The costume ball was sponsored by the Junior League — the same women who had once barred her entrance into Atlanta society.