by Anne Edwards
Only a privileged 2,031 persons, the sum total of all the seats in the Grand Theatre, were to attend the premiere, and from the moment of the announcement it seemed to Peggy that “the whole of Atlanta — and apparently the South” and, in fact, “everybody in Christendom” was on her neck in a grim and desperate struggle to obtain tickets. She and John had been given only the four tickets that they had requested, for themselves and Stephens and Carrie Lou. The folks at Macmillan wrote her that they were concerned about not having enough tickets for the executives who hoped to come to Atlanta, but Peggy was unable to help. In the end, Selznick gave Macmillan enough tickets for Latham, George Brett and his wife, and the Taylors. There was one extra ticket (presumably because they thought Latham was married), and it proved to be a problem, as all the other executives at Macmillan fought to claim it. Sue Myrick and Wilbur Kurtz and his wife, all now officially “home from the war” were, of course, attending. Peggy had the three of them to dinner, which was not an altogether happy occasion, for they all mourned the tragic death, only a few months before, of Sidney Howard.
Peggy had been suffering from abdominal adhesions for six months and the doctors now planned to operate in January. Eugene Mitchell’s condition had steadily worsened and Peggy was in daily attendance. The movie premiere in her hometown should have been a glorious moment, but now, as always, she cast her startling blue eyes on the dark side, and the closer December 15 came, the less certain she was that she would have the stamina or the time to be at her own premiere. The Selznick people were up in arms when they heard about this, and finally she promised that she would attend.
Selznick had taken the same extravagant care in staging the premiere as he had in filming Gone With the Wind. Howard Dietz, the film’s public relations man, received a telegram from Selznick before the premiere that read, in part: “I WANT YOU TO BE VERY CAREFUL OF THE PAPER YOU SELECT FOR THE PROGRAM STOP SOMETIMES THEIR CRACKLING MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO HEAR THE DIALOGUE STOP PROMISE YOU WILL ATTEND TO THIS STOP.”
Selznick also sent down an advance photographer weeks before to photograph still backgrounds against which portraits of the stars could be taken. Therefore, many of the pictures of the stars that appeared in press releases were “process shots.” By taking the foreground and background separately, stars could be photographed anywhere, indoors, or out, without the distraction of the crowds who always followed them in public.
Everyone connected with the film company was besieged with requests for tickets. Dietz tells the story of the elderly lady who followed him wherever he went, repeating, “You don’t understand. I am president of the local chapter of the D.A.R.”
At the end of his patience, Dietz replied, “But you don’t understand, madam. This picture is about another war.”
Crowds larger than the combined armies that fought the Battle of Atlanta lined up for seven miles to watch the procession of limousines from the airport to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where most of the visiting celebrities were staying. There were said to be three hundred thousand people waiting at the airport to greet the stellar performers. A forty-piece band blasted out “Dixie” as Vivien Leigh alighted, and to Dietz’s horror, she naively exclaimed, “Oh, they’re playing the song from the picture!” “Dixie” was, in fact, played almost nonstop, and both the American and the Confederate flags were flown. Confetti littered the path from the airport to the hotel and the Rebel yell echoed through the streets as star-watchers whistled, cheered, and goggled.
On Wednesday evening. December 13, Peggy had the Selznicks, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Olivia de Havilland, Sue Myrick, and Annie and Wilbur Kurtz to the apartment for drinks. She was tremendously impressed with Miss Leigh, whom she found to be extremely knowledgeable in Southern history. Gable and Carole Lombard were not due to arrive until Thursday morning, when the crowds came out again to welcome them.
At the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium the following night, nearly six thousand celebrants, dressed in Civil War-period gowns and uniforms, danced to Kay Kyser’s music at the Junior League ball. All of the film’s stars were present. Gable danced with Mayor Hartfield’s daughter and sent one debutante into a faint when she was introduced to him. But the author of Gone With the Wind held to her vow and was not present at this gala affair.
Peggy made her first public appearance the next day, Friday, at a luncheon in honor of the Macmillan executives. To her delight, Julia Peterkin and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, both Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, also attended. John was to join Peggy later that day at a cocktail party in the Marshes’ honor given by the Altanta Women’s Press Club at the Piedmont Driving Club. Invitations had been limited to a few official guests, Press Club members, and local reporters and photographers. The ladies of the press had gone to great lengths to keep the time and place of the party out of the newspapers. Unfortunately, they guarded this information so well that there was a mix-up about the hour. Peggy had thought the party was to begin at 6:00 P.M. and so had not yet arrived when, at 5:30, police sirens announced the approach of the Selznick contingent. Only the officers of the Press Club were there to greet the celebrities and there was much scurrying about as the waiters rushed to provide them with mint juleps.
Gable and Selznick exchanged nervous glances. Where was Margaret Mitchell? Would she fail to show up again? To everyone’s relief, the Marshes finally arrived at 6:10 and, after greeting everyone, Peggy talked with Clark Gable for the first time. Gable was struck by her diminutive size and sat down with her in a fairly quiet corner so that she would not have to look up at him and strain her neck. Peggy, a coquettish velvet hat in the shape of a large bow precariously secured to the back of her head, was flushed and a bit insecure as flashbulbs exploded close by. Her glance caught Gable’s. He smiled down at her and then, on impulse, jumped up and spirited her into one of the smaller adjoining rooms, for a private chat about herself and the book. Gable, towering over Peggy, was in full command as he shut the door to curious eyes. Later he said she was “charming” and she said he was “grand.” But, in fact, they remained behind those closed doors for less than five minutes, so it would appear that once social amenities had been exchanged and they were alone, Margaret Mitchell and Rhett Butler had little to say to each other.
A throng estimated at a hundred thousand people or more packed the brilliantly klieg-lighted block of Peachtree Street that held Loew’s Grand Theatre as the privileged ticket holders began to arrive. The audience members were well aware that they were participating in a national event, that they were about to see enacted a story that it had taken Margaret Mitchell seven years to write. They were also aware that it had taken two years to find an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, that the film was the third most costly picture Hollywood had ever produced, and that it ran three and three-quarters hours, making it one of the longest pictures ever filmed. “Above all,” Time was to say in its story on the premiere, “most of them knew by heart the love story of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and they were there to protest if it had undergone a single serious film change.”
Nowhere in the voluminous correspondence that survived the later destruction of her personal papers did Peggy record what she felt as she and John sat on the plush rear seat of the limousine Selznick had supplied, on their way for the first time to see her book and characters brought to life. But she did comment on the luxuriousness of the vehicle, the first of its kind she had ever ridden in. And Bessie, who helped her into the bouffant, pale pink tulle gown she had chosen for the opening, said, “Miss Peggy wished she had been able to see the picture by her own self ’til the very last minute.”
The theatre was only a five-minute ride from the Marshes’ apartment, and Dietz had staged Peggy’s arrival to come last. The crowds had been standing all day in hopes of getting a glimpse of members of the famous assemblage as they arrived, and by this time they were in a near frenzy. There was a crisp breeze and the evening was a cool forty-two degrees, but people had their coats off and were waving their hats
along with Confederate flags. The moment they had been waiting for had arrived. Their own Peggy Mitchell was on her way to the theatre where Atlanta’s history would be recreated, and, in a few moments, she would emerge from the sleek black car that was flanked front and rear by caterwauling police cars. When she did, careful her gown did not reveal her low-heeled, heavy shoes, she flinched in the extraordinary glare. The square before the theatre had been brilliantly flood-lighted, powerful beacons criss-crossed in the sky, and searchlights threw arcs of dazzling light up and down Peachtree Street.
Mayor Hartsfield stepped forward, took Peggy’s hand and led her onto a platform in front of the theatre where a microphone had been set up. She glanced back over her shoulder to watch John get out of the car and then turned again and waved to the crowds, who could not possibly have heard Julian Boehm’s introduction above the shouting and whistling. Howard Dietz was at Peggy’s shoulder, between her and John, and helped her down from the platform and across the short red-carpeted area to the entrance of the theatre. As Margaret Mitchell disappeared through the columned doorway of “Tara,” a great and thunderous cheer arose from the crowds.
Four aged veterans (the youngest was ninety-three) who had fought in the battle of Atlanta — each proudly dressed in Confederate gray — had been seated on the aisle. As she came down it on the arm of Howard Dietz, Peggy paused, leaned over, and shook hands with each of them. Then she continued down to her own seat.
Only a few minutes after Peggy’s arrival, the houselights dimmed. Later she was to say that she was somewhat aghast when Ben Hecht’s first title moved across the screen: “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South ...”
“Cavalier” was not a word she liked associated with the South. But Vivien Leigh had not pouted on the screen for more than five minutes before Peggy, along with the rest of the audience, was convinced no better choice for Scarlett O’Hara could have been made. She did not speak letter-perfect middle-high Georgian, but no one watching her really cared. “She is my Scarlett,” Peggy told Medora during the intermission.
Throughout the entire film, the audience clapped, cheered, whistled, and wept in turn. There were cheers when Scarlett shot the Yankee deserter, loud sobbing at the scene of mass desolation as the grieving folk of Atlanta read the casualty lists after Gettysburg, and cheers again as the Confederate band dispelled the mood of tragedy with a rousing chorus of “Dixie.”
Peggy’s “haw-haw” could be heard during moments when Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) was on screen, and when Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), whom Time dubbed “the sly, leather-lunged devoted Emily Post of the O’Hara’s,” lifted her skirts to show Rhett Butler her red petticoat. Peggy told Medora, who reported it in her Journal coverage the next day, that she felt desolate that Hattie McDaniel was “the only big star of the picture who isn’t here — and a real star, too. The scene in which Mammy walked up the stairs with Melanie after Bonnie’s death was one of the finest I ever saw.”
When the lights came up at the end of the film, there was hardly a dry eye in the house and, when Peggy was escorted down the aisle by Mayor Hartsfield and onto the stage to stand with David O. Selznick and all of the actors and actresses who had come to Atlanta, she unashamedly dabbed at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. The entire audience was on its feet, yelling “Bravo!” and applauding at the same time. Mayor Hartsfield stepped in and guided Peggy to the microphone. There was silence for a brief moment as the master of ceremonies announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta.”
He lowered the microphone to her height, but it was fully three minutes before the wild, enthusiastic cheering was finally silenced. She stood there looking incredibly childlike, her cheeks flushed, eyes red-rimmed, a coy pink bow holding back her hair on one side. “It was an experience,” she finally said in a trembling voice. The audience laughed nervously. “And I’m so glad you liked my Scarlett.” She finished by thanking Mr. Selznick and all the film people for “doing such a fine job of bringing my book to life.”
Whatever adverse literary criticism had been laid upon the book — that perhaps its love story was too “women’s magazine”; its history, sectional; its length, pretentious; its writing, lacking in style — the film avoided. In the three years since its publication, Gone With the Wind had been recognized as the incarnation of not one, but two American legends — one, a vivid, moving account of the war between the states, told from the viewpoint of the South; and two, the heroic and tragic love story of two people who were strong and brutal enough to have survived the first. The advantage of filming two great legends in one picture was that Selznick had two great pictures in one — “a surefire Rebel-rouser for the South, a surefire love story for the rest of the country,” Time said.
Peggy never doubted the film’s success as she had once doubted the success of the book. And as she was escorted out of the theatre, having to stop every inch of the way to accept tearful congratulations, she whispered to Medora, “Oh, I do hope the madness isn’t going to start up all over again!”
After a series of “premieres” in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, Gone With the Wind was booked into theatres all over the country on a reserved-seat basis. Ticket prices began at twice the normal movie-house admission. Yet, despite the high tariff and the necessity of purchasing seats far in advance, box office receipts were extraordinary. Scalpers bought and resold tickets at such exorbitant prices that in New York live theatre was frequently a less expensive form of entertainment. Even people who, because they were not readers, had been unaware of either Margaret Mitchell or Gone With the Wind before the film’s release, now could not help but be thoroughly aware of both. Say what she would about Annie Laurie Williams, Peggy had been assured her name would appear above the title as a result of Miss Williams’s perseverance. And now the words “David O. Selznick Presents Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind” seemed to appear on towering billboard posters everywhere; they dominated the highways that led into major cities and were plastered on the sides of buildings and the backs of buses. Her name and the title of the book even flashed on and off in garish neon high over New York’s Times Square. And the first week in January, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind” occupied the covers of eleven major national magazines. The mail once again had to be delivered in satchels and the telephone rang off the wall.
Peggy and John went to Tucson, Arizona, to visit Helen and Clifford Dowdey for Christmas. One of the enhancements was that Herschel Brickell was also there. “We did have a good Christmas, didn’t we?” she wrote him upon her return. As Brickell was deeply depressed over his divorce problems at the time, and the Dowdeys were struggling through financial reverses, the question seems especially poignant. She had helped to cheer everyone up with stories about the premiere. Her friends had not yet seen the film and she expounded on its merits and demerits, “discussing every angle of the thing.” The Marshes had both been back to see the film a second time and, in retrospect, as John wrote the Dowdeys, they thought that “the novel was followed much too closely”; Leigh was “unqualifiedly marvelous — she was Scarlett”; Gable seemed “only adequate”; de Havilland, “good”; and Howard, as Ashley Wilkes, “wretched beyond compare.” Peggy was delighted with Mammy, but now felt moments of her performance were “a little on the Show Boat side.” Miss Pittypat was poor, and except for the “excellent” Carroll Nye, who played Frank Kennedy, all of the supporting performers were “adequate.” Twelve Oaks was “too lavish” a set; and Tara, “not nearly plain enough;” and the house Rhett Butler built for Scarlett “could have been in Omaha so little does it resemble any dwelling in the Atlanta of the Reconstruction period.” But on second viewing, both of them had agreed that the feeling of the old South was stronger than they had originally thought, and Thomas Mitchell’s performance as Gerald O’Hara, much more moving.
Neither of the Marshes had been well when they had left for Arizona. Peggy had her abdominal operation to face on her retu
rn (now scheduled for January 13) and was in a moderate amount of pain, and John just seemed exhausted. Home again in Atlanta, they were plunged back into the madness the film had stirred up, and they also mourned the demise of the newspaper the Georgian, which had employed many of their good friends. Wistfully, Peggy commented to Brickell, “It seems like a pleasant but improbable dream that we all managed to get together in a far place. I’ll always think the first batch of eggnog we made was the best I ever drank, and I wish I had the energy to make some right now. But I have decided that the best flavor eggnog can have is when it is made by the combined efforts of a very few people and these people are good friends.”
In personal terms, the year 1939 had been the most rewarding since the publication of Gone With the Wind. In early June, Peggy had traveled to Smith College to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree. For three years her friends had been aware that she hoped Smith might so honor her one day. To Edwin Granberry, in refusing a similar honor from his school, Rollins, she had ruefully mentioned that she was as illustrious a Smith alumna as Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and that, although she must say no to Rollins, she would accept an honorary degree from Smith if asked. Ginny was not at the commencement exercises, but Red Baxter and some of the other girls from Ten Hen were there. Lois, also a Smith alumna, met Peggy on campus and they drove back to New York together through the rich green countryside of Massachusetts and the rolling verdant hills of Connecticut. Peggy felt good about herself. Twenty years after her departure from Smith, Margaret Mitchell had achieved the recognition of her classmates and her school as one of the “top.”
