Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  It was so well known among servicemen abroad that Margaret Mitchell would reply to their letters that Bill Mauldin, the syndicated cartoonist, published a cartoon that showed one of his “feet-itchy,” exhausted combat soldiers writing on a pad, “Dear, Dear Miss Mitchell” by the light from nearby artillery fire. Peggy wrote Mauldin that his cartoon had “raised her stock with youngsters to extravagant heights.”

  A temporary building was set up for a Red Cross canteen in Piedmont Park, a short distance from the Marsh apartment, and Peggy was often there to help servicemen by mending uniforms, sewing on new chevrons, reattaching buttons, and reknitting gloves. And, as she worked, there would always be a crowd of young soldiers around her chair, sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall, laughing and rallying with her, or listening quietly while she told a story.

  She remained an extraordinary tale bender and she collected stories to tell her young uniformed admirers:

  A soldier was stationed near Boston and became infatuated with a young lady in that city. The government moved him to Mississippi. Shortly after his arrival in Mississippi he received a letter from her stating that she was “elected” and knew that he wanted to do the right thing by her and please send her some money and she would come on down to Mississippi. He replied in about ten days, telling her that she had better stay where she was; that after careful inquiry in the community he believed a bastard would have more chance in Boston than a Yankee in Mississippi.

  Peggy’s network of servicemen correspondents brought news about the fate of Gone With the Wind in war-torn Europe, although she had no way to keep track of foreign sales. Many of the publishers she had been contracted to had been liquidated by invading armies. Still, Gone With the Wind was read. The Germans at first allowed its circulation in Occupied France, feeling the Yankee oppressors would serve German propaganda well in discrediting the United States as the “land of the free.” When they realized that this plan had boomeranged, and that the French wholly empathized with the portrait of Southerners as a people who would not accept defeat, publication was halted in France and all copies that could be found were confiscated. Indomitably, Gone With the Wind then turned up on the black market at about sixty dollars a copy, a price that could have purchased the rare luxuries of a pound of butter and a dozen eggs in Holland, Norway, and Belgium. According to the reports of her correspondents, people had been shot for possession of a copy of the book.

  A tide of gallantry rose in Peggy during the war years, and, at the same time, her middle-aged jowliness evolved into a stalwart maturity. When she spoke, she kindled the fire of pride and sacrifice and heroism in her audience. She wholeheartedly believed in the war, and sacrifice was to be borne proudly. When news came back to her that one of her “pen pals” had been killed in action and her letters to him found in his knapsack, she framed the letter. In February, 1944, she received an invitation to christen the new U.S.S. Atlanta. It afforded the Marshes an opportunity to travel up North to visit with John’s family and to see the Dowdeys, who, they had just learned, were having marital problems. They arranged for Helen Dowdey to dine with them alone in their suite at the Waldorf Astoria on the night of February 8. Since they knew there had been another woman involved, they were not surprised to hear that Helen planned to go to Reno for a divorce. Peggy tried to convince her that this would be a legally unsound move, for if she ever was to remarry and to have children, that marriage might not be legal, nor would the children of that marriage have their rights of inheritance protected. But Helen would not be swayed.

  As summer, 1944, approached it looked as though the war was near its end. Peggy’s happiness over this was dimmed by Eugene Mitchell’s severe kidney problems and rapidly deteriorating condition. She wrote Helen Dowdey that her father was ‘just as easy to handle as a wildcat in his prime.” Eugene Mitchell had grown even more irascible with the years, and his illness now required that he be tended twenty-four hours a day. Good nursing help was hard to find and, to make matters worse, Mr. Mitchell harassed the orderlies Peggy was able to hire, was rude to the doctors, and refused to take so much as an aspirin unless Peggy administered it.

  Eugene Mitchell died on June 17, 1944. Peggy was torn by her ambivalent feelings toward her father and his death. For six years his illness had been an excuse for her nonattendance and nonapplication to anything that she was opposed to doing. In 1941, she had written the Dowdeys that if it were not for her responsibility to her father, who used up all her energies, she would be writing again. To Douglas S. Freeman, Robert E. Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, she wrote much the same thing in 1944. It was not true, of course. She had filled her life during those years with her wartime activities — the letters, the bond drives, the canteen appearances, Red Cross work, street-warden duty, and packing and sending gifts to soldiers: food, sweaters, chewing tobacco, snuff, and even, in one case, a country guitar.

  Magazines still approached her frequently to write a story for them, and she always refused. Selznick had tried to reopen negotiations to buy the stage rights to Gone With the Wind for “an agreeable figure,” but Stephens and John felt they would be worth more at a later date. And Macmillan often inquired through Lois and Latham about any new “literary activity.”

  The inconsistency of Peggy’s attitude was that she was always trying to galvanize other writers into beginning new works, whereas she remained caught up in her Gone With the Wind fame. She even wrote Stark Young, begging him to begin a new book soon; and, after the publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she wrote to Betty Smith, whom she did not know, “I hope the world is not too much with you and that you will have time to write more books.”

  Evidently the world was too much with Margaret Mitchell, because even her father’s death did not get her back to the typewriter, at least, not in any literary pursuit. The “business” of Gone With the Wind remained to take up the time and energy she was not giving to the war effort. To an under secretary at the State Department, in a letter dated October 14, 1944, she confided her fears that perhaps she might be considered to be “trading with the enemy” if she continued doing business with her French publisher, who was a suspected collaborationist. She asked: “Has a policy or procedure been established by the provisional French government or the Allied nations for the handling of the property and assets of collaborationists? If such assets have been taken over by some governmental agency, what is that agency and what would be my line of action in protecting my right? Would I be expected to deal directly with that agency in France or through some agency of the United States Government in this country?”

  A few days later, she was battling with the editor of the New York World Telegram because they had published two stories that repeated the statement that Gone With the Wind had been sold to the movies in galley proof for fifty thousand dollars:

  “Gone With the Wind” was not sold in galley proof and I have never made any statement as to the amount I received.... I have been correcting this misstatement ever since 1936. But here we go again!

  I finished reading galley proofs on “Gone With the Wind” in March. It is highly doubtful that anyone read it in galley proof. If they did no offer was made to me at that time.... I sold the motion picture rights on July 30, 1936, as the date of my contract will show. As the pre-publication sale was something between 50,000 and 90,000 copies, I knew my book would be fairly successful. “Gone With the Wind” had sold several hundred thousand copies by the time I disposed of the motion picture rights.

  I do get tired of seeing this error crop up about once a month, in spite of my denials.... If ever you ... are writing on the subject of the sale of moving picture rights, I hope you omit mention of “Gone With the Wind” or else state that it was not sold in galley proof and that, far from being hornswaggled by Hollywood, the rights to “Gone With the Wind” brought the highest price ever paid for a first novel by an unknown author up to that time.

  Working backwards in Peggy’s letter to the World Telegram,
it would seem she did not want anyone to think she had been fool enough to sell Gone With the Wind as cheaply as its original purchase price now appeared. But of course, it had been sold for $50,000 to Selznick and, furthermore, not only had Kay Brown received galley proofs from Annie Laurie Williams in April of 1936, but so had Doris Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl Zanuck. Warner’s first offers had been made in April and there were no books of Gone With the Wind until early May. And, in Macmillan’s files there remains an order for twelve sets of galley proofs.

  But the point is, why was Peggy still expending so much energy on the maintenance of her legend and that of her book? The answer is all too sad and clear. The critiques on the book were all in, the excitement long past, the film accepted as a classic. With no new book on the horizon, Margaret Mitchell was no longer news. Keeping the legend alive was the only way Peggy knew to sustain interest in herself and, during this period, she seems to have been involved in a small game in which she wrote to friends in the newspaper world and told them, for instance, about Gone With the Wind playing for five years to queues in wartime England, or about Hitler having a private showing of it in Berlin with his “four closest boyfriends.” These nuggets would then appear in the press, much to Peggy’s “consternation.”

  Margaret Baugh noted a change in her employer’s appearance and attitude around Christmas, 1944. Peggy’s sense of humor did not surface as often, she was careless of her grooming, and her letters to her fans lost all their variety and verve. The two Margarets — who had now spent over nine years in each other’s daily company, and under particularly close circumstances — were always on a slightly formal basis. Peggy was tremendously fond of Margaret Baugh and grateful for her help and her loyalty. But a line was drawn, and the employer-secretary relationship was meticulously maintained. Margaret Baugh kept a sheaf of notes about Peggy’s moods and made certain close observations which indicate she might have been considering writing a book about Peggy at some future date.

  Before Christmas, 1944, Margaret Baugh noted that Peggy was “generally cheerful.” After that, she entered a “glum” period. The only time Margaret Baugh ever saw Peggy cry was in February of 1945, when a nylon stocking she was rinsing out in the kitchen sink somehow slid down the drain and was lost. For some reason known to Peggy alone, this stirred her emotions, and she stood leaning against the sink sobbing bitterly, unmindful of Margaret Baugh standing helplessly and with some embarrassment in the doorway.

  The Germans signed an unconditional surrender in Rheims on May 7, 1945. America was still at war with Japan but, during the summer of 1945, many Atlanta boys returned home. Their return contributed to Peggy’s bouts of depression. She explained to her few close friends that she could not help but think of all the Georgia boys who had been left dead on foreign soil. Images of death paraded through her night dreams. She was suffering insomnia again, and she wrote Edwin Granberry an odd request — not to destroy her letters no matter who should ask him to do so. She added, “I’m going to die in a car-crash. I feel very certain of this.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  WITH THE WAR OVER and her father dead, Peggy finally had to face up to the fact that she would never return to her “writing desk.” In January of 1945, Peggy had written George Brett that procrastination was one of Scarlett O’Hara’s basic weaknesses — she kept putting off until tomorrow coming to terms with her own conscience — and that she guessed she was guilty of the same vice. Someday she would try to understand why she had not written anything but letters since Gone With the Wind — but, for the present, that day would have to be tomorrow.

  Nine years had passed since the publication of her book. During that time, she had made notes for only one story idea, which she had discussed with John and Margaret Baugh. It was to be a fictionalized account of her own sudden fame — its cause and effect. But Margaret Baugh later told friends that by 1945 Peggy had long since abandoned this idea and that she had made no story notes for years. The creator of Scarlett O’Hara had fallen into the trap that her heroine had avoided — Margaret Mitchell was the victim, not the master, of her world.

  With peace came a brand new surge of activity in the sales of Gone With the Wind, both domestic and foreign. In October and November of 1945, the book even reappeared at the bottoms of the best-seller lists, and the rise in sales in Europe was astronomical. The daily business of the foreign editions was complex. The Marshes still had a bookkeeper two evenings a month, and he recorded all monies coming in and going out. But John was in charge of the foreign rights. In 1941, the Marshes had dealt with a foreign agency for a short time, but the association had ended unpleasantly when Stephens accused the agents of not giving their best effort to the problems the book was having in the Netherlands. The fact was, the Mitchells did not trust strangers; and John now made himself responsible for such matters as finding out which foreign publishers had survived the ravages of war, and what laws now governed them. Letters had been sent to Peggy’s “storm-battered” European publishers and they were “checking in.” She reported to Lois, “Still no news from Poland, where I know my first set of publishers were Jewish. Nothing from Latvia, but the Russians have them. No news from Finland at all. They were a fine set of people, and I recall that when the Russians were almost at the gates of Helsinki and the old gentleman of the firm was running the business while his boys were at the front, they still came through and paid my royalties.”

  The “foreign stuff,” as she called it, was keeping the Marshes busy. Peggy’s network of servicemen overseas and her foreign admirers had reported to her the incredible sales of Gone With the Wind in occupied countries during the war, and she was determined that this information now be verified so that her foreign publishers could do the “honorable thing” by her and square their debts. She was aware that the book had been banned by the Nazis, and that, therefore, it had been sold on the black market and a true accounting could never be had. But John wrote letters whenever he could trace a publisher’s address. In most cases, he received replies, and eventually — since the firms wanted to continue publishing the book — royalties.

  Since June of 1945, John had had a fever that persisted without any sign of abating, and the doctors once again were baffled. One diagnosed the return of undulant fever but, as there was nothing he could prescribe for it, John continued both his work at Georgia Power and on the foreign affairs of Gone With the Wind. By December, Peggy was alarmed. “He is always so fatigued it frightens me,” she wrote a friend, “but there is nothing much to do about it except ‘supportive’ treatment. Perhaps by spring this new drug, ‘streptomycin’ [sic] will be out of the experimental class and we can try it.”

  John wrote to Helen Dowdey that they never did seem to get caught up on the work that had to be done. Despite this, he and Peggy were going to go to Sea Island, a resort off the Georgia coast, for Christmas to get a few days’ rest. Early on the morning of December 24, they arrived by train in Jesup, Georgia, where they then had to change for Brunswick and Sea Island by private transport. A station wagon was scheduled to meet them, but when they left the train — in a driving rainstorm and a hundred feet from the depot — there was no porter in sight and no station wagon. Peggy, a coat over her head for protection, ran for cover as she shouted to John to leave their suitcases and follow her. Ignoring her order, John juggled the bags uncomfortably and started toward the station house. Halfway there he was seized by a sharp pain up his arm and stood frozen for a few moments. Then, as the pain began to subside, he made his way shakily to Peggy’s side. His face was drawn and tissue-paper white, but he assured her he was all right. A few minutes later, the station wagon arrived.

  As soon as they reached the Cloister Hotel at Sea Island, John went to bed. An hour later, he suffered a severe heart attack. There was no doctor in the hotel, no doctor on the island. Peggy was frantic and she finally commandeered the hotel’s station wagon and got John to nearby Brunswick, where there was a hospital. On Christmas Day,
John Marsh nearly died, but then slowly, he began to revive. It was three weeks before he could be moved to Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital. Two months later, he was still there, and Peggy wrote Lois: “There is a faint hope that John will be home in a week by ambulance. How long he will stay upstairs [in their apartment] I do not know.... The whole truth of his recovery will not be apparent until he starts to take up normal or semi-normal life again.”

  That was not to be for a very long time and, in fact, John Marsh never did recover from this attack; from the time of his heart attack on Sea Island he lived what Peggy called a “semi-normal life.” He was brought home from the hospital on a stretcher ten weeks after the attack, and for months he could do nothing but lie flat on his back. The doctor had wanted him to remain in the hospital, but Peggy did not think he was strong enough “to stand the hospital,” where it took “forty minutes for the nurses to come,” and where the orderlies stopped work at 8:00 P.M. “with the sanction of the hospital” and let ”the patients wet the bed if they so desired.” She was a martinet at trying to get things done for him in the hospital, but still complained that it was sometimes sixteen hours between supper and breakfast, and that the dirty plates and greasy tableware were more than she could bear.

  Peggy hired a young black man who was studying to be an orderly to come home with John. For months, the house was turned into a hospital, with Peggy helping with the nursing and Bessie putting in extra hours for a “second shift.” By July, 1946, John was able to be propped up in bed for twenty to thirty minutes. “It seems wonderful to him. It is wonderful to me, too,” she wrote to Helen Dowdey. But the future was unknown. At present, she was grateful for the small progress he had made. But, she said, she did not want to think about “how long it will be before John can think of getting out of bed, nor how free or limited his activities will be when he does get up.”