Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  Mrs. Una M. Dean, corps sergeant major, said the 47-year-old seaman had passed out Tuesday at the Salvation Army home in a “kind of a fit” and when he recovered appeared in a dazed condition and claimed he couldn’t remember his name.

  Upshaw was discovered lying in the alley behind the hotel by Steve Connell, clerk of corporation court.

  Justice of the Peace James L. McKenna returned an inquest verdict of death due to jumping from the fifth-story fire escape of a building, resulting in self-inflicted multiple traumatic injuries, suicidal.

  According to the hotel clerk, Upshaw was sharing a fifth-floor room with three other men.

  Upshaw’s roommates said he arose a little after 6 A.M. Wednesday and went out of the room without saying anything to any of them. That was the last they saw of him.

  Detectives William Whitburn and James Fox, who investigated the case, said they found a hall window leading to the fire escape open when they arrived at the scene.

  Mrs. Dean said she didn’t know how long the man had been in Galveston. She said he called at the Salvation Army home Tuesday and asked for supper and a bed.

  It was while he was waiting for supper that he had what she described as a “fit.”

  The body will be sent to Raleigh, N.C., Thursday under direction of Malloy & Son Funeral home.”

  Nowhere in the article in the Galveston Daily News had it said that Berrien Kinnard Upshaw had been married to Margaret Mitchell, author of the internationally famous Gone With the Wind.

  The Marshes’ world now consisted of the few square blocks of the section in which they lived. Movies were still their best entertainment. As the spring of 1949 approached, John had made enough progress to be able to cross the street to the Piedmont Driving Club for dinner occasionally, or to go to a neighborhood film. On May 5, they went to see Gone With the Wind, and the next day Peggy wrote Harold E. George, the manager of the theatre, how pleased she was to see “the theatre packed and even the front rows in use.” She noted that many in the audience were “repeaters” who knew beforehand what was going to happen and “started laughing or crying ... before the cause for laughter or tears appeared on the screen.”

  In July, Peggy was made an honorary citizen of the town of Vimoutiers, France, in gratitude for some help she had given this old Normandy village in obtaining American aid after the war. She was pleased with this, but concerned about the ramifications and she wrote for advice from Dr. Wallace McClure in the State Department, who, over the years, had become something of a special advisor to her on various copyright matters. The honor made her more conscious than she had ever been of the problems now besetting foreign countries, and she confided to Dr. McClure:

  I lie awake at night wondering about the publishers, agents, newspaper critics, and just plain letter-writing friends who have suddenly become silent and disappeared as Russia rolled over their countries — Bulgaria, Roumania, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and now Czechoslovakia. The Communists have attacked “Gone With the Wind” in this country and every other country.... My Czech publisher has just had his publishing house “Nationalized.” He is still alive and still at liberty but I do not know for how long.

  At night I pack food and vitamins and clothing boxes, always wondering if they will ever reach the people to whom they are sent. Sometimes when I am out in crowds I find I do not have too much conversation about what is going on in Georgia because I have been wrestling with international financial regulations and wondering about people who cannot possibly escape from the encirclement of Russia.

  Sometimes I discover I know things about some foreign countries which are not public property. I tell you this so that if ever my experience can be of help to you I hope you will call on me.

  And, on July 28, in a letter refusing a request from Governor James M. Cox for an autographed copy of Gone With the Wind to place in a case in the Atlanta Journal building, she wrote that she was sending him a copy of the Yugoslavian translation of Gone With the Wind — for reasons that the governor never quite understood, although she explained:

  In Yugoslavia, as in all Communist countries, the press denounced Gone With the Wind at the top of its lungs, stating, to my great pleasure and pride, that the book was a glorification of individual courage and individual enterprise (both qualities being highly obnoxious to Communists) and revealing in a hideous, bourgeois fashion the love of a person for their land and their home. The Communist critics observed virtuously that any school boy knew how vicious such ideas were because the STATE is everything, the individual nothing. To love one’s home and fight for one’s land is the act of a traitor.

  The summer of 1949 was wickedly hot and, to escape the heat of their apartment, the Marshes often dined across the street on the porch of the Driving Club, overlooking the pool. On the night of August 11, their plans were to go there for dinner with Richard Harwell, a young friend and historian. But the day was an especially draining one for Peggy, and in the late afternoon she asked John to call Harwell and ask if they could postpone their engagement until another evening. Harwell, of course, agreed. Peggy had been unduly depressed all day and, after a light dinner, John talked her into going down to the Peachtree Arts Theatre to see the English film Canterbury Tales. If they were going to make the first show, Peggy had no time to change, and so she kept on the bright cotton peasant-style housedress she was wearing, which looked a bit as if it belonged on a Swiss schoolgirl. She helped John down the stairs and then they drove the few short blocks to the theatre. She was still in low spirits as she parked the car, at quarter past eight, on the west side of Peachtree Street. The Arts was across the street, at the corner of Thirteenth and Peachtree streets, the latter being a main thoroughfare and a dangerous crossing. There was no traffic signal or marked crosswalk and, for about a hundred yards both north and south, Peachtree Street curved sharply, blocking the view of anyone crossing to the theatre at the point the Marshes chose.

  Why Peggy did not drive the car around to Thirteenth Street and park in a public lot, or even on the side street, is not clear. But there were only a few minutes until the film was to begin and she probably thought it best simply to pull into the first available space.

  Peggy got out of the car first and went around to help John. He still walked with a lumbering step and had to be helped up and down curbs. Conscious of the dangerous spot she had chosen to cross the street, Peggy waited with John until Peachtree Street, according to John’S police report, was free of traffic “from one curve to the other, except for two cars already abreast of the Thirteenth Street corner.”

  Her hand supportively under John’s elbow, they started slowly across. They had just passed the center line and were heading for the opposite curb when Peggy saw a car to the right of them, speeding down the middle of Peachtree Street, and advancing fast enough so that she must have known instantly it would hit them unless they got out of its path. She screamed something unintelligible and, in that split second when a decision had to be made, panicked, withdrew her support from John’S arm, pivoted sharply, and — leaving John standing immobile in what at that moment looked like the advancing car’s path — started to run back toward the curb where her car was parked.

  Terrified spectators on the street knew at that moment exactly what would happen, and there were screams from both sides of the road. The driver, suddenly aware of the danger and in a last-ditch effort to avoid an accident, swerved to the left on an impulse, never expecting either pedestrian would turn and go backward. He jammed on the brakes, but the car plunged forward in a sixty-foot skid, and Peggy fell under the wheels and was dragged another seven feet before the driver could bring the car to a tire-shrieking stop. Peggy was eleven feet from the sidewalk, unconscious, bleeding profusely, obviously critically injured.

  Someone at the theatre called for an ambulance, and someone else helped John back across the street to Peggy’s side. He dropped to the asphalt beside her and knelt there over her prostrate body refusing to let anyone touch her or try t
o move her until the ambulance came. No one knew at this time that the injured woman was Margaret Mitchell. The young man who had driven the car hung back, watched by two men, until a police car arrived. Twelve minutes from the time of the impact, the ambulance from Grady Hospital was on the scene. By coincidence, the intern on ambulance duty that evening was Dr. Edwin Lochridge, Lethea Turman Lochridge’s son, a young man whom Peggy had known since he was a child. John rode in the ambulance with Peggy to Grady Hospital and, after X rays and emergency treatment, she was wheeled up to a private room on the third floor where the battle for her life began.

  Peggy had a skull fracture that went from her brain to the top of her spine, a concussion, internal injuries, and a fractured pelvis.

  The doctors debated whether to operate to relieve pressure on her brain, but they feared she would not survive surgery. On the third day, she seemed to rally a bit and mumbled incoherently. A nurse reported that she drank some orange juice and said, “It tastes bad.” Someone else said she moaned that she hurt all over. Stephens and John hardly left her bedside and the rest of the Mitchell family was always close by, as were Augusta and Lee Edwards and Margaret Baugh.

  From the moment it was known that Margaret Mitchell, author of the most celebrated of all American novels, was the victim of a car accident, the hospital was inundated with calls and invaded by people who wanted to see her. Medora mobilized all the friends she could think of to assist the telephone operators at the hospital at their overloaded switchboard. Thousands of people called throughout the five-day vigil that followed, including President Harry S Truman. Instantly, Peggy became a symbol for everyone who had suffered similar brutal and needless accidents. As she fought for her life, newspapers across the country published articles about the need for more traffic lights and tougher driving regulations in metropolitan areas. And the twenty-nine year old Atlanta taxi driver, Hugh D. Gravitt, who had been at the wheel of the car that had struck Peggy down, also became a symbol — of the deeper causes behind reckless driving. Gravitt had a long history of traffic violations as a cabby and had always gotten off easily. This time, however, he had been in his private car, and the victim was Atlanta’s most famous citizen. He was held on counts of driving while intoxicated (he had had a beer four hours before the accident) and reckless driving, and was released on $5,450 bail, with homocide charges pending until it was seen whether Margaret Mitchell would survive.

  On the morning of the fifth day, Peggy’s condition seemed to have stabilized, but the doctors held little hope of her recovery, and both John and Stephens accepted the grim truth that Peggy’s death was imminent. For four days they had kept a close vigil at the hospital; now there were practical matters that had to be dealt with.

  For business and tax purposes, several of Peggy’s bank accounts had been in the name of Margaret Mitchell. As long as she was alive, John had power of attorney and could transfer those funds to one of the Marshes’ joint accounts, so that the bulk of Peggy’s estate would not be tied up in probate after her death. With Margaret Baugh’s help, John left the hospital on the fifth morning to make these transactions.

  Meanwhile, Stephens hurried down to the offices of the Atlanta Journal to speak with Medora. Knowing that an obituary must already have been drafted, Stephens wanted to make sure that no mention of Peggy’s marriage to Red Upshaw was printed. Just as the Journal clock struck noon, while Stephens was in putting his request to Medora, Frank Daniel received the news that, at 11:50 A.M., with three doctors in attendance, Margaret Mitchell had died. Daniel then had the difficult task of telling Stephens as he came out of Angus’s office. Someone asked over the loud speaker for a minute of silence in Peggy Mitchell’s memory, but many of the staff were not able to contain their sobs. People cried as they walked down Peachtree Street, and many Atlanta motorists who heard the news over their car radios pulled over to the nearest curb to absorb the news. Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta was dead. It was as though a member of their own family had died.

  Bessie had been the first to be told of Peggy’s death, for the hospital had called hoping to reach John. He walked in fifteen minutes later, but Bessie, concerned about how weary he appeared, decided he should not be told until after he had eaten his lunch. By then, Stephens had arrived and, with Bessie supporting John’s arm, Stephens told him that Peggy was dead. John took the news stoically. “It was something that didn’t have to happen,” he said softly.

  Tickets had to be issued to the funeral because the requests to attend were so overwhelming. The funeral cortege followed the route that the parade had taken on the night Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta. Peggy was buried beside Maybelle and Eugene and a brother who had died in infancy, in a plot surrounded by the graves of dozens of Confederate soldiers. Children stood on their parents’ shoulders to see Margaret Mitchell being lowered into the red Georgia dirt, and police had to hold back the lines of the grieving and the curious, as well as the throngs of press photographers and reporters.

  Though he had held up well throughout the crisis, after the funeral John became too ill to leave his bed. For several days he appeared troubled about something, and finally he called Margaret Baugh into his room. “Margaret,” he said, “I promised Peggy I would burn all her papers. It was a trust. I can’t do it. Can you?”

  The shaken woman stood there unable to reply for a moment or two. “If Peggy really ... ”

  “I have a list,” he said. She nodded. “All manuscripts and notes, all the papers and correspondence that are left from Gone With the Wind. Original drafts, revisions, research, proofs — just keep out the papers marked on here.” And he handed her a sheet that delineated certain pages from Peggy’s work that were to survive the flames and, as he explained, were to be placed in a sealed envelope and deposited in a bank vault which would never be opened unless Peggy’s authorship of Gone With the Wind was challenged. He then gave her the list of correspondence that he wanted her to burn, and he warned her “not to leave a single piece.” Written in John Marsh’s careful hand was a list that included the names Medora, Augusta, Lethea, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Faith Baldwin, Clifford Dowdey, Edwin Granberry, Stark Young, Herschel Brickell, Lois Dwight Cole, Harold Latham, George Brett, and several others.

  Carbon copies had been made of all of Peggy’s correspondence since 1935. Margaret Baugh pulled those files specified by John. But, of course, she could only destroy carbons of Peggy’s letters; and, though she could burn all the original letters Peggy had received from these people, they also might have carbons. She spoke to John about this and it was decided that letters would be written either by John or Stephens to Peggy’s correspondents asking them to destroy the letters they had in their possession.

  Then, with the old janitor’S help, Margaret Baugh dragged all the material to be destroyed down two flights of stairs to the basement, where she stood by as the trusted black man fed Peggy’s papers into the flames of the boiler. She remained until every shred was ash, unable to control her tears or to console the janitor, who was also crying. It seemed to both of them that here, on this spot, Margaret Mitchell was being consumed by flames. John had said it was a trust. And she had believed him. But once the papers were gone, Margaret Baugh was never sure that she had done the right thing.

  Afterword

  THE PRIVET HEDGES in front of John Marsh’s house on Walker Terrace grew in tall, “sprangling” rows because he did not like to have them trimmed down into hard, compact walls. The shrubs were thick with blooms this spring of 1952, and their strong, sweet fragrance filled his rooms. Peggy had never seriously wanted a house, but it had been a long-held desire of his, and as soon as the estate had been settled, Margaret Baugh had gone house hunting for him.

  She had helped him move into the charming one-story cottage on Walker Terrace just before Christmas, 1949. The house had an apartment attached to it, which Bessie Jordan occupied so that John need never be alone. In the three and a half years since Peggy’s death, he had lived a quiet but fulfilling l
ife. Stephens had taken over most of the “business of Margaret Mitchell,” although John still kept his hand in on the foreign affairs. He had a number of friends who came by often to see him, and Margaret Baugh drove him wherever he wanted to go. His favorite entertainment was the opera and he looked forward to its arrival in Atlanta each spring, attending as many performances as he could.

  In late April of 1952, he attended a performance by Dorothy Kirsten in Carmen with a young friend, Bill Corley. He was much enchanted with Miss Kirsten and, after leaving the theatre, told Corley, “That’s my kind of woman!”

  The following Monday, May 5, 1952, John felt weary, for there had been several visitors over the weekend and he had remained up long past his usual bedtime. Bessie served his dinner and, thinking he looked “peaked,” told him he should go straight to bed. But he sat up reading rather late. Bessie heard him calling for help about 11:00 P.M. and instantly went to his aid. He had been stricken by a heart seizure. Bessie got him to the bed, called the doctor and an ambulance, and remained by his bedside until medical assistance arrived. But it was too late.

  The “mama and papa” of Gone With the Wind were now both dead.

  Margaret Mitchell had left all rights to Gone With the Wind to John Marsh. On his death, these rights passed to Stephens Mitchell. When asked once by an interviewer what Gone With the Wind was about, Stephens Mitchell replied, “Not change and survival or war or its aftermath. That’s the background. It is the story of the inheritance of a certain characteristic, that characteristic being juvenile love for some man. [Scarlett O’Hara’s] mother falls in love with her worthless cousin, who finally gets killed in a barroom. But she marries and is a faithful wife, builds up a big plantation for her husband, and dies with her worthless cousin’s name on her lips.