Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (11 page)

With Latham focused on England, Cole tried to catch the eye of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a major player in the American book distribution field. Founded in 1926, the club was a subscription service through which members, many of whom lived in small towns with no bookstores, could learn about and buy new books by mail at discounted prices. A panel of distinguished literary critics picked the best and most important new titles each month for the club to offer, thereby saving readers the trouble of keeping up with and sorting through the thousands of books published each year. By 1936, about two hundred thousand people had signed up for the service.
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If the club selected
Gone With the Wind
as one of its titles, Cole knew it would mean big things for Macmillan and Mitchell. The club placed large orders for the books it offered and promoted them extensively. The organization insisted on buying books from publishers at a deep discount, but Macmillan was happy to play along.

Cole feared the length of
Gone With the Wind
might work against the book's selection but thought it worth the effort to make a pitch. At an industry luncheon on February 19, she approached two of the club's principals, Meredith Wood and Basil Davenport, and sang Mitchell's praises. Intrigued, the two men asked for galleys and promised to give the book special consideration.
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When Cole returned to the office, she asked Brett's right-hand man, James Putnam, to send the galleys as soon as possible, along with a personal note of recommendation.
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Putnam was a respected voice in the industry, and his personal imprimatur might help convey the seriousness of Macmillan's enthusiasm for the book. On February 26, he sent Davenport three sets of galleys and a note declaring that
Gone With the Wind
was one of the greatest novels Macmillan had ever published.
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In Atlanta, Mitchell and Marsh were still combing through the galleys, and it came as no surprise that Macmillan complained they were taking too long. When the couple had not finished by March 7, the production department approached Cole en masse wanting the pages back. She, in turn, advised Mitchell that the deadline was March 15 and not a day later. Any delay would mean the release date would have to be pushed back again. Mistakes, she said, could be fixed in future printings.
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Cole instructed the author to send sections back as she got through them and to send as many as she could at one time.
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Mitchell shipped the final batch of galley pages to New York by airmail on the morning of March 15.
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Exhausted, she told her sister-in-law that she “didn't know when one day ended and another began.” She could not imagine ever writing another book and being foolish enough to let herself in for such misery again.
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And there was no time to relax quite yet. As Macmillan began processing Mitchell's edits, it identified several potential continuity problems in the story line and sent a flurry of telegrams to Atlanta—sometimes up to five a day—trying to clarify details: How old was Ella when Frank died? How long before Scarlett married Rhett? How old was Scarlett when Bonnie was born? How old was Bonnie when she died? How old was Scarlett at the end?
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Macmillan also kept Mitchell busy working with Cole on the advance promotional copies the sales team wanted autographed. As enthusiasm for the book grew, so did the number of signed copies Macmillan planned to distribute—from five hundred to seven hundred and fifty. The logistics of getting such a mountain of books signed were complicated, given the books were not even printed yet. Macmillan fell back on an old ploy of the publishing trade and asked the author to sign a stack of blank sheets that would be incorporated into the books as they were bound.
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These presigned sheets would be the endpapers, the blank pages that appear before the title page in most books. To the people who received such copies, it would seem Mitchell had handled those volumes and taken the time to sign the books especially for them.

The Marshes thought the entire process absurd. Calling it a “dirty Yankee trick,” Marsh wrote to his mother: “Macmillan is getting these copies autographed so they can present them to ‘key people' [all] over the country with a sly smile and a wink, telling the recipient how they went to no end of trouble to get the great author to autograph the book ‘just for you.' ”
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Beyond the ethical qualms, Mitchell doubted her ability to sign that many pages. Over the previous months of work, she had developed a painful growth on the middle finger of her writing hand.
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And, as an unknown writer, she did not think her signature would add any value to the books. But she was willing to do what her publisher asked. It was, Marsh said, the least she could do to join Macmillan's “heroic efforts to prevent the book from being a complete flop.”
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Using a sample sheet from Cole showing her where to sign, Mitchell felt like “all kinds of a fool” writing her name over and over again. She finished in five days and joked that she had run “amuck and autographed every thing in sight, including wall paper.”
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Macmillan's Atlanta office shipped the sheets back to Cole on March 23. On most of the pages, the author simply had written “Margaret Mitchell,” but she also inscribed many to specific individuals identified by Macmillan. Cole checked through the sheets and noticed two instances in which Mitchell had left off the “Mrs.” in front of a recipient's name. Cole reported to Mitchell that she took matters into her own hands—literally—and added poor imitations of Mitchell's “Mrs.” on the inscriptions.
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In mid-March, the Book-of-the-Month Club's preselection committee gave Mitchell's novel a thumbs-up and asked Macmillan to send additional galleys to the club's final review committee.
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Latham shipped copies to, among others, committee member William Allen White, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of the
Emporia Gazette
in Kansas. In a telegram, Latham declared
Gone With the Wind
one of the most important novels his firm had ever published and encouraged White to advocate the book's selection.56 The Macmillan editor followed up with an enthusiastic letter saying that Mitchell's book had taken the firm by storm and the publisher would pull out all the stops to make it an enormous success.
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White must have seen an earlier copy of the galleys provided to the club because he responded the next day with lavish praise that he had already finished reading
Gone With the Wind
and thought it “a whale of a book.” He declared that Mitchell had the “narrator's magic,” praising her skill at storytelling and “creating suspense.” He assured Latham he would advance the book's cause with the caveat that the story might not appeal to the literary elite because of its setting in America, a locale unpopular with sophisticates.
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Latham now had an outside review, and, for the most part, it was a rave.

Latham sensed Mitchell had the makings of a star. She was attractive, interesting, and witty, a powerful combination that could do wonders to advance
Gone With the Wind
. Hoping to capitalize on her charisma, he contacted the Leigh Bureau of Lectures and Entertainments, a firm that arranged speaking tours for major artists and celebrities, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Latham told W. Colston Leigh, founder of the firm, how Mitchell's manuscript was discovered and encouraged the bureau to sign her for a tour. Sight unseen, and apparently without having read a word of the manuscript, Leigh wrote Mitchell on March 27 and offered to hire her for a brief tour in late 1936, with the possibility of a transcontinental one for the 1937–1938 season.
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Most authors on book tour are paid nothing, their only remuneration being royalties on sales spurred by their appearances. Here, Mitchell was being offered a paid speaking tour orchestrated by one of the top players in the entertainment industry, a prize afforded only the biggest names. Latham must have assumed Mitchell would be thrilled.

Cole, however, had an inclination her friend might not react so warmly. Back in January, the Macon Writers Club in Georgia had asked Cole to recommend an author to speak at its annual breakfast meeting. She thought Mitchell the obvious choice and passed the request along to the author. Mitchell had little desire to speak in public about her book and apparently never responded. Anticipating Mitchell would also not have an interest in Leigh's proposal, Cole wrote her explaining the importance of his offer. Cole characterized Leigh as one of the most efficient and powerful players in the lecture field, and appealed to Mitchell's practical side, noting there was nobody who could make the author more money.
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The promise of riches did not sway Mitchell. On the heels of receiving Leigh's offer, she had an experience that convinced her she was not cut out for giving speeches. She had succumbed to pressure from friends in Macon to give a talk to the writers group when its speaker canceled at the last minute, and the event, in her estimation, had been a disaster. Rushed for time, she had hurried to buy something to wear. The stress of the previous months had caused her to lose weight, and she ended up wearing a “juvenile” outfit that she felt did not give her an “authorish” appearance. She was no happier with the quality of her remarks. As Mitchell described the scene in a letter to Cole, she had prattled on for several minutes about Latham's trip to Atlanta the previous spring and gave the audience a lessthan-genteel discourse on the “horrors of galley proofs.” In her frank way of speaking, she told the room of writers that she was not picky about grammar and would not be able to identify a dangling participle unless it “rose up and gave me a Bronx cheer.” She also claimed that when she told the crowd she didn't think her book would sell “because the heroine was in love with another woman's husband for years and they never did anything about it,” two members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy “fell on the floor.” Mitchell swore to Cole she would never speak in public again, calling it a horrible experience, second only to when “I dropped my drawers in the church aisle when I was six or seven.” There was no chance she would subject herself to a speaking tour.
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Mitchell thanked Leigh for his offer but declined. She said Latham must have been pulling Leigh's leg when suggesting her: “I have made only one speech in my life, and that was last week, and, God helping me, I never intend to make another. I am small, unimpressive, afflicted with stage fright and have a loathing for crowds of strangers.” Claiming to have nothing of interest to lecture about, she said, “I'm not a speaker, I'm not yet a writer and may never be one if the critics don't like me.”
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Mitchell's charming rejection whetted Leigh's appetite. He thought her delightful and, in her short letter, saw the spark of star quality. As he explained to Latham, “Your Margaret Mitchell Marsh must be about as nice a person as I can ever hope to meet. This is what I call a real letter from a mighty genuine person and it makes me feel that I want to manage her, if she can talk at all. There is no bluff or pretense about her—just a grand woman, and I am for her in a big way.”
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Over the following month, Leigh tried to convince Mitchell that a tour would be worthwhile. He assured her she did not have to expound on any weighty topics, suggesting she could talk about anything she liked, perhaps something as simple as “The Urge to Write.” Getting down to brass tacks, he reminded her of the money at stake: “Inasmuch as you are undoubtedly besieged with requests for engagements, you might as well be paid for them, instead of doing them free.”
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Leigh was right about one thing. Mitchell would soon be besieged by requests for public speaking engagements from all manner of people—other lecture agencies, writing groups, schools, clubs, and civic associations. He failed to appreciate, though, that she had no plans to accept any of them, including his, regardless of the money involved. After her experience in Macon, she scoffed at the idea of standing before a crowd pontificating about writing. She told Latham she “fell on the sofa and bellowed” at the idea: “I have no urge to write and never had, loathing writing above all things, except perhaps, Wagnerian opera and tap dancing.”
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Her answer was “no” and would stay “no.”