Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (17 page)

In late June, with advance orders continuing to roll in, the company ordered a third printing of fifteen thousand copies.
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Including the fifty thousand for the Book-of-the-Month Club, this meant one hundred thousand copies would be in print before publication. The firm also geared up to start advertising the novel to book buyers through a carefully orchestrated campaign that would begin release week in the large urban markets and then, if all went well, expand into the regional markets. Macmillan reserved advertising space in major newspapers and magazines for the important cities on both coasts, with special attention paid to the South. The publisher announced it planned to cover “Dixie like the dew,” borrowing the tagline of the
Atlanta Journal
. A variety of advertisements was designed to appeal to a range of readers. Some commended Mitchell's literary skill and included praise from respected authors such as Ellen Glasgow. Others focused on the upcoming holiday and encouraged readers to take Macmillan's new novel away with them on the Fourth of July as insurance against rainy weather.

Macmillan Canada likewise prepared for the big day. It had purchased one thousand sets of printed sheets of the book and one thousand dust jackets from New York. These materials had been shipped to Canada, where the pages were bound in a light gray cloth with blue lettering, trying to match the American edition as closely as possible. The Canadian firm implemented its own marketing campaign, which included newspaper and magazine advertisements, as well as an encouraging letter from Hugh Eayrs to 250 booksellers, libraries, and universities. He confessed that he had not been as moved by a romantic story “in donkey's years” as he was by Mitchell's novel.
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Now the official—albeit secret—movie rights agent, Williams, finally merited an advance copy of
Gone With the Wind
. Her enthusiasm soared after reading the book for herself. She thought it one of the grandest motion picture sagas ever written and loved that it was a “natural co-starring story” with roles for four leading actors.
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Inspired by the possibilities, she raised her estimate of what the rights were worth to one hundred thousand dollars, more than double what a novice author had ever received.

Although Latham had assured Mitchell he would look out for her interests in dealing with Hollywood, Williams was working alone. After formalizing the agency relationship with the author, Latham left on an extended vacation, with plans to be out of town for the rest of the summer. Williams was also working in the dark: Latham apparently had not bothered to tell her about Mitchell's desire for script review. As an unknown firsttime author, there was almost no chance Mitchell would be granted such input. Latham, having little or no experience negotiating movie deals, perhaps did not know enough to advise her of this. Or perhaps he did know and simply hoped Mitchell would not cause a fuss when the time came. In either case, Latham's negligence likely changed the course of cinematic history. Had the author been told the truth up front, she might well have refused to shop the movie rights to Hollywood at that time.

Even without knowing Mitchell wanted to review the script, Williams encountered difficulties bringing offers to the table. For starters, although it was standard practice for deals to be reached based on plot summaries of books, Williams felt strongly that the key decision makers in this case needed to read the book in its entirety. She wanted the studio executives and the potential stars to experience firsthand the novel's power and had her hands full convincing them to read such a long book.
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She also faced the unassailable fact that Mitchell's complex novel would be expensive to produce, a serious problem considering that the film industry was still reeling from the Great Depression. The financial risks were exacerbated because the Civil War, as a topic, was considered bad box office. Fresh on the minds of industry players was Paramount's
So Red the Rose
, a Civil War saga based on a bestselling novel; the film had bombed the year before.
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Williams gradually came to accept that she had overestimated the value of Mitchell's rights. Paramount had removed itself from consideration, and Fox had offered only twenty-five thousand dollars. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remained in the running, and there had been warm interest from independent producer David O. Selznick, as well as Warner Brothers and RKO.
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However, none of them had talked about an offer anywhere near one hundred thousand dollars. Williams began to suspect that fifty thousand was the best they could hope to earn. Selznick and the others were balking even at that price, but she held out hope that the studios would come around when good reviews started appearing in newspapers during release week.
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With such a drastic price reduction from her last estimate, Williams needed to know whether fifty thousand dollars was acceptable to Mitchell. The agent had earlier alerted the vacationing Latham to “please stand by,” and she now needed him to step forward.
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If an offer came through, Williams wanted to say yes right away and not risk an interested studio reconsidering while she tracked down the editor for Mitchell's consent. Williams called Latham's home multiple times the first week of June and left messages. When he failed to respond, she wrote a letter urging him to contact her immediately. Still getting no reply, she sent him a telegram on June 12. She must have been frustrated knowing she had to share half her commission with Macmillan, yet Latham could not be bothered with the details.

The telegram managed to get his attention, although only marginally. Not interested in interrupting his vacation to deal with the movie rights, Latham decided to come clean with Mitchell on his arrangement with Williams. He wired Mitchell on June 14 about the agent's involvement and followed up three days later with a letter explaining that he had decided to bring in the agent because of her experience approaching movie studios. He assured Mitchell that Macmillan's arrangement with Williams did not have any effect on the author's agency relationship with the firm. He promised to present the final contract to her and that Macmillan would pay Williams's fee out of its commission.
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Latham expected Williams to receive an offer soon and termed fifty thousand dollars a fair price. He asked the author to wire Cole if she would accept that amount.
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Mitchell was shocked. She had trusted Latham, and he had betrayed her. She intended to give him a piece of her mind but did not have time with all the activity swirling around her.
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Mitchell held her tongue and replied to Cole that she would accept fifty thousand dollars provided she was satisfied with the terms of the contract.
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Although she did not say so to Cole, in the author's mind, Macmillan remained her agent regardless of what Latham and Williams had agreed to. She had not hired Williams and planned on having no interaction with her.

When Cole gave the go-ahead, Williams set about convincing RKO to come through with an offer. Its leading female star, Katharine Hepburn, wanted to play the role of Scarlett, and Williams sensed the studio president was ready to make a move. To her frustration, he insisted on running the project by producer Pandro Berman, who vetoed it on the grounds that Hepburn would not be sympathetic enough in the part. Williams reported the disappointing news to Cole, predicting that Hepburn was “not going to like it one little bit.”
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The agent remained optimistic though that another studio would make an offer soon. The Macmillan salespeople had been touting the firm's high expectations for the movie deal, and newspapers were speculating wildly about the money the studios were willing to throw at Mitchell. Surely, something would shake loose soon.

Still interested was Selznick, a thirty-four-year-old producer whose family had roots in the earliest days of Hollywood history. Although Selznick had built his reputation making films based on classics such as
A Tale of
Two Cities
,
Anna Karenina
,
David Copperfield
, and
Little Lord Fauntleroy
, his East Coast story editor, Kay Brown, thought Mitchell's book was splendid and wanted her boss to take a chance on the unknown author. A savvy Hollywood insider—described by Selznick biographer David Thomson as “small, feisty and snub-nosed pretty”
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—Brown had a strong intuition about Mitchell's book and had been urging her boss since May not to let another studio snatch it up. Because she and Selznick worked on opposite coasts, they communicated regularly by teletype, a typewriter-like machine that allowed private parties to send written messages without going through a telegram service. Many of the printouts from their communications survive and offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how important Brown thought Mitchell's book was. In one, Brown told Selznick of a meeting with Williams and her impression that the agent would be satisfied with a fifty-thousand-dollar offer. Brown thought that absurdly low, predicting the book could sell for up to one hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a more skilled agent. Brown characterized Williams as a nice person but inexperienced in negotiating a deal like this.
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After reading Brown's synopsis of Mitchell's novel, Selznick agreed the story had potential. But, he refused to pay even fifty thousand dollars for a book by an unproven author. He also had concerns about being able to afford the big-name stars who would be needed to bring the story to life.
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Brown gave Williams the bad news but continued to plead Mitchell's case with her boss. Urging him to take a gamble on the Atlantan, Brown encouraged him to read the book, or at least part of it, for himself. Mitchell's story, Brown said, carried an emotional wallop akin to having your heart ripped out of your chest.
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Somewhere along the way, her impassioned pleas must have resonated with Selznick. By June, Brown was scrambling behind the scenes to pull an offer together. Could Selznick's small, independent studio come up with the money to buy the rights and produce a movie worthy of Mitchell's epic novel?

While Macmillan and Williams oversaw developments in New York and Hollywood, Mitchell kept the home fires burning. Consistent with her goal of courting Southern acceptance, she participated in several events that thrust her and
Gone With the Wind
into the local spotlight. At the Georgia Press Association's annual meeting in mid-June, she saw a particularly valuable opportunity to promote her book. She was recognized at the convention for her forthcoming achievement and put her time there to good use connecting with members of the press. According to Marsh, she was the “belle of the ball” and “the center of attention at every gathering.” Newspapers throughout the South ran stories about her appearance, many including her photograph. “If I was publicity man for Macmillan, I would expect a raise in salary for getting an advance write-up of the book and picture of the author [in so many papers],” Marsh told his mother. “But no publicity man could or did get it done.” Mitchell deserved all the credit, he said. The members of the press embraced her because they liked her.
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Mitchell also worked with Norman Berg to schedule a series of autograph sessions for release week. Their efforts focused on three Atlanta venues: Rich's, the city's hometown department store; Davison-Paxon, the local division of Macy's; and the lending library at Sears, Roebuck. Mitchell was not eager to appear before crowds but wanted to support the local retailers who had gone out on a limb and placed large advance orders for
Gone With the Wind
. At a June 20 dinner party at the home of the book buyer at Davison-Paxon, Luise Sims, Mitchell teased her hostess that she would lose her job for having ordered seven hundred and fifty copies.
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But the author was willing to go only so far to help Sims and the other booksellers. She let it be known that she would not give any speeches at the events and that these were one-shot deals that had to be scheduled during release week. The only public speaking Mitchell agreed to was a radio interview by her friend Medora Field Perkerson.