Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (24 page)

D
uring thecontract negotiations inJuly, the Selznick teamasserted that Margaret Mitchell had no role to play in the life of
Gone With the
Wind
as a motion picture. Almost as soon as she signed the contract, though, the studio realized the value the author could add to the movie's chances of success. The public had embraced this fresh, new literary star, and it would be an obvious mistake to distance the movie from Mitchell. Moreover, the studio needed her help. David O. Selznick wanted to preserve the historical authenticity of the book and had come to understand that the production could benefit from the author's guidance on everything from sets to costumes. Her assistance was also needed with the screenplay. The task of converting her massive book into a manageable script had been assigned to Sidney Howard, a Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist and two-time Oscar nominee. As soon as he began writing, Howard agonized over where to make cuts. He desperately wanted Mitchell to guide him through the process.
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In the fall of 1936, Selznick offered to fly Mitchell to California to serve as a consultant on the movie. Given her request for script approval, he likely assumed the author would be thrilled. As would become a recurring pattern in his dealings with Mitchell though, Selznick's good intentions backfired. Instead of being appreciative, the author was appalled at his nerve in asking. After having been denied the contractual right of script approval, she had no intention of dropping everything and flitting off to California. Adding to her irritation were the continuing rumors that Selznick had taken advantage of her in the movie deal. Since July, it had become clear she had sold for too little money and without an adequate understanding of the obligations the contract imposed on her. For the rest of her life she claimed to have no regrets about signing with Selznick, but Mitchell would have been superhuman not to have wondered how things might have differed if she had waited another month or two to sell the rights.

In this situation, it might seem odd that Mitchell did not use Selznick's predicament as an opportunity to right the wrongs she felt the contract had caused. She might have insisted on straightening out the “God Almighty clause,” for example. She could have almost certainly extracted a handsome bonus from the studio. But that was not the Mitchell way. Her family signed contracts and stuck to them, and they expected others to do the same. So the author politely declined Selznick's offer. A stickler for good manners, she never rehashed any of her cause for discontent. She never even said “I told you so.” She simply begged off, claiming her readers would get upset if she had anything to do with altering the story as originally written. She would not lift a finger to assist him in making his movie a success and certainly was not going to let him use her name to bring attention to the production. Mitchell expected that to be the end of it.

Had she been more direct with Selznick and expressed her dissatisfaction with the movie contract, the producer may have respected her wishes. For all his power and wealth, he was an affable fellow. And, as later events would make clear, he greatly admired Mitchell's work and wanted her to be happy. However, he failed to pick up on any resentment on her part and seemed unable to fathom that she did not want to weigh in on details of the production. To Mitchell's great annoyance, he ignored her protestations about not wanting to get involved, and the studio bombarded her with questions. But she remained firm and refused to offer any assistance. It was frustrating for both of them. She could not comprehend why he continued to bother her, and he could not understand why she was being so uncooperative. They would spend years figuring out how to come to terms with each other.

Macmillan, too, would have cause to regret not being more sensitive to Mitchell's displeasure with the movie deal. The Marshes felt that Macmillan had “put a blindfold over Peggy's eyes and tied her hands behind her back and delivered her over to Selznick.”
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John Marsh labeled the contract “bad and unfair” and said his wife never would have signed it except for Harold Latham's assurances that the firm would look after her. Marsh had warned Lois Cole that Macmillan would pay a price if it did not handle Mitchell gently during these difficult days, and Marsh was nothing if not true to his word.

Before the book's release, the author had put Macmillan on notice that she was opposed to joining any dog-and-pony show the publisher had in mind for promoting her novel. She never wanted to be a celebrity and did not want to join her book in the spotlight. She had cooperated with Norman Berg during release week, but the question lurked as to what would happen next. Would she, as Macmillan hoped, come around and embrace her role as a bestselling author? After the debacle over the movie contract, Mitchell had little trouble saying no. Not being under contractual obligation to shill for Macmillan, she felt no desire to do so out of the goodness of her heart.

As the fall of 1936 approached, Mitchell let the company know that she would not insert herself into the public arena to help sell books. Although she had led Latham to believe she would come to New York for a promotional trip when the weather cooled, the plan never got off the ground. Throughout September and October, Mitchell maintained that her eyes were still in poor condition. She refused to attend any events, near or far, that involved a crowd. Rich's department store, which realized it had missed an opportunity by refusing to hold an autograph session during release week, offered to host a Margaret Mitchell Day including a special tea and reception in her honor. Mitchell declined without apology.
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Macmillan would have liked its star author to make an appearance that fall at the first
New York Times
Book Fair, a major industry event where the company could have trotted her out in all her glory. Knowing that would never happen, the publisher proposed instead to display a few
Gone With the
Wind
manuscript pages in the Macmillan booth.
⁴
When Latham asked Mitchell to send pages for them to use, she claimed the final manuscript had never been returned to her. Panic ensued until Macmillan located the original document in a company vault. At that point, the author was so irritated that she did not want to approve the display, which she had not thought much of to begin with. Mitchell believed authors should be judged solely on their published books, not their drafts, notes, and other working papers. But she did not bother arguing and agreed to the proposal. Macmillan pulled out three pages and shipped the rest of the manuscript to Atlanta, insuring it for one thousand dollars.
⁵

The book fair exhibit attracted a great deal of attention but gave Mitchell further cause for anger when Macmillan misplaced two of the pages. The publisher arranged to have the sheets displayed in a glass case each day and taken home at night for safekeeping by a Macmillan employee.
⁶
One morning, the staffer responsible for the pages inadvertently left two of them sitting on the display table, atop an open copy of the
Cambridge University Press Bulletin
. A visitor to the booth innocently picked up the bulletin—and the manuscript pages—and walked away. When the employee realized they were missing and how it had happened, she searched the crowd frantically, carrying with her another copy of the Cambridge booklet. She approached people she saw carrying the
Bulletin
and offered to swap copies, claiming the ones handed out earlier were damaged. “It took fifty-one tries and a lot of tact to retrieve the missing Mitchelliana,”
Publish-
ers Weekly
reported.
⁷

When the author heard what happened, she vowed never again to let a single page of the manuscript leave her possession, threatening to burn the entire thing. She considered the document a personal and intimate record of her thought process and could not believe that Macmillan had been so careless. For the rest of her life she balked at sharing the manuscript with the public and declined repeated requests from institutions and collectors wanting to acquire the document, often claiming she had already destroyed portions of it.
⁸

Keeping Mitchell's name in the press was good business for Macmillan, but the increasingly irritated author refused to cooperate in that regard as well. Reporters hounded her for interviews and photographs, many of the inquiries focusing on her personal life. Seeing no reason to have her private business on display for public consumption or to have her face appear in newspapers several times a week, she declined countless requests for interviews. She even turned down an invitation by the National Press Club to honor her at a luncheon or reception. The group had welcomed only one other woman in such a manner—Amelia Earhart upon her return from her first transatlantic flight—but Mitchell was not interested.
⁹
If she did interact with the press, it had to be for a specific reason, such as correcting rumors about her life. Even then she proceeded cautiously and made sure not to reveal too much. She famously refused to disclose her age, saying that all the public needed to know was that she was old enough to have written
Gone With the Wind
. In one case, she agreed to talk to an Atlanta friend writing an article for a Junior League magazine but insisted on approving the piece before publication. “I hope you'll understand when I ask you to omit mention of the cigarette in paragraph one,” Mitchell wrote after reviewing a draft. Her father did not know she smoked, and she did not want him learning of her bad habit in the press. “Yes, I know that sounds foolish and Victorian but it's true! I wouldn't want him to be hurt about it.”
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Macmillan was further dismayed when Mitchell declined offers from the
Saturday Review of Literature
,
Cosmopolitan
,
Redbook
, and
Ladies Home
Journal
, among others, for her to write essays, articles, or short stories. To the publisher, these offers were a marketing godsend; Mitchell would be getting paid to give
Gone With the Wind
publicity. She said no to them all, appalled at the money being thrown at her to do nothing but slap her name on meaningless tripe. Some in the literary community judged her a fool for not cashing in, but Mitchell did not let any of this affect her. If she were going to put her name in print, it would be on something she was proud of, not a piece thrown together for promotional purposes.

Much to Macmillan's chagrin, Mitchell also refused to write a sequel to
Gone With the Wind
. The public was enthralled by the book's open ending and wanted to know if Scarlett and Rhett reunited. Finding it hard to believe there was no neat conclusion, people speculated that Mitchell was working on some form of continuation of the story. Rumor had it that she had written a final chapter readers could purchase from Macmillan for a dollar.
¹¹
Others envisioned that she was writing a second book that told the rest of the story. A bookseller in North Carolina reported taking at least two hundred advance orders for the supposed sequel.
¹²
There was obviously a ready market for a continuation, but Mitchell would not fill that demand. She liked her story the way she had written it and did not relish being “assaulted on all sides by readers who wished the book to end in a clinch.”
¹³
To a reader in Dallas who agreed Mitchell should leave the ending a mystery, the author expressed her gratitude: “So many people have said indignantly that I should have had a happy ending, so I am very glad you wrote that you appreciated the fact that I did not have ‘Scarlett and Rhett holding hands across Melly's death bed.' ”
¹⁴

But many readers refused to accept that they would not be hearing more about Scarlett and Rhett. In November, a Missouri woman wrote the author, declaring Mitchell owed the public an answer to whether Rhett came back. The woman suggested, “How about a new book, ‘Returned With the Tide,' in view of the fact that Rhett said he might go to England or some other port? I believe Scarlet [sic] has had enough hard knocks to make her see life in a different manner. . . . Please do not make her too good, but just soften her up a little so she will not appear as hard as nails on the surface.”
¹⁵
A fan in North Carolina used rhyme to plead her case. She sent Mitchell a poem about the novel, with a final stanza: “Your style I considered most pleasing / You are wonderfully clever I'd say / So please! Will you write us a sequel / To
Gone With the Wind
some other day.”
¹⁶
No matter how demanding or witty the entreaty, the author could not be swayed.

It might appear Mitchell was cutting off her nose to spite her face by turning down so many lucrative opportunities. Regardless of how disappointed she was with Macmillan, her refusal to participate in the company's publicity efforts affected her bottom line as well as the publisher's. Yet, earning more money was the last thing on Mitchell's mind in the fall of 1936. Records indicate she took in more than $225,000 that year in
Gone With
the Wind
–related income. This was a tremendous sum to the Marshes, who were used to living off John's power company salary. Mitchell once claimed that, when the big money began rolling in, her savings account contained only $2.75. She joked about walking into the bank with Selznick's massive check and startling the teller who had been handling her account for years. Going forward, she took care to break the news gently to the clerk when other large checks arrived.
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