Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (27 page)

Mitchell burrowed further into her self-imposed shell, terrified of saying or doing anything that could end up in the newspapers. She felt as if she could not sneeze without appearing in a gossip column and scarcely opened her mouth in public for fear her remarks would “appear immediately in a garbled form in someone's column.”
⁷⁰
But there was little she could do to stop the wild stories. Many of the rumors originated from a spate of Mitchell impersonators who began popping up around the country. The imposters gave interviews, signed books, and basked in the spotlight as the famed author. One appeared at an airport in Florida with two men she claimed were her managers and demanded seats on a flight to Cuba. Another had a grand time on a cruise ship. The Seaboard Air Line Railway between Florida and Virginia had a regular wannabe Mitchell who caused a stir picking up men. The Marshes were astonished at how well the impersonators succeeded in their aims. “The majority of people these days seem lacking in suspiciousness, and if some plausible stranger says that he is Oliver Cromwell or Franklin Roosevelt, people seem to fall for it,” Marsh said.
⁷¹

With every new rumor, family, friends, reporters, and random strangers contacted Mitchell wanting to know the details. Each incident caused her embarrassment and a great deal of work, as she felt obligated to write round after round of letters setting the record straight. She fretted that if a single false tale went unchecked, her reputation would be irretrievably damaged. She desperately wanted to escape the fate of other celebrities who rode the roller coaster of fame to their downfall. One example that struck fear in her heart was Richmond Pearson Hobson, a Spanish-American War hero who permitted himself to be photographed being kissed by a group of nubile young ladies and was ridiculed the rest of his life as Kissing Bug Hobson. Though she had no desire to be acclaimed, she found the idea of being reviled or laughed at unsettling. She also worried about how the constant glare of attention would affect her relationships with family and friends. She did not want to end up like the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Caroline Miller, also from Georgia, whose marriage fell apart after her sudden rise to fame. Mitchell felt she lived “in the middle of the swirl of public emotions” surrounding her book and had to “steer a careful course every day” to “escape being wrecked.”
⁷²

* She kept these letters in files labeled “Gems,” “Curioso,” and “Of all the gall.”

† In their authorized sequels, Alexandra Ripley (
Scarlett
) settled on Kinnicutt, while Donald McCaig (
Rhett Butler's People
) went with Kershaw. Mitchell biographer Anne Edwards attempted to draw a link between Rhett's initials, R.K.B., and those of Mitchell's first husband, Berrien Kinnard “Red” Upshaw.

* The only exception Mitchell made for a dust jacket blurb was in the spring of 1936 for the book
Empire: Georgia Today in Photographs and Paragraphs
, by her friend Emily Woodward. Afterward, Macmillan asked Mitchell to decline blurbing books by other publishers and promised not to ask her to promote Macmillan titles.

9
Gone With the Wind
, Inc.

A
s 1936 came toa close, Margaret Mitchell accepted that
Gone With the
Wind
had changed her life. But she had no intention of letting it ruin her life. The author decided to make some changes in the way she managed the chaos around her. One option would have been to reverse course and team up with Macmillan and David O. Selznick to control the media coverage. Not only could the two companies, with their ample resources, have offered her protection, but they might have also been willing to make concessions on her royalties or on the movie contract. As attractive as that would have been, Mitchell appears never to have considered asking them for help.

Another possibility would have been to hire a manager or a press agent, or both. She could have had her pick of the top New York literary representatives and public relations firms to help navigate the celebrity maze. Yet, Mitchell termed the idea of hiring an outsider “wholly unsatisfactory and inadequate to the needs of the job.” She was reluctant to rely on a stranger, especially one who was not “familiar with the peculiarities and the personalities of Georgia and the South.”
¹

There was only one person Mitchell trusted to help her through this ordeal—her husband. John Marsh had already done admirable work protecting her interests with the Lamar Q. Ball articles that fall, and it was to him she turned again. She formally retained his services as her business manager, for which he would earn 10 percent of the money she made on the book.
²
She also agreed to transfer to him the foreign rights to her novel. Although he maintained his job at Georgia Power, it became his primary mission in life to get his “dearly beloved young lady through this without breaking her health or her nerves or her spirit.”
³

Marsh's first major initiative in his quest to return a sense of normalcy to his wife's life was to have her stop signing books. Mitchell estimated with exasperation that there had been “hundreds of thousands” of requests, with no end in sight.
⁴
If she autographed a copy for one person, the next thing she knew she received a stack to sign from friends of that person. A man from Toledo, Ohio, sent thirty copies and asked her to write a personal message in each. And it was not just fans. Friends hounded the author for signed copies while acknowledging the burden it placed on her. As one wrote, “Like all the other 5,000 I do not want to impose on [your] good nature—but!”
⁵
Her family members were harassed as well. She told Lois Cole that Stephens Mitchell and his wife, Carrie Lou, led “hunted lives because perfect strangers descend upon them, leaving copies with them and instructions that they
make
me sign them.”
⁶
Amidst the attention surrounding the millionth copy, Marsh announced his wife would no longer sign copies of
Gone
With the Wind
. At first the ban was limited to strangers, but he soon expanded it to friends, family, and charities. Although Mitchell knew the stance seemed “hardboiled” and could generate bitterness among fans she agreed with Marsh it was a necessary step. She refused all requests from that point forward, subject to only a few exceptions, such as for a fan to whom she had promised a copy before the moratorium and for people especially close to her, including Cole's mother.

Macmillan did not welcome this decision. The author's willingness to handle the inscriptions by mail alleviated some of the pressure on the firm over her refusal to conduct mass signings in bookstores. Scrambling to come up with another way to appease fans, Cole suggested a rubber stamp of the author's signature be created. Mitchell declined, wanting nothing to do with fake autographs.
⁷
Rumors had circulated that all the existing signatures in signed copies of
Gone With the Wind
had been created with a rubber stamp. This had caused her a considerable amount of trouble:

Second hand book shops wanted my word of honor that I had honest to God autographed the volume they were trying to sell. I've had to say so often, with what patience I could muster, that I had never used a rubber stamp or a facsimile signature and that I never would—that anyone would be perfectly safe in buying an autographed copy because, short of forgery, the signature would really be mine.
⁸

Mitchell had no plans to spend the rest of her life distinguishing stamped signatures from authentic ones. She realized her concerns might sound “incredible” but assured Cole “this last year has been so full of incredibilities that with ease, I now believe six impossible things before breakfast every morning.” Mitchell also explained that she had never understood the importance of obtaining a famous person's signature. “For of what value is a signature if you do not know the person who writes it? Of what value is it even if you
do
know them and you do not love them or at least respect them highly?” Mitchell claimed she had never bothered celebrities for their signature and could not comprehend why anyone wanted hers. In fact, she regretted having signed any books for strangers.

The ban on signing failed as a quick fix. Fans continued to approach her in public; one tactless woman, book in hand, confronted Mitchell at a cousin's funeral as the author exited the church.
⁹
And the mailman still brought hundreds of books for her to autograph, all of which needed to be shipped back. As incongruous as it was, in many cases she sent lengthy letters explaining why she could not sign the enclosed volume. Of course, those letters ended with her much sought-after signature. Though she saved herself little time, the ban seems to have offered Mitchell a psychological victory of sorts. She could not stop people from being curious about her. She could not control what people said or wrote about her. However, by refusing to sign books, she showed she could not be pressured into participating in what she considered a meaningless ritual.

Marsh next focused on the media situation. The Ball articles had been a good first step at distancing Mitchell from the spotlight, but the couple needed a more forceful and widespread message to set the record straight on Mitchell's life and to quell the frenzy of interest in her. Her husband selected three writers to issue a new series of articles that would further shape her public image. He asked Mitchell's close friend Medora Field Perkerson to write a story for the
Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine
—“Double Life of Margaret Mitchell”—debunking the rumors that were swirling.
¹⁰
The novelist Faith Baldwin was given the task of writing about Mitchell's home life for
Pictorial Review
, a national ladies journal. Titled “The Woman Who Wrote
Gone With the Wind
, An Exclusive and Authentic Interview,” Baldwin painted a picture of the author “with the world at her feet” wanting nothing more than to “stay at home with books and peace and friends.”
¹¹

Finally, Marsh asked the always-supportive Edwin Granberry to do an in-depth story for the popular
Collier's
magazine on Mitchell's struggle with fame. Under Marsh's close editorial guidance, Granberry told of Mitchell's childhood, how she came to write her book, and the plight she found herself in since its publication. Marsh reviewed at least two drafts of the article and offered the reporter twenty-four pages of comments, which he insisted that Granberry return. “Edwin, if
anybody
sees these notes but you, I will personally break your neck with my strong hairy hands,” Marsh vowed, obviously not wanting word to get out that he had orchestrated the piece.
¹²
The finished product paints a distinctly sympathetic portrait. “Miss Mitchell stands at the moment in such a spotlight of public attention as no American, excepting the President, has known since Colonel Lindbergh flew the Atlantic,” it says. Granberry explained how the pressure weighed on her:

She fears that the intense glare of the spotlight beating down upon her, month after month, may eventually drive her into complete seclusion, in the hope of salvaging some remnant of her private life; she fears that she will lose touch with the world she loves because of this seclusion; she fears that people may think her hard and unappreciative and unsociable because of her enforced necessity of refusing the public demands upon her; she fears to be set apart, to lose the easy friendships she cherishes, to be put on an eminence from which she will not be permitted to descend.
¹³

The author wanted her privacy and to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book she had written, not on what she said, the way she dressed, or her likes and dislikes. Her book belonged to anyone who paid the price for it, but nothing of her life belonged to the public. Whether her wishes mattered to anyone reading the article remained to be seen, but at least the couple had made her position clear.

Of all the actions Marsh took to bring order into their lives, the one that had the most lasting impact came about on the spur of the moment. In January 1937, Margaret Baugh, the Macmillan secretary who had helped with the manuscript revisions, went to see Marsh at his Georgia Power office for career advice. She had been let go from Macmillan in December and asked if he could assist her in finding a new position. He knew of no openings at the power company but thought she might be of assistance to Mitchell, who had been unable to find reliable secretarial help. Few of the temporary workers she had hired knew anything about publishing, and some were so starstruck that Mitchell had been tempted to “slap” some sense into them when they began fawning over her.
¹⁴
Marsh asked Baugh, a no-nonsense schoolmarm-type, if she would be willing to step in and assist Mitchell in bringing the
Gone With the Wind
correspondence under control. The Marshes had recently returned from a brief getaway to find the mail piled almost as high as the door.
¹⁵
Baugh accepted, even though Marsh warned her the job might last only a few weeks, three months at the most. Upon hearing the news that the organized and professional Baugh was stepping in to help, Mitchell told Cole she “burst into tears of joy” with relief.
¹⁶
Three months stretched into more than thirty years. Baugh, who never married, would devote the rest of her life to the Marshes. Although she and Mitchell were close in age, Baugh became the mother hen, proving herself indispensable as the author's personal assistant, secretary, bookkeeper, confidant, and protector.