Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (30 page)

Although some critics, including the
Saturday Review of Literature
, questioned bestowing such an esteemed literary accolade on a work of popular fiction, the award signaled good news for the book.
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Publishers Weekly
reported that fourteen thousand copies of
Gone With the Wind
were sold the day after the announcement, more than three times the daily average for that year. Never shy about keeping Scarlett and Rhett the center of attention, Macmillan increased advertising in major cities and sent retailers posters announcing the award. The company also printed the news on more than thirty thousand green foil bands that were wrapped around copies of the book.
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To Mitchell's relief, the Pulitzer did not cause an influx of fan letters or visitors. In fact, just the opposite occurred. “We were afraid the Award would serve to stir up public interest in me personally again and were all set for another awful siege,” Mitchell wrote to Marsh's family. “But, fortunately, it worked just the other way, and from the date of the announcement the mail, phone calls and tourists have fallen off sharply. Life is beginning to wear its old face again.”
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Perhaps the award distanced the author from her admirers; she was now considered a verified literary talent, not a fairytale housewife who had stumbled into incredible good fortune. Many may have felt she was no longer one of them, someone they could treat like an old friend. It is a tribute to Mitchell's good nature that it took people so long to come to that conclusion. As a college student wrote her that May, thanking her for helping with his school's
Gone With the Wind
–themed yearbook, “My highest regards to you for remaining a very real and human person while the world knelt at your feet.”
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The only major literary prize Mitchell did not receive that year was the Nobel Prize in Literature, an international award issued by the Swedish Academy. However, she was nominated for the award in 1938 by geographer and explorer Sven Hedin, a member of the academy. She did not win and, due to the strict secrecy surrounding the Nobel process, likely never knew she had been under consideration. The Nobel Foundation restricts disclosure of information about nominations for fifty years, meaning that information about Mitchell's nomination was not publicly available until long after her death.
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In the spring of 1937,
American Business
magazine published an article about Mitchell's novel titled “The Making of a Best Seller.” The piece went into painstaking detail about the marketing strategy behind the
Gone With the
Wind
publishing phenomenon, covering sales figures, advertising plans, the money spent, and the savvy decisions by Macmillan that contributed to the book's blockbuster achievement. What the article failed to mention, even in passing, was the role Mitchell played in the success of her book.

The omission is hardly a surprise, given the perception of the author that first year as something of a recluse. Yet, it is a glaring error if due credit is to be afforded to what made
Gone With the Wind
such a triumph. Beyond having written the book, Mitchell endeared herself to fans by being approachable and accommodating. The Margaret Mitchell mystique sold books—and still does today, long after Macmillan's flashy advertisements and window displays have been forgotten. She protected her famous asset from exploitation and tried to give it the opportunity for a life overseas. By the author's own standards, which are the only ones that mattered to her, she had done her best to support her brainchild.

* This National Book Award is not affiliated with the award of the same name sponsored since 1950 by the National Book Foundation.

10
Defending Scarlett's Honor

B
y the spring of 1937,
Gone With the Wind
started to cause increasingly complicated problems for its attentive mother. Margaret Mitchell would be forced to blow her cover as a reclusive Southern belle and establish herself as a steel magnolia prepared to defend her rights at any cost. Her first inkling of big trouble came from a seventy-six-year-old fellow Southern author named Susan Lawrence Davis. With Mitchell's novel still entrenched atop the nation's bestseller lists, the distinctive yellow dust jacket became increasingly famous, and that made Davis see green.

The Alabama author, who claimed to be descended from Confederate president Jefferson Davis, had published in 1924 a volume titled
Authentic
History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877
. The book had not been a commercial success, but Davis hoped it would one day obtain the recognition she felt it deserved. In the years before
Gone With the Wind
's publication, she made a name for herself as something of a literary narcissist, lodging charges of plagiarism against people who wrote about the subjects covered in her
Authentic History
without acknowledging her contribution to the field. She demanded millions of dollars in damages when Claude G. Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, released a book titled
The Tragic Era: The
Revolution after Lincoln
. She sued the
Atlanta Journal
for running a photograph of General Robert E. Lee that she had used in her book. Neither of those claims succeeded, but she did finagle a five-hundred-dollar nuisance settlement out of the
New York Times
for a story she claimed used her work as an unattributed source.
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When
Gone With the Wind
became the most talked-about book in America, Davis must have thought she hit the jackpot. She combed through every word of Mitchell's book, looking for similarities between the novel and her Klan history. After amassing a list of hundreds of parallels, she found a lawyer willing to file a plagiarism lawsuit against Macmillan. In a 461page complaint, Davis sought five thousand dollars per alleged instance of infringement of her copyright. If taken to mean each copy of Mitchell's novel sold so far, this translated to 6.5 billion dollars. Among hundreds of accusations, Davis found fault with Macmillan for having bound
Gone With
the Wind
in Confederate gray, the same color fabric used on her book. She also thought actionable Mitchell's references to people, places, and events mentioned in her
Authentic History
, including poet-priest Father Abram Ryan, the Freedman's Bureau, General Wade Hampton, General John B. Gordon, scalawags, carpetbaggers, and the federal commissioners who tried to see President Abraham Lincoln before Fort Sumter fell. She also pointed to similarities between Mitchell's phrasing and her own. They had both referred to the crosses of the Klan as fiery and called people from Charleston Charlestonians. Davis seemed to think she had a copyright on the history of the Confederacy.

Mitchell was flabbergasted when she read the allegations. She took pride in the research she had done to support the details in her book and had been open about her reliance on historic records, books, manuscripts, and diaries. She denied, however, that she had ever heard of either Davis or her book. Moreover, coming from a family of lawyers, she knew the fundamentals of copyright law and insisted she would have never usurped another author's work, even inadvertently. Although she dreaded the prospect of a drawn-out lawsuit, she was determined to fight Davis in court. She feared any sign of weakness would encourage copycat lawsuits and cause people to doubt her integrity.
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Adding insult to injury was the expense the suit would cause Mitchell. Even though Davis had not named the author as a defendant, Mitchell was on the hook for responding to the allegations. In her 1935 contract with Macmillan, she accepted responsibility for defending plagiarism claims related to
Gone With the Wind
. George Brett predicted the legal fees in this instance would be nominal and offered to share the cost. Continuing to nurse her wounds over the movie deal, she was reluctant to accept charity from him. She declined. She told Brett to bring in his own lawyers and send her the bill when the case was resolved.

Brett hired Walbridge Taft, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, to represent Macmillan's and Mitchell's interests. Taft, a nephew of former president and Supreme Court justice William Howard Taft, assessed the matter and concluded Davis had little chance of success. No author had exclusive literary rights to the people and events of the Civil War, and Davis's track record made it unlikely a judge or jury would be sympathetic to her cause. Brett promised Mitchell that the case would be resolved in their favor: “This has all the earmarks of a shake down, and if that's all it is I reckon they'll find us hard to shake!”
³

Brett took an assertive stance against Davis and released indignant press releases promising to fight her. Although Mitchell probably did not like her name being bandied about in any discussions of plagiarism, Brett saw it all as for the greater good of publicity. The lawsuit received extensive news coverage and yielded many supportive letters from the public, including several that gave Macmillan helpful information about Davis. Reed Harris, assistant national director of the Federal Writers' Project, wrote Macmillan about the woman's unsuccessful attempts to obtain work with his agency; he labeled her one of the most annoying people on earth. She had staged a one-woman sit-down strike in the agency's office and confronted Harris after hours. He assured the publisher that, if he had not been a government employee, “I am sure that I would have dropped whatever dignity I had and socked this old lady.”
⁴
Another letter gave rise to a light moment between Brett and Taft. A purported friend of a friend of Davis sent an inkstained note in a scrawling handwriting, offering to broker a settlement for somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. The letter writer warned Brett that, if the publisher ignored the “kindly offer,” the firm would “sup sorrow” in the end.
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Brett forwarded the letter to Taft, noting, “Here's our chance! We can now settle for a billion dollars.”
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Taft replied, “I have your letter of June 21, but couldn't find your billion-dollar check to settle the case. However, I just advanced that amount from our funds, and at your convenience you will reimburse us!”
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Stephens Mitchell, who still fretted about the unfairness of his sister's income tax liabilities, managed to find a silver lining in the Davis cloud. Sales of his sister's book remained strong, and 1937 was shaping up to be another collection windfall for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, forerunner of today's Internal Revenue Service. He wondered whether the Davis suit could be used as a way to defer some of his sister's income until 1938, when sales were sure to slow and she might be in a lower tax bracket. He asked Harold Latham if Macmillan would be willing to withhold a portion of her earnings as a bond pending resolution of the litigation.
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Latham appreciated Mitchell's difficulty but, in a letter dated May 20, declined to help, stating that the company had to pay her in accordance with its contractually established schedule. Only if the Davis suit assumed serious proportions, he said, would Macmillan consider asking for a bond or authority to withhold royalties.
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The author's brother did not give up on the idea. In July, he broached the topic with Brett and traveled to New York so they could discuss it in person. Although the specifics of that trip are not documented, it is known that the attorney and his family enjoyed an outing on Brett's yacht. Sometime during the visit, Brett overruled Latham and agreed to defer $175,000 of the author's 1937 royalties in case of an adverse judgment in the Davis litigation. What ensued next is something out of a slapstick comedy.

First, someone at Macmillan, presumably Brett, handwrote a note ordering the destruction of Latham's May letter. That order was not carried out: both Latham's letter and the note remain in the files today. Then Stephens Mitchell and Brett went back and forth, drafting a letter for Brett to sign that would give the appearance that it had been Macmillan's idea to withhold the royalties. They had trouble getting their act together, and at one point, Brett instructed the Atlanta attorney to be more specific about what he wanted and offered some advice about the art of surreptitious business schemes: “Now if you will tear up this letter it won't be in your files. It is simply to say that if you will write me an informal letter and tell me just exactly what it is you do want to do we shall be very glad to co-operate in every possible way.”
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Brett, or maybe his secretary, did not follow his own advice. A copy of his note to Stephens Mitchell—along with the draft letters—were filed in the Macmillan records. By July 27, they finally worked out mutually agreeable language, and Brett sent the author's brother a demand for the bond, along with a note saying he thought this version ought to “hold up under scrutiny.”
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