Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (35 page)

Marsh also reached out for guidance to the Department of State's Wallace McClure, who contacted the American Embassy in Chile on Mitchell's behalf. McClure reported back with the unfortunate news that Ercilla had acted within its rights. Because neither Macmillan nor the Marshes had filed for copyright protection in Chile, Ercilla had violated no law.
¹²
After reviewing their options with Taft, Marsh understood he had no choice but to fall back on Saunders's original plan of negotiating a deal with the firm. If the publisher acknowledged Macmillan's copyright, Marsh would grant Ercilla exclusive rights to distribute
Gone With the Wind
in Chile and nonexclusive rights throughout Spanish-speaking South America, Central America, and Mexico. To everyone's relief, the firm accepted. The book was selling so well Ercilla agreed to pay royalties and also issue an improved edition.
¹³

On Taft's advice, Marsh signed a contract without raising various legal technicalities that remained unresolved.
¹⁴
The lawyer convinced him that their interests were better served by getting a deal done without protracted negotiations. Even so, it was quite a feat finalizing the paperwork. Mitchell reported there were sixteen copies of the contract to be signed by assorted officials, including the governor and secretary of state of Georgia, the Department of State in Washington, and a Chilean governmental minister. In those days of wax seals on official documents, she joked to Brett that “the Seal of the State of Georgia is as big as a Smithfield ham and, as the weather was warm, the seals were very mushy.” She guessed the filing fees alone ate up the royalties she would earn on the edition, not to mention the legal costs.
¹⁵

While the Marshes scrambled to figure out what to do in Chile, the Dutch case heated up. Mitchell's appeal was scheduled to be heard at the end of January 1938, and the Marshes found themselves dealing with interminable communications between New York, Washington, D.C., and The Hague.
¹⁶
Overwhelmed by “work and worry,” Mitchell lost her patience: “My mind is made up that if I do win I am going to try to hang damages that will look like the national war debt on ZHUM.”
¹⁷
A week before the hearing, ZHUM expressed interest in reaching a deal, but Mitchell declined to pursue a settlement. Latham thought this foolish and suspected it was J. A. Fruin who had counseled her to fight to the end.
¹⁸

Fruin appeared in court armed with affidavits from Brett and Hugh Eayrs establishing the facts related to the publication of
Gone With the Wind
in America and Canada. At Fruin's suggestion, Latham, who was in England at the time on a scouting trip, traveled to The Hague to testify in person. With the factual record laid out in detail, Fruin convinced the court that the initial ruling had been in error. The court ordered the sale of the Dutch edition halted and all unsold copies seized pending a full trial.
¹⁹

While this was welcome news, it did not signal the end of Mitchell's Dutch troubles. ZHUM dug in its heels and continued the fight under a new argument. The publisher now claimed that Macmillan Canada had not published the work at all but rather acted as a distributing agent for books provided by Macmillan New York. ZHUM appealed the court's ruling, and to Mitchell's amazement, the injunction was reversed. ZHUM had the Dutch edition back on the market in a matter of weeks. Mitchell authorized Taft and Fruin to proceed with another appeal. The author knew she was spending far more on the case than the royalties were worth but vowed to see it through.

Although Macmillan would not join Mitchell in the case, Brett followed the proceedings and did what he could to help from a distance. He apparently never admitted it to Mitchell, but he gradually realized there had been irregularities in protection of the Canadian copyright, especially the two-week delay in its registration. Eayrs defended his firm's actions, stating that it had followed standard Canadian practice, but, as Brett pointed out, this was no defense if standard practice did not comport with the law. Also lurking in the background was the early release by Macmillan of copies of the book to Lewis Titterton and Mitchell. If any of these facts came before the Dutch court, the author's case might be in serious trouble. And, if Mitchell lost, the foreign copyright to Macmillan's other titles—and those of many other publishers—would be in jeopardy to the extent similar lapses had occurred with other books. Brett now viewed Mitchell's case as one of the most important in the history of copyright law.
²⁰
He felt so strongly about it that he traveled to The Hague that spring as a witness on her behalf at another hearing. Although the court did not allow him to testify, his trip indicated how seriously he viewed the matter.

To guide the Marshes on avoiding similar problems in other countries, Taft's firm conducted an exhaustive study of copyright laws around the globe, country by country. The good news was that Taft felt they had a strong case for “backdoor” coverage under Berne, despite the irregularities that had occurred, and recommended the Marshes take no further action to preserve the copyright in Berne countries pending the outcome of the Dutch litigation. He also identified several South American countries that gave automatic protection to any book copyrighted in the United States. The bad news was that Mitchell faced a serious risk of piracy in countries that had no copyright law, including Albania, Estonia, Iceland, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Other countries, such as Bolivia, Egypt, Iraq, Liberia, Sudan, Turkey, and Venezuela, had domestic copyright laws but were not members of any major international conventions. These countries were under no obligation to allow Americans to register copyrights within their borders; further inquiries would have to be made about what could be done to protect
Gone With the Wind
. More danger lurked in countries like Chile that had reciprocal agreements with the United States, including Argentina, Austria, Cuba, Mexico, and Romania.
²¹
In these countries, Mitchell's book was ripe for the picking until such time as she registered the copyright in each place.

For countries that allowed foreign authors to register copyrights, the Marshes came to the distressing conclusion that they would have to hire Taft to do so in each nation. This would be an expensive and time-consuming process because the lawyers had to research each country's procedures and dispatch the necessary documents. In countries without a protective copyright law, the Marshes decided their best bet was to find legitimate publishers to issue authorized editions in the hope of discouraging pirates from entering the market. They gave Saunders the go-ahead to arrange for contracts in as many of those countries as possible, even if the terms were not attractive. Where she could not get authorized editions in place, they would wait and see what happened.

By May 1938, Brett finally acknowledged that the movie contract had put Mitchell in an impossible situation. It did not seem fair to him that she should have to spend so much time and money preventing piracies overseas because of the “God Almighty clause.” He broached the issue with Selznick's lawyers, who agreed that piracies in small and remote countries would not materially affect the studio's rights. Encouraged, Brett suggested the author ask Selznick to clarify what he wanted her to do.
²²
Mitchell appreciated the gesture but declined to grovel to the producer. Although the movie contract had hung over her “like the sword of Damocles” and cost her and her family “unhappiness, worry and money,” she was determined to meet her obligation to protect the copyright “from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand.” Only then would she approach Selznick.
²³

As
Gone With the Wind
celebrated its second anniversary in June 1938, Macmillan approached production of the 1,500,000th copy of the three-dollar edition.
²⁴
This time, though, the landmark edition would not go to Mitchell. The previous February, Selznick had called dibs on this copy, as well as the two millionth. With Brett's permission, Lois Cole agreed to the former.
²⁵
However, she did not go to any great pains to make sure Selznick received his heart's desire. She directed the printing department to hold a copy from the press run that included the milestone number, telling them it was not necessary to pull out the exact copy the producer wanted.
²⁶

That summer also signaled Mitchell's first return to New York since the movie contract negotiations in 1936. The main purpose of the trip was to spend time with Cole, who had just given birth to her first child, a son named Turney Allan Taylor, Jr. The Taylors had asked Mitchell to be the boy's godmother. During her visit, she spent a night at their Greenwich Village apartment. Allan Taylor slept on the couch so Cole and Mitchell could share the bedroom and talk.
²⁷
They caught up on personal matters, but the business of publishing also cropped up. Cole hoped her friend might write again and nudged her in that direction, suggesting Mitchell had given people so much pleasure that she practically had a duty to produce another book. The author said she probably would some day, when the fan mail fell off and the foreign editions were all published.

When Brett heard she would be in the city, he gushed at the chance to meet her in person. “Oh, do tell us more,” he pleaded, wanting to know her itinerary. He lived in Connecticut and hoped she would consider visiting him there, as well as at the New York office. He offered to host a picnic on his yacht for Mitchell and her friends and to take her to a Broadway show. Mitchell declined the boat ride, claiming she was prone to seasickness and did not think she would make a pleasant guest for Mrs. Brett if she “turned green and prayed fervently for quick death.” However, she did agree to visit the Macmillan offices and go to the theater.
²⁸

Macmillan rolled out the red carpet for its star author. George Brett, Harold Latham, Alec Blanton, and James Putnam escorted her through the building, showing her off and introducing her to many of the people who had been working so hard on behalf of
Gone With the Wind
. The author James Michener, then a junior editor, recalled years later his secretary calling out excitedly as Mitchell approached his office. He watched from his door “as the solemn procession, much like the marching priests in
Aida
, moved past.” The executives, all wearing grave countenances, surrounded the diminutive author while she nodded greetings to everyone they passed. Later that day, after Michener had occasion to shake hands with her, he could not get over how petite she was. A joke circulated around the Macmillan office that, when Mitchell went to formal dinners, she carried a copy of
Bartlett's Quotations
to put on the floor to use as a footstool.
²⁹

And, a sure sign that her ill feelings toward Macmillan had been soothed, the author participated in a press conference arranged by the publisher. At long last, Brett was able to introduce her formally to the press. She charmed the journalists with stories of how busy she had been over the previous two years fighting piracies and fending off starlets vying for a role in Selznick's film. She tried to dispel some of the old rumors that continued to circulate, especially that she had been working on a sequel.
³⁰

When she returned to Atlanta, Mitchell thanked Brett for allowing her to interrupt the company's busy schedule: “My appreciation of what The Macmillan Company has done for me increases with time rather than diminishes. That was why I wanted to meet the staff—from the telephone operators who have handled my frenzied long distance calls to the boys on the bottom floor who sent the books on their way.”
³¹
In this letter, Mitchell addresses the publisher by his first name, something she appears to have never done before. Whereas she and Latham had been writing each other informally since 1935, Brett and Mitchell had started off on the wrong foot and had been on reserved terms ever since. After meeting Brett in person, he became “My dear George” to her, and she “Peggy” to him. Although Marsh still licked his wounds over the movie deal and would for years to come, Mitchell appeared to have moved on.