Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (40 page)

The author knew things were certain to get stirred up again when Selznick released his movie—now scheduled for the fall of 1939—but until then she looked forward to the year ending on a quiet note. She remained one of the most famous people in the country—according to a Gallup poll, an estimated fourteen million people in the United States had read
Gone
With the Wind
⁵⁴
—but the author was heartened that people no longer considered her a curiosity. The press seemed to have lost some of its fervor for tracking her every movement, and she found it easier to let her guard down among friends. After a round of Christmas social calls, she wrote to Latham, “Thank heaven, the ‘new' must be off of me, for no one asked for autographs or stole my handkerchief or tried to pull off buttons for a souvenir.”
⁵⁵
To author Clifford Dowdey, Mitchell reported with pleasure that she was treated as no more special than “a successful lady embalmer or life insurance salesman.”
⁵⁶
She could not ask for anything more.

* Although the Marshes refused to publicly express any opinion on casting, Gable was not their first choice. “In our opinion, his he-man stuff is synthetic,” Marsh wrote his sister on August 1, 1936. “He just doesn't ring the bell.”

12
Me and My Poor Scarlett

T
he year 1939 marked a major turning point in the life of
Gone With the
Wind
. After two and a half years of suspense, on January 13, David O. Selznick announced that a little-known British actress named Vivien Leigh would be his Scarlett O'Hara. At last, the movie production went into high gear, forcing the author to steel herself. In late January, Margaret Mitchell wrote to Kay Brown about how much the Marshes dreaded the months until the movie was finished, noting that hundreds of people already had asked them about getting seats to the premiere. “With interest already so high, this coming year may be even harder on us than 1936 was.”
¹

Also on Mitchell's mind were the day-to-day issues of managing what was becoming an international publishing empire. The Marshes were nothing if not meticulous and kept a close eye on the financial side of the foreign accounts. They puzzled over the royalty statements that were written in a variety of different languages and used unfamiliar accounting practices. Figuring out exchange rates and tax liabilities for income earned in foreign countries proved challenging as well. That February, when Mitchell received a notification about overdue taxes in England, the couple had no idea whether they owed the money. John Marsh asked George Brett what to do, but the publisher was also at a loss and told them to ignore it: “Tear His Majesty's income tax blank up and throw it in the waste basket, or to be a little more cagey about it put it in the file and forget it.”
²

One of Marsh's chief worries that winter was France, where no edition had appeared, despite the rights having been purchased by the venerable French publishing house Hachette in 1937. The delay stemmed from Hachette's insistence on printing lengthy extracts of
Gone With the Wind
in high-end literary magazines as part of its marketing plan. Marsh had no objection to that approach, but he had to get Macmillan's approval because most of the leading French magazines were circulated in the United States. After much back and forth over a period of several months, Brett refused to grant permission. American magazines had not been given permission to excerpt the book, and he did not see why French magazines should be treated differently. When Marsh declined Hachette's request, the French publisher lost interest in
Gone With the Wind
and, in May 1938, sold its rights to the rival firm of Gaston Gallimard. Although Gallimard claimed to be enthusiastic about the project, he, too, appeared in no rush to get the book produced, leaving the Marshes to cool their heels for months.

Gallimard's edition finally arrived in Atlanta in March 1939. Although relieved to see it, the Marshes were disappointed with the finished product. By this time, France was on the brink of war with Germany, and Gallimard did not have the luxury of producing a high-quality edition. Printed on flimsy paper, Mitchell deemed it a “poorly turned out affair.”
³
She took comfort in the knowledge that great care had been taken with the text. The translator, Pierre-Franc¸ois Caille´, had struck up a correspondence with Mitchell over the previous years. He assured her that his interpretation was as close to the original as possible while giving a colloquial French rendition. She was amused to read Gerald O'Hara exclaiming “oo, la la!” and Aunt Pittypat's swoon bottle rendered as “la bouteille aux vapeurs.” Also consoling, the book received a warm reception. In March, a correspondent for the
New Yorker
reported that France had recovered from a flu epidemic only to find itself in the early stages of a
Gone With the Wind
attack. Though the translation ran eight hundred pages, one critic regretted it did not run another thousand.
⁴

Unauthorized editions continued to be a problem, especially in China and Japan, where Walbridge Taft had been unable to register the copyright. China was not a signatory of any reciprocal agreement with the United States and thus under no obligation to respect the
Gone With the Wind
copyright. Japan and the United States had a copyright agreement, but it offered Mitchell no protection. Early in the century, to encourage the spread of Western ideas in Japan, the United States had given free rein to Japanese publishers interested in distributing the work of American authors; the publishers did not have to obtain permission or pay royalties. This approach was not considered unduly damaging to American authors because so few American books appealed to Japanese readers. That her work was being used for a good cause provided Mitchell little comfort. A legally pirated edition was no more welcome to her than an illegal one. And the theory that she was not losing any money did not ring true when reports surfaced that several hundred thousand unauthorized copies of
Gone With the Wind
had been sold in Japan. Mitchell thought this unfair, not only to her, but also to Marion Saunders, who earned no commission on those books.
⁵

What bothered Mitchell the most though was that such publishers demonstrated little remorse over profiting from her labors. A Japanese translator sent her a silk kimono and a three-foot-tall geisha doll in a red lacquer case. He asked Mitchell to pose for a publicity photograph wearing the kimono and standing next to the doll. She was appalled: “It has never occurred to them that this request was insult added to injury—after swiping my book and paying me no money, they want me to assist in the sale! I did not answer the letter.”
⁶
She suggested to Wallace McClure that “a nation with so much gall certainly should go far.”
⁷
Beyond the fairness issue, the author also was bothered by the poor quality of the editions circulating in Asia, noting that one of the Chinese editions was printed on newsprint and the pages bound so tightly it was difficult to open.
⁸
She was glad to have a copy of it though when McClure sent her one, saying it rounded out her collection of foreign editions and would be all she ever got out of China.
⁹

The political unrest in Europe resulting from Adolph Hitler's rise to power posed additional complications for the Marshes. As the Fu¨hrer expanded his reach across the continent, it became difficult to communicate or do business in many countries. Exporting money to the United States was nightmarishly complicated, and the flow of foreign royalties became irregular at best. Initially, Marsh took an unsympathetic approach to the problem and expected the foreign publishers to keep trying to get Mitchell's money through. The couple paid their bills on time and expected others to do the same. Marsh made it clear that, if Mitchell wrote another book, she would not do business with any firm that had been lax about paying royalties on
Gone With the Wind
.
¹⁰
Not until war broke out in September did he come to understand the devastation Hitler wrought on the lives of Europeans. When the Germans invaded Poland, Saunders warned that the situation looked grim for Przeworski, who was Jewish. “We must obviously forget about your Polish edition,” she wrote. “It is all too, too sad and I wonder if your Polish publisher and his eighty-year-old mother are still alive.”
¹¹

In Hollywood, filming on
Gone With the Wind
continued, and for a while it seemed as if industry naysayers, who had dubbed the production “Selznick's folly,” might be right. In mid-February, Selznick fired director George Cukor; the producer was not pleased with the daily rushes. He got permission from his father-in-law to pull director Victor Fleming off MetroGoldwyn-Mayer's (MGM)
The Wizard of Oz
to take the helm, but Fleming demanded a new script, so Selznick hired Ben Hecht for a rewrite. The original cinematographer was replaced when the producer felt the footage was too dark, and the actor playing overseer Jonas Wilkerson died, forcing a quick recast. Every development was covered by newspapers and movie magazines. Mitchell continued to keep her public distance, but, in private, her friend, Susan Myrick, who served as an adviser on the film, kept her posted on all the latest gossip.

Despite the delays, excitement was brewing for the movie's release. Plans began for a gala premiere in Atlanta, hopefully some time that fall. Brett offered to throw a grand party for Mitchell during the festivities, but she declined, having already accepted an invitation to an event hosted by the Atlanta Women's Press Club. The author felt one major to-do in her honor was enough. Brett mentioned the possibility of Macmillan and Selznick joining forces with the press club but Mitchell did not want to slight the organization or its president, her close friend Medora Field Perkerson. The author was a charter member of the club and felt a special bond with its members who had been so supportive of her novel. The publisher graciously accepted her position and demonstrated no ill will toward Mitchell for once again denying his company the opportunity to celebrate its association with her.

In March, Mitchell heard from her college roommate Ginny Morris.
Photoplay
magazine had renewed its interest in Morris writing about Mitchell. Now that the movie was underway, Morris assumed the author would have no objection to an “innocuous reminiscence” of their college days, “a harmless little piece.”
¹²
Mitchell exploded over the news, which she likened to a “bombshell.” She fired back, quoting extensively from their 1937 correspondence in which Morris had agreed not to write about Mitchell. “Whether the article is ‘innocuous' or not, its publication will mean the end of any friendship between you and me,” Mitchell announced.
¹³

The author also contacted
Photoplay
and asked the magazine to kill the article. The executive editor did not want to lose the story so he forwarded a copy of the piece to Mitchell, asking her to rewrite it to her satisfaction. In a twelve-page, single-spaced, typed response, the author presented her case that publishing the story would be embarrassing to both her and the magazine. She set forth her desire to avoid the public spotlight and detailed the difference, in her mind, between answering reporters' questions about a newsworthy event in her life—winning the Pulitzer Prize, for instance—and articles that “pry into my private affairs.” She outlined the many factual errors in the draft article, from the misspelling of her name as “March” to the claim that Mitchell's father, Eugene, was like Gerald O'Hara. She also downplayed her friendship with Morris, calling it a “brief schoolgirl acquaintance twenty years ago.” Mitchell then came to her most important point: Morris's claim that the author “was closer to being Scarlett than anyone who ever lived” was potentially libelous. “How could anyone who read my book make such a statement without intending it as an insult?” her creator fumed. Scarlett was not an admirable person: