Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (49 page)

Marsh considered her proposal but decided to part ways. The next day, Saunders and Mitchell executed a document terminating their agency relationship. Saunders agreed to pay back the missing royalties as soon as possible and to (1) promptly notify all of Mitchell's foreign publishers that she no longer represented the author; (2) provide Marsh a detailed list of contact information for all the foreign contracts; and (3) cooperate in the resolution of the ongoing audit. In exchange, Mitchell agreed to waive interest on the missing royalties and credit toward Saunders's debt any commissions owed on the foreign accounts.
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Firing Saunders had been an easy decision. More difficult would be whether to pursue criminal charges. The Marshes had little sympathy for the agent but were averse to embroiling themselves in a messy judicial proceeding. Admitting they had been swindled would be embarrassing. As Margaret Baugh recalled, the Marshes did not want to “look like suckers and yokels to have been so taken in by [Saunders].”
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A trial would be time consuming and stressful. Mitchell's back was bothering her that summer, and her father was ill. After much soul searching, they decided not to report the embezzlement to the police.
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However, they were not willing to let Saunders off the hook entirely. Given the FBI's inquiry the previous year, Marsh worried that the agent might have used the embezzled money for subversive purposes. Just in case, they reported Saunders to the FBI. Marsh and Stephens Mitchell met with agents at the Atlanta field office at least twice. Marsh explained that, although he had assumed Saunders “antiAxis,” he now worried that she had duped them. The FBI agreed to look into it but apparently found no cause to suspect Saunders of treason. The bureau kept the matter confidential, and the story appears never to have made the newspapers.
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The next question for the Marshes was how to oversee the foreign accounts without Saunders. The idea of bringing in a new agent held little appeal. It would be burdensome finding someone they trusted and would draw attention to the break in their relations with Saunders. Handling the foreign accounts themselves would be difficult, especially given the confused state of world affairs, but it was an option they were considering. While they developed a game plan for the future, Saunders tried to convince them that she deserved another chance. Throughout the fall, she peppered the Marshes with letters in which she struggled to come to grips with what she had done. The correspondence is striking, both for its pathos and its remarkable lack of self-awareness. One moment she was despondent with remorse; the next, she cockily warned they could not function without her.

Saunders admitted she had done a “horrible thing” and that no “apology or reparation” would ever be good enough. Her actions showed “a corruption and a deadness of conscience” that made her “absolutely ill.” She acknowledged this was small punishment compared to the “awful worry and sickness” Mitchell must have been suffering at having her trust betrayed.
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She wrote Marsh that her legs were shaky as she walked the streets of New York, tormented by what she had done and the kindness with which they had treated her. Desperate for forgiveness, Saunders tried to explain away her behavior. Harking back to earlier comments about how she liked working on her own, the agent now held that independent streak responsible for her predicament. She had been alone too much since moving to the United States and wished she'd had someone like Marsh or Stephens Mitchell to advise her. She also tried to cast blame on the “impressions and influences” of her early years. Claiming to have been brought up in “luxury in Berlin and Paris,” she suffered from a lack of discipline. For good measure, she also threw in that she had a thyroid deficiency and problems training secretaries.
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She must have believed these excuses justified her actions because she had the nerve to ask the Marshes to reconsider her termination, assuring them that she had their best interests at heart. It was unheard of, Saunders claimed, for an American author to deal directly with foreign publishers. Moreover, if word got out about the embezzlement, it would look bad for Mitchell and cause unwanted attention. And, Saunders fretted, if it became public that she had been fired, it would ruin her business and she would never be able to repay the debt. She desperately wanted to know if Marsh had told Macmillan what happened. She claimed to have “very happy relations” with Harold Latham and Cole and continued to send them manuscripts on behalf of other authors. Saunders felt uncomfortable engaging in pleasantries with the editors not knowing what they knew.
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Would Marsh be willing to downplay the theft and not go into details about why the agent no longer worked for Mitchell?

Marsh would have none of it. Her letters showed “a fine attitude” and it was “human to indulge in self-justification” but enough was enough. If the contract with Mitchell had been burdensome to Saunders, she should have quit. He blamed matters on the agent's “unbusinesslike methods” and failure to follow “elementary principles of business and law.” Whereas a “proper agent relieves her client of burdens and worries,” he felt Saunders created them and put “hard labor” on the Marshes by forcing them to argue with her about matters “which should have required no argument at all.”
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At the end of October, the accountants finished the audit and declared the final amount due, including the one thousand dollars Mitchell had advanced the agent, was $30,088.22.
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Marsh instructed Saunders to get busy notifying the publishers and agents that she no longer represented Mitchell.

As for Macmillan, Marsh had not yet told George Brett, Latham, or Cole about the embezzlement. He expected Saunders to do so and was not cowed by her threats about bad publicity. “We are free at any time to tell the whole story or any part of it,” he wrote. “You will be making a serious error of judgment if you assume that we have changed our position just because we have said nothing yet.”
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Marsh would not be a partner to any deception. He recommended Saunders tell Latham and everyone else the full truth and be done with it.
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If the agent even hinted that any fault for the situation rested with Mitchell, he said, the Marshes would not hesitate to file a lawsuit for libel or slander. They did not want to hear any more excuses. “The disruption of my life and the gray hairs I have gained these past seven years were largely because of the foreign business, and the hard job of holding you in line,” he wrote, “and no amount of money in the world could compensate me for it.”
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He reminded Saunders that her career had benefited from her association with Mitchell and that she was fortunate they did not charge her interest on the missing funds or ask her to pay the cost of the audit.

After several weeks of back and forth, Saunders called the apartment in Atlanta at nine o'clock on the evening of December 1, 1943, and frantically tried to convince Marsh to keep his mouth shut. Did he want her to go out of business? If word got out about what she had done, she threatened, she would never be able to pay back the money she owed. She was most anxious to avoid telling Latham; even if the editor promised to keep it secret, she felt sure he would broadcast the news to others. According to Marsh's notes of the phone conversation, he explained to Saunders that he would not deceive other people, even if it did slow down her repayment. He summarized the discussion this way: “Throughout the conversation she displayed the same mental dishonesty, inability to grasp simple principles of right and wrong and twisted thinking which she displayed in our Atlanta discussions and which got her into trouble in the first place.”
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After half an hour of her ranting, he hung up on her.

The following day, the agent wrote to Marsh full of remorse. She apologized for having called so late but explained that she would have been unable to sleep without talking to him. She had no business making excuses and acknowledged that it had been tactless of her to suggest otherwise. It would not happen again, she promised.22 Accepting Saunders at her word, Marsh was glad they had reached an understanding. He assured her that if the Marshes disclosed details of what happened, it would not be with pleasure but because the “only way we know how to do business is to plow a straight furrow.”
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On December 8, 1943, Saunders broke the news to Macmillan that she no longer represented Mitchell.
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Although the agent volunteered no details about what caused the split, the firm heard the full story from Marsh. Brett was sympathetic with what the Marshes had endured but disagreed with their decision not to report Saunders to the police. He thought they should haul her into court and obtain an order directing her to turn over the records and money immediately. He also wanted Mitchell to inform
Publishers Weekly
and the Authors League. He thought Saunders ought to be put out of the literary agency business; it was unfair to other authors not to reveal what happened. If Mitchell was not comfortable doing so, Macmillan would be glad to step forward once she provided the firm with the necessary evidence to defend itself from a libel suit.
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Marsh did not take kindly to the unsolicited advice. He blasted back, explaining that they had decided against legal action “not out of kindness to Miss Saunders but because it would have hurt the innocent party, Peggy, more than the guilty one.” While they considered themselves to have a good sense of their public duties, the Marsh family had no regrets about not going public. As for other possible victims, Marsh doubted Saunders could afford to remain in business much longer. In any event, he felt Macmillan was in no position to be critical of them. After all, Marsh charged, Saunders would have never come into their lives except for Macmillan: “You gave her to us along with the foreign publication rights and, from that day on, she was a constant source of trouble and expense to us until we terminated her contract, and since then, too, for she left a terrible tangle and mess for us to clear up.”
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Taken aback by the vitriol of Marsh's response, Brett forwarded the correspondence to Latham for his reaction. Latham, too, failed to see any reason for Marsh's ire.
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Nonetheless, Brett took the high ground. He gave up on the idea of the Marshes exposing Saunders and went about privately advising Macmillan's authors to cut ties with the agent. The publisher apologized to Marsh for any discomfort his letter had caused, saying he had not meant to give the impression he was criticizing the couple.
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Brett did dispute though that Macmillan had saddled the Marshes with Saunders. Back in 1936, Macmillan had no reason not to trust her, he explained, and it was logical that she had been allowed to continue working on
Gone With the
Wind
after the foreign rights were transferred to Mitchell. Chastened, Marsh accepted the apology. “A situation of this kind is always difficult to handle, and practically any method of dealing with it might fall short of the best way,” he wrote.
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By the spring of 1944, Marsh began to wonder if Brett had been right about how to handle Saunders. Not yet having hired a replacement agent, the Marshes found themselves in the uncomfortable position of continuing to rely on her for advice. They had been working the foreign accounts with her for more than seven years by this point but still faced a steep learning curve on almost every facet of their overseas dealings. Saunders proved irresistibly helpful, and knew it. In the months since she had been let go, the agent had been tutoring Marsh on the accounts, giving him an exhaustive report about each of the publishers, going into great detail about their likes, dislikes, marital statuses, incomes, and attitudes toward
Gone With the Wind
. She described how one was loyal because he had bought a car with the money he earned from Mitchell's book. Another, she said, was reliable but had a quick temper. She also knew which ones were Jewish or had Jewish spouses, an important consideration in trying to sort through why some publishers may have been unable to pay royalties in recent years. The Marshes further took advantage of her connections in the publishing world and savoir faire about how to operate on an international level. She alerted them to potential piracies in Canada and Iceland and helped them sort through what to do in each case.

Their failure to make a clean break with Saunders put the Marshes in a difficult position. Knowing that they needed her, Saunders again became less contrite and more demanding. She lashed out at Marsh for daring ask about her plans for repaying the debt. She criticized him for not being more sympathetic to her plight. She also started making noises that she wanted credit against her debt for the information she had been providing them since her termination. By the summer of 1944, Saunders had cast herself in the role of the victim struggling against mean ol' John Marsh.

Marsh went through several rounds with her, and it took him until July 1944, almost a full year after discovering her wrongdoing, to put matters to rest. He acknowledged she been helpful over the preceding months but explained that he had accepted her assistance with a clean conscience on the assumption that she wanted to be of service. “If I were living in a friend's house in a relationship of trust and confidence and, accidentally or intentionally, burned the house down, I would want to help rebuild it,” he wrote. “If I did not have the money to pay for the damage, I would want to help in any other way I could, even if I could do nothing more than push a wheelbarrow.” Sermon delivered, he offered to credit Saunders whatever amount she believed proper for providing them helpful information.
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With that behind them, he wanted to cut ties. It would be a gradual process, but by fall, Saunders accepted the reality of her position and started making payments on her debt.