Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (51 page)

Another headache arose for Mitchell when an American army officer in Germany asked for permission to use excerpts from the English-language version of
Gone With the Wind
in an anthology to be distributed to Germans studying English. This was not something she was eager to do. At that time, Goverts's whereabouts were still unknown, and it was not clear to Mitchell who owned the rights to produce English-language editions outside the United States. The rights arguably belonged to her because she had not specifically granted them to anyone else, but she figured Goverts, Macmillan London, and Macmillan New York might claim an interest. She predicted the contract would be “the damnedest thing to write I can possibly imagine.”
⁴⁸
She considered saying no, but Brett cautioned that doing so might look unpatriotic.
⁴⁹
With his encouragement, she put on a brave face: “Margaret Baugh and I have charged boldly at hurdles and hedges and have cooked up something like a dozen foreign contracts each one different. So I suppose we can cook up this one.”
⁵⁰

As she predicted, the project proved to be a disaster. The American official who had goaded her into agreeing to the book was transferred stateside, leaving Mitchell to deal with the German professor whose idea it had been. As it turned out, what he actually had in mind was an abridged and reorganized edition of
Gone With the Wind
. He also wanted Mitchell to waive her royalty and spared no effort in plucking at her heartstrings. He wrote to her in November 1946:

After my house being plundered and my wife finding a painful death as one of the last victims of the European havoc, it is bitter to see one's own and only child feel always hungry. With health and strength almost failing, it seems often desperate—unpractical as I am—to stand through a time when inconsiderate self-preservation prevails and morals are turned upside down. The hopelessness of the situation as well as physical exhaustion threaten to stifle initiative and idealism altogether.
⁵¹

Mitchell sympathized with the man's plight but would not give him the rights to
Gone With the Wind
for free. If she did so in this case, she would be expected to do the same in other countries. She dreaded breaking the news to the professor. As she explained to Brett, “So much of my work these days is done with the pitiful starving of Europe that I cannot take on another one; nor can I say no to another one, as I am carrying more than I really am able to carry.” She was working past midnight every night on the foreign accounts and doing her best to care for her still-ailing husband. Asserting that the revised proposal created copyright implications for Macmillan's interest, she asked Brett to handle it in her stead. “George, I just can't wrestle with this, and I can't wrestle with the problem of writing a long explanatory letter to this German.”
⁵²
Brett graciously agreed to make her excuses. The following spring, Mitchell was relieved to learn that Goverts was back in business.
⁵³

The author also had to figure out how her contracts were affected by changes to geopolitical boundaries after the war. For example, according to the terms of its 1935 contract with Mitchell, Macmillan had the exclusive right to publish and distribute
Gone With the Wind
in the United States and in U.S. territories such as the Philippines. Macmillan did not allow any foreign translations to be distributed within its markets, and, thus, the only version of
Gone With the Wind
available in the Philippines was the American one, despite the fact that several other languages were spoken there. When the Philippines obtained its independence after the war, Mitchell assumed Macmillan no longer had exclusive rights in the island nation and that she would be free to promote foreign language editions there. As a matter of courtesy, she confirmed her understanding with Brett. He agreed and appreciated her forthrightness: “Know the reason why I am so partial to Margaret Mitchell as an author? Because she is always so frank and helpful and always confers before doing things.”
⁵⁴
He declared it a delight to do business with her.

Without Saunders and her network of overseas connections, the author did the best she could to keep her ear to the ground for word of new unauthorized editions. Her clipping service proved useful in this regard, as did the Department of State and Peat, Marwick & Mitchell. Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM), which had extensive overseas operations and was eager to protect its rights to the film version of
Gone With the Wind
overseas, also tipped her off when it learned of issues related to her book in foreign countries. And, as always, some of the pirating publishers were bold enough to contact her directly, presumably oblivious to the fact that she was not enamored of their endeavors. In 1947, the son of one of her Chinese translators sent Mitchell a copy of an introduction to
Gone With the Wind
that his father had written, along with a request that she send them a pair of pants, a violin, and some ginseng.
⁵⁵
She had the piece translated and was touched by the effort that had gone into it. Although much of the information was incorrect or exaggerated—she was amused by references to her as “modest, pure and benevolent” and an excellent housekeeper—it reflected an honest attempt at accuracy. It gave her hope that the book might be a quality production, and she sent the young man the requested items.
⁵⁶

Her major worry remained the still-unresolved Dutch piracy litigation, which had been on hold for years now. J. A. Fruin had served as a captain in the Dutch cavalry throughout the war and only occasionally got word through. Mitchell understood from him that ZHUM had wearied of the lawsuit and was willing to move forward as an authorized publisher and pay her back royalties. Mitchell, too, was weary and willing to settle but by February 1946 had not received the promised payment or any word about where things stood. Reporters frequently asked her about the status of the case, and it embarrassed her to respond that she knew nothing. Worse, she heard rumors that ZHUM had authorized a Belgian edition of
Gone With
the Wind
, as if the tentative resolution gave Adrian Stok, the publisher, the right to start selling her translation rights to third parties. Mitchell was anxious for Fruin to set matters straight. She allowed that perhaps he had been “killed in the liberation fighting” but felt some other member of his firm or perhaps a family member should have contacted her.
⁵⁷
She was also frustrated with Walbridge Taft, her lawyer in New York. Despite repeated attempts to light a fire under him to get the case resolved, he seemed content to wait for Fruin to get in touch.

The Dutch lawyer reestablished contact in the spring of 1946 and promised the settlement would be resolved soon. Mitchell expected Taft to follow up, but he saw no urgency in the matter. In his estimation, Fruin had done wonders given the conditions he faced. Taft also questioned whether the negligible sum involved merited the importance Mitchell attached to it. Not willing to wait any longer, Mitchell went over Taft's head and wired Fruin directly. Three days later, word came that ZHUM had paid Fruin the settlement. For Mitchell, this good news was tempered by the fact Fruin had subtracted his fees from the Dutch publisher's payment without her approval and made no mention of when her money would be forwarded. Then, when the legal papers arrived, the settlement agreement was written poorly, and there was no record of court approval.
⁵⁸
Taft again expressed no particular concern, and the author told him she no longer required his services.

She asked her accountants to review the files, and, in short order, they gave Mitchell a full report of what Fruin owed. “It is like a breath of fresh salt air in a close room to read their lucid account of what has been taking place in Holland,” she wrote Stephens Mitchell in the fall of 1946. The author asked her brother to step in and wrap things up. “It has become such an unwieldy, bulky and long-drawn-out affair that I hope in some manner you can get it simplified,” she told him. “The most exasperating thing about the whole situation is the bunglesomeness with which it has been handled, the many mistakes which have occurred along the way and the delay in closing up the case properly.”
⁵⁹

Taking his sister's statements of what had occurred at face value, Stephens Mitchell wrote a sharp letter to J. Drost, a lawyer who had take over the case from Fruin. He received an equally sharp reply. Drost evidenced little patience for demanding Americans but expressed a willingness to address Mitchell's concerns:

My first impression by this letter was: One more proof of the complete ignorance of Americans about a country, occupied, ruined and plundered five long years by the Germans, slaughtered and terrorized by the Gestapo, having lost—relatively—far greater part of its population than any other allied country of Western Europe or America, having been since September 1944 without rail or car traffic, with scarce and very slow postal communications, nearly starved by cold and want of food, utterly disorganized even after its liberation in May 1945.

The second impression was: I must thoroughly study its contents and then make the situation clear and put things right. This is what I will now try to do.
⁶⁰

Drost made a convincing case that his firm had not been negligent. He had not put the settlement agreement in writing earlier for fear the Germans might have found the document and punished them for dealing with Americans. Once the papers were finally drawn up, they had not been presented to the court because it was a private matter that did not need court approval under Dutch law. He assured Stephens Mitchell that the text was not poorly written in the original Dutch; he could not vouch for the translation the author had obtained.

The Belgian edition also turned out to be much ado about nothing. ZHUM had subcontracted with the Belgian publisher because Holland, which had been “far more plundered by the Germans than Belgium,” did not have enough paper to print the book. Drost explained that Belgian is not a separate language from Dutch but rather a variation spoken in the Flemish section of Belgium. From that point forward, the case moved to a smooth resolution. Though the money Mitchell eventually received was nothing close to what she had spent on the litigation, the author felt she had done the right thing. She was proud of the attention she had drawn to the plight of American writers as a result of her country's failure to join the Berne Convention and regretted only that she had not accomplished a change in the law.
⁶¹
Although it had taken a decade of her life to bring ZHUM into the fold, the author held no grudge against Stok and went on to develop a productive working relationship with him. At long last, the foreign accounts appeared well in hand.

* The Mitchell in the firm's name was no relation to the author.

15
A Bolt from the Blue

B
y the fall of 1947, John Marsh had regained enough strength to resume working on the
GWTW
business affairs. Although he would never be well enough to return to Georgia Power—he resigned his position in early September—he wanted to take some of the heavy load off his wife's shoulders. One of his initial forays back into the role as her manager reveals the uncertain nature of his relationship with Macmillan more than a decade into their association. As meticulous as ever, Marsh went over with a fine-tooth comb the publisher's royalty statement for the previous year and spotted an irregularity in the percentages the company used to calculate the author's earnings. Instead of paying her a 15 percent royalty, the firm had used a 10 percent scale. When Marsh wrote to Macmillan about the issue that September, Brett greeted him like a long-lost friend: “Cheers and more cheers! . . . It is a delight to my heart to learn that you are up and at 'em again.” The publisher explained that Macmillan had used a 10 percent figure to determine royalties because the book sold less than five thousand copies that year. According to the 1936 revised royalty agreement, the percentages dropped in any year the book sold below that threshold. “Did that clear matters up?” Brett asked optimistically.
¹
It did not.

Margaret Mitchell's book had sold close to forty-five thousand copies the year in question, all formats combined; only the three-dollar edition sold fewer than five thousand. But Marsh was not content to simply point out the error and move on. Instead, he launched into a detailed explanation of why Macmillan had been unreasonable in its adjustment of her royalty agreement back in the spring of 1936. He also made a passing reference to the “bad and unfair” contract Macmillan had let Mitchell sign with David O. Selznick.
²

The publisher apologized immediately and without equivocation for the calculation error. Brett was sorry. The mistake would be corrected. As for Marsh's feeling that Macmillan had let Mitchell down on the negotiations with Selznick, Brett regretted the Marshes were unhappy with the movie contract. He stated that fifty thousand dollars was a generous amount of money back in 1936 and that Harold Latham had done as well as could have been expected at the time the sale was made.
³