Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (55 page)

Mitchell was not alone in her outrage. Many readers wrote to her, to Macmillan, and to
Reader's Digest
, pointing out the error. The magazine reportedly received more than eight thousand phone calls about the matter in a single day and so much mail that it prepared a form letter in response.
⁶²
When the
Digest
realized the level of support Mitchell had and that she was not going to go away quietly, it agreed to run a correction. At Marsh's insistence, the editors worked closely with him on the exact wording, and Mitchell triumphantly announced her victory to Latham on July 29: “I believe the long record of our successful legal moves against people who had misused my name or literary material finally convinced the
Reader's
Digest
that they were going to have a great deal of trouble with me. I think their idea was to print some sort of something in September that would make me look like an ass and you and the Macmillan Company, too, but we stopped all that.”
⁶³

Victory came with a price. Between battling the magazine, the Pajot incident, and the trouble in Japan, the couple's workload had increased so much that in July they were forced to hire a second secretary. “We should have done it years ago, as Margaret Baugh has had more than any one person could carry even if she worked twenty-four hours a day,” Mitchell noted to Latham. “We always hoped that things would quiet down and life become simpler, but here it is a great many years since 1936, and the work growing out of
Gone With the Wind
is so heavy we have to have additional help.”
⁶⁴

They needed more than secretarial help, though. In the midst of resolving the
Reader's Digest
matter, Mitchell began to receive inquiries about developing the television rights to her novel. Being unfamiliar with how this new medium operated, the Marshes decided to bring in an outside adviser. Unwilling to deal with strangers, they asked Kay Brown, who was now an agent with Music Corporation of America, to represent them in negotiating the television rights.
⁶⁵
Although it may have seemed odd to turn to somebody who played such a major role in securing the movie contract that caused the Marshes so much expense and angst, the couple never held a grudge against Brown. They admired the way she handled herself and welcomed her expert guidance.

After supper on Thursday, August 11, 1949, the Marshes decided to see a movie. Mitchell drove them the short distance to the Peachtree Arts Theatre, where the 1944 British film
A Canterbury Tale
was showing. Parking on the west side of Peachtree, she helped Marsh out of the car. Dusk was beginning to settle. Taking his arm, Mitchell looked both ways and said, “It looks safe now,” then began crossing the thoroughfare her book had made world famous. As they reached the middle of the street, she apparently sensed something; she leaned around her husband and, looking south, spotted a car speeding toward them out of a broad curve. Suddenly, her comment a few weeks earlier to Latham about an “innocent pedestrian” seemed eerily prescient. As Marsh would recall later, they both hesitated, and then, without speaking, she turned and headed back to the curb they had just left.

By now, twenty-nine-year-old Hugh Gravitt, an off-duty taxi driver at the wheel of his own car, had spotted the couple in the middle of the street. He blew his horn and swerved to the left, slamming on his brakes. The car went into a skid and seemed to be chasing Mitchell, witnesses recalled. The vehicle struck her and threw her to the pavement. Marsh shakily rushed to his wife's side. An ambulance arrived in minutes and raced the author to Grady Hospital.

The next morning's
Atlanta Constitution
carried a large photograph of the author and the banner headline “Margaret Mitchell Struck by Car, Gravely Injured; Driver Held.” Atlanta began a vigil for the woman who had brought them such pride and attention. Over the next several days, newspapers around the world updated their readers. Calls, letters, and telegrams—from President Harry Truman, Selznick, and Brett, among many others—poured in, inquiring about her condition and offering prayers. Mitchell had suffered a skull fracture and internal injuries. Each day, the Atlanta newspapers carried front-page updates on the author. On Saturday, Mitchell seemed to rally slightly, but on Sunday her condition worsened. She had murmured a few words—“it hurts” and “it tastes bad” when given some orange juice to drink. On several occasions, she rose up and said a few phrases such as “I'll take care of that in the morning” before falling back into unconsciousness. On Tuesday, August 16, doctors talked about operating to relieve the pressure on her brain. But it was too late; Margaret Mitchell died just before noon.

The funeral was scheduled for Thursday. In an effort to control what was sure to be a large crowd, the family had 350 admittance cards printed and hand delivered to friends, family members, and dignitaries across the city, including Georgia governor Herman Talmadge and Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield. Brett offered the services of Macmillan employees in the Atlanta office to help answer the telephone and record telegrams and other messages for Mitchell's family. He also ordered two floral arrangements—one from the officers and directors of Macmillan, the other from its employees.
⁶⁶
He flew to Atlanta Wednesday night.

Latham had heard a radio broadcast about the accident on the morning of August 12, the day he was leaving for a month's vacation in Maine and Canada. The news frightened him, he later wrote; he sensed Mitchell would not recover. Though unable to attend her funeral, the editor recalled with fondness his lunch with the Marshes that spring at the Waldorf. His last vivid recollection of Mitchell was her excitement over an unusual orchid corsage he had sent her that day.
⁶⁷

Cole and Allan Taylor also were on vacation. By the time they heard of Mitchell's death, they could not make the necessary flight connections from their family cabin in the remote reaches of the Adirondack Mountains.
⁶⁸
Devastated, they wrote Marsh a personal and heartrending letter, fretting about not having immediately left for Atlanta upon hearing of the accident. To Cole and her husband, the timing of their friend's death was inescapably cruel given how close the Marshes seemed to be at starting a “happier, less harried life.”
⁶⁹
Cole later told Baugh, “Allan and I will never have a friend like her again—and I could have lost anyone but her.”
⁷⁰

Condolences streamed in from around the world. In a telegram to Marsh, President Truman lauded Mitchell as “an artist who gave the world an eternal book” and said she would be remembered “as a great soul who exemplified in her all too brief span of years the highest ideals of American womanhood.”
⁷¹
Governor Talmadge noted, “The people of Georgia, the people of the nation and millions in foreign lands who have read and been inspired by her great and famous book will be saddened.”
⁷²
Marsh received many touching letters from fans, including a blind boy who wrote to him in Braille and several Catholic nuns who said they were having masses said for the author.
⁷³
The family requested memorial donations be made to Grady Hospital, but many people also sent floral tributes, including a spray of red roses from actress Olivia de Havilland; an arrangement from Gallimard, Mitchell's French publisher; and a vase of flowers from New York with a card signed simply “M.S.,” presumably Marion Saunders.
⁷⁴

On August 18, a large crowd gathered in front of the prestigious H. M. Patterson Funeral Home on Spring Street and listened to the service on loudspeakers that had been set up at Mayor Hartsfield's request. Calling Mitchell Atlanta's “greatest and most beloved citizen,” the mayor urged city residents to pause for a moment of silent prayer. After a ten-minute ceremony, the funeral procession headed toward the city's historic Oakland Cemetery, where thousands of fallen Confederate soldiers lay. As the hearse crossed Peachtree Street, “a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds, and seemed to light up that historic thoroughfare,” the
Atlanta Journal
reported.
⁷⁵
Thousands of Atlantans lined the sidewalks or stood on their front porches to watch the cortege, some crying quietly, men removing their hats in respect. Slowly, the cars made their way between the cemetery's narrow brick gateposts and toward the plot where Mitchell's parents were buried. At the grave, John Marsh, Stephens Mitchell, Margaret Baugh, Bessie Jordan, and other friends and family members said their goodbyes while, at a distance, photographers from the local newspapers and the national media, including the Associated Press and
Life
magazine, snapped photos.

That same week, the September
Reader's Digest
appeared on newsstands containing a lengthy correction regarding the Ashley Wilkes piece. The editors admitted the anecdote was inaccurate and regretted they had given the impression Mitchell had been careless with the historical details of her book. It was a final triumph for the author to whom history and accuracy meant so much—but one that came too late for her to savor.

* Mitchell was so pleased with this turn of events that she wrote General Douglas MacArthur, head of the Allied occupation, and thanked him for his efforts defending American interests.

16
Inherit the Wind

I
n the days after Margaret Mitchell's death, the newspapers and magazines that had so closely followed her in life now offered tributes and commemorations. Even the
Saturday Review of Literature
, which had objected to her book's Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that
Gone With the Wind
was inferior to several other novels on the same theme, conceded that she deserved credit for having written “the most popular novel in the world.”
Review
editor Harrison Smith tipped his hat to Mitchell for the way she handled the circus her life had become.
¹

With the blitz of media attention, sales of
Gone With the Wind
jumped sharply in August 1949. Bookstores in Atlanta sold out quickly and placed hundreds of orders for both the full-priced and cheap editions. Similar demand for the novel was reported throughout the South. At the end of the month, when Atlanta's Piedmont Drive-In showed the movie—the booking had been made before her death—thousands of patrons jammed the roads near the theater, creating a three-mile backup.

John Marsh assumed responsibility for his wife's literary legacy. He gave the task his full attention despite his immense grief. After battling health problems for so many years, Marsh considered himself well trained in “living with a wholly obnoxious state of affairs.” As he wrote to Harold Latham, “Peggy herself was preparation for the experience of losing her. She went through some awfully tough experiences, and over and over she whipped them. She would have whipped the last one if the son-of-a-bitch Gravitt* had been driving even a little slower and given her one additional second of time in which to escape.” Mitchell had written a book about survival and how people faced the “major upheavals of life.” With that before him, Marsh said, “I just could not afford to fail.”
²

One of the first actions he took was to write a will providing for disposition of the
GWTW
rights upon his death. Consistent with Mitchell's wishes, he specified that all the rights, income, and property related to the novel would pass to her brother Stephens Mitchell. Next, Marsh confronted the painful task of sorting through his wife's papers. Knowing she had not wanted a biography written or her working papers viewed by the public, he began burning her personal correspondence, as well as the bulk of the manuscript of
Gone With the Wind
. The process proved agonizing for the distraught husband, so he asked Margaret Baugh to continue the chore on his behalf. After instructing her to destroy hundreds of items, Marsh began to have second thoughts. He wanted to respect his wife's wishes but came to see that he was erasing the record of her remarkable life and that of her novel. He instructed Baugh to stop for the time being.
³