Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (58 page)

Robins's reaction was not an unusual one. Ever since Margaret Mitchell retreated from the public spotlight in 1936, the Marshes had struggled with the image question, knowing that their behavior at times seemed odd or paranoid. The perception of his sister as an eccentric had always troubled Stephens Mitchell. In a letter to Brett, he lamented that his sister had been presented to the public as “a lay figure, as flat and formal as a Byzantine portrait.” Now that he was in charge, he did not intend for her to be remembered as a neurotic, hypersensitive recluse. He knew he had “no business knocking down the ikon” but did not “intend to gild it.”
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For the rest of his life, he would go to great lengths to balance his sister's desire for privacy with his sense of responsibility for protecting her reputation.

Stephens Mitchell understood his sister's reasons for wanting to shield her personal life from public scrutiny. The siblings had been raised with the mores of the Southern intellectual elite. Showiness was abhorred. Private matters were kept private. Thus, when it came to his sister's personal life, he vigorously respected her wishes. Most dramatically, after he remarried and built a new house, Mitchell made arrangements for the Mitchell family home on Peachtree Street to be razed. He told the press that he and his sister had agreed that only Mitchells should ever live there. They also did not want the house opened as a tourist attraction.
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It probably came as no surprise to him that
Gone With the Wind
fans hauled away bricks and other pieces of the building as souvenirs.

Mitchell also accepted his sister's views about not wanting the
GWTW
manuscript and working papers made public. After Marsh's death, he and Baugh discovered in the widower's office the 1951 codicil related to the
GWTW
manuscript, along with the sealed envelope of papers. According to notes found with the material, Marsh had intended to add more items to the cache but had died before finishing the task. Mitchell returned the envelope to the bank and later added an additional envelope of materials specified by Marsh, including chapters 44 and 47 from the final manuscript showing edits by Macmillan and the Marshes. The second envelope was taped to the original, and the double package remains in a safe-deposit box to this day.
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As for the rest of the author's papers, of which thousands remained, Stephens Mitchell took a more measured approach. At Baugh's behest, he proceeded cautiously before destroying anything related to the business of
Gone With the Wind
. Recalling that she and Marsh had burned some letters that contained valuable information, Baugh insisted on “re-reading and considering” each document carefully. “It's a great responsibility,” she told Cole.
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They limited the destruction to personal items, such as the author's childhood report cards, handwritten verses of poetry, and letters about Clifford Henry, her World War I fiance´.
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The bulk of Margaret Mitchell's correspondence related to
Gone With the Wind
survived—but to what end?

That question would plague Stephens Mitchell for more than a decade. While he went about the business of managing his law practice and his sister's estate, the nagging issue remained: what to do about
Gone With the
Wind
's literary legacy. After mulling over the issue for several years, Mitchell decided that the estate needed to authorize a biography to establish the record of her life and that of her literary progeny. It was only a matter of time before an unauthorized work appeared, and it did not take much imagination to predict what such a project would look like: either a hatchet job by a critic or an inadequate portrayal by a well-meaning fan.

Mitchell considered hiring an outside writer to tell the story but ultimately decided to tackle the job himself. In the mid-1950s, he began drafting a memoir about his sister's life with a focus on her experiences writing and managing
Gone With the Wind
. He relied on Baugh's assistance a great deal, and the project would be the source of considerable friction between them. When Mitchell once threatened to tear up a section they had worked on together, Baugh told Cole, “If I die young, you'll know why, and you can put up a monument accordingly.”
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They would struggle over the task well into the next decade.

During the years that Stephens Mitchell worked on a biography, he also managed the ongoing business of
Gone With the Wind
. There were still crackpots hoping to capitalize on the book's success, such as a man who showed up demanding money for the help he claimed to have given Mitchell in writing the manuscript. And some of the old troublemakers reared their heads, including the persistent French sequelist Madame Henri Pajot. Stephens Mitchell heard from a Catholic priest who had been convinced by Pajot that her “Lady of Tara” was the true story of actual people named Scarlett and “Rebb,” as supposedly told to Pajot by Margaret Mitchell. The author's brother had to tell the man of the cloth that the creative Parisian had “spun an elaborate yarn.”
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The rumor mill also required tending. Mitchell and Baugh routinely sent letters of correction any time the press misrepresented the record of the author's life. When publisher Bennett Cerf 's syndicated column reprinted the anecdote from
Reader's Digest
about Ashley Wilkes being killed at Gettysburg and Melanie's ill-timed pregnancy, Baugh wrote Cerf at length pointing out his errors. If Ashley had died, she said, “the story would have been entirely different—and some 800 pages shorter.”
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Cerf quickly apologized, noting he heard from other readers about the mistake, and ran a correction.

But not all of the estate's work was adversarial. Fan letters still arrived on a regular basis, and the author's grave became a tourist mecca. One of her biggest admirers turned out to be Adrian Stok of ZHUM, the Dutch publisher she had fought in court for so many years. He donated one hundred dollars to a hospital memorial in her honor and sent tulip bulbs to be planted on her grave every fall. In the mid-1950s, he came to the United States to visit family and made a special trip to Atlanta to pay tribute to the author. Baugh took him on a sightseeing tour of the city; when they visited Mitchell's grave, he left a basket of gladioli and peonies “to our Margaret.”
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The people of Atlanta also continued to cherish
Gone With the Wind
and Mitchell's memory. When the city considered renaming its utilitariansounding Atlanta Municipal Airport in 1954, several area residents wrote the
Atlanta Constitution
to suggest the airfield be called Margaret Mitchell Airport, Scarlett O'Hara Airport, or Gone With the Wind Airport. Noted one reader about the latter name: “It is catchy. Airplanes go like the wind, and
Gone With the Wind
is known all over the United States and in foreign countries.”
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Although longtime mayor William B. Hartsfield eventually won the honor of having the airport named for him, there was no shortage of local pride for the book that made the city famous.

The following year, Atlanta's WSB Radio and Television—the call letters of which were promoted as standing for “Welcome South, Brother”—began planning the dedication of its new headquarters. Station officials wanted to present guests with a souvenir of the event and decided on a limited edition of
Gone With the Wind
. The station made arrangements with Macmillan and the estate to produce five hundred leather-bound copies. George Brett took an active interest in the publication, even suggesting that the copies not be numbered so as to avoid causing hard feelings for those who received the higher-numbered books. Telling Stephens Mitchell that it was an honor for
Gone With the Wind
to be selected as the gift by the broadcasting firm,
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Brett encouraged the estate to waive its royalty. Stephens Mitchell did not want to go quite that far but agreed to donate the estate's share of the proceeds to the Atlanta Historical Society.
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Foreign interest in
Gone With the Wind
remained steady. The novel appeared for the first time in Portugal, Lebanon, and Iran, and in new editions in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and Sweden. Pirated editions popped up on occasion, such as in Mexico and Greece, but Stephens Mitchell did not have the drive to fight them as vigilantly as had the Marshes. He told Brett he did not “have the money or the desire or the time to sit on the steam boiler safety valve all my life.” The lawyer generally tried to come to some sort of agreement with the perpetrators, even if for a modest sum. He did not want to waste time trying to “keep from the market something for which there is a market.”
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If unauthorized publishers refused to sign contracts, he was content to hope that they did not make any money.
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Still, Stephens Mitchell had not completely abandoned his sister's position against the injustices of literary piracy. In the fall of 1953, he paid tribute to her memory by taking a stand on an issue that had been near and dear to her heart—the failure of the U.S. government to protect the literary rights of its authors in overseas markets. After World War II, pressure built for the United States to join the Universal Copyright Convention, an international agreement developed by the United Nations as an alternative to the Berne Convention. Leading the charge on behalf of the publishing industry was the American Book Publishers Council. Its managing director, Dan Lacy, approached Brett about including testimony from the Mitchell estate regarding the difficulties the author had faced because of the failure of the United States to join Berne. Curiously, Brett initially dismissed the idea, saying it was his impression that the author had not experienced many problems managing the foreign copyrights because she had received assistance from the Department of State.
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Margaret Mitchell would have been appalled at Brett's flippancy. Certainly, Wallace McClure and other government officials had helped, but the bulk of the foreign copyright battles had fallen on her and her husband. Brett forwarded Lacy's request to Stephens Mitchell, who seemed eager to tell the story.

The following spring, Stephens Mitchell traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before a Senate committee. He told of twenty-three separate cases of copyright infringement that his sister had fought. He pointed out that the business of policing the book's copyright around the world involved hiring a full-time secretary in Atlanta, along with local lawyers and accountants in each country where the book was published. He estimated the Marshes had spent at least $15,000 in legal fees fighting the 1937 Dutch piracy and another $3,500 on the Chilean piracy. It was a point of pride for the author's brother when Congress approved membership in the convention.

From Macmillan's perspective, the 1950s represented a new era in the life of
Gone With the Wind
. Latham retired in 1952, and the book seemed to have run its course among a large population of readers. The yearly totals in American sales had fallen in 1951 and 1952 to less than thirteen thousand copies per year. Although still an impressive number for such an old title, sales were showing a distinct downward trend. But Brett refused to put the old girl out to pasture just yet. In 1953, he solicited offers from discount publishers that might be willing to reissue the book in a cheap format aimed at a new generation of readers. He received only two bids. One was from the New American Library for what he considered a paltry twenty-five thousand dollars. The other, which far exceeded his expectations, was from Doubleday & Company; it guaranteed a minimum payment of $87,500 for the rights to produce three new inexpensive editions of the book, including the first pocket-sized paperback. In proposing the deal to Stephens Mitchell, who would receive half the payout on the contract, Brett called the offer a gold mine waiting to be tapped.
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Mitchell accepted and congratulated the publisher on his efforts. “That is an old story—ever ancient, ever new—but I want you to know that it is appreciated by me,” he wrote, apparently not sharing his brother-in-law's animosity toward Brett.
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