Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (59 page)

The Doubleday deal received considerable attention because it was the first time Macmillan had licensed an outside firm to publish
Gone With the
Wind
. At least one reporter expressed surprise that there was anyone who had not yet read the book, and a member of the American Book Publishers Council jokingly referred to the release as “Gone With the Second Wind.”
⁵⁶
The three new editions, released in 1954, garnered further attention when Doubleday gave Margaret Mitchell's book a dramatic facelift. The two hardcover versions—one sold to book club members, the other through bookstores—received a dynamic new dust jacket design featuring prominent images of Scarlett and Rhett, who looked a great deal like Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Doubleday also reset the type so that all three unabridged versions took up far fewer pages than readers were used to seeing. The new paperback version contained a relatively svelte 862 pages. A columnist in the
New York Herald Tribune
speculated that the new format would be short enough to read in a single evening—if the reader lived in the Arctic.

In case the updated look was not enough to attract readers, publication of the new editions was timed to coincide with a rerelease of Selznick's motion picture. To celebrate the movie's fifteenth anniversary that year, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) launched another run through the national theater circuit. Atlanta hosted a kickoff celebration with a special showing of the film at Loew's Grand Theatre. Doubleday's bet on Mitchell proved well placed. The updated formats, along with long lines of moviegoers, breathed new life into Mitchell's book. Within a year, the three editions had sold a combined total of more than 840,000 copies.
⁵⁷
Eager to tout this success, Macmillan reported to the estate that, with these additional copies in circulation, English-language sales of
Gone With the Wind
since 1936 now stood at a remarkable 5,251,931 copies.

While Stephens Mitchell shared a more pleasant relationship with Brett than had Marsh, the Mitchell family never took anything at face value. When Mitchell read Macmillan's claim about total sales, the number did not seem right to him. He reviewed nearly two decades' worth of royalty statements and determined that the figure was more than a million copies higher than the sales indicated in the estate's records. The Marshes and the estate always kept a careful eye on the royalty statements, and Stephens Mitchell felt certain Macmillan had overstated the numbers. “Margaret and John were proud of the sales, and very careful about their records,” he wrote Brett, seeking clarification. “They would hardly have lost sight of a million copies. If they have been lost, we'd like to find them.”
⁵⁸
At first, Brett was convinced the mistake was in Atlanta, but when Mitchell insisted his records could not be reconciled to get the higher figure, Macmillan accountants went to work on a year-by-year analysis of sales. Brett warned his staff that they better get it right this time. He did not want Mitchell to start asking questions about where the extra royalties were.
⁵⁹
Within days, the publisher conceded the “horrible” mistake had been on its part.
⁶⁰

Even with a red face, Macmillan had cause to celebrate, as did the estate. Margaret Mitchell's story had proven itself a survivor on par with Scarlett O'Hara herself. In less than two decades, the book had sold more than four million copies in the English language; overseas, it had been translated into twenty-four languages in thirty-one countries and sold almost another three million copies.
⁶¹
And, as evidenced by Doubleday's venture,
Gone With the Wind
still captured the public's imagination. Indeed, Macmillan continued to receive fan mail about the book—an average of ninety letters a month.
⁶²
Baugh summed up the book's remarkable history to Cole: “The whole goldarned 20 years have read like a romance to me, seeing it all unfold.”
⁶³

The Doubleday deal served as George Brett's last
Gone With the Wind
hurrah. As the 1950s came to an end, he retired, turning over the reins of Macmillan to his son, Bruce Y. Brett. Shortly thereafter, Macmillan merged with Crowell-Collier Publishing Company. Macmillan would remain its own imprint, but its reign as the preeminent American publishing house was over. Bruce Brett met with Stephens Mitchell to assure him that the transition would be a smooth one. Macmillan would have the same setup and be the same company but with additional capital. The younger Brett hoped that Macmillan and the Mitchell family could continue their dealings in the same informal manner they had enjoyed for so many years. “I did not reply to this,” Mitchell wrote in his notes of their discussion, acknowledging only that they had “always gotten on fine.”
⁶⁴

* Hugh Gravitt, originally charged with drunk driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road, was tried for involuntary manslaughter in November 1949. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, of which he served almost eleven.

* In 1996, two hundred pages of Mitchell's childhood stories, essays, and journal entries were discovered in the basement of an Atlanta home owned by Wailes Thomas, a nephew of Marguerite Reynolds. Thomas had inherited the house from his mother, who had lived there at one time with Reynolds. Marsh's suspicions about Reynolds taking papers from the Mitchell home never came to light, and the estate granted permission to publish the papers as
Before Scarlett: The Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell
.

* Mitchell's personal collection of souvenirs and mementos of her literary career went to the Atlanta Public Library, including the typewriter on which she wrote most of the novel, her copy of the original galleys, her Pulitzer Prize certificate, the National Book Award, and her personal collection of almost seventy foreign editions of her novel.

17
Minding Scarlett's Business

T
he new Macmillan began the decade planning for a major milestone in the history of
Gone With the Wind
—the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1961 of the novel's publication. Conveniently, that year would also mark the beginning of a nationwide commemoration of the Civil War centennial. The publisher revamped its full-priced hardback edition of Margaret Mitchell's novel with tweaks to its binding and dust jacket and developed three new editions—two paperbacks (one under the Macmillan imprint, the other through Pocket Books) and a deluxe hardcover anniversary volume featuring original illustrations. Included with the slipcased anniversary edition was a souvenir booklet titled “
Gone With the Wind
and Its Author Margaret Mitchell” that brought a new generation of readers up to date on the history of the book.

Once again, the new editions were tied to a rerelease of the movie. The film had another gala opening—its fourth—in Atlanta. Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland attended, as did David O. Selznick, who had not yet managed to capture Mitchell's story in a musical stage version. The producer had recently renewed his option with the estate—one of many such renewals—and brought to Atlanta as potential collaborators poet Ogden Nash, of “candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” fame, and musician Leroy Anderson. The producer wanted the men to “get the feel of the region and get to know the people of the
Gone With the Wind
country.” Selznick declined to speculate on casting but promised the press his project would “retain the dignity and beauty of Miss Mitchell's story.”
¹

Stephens Mitchell was not impressed with the producer's big talk. As the years had dragged on with no production, the lawyer had become impatient with Selznick for failing to get the show staged; other producers were interested and might have a better chance of turning the novel into a moneymaking Broadway hit. Hoping to stir Selznick into action or force him to abandon the project, Mitchell had been gradually raising the price of the option. As he explained to Kay Brown, “When I played poker as a college boy, there was a saying that ‘the best way to discourage vice is to make it expensive.' ”
²
The strategy had not worked so far, but Mitchell sensed Selznick would eventually have to throw in his cards. After the producer's visit to Atlanta, the author's brother told Brown that Selznick “does not look nor act like a man who is about to produce a musical.”
³

Selznick's unfulfilled promises aside,
Gone With the Wind
as book and film again proved a dynamic duo. The movie filled theaters across the nation, and the four editions sold more than five hundred thousand copies that first year.
⁴
A reporter aptly referred to Mitchell's magnum opus as “a geriatric literary curiosity, a veritable Methuselah.”
⁵

After almost a decade of maintaining a dual life as a lawyer and the manager of his sister's estate, as well as part-time biographer, Stephens Mitchell decided to take a step back from the literary career that had been thrust upon him at John Marsh's death. When he assumed responsibility for the estate in 1952, Mitchell must have thought that the responsibilities of looking after his sister's literary rights would diminish with time. However, Scarlett and Rhett showed no sign of slowing down. In the early 1950s, the estate earned between thirty thousand and forty thousand dollars a year from the literary rights. In 1954, the money had shot up dramatically in the wake of the three successful Doubleday editions: $67,000 in 1954, $71,000 in 1955, and $109,000 in 1956. Since then, the yearly income had not dropped below $68,000. The
GWTW
literary rights were not a sideline Mitchell could deal with in his spare time. If he was to maximize the value of those assets, it made sense to bring in professional help. In 1961, the lawyer contacted Brown, still an agent with Music Corporation of America (MCA), and asked her to take over management of the
GWTW
rights.

Margaret Baugh was not happy with the new arrangement. She considered Brown well qualified to handle the dramatic and musical rights but hated to see Stephens Mitchell bring an agency in on “all of the
GWTW
business.” Specifically, she questioned MCA's ability to manage the publishing and commercial side of things to Margaret Mitchell's exacting specifications. She wrote to her boss: “MCA, like any other agent, is in for making the most money with the least time expenditure. They won't try to run down Argentine etc. pirates, they will farm out sequels, build Taras, they will not know or understand [Margaret Mitchell's] policies, or care anything about such.” Baugh thought Stephens Mitchell's two adult sons, Eugene, an economist, and Joseph, who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), far better suited to the task: “I see no reason why Eugene and Joe can't operate the business—by just paying a little attention to routine and details. They doubtless will surprise you when they really have the responsibility.”
⁶
Baugh's entreaty did not sway Stephens Mitchell to change course. Presumably, he did not want to weigh down his sons with managing their aunt's affairs.

Brown's first priority in her new role was dealing with the copyright on
Gone With the Wind
, which was set to expire in 1964, twenty-eight years after the book's original publication. Under U.S. law at the time, authors or their estate could renew a book's copyright for another twenty-eight years, after which the work would enter the public domain, allowing anyone to print and sell copies. For
Gone With the Wind
, a renewal would mean protection through 1992. Stephens Mitchell wanted the rights to remain profitable, so he had every incentive to renew. But the renewal was equally important to Macmillan and MGM. If the copyright on the book lapsed, other publishers and movie studios could release their own versions of
Gone
With the Wind
. To prevent that, Macmillan and Selznick, in their original contracts with Margaret Mitchell, had obtained the right to renew the copyright if she or her estate failed to do so. However, a 1960 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court established that a grant of renewal rights was void if an author died before time for copyright renewal. In a case like Mitchell's, only the author's heirs controlled the right to renew.
⁷
Thus, the Mitchell estate had Macmillan and MGM over a barrel. If Stephens Mitchell did not renew the copyright, the value of the publisher's and studio's investments in
Gone With the Wind
would decline precipitously.