Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (63 page)

The committeemen asked Kay Brown and her firm, International Creative Management (ICM), to continue as the estate's agent, and she remained responsible for coordinating publishing contracts and the dramatic, motion picture, and television rights. Despite her advanced years—she turned eighty-one the year Stephens Mitchell died—she remained an integral part of the
GWTW
team, as Mitchell would have wanted. Indeed, he had credited the agent with much of his success in preserving the value of his sister's literary assets. As he once admitted to Brown, “One of the smart things I have done in developing and making a paying proposition out of these rights to
Gone With the Wind
was to hold on to your hand while you led me through the morasses and caverns of the theatrical world.”
²

In June 1984, a little more than a year after Stephens Mitchell's death, a federal trial court issued a decision in the lawsuit against MGM: the rights to authorize a sequel to
Gone With the Wind
belonged to Margaret Mitchell's estate. MGM appealed, but in September 1985, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, establishing that the estate alone controlled the future of Mitchell's characters.
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Resolving the matter had cost the estate more than three hundred thousand dollars in attorney's fees. It was an expensive but worthwhile investment given the value of the rights at stake.
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With the sequel train back on track, the trustees moved to make up for lost time in developing
Gone With the Wind
's continuation. Brown recommended the estate change course and authorize a book sequel that could later be sold to a movie studio. The committee members were in favor of this approach, and she began vetting writers. As word spread throughout the entertainment industry that the estate was again developing the sequel rights, industry players sensed something big in the works. The William Morris Agency, a rival of Brown's firm, approached the trustees and made a pitch to take over representation of the
GWTW
rights. Although the committee members were confident of Brown's abilities, they had a fiduciary duty to protect the estate's interests and were willing to hear what William Morris had to say. The Morris agency agreed with Brown that a book sequel was the best route but impressed the trustees with grand plans for exploiting other subsidiary rights through subsequent sequels or perhaps an episodic
Gone With the Wind
television program.
⁵
In the summer of 1986, the trustees advised Brown they were bringing William Morris into the fold. Reluctant to sever ties with her, the committee asked Brown if she would continue working with the estate on a freelance basis. Her boss at ICM refused to allow the arrangement and, so, after a quarter of a century, Brown was out. It would fall to the William Morris Agency—a firm that had no personal relationship with Margaret Mitchell—to find the heir to her literary legacy.
⁶

In addition to signaling the end of Brown's involvement with
Gone With
the Wind
, 1986 represented a landmark year in the book's life: the novel turned fifty. To mark the golden anniversary, Macmillan printed sixty thousand facsimiles of the book's May 1936 printing. The special edition, which featured a reproduction of the original dust jacket and binding, sold out quickly, bringing Margaret Mitchell back to the
New York Times
bestseller list for five weeks that summer.
⁷
(According to the
New York Times Book
Review
, the only other book in recent memory to make a reappearance on the list so many years after its original publication was George Orwell's
1984
, which had experienced a resurgence of interest two years earlier.)
⁸
The Book-of-the-Month Club offered its own commemorative edition of Mitchell's novel, and in Atlanta, an informal weeklong celebration of bus tours, exhibits, and lectures took place. Even the U.S. Postal Service acknowledged the occasion by issuing a one-cent stamp honoring Margaret Mitchell in its “Great Americans” series.*

The year also brought Scarlett and Rhett together with media mogul Ted Turner, whose devotion to their story—he named one of his sons Rhett—would do much to ensure their enduring legacy in pop culture. That summer, Turner purchased the film studio MGM/UA Entertainment Company for $1.5 billion. Three months later, he sold many of the studio's assets but held on to what he most coveted, its film and TV library, which included
Gone With the Wind
. Taking advantage of the attention surrounding the book's anniversary, Turner Entertainment Company jump-started a craze of
Gone With the Wind
collectibles by licensing independent manufacturers to create a tidal wave of plates, beach towels, calendars, music boxes, dolls, figurines, and T-shirts bearing the likenesses of characters and scenes from the movie.

When the trustees saw the money Turner was making off of Mitchell's characters, they questioned whether the estate had a stake in those proceeds. Margaret Mitchell had granted the commercial tie-in rights to Loew's, MGM's parent company, but had Turner acquired those rights in his deal with MGM/UA? The trustees concluded not and advised Turner that he had exceeded the bounds of his authority. The estate and Turner Entertainment worked out a deal: Turner would manage the commercial products and pay the estate a share of the royalties on all licensed products, which, going forward, would be released under both the Turner Entertainment and Stephens Mitchell Trusts names. Within a few years, the pact generated more than three million dollars for the estate.
⁹

Not all of the trustees' efforts to protect the estate's interests were as successful. In 1986, French author Regine Deforges released a book in the United States titled
The Blue Bicycle
; it was an English-language version of a novel she had published in France several years earlier to great success. Deforges admitted the opening section of her story was an updated version of
Gone With the Wind
. Set in World War II France, the narrative opens at a garden party at which Lea is rebuffed by Laurant, who marries his cousin Camille. Laurant leaves for war, and Lea falls for the dashing Franc¸ois, who helps her escape Paris after the Germans invade. Believing Stephens Mitchell would not have tolerated Deforges's blatant use of Margaret Mitchell's plot, the trustees, acting through the Trust Company of Georgia, filed a plagiarism lawsuit against the author in Los Angeles and then in France. Not the least bit intimidated, Deforges defended her right of free expression, claiming the bank could not claim exclusive rights to the classic literary theme of a love triangle in which a woman loves a man who loves another woman. The legal proceedings dragged out for several years, with the estate winning twice at the trial court level and Deforges prevailing both times on appeal. Not eager to incur the cost of a third trial, the trustees let the matter drop.
¹⁰
Anderson and Clarke were serious about protecting the copyright but would not fall on their sword to prove a point.

While Margaret Mitchell had fought every usurper as a matter of principle, the committee lawyers endeavored to take a measured approach to managing the
GWTW
rights. Anderson has said the committee tries “not to make a federal case” out of every situation where someone is violating the book's copyright. “There's a point where you have to exercise judgment about it, and we try to do that.”
¹¹
For instance, when an unauthorized translation of
Gone With the Wind
appeared in Ethiopia in 1986, the trustees took no action, presumably given the unusual circumstances of the book's production. In the late 1970s, an inmate at an Ethiopian prison smuggled in an English-language copy of Mitchell's novel. The prisoners took turns reading it an hour each day. Fascinated with Scarlett and Rhett, a political prisoner named Nebiy Mekonnen began translating
Gone With the Wind
into his native language, Amharic. He wrote with a smuggled pen on the sole source of paper available—the back side of foil linings from cigarette packets. His fellow prisoners were so pleased with his efforts that they relinquished their allotted hours with the book so he could have more time to work. They also donated their cigarette wrappers to Mekonnen, a nonsmoker. Over the years of his imprisonment, the translator filled an estimated three thousand scraps of paper, which he smuggled out for safekeeping with fellow inmates as they were released. After he gained his own freedom, the translator tracked down the papers and borrowed money to publish twenty thousand copies of
Negem Lela Ken New
, which translates to “Tomorrow Is Another Day.”
¹²

The April 1988 issue of
Life
magazine announced that, at long last, the Mitchell estate had chosen an author to write a sequel to
Gone With the
Wind
. The successor to Margaret Mitchell's literary legacy would be Alexandra Ripley, a novelist from Charleston, South Carolina. Acknowledging Mitchell was a tough act to follow, the South Carolinian prepared herself for the task by reading
Gone With the Wind
six times and making a detailed outline of its plot. She also copied by hand hundreds of pages of Mitchell's novel to get a physical feel for her predecessor's writing style. Yet, the pressure of living up to the expectations of Mitchell's fans did not frighten her. “Yes, Margaret Mitchell writes better than I do,” she said, “but she's dead.”
¹³

Ten days after the announcement, the estate held an auction for publishers to bid on the rights to release the new book. Several firms tossed their wallets into the ring, though noticeably absent was Macmillan. Warner Books won the auction with a bid of $4.94 million as an advance on royalties, narrowly beating out the underbidder, Delacorte/Dell, which offered $4.8 million. For Warner, it was money well spent. Within six months, the publisher recouped most of its investment by securing more than four million dollars in advances from publishers in Brazil, England, France, Japan, Sweden, and West Germany eager to issue translations of Ripley's continuation.

Although Warner Books announced the sequel would be released in the spring of 1990, the work took Scarlett's “foster mother”—as Ripley considered herself—longer than anticipated. Ripley did not submit a draft of her one thousand–page manuscript to the publisher until March of that year. Warner was not happy with what it saw, asked for extensive rewrites, and delayed the book's release until fall. Then, just before the June American Booksellers Association convention, where publishers unveil their upcoming titles, Warner yanked the book from the company's autumn lineup. Ripley and her editor at Warner were at an impasse, and industry insiders speculated that the effort to produce a sequel might again fall apart.
¹⁴

The publisher and the Mitchell estate agreed to hire and split the cost of an independent editor to work on Ripley's manuscript. They retained the services of Jeanne Bernkopf, known in the industry as a “book doctor,” to assess the draft and facilitate rewrites. After several frantic months of work, Warner Books approved a revised manuscript in early 1991. Downplaying rumors swirling around the project, the publisher blamed the delay on the length of the manuscript and the care Ripley was taking to ensure fans of the original book would be pleased.
¹⁵
To the relief of everyone involved, Scarlett and friends would see another day. Especially grateful, the estate paid Bernkopf a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus on top of its share of her thirty-thousand-dollar fee.
¹⁶

The sequel was scheduled for a fall 1991 release, and the publicity department at Warner Books began trumpeting that “Tomorrow Is Here, at Last. . . .” The publisher had high expectations for Ripley's novel, titled
Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind, and announced a first printing of a half million copies.
¹⁷
Warner's marketing strategy differed dramatically from the approach Macmillan had taken with Mitchell's original. Whereas Macmillan had been anxious to build buzz by getting the book into the hands of as many reviewers as possible, Warner embargoed
Scarlett
, meaning it did not release review copies until immediately before publication. This is a modern technique publishers use to prevent reviewers from stealing the thunder of a hotly anticipated book. If all goes well, an embargo helps the publisher create a buying frenzy on release day. The only hint Warner gave of what Ripley had to offer was an excerpt it released in
Life
magazine six weeks before publication day. Keeping the book under wraps worked. In the days leading up to the release, advance orders streamed in, and numerous additional overseas publishers signed contracts for translations. Warner increased the first run to 750,000 copies and ordered an additional 350,000 copies as of publication day.
¹⁸
Like
Gone With
the Wind
, the sequel was a guaranteed bestseller before its release.