Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (64 page)

Macmillan president Barry Lippman took the opportunity to get in a dig at Warner Books, saying that the quality of Ripley's book did not matter; it was destined to succeed simply for being what it was.
¹⁹
He predicted people would be buying
Gone With the Wind
long after
Scarlett
ran its course. His disdain did not stop Macmillan from capitalizing on Ripley's work though. The firm produced more than fifty thousand copies of Mitchell's novel to coincide with the sequel's release. (Warner did not dispute Lippman's assessment of
Gone With the Wind
's lasting appeal; it later acquired the paperback rights to Mitchell's original from Macmillan.)

Fifty-five years after Rhett said he didn't give a damn, Warner Books unveiled Ripley's book on September 25, 1991. The story opens at Melanie's burial, after which Scarlett returns to Tara, where her beloved Mammy dies. A tryst with Rhett in Charleston leaves Scarlett pregnant, but when he becomes involved with another woman, Scarlett flees to her father's family in Savannah. She later accompanies a cousin to Ireland, where she gives birth to Rhett's daughter. After numerous adventures in the O'Hara homeland, Scarlett and Rhett reunite and head off to face new challenges. It was not the ending Mitchell had in mind for her famous lovers, but Ripley felt obligated to offer a happy resolution for the fans. Her daughter Merrill Geier says that Ripley “did not want to pander to the lowest common denominator” yet understood the business side of what it meant to write a
Gone With
the Wind
sequel. “Nobody was trying to break literary ground here.”
²⁰

Eager fans lined up outside a B. Dalton Booksellers near Atlanta to be among the first to buy a copy when the store opened at midnight. By the end of the first day, readers in the United States had snapped up 250,000 copies. Booksellers were harried but thrilled to report that customers were grabbing the books as quickly as the boxes were opened. Some fans even claimed the cartons as souvenirs. The nation's two leading bookstore chains at the time—B. Dalton and Waldenbooks—both set one-day sales records. Warner Books was ecstatic and amazed by the public's reaction; its president, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, deemed
Scarlett
a phenomenon.
²¹

Book reviewers were not so impressed. The notices were scathing. A newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, judged that Ripley didn't “know nothin' 'bout writin' no sequels,” while columnist Molly Ivins quipped that more probable plot lines could be found in episodes of
Gilligan's Island
. Once they read the book, many readers also expressed disappointment. The story had a fantastical element to it that some found not in keeping with Mitchell's original, while others were disconcerted that the bulk of the action took place outside Georgia. Ripley shrugged off the criticism, saying she doubted fans would have been happy with a sequel written by Margaret Mitchell herself.

The harsh critical reaction did not appear to have any negative impact on
Scarlett
's sales. By the end of the first week, more than five hundred thousand copies had been sold. Ripley energetically promoted the sequel, appearing at signings across the country. Thousands turned out to see her, and she was a good sport along the way. At a book signing at a Rich's department store in Atlanta, the author found herself waiting in a long line at the women's restroom. She bartered a place up front for a signed copy of her book, which she inscribed in the stall: “From the ladies room at Rich's.” After developing tendinitis in her wrist from signing more than ten thousand copies of
Scarlett
, she felt a special kinship with Margaret Mitchell. She joked to the press about putting her arm in a sling and going into seclusion.
²²

When 1.5 million copies had moved after one month,
Scarlett
was proclaimed by some sources to be the fastest-selling novel in U.S. history.
²³
The book spent thirty-four weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, its first sixteen weeks in the top spot. By the end of the year, Warner Books had printed 2,100,000 hardback copies of
Scarlett
.
²⁴
Gone With the Wind
tagged along for the ride, landing on the bestseller list yet again, this time for ten weeks. And despite Lippman's distaste for
Scarlett
, he must have been pleased by its success. Macmillan went back to press three times that fall, printing approximately forty-five thousand more copies of Mitchell's original.

Book buyers outside the United States were equally enthusiastic about Scarlett's new adventures. Publishers in more than thirty countries released translations. Within months, foreign sales topped four million, including 670,000 copies in Germany and 500,000 in France.
²⁵
Ripley made appearances in both countries, where she received the full celebrity treatment. In Biaritz, France, she stayed at a luxury hotel and, according to her daughter, “learned what it was like to be a rock star.”
²⁶
As in America, the sequel revived interest in Mitchell's original, leading to numerous new editions of
Gone With the Wind
overseas, some packaged with copies of
Scarlett
.

As the trustees and William Morris had hoped, the sequel's overwhelming success caught the attention of producers interested in translating the story to the screen—although this time it would be the more compact medium of television. In November 1991, with
Scarlett
riding high on bestseller lists, Hungarian producer Robert Halmi bid nine million dollars for the rights to turn the book into a miniseries. While working on the teleplay, Halmi let it slip that he intended to jettison Scarlett's move to Ireland and take the characters to the Wild West instead. Not so fast, the trustees responded. They had authorized one sequel in Ripley's novel; they had no intention of allowing Halmi to rewrite the book into a second one. They forced the producer to carry on with Ripley's basic plot.
²⁷

Like David O. Selznick, Halmi conducted an extensive talent search for an actress to play Scarlett. He claimed to have received more than twenty thousand applications. After holding auditions in the United States, England, Germany, Ireland, and Spain, he brought nine of the most promising candidates to Atlanta in October 1992 for a contest broadcast live from the Georgia State Capitol. At the end of the program, in which viewers watched hopefuls perform screen tests, Halmi announced the winner was none of the above. The search continued. A year later, the producer again followed in Selznick's footsteps by settling on a little-known British actress to play the most famous Southern belle in history. He selected thirty-oneyear-old Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to portray Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler. Former James Bond, Timothy Dalton, was to be her Rhett. The six-hour miniseries aired on CBS in November 1994 to respectable ratings but was a critical failure.*

Hoping financial lightning would strike twice, the trustees and the William Morris Agency began planning for a second sequel. Ripley had no interest in participating. She was eager to return to her own writing and had earned enough to allow her that luxury—she anticipated taking in more than six hundred thousand dollars from the sequel.
²⁸
For
Scarlett
redux, the estate settled on British novelist Emma Tennant, who had written a sequel to Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
.
²⁹
The trustees auctioned the rights on January 24, 1995, and the prize went to St. Martin's Press with a $4.5 million bid.
³⁰
Tennant produced a manuscript that October, but St. Martin's identified problems with the story line, character development, setting, and writing style. Tennant refused to make substantive changes, and St. Martin's fired her.
³¹
Though neither the estate nor the publisher publicly disclosed the problematic plot, the disappointed author revealed salient details in an interview with
The Mail
in London. Her story, titled “Tara,” takes Scarlett to New York and later Washington, D.C., where she becomes the mistress of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Rhett finds himself entangled with a criminal gang, forcing Scarlett to infiltrate the mob as a moll to save his life. He flees to South America, and Scarlett marries Ashley, but eventually Rhett staggers home, and the couple reunites.
³²

With Tennant out of the picture, St. Martin's embarked on a hunt for a new writer. Interest in Scarlett's further adventures remained high, and the pressure was on for the publisher to fill that demand before someone else did. In Russia, a group of writers took advantage of the delay and churned out a series of unauthorized sequels with titles such as
We Call Her
Scarlett
and
The Secret of Rhett Butler
.
³³
The Mitchell estate apparently chose not to waste resources fighting the rogue publishers, and many of these books became bestsellers in the former Soviet Union. At home, the estate took a firmer hand. In 1996, a mother-daughter team in North Carolina self-published a book called
My Beloved Tara
that takes Mitchell's characters into the early years of the twentieth century. The duo earned the distinction of producing the first unauthorized sequel published in book form in the United States. The Mitchell trustees insisted the book be withdrawn. The authors complied, but St. Martin's and the estate knew time was of the essence in hiring a new writer if they hoped to avoid an onslaught of other unauthorized continuations. Their next candidate would come indirectly through Macmillan.

The sixtieth anniversary of
Gone With the Wind
's publication in 1996 marked the end of Macmillan's role as its publisher. In the late 1980s, the firm had been acquired by Robert Maxwell, a controversial British media tycoon. A few years later, Maxwell's body was discovered floating in the ocean near his yacht, and it came to light that the financier was nearly broke. His assets were divvied up among creditors in a complicated series of transactions that resulted in the Scribner publishing firm acquiring the rights to Mitchell's novel. Beginning with the 106th printing of
Gone With the Wind
in 1996, Scribner replaced Macmillan's name on the spine of the
GWTW
dust jacket. One of the publisher's inaugural acts as custodian of the novel was to issue a sixtieth anniversary edition. The book featured a foreword by novelist and Atlanta native Pat Conroy, who sang the book's praises and recalled his mother's admiration for Margaret Mitchell.

Intrigued by Conroy's commentary, St. Martin's approached him about writing the second sequel, although not necessarily a continuation of
Scarlett
. Conroy, who had been baptized in the same Atlanta church as Margaret Mitchell and fondly remembered her book as his first foray into the world of literature, eagerly accepted the invitation. In 1998, St. Martin's announced that Conroy would offer readers Rhett's point of view of the events in
Gone With the Wind
in a book to be titled “Rules of Pride: The Autobiography of Captain Rhett Butler, CSA.” Many of Conroy's friends expressed surprise that he would agree to be associated with what they considered a racist book. Conroy stood his ground, declaring in a letter to the Mitchell trustees that he had nothing to be ashamed of. Mitchell admired the blacks in her story, he said, and had depicted them as finely as characters created by African American writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Conroy considered it an honor to step into Mitchell's shoes and wanted to do her proud.
³⁴

The honeymoon was not to last, though. As the project progressed, Conroy chafed at restrictions the estate imposed on his creative process. He claimed the committee members forbade him from touching on such topics as homosexuality and miscegenation and nixed plans he had to kill off Scarlett in what he promised would be one of the great death scenes in literature. In early 1999, Conroy withdrew from the project. As a jab at the trustees, Conroy joked that he had planned on beginning his book with Rhett and Ashley in bed together—and Rhett asking Ashley, “Did I ever tell you my grandmother was black?” It was back to the drawing board for St. Martin's.

In 1998, Congress extended the U.S. copyright term on creative works for another twenty years. Under the new law,
Gone With the Wind
's copyright is protected until 2031, ninety-five years after the book's original publication. The extension caused a firestorm of controversy. Free speech advocates claimed that locking down the rights to books for such a lengthy period of time beyond an author's death was unfair to living artists and unnecessary because the vast majority of old artistic works no longer had commercial value. They dubbed the extension the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” arguing that it benefited only a small group of highly profitable entertainment and literary estates, such as Walt Disney's and Margaret Mitchell's. Opponents filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that Congress had exceeded its authority.