Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (20 page)

As Williams had hoped, the successful book release—once past the Thompson review hiccup—energized the movie negotiations. On Tuesday, July 7, Williams told Kay Brown that another studio was on the verge of making an offer for an unspecified amount above fifty thousand dollars. Brown wired David O. Selznick at home that morning and asked for permission to bid fifty-five thousand dollars.
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After several frantic cross-country messages, Selznick authorized Brown to offer Williams fifty thousand. Brown conveyed the offer that day, and the agent accepted on the spot. Williams called Cole at home at ten o'clock that evening to report the news. Although the offer was half of what Williams's gut told her the rights were worth, she assured Cole they could do no better. The agent dismissed the rumors swirling in the press about the fantastic sums producers were willing to pay and convinced Cole none of the other companies would go any higher. Williams declared it the highest price ever paid for the movie rights to a first novel.
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Cole shared the details with the Marshes by letter the following morning, assuring them it was a fair deal. With summer vacations approaching, Macmillan and Selznick hoped to have matters finalized by the middle of the following week, so she promised a draft contract would be on its way in a matter of days.
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Marsh responded on July 13 warning Cole that the document would not be hurried back to New York “five minutes” after its arrival in Atlanta. “The Mitchell family just doesn't work that way, as you all may have discovered last summer,” he wrote, referring to the book contract negotiations. “With their legal training and legal habits, they wouldn't sign
any
contract without careful consideration and due deliberation.”
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The Marshes and Stephens Mitchell planned to review the document thoroughly. In the midst of all the excitement that summer, the author had asked her brother to serve as her legal counsel on any issues that arose out of
Gone With the Wind
. That he had no experience with international publishing or movie contracts did not trouble her. In that day, few lawyers, especially in the South, handled such transactions. Stephens had more important credentials—he was smart, and he was family. Margaret trusted her brother implicitly and promised him 10 percent of her earnings in exchange for him serving as her permanent legal adviser.
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In Marsh's July 13 letter, he also put Cole on notice that Macmillan needed to do a better job of shielding Mitchell from the media attention surrounding the movie negotiations. The author did not want the sales price for the rights made public, and Marsh warned Cole that Macmillan should not leak it for publicity purposes. He explained:

The excitement stirred up by the book's success has already just about driven her crazy and she knows the excitement would be intensified many times if the figure involved is published. The over-active interest of her friends and total strangers is bad enough as it is, but publication of the figure would attract to her a new horde of curiosity-seekers, salesmen of all kinds, beggars for money, etc., that would make her life miserable. She doesn't want to become the object of the same type of curiosity as is centered on the winners of the British lotteries and the Dionne quintuplets. Some people might like that sort of public prominence but she heartily despises it.
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Mitchell was capable of writing again and willing for Macmillan to profit from it, but that would never happen unless the publisher gave her time to get her strength back from the strain she had been under the previous year. “She isn't ungrateful to you for all that you've done and she isn't unappreciative of the money that's rolling in,” he wrote. “But money isn't as important as health, and no amount of money could compensate her if her too sudden success should wreck her health.”
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Meanwhile, Williams was busy behind the scenes tying up loose ends. One issue pressing on her mind was tracking down the copies of
Gone With the
Wind
that had been sent to the various studios in May. She wrote to several of her contacts, asking them to return the books. The records do not make clear what she intended to do with them, but it may have been that she understood the value of those copies, which were all first printings. At least two of the companies complied. Richard Halliday, a producer at Paramount to whom Macmillan had sent two copies, sent back one and expressed appreciation to Williams for letting him keep the other. William W. Hawkins, Jr., at Samuel Goldwyn, returned his with good wishes. Hawkins regretted that he would not be the one to produce the film but was eager to see a quality production come from it. He hoped the book sold millions of copies and that Selznick's picture would be the “finest ever made.”
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On July 14, Williams arrived at Macmillan headquarters with Selznick's draft of the movie contract. Cole sent it to Marsh right away, promising him Macmillan would do what it could to keep the press at bay. Macmillan wanted Mitchell to write more books for the firm, Cole said, and was concerned about the author's health.
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As for the contract, Cole encouraged Marsh to take his time reviewing the document but cautioned him not to go overboard in suggesting changes. The contract was apparently a standard form used by all of the major producers, and Selznick would not be amendable to making major revisions.

When Marsh received the document the following day, he telephoned Cole to complain that the draft did not give Mitchell the one thing she had insisted upon: script review. Cole checked with Williams to see what could be done in that regard and came back with bad news. There was no chance the studio would allow Mitchell to pass judgment on the movie. As Cole explained to Marsh, authors do not generally have an instinct for what should go in a film scenario any more than a motion picture producer would know what should go in a novel. But, Cole assured him, Mitchell should not worry about the script. The studio people loved the book and wanted to follow it as closely as they could.
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Considering that issue resolved, Cole went on vacation, leaving Putnam to await the signed document in the mail.

On July 23, with no contract in hand, Putnam wired Atlanta, asking if the Marshes had identified any further difficulties with the document. They had. In an eleven-page, single-spaced typed letter to Cole and Putnam, Marsh detailed a litany of problems that had to be resolved before Mitchell would consider signing the contract. Anticipating that his comments might raise a few hackles, Marsh began by stating that Mitchell did not doubt Selznick's good intentions. “This statement is made,” he explained to Cole, “because of the fact that you yourself were somewhat disturbed over some of the changes [Mitchell] requested in the Macmillan contract [the previous summer], although these changes seemed entirely proper to us and Macmillan later agreed they were proper.”
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The most significant point of contention, beyond script review, related to copyright issues. The draft contract contained basic factual errors including a statement that Mitchell was the copyright holder instead of Macmillan. The agreement also held Mitchell liable for any infringement claims made against Selznick, such as if someone claimed that a character in the film was based on a real person. The document imposed liability even if a problem arose through no fault of Mitchell's and, making matters worse, gave the author no right to intervene in any ensuing lawsuits. Thus, Marsh posited, if a person in New Zealand made a fraudulent claim of copyright infringement against Selznick, and the producer decided to settle for one million dollars, Mitchell would be on the hook for the judgment, regardless of whether the case had merit. He also worried that Mitchell would be liable for possible actions Selznick took to create an infringement. She stood behind
Gone
With the Wind
but did not have any notion of “signing her life away by agreeing to a lot of unreasonable and unfair commitments and liabilities that ought not be asked of her.” In addition, Marsh expressed concern over a provision giving Selznick rights to something called “commercial tie-ups.” Unclear what this meant, Marsh wanted to ensure his wife retained the rights to her characters and that Selznick would not use her name to market any
GWTW
-themed products. “She would not like to discover herself endorsing ‘Wade Hampton Hamilton Bran Flakes' or ‘Scarlett O'HaraHamilton-Kennedy-Butler Toilet Water,' ” he wrote. Marsh closed the exhaustively detailed letter, “And I hope the job of getting the contract revised and signed won't be as laborious as the job of getting this very long letter written.”
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Given the time crunch, Marsh and Putnam tried to resolve the issues by telephone but were unable to make much progress. They considered using telegrams, but Marsh feared the wire operators were responsible for feeding rumors to the press. The only other option was to negotiate in person. Marsh was busy with work at the power company, and so it fell to Mitchell and her brother to make a trip to New York.

The Big Apple was the last place on earth Mitchell wanted to be that July. Exhausted from the excitement still swirling around
Gone With the
Wind
, she abhorred the prospect of a long train ride in the summer heat and lamented not having time to buy any decent clothes to wear. Nonetheless, she resolved to go and straighten out what she deemed “the stupidest contract” she had ever seen, a document “no rational person could sign, regardless of the amount of money involved.”
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She would lose her mind, she swore, “if this thing isn't settled soon.”
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On July 28, the siblings boarded a train for New York.

The following morning, the two reported to Selznick's Park Avenue offices, where they were met by Cole and Richard Brett. Also present was J. Swords, an attorney from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, a firm that often advised the publisher on copyright matters. Noticeably absent was Harold Latham, who remained on vacation and had expressed no interest in the movie contract after having disclosed Williams's involvement. Williams was there, but Mitchell refused to acknowledge the Texan as her agent. In Mitchell's mind, Brett and Swords represented her, and Williams was there solely on behalf of Macmillan. That said, there was no hostility between the women. They chatted about their Southern heritage and discovered that Williams's husband's grandfather had served in the same Confederate Army company with Mitchell's grandfather.
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On the other side of the table were Brown and Selznick's attorneys John F. Wharton and M. D. Mermin. Neither of the Mitchell siblings was a shrinking violet, yet they could not help but be intimidated going up against this crowd. In the author's words, they were “as ignorant as a babe unborn” about the issues before them.
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Wharton, one of the top theatrical lawyers in the country, posed particular concern.
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As Stephens Mitchell described the scene decades later, “All of a sudden there I was—wham! I had never done a movie contract before.”
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Despite their nerves, the Mitchells found all of the “Selznickers,” as they dubbed them, pleasant, especially Brown.
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Years later, Stephens Mitchell admitted to Brown that he and his sister had been impressed the moment they met her: “Margaret and I had not been in New York fifteen minutes in July 1936 before we both whispered to each other that you were the smartest person around . . . so we decided to get you on our side when we could.”
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They struck up a friendship with Brown, even sharing cocktails with her during the trip.

The convivial atmosphere did not signal smooth sailing though. Using Marsh's lengthy letter as his guide, Stephens Mitchell went over their concerns point by point. As Cole had warned, Selznick wanted to stick with the standard contract. The request for script review was a nonstarter, and the studio dismissed complaints about the copyright problems as hypertechnical. The Mitchells turned for guidance to Brett and Swords but found little support. Macmillan seemed to agree with the studio that the contract was fine.
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By the end of the day, the only issue the Mitchells obtained any satisfaction on was the tie-ups. The studio representatives clarified that the term referred to dolls, toys, and other such articles based on the characters in the movie. Stephens Mitchell took this to mean that his sister retained the rights to her characters as used in the book and let the issue drop.
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The author and her brother were exhausted, their resolve weakening. They had traveled all this way to negotiate terms and were being stonewalled, not only by the studio but also by Macmillan, Mitchell's agent. That evening, they rehashed the day's events at supper with Cole and Allan Taylor. Weighing heaviest on Stephens Mitchell's mind was whether they should hold out for more money. Not having any official advisory role, Cole spoke frankly as a friend of the family. She did not think Selznick would raise his offer but proposed an idea for getting him to sweeten the pot. Pointing out that the studio had included the theatrical and radio rights to
Gone With the Wind
among those Mitchell was transferring to Selznick, Cole suggested that the author carve them out from this deal. Cole predicted these rights might prove valuable in the future and suggested that, if Selznick wanted them later, he could pay for them separately.
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