Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (25 page)

Though the Marshes welcomed their new financial security, there is a saying that the only thing wealth does for some people is make them worry about losing it. That would certainly prove true in Mitchell's case. It was the era of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a social reform program designed to bring the nation out of the Depression through massive federal spending. To pay for these initiatives, the government enacted enormous tax increases, setting the highest tax bracket at 79 percent. Mitchell fell among the higher tiers, which resulted in her having to turn over a substantial portion of her new income to the federal government. The Marshes struggled to figure out what, if anything, could be done to shelter some of the money and considered it one of the most stressful problems they faced that year.
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Initially, they hoped to place Mitchell in a lower tax bracket by spreading the royalties out over the number of years she had spent working on the manuscript. They were dismayed to learn, however, that federal tax law did not allow authors to apportion royalties that way. The author's only hope of reducing her tax liability was to slow down the income stream. If her earnings dropped, her income tax rate would decrease, and she might be able to enjoy the fruits of her labors.
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Until that happened, Mitchell had no incentive to take on additional paid work. As her own Scarlett O'Hara mused, “Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!”
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Macmillan did what it could to work around its reluctant author. Throughout the fall of 1936, it blamed Mitchell's absence on her ailing eyes and continued to market
Gone With the Wind
without her. To keep the momentum going, it updated the advertising campaign on a regular basis by adding timely new pitches to catch the public's attention. During the presidential election campaign, the firm proclaimed the novel “elected by acclamation.” At Thanksgiving, Macmillan suggested the book would make an ideal “bread and butter” hostess gift. If there were any lingering concerns about the hefty three-dollar price, the publisher released ads declaring
Gone With
the Wind
a great buy, worth five regular novels.

To fill some of the informational void caused by Mitchell's public reticence, the publisher created a booklet about her for reporters and fans who deluged the firm with questions.
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Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel
contained facts and figures about sales, an essay from Latham on how he secured the manuscript, reprints of several reviews, and a brief biographical essay about the author. The booklet also included a section in which Mitchell answered some of the most common inquiries people had about
Gone With the Wind
, including how to determine a first edition (it had to say May on the copyright page), where was the real Tara (there wasn't one), and, of course, did Scarlett get Rhett back (Mitchell claimed to have no idea).

It must have been to Macmillan's surprise—and relief—that the author's absence did not negatively affect the public's interest in her book. The publisher went back to press seven times in October and another four in November, increasing the individual press runs from twenty-five thousand copies to fifty thousand. If anything, Mitchell's refusal to make a spectacle of herself seemed to fuel curiosity about
Gone With the Wind
. The world was intrigued by the attractive and mysterious Southern author. As Berg remarked with amazement in November, “If all the articles on Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
, and how it came to be written and published, were collected they would make a volume many times the size of the novel itself.”
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Not so clear though is whether the “I-want-to-be-left-alone” routine worked to Mitchell's advantage. When the author declined to participate in Macmillan's promotional campaign, she spared herself some of the vagaries of celebrity authorship. She did not have to go on a lecture tour. She did not have to waste time writing fluff magazine pieces. However, that did not mean she was nestled away in her apartment safe from prying eyes. Months after the book's release, Mitchell remained besieged by fans and curiosity seekers. At all hours of the day and night, people called to speak to her or arrived at the apartment hoping to catch a glimpse of her. A woman from Philadelphia showed up one afternoon with a photographer and insisted that Mitchell pose with her shaking hands.
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As the author described the situation to her brother, she felt like Stone Mountain, a popular Georgia tourist destination. Not being a celebrity gawker herself, none of the attention made sense to Mitchell. To James Putnam, she wrote, “Having so little curiosity about people, celebrities or otherwise, I will never understand strangers who ring the door bell and ask Bessie for ‘just a peek' at me. I feel that this puts me in the class with an educated pig, a flea circus or a two-headed baby in a jar of alcohol.”
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She was also buried in an avalanche of mail. On slow days, Mitchell received at least fifty letters, but the daily total was frequently triple or quadruple that. At times, there were six hundred letters in a single day. The mailman appeared before dawn some mornings, laden with special deliveries, telegrams, and letters that had accumulated the previous night. The volume of paper was so staggering within the confines of their apartment that the Marshes rented an efficiency unit in the building next door to use as an office and storage area.

Mitchell could not get over the many types of people who reached out to her. She received letters from all segments of society, rich and poor, young and old, and male and female, from doctors, judges, and teachers to elevator operators, garage mechanics, and clerks in what she called “HelpsySelfy” stores.
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She was honored to hear from respected writers such as historian Douglas Southall Freeman and novelist Ellen Glasgow, as well as from fans in Canada, England, Germany, and Italy.
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To her surprise, even children were enjoying the book; she claimed her mother would never have let her read such a story as a girl. But the author took comfort in the fact that the “sex angle” went over the heads of most children. She once described an eleven-year-old girl who had given a book report on
Gone With the
Wind
, referring to madam Belle Watling's house as “the swankiest night club in Atlanta, run by a lady named Miss Watling who, I think, was sorta like a blues singer.”
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The variety of topics about which people wrote was equally diverse. In addition to hundreds of letters about a sequel and casting for the movie, she received traditional fan letters containing testimonials of how the book had captured the public's attention. In September, a woman related her experience reading
Gone With the Wind
while on a Caribbean cruise. She was so wrapped up in the story she could not be bothered to sunbathe, play shuffleboard or ping-pong, or swim. When the novel got “too gripping,” she took breaks walking around the ship's deck to calm herself. And the woman was not the only one onboard so enamored. She noticed a young couple on the sundeck, in their bathing suits, lying on their stomachs with a copy of Mitchell's book between them: “There in the glaring, broiling sun they can't leave the story long enough to save their eyesight,” she wrote to the author. “They grunt at each other when ready for the pages to be turned.”
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Other letters were of a practical nature, such as those from sharp-eyed readers who had noticed typographical or continuity problems in the book. One corrected her spelling of Cecilia, the famous ball in Charleston, South Carolina. At least two suggested she had erred by not giving Belle Watling a pet parrot. Many were curious about the pronunciation of Tara, Melanie, Scarlett, and even “wind” as used in the title. How had Mitchell chosen the names of her characters? What did the expression “broad-wife” mean? Was the story drawn from real life? Where was Aunt Pittypat's house and the real Tara? Had Melanie and Rhett had “carnal relations”? (“Dear me,” Mitchell remarked to Cole after several people raised that issue, “even the most chaste women must avoid the appearance of evil and Melanie should never have closed that door.”)
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Countless correspondents were curious about Mitchell's personal life, including many who wondered if they were related to her or had known her as a child. In a surprising number of cases, fans wanted the author to know about their personal lives. Wives reported that Rhett and Scarlett's failures had opened their eyes to problems in their own marriages and had moved them to mend estrangements. Husbands wrote that Rhett's loss of Scarlett, despite his love for her, had them worried that they might lose their own wives.
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People also wanted things from Mitchell. There were dozens of requests each week for the author to give speeches. Aspiring writers asked for advice. Published authors hoped she would review their books or write blurbs for their dust jackets. Strangers sought financial assistance. Some of the pleas were charitable in nature, such as a man who wanted money to help his wife get treatment for tuberculosis using a “new, very expensive” drug. Others asked for money because they assumed she had enough to go around.

Life outside her apartment had its travails as well. Fans recognized Mitchell everywhere she went.
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Walking down the street, strangers stopped her to shake her hand and often as not asked intimate questions about her personal life. As Marsh described it, the whole world was “madly trying to find out what she likes to eat, what kind of underwear she prefers, what her hobbies are and other things that are nobody's business but hers.”
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And there were constant demands for signed books. “When I make a business appointment with someone they usually turn up staggering under a dozen copies which their friends have wished upon them,” she bemoaned.
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So how did Macmillan's reluctant celebrity handle the onslaught? Oddly enough, not very reluctantly. While she did not have any interest in being a public figure, Mitchell embraced in an exceedingly warm and open way the public who approached her. When the phone rang, she answered it. Fans bold enough to knock on her apartment door were often invited in for a cup of tea. Students who wanted to ask her questions for book reports or articles in their school papers were granted interviews. The same approach applied to the letters. Except for those from obviously disturbed or rude people,* Mitchell determined that nearly every one that had a legible return address deserved a response, in some cases a personal, handwritten note. She would not divulge intimate details of her own life and refused to state any opinion about Selznick's movie production but provided helpful responses to the many questions that came her way.

When it came to questions about her book, she answered most inquiries in detail, no matter how silly the question seemed. “Wind,” in her title, she explained patiently, rhymed with
sinned
and
grinned
. She often provided insights into the story that she never otherwise made public. For example, she revealed to a reader that Rhett Butler's middle name was King, a question enticingly left unanswered in the story.† When a reader suggested Melanie must have known about Ashley and Scarlett's feelings for each other, she disagreed, saying that, for Melanie, “being the type of woman she was, it would have been impossible for her to dissemble even had she desired to do so.”
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If a reader tried to nab her on errors in the historical details, the author was quick to defend herself. To a man who questioned her use of the term “La Grippe” to refer to influenza, Mitchell explained that she had interviewed many people who lived through the war who confirmed the word's usage during that time.
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When
Time
magazine ran a letter to the editor taking Mitchell to task for her description of federal soldiers looting cemeteries in Atlanta, the author replied, citing numerous references for her version of events.
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She just as readily conceded error when appropriate, such as when a reader pointed out an inconsistency in the scene where Scarlett meets Frank Kennedy in Atlanta after the war. The text had Scarlett calling Kennedy by his first name, supposedly for the first time, although she had called him Frank several pages earlier. Mitchell graciously thanked anyone who pointed out a mistake and made sure Macmillan made appropriate adjustments in future printings.
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One topic she would not debate with readers was which portions of her story had been inspired by actual people, places, and events. Mitchell insisted her novel had been made up from whole cloth, saying she did not care for authors who dragged their own feelings and experiences into fiction books.
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“Ever so often I am amused, and sometimes disconcerted, when strangers meeting me tell me exactly whom I took some character from,” she wrote. “It does me no good to deny it for the stranger always knows more about the matter than I do.”
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She thought people ought to be more generous and credit authors for having “even a little creative talent.”
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To any reader who wrote proclaiming that a particular house served as the inspiration for Tara or that a relative had been the real Rhett Butler, she denied all such associations. In only two instances is she known to have admitted specific inspirations for fictional scenarios. She said she based the slave girl Prissy on a former Mitchell family maid and that she had placed Scarlett and Rhett's house in Atlanta “vaguely . . . on Peachtree somewhere between Forest Avenue and Ellis Street.”
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