Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (48 page)

The dissolution of Selznick International Pictures signaled two important changes for the future of
Gone With the Wind
. On the advice of tax attorneys, Selznick sold his interest in the film to Whitney and his sister, Joan Whitney Payson. The siblings subsequently sold their shares to MGM, as did other smaller stockholders, resulting in MGM obtaining control of the movie.† The producer also severed ties with Brown that year. After receiving the credit for bringing Selznick and Mitchell together, Brown became one of the producer's most trusted advisers, earning a reputation as a top-notch talent scout. In an interview she gave late in life, Brown claimed Selznick fired her in 1942 because she had been receiving too much of the credit for his successes. She recalled receiving a phone call from one of Selznick's executives telling her she was being let go and asking her to circulate the story that she was quitting to take care of her children. She refused, stating that she would protest if Selznick made any such claim. She resigned without offering any public explanation and went to work as an agent for Leland Hayward.
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Although she no longer had any official responsibilities for
Gone With the Wind
, she remained in contact with the Marshes, with whom she had developed a collegial working relationship.

Another interruption of Mitchell's idyll came that October when cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the popular syndicated comic strip
Li'l Abner
, published a three-week slapstick spoof of
Gone With the Wind
called
Gone Wif the
Wind
. He depicted Abner as Wreck Butler, Daisy Mae as Scallop O'Hara, and Hannibal Hoops as Ashcan Wilkes. The parody appeared in more than six hundred newspapers across the United States. Although some writers might have considered it an honor to be lampooned by the respected humorist, Mitchell did not. On his wife's behalf, Marsh demanded that Capp apologize and cancel any further segments of the strip. The cartoonist apparently did not take kindly to the protective husband's demands. In a speech to the National Cartoonists Society, he later described a telephone conversation he had with Marsh in which the author's husband nagged at him until Capp snapped and ended the discussion with a two-word “AngloSaxon phrase” that he found handy for “getting rid of pests” and “beginning lawsuits.”
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Undeterred, Marsh contacted Capp's publisher, United Features, and threatened to sue for one dollar for every copy of every paper in which the spoof had appeared. This amounted to about seventy-five million dollars, a figure that immediately caught the attention of syndicate executives, who flew a representative to Atlanta to apologize in person. The firm agreed to cancel any future installments in the series and run a public apology in Capp's strip. Pleased with their quick reaction, Mitchell decided to forgo seeking monetary damages. With one arm twisted behind his back, Capp devoted two panels of his Sunday strip to a public mea culpa. In the first, Mammy Yokum declared that “Mistah Capp” owed Mitchell an apology for hurting the author's “feelin's.” The second offered a formal apology in which United Features and Capp acknowledged that he had inappropriately made use of Mitchell's characters.

The year 1942 ended with a bang when Selznick, who so recently had redeemed himself in Mitchell's eyes, demonstrated that he was not quite through with her yet—or his idea for bringing Scarlett back to life. On December 3, he dropped the author a line saying he had figured out the topic for her next book, as if she were wracking her brain looking for possibilities. He had been thinking about it for a while and could not resist presenting his idea. She would be doing a service to the nation, he said, by writing a modern novel featuring the life of contemporary Southern women. He thought Mitchell the only person qualified to take on the task and had figured out a surefire method to make the book a smashing success. Warning her to hold her breath, the producer announced that the main character, and a guaranteed crowd pleaser, would be—Scarlett O'Hara's granddaughter.
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Would the plotting of idiocies never end?

* Selznick's Best Picture Oscar for
Gone With the Wind
was sold in 1999 at Sotheby's auction house in New York for a record $1.54 million; the buyer was entertainer Michael Jackson.

* It may have come as some consolation to Mitchell that Hitler faced his own difficulties with World War II currency restrictions. When Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin released an English translation of Hitler's memoir,
Mein Kampf
, the book was a bestseller, earning Hitler royalties of more than twenty thousand dollars. Those funds were impounded by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian.

* Congress revised the law again in 1952, allowing authors to average book royalties.

† Selznick's brother, Myron, owned a small percentage of the film, which he held on to. Years later, part of that share passed to David O. Selznick's two sons, Jeffrey and Daniel, upon the death of Myron's daughter.

14
Reconstruction

A
lthough war still raged around the world, the new year began quietly for Margaret Mitchell and
Gone With the Wind
. Over the holidays, she and John Marsh had enjoyed a trip to New York, which included time with the Taylors. The couples spent a memorable evening at the famous Gay Nineties nightclub. “It isn't often that people have new experiences at our time in life and John and I enjoyed it enormously,” she wrote Lois Cole. “Afterwards we thought up a score of old songs we wished had been sung.”
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The only significant business pending was David O. Selznick's continuing interest in acquiring stage rights to her novel. The matter had been in a holding pattern during the liquidation of Selznick International Pictures, but in February, the producer finally made a formal bid on the rights to mount a stage production of
Gone With the Wind
. He offered an advance of $2,500 against a percentage of the show's gross receipts. Mitchell declined, saying she wanted a guaranteed upfront payment, plus royalties, and would be “a dope” to accept anything less. The author told Selznick to adjust his terms accordingly; she was not willing to go through another one of his “foofarahs” until he came back to the table prepared to meet her requirements. He failed to come up with an acceptable proposal, and the matter languished.

Overseas, matters remained largely at a standstill, but Marsh continued to keep meticulous records of the accounts. The federal government required American citizens to document their foreign income, and in the course of preparing such a report in the spring of 1943, Marsh noticed irregularities in the few royalty statements Marion Saunders had sent. There were discrepancies in some of the figures and also informational gaps. While he understood why countries such as Poland and France could not get money through, it troubled him to have heard nothing from Sweden, a neutral country where
Gone With the Wind
supposedly continued to sell well. He wondered about the publisher in Cairo and why they had not heard from him now that the Germans were being driven from North Africa. Saunders also had failed to update the Marshes on unauthorized theatrical productions in Ireland and Spain that she had promised to look in to.

Marsh let matters slide for several months, realizing conditions in Europe were difficult and not wanting to appear a nag. However, by summer, he felt he had been patient long enough. The Allies were making progress, and he wanted to be ready to hit the ground running when Europe reopened for business. Unable to resolve the discrepancies on his own, he asked Peat, Marwick & Mitchell, an accounting firm that helped with their taxes, to review the documents.* When the accountants confirmed that the numbers did not add up, Marsh wrote Saunders on August 6, 1943, that he had concerns about the foreign income reports and was sending an accountant to New York to review her records. He also mentioned that, while the accountant was there, it made sense to audit all the
GWTW
files. On August 10, he followed up with a longer letter detailing a list of assorted “unfinished business” he wanted Saunders to address. Marsh ended the letter on a friendly note, saying he did not expect the impossible from her. He knew she could do nothing about the nations under German control, but he did want to put things in order as much as possible. He also left the door open for the chance the errors were his own: “If I have misrepresented any of the above situations, because of letters misplaced in my files or carelessness in my record-keeping, I want to apologize in advance.” He sent along best regards for Saunders and “her kinfolks in England” and acknowledged “we all have much to be thankful for these days in the complete reversal of the war picture from what it was not many months ago.”
²

Saunders responded right away, acknowledging there were unresolved issues and that she had been meaning to sort things through with him. She placed much of the blame on Hitler and identified all the
GWTW
publishers who were Jewish, suggesting it might be impossible to ever figure out what happened in those cases. She promised to cooperate with the accountant but could not do so until September because she was having trouble finding competent secretarial support amidst the wartime labor shortage. Her secretary had died in March, and the files had been in disarray ever since.
³
Marsh replied on August 31 that he was glad she would cooperate and advised her that the accountant would be in touch soon.

The next document in the Mitchell files is a frantic letter from Saunders to Marsh dated September 20, by which point the accountant had paid her a visit. She cryptically told Marsh that information he would receive from the accountant was being sent at her suggestion. “I want you to know this,” Saunders wrote. She also announced that she would be traveling to Atlanta with the accountant and wanted to meet with Marsh confidentially.
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Something was amiss.

What Saunders wanted to talk to Marsh about was a shortfall in Mitchell's royalty account of close to thirty thousand dollars. The accountant had not pinned down an exact number but had seen enough to know that Saunders had been stealing from Mitchell for years. The agent did not deny the findings and was distraught at having been exposed. Over the following days, she wrote several letters to Marsh, baring her soul. As would become a pattern in the coming months, she recognized she had committed a crime but could not bring herself to accept full responsibility for her actions. Desperate for forgiveness, she told Marsh that their meeting would not be easy for her. She grieved, recalling how kind he and Mitchell had been to her. Conceding she should have come clean long before, she did not know how she could face him: “It is made ever so much harder by reason of my feelings and admiration for you all—which may sound futile at this time. I have been too proud and optimistic.”
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She assured Marsh that she could be trusted to continue working for them and pleaded for the opportunity to do so. She wanted a chance to restore their relationship: “To say that I am terribly, terribly upset, is to put it mildly. I have been through h—in the past few weeks.”
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On October 7, she met with Marsh and Stephens Mitchell at Peat, Marwick & Mitchell's Atlanta office. Margaret Mitchell was not present; she knew what the accountants had discovered, but Marsh saw no reason for his wife to face her betrayer. At the meeting, Saunders acknowledged that since 1938 she had failed to pay Mitchell more than twenty-eight thousand dollars in royalties.
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The agent said she could not repay the debt because her work had dried up during the war, and her expenses had exceeded her income for some time. Although she could not specify precisely where Mitchell's money had gone, she assured them she was not doing business with the Nazis or any enemies of the United States. She wanted to repay Mitchell and proposed that they retain her services on a reduced-fee basis so she could earn back the missing money and save them the trouble of hiring a new agent.
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