Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (66 page)

In January 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1998 copyright extension act.
⁵⁷
This meant
Gone With the Wind
would remain the exclusive property of the Mitchell estate in the United States until 2031, giving the estate another twenty-eight years to control Scarlett and Rhett in the United States. But where did the copyright stand in the rest of the world?

The European Union had granted copyright extensions similar to those in the United States, but not all nations were as generous. In countries where the copyright has expired,
Gone With the Wind
is no longer the exclusive property of the Mitchell estate. The Australian copyright, for instance, expired in 1999, fifty years after Mitchell's death. At least one American writer took advantage of the situation and published through an Australian firm a
Gone With the Wind
sequel that the estate had blocked in the United States several years earlier. The book cannot legally be sold in the United States, but is available for purchase online, making its distribution difficult to police. Also of concern to the estate, in 2004, the Australian version of Project Gutenberg—an online association of volunteers who upload noncopyrighted works onto the Internet—posted an electronic version of
Gone With the Wind
on its server. The estate contacted the organizers and asked them to remove the book or take measures to prevent access in countries where
Gone With the Wind
remained under copyright. Presumably unwilling to battle the estate, Project Gutenberg took the book down.
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Although the estate denied having forced the site's hand, cyberspace pundits criticized Mitchell's representatives for picking on the innocent and law-abiding Australian book lovers and expecting them to keep up with and enforce American copyright law. The following year, the website reposted Mitchell's book online.

Nearly thirteen years after St. Martin's won the right to publish an authorized sequel to
Gone With the Wind
, the firm released McCaig's
Rhett Butler's
People
. McCaig dedicated the 2007 book to Anderson, “Faithful Fiduciary,” and offered readers a look at Rhett's life before he met Scarlett and during the long stretches in
Gone With the Wind
in which he was offstage. Ultimately, the couple reunites, albeit in entirely different circumstances than Ripley had imagined.

As had been done for
Scarlett
, St. Martin's embargoed the release. Taking full advantage of the intervening years' worth of technological advancements, an interactive website and e-newsletter offered fans teasers, tidbits, and trivia quizzes. Although many
GWTW
enthusiasts enjoyed the approach, the efforts were seen by some as overly contrived. Valley Haggard, a book reviewer in McCaig's home state of Virginia, said of the process, “It got old. It got boring. I wanted to talk with this so-called-amazing author that the Mitchell Estate handpicked to write the second authorized sequel and I wanted to read his book, not take some stupid quiz.”
⁵⁹

Once they finally read the book, many critics—including Haggard—were impressed. Few reviews were out-and-out raves, but the overall sense was that McCaig had done greater justice to Mitchell's story than had Ripley. His book debuted at number 5 on the
New York Times
bestseller list and remained on the list for eight weeks. Though
Rhett Butler's People
failed to take America by storm, it stoked interest overseas in Mitchell's original novel, and numerous new editions of
Gone With the Wind
appeared when McCaig's novel was released in at least fifteen countries, including Brazil, Finland, Japan, Korea, Poland, and Russia.

When asked about the possibility of a third sequel, Anderson said he did not think so but would not make any promises. “Something could come along that we couldn't turn down. Never say never.”
⁶⁰
With the second authorized sequel behind them, Anderson and Clarke prepared to turn over the estate's affairs to a new generation of lawyers, their sons Paul Anderson, Jr., and Thomas Hal Clarke, Jr. As the senior Clarke officially retired and the senior Anderson began to step back from his day-to-day duties, their sons were designated trustees. Responsibility for the future of
Gone With the Wind
now rests largely in the younger generation's hands.
⁶¹

In 2008, Scarlett O'Hara had another chance to prove herself onstage. After the Harold Rome musical production failed to set the British or American theatrical worlds on fire in the 1970s, other stage versions of her story—some musical—played in France, Greece, and South Korea, but all met with mixed success. Only in Japan did she seem fully comfortable before the footlights. Undaunted by this track record—or perhaps unaware of it—Margaret Martin, a Los Angeles–based public health expert who dabbled in songwriting as a hobby, decided to try her hand at creating a
Gone With the
Wind
musical. Unlike many of the previous adaptors, she focused on Mitchell's book for source material rather than on Selznick's film.

Martin asked the Stephens Mitchell Trusts for the rights to produce her vision of Mitchell's novel, knowing the chances of the estate entrusting such a valuable property to a novice were remote. Indeed, Anderson, Jr., later recalled having thought Martin's proposal a “dead duck.”
⁶²
Yet, the committeemen heard her out and came away impressed. After months of discussions, they granted her the rights. Martin scored her next coup when she convinced Sir Trevor Nunn of
Les Miserables
and
Cats
fame to direct the production.

With Nunn's involvement, Martin succeeded in pulling together the necessary financing for her
Gone With the Wind
. She had high expectations for the $9.5 million show when it opened on April 22, 2008, in London's West End. Among the invitation-only guests at the 1,100-seat New London Theatre were the trustees, actress Joan Collins, fashion model Twiggy, and television host Sir David Frost. The production, which starred American actress Jill Paice as Scarlett and Scottish singer Darius Danesh as Rhett, opened with a rousing song titled “Born to Be Free,” sung by the slaves at Tara, while narrators set the scene with words from Mitchell's first chapter. The three-and-a-half-hour show closed to a lengthy standing ovation.

Afterward, audience members made their way to the first night party at the nearby Waldorf Hilton hotel. All along the five-block walk down London's famed Drury Lane, theater employees were stationed with candlelit lanterns and large signs reading: “Road to Tara This Way.” The street entrance to the hotel's Palm Court ballroom was flanked with two large torches. Inside, Confederate flags and red, white, and blue bunting decorated the rooms, and a small orchestra played. Guests could sample various Southern dishes, including “Mammy's Jambalaya,” “Prissy's Alabama Barbecue,” “Big Sam's Three-Bean Chili,” and “Cookie's Cajun Sausages,” while waiters wearing aprons proclaiming “I'll Never Be Hungry Again” circled the rooms with trays of hors d'oeuvres and glasses of champagne.

Any sense of elation Martin or the estate may have enjoyed came crashing down when the British critics weighed in. Their reviews were brutal. The
Sunday Times
blasted the “interminable tiffs and tantrums” between Rhett and Scarlett “expressed in limp, forgettable songs,”
⁶³
while the
Telegraph
called it a “soullessly efficient” production that “merely feels like one damn thing after another.”
⁶⁴
Scarlett and Rhett closed up their tent after only seventy-nine performances.

Theatrical failings aside,
Gone With the Wind
rolls on. As of 2010, more than thirty million copies of Mitchell's novel have been printed in the United States and abroad, and its publisher expects a profitable future for the remainder of the copyright term. A sure sign of Scribner's faith in the title is that, when Warner Books' paperback license rights expired in 2005, Scribner declined to renew. It wanted the rights for itself. After decades of farming the paperbacks out to independent publishers, Scribner began issuing its own softcover editions of Mitchell's novel. Seventy-five years after its original publication, new editions also continue to appear across Europe and Asia. In China, more than two dozen editions have been issued in the past few years. New countries continue to enter the
Gone With the Wind
family as well; in 2009, the book appeared for the first time in Albania. The motion picture still attracts viewers and regularly lands on “all-time favorites” lists. Clark Gable's famous exit line—“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn”—nabbed the number 1 ranking on the American Film Institute's list of one hundred all-time favorite movie quotes. The 1939 film classic remains the most-watched movie in history and, when figures are adjusted for inflation, also still leads the list of top grossers. The movie has gone on to live a new life on videotape, DVD, and Blu-ray as well. When Margaret Mitchell ended her novel with Scarlett's vow that tomorrow would be another day, she never imagined the unending tomorrows her book would experience.

As a new generation of readers reaches maturity with a fresh set of perspectives and tolerances, can Scarlett and Rhett maintain this remarkable pace? The two surviving original trustees believe so. Clarke suggests
Gone
With the Wind
is a cultural heirloom for many people: the book was a “big, big thing in those days, and the people who became so intimate with it have passed it down through the years. It's a part of the history of the South.”
⁶⁵
Anderson points to the seemingly unstoppable synergy between Mitchell's novel and Selznick's movie: “It's the unusual combination of a first-class book with a first-class picture.”
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The two men expect the book's literary rights will require careful tending until 2031, when its current copyright term expires, and far beyond. Regardless of whether Congress extends the copyright again, the
Gone With the Wind
trademark remains protected indefinitely, and the estate holds the copyright on the two authorized sequels, both of which will enjoy legal protection for decades beyond Mitchell's original.