by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Among the bizarre items on
KPBS’s schedule last night (on the 17th anniversary of the 9/11
terror attacks, when I was actually expecting either original programming or
reruns about the events) was a six-year-old episode of their long-running American
Masters series about great men and
women that have shaped American history and culture. This one dealt with a
woman whose work is probably far more famous than her name: Margaret Mitchell,
born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900, an aspiring playwright and actress who became
a journalist, short-story writer and ultimately author of one of the most
incredibly successful novels in history: Gone with the Wind. Though published in 1936, in the middle of the
Great Depression, Gone with the Wind became the biggest-selling novel ever written by an American to that point, and three
years later it became the basis for a hugely successful movie that was the
biggest-grossing hit Hollywood had ever seen. Indeed, if you count the number
of times someone has paid admission to see it (a test a number of movie
scholars have argued is more accurate than comparing gross incomes on a film, because — especially for a film like Gone
with the Wind that was periodically
reissued — that eliminates the problem of having to compensate for inflation),
it’s still the most popular movie of
all time. The American Masters program, called Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel, told Mitchell’s story via direction by Kathy
White, writing by Pamela Roberts, a narration delivered by Harry Pritchett, and
interview with various authorities including modern-day Southern author Pat
Conroy and film historian Molly Haskell.
The basics of Mitchell’s story are
that she was born November 8, 1900 to a couple of attorneys, Eugene Mitchell
and his wife Maybelle Stephens Mitchell. Not only had Maybelle cracked the bar
at a time when it was difficult for women even to be admitted to law school,
much less being licensed to practice, she had also been active in the suffrage
movement. When Margaret had a household accident at age three — her dress
caught fire and she nearly burned — her mom responded by dressing her in
trousers and she went full-out tomboy, calling herself “Jimmy” after the child
hero of a then-popular comic strip. She also took up horseback riding and
became fascinated by the Civil War by hearing tales of it from older relatives
and their friends who had actually fought — but those tales romanticized the
war so much it wasn’t until she was 10 that she realized the South had actually
lost. Margaret mentioned one carriage ride her mom took her on through Atlanta
and its outskirts, in which mom showed her the wreckages of the great pre-war
plantations and offered these as an example of the frailty of human
accomplishments. As a girl, Margaret also organized her friends into an amateur
acting troupe and wrote scripts for them — one of which was based on a novel by
Thomas Dixon, one of whose other books, The Clansman, provided the basis for D. W. Griffith’s
blockbuster hit film The Birth of a Nation. She also wrote short stories which weren’t published, and went to work
for the Atlanta Journal as a
reporter and feature writer. As a teenager Margaret directly experienced the
buildup to a war when the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, and her first
serious boyfriend, fiancé Clifford West Henry, was actually killed in combat in
France shortly before the war ended. (In her biography of Margaret Mitchell,
Anne Edwards suggests that Henry was really Gay and that’s why, as Margaret’s
older brother Stephens Henry recalled, she wrote in a letter to a friend that
she had a “memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion.”)
When
the war ended and the 1920’s arrived, Margaret enthusiastically embraced the
“flapper” movement, in which young women showed their liberation from
traditional notions of femininity by wearing bras instead of full corsets,
attempted to look as “boyish” as possible, wore short skirts and, in their most
important fashion statement, “bobbed” their hair — cut it short to almost men’s
length. (When I was in high school in the 1960’s, one of the texts I read in my
history of short stories class was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her
Hair” — and of course even then I had a strong enough sense of irony that in an
era in which men were showing their rebellion by growing their hair long, I was
reading a story about an era in which women were showing their rebellion by
cutting their hair short.) After she returned home from one disastrous year at
Smith College, during which she asked to be transferred out of a class because
another student was Black, Margaret Mitchell became a well-known figure in
Atlanta night life, learning to dance (despite a horseback-riding injury in her
childhood that had caused lasting damage to one leg) and attracting a wide variety
of suitors even though she was not all that conventionally attractive — a trait
she passed on to her heroine Scarlett O’Hara in the opening lines of Gone
with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell was
courted especially intensely by two roommates, Berrien “Red” Kinnard Upshaw and
John Robert Marsh. She first married Upshaw — whom Pamela Roberts’ narration
suggests was the model for Rhett Butler — but when he turned out to be a
scapegrace with no job and no particular interest in finding one, she divorced
him and married Marsh. After another riding accident re-injured her leg, forced
her to wear orthopedic shoes and thereby made it impossible for her to dance
anymore, Margaret determined to use her time to write a novel. She first tried
to write a book about the 1920’s but never finished it, and then she seized on
the Civil War as a subject. Margaret apparently wrote Gone with the Wind over a three-year period from 1926 to 1929, and
according to her own account she wrote it backwards, starting with the
now-famous ending and working her way back to the beginning — which she would
rewrite again and again over time and never was quite satisfied with it. (When
the film of Gone with the Wind was made, that was the part that most bedeviled its makers, producer
David O. Selznick and the various directors and writers he platooned on the
project: the very last scene star Vivien Leigh filmed for the movie was yet
another retake of the opening sequence.)
Before I watched this show the story
I’d heard of the origin of Gone with the Wind and how this reclusive Southern belle got her
novel in print was that John Marsh had a friend, New York literary editor
Harold Latham, whom he invited to his home in Atlanta as a house guest. One
evening over dinner, Latham was lamenting that he couldn’t find any interesting
new books by previously unpublished authors, and asked Marsh if he knew any.
“Well, my wife is writing something,” Marsh told Latham. Mitchell herself was
uncertain as to whether she should offer the book, regarding it as unfinished
and more of a hobby project than a publishable novel. She gave Latham part of
her manuscript (famously, she wrote it in envelopes, one envelope per chapter,
and she kept the envelopes in a file drawer in sequence and drew out each one
as she wanted to revise it) and he left on the train back to New York. She
cabled him to return the book, but by then he’d started reading it, was
absolutely captivated and decided to publish it. The book was an immediate
sensation, not only becoming a huge seller but winning the Pulitzer Prize and
the National Book Award, and this film suggests that Depression audiences
responded more than anything else to Scarlett’s struggle for sheer survival —
“As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again” — as a reflection of what
they were going through themselves.
Margaret Mitchell had the fame she had long
said she wanted, but found it was a double-edged sword: innumerable people
called her (usually the phone was taken by her faithful Black maid Beulah, the
model for Mammy in the book) and asked if Scarlett and Rhett ever got back
together. “I don’t know, and she doesn’t know either,” Beulah would tell the
various callers. One story about Margaret Mitchell that I particularly love
didn’t make it into the documentary but reveals how she thought the book was
absolutely complete the way it was and neither had nor needed a sequel: in
1940, after the smash success of his film of Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick offered her a large sum of
money to write a sequel. To sweeten the deal, Selznick said that his payment
was only for the movie rights: she could make more money selling it as a novel
or for adaptation into any other medium. Mitchell turned down the offer,
telling Selznick in her quiet, unassuming way, “I have nothing more to say
about those people.” The show mentioned that Margaret Mitchell had recurring
bouts of clinical depression — they didn’t mention it, but Vivien Leigh, who
played Mitchell’s creation in the famous film, also had that problem — and it
also touched on the controversy over the story’s treatment of
African-Americans. Mitchell herself was upset at the criticism she got from the
Black community, saying that she had created Black characters of real dignity
and worth, and she seemed oblivious of the difference between being a servant
and being a slave.
Ironically, in a part of Mitchell’s biography so little
known her Wikipedia page doesn’t say a word about it, Margaret Mitchell gave a
lot of the income from Gone with the Wind to charity, and particularly to charities benefiting African-Americans
— notably Morehouse College in Atlanta, an all-male, historically Black
university. Mitchell befriended Benjamin Mays, who had become president of
Morehouse in 1940, and she started giving him money to fund scholarships, with
particular emphasis on training Black doctors. Mitchell also endowed the
largest Black hospital in Atlanta and said she saw giving money to the hospital
and funding scholarships to Morehouse’s medical school as two parts of the same
program: giving Atlanta’s Black community a state-of-the-art hospital and also
training Black doctors to staff it. (In 1948 Morehouse would graduate from its
divinity school a young man named Martin Luther King, Jr., who was apparently a
personal protégé of Benjamin Mays.) This suggests that Margaret Mitchell was a
racial progressive but also a staunch segregationist; she wanted to make good
on the promise of “separate but equal” but she didn’t favor integration.
Mitchell also did more conventional social work during World War II, including
working as an American Red Cross volunteer, sending food packages to
servicemembers and christening a U.S. Navy anti-aircraft ship called U.S.S. Atlanta
— actually two ships called U.S.S. Atlanta, the one that was destroyed in the Battle of
Guadalcanal and the second Atlanta that was built to replace it. Margaret Mitchell died in 1949 when she
was hit by a car while she and her husband were on their way to see a movie
(the driver, off-duty cabbie Hugh Gravitt, was convicted of involuntary
manslaughter and served 18 months in jail), putting an end to an enigmatic life
which seems to straddle quite a lot of our racial, sexual and political divide:
the young college student who refused to stay in a class with a Black student
turned benefactress of a Black university and a Black hospital; the
suffragette’s daughter who was a flapper in the 1920’s and eventually settled
into a quiet married life; a woman who wrote the most popular novel of 20th
Century America at a time when the works of women authors were even more
severely ghettoized as “chick lit” than they are today; and a surprisingly
progressive figure who also created the most haunting and culturally enduring
romanticization of the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy and their
struggle to preserve their “right” to own Black people as slaves.
