F E B R U A R Y 1 9 7 3
by Gavin Lambert
DAVID Selznick's father, Lewis, was an adventurer who made and lost his pile in the early days of the film industry, and the son inherited many of his qualities -- chutzpa, galvanic energy, a taste for gambling and self- display, a hard heart in business and a soft one in personal relations. The exuberant sharper also bequethed to his son a reverence for culture and good living. He collected Ming vases and vintage wines, and his favorite book was David Copperfield,which the boy began to read at the age of seven.
See the second installment of this article from the March, 1973, Atlantic Monthly.
Return to Flashback: "Gone With the Wind."
Lewis J. Zeleznik, born in Kiev, Russia, in 1870, worked his way to the United States at the age of eighteen. He changed his name to Selznick and built up a successful jewelry retail business in Pittsburgh. In 1910 he overreached himself for the first time when he decided to open "the world's largest jewelry store" in New York. Its doors closed after a few months, and without this modestly grandiose failure there might never have been David's production of Gone With the Wind.
For this was the time when many businessmen, most of them Jewish emigres, were turning to a new business. Louis Burt Mayer from Minsk, having made some money dealing in scrap metal, used it to buy old theaters which he converted to nickelodeons, thus taking his first step toward becoming the Emperor of MGM. Adolph Zukor, a furrier from Ricse, Hungary, invested his savings in buying the rights to a French four-reeler, Queen Elizabeth,starring Sarah Bernhardt, thus taking hisfirst step toward the foundation of Paramount Pictures. Sammy Goldfish, a glove salesman from Warsaw, persuaded his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, who owned a chain of vaudeville houses, to risk a few thousands in film production. They went out to Hollywood, then only a village where no studios had yet been built, and joined forces with a young actor ambitious to direct. His name was Cecil B. De Mille. After the success of their film, The Squaw Man,shot in a converted barn and the first full-length feature to be made in California, the producer, Sammy Goldfish, decided to be known as Samuel Goldwyn.
Lewis J. Selznick entered the film business through a friend who owned stock in Universal Film Manufacturing and who commissioned Selznick to sell it for him to one of two men engaged in a struggle for control of the company. Selznick favored Carl Laemmle from Wurttemberg, Germany, formerly store manager of a clothing company in Wisconsin, and by selling Laemmle the stock and enabling him to gain the upper hand at Universal, Selznick maneuvered himself into a job with the company. Another struggle for power soon followed, since both men were too ambitious to remain colleagues for long. While Selznick had great enthusiasm for business intrigue, he was less experienced than Laemmle, who ousted him. He then met a mail-order agent named Arthur Spiegel and persuaded him to become a partner in a new company with the flaunty title of World Film Company. At that time it was the practice of both Laemmle and Zukor to entice "prestige" names from the theater to film their successes, and Selznick followed it, outbidding his rivals for the services of Clara Kimball Young, Nazimova, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Russell. He also employed a young director named Allan Dwan, who saw every D. W. Griffith film as it came out and who imitated the master's innovations with such speed that he became the second American director to use the close-up.
After quarreling with Spiegel, Selznick next induced Clara Kimball Young to become his partner. For the next few years, he and his rivals stole each other's stars, intriguing endlessly over the Talmadge sisters, tried to buy each other out, feuded in open letters to the trade press, and competed in flamboyant publicity stunts. The climax occurred in 1917, when Selznick cabled the deposed Czar Nicholas of Russia, offering him a position with his company. "When I was a boy in Russia your police treated my people very badly but no hard feelings ... " There was no reply from the last of the Romanovs. One empire fell, another expanded. A Rolls-Royce, a seventeen-room apartment on Park Avenue, and the collection of Ming vases became the symbols of Selznick's success. Yet even at its height the operation struck a wrong note, for in the arena of ambition and self- display Selznick was less sophisticated than Laemmle and Zukor, and he had the effect of uniting them against him. Compared to the furrier, the glove salesman and the scrap-metal merchant, the jewelry dealer seemed an upstart. They waited for him to overreach himself.
Apart from extravagance, Selznick's greatest mistake was to remain in New York when the trend was westward. By the early 1920s, Laemmle had moved to Hollywood and taken charge of the growing, prosperous Universal lot. Mayer had started producing pictures in a downtown Los Angeles studio rented from a man who made documentaries about animals -- the premises included a small zoo containing, symbolically, a lion. Zukor and Lasky had merged to form Paramount. Selznick's stars followed the trend to the West, and he found himself increasingly isolated. In 1923 the company went bankrupt. Since its owner had quarreled with or alienated almost everybody, his ruin was greeted with applause.
This time the overreaching was final. There was a last, pathetic attempt to recoup by cashing in on a land boom in Florida. After its failure, Lewis J. Selznick retired from the field. Rolls-Royce, apartment, Ming vases, and his wife's jewels were sold, a squadron of servants dismissed. The Jester, as his rivals nicknamed him, moved to a three-room walk-up where Mrs. Selznick did the housework and cooking.
The Jester's naivete and greed might not in themselves have proved self-destructive. His methods, and the enmity they aroused, had a less forgivable reason behind them. For he never cared about the movies themselves, was blind to the coin in which he dealt, and publicized his contempt for it. In 1917 he told a congressional committee investigating the financial structure of the industry, "Less brains are necessary in the motion picture business than in any other." The movies remained for him on the level of the poker games at which he could win or lose thousands of dollars in a single night. They could never be art, for art was Ming vases and David Copperfieldand Nazimova in the theater, way beyond the reach of his own canned versions of Trilbyand Wildfire.
The other merchants, the dealers in scrap metal and furs and gloves from Russia and central Europe, had certainly been attracted to the movies for the same reasons as Selznick. There was quick money to be made and the new entertainment form, being silent, offered no language barrier. But Mayer, Goldwyn, and the others developed a passion for the movies and saw their extraordinary potential. The passion and the vision might have been primitive and narrow, but it was also intense and lasting and, in a raw way, imaginative. Starting as wheeler-dealers, they realized that they had something unique on their hands and they turned into founding fathers. Lewis J. Selznick, however, remained a wheeler-dealer all his active life, a promoter for the sake of promotion, and so his downfall is not for mourning and his career is chiefly remarkable for its effect on his sons.
To Myron, the eldest, and David, born in 1902, their father was a martyr. They loved him deeply, and when his empire collapsed, they saw him as a victim of callous businessmen and a true friend of the artist. Movie-struck from their schooldays, both brothers left Columbia University in New York to work for their father; after the fall, they were suddenly penniless. Myron went out to Hollywood, and David followed after raising enough money to produce a couple of shorts, one about boxing and the other of Rudolph Valentino judging a beauty contest.
In Hollywood the brothers had the advantage of being brought up in the business, but the disadvantage of their father's personal unpopularity and failure. However, their determination to succeed was unbeatable. Within a few years, Myron had established himself as the most powerful agent in town. Starting with a few clients, mainly personal friends like Lewis Milestone and William Wellman, Myron built up a company that by the early 1930s handled at least 50 percent of Hollywood's most famous stars, directors, and writers, and set the pattern for the later power structures of MCA and its imitators. A driven, possessed man who drank heavily, he believed he had a mission to avenge artists on the producers who'd ruined his father. "His work of vengeance changed the Hollywood climate," Ben Hecht wrote in A Child of the Century. "It doubled and quadrupled the salaries of directors, writers and actors -- myself among them.... Brooding in his tent after a sortie on a major studio, Myron would chortle, 'I'll break them all. I'll send all those thieves and fourflushers crawling to the poorhouse. Before I'm done the artists in this town will have all the money.' " Before he was done (he died in 1944 of an internal hemorrhage), they certainly had a great deal of it.
David's rise was no less spectacular, though ironically enough he became a producer, in Myron's eyes the enemy profession. Equally possessed of talent, David had the greater equilibrium. He seems to have combined his father's quicksilver arrogance with a staying power and love of organization. Shortly after his arrival in California he made a characteristic move. Because his own name coincided with that of an uncle he disliked, and because it struck him as insufficiently impressive, he decided it needed a middle initial -- like his father, like Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. De Mille -- and settled on O as the most imposing. (He announced that it stood for Oliver; but O in itself represents Omega, the end, the climax, the last of its kind.) It certainly seems to have imposed: by 1931 he had brought off two major coups: he married Irene, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer (over her father's strong opposition -- "Keep away from that schnook!" he warned her. "He'll end up a bum just like his old man!"), and became vice president in charge of production at RKO.
When Selznick took over, RKO was short of prestige and profits, but he revitalized it in both areas within a year. His first step was to approve Merian C. Cooper's King Kong,a project that had been hanging fire; his second was to pick a subject that he would produce himself. To direct What Price Hollywood?he chose George Cukor, whom he'd met when both were new to California, and had introduced to a Russian friend, Lewis Milestone. Cukor worked as dialogue director on All Quiet on the Western Front,then was signed to make films for Paramount. The Hollywood story, originally conceived as a vehicle for the fading Clara Bow, then retailored for the rising Constance Bennett, was, as Cukor said later, "dear to David's heart. He later used it in a different way for the first version of A Star Is Born.Like the audience at that time, Selznick had a very romantic view of Hollywood, a real love of it.... Most of the other Hollywood pictures make it a kind of crazy, kooky place, but to David it was absolutely real, he believed in it." At that time, of course, it was a heady place in which to believe. The rise of Selznick coincided with the rise of the great studios; he stood at the entrance to an age of triumphant prosperity, unrivaled arsenals of technical resources and international talent that entertained the world. And yet, curiously enough, David's two films about Hollywood were preoccupied with failure. In the story dear to his heart, although the movie queen survives, the male figure -- in What Price Hollywood?a director, inA Star Is Bornan actor -- becomes a drunken failure and commits suicide. While Myron's heavy drinking may or may not have had a bearing on this, it seems certain that for all his romantic love of the place, David Selznick was not blind to the insecurities beneath its alluring surface.
On one level, the thirties were the great "halcyon period," as S. N. Behrman (who worked on several scripts in Hollywood, including Anna Kareninafor Selznick) writes in his memoir, People in a Diary."There were few places in America where you could go out to dinner with Harpo and Groucho Marx, the Franz Werfels, Leopold Stokowski, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, and George and Ira Gershwin." On another and less obvious level, there was a ruthless attitude toward failure and constant secret intrigue within the higher echelons of power. Falls from grace could be as drastic as rises to favor. Behrman tells the story of how Lubitsch learned one morning that he'd been dismissed as head of Paramount from his gym instructor, who had massaged a studio executive the night before and heard the gossip. Selznick's energy and ambition were outstanding even in a place bursting with both qualities; but perhaps, like others, he was propelled by fear as well as enthusiasm. The world in which he'd chosen to succeed also gave back echoes of his father's failure.
The film What Price Hollywood?was well received and led to further collaborations between Selznick and Cukor. A Bill of Divorcementintroduced Katharine Hepburn to the screen and began a director-star partnership that became famous. For all three the pinnacle of this period was Little Women,a piece of classic Americana unequaled for intimate, charming exactness.
Selznick's success at RKO reconciled him, on the business level at least, with his father-in-law. Mayer had been quarreling repeatedly with the second vice president of MGM, the fragile but determined Irving Thalberg. After Thalberg recovered from a heart attack and left for a long European vacation with his wife, Norma Shearer, the Emperor made overtures to Selznick, offering him carte blanche as producer at the studio and implying he might soon take Thalberg's place. Selznick accepted, not out of affection for Mayer, nor because he wanted to succeed Thalberg; but the resources of Hollywood's most glamorous and celebrated studio were irresistible. He left RKO in 1933, Cukor went with him, and they made the all-star Dinner at Eight.Based on a Broadway hit, with a cast including Marie Dressler, John and Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, and Billie Burke, it had the same formula as Thalberg's coup of the previous year, Grand Hotel.Cukor handled the lineup of sacred monsters with ease and skill, shot the whole blockbuster in twenty-seven days, and made of it one of the most hardedged of Depression comedies.
The film earned a lot of money, gained Selznick more prestige in the industry than he'd ever enjoyed before, and killed the joke -- "the son-in-law also rises" -- that could be heard everywhere when he joined MGM. Other successes quickly followed -- Dancing Lady,with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, which introduced Astaire to the screen; Manhattan Melodrama,again with Gable; and Viva Villa! -- and Selznick found himself in a position to achieve something he'd wanted for a long time: a real cultural splash. As a work of literature, Little Womenhad been at best a minor classic, and the film itself, for all its virtues, had been on a small scale. Selznick was now, as they say, thinking big. He had already prepared for the occasion by compiling a methodical, obsessive list of all the classics he might one day wish to film. At the head of it was David Copperfield,his father's favorite novel. He chose Cukor to direct. Mayer opposed the project, fearful that classics were bad box-office (and the record showed that most of them were); when his son-in-law insisted, he tried to impose the MGM child star, Jackie Cooper, for the young David. Selznick and Cukor held out for an unknown and discovered Freddie Bartholomew in England.
Producer and director agreed that the way to film Dickens was not to restructure him, not to add new and more "commercial" elements to the story, but to respect his episodic style and concentrate on the gallery of characters. For the time this was an almost revolutionary approach, and unnerved the studio even further, especially since it would involve a movie about two and a half hours long. Box-office insurance was taken out by assembling an all-star cast for the other major roles -- W. C. Fields, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lionel Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, Edna May Oliver, and all -- but the audience reaction at a sneak preview in Bakersfield was discouraging. Selznick toyed with the idea of eliminating Barrymore as Peggotty (in fact the only weak performance), then shrewdly decided to avoid the wrath of Dickens lovers and to trim the running time by a few minutes instead. When David Copperfieldwas released, both critics and public liked it very much -- rightly so, for in spite of some uncertain art direction it has great vitality and conviction, and remains the most authentically flavored Dickens movie ever made. Later, David confessed that with a mixture of sentiment and superstition, during the preparation and shooting of the film, "I lugged with me every place we went the old-fashioned red leather copy of Copperfieldwhich my father had given me."
This success was a turning point in Selznick's career, for it proved not only that a film of a classic novel could make money but that respect for the original paid off. He repeated the formula with Anna Karenina,for Garbo, and A Tale of Two Cities. By this time Thalberg had recovered and returned to the studio. Having no wish to be entangled in Mayer's intrigues, Selznick declared that he was leaving to form his own company. In a memo to Nicholas Schenck, the president of MGM, he explained with that characteristic touch of portentousness: "I am at a crossroads where a sign hangs high: 'To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.'"
Assembling a formidable list of stockholders, he announced the formation of Selznick International Pictures at the end of 1935. Capitalized at over $3,000,000, it had the multimillionaire John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, whom he'd originally met through Merian C. Cooper of King Kong,as chairman of the board. The directors included Cornelius Whitney and three Whitney sisters, representing an investment of $2,400,000; three New York financiers, Robert Lehman, and Arthur and John Herts ($150,000 each); Myron Selznick ($200,000); and as a gesture of private sympathy, a silent investment of $200,000 from Irving and Norma Shearer Thalberg. Mayer felt deeply rejected, and the event was to have repercussions when David came to produce Gone With the Wind.
The old Pathe studio in Culver City was the new headquarters. A portrait of Lewis J. Selznick hung on the wall of his son's office. From the beginning, "class" was the watchword, and both the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory were considered for company trademarks. Then Selznick was struck one day by the facade of the studio building. Colonial in style, with white pillars, it seems now to carry an unconscious premonition of Margaret Mitchell's Tara, as prophetic as the adopted O. Superimposed on this emblem was the proud slogan, "In a Tradition of Quality."
The tradition began with adaptations of Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Garden of Allah (Selznick's one failure, but interestingly bizarre), and The Prisoner of Zenda. This list of "classics" suggests that his literary taste was basically nineteenth century-romantic, and erratic at that, but for Dickens and Robert Hichens alike he advertised the same unwavering, serious respect. A compiler of lists is also a natural composer of notes and memos. In a series of them, written while he was making Anna Karenina,he outlined his procedure for adapting a classic:
Having just gone through the difficulties of adapting David Copperfield,the prospect of compressing Tolstoi's work without too great a loss of values did not faze us.... Our first blow was a flat refusal by the Hays office to permit the entire section of the story dealing with Anna's illegitimate child ... but even what remained of the personal story of Anna seemed so far superior to such inventions of writers today as could be considered possibilities for Miss Garbo, that we went on with the job.... We had to eliminate everything that could even remotely be classified as a passionate love scene: and we had to make it perfectly clear that not merely did Anna suffer but that Vronsky suffered.... Our next step in the adaptation was to decide which of the several stories that are told in the book we could tell on the screen without diverting the audience's interest from one line to another. This meant the minimizing of the story of Levin, including that magnificent scene, the death of Levin's brother.... From this point on, it became a matter of the careful selection and editing of Tolstoi's scenes, with a surprising little amount of original writing necessary ... I like to think that we retained the literary quality and the greater part of the poignant story of a woman torn between two equal loves and doomed to tragedy whichever one she chose....
The tone of this, and the memo habit that was to grow over the years, stretching into hundreds of thousands of words, provides a clue to something that happened within Selznick at the time. The stilted style, rather like an old-fashioned politician's and rich with doublethink, is both curiously old for a man still in his early thirties and masterly in its techniques of self-justification -- the glossing over of the difference between fidelity and distortion with "I like to think ... " These are statements in the form of an order, and the order comes from the top. He has found the secret of authority, which is belief in oneself at all times. A parallel can be seen in the increasing size and grandeur of the films themselves, which also cost more to produce -- starting with Fauntleroyat about $550,000 and rising to Zendaat about $900,000.
Another habit on the increase was gambling. Selznick liked to play mainly at a club on the Sunset Strip, and was dedicated but unlucky at roulette. He had a system, of course, devised as elaborately as the card index and the lists and the memos, but it seldom seemed to work. One night he lost more than $100,000 to Joseph Schenck, chairman of the board of Twentieth Century-Fox. He also built a house in Beverly Hills for himself and Irene, furnished with expensive antiques, a dining table that seated thirty, and a projection room. Servants were employed around the clock, as were secretaries, in case he wished to eat or dictate in the small hours. Dinner parties for the Hollywood elite, and occasional weekend yachting excursions, were planned like productions. The after-dinner movie started promptly at the scheduled time, and invitations to the yacht arrived in the form of sailing orders.
From poker to life-style to movies, the stakes were growing higher.
Early in 1936, Selznick's story editor on the East Coast, Kay Brown, sent him a long synopsis of a long forthcoming novel. It was called Gone With the Wind,and nobody had ever heard of the author. Kay Brown felt strongly enough about its possibilities to end her note of recommendation: "I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it."
He didn't. Although he read the digest at once, and on the face of it the project should have seemed irresistible -- a twentieth-century work with all the nineteenth-century romantic ingredients that he adored -- Selznick resisted. While the nostalgia and sweep of the material intrigued him, his business sense made signals of alarm. Pictures about the Civil War, with the exception of The Birth of a Nation -- and that was a long time ago -- had never been successful at the box office. Only the previous year, So Red the Rose,directed by his friend King Vidor with the popular stars Margaret Sullavan and Randolph Scott, had confirmed the jinx all over again. A cabled memo to Kay Brown ended, "Most sorry to have to say No in face of your enthusiasm for this story."
A few days later, second thoughts began. Another cabled memo to Kay Brown agreed that the novel had great possibilities, especially if filmed in color; but he was worried about the difficulty of casting the leads, and the high asking price for the rights, $65,000. Torn between enthusiasm and doubt for six weeks, he made no final move. In the Hollywood phrase, he sat on it -- "it" being the symbolic toilet seat which one cannot decide either to use or to leave. But Kay Brown was sure of her instinct. She sent the synopsis of Gone With the Windto the company chairman, Jock Whitney. His response was immediate, and he told her that if Selznick didn't buy the rights, he would go after them himself. This had its effect. Selznick made an offer of $50,000. A day or so later the director Mervyn Le Roy, who had by now got hold of an advance copy, offered $55,000.
To the end of her life Margaret Mitchell remained aloof from the movies. She enjoyed going to them, but had no desire to become involved with their world. The reason she accepted Selznick's offer was entirely personal. She had seen David Copperfield,admired it, and felt that her work could not be in safer hands.
As a child, Margaret Mitchell loved to ride horseback, but a bad fall permanently weakened her left ankle. In 1926 she was still living in her birthplace, Atlanta, was four feet eleven inches tall and as old as the century, married for the second time to John Marsh, an advertising executive, and walking on crutches, after violently spraining her damaged ankle. She was living the life of a semi-cripple and depressed by her lack of success as a writer. (Two years on the Atlanta Journal;a handful of short stories that nobody would publish; an abandoned novel dealing with the Jazz Age.) It is probable that she would have given up writing altogether if Marsh had not believed in her talent and applied pressure at a telling moment.
There seemed no way out of trying again. As long as the ankle refused to heal, her social life was curtailed, she was unable to dance, which she loved, and the days were spent in reading and playing bridge. Most of all, it would please her husband. So one morning she limped to her typewriter and began writing a novel about the Civil War. Until she was ten years old, she hadn't even known that the South had lost it. Her mother took her on a buggy ride, showed her the surviving ruins of gutted plantation homes in the countryside beyond Atlanta, and broke the important news. Later she said that this tale of defeat haunted her and the war itself continued to cast a shadow across her life. She grew up in a city where memories of it, through people and places, were still vivid; and another journey that lingered in her mind was a visit to some relatives on a farm twenty miles south of Atlanta. It had belonged to her grandmother, who escaped there on the last train out of Atlanta before Sherman arrived.
When she began the novel, she knew only the beginning and end of the story, and wrote the last chapter first: Rhett Butler walking out on Scarlett. In fact, she hardly ever wrote in continuity, skipping between events that took place years apart and storing each chapter in a large manila envelope. As time passed, the envelopes faded and became blotched with coffee stains. On some of them she scribbled kitchen recipes and grocery lists. Lack of confidence made her secretive; she allowed only her husband to read the work in progress, but disclosed something about it to a close friend, Lois Cole, who later went to New York to work for the Macmillan publishing house. The rest of her friends knew that something was up, because a visitor would arrive unexpectedly from time to time and catch her hobbling to hide a bulky envelope underneath a cushion on the sofa. No questions were asked because they had always considered Peggy Marsh a mystery, and she had an aura of privacy that people instinctively respected. A Catholic, she'd divorced her first husband after a few months, and married his best man. Uncommunicative about herself, she was a lively conversationalist on many other topics. "If you want your dinner party to be a success," said a friend, "invite Peggy Marsh." After the novel came out, many people said that she looked like Melanie Hamilton but in person was really much closer to Scarlett. This displeased her. The tiny, soberly dressed lady always insisted that Scarlett was "a far from admirable character."
Her heroine began as Pansy O'Hara, a character from one of the author's unpublished stories, Melanie was at first called Permelia, then Melisande, and when she'd been writing for about a year Fontenoy Hall became Tara. This accidental, haphazard method continued for two more years, with alternate versions of several episodes adding to the pile of manila envelopes. (How to kill off Scarlett's second husband, Frank Kennedy, was not solved until a few months before publication.) It is clear she drew a few scenes from personal experience. In 1918, while she was away at Smith College in Massachusetts, her mother died during a flu epidemic in Atlanta; in the novel, Scarlett returns to Tara and learns that her mother died of typhoid. Later that same year she became engaged to a young lieutenant who went to France and was killed there, just as Scarlett's first husband goes off to war and loses his life (less heroically) right after their marriage. In 1919 she scandalized Atlanta society by performing an exotic Apache dance at a party organized for charity by local debutantes. No well-brought-up girl was expected to behave like this so soon after her mother's death, and Gone With the Windechoes the situation when Scarlett appalls everybody by dancing with Rhett in her widow's black at the Atlanta Bazaar. In 1920 a major fire broke out in her native city, and she worked all night at a panic-stricken emergency center. For Scarlett's escape from a burning, terrified Atlanta she no doubt consulted her memories as well as the history books.
By 1930 the novel was about two-thirds finished and the manila envelopes contained over a thousand typewritten pages. It still lacked an opening chapter, several connecting passages, and a title. She hesitated between Another Day, Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars,and Tote the Weary Load,not really satisfied with any of them. And by this time the weary load itself was beginning to get her down. Her ankle finally healed and she could escape back to the social life, country club luncheons, dinner parties, and dances.
When the Marshes moved to a new apartment, she stored all the envelopes in a closet. Because her husband continued to apply pressure, she worked at trying to finish the book from time to time, but the original impetus seems to have been lost. "I hit the book a few more licks in 1930 and 1931.. ." She developed a curious, maddening indifference to the enormous amount of work she'd already done, and five years later the novel was still incomplete, the envelopes fading in the closet. In 1934 she hardly hit the book any licks at all, since her neck was in a brace after an automobile accident. In April, 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan was visiting Atlanta, and he knew about the novel through Lois Cole, now an associate editor and his colleague. "If she can write the way she talks," said Lois Cole, "it should be a honey." Latham met her at a country club luncheon and asked to see the manuscript. "I have no novel," she told him, surprised and alarmed, but Marsh persuaded her to take it to Latham's hotel next day. Summoned to the lobby, he saw the tiny lady sitting on a divan beside the biggest manuscript he'd ever encountered in his life, the pile of envelopes reaching to her shoulders. "Take the thing before I change my mind," she said, and was gone again.
After buying a suitcase to carry the mass of envelopes, Latham began reading the novel on the train to New Orleans. Physically, it was one of the most discouraging manuscripts ever offered to him, the pages now yellowed and moldering, the typescript covered with pencil corrections. A cable awaited him at his hotel in New Orleans. "SEND THE MANUSCRIPT BACK HAVE CHANGED MY MIND." Ignoring it, he continued reading the work on the train back to New York; in spite of the gaps and the rough, unrevised quality of parts of the writing, he sniffed a best seller. He made an immediate offer to publish the book -- if only she would finish it. Astonished, she said to her husband, "I don't see how they can make heads or tails of it." Then she worried about how the South would receive the book if she allowed it to be published. If Atlanta disapproved, wouldn't she be socially ostracized? Marsh cajoled her into accepting the offer; then both he and Latham pressured her to work for another six months, during which she checked all the historical details, rewrote the opening chapter several times, decided that Frank Kennedy should meet his death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, and finally found her title in a poem by Ernest Dowson, "Cynara."
Macmillan scheduled the publication of Gone With the Wind for April, 1936, deciding to print 10,000 copies priced at $3. Then the Book-of-the-Month Club wanted the novel for its July selection; publication date was delayed accordingly and 50,000 more copies were printed. By the end of July, it was clear that a phenomenon had occurred. The New York Timesgave the novel an enthusiastic front-page review in its book section, the New York Suncompared it to War and Peace,Stephen Vincent Benet, Robert Nathan, and a visiting H. G. Wells endorsed it, and the entire Southern press quieted its author's fears with a chorus of praise. Within six months, half a million copies had been sold, and the figure would be more than doubled when the book had been out a year. In 1937 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Even the less amiable reviewers, the left-wing papers that accused it of glorifying slavery, the critics like Malcolm Cowley and Louis Kronenberger who found it indifferently written, had to admit its extraordinary impact and the appeal of its passionate escapism.
As a work of literature, Gone With the Windis no better and no worse than most best sellers, but with women it struck a deep emotional chord, rather as the immensely superior Jane Eyrehad done in England almost a hundred years earlier. Charlotte Bronte's heroine was the first emancipated young lady, determined to assert her independence in the face of social pressures, in Victorian fiction. Not beautiful, but sensual, not rich, but intelligent and strong-willed, her relationship with men was a duel. The emotional point she made to women readers was resistance to male domination. Scarlett O'Hara is a glamorized version of the same idea. Attractive, spoiled, selfish, she can still act like a man at moments of crisis, and even though Rhett Butler walks out on her at the end, it's not certain that she won't get him back. In any case, she's a survivor, and her unbroken spirit continued the revolution that Charlotte Bronte began. "I still feebly say," Margaret Mitchell wrote to a friend, "that it's just a simple story of some people who went up and some who went down, those who could take it and those who couldn't." Her Scarlett could take it, and for thousands of women she raised the basic question of exactly what "independence" involved and how high the stakes should be raised.
Her effect on her creator, Peggy Marsh of Atlanta, born Margaret Mitchell, remains ironic and a little sad. By writing Gone With the Wind,Margaret Mitchell struck her own blow for women's independence, but it was reluctant and painful and would never have been sustained without her husband's help. Fame and fortune, when they arrived, seemed more a threat than a liberation. She retreated even further into provincial married life and never wrote anything more. "I'm on the run," she wrote soon after the novel came out. "I'm sure Scarlett O'Hara never struggled to get out of Atlanta or suffered more during her siege of Atlanta than I have suffered during the siege that has been on since publication day." The limelight stunned her; she refused to go to Hollywood to meet Selznick and would have nothing to do with the production of the movie.
In 1945 her husband had a heart attack from which he never completely recovered, and Scarlett's creator became more Melanie-like than ever, patient nurse as well as devoted wife. In 1949, while crossing a street in Atlanta with John Marsh, she was hit by a speeding car and died five days later, a few months away from her forty-ninth birthday. Marsh survived until 1952, and was buried beside her in Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta.
The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to part two.
Copyright © 1973 by Gavin Lambert. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; February 1973; The Making of Gone With the Wind, Volume 231, No. 2, Pages 37-51
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |