Road to Tara Read online

  Road to Tara

  Books by Anne Edwards

  Biography

  Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy

  Vivien Leigh

  Judy Garland

  Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell

  Novels

  The Survivors

  Miklos Alexandrovich Is Missing

  Shadow of a Lion

  Haunted Summer

  The Hesitant Heart

  Child of Night

  Autobiography

  The Inn and Us (with Stephen Citron)

  Road to Tara

  The Life of Margaret Mitchell

  Commemorative Reprint of the Classic

  Anne Edwards

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT, United Kingdom

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 1983 by Anne Edwards

  First Taylor Trade edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Edwards, Anne.

  Road to Tara.

  Includes index.

  1. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900–1949—Biography. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3525.I972Z65 1983 813'.52 [B] 82–19520

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-899-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-58979-900-4 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Contents

  PREFACE

  Peggy Mitchell Marsh

  Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell

  Peggy Mitchell, 1919–1925

  Mrs. John R. Marsh, 1925–1936

  Margaret Mitchell, Author

  AFTERWORD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  NOTES

  Illustrations

  To S.C.

  Preface

  I DID NOT KNOW Margaret Mitchell personally, but, after a decade of involvement in her life and the writing of her one great novel, Gone With the Wind, I believe I know her better now than most of her friends did. My immersion in her work was not a quick, baptismal thing, but a step-by-step process led on by a curious set of circumstances that seem in retrospect to have been guided by fate.

  Ten years ago, I began a biography of the English actress Vivien Leigh, who, among other great film performances, had portrayed Scarlett O’Hara, the heroine of Gone With the Wind. For the purposes of my research, I visited Atlanta, Georgia. Miss Leigh had attended the premiere of Gone With the Wind there in December, 1939, and I wanted to recreate with firsthand authority the excitement of that occasion. To do this, I had to evoke a clear picture of the city as it was at that time and, since perhaps no city in the United States has grown and prospered and changed as overwhelmingly in the intervening years as has Atlanta, this meant interviewing a large number of residents who had been involved in the premiere activities.

  I learned quickly that Gone With the Wind, both the book and the film, had a special place in the hearts and lives of the people of Atlanta, as did their fellow Atlantan Margaret Mitchell, the author of this publishing phenomenon. It did not seem to me that even Thomas Wolfe was as closely aligned with his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, which he fictionalized in Look Homeward, Angel, as Margaret Mitchell was with Atlanta. I made some fine friends during my short stay in the city. Upon my return home, I wrote asking them questions — not further inquiries about Vivien Leigh and the premiere of Gone With the Wind, but about Margaret Mitchell, who, although I did not realize it, had already captivated me with the aura of mystery, defiance and drama that surrounded her extraordinary life and her tragic and dramatic early death.

  One morning, when I was waiting for the galleys of my biography of Vivien Leigh, I received a call from my agent. He informed me that Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the producers of such films as The Sting and Jaws, had acquired the sequel rights to Gone With the Wind and were looking for a writer to develop the story. Would I be interested? Since I had just seen the film several times to evaluate Miss Leigh’s performance in it for my book, the story and characters were fresh in my mind. I agreed to talk with David Brown in New York. A few days later, I was on a plane to California to speak with Richard Zanuck, and, by that weekend, I had been engaged to write “The Continuation of Gone With the Wind” — later to be called “Tara” — as a book which, if approved, would then be adapted for a screenplay.

  That summer, my husband and I spent ten weeks traveling through the South. Then I settled in Atlanta for a time. I worked in the same libraries, and in one case with the same librarian, that Margaret Mitchell had over forty years earlier. Almost everywhere I went in search of my material, I encountered men and women who had met Miss Mitchell in the course of their work, or who had a story they had heard about the writing of Gone With the Wind or about Margaret Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh. By the time I left Atlanta, I knew the names of most of Miss Mitchell’s close circle of family and friends and had met a number of them. I did not know it then, but my work on the life of Margaret Mitchell had already begun.

  “Tara: The Continuation of Gone With the Wind” was completed and was approved by Richard Zanuck and David Brown in the fall of 1978. James Goldman was assigned to write the screenplay. Unfortunately, at this writing, the film has not yet come to fruition. I went on to write the biography of Sonya, Countess Tolstoy. It was not until the winter of 1979, when I returned to Atlanta to visit my newfound friends, that I began actual work on this book.

  The destruction by fire of all of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind papers, unpublished manuscripts, and personal letters had been so well publicized that I feared an in-depth biography might be difficult. Margaret Mitchell, however, was a compulsive letter writer. She replied to something in the neighborhood of twenty thousand letters from admirers of her book (she did not like to use the word fan), and commented on, clarified, and argued points at length with her correspondents. It is impossible to calculate the extent of her personal correspondence, but with her good friends she did not let much time elapse between the receipt of a letter and her reply. From the time of the publication of Gone With the Wind, most of these letters were typed with a carbon. It was these carbons, as well as the letters that she received from her friends, that Margaret Mitchell’s secretary and a janitor in her apartment house burned at the insistence of Margaret Mitchell’s husband, John Marsh, and Stephens Mitchell, her brother. Letters were then written to Margaret’s correspondents telling them that she had requested that all her papers be destroyed, and asking that they be kind enough to comply. This instruction was not included in her will, however, which was handwritten by her just nine months before her death.

  Over the years, enough of Peggy Mitchell’s personal papers had been shown to me to indicate that friends had not destroyed her letters. To her good friend Edwin Granberry, professor of English at Rollins College, she had written a warning not to destroy her letters, that they were her bequest to him. She was aw
are that they would one day be quite valuable. Yet, money had little to do with her friends’ decisions not to sell or destroy Peggy’s correspondence. These letters kept her alive to them. She wrote to her friends as she talked to them. And when Margaret Mitchell engaged anyone in conversation, she was a real spellbinder.

  To those who knew Peggy Mitchell personally and shared their memories with me so that I could write this biography, I am deeply indebted. Never have I encountered such patience and careful recall as I did in the close friends of Peggy Mitchell. Almost everyone I contacted shared impressions and anecdotes. Some lent me their entire correspondence with Peggy. Others gave me photographs and memorabilia. Several key people in her life freely gave hundreds of painstaking interview hours and devoted additional time searching through their own personal archives and helping me ferret out the facts necessary for a truthful portrait.

  In the course of the writing of the book, an extraordinary discovery was made: Macmillan’s files on Gone With the Wind, previously thought to be lost, turned up in the riverside warehouse of the New York Public Library in four cardboard boxes, the contents yet to be inventoried. Inside were over a hundred manila envelopes filled with the editorial and publishing history of Gone With the Wind. There were all of John Marsh’s editorial comments and Peggy Mitchell’s changes in the manuscript, all of Macmillan’s letters to the author of Gone With the Wind, along with contracts, interoffice memos, travel diaries, foreign rights agreements, correspondence, and publicity records. Not only had the collection never been catalogued, it had never been put into acetate containers, so telegrams, newspaper clippings and anything on yellow copy paper had almost turned to dust. But a valuable cache of letters and contracts and memos remained.

  Of the many people who helped me to bring this intimate study of Margaret Mitchell to fruition, eight have contributed more bountifully than others: Frances Marsh Zane and C. Rollin Zane, Augusta Dearborn Edwards, Peggy Mitchell’s lifelong friend; Richard Harwell, editor of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind Letters, 1936–1949; Andrew Sparks, of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution; Olive Ann Sparks; and Franklin Garrett, historian and former president of the Atlanta Historical Society. I am especially grateful to Frances Marsh Zane for her permission to include some of John Marsh’s personal letters and photographs in this book, and to Stephens Mitchell for the right to quote from letters in the Margaret Mitchell Archives, University of Georgia.

  I owe special thanks to George Walsh of Macmillan, who was responsible for helping me locate and preserve the Macmillan papers in the New York Public Library; to Jeremiah Kaplan, executive vice-president of Macmillan; to John Stinson, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library; to J. Larry Gulley, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Georgia; and to Raleigh Bryans and Yolande Gwin of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

  I am also indebted to many other people who have contributed meaningfully to this book: the Reverend D. L. Blacksheet (Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, Atlanta), Professor Harold Blodgett, Philip Bolton, Miss Billie Bozone (Librarian, Smith College), Chris Bready, Mary Ellen Brooks, Katharine Brown, Russell A. Browne (Librarian, Dalton Jr. College), Erskine Caldwell, John K. Cameron, Mrs. Colquitt Carter, Mary Civille (the Atlanta Constitution,) D. Louise Cook, Bill Corley, Malcolm Cowley, Scott M. Cutlep (Dean, University of Georgia), the late Frank Daniel, Howard Dietz, Lucinda Dietz, Thomas F. Dietz, P. K. Dixon, Mrs. Margaret Gaydos, David Hammond, Diane Haskell (Newbury Library), Larry Hughes (Publicity Director, Macmillan), Diane C. Hunter (Director of Library Services, Atlanta Journal and Constitution), Herbert Johnson (Director of Libraries, Emory University), Dorothy Kasica (Alumnae Association, Smith College), Maureen J. Kelly (Harvard Alumni Records Office), Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Helen Lane, Estelle Lantzy (jonesboro Library, Clayton County), Sue Lindsley, Dr. Edwin Lochridge, Jr., Mrs. Helen Turman Markey, Mrs. Lethea Turman Lochridge, Linda Mathews (Special Collections, Emory University), Mrs. Colyne Cooper Miller, Fred B. Moore, Kathleen Morehouse, Fanny Neville-Rolse (Sotheby Parke Bernet), David M. Pelham, Deborah Perry (Atlanta Public Library), Miriam E. Phelps (Research Librarian, Publishers Weekly), Anne A. Salter (Assistant Archivist, Atlanta Historical Society), Mrs. Janice Sikes (Special Collections, Atlanta Public Library), Mrs. Patsy Slappey, M. M. “Mugsy” Smith, Jeff Stafford (Special Collections, University of Georgia), Marguerite Steedman, Mrs. Carlotta Tait, James Taylor (Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Georgia), Lloyd Terrell, Mary B. Trott (Archivist, Smith College), Samuel Y. Tupper, Jr., Mrs. Marshall J. Wellborn, Robert Willingham (Special Collections, University of Georgia), Patsy Wiggans (Archivist, Atlanta Historical Society), Herschel Williams, Ms. Margie Williams (Librarian, Margaret Mitchell Library, Fayetteville, Georgia), J. Travis Wolfe, Mrs. Yates-Edwards (Atlanta Public Library), Maurice C. York (Curator, East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library), Lydia Zelaya (Macmillan), Edwin A. Zelnicker, Jr., and to the following who granted me permission to reprint letters, excerpts, and photographs: Macmillan, Inc., the University of Georgia, the Atlanta Historical Society, William Morrow & Company, Inc., the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sue Lindsley, Edwin Granberry, Richard Harwell, and the late Finis Farr.

  I extend my deepest thanks to my publisher, Chester Kerr, and to my agent, Mitchell Douglas, and for the fine editorial help of Mary Cable, the superb copy-editing of Katrina Kenison, the early research assistance of Rosalie Berman, and the typing skills of Barbara Mitchell and Barbara Howland.

  My greatest appreciation goes to my husband, Stephen Citron. His contribution at each stage of this biography is inestimable. He took time from his own demanding career in music to travel with me to Atlanta and many other American cities where I had to conduct interviews and seek research material, and he participated in both of these trying tasks. He read my various drafts with fresh comments each time, and he encouraged and supported me through the entire period of the writing of this book. Road to Tara is dedicated with love and gratitude to him.

  Was Tara still standing? Or was it gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia? She laid the whip on the tired horse’s back and tried to urge him on while the waggling wheels rocked them drunkenly from side to side.

  — Gone With the Wind

  Peggy Mitchell Marsh

  Chapter One

  AS HE STEPPED off the train from Charleston into Atlanta’s bustling depot, Harold Latham entertained doubts about the success of his trip. It was an unseasonably warm morning for April, and he stood blinking his owlish, bespectacled eyes in the dazzle of the hot sun. A large man with a peaked face and a stomach that protruded above his belt, the vice-president and editor in chief of the Macmillan Company still had a certain jauntiness about him. He wore a stiff-brimmed Panama at a rakish angle on his graying hair, and he carried a monogrammed leather briefcase. He was annoyed that no representative from the local Macmillan office was there to meet him but he knew it was his own fault; he had taken an earlier train than his itinerary called for. To his further irritation, when he arrived by taxi at the Georgian Terrace Hotel on Peachtree Street, his suite was not yet ready.

  To fill the time, Latham went for a walk. He was disappointed by what he saw. Atlanta had none of the old Southern charm of the other cities he had visited on this trip. Indeed, it looked much like any Northern city of around five hundred thousand inhabitants. Most of the buildings and homes he strolled past struck him as the worst examples of Victorian architecture. Peachtree Street, one of the more elegant boulevards, had no peach trees and had little more than its width and sporadic patches of green curbside planting to recommend it, although there were large, old magnolia trees with dark, glossy green leaves in front of a few houses, serving as reminders that this was the deep South. Latham could not recall much of Atlanta’s history, but he knew that the city had been nearly razed to the ground by Sherman’s army in 1864, and that it had always been a railway terminus.

  In fact, Atlanta had been called Terminus in the 1840s. Later it was known as an “
over-seers’ city” because a great part of its cosmopolitan population was made up of citizens sent South by national concerns to found bases for their Southern operations. Most of Atlanta’s old families had made their money in real estate, by investing in their home product, Coca-Cola, or by taking advantage of the city’s geographical position, which made it a communications and distribution center. It was a city that was constantly outgrowing itself, changing too rapidly to fit any conventional mold.

  Latham had come South from New York to scout for manuscripts. It was 1935, and times were hard for most of the nation, but not for the publishing industry, which had nearly tripled its volume of sales since 1929. Books offered escape at an affordable price and, to fill the demand for them, publishers had been sending acquisitions editors to England to sign up British authors for American publication. Latham had been doing this for five years. Then, in 1934, to the industry’s surprise, Lamb in His Bosom, a first novel by a Southern woman, Caroline Miller, had not only been a best-seller, but had won the Pulitzer Prize. Excited by the idea that Mrs. Miller’s book might be the precursor of a trend, Latham went to Macmillan’s president, George Brett, and told him that he would like to head South in his search for new writers.

  In a young country scant on tradition and with few sagas of its own, tales of the vanquished South and its “lost cause” filled a hungry need for romance. For fifty years Southern writers had been creating a legend of the past in which, as one historian put it, “the great houses became greater, the lovely women lovelier, the chivalrous men more chivalrous, the happy darkies happier.” But now, since the Crash, some of the new Southern novelists had begun to deal with their homeland in an iconoclastic, sometimes grotesque manner. Erskine Caldwell, for example, in Tobacco Road, made the illiterate Jeeter Lester family repulsive in their squalor. Latham did not think much of Caldwell’s books, but their overwhelming success suggested to him that the book-buying public was fascinated by the South.