Road to Tara Page 11

  The third-floor rear office in which the Sunday magazine was quartered was dark and gloomy. The entire staff worked in one large room with six battered desks, files jammed against the walls, and a telephone on the front reception desk that was constantly in service.

  “She had something of the look of a little girl playing dress-up in ‘grown-lady’ clothes,” Medora later recalled of Peggy’s first day as a reporter. “She wore a tailored dark blue suit and a white shirtwaist, anchored to the skirt with a big safety pin, which was very much in evidence before the day was over. But she was too serious about her new job to give the safety pin anything more than absentminded attention.”

  Peggy was told to use the desk at the entrance to the office, the same one that served as the base for the telephone. Except for Medora’s private extension, this was the only telephone for a staff of twelve, and people were constantly perched on the edge of Peggy’s desk as they talked on the telephone. The desk and chair were both so high that her feet didn’t touch the floor, but she had no complaints.

  Her first assignment — “Atlanta Girl Sees Italian Revolution,” December 31, 1922 — was an interview with a Mrs. Hines Gunsalas who had been to Europe on a three-month clothes-buying spree. Peggy had been assigned the interview in order to report the latest European fashions, but the lady just happened to mention that while she was in Rome the Mussolini coup had taken place. Peggy made a short mention of this at the end of the article, the name Mussolini being unknown to her. Angus Perkerson turned the item into the lead and heavily edited the article, making it a news rather than a fashion story. Peggy also came up against Perkerson’s tough standards and unrestrained criticism. Not only did he rewrite the piece, he told Peggy in no uncertain terms what she had missed and what was badly written. This shook Peggy’s confidence somewhat, but Perkerson thought she had potential and was positive that she would turn into a clever interviewer. Her second assignment was an interview with a local plant doctor — “Plant Wizard Does Miracles Here,” January 7, 1923. “There’s a man out Peachtree Street,” Peggy’s story began,

  who can give a strawberry plant a “shot in the arm” and make it feel so good that it doesn’t give a whoop for freezing weather. He has a bunch of these immoderately bold plants with big, red, juicy strawberries on them, growing out in the open air, right now — not in a hothouse or under glass — but in the chill of the January weather. And winter-bearing strawberries are not the only strange things that this plant magician has produced. He has pried into Nature’s innermost secrets, so that he is able to make ordinary plants and trees do extraordinary things.

  With a doctor’s hypodermic needle, he injects a mysterious solution into a plant and makes it forget all the traditions of its ancestry ...

  She goes on to describe Iverson G. Hodgins, Atlanta’s plant wizard, as

  ... a small man with a kindly face, a white mustache and a shock of white Paderewski-like hair on which a battered derby was tilted. A shirt open at the collar, a sailor’s pea jacket and a pair of muddy kneeless trousers completed his costume. But from the lips of the muddy little man issued faultless English and a bewildering flow of Latin names of his beloved plants.

  Perkerson printed the entire article (approximately three thousand words), this time as she had written it, and gave it a full page with a photograph of the wizardly gentleman himself. Peggy’s by-line for this story read, “Margaret Mitchell Upshaw,” her legal name. She was pleased to have a by-line, but, without John’s prodding she might not have gone that Monday morning, as she did, into Perkerson’s office to ask for a desk of her own and the title of feature writer. She got both, but it was several months before her salary was upped to the lordly amount of thirty dollars a week, still not on the level of the men in Sports and News. She was assigned another feature right away, and this time she wanted it understood that the by-line would read simply, “Peggy Mitchell.” It did.

  Her new desk was by the window. Railroad tracks ran directly below it and steam locomotives belched thick clouds of sooty black smoke that blocked the view in winter and made it difficult to breathe in the summer. Peggy quickly and aptly named the office “The Black Hole of Calcutta.”

  Peggy’s desk and chair had both been designed for a large man, and the janitor was called in to saw off about three inches from the legs of both. Medora Field Perkerson’s desk was directly to her right, and the women got on well from their first meeting. Medora was only a few years older than Peggy, a dark-haired, square-faced, capable-looking woman with many of Maybelle’S most striking traits — an authoritarian manner, which some might have called bossiness, a tremendous talent for organization, a social conscience, and a quick grasp of issues. Seasoned reporters would shrink a bit when facing Medora across her desk, but she quickly became Peggy’s protector — not that the young woman needed to be shielded for long, for she was able to give and take with the best of them in a short time.

  Erskine Caldwell, who was a Journal reporter during Peggy’s time, remembers her as being “stylish except for her high buttontop shoes with large, thick heels. She made a loud thumping sound when she walked.” Peggy was well aware of this, and she wrote Frances, “I look like a hat rack because I have to wear high-laced shoes on account of my ankle, and no matter what I wear I look awful.”

  Caldwell also recalls, “She was perky and friendly enough to have been nicknamed ‘Bubbles’ or ‘Smiley,’ but the feature writers did not associate much with the news and sports writers (the latter being the most prestigious group on the paper).... Life on the Journal was exciting journalism. Competition was the afternoon Georgian and the two papers had plants facing each other across the street. Both papers raced to get editions on the street and tried to outdo each other with blazing headlines. Atlanta was a great railroad and hotel town in the twenties, and was perhaps the leading convention city of the South. There seemed to me a constant flow of well-known political, business, and sports personalities, ready and willing to make comments and give interviews. A real good newspaper town.”

  And William Howland, who was also on the staff then, adds, “As rugged as was the physical setup of the Journal in the twenties, perhaps even more rugged was the professional setup. Those were the days ... of Extra editions, when newspapers strained every nerve and muscle to be on the street first with any big news; when the newsboys calling ‘Extra! Extra!’ were the public’s first warning of sensational events.”

  Despite their grubbiness, the Journal offices had an undeniable esprit de corps. At lunchtime, the cafeteria on the ground floor, nicknamed by its clientelle “The Roachery,” was crowded with every level of employee, from top executives to pressmen in soiled overalls and sweaty shirts, all sitting at rickety tables or milling about the counter, shouting back and forth, telling jokes as they ate “the rugged fare.” According to Howland, it was a rowdy, free-and-easy group and, though they complained about the low pay, they worked for the paper with “an enthusiasm money could never buy. They cursed the long hours and at the end of the long day, they had steam enough left over to work up elaborate practical jokes involving the connivance of every department of the paper.”

  Within a short time, Peggy was accepted as one of the team. She was seeing John Marsh on a steady basis, but it seemed a close friendship rather than a romance to those who knew them both. More and more, she grew to depend on him, not only showing him most of the stories she wrote before she handed them in, but often giving them to him for editing. One early story that survives in galley has his hand-written corrections and deletions on it, and the story was published exactly as he edited it. The title, “Atlanta Sub Debs Pass up Tutankhamen,” is also written in his hand, over her by-line. The corrections are pedantic, and do not affect the style of the piece. Still, there is no question that Peggy benefited greatly from John’s English-teaching, copy-editing background, for her work soon had a polished, professional flow to it.

  Peggy worked a six-day, sixty-hour week, leaving the house at seven in
the morning before Bessie arrived. She took the trolley that went right past her house, breakfasted at the Roachery, and was the first of the day staff to appear at the Journal offices. Within a few months, she had become the most prolific feature writer on the paper. According to the records that still exist, in her four years and four months on the magazine, Peggy wrote 139 by-lined features and 85 news stories, assisted in the writing of a personal-advice column and a film column, and wrote a chapter for one of the Journal’s weekly serials when parts of a manuscript were lost. She could be counted upon to do a good job on any assignment she was handed, to meet deadlines, and never to complain when she pulled night work or when a story did not earn a by-line. For that matter, few of her stories for Harlee Branch in News were signed, and, though Branch liked Peggy personally, he still gave the men on his staff first consideration.

  Not only was Angus Perkerson a dour man, he was also a tyrannical taskmaster. If a word was not exactly right, he made the reporter go back to the dictionary for a better one. Facts had better be correct; references, noted; and spelling, accurate. Peggy adhered to his rules without complaint. Nor did she ever turn down a story or feel that any assignment was beneath her. And thanks to Marsh’s editorial help, her writing seldom required copy-editing. She wrote her leads last and her final paragraphs first, a curious habit that she was to retain, not “due to any Chinese blood,” she explained, “but to the fact that I am an effect to cause reasoner rather than a cause to effect one.”

  Her stories were typed on an old upright Underwood that lacked a back-space key, but that “had the sweetest running movement,” she said, “of any typewriter I ever used.” In truth, Peggy enjoyed her newspaper days as she never quite enjoyed anything before or after. Best of all, she liked interviewing Atlanta’s elderly. “Most of the things I asked them,” she was later to comment, “had nothing to do with the story I wrote eventually. I was interested in how people felt during the siege of Atlanta, where casualty lists were posted, what they ate during the blockade, did boys kiss girls before they married them and did nice ladies nurse in the hospitals.” She had no idea why she asked such questions, except that she “just wanted to know those things.” She always liked to hear people talk about the things they knew best, and it was the war and the hard days after that the old-timers recalled most vividly.

  Politics and economics held little appeal for Peggy and she seldom covered these subjects. However, she did interview Vice-President Coolidge when, shortly before President Harding’s death, the Coolidges came through Atlanta. She did not remind him of their meeting at Mrs. Pearson’s, but she made note of his “taciturnity” and his “spindly legs,” and took up a good amount of space discussing the Vice-President’s penchant for window-shopping. Mrs. Coolidge commented that he often returned from these excursions with a purchase that he thought she might like, and that at these times — and although he was a frugal man — “he became the most extravagant of husbands.”

  In March, just ten weeks after she had started the job, Peggy interviewed Hudson Maxim. A controversial figure, Maxim was known as the world’s greatest inventor of high explosives and smokeless powder. As such, his opinions often gave an insight into what was happening in the arms race between countries. Peggy started her article with a good lead:

  Mrs. Maxim, tiny and sweet-faced, was holding Hudson Maxim’s bare feet in her lap, drawing on his socks in their room at the Piedmont Hotel, where the interviewer entered somewhat abashed.... Hudson Maxim tugged at his white beard and smiled — a sturdy old man with a magnificent leonine head topped by a mass of unruly white curls, a personality as well as a celebrity.

  But buried in the middle of the three-thousand word article is this amazing quote of Maxim’s, which elicited no editorial comment from Peggy:

  There will be another war with Germany ... the biggest war the world will ever see ... between the clear-thinking sane people of the world and insane rabid force. A war that will be fought with weapons never even thought about before, high explosives that will lift entire towns off the maps — bombing planes that will carry huge crews and worst of all the gas ... the United States Government has at present a formula for poison gas that is the most destructive thing the world has ever known.

  To say that Peggy Mitchell was a great newspaper reporter would be an overstatement, for she never had a strong point of view and seldom caught the social or political ramifications of her articles. But she did have a unique eye and an ear for stories that would hold a reader’s interest, and she possessed a fine ability to describe what she saw and heard in a fresh way.

  A persuasive interviewer, she could often garner information withheld from one of the gruffer newsmen. When she did land a good news lead in this fashion, Angus would pull the story and send it down to Harlee Branch in News. Perkerson recognized, as did Medora and their co-workers, that Peggy had a great instinct for a story and an eye for detail; she could take a report on the Traveler’s Aid or the Atlanta Humane Society and turn it into a gripping well-researched piece that qualified as a front-page Sunday magazine article.

  Whenever Marsh could, he accompanied her on assignments. His job was not as exciting as hers and he was beginning to live vicariously through Peggy, enjoying her adventures and achievements. He remained cautiously in the background, waiting in hotel lobbies while she did interviews in celebrities’ rooms, or remaining in the car when an assignment took her to a subject’s home, or jail cell, or hospital ward.

  Her work, John, and the big house on Peachtree Street left Peggy little free time, and she saw less and less of her old friends at the Yacht Club. Her father and brother were delighted by this and felt Marsh was a steadying influence. To some extent this was true, but more important was the fact that Peggy had finally found something that she enjoyed doing — gathering facts for stories, meeting interesting and exciting people, traveling about the city.

  Curiously, what she liked least about her job as a reporter was actually sitting down at her old Underwood and writing her stories. Medora noted, “Writing always came hard to Peggy. I could always tell when she was stuck, for she would get out her lipstick and make up her mouth.”

  One bright spring morning, for the sake of a good story, Peggy allowed herself to be strapped into a boatswain’s chair — which she judged was “about as large as the palm of your hand” — and shoved out of a window on the top floor of a fifteen-story building that had been selected as an imitation Stone Mountain, the site for the carvings by sculptor Gutzon Borglum that would “bring into existence the world’s most magnificent monument to the Southern Confederacy.” The idea was for Peggy to simulate the experience Borglum and his assistants would have while carving the work hundreds of feet up in the air. She wrote:

  In an enormous pair of size 40 overalls, which gave the effect of a deep sea diver’s costume, and with a hammer and chisel to complete the workmanlike rig, I was strapped and swung far out of the window. A dizzy whirl — buildings, windows, a glimpse of the sky, anxious faces at the windows, all jumbled up for an instant of eternity, a feeling of nausea, then BUMP! completed the first swing in the air and I came against the side of the building with an awful wallop. The wall felt good. It was rough and it hit me with a jolt, but it was solid and secure. Before I could catch hold of it, however, Newton’s third law of motion asserted itself — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — and pendulum-like we started to swing out over the great, wide world again.

  “Hey!” shouted a distant voice. “Look down this way and smile!”

  Smile! Ha! Smile! Imagine that at a time like this! Except that both hands were so busy holding on to the leather straps I would have laughed up my sleeve at him. I glanced down to give him the most cutting, scornful look in my repertoire and — What a sensation!

  The realization of how high above the world I was hit me with a jolt. There was a sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach. I jumped. The seat of the swing slipped from under me for a terrible in
stant, I hung there spinning, with only the strap under my arms between me and the hard, hard street 200 feet below.

  Fortunately I had been fastened in so tight that I could hardly breathe and the strap held. They lowered me down the side of the building and swung me around some more and after a while they decided that the cause of journalism had been sufficiently served and they consented to pull me back up to the window and the thing was over. But the feel of solid floor beneath my feet brought back the jolly old bluff and I managed to pull a weak sort of smile and announce — “Oh it wasn’t so bad!”

  Directly after the publication of this article, complete with photographs of Peggy in action, she went to Angus Perkerson and asked that she be given the opportunity to write some stories of higher literary value. Her idea was to do a four-part series dealing with women in Georgia’s history. Perkerson was not keen on the idea but finally agreed, with the proviso that it be written when she had time to spare from other more “pertinent” stories (“Football Players Make the Best Husbands” and “How a Perfect Lady Refuses a Proposal”).