Chamblee54

As we started to discuss the other day, PG is reading I Remember Margaret Mitchell by Yolande Gwin. It starts with August 11, 1949. Margaret Mitchell, known to her friends as Peggy Marsh, went to to see “A Canterbury Tale” at the Peachtree Art Theater. She left her apartment on Piedmont Avenue, accompanied by her husband John. They parked across the street, and Mrs. Marsh was struck by a taxi, driven by Hugh D. Gravitt. She died August 16,1949.
This story contradicts what PG heard about the accident. The other story is that Mrs. Marsh had been at the Atlanta Women’s Club, having cocktails, where her husband met her. In this account, Mrs. Marsh was bombed, and never knew what hit her. ( One mile away, and fifty five years later, PG had an encounter with a speeding taxi. His story has a happier ending.)
On page 23, another myth is challenged. The traditional story is that if you asked Margaret Mitchell if she based Scarlet O’Hara on herself, she would look horrified, and say “Scarlet O’Hara was a hussy”. This view is challenged by an Atlanta native, who went to a party, and saw that Margaret Mitchell was the life of the party. The Atlanta native said her father “Scarlet O’Hara is certainly the personification of Margaret Mitchell”.
Margaret Mitchell was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal. She married John Marsh on July 4, 1925, and injured her ankle in 1926. Every day Mr. Marsh brought home books to his bedridden wife. One day, he brought home a writing pad, and said “You have read everything I’ve brought you so now you write a book.”
The couple lived in a small apartment on Crescent Avenue, across from a mural of a southern colonel. (He said, I would even go north for Southern Bread.) They moved out of “the dump”, in 1932, to an apartment at 4 17th Street. When Peggy sold a few books, and John’s career at Georgia Power prospered, they moved to the Della Manta. This was at the corner of Piedmont and South Prado, across from her beloved Piedmont Driving Club.
Mrs. Marsh wrote and wrote, preferring a typewriter to a writing pad. Each chapter was kept in a manila envelope, which were piled up all over the place. Some chapters were re written sixty times. In 1935, Harold Latham, of MacMillan Publishers, was in the south looking for talent. He persuaded Mrs. Marsh to let him look at her book, and would not give it back to her.
The title of her book was borrowed from a poem by Ernest Dawson, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae . The line of the poem was “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, (spell check suggestion: Canary) in my fashion; I forgot much Cynara, Gone With The Wind!”
The book became a runaway best seller. Macy’s of New York helped by ordering 50,000 copies. The idea was to offer GWTW as a loss leader, as Gimbels was doing. Federal price controls ruled this to be illegal, and Macy’s returned 35,000 copies to the publisher.
The first printing of GWTW has a mistake on the back page. The book was published June 30, 1936. The first edition says, on back of the title page, “Published May 1939”.
David Selznick bought the rights to GWTW, and you probably know the rest of that story. Shortly before the premiere of GWTW, someone at the Piedmont Driving Club pulled a chair out from under Mrs. Marsh. She had not started to stand up. Mrs. Marsh  crashed hard on the floor, and hurt her back. This would require two rounds of back surgery.
Celestine Sibley tells a story about the Atlanta Women’s Press Club. Miss Sibley moved to Atlanta in 1941, and went to her first AWPC meeting, at the Henry Grady Hotel. “A plump little woman in a funny Carmen Miranda style hat” noticed the newcomer, and started to talk to her. In the early days of the war, there were blackouts, to save the city from German bombers. The plump little woman was an air raid warden in the area around Piedmont Park. Finally, Miss Sibley said she had to go catch the Piedmont-Morningside bus. Peggy Marsh said she had a car, and could take her home.
Pictures today are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.