Gone With the Wind 9781844578719, 9781838713775, 9781844578733

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.bloomsbury.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Gone With the Wind Helen Taylor

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2015 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Helen Taylor, 2015 Helen Taylor has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. 6-7 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: HelloVon Text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), © Selznick International Pictures; 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), © Regency Entertainment Inc./Bass Films, LLC/Monarchy Enterprises S.a.r.l.; The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), © David W. Griffith Corporation/Epoch Producing Corporation; Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), © Warner Bros.; A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), © Charles K. Feldman Group Productions.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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978-1-8445-7871-9 978-1-8445-7873-3

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Foreword

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Overture

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1 ‘Selznick’s Folly’: How Gone With the Wind Was Made

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2 ‘The Greatest Star England Ever Gave Hollywood’: Britain and the Search for Scarlett

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3 The Racial Politics of Gone With the Wind

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4 Scarlett and Rhett – Destined or Doomed?

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Exit Music

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Notes

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Credits

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Select Bibliography

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Acknowledgments I am very grateful for the help of many individuals and organisations with this volume. The Victoria and Albert Museum, especially Olivia Stroud and Keith Lodwick, provided images from the Vivien Leigh Archive and Hollywood Exhibition materials. Keith has long supported my work on GWTW. Rachel Nichols of Topsham Museum gave permission for me to reproduce the photograph of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett nightdress. The curator Steve Wilson and curatorial assistant Albert A. Palacios of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas, Austin, assisted with the burgundy ball dress, which the Center allowed me to reproduce. Steve also helped with various queries. Socialist Worker gave permission to reproduce their spoof Reagan/Thatcher poster, which the Victoria and Albert Museum supplied. Staff at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, including Dr Liz Bird, shared Vivien Leigh materials and the Mander & Mitchenson Collection. James A. Crank has given me permission to quote from his forthcoming (still unpaginated) LSU Press collection, New Approaches to Gone With the Wind, and Mr Roger Squire agreed to my quoting from his grandfather Sir John Squire’s publisher reader’s report (Macmillan Archive). I was helped through the Archive by Alysoun Saunders and especially Elizabeth James. I have unsuccessfully attempted to contact the estate of George Brett for a further quotation from the Macmillan Archive. The two anonymous readers offered excellent constructive criticism. My editor Jenna Steventon offered shrewd critical advice, and Sophie Contento was a wonderful provider of screengrabs and help

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of many kinds. Chantal Latchford copy edited with a splendidly sharp eye. I am most indebted to my inspirational, supportive friend Richard Dyer and (as ever) to my own Rhett Butler, Derrick Price.

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Foreword It was a hot and humid afternoon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, some time in the early 1980s. To cool down, I plunged into an icily airconditioned movie theatre which happened to be showing a film I had first seen as a teenager. As the credits rolled to Max Steiner’s stirring score, I remembered how much Gone With the Wind had meant to me and how profoundly it remained part of my emotional baggage. Though a rational and (alas) rather sensible academic, I sat alone through nearly four hours of that romantic epic in a state of pure bliss, enraptured by the story, weeping profusely and laughing far more than I expected. Since the late 1960s, I have lived in and visited the South many times and, as a result of my fascination with the region, became a scholar of southern literature and culture. That afternoon in the cinema, I was appalled at the treatment of slavery and angry about the one-dimensional African American characters, and felt ashamed of my younger self’s enthusiasm. But still, I lapped it all up. At the end, as before and since, whenever watching this movie in a cinema or on BBC TV at Christmas, I knew I could hardly imagine another cinematic experience offering such an emotional rollercoaster and so many sensory delights. In 1989, during the fiftieth anniversary year of the film, I published Scarlett’s Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans, both as hommage to this work, and also as a tribute to the memories and associations of the hundreds of women I consulted in the creation of the book. My earnest political reason for writing was to place it within the context of American fiction and film about the South and – especially for British readers and audiences who were generally unfamiliar with debates about slavery and the American Civil War – to unpack the complicated race, class and gender

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meanings that are constantly in play within the work. My emotional reason was wanting to explain why this historical costume drama has so captured hearts and minds across the globe, not least my own. Since the late 1980s, my cohabitation with this work has been a fairly rocky ride with long periods of separation. Over the years, I have been in communication with memorabilia collectors, Confederate groups, students of film and southern culture, the woman who believes she is a reincarnation of the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell, and numerous fans and fanatics. I have watched sequels come and go, plagiarism charges against writers who dared revisit the work, TV serialisations, documentaries and news items at key anniversaries, new film prints, a failed Trevor Nunn musical, costume and star exhibitions, and attempts to establish tribute museums. New films about slavery, the Civil War, civil rights and southern culture have complicated and clarified our understanding of that region and its history. In recent years, thinking Gone With the Wind was now a rather embarrassing anachronism, I donated my small collection of books, beer-mats and calendars to Exeter’s Bill Douglas Film Museum, including (with some misgivings) the Scarlett O’Hara Barbie doll an ex-student gave me as a wedding present in 2003. I thought the film’s appeal would fade away as stronger meat took over the cinema. And yet it persists. My book was reprinted for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the film, and I gave talks where I met old and new enthusiasts. In early 2015, at a discussion about the film in a Gloucestershire club, two youngish women came up to me and poured out their lasting love for Gone With the Wind. This couple, sisters-in-law who had seen the DVD countless times, went everywhere the film was showing, to any event where it might feature, and in 2013 had double-handedly forced their local cinema to change the showtimes from afternoon to evening, to accommodate working mothers. Their daughters were called respectively Scarlett and Atlanta.

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So do we need yet another book about this work of dubious racial politics and already much-hyped and celebrated fame and acclaim? Should we not leave it alone and allow those who adore it to watch their DVDs with their daughters Scarlett and Atlanta, munching chocolates and clutching hankies to wallow in a classic love story? No. Gone With the Wind is too important to ignore or sideline in the history of cinema. This single work, with its combination of stellar performances, great production values, stirring score and monumental ambition, is one of the most beloved films of all time. Its impact has been too great, and its influence too lasting, on the world’s fitful understanding of the terrible narrative of slavery and the Civil War. In the following pages I will examine just what it is that makes this a complex, subtle and deeply problematic work of genius which – warts and all – for me and countless others ticks almost all the boxes of pure cinematic pleasure.

The classic Gone With the Wind poster

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Overture In 2013, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum hosted a hugely successful exhibition, called Hollywood Costume. Despite displays from films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and Titanic (1997), the costume most talked about and admired was Scarlett O’Hara’s green velvet dress made from Tara’s curtains. In popular discourse, Gone With the Wind (1939) is described hyperbolically as an ‘immortal’, ‘legendary’, ‘classic’ work that has somehow transcended its time, and can fly free of critical evaluation. The film’s producer, David Selznick, argued it had become ‘an American Bible’1 and surveys of American readers reveal that, excepting the Bible itself, it is their favourite book. Words like ‘survival’ and ‘endurance’, usually associated with high culture, are used to describe its longevity. A global treasure of a book and film, it continues to be a source of instantly recognisable reference, reworking and parody. Gone With the Wind is the story of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), a sixteen-yearold spoiled southern belle who reaps the harvest of luxury of the slave-owning Georgia plantation life, but is thwarted in love – her beloved Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) marrying his cousin Melanie Scarlett’s dress made from Tara’s velvet curtains, V&A Hollywood Costume Exhibition, 2012 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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(Olivia de Havilland). She is quickly plunged into the terrible challenges of the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, losing her home, getting her lilywhite hands dirty delivering Melanie’s baby and picking cotton, marrying three times and finally prospering as a businesswoman in Atlanta.2 Along the way, she murders a deserting Union officer, deals with the deaths of both her parents, many family friends, her daughter and best friend. She marries one man out of spite, and a second to pay off her debts. At the heart of the work is the complicated love triangle of Scarlett, Ashley and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). In one of the greatest on-off romances in literature and film, her (third) husband Rhett Butler, whom she comes too late to love, finally leaves her because he ‘don’t give a damn’. The story focuses on a small group of white families, hurled from a privileged and affluent plantocracy into a new world of war, the loss of loved ones, slaves and homes, and the necessity to earn a living when they had always assumed their wealth would ensure a life of leisure. Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the film explores the ways these upheavals traumatised and transformed them when the rules of their society no longer applied. This is also true of the black ‘house servants’, though their newly established emancipation seems to mean nothing, since relations with ‘their’ white masters remain much the same as ever. Gone With the Wind, known familiarly as GWTW, was described by Steven Spielberg as ‘one of the greatest American movies ever made’.3 The culmination of Hollywood’s Golden Age, it was – in historian Willie Lee Rose’s words – ‘the greatest publishing-viewing extravaganza of all time’,4 and (adjusted for inflation) is still the most successful movie ever made. It cost $4 million to make but has grossed over $400 million in the last seventy-five years. Its premiere in Atlanta, 15 December 1939, remains one of America’s most memorable cultural celebrations – though no black actors were invited to that segregated city. The following year, Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, the first

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African American to do so – and another fifty years would pass before her triumph was matched by Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost (1990). The film was nominated for thirteen and won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Vivien Leigh. A special award was given to production designer William Cameron Menzies, and the Irving J. Thalberg Memorial Award to its producer and mastermind David O. Selznick. Regardless of some scholarly and liberal disdain, Gone With the Wind has survived to tell a partisan story of southern history, and other literary and film versions skulk in its shadow. Our twenty-first-century world looks very different from that of 1939 when GWTW first appeared, brought into perspective by the acclaim given to Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), Steve McQueen’s film about the brutality of the slave South. In recent years, writers and film-makers have amply rebutted GWTW’s reactionary perspective on southern history, slavery and race – think of book and film Beloved (1987, 1998), and films such as Amistad (1997), Django Unchained and Lincoln (both 2012). Great epic 12 Years a Slave (2013), starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup

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production as it is, GWTW’s silence about the horrors of the slave system speaks volumes, and it is good that we now condemn its politics. Gone With the Wind gave the white conservative version of the Civil War a mythic status throughout a century which saw bitter struggles for progress in civil rights and relations between the races. There is no doubt that GWTW influenced and shaped popular views of southern history – in Steve Wilson’s words, it represented ‘a powerful touchstone for questions of race, gender, violence, and regionalism in America’.5 Yet both book and film versions have international iconic status, a reputation that has survived social and political change, critical attack and dramatic advances in the ways race is debated and understood. Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, published in 1936, is one of the bestsellers of all time, with at least 25 million copies and more than 155 editions published in most languages and countries. David Selznick’s film stands as possibly Hollywood’s most faithful adaptation of a successful novel. Its first musical version, Scarlett, appeared in Tokyo, 1970; many others have followed, the most recent in London, 2008. Despite many a rumour (Sergio Leone, for example, wanted to revisit it), there has been no remake of the film. There is no end to the information you can find about GWTW. A quick Google search turned up 9.4 million sites. Serious scholars have produced impressive studies of the book’s author, film and stars.6 You can buy deluxe box sets and anniversary editions in every format imaginable. There are countless GWTW heritage dolls, china figurines, song titles, cookbooks, themed restaurants and children and dogs named after its characters. One of the most celebrated political images of the 1980s imitated the famous film poster, showing Margaret Thatcher borne in Ronald Reagan’s arms. There have been parodies by The Simpsons and British comedians French and Saunders. Renowned Jewish scholar Gertrude Epstein changed her name to Scarlett after helping her parents flee Nazi Austria for England: ‘I identified with Scarlett O’Hara and the way she fought.

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Calling myself Scarlett completed my new identity and gave me strength.’ Tourists fly into Atlanta, Georgia, seeking in vain the Tara plantation, and instead find themselves buying Scarlett pop-up books and fridge magnets, Tara postcards and – yes – toilet seats at the Margaret Mitchell Museum and downtown stores. Novelists from Alex Haley and Julian Green to Sally Beauman and Andrea Levy reinterpret or refer to the work in their own writings. You can buy books on everything from GWTW trivia and memorabilia to a study of the Irish roots of the work. Crime writer Stuart M. Kaminsky published a Toby Peters murder mystery located on the film set (with Clark Gable as chief suspect). Titles claim to be the ‘ultimate’ or ‘official’ guides to the film. Indeed, published tributes get ever more extravagant and glossy. For instance, in 2014, the editors of Life produced a coffee-table book, Gone With the Wind: The Great American Movie 75 Years Later, while a dining- table chunk of a book was published by the Harry Ransom Center for its record-breaking anniversary exhibition, ‘The Making of Gone With the Wind’.7 If these do not slake your thirst, you can subscribe to the fanzine, The Scarlett Letter. Phrases such as Scarlett O’Hara’s ‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘Fiddle-dee-dee’, slave Prissy’s (Butterfly McQueen) ‘I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies’, and Rhett Butler’s ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’, have become familiar colloquialisms. Filmmakers have referenced and emulated technical aspects of the original, from Spielberg’s use of image, colour and music in The Socialist Worker poster featuring Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher by Bob Light and John Houston, 1982 (courtesy of Socialist Worker)

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Color Purple (1985) to James Kent’s moving crane shot of the dead and dying young men of World War I outside a French hospital, in Testament of Youth (2014), recalling one of GWTW’s most memorable moments. The 1977 TV series of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) was dubbed ‘the black Gone With the Wind’, and Brokeback Mountain (2005) ‘the gay Gone With the Wind’.8 Margaret Mitchell’s only novel, published in 1936, has sometimes been read as the quintessential representation of the moonlight-and-magnolias plantation romance, since it employs those tropes and characters of a genre best represented in nineteenthcentury fiction by Mary Johnston, Augusta Evans Wilson and Thomas Dixon. In recent years, following popular and scholarly attention to the book – including Richard Harwell’s collection of Mitchell’s GWTW letters, and biographies by Anne Edwards and Darden Asbury Pyron – it is now interpreted as working in dialogue with that tradition from the perspective of a suffragist’s daughter, a Dubbed ‘the black Gone With the Wind’, ABC-TV miniseries Roots (1977)

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rebellious young Atlantan and a woman who was both a loyal southerner and also a well-informed local historian, journalist and iconoclast. Born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell came from a wealthy Atlanta lawyer’s family proud of its Confederate ancestors and home city. As a child, on the proverbial southern porch she heard from parents and great-aunts stories and songs of the Civil War, attended parades commemorating Atlanta’s Confederate dead, and listened to searing accounts of the dreaded General Sherman’s burning of the city. She famously said, ‘I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war’.9 The novel, written after she had quit her journalism post because of minor illness, was both her own story and that of the city she adored. Reared in the southern belle tradition, Margaret (‘Peggy’) rebelled against her family, became a flapper and wild child (condemned by the ladies of the Junior League for a sexually explicit dance), and married a dashing bootlegger and violent alcoholic, Red Upshaw. Divorcing him after the relationship became abusive, she married their best man, a quiet and respectable businessman who supported her desire to escape from the world and to write the novel that became Gone With the Wind. It has not gone unnoticed that the name Mitchell first gave Scarlett, Pansy, and that of Rhett, are significantly similar to those of Peggy and Red. This was Mitchell’s only novel, but within its 1,000+ pages it contains multiple narratives of a conflicted and battered South; humiliated and angry post-bellum southerners; and the desperate aspirations of a Depression-hit region and nation. It also recorded the uneasy struggles and negotiations between races and genders in a rapidly changing South. The novel alludes knowingly to the mythified history of the South’s Celtic links, influenced by what Mark Twain dismissed as ‘Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments’.10 Thomas Mitchell’s Gerald O’Hara (no Cavalier) has decidedly peasant Irish roots, but nevertheless names the plantation he won at poker ‘Tara’ after Ireland’s sacred site of the gods and ancient seat of power. Margaret Mitchell’s biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, argues

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that the book adapts the Confederate novel to the realism and pessimism of post-World War I culture, reflecting Southern Literary Renaissance writers’ attempts to deal with the conflict between their past and a modernist future. Certainly, both novel and film addressed 1930s and 40s readers’ and audiences’ anxieties during a long decade of austerity, war and rising international fascism, as well as a volatile global economy. In subsequent decades, the work has had meaning for many kinds of reader-viewers who relish its epic sweep through war and its aftermath from the perspective of those left behind on the home front – notably strong, suffering women, epitomised by Scarlett O’Hara – and characters who share doubts and worries about their role in cataclysmic sociopolitical change.11 In many ways, the ‘moonlight-and-magnolias’ association owes less to Mitchell’s novel, and more to David Selznick’s film that riffs on earlier ‘southern films’, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) to The Littlest Rebel (1935) and So Red the Rose (1935). GWTW adheres to southern romantic Celtic mythology by presenting aristocrats and young gallants, stereotypical belles and great ladies; appears to celebrate faithful slaves, loyal freedmen and women, and

The Birth of a Nation (1915), starring Lillian Gish as Elsie Stoneman

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condemn shiftless fieldhands and troublemaking carpetbaggers. Reconstruction is seen through Scarlett’s eyes as unrelieved violence, corruption and profligacy. The film transforms Mitchell’s pretentiously named but workaday farm Tara, a ‘clumsy, sprawling building’ of whitewashed brick, into a splendid white-columned plantation home (with nearby Twelve Oaks even more glorious), and offers a gorgeous ante-bellum South mise en scène. Despite the sneers of Rhett Butler and the horrors of a destructive war, audiences’ sympathies are directed towards white southerners, and Mitchell’s ambivalence about the War, gender and family roles within the South, and confused, reactionary perspectives on race and slavery are somewhat obfuscated within a Hollywood epic. In contemporary multicultural societies, following the 1960s civil rights transformations of the United States, in which the South again played a bloody role, and the oppression of African Americans throughout the nation to the present day, there is understandable unease about the legacy of this work, and what it means for a civilised world that is trying to make reparation for the slave trade and slavery. Every time the book is reprinted and the film shown on TV, modern readers and viewers cringe at Scarlett’s fat, comical surrogate mother, Mammy, who lives for and through ‘her’ white family and Prissy, the comic buffoon who lies about her midwifery experience and gets slapped for her pains. When I interviewed women in the 1980s for my book, Scarlett’s Women, I found a generation of older women enthusiasts who had read this doorstop of a novel and seen the film in the late 1930s or 40s. They closely identified with the wartime horrors, deprivations and dilemmas of Scarlett and her family, loving the saintly, timid Melanie Wilkes, but reluctantly admiring bold, amoral heroine Scarlett, who flouts conventions to keep her extended family fed and herself satisfied. Many of these women shared the precious book around the family, and saw the film under the threat of air raids, returning home before the final credits in case of bombing (wrongly anticipating a conventionally happy ending). I also interviewed

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younger women who encountered GWTW from the 1970s onwards and saw Scarlett as a feminist role model, with Melanie dismissed as a feeble wimp – but they felt uncomfortable about the treatment of black characters and the scant regard paid to the issue of slavery. Gone With the Wind is a great adventure story and moving tale of courage, survival, endurance and loss. It is also a singularly idiosyncratic and unpredictable love story, a triangular struggle between two very different men and the woman they both love in their own way, with Scarlett discovering her own heart far too late. It is hard to think of another film that features a female protagonist who both defiantly bears the brunt of an epoch of history on her shoulders, and also makes audiences laugh at her naivety and selfdeception. If one applies the notorious feminist Bechdel Test (in which a film is judged according to whether it has at least two women characters talking to each other about something other than a man), then it passes with flying colours. GWTW carries a quirky and ambitious young woman character through a swathe of history, multiple life trials, covering most of women’s biggest challenges – the abrupt loss of adolescent dreams and innocence, the deaths of both parents, the loss of two husbands, an unborn baby and a daughter, a best friend, true love and a beloved home. And yet she survives with gumption, without becoming a victim – responding philosophically that she will think about her problems tomorrow since ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ I am often told that GWTW has given women courage to keep on trucking as well as to live against the grain.12 No wonder so many gather together to watch the DVD with a big box of tissues. As a ‘three-handkerchief’ film, this has no rival. At the emotional centre of this work there is also the red soil of Tara, the land of our fathers, the earth that nurtured and the importance of a struggle to rebuild a lost home and a safe haven. As Salman Rushdie argues about The Wizard of Oz, the idea of ‘home’ is complex, and often fraught with tension, nostalgia, regret.13 Being at, leaving and returning home are central issues in those two great

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films of 1939, a significant moment in world history when personal and national security were endangered. For a film specifically targeting female audiences already familiar with the romance genre, GWTW has an unexpectedly ambiguous ending. The resolution audiences would have anticipated never comes, and the great lovers separate with Scarlett pronouncing her determination to get Rhett back. Despite repeated requests, Margaret Mitchell was adamant she would say and write no more on the subject. David Selznick very much wanted to make a sequel as Vivien Leigh’s ‘next contractual picture’ for him. He also aired the possibility of Margaret Mitchell writing a short story (at great speed!) for his film The Daughter of Scarlett O’Hara, with Leigh playing the central role.14 Mitchell refused, and included in her will a proscription of any such sequel – something her nephew heirs chose to ignore. In considering the after-life of GWTW, Daniel Cross Turner and Keaghan Turner have described it as ‘an unending palimpsest, a source of serial authorship’.15 From the early 1990s, three writers were commissioned by the Margaret Mitchell Estate to write sequel novels, two of which were published: Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett (1991) and Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People (2007). Ripley’s novel was made into a TV miniseries. Each writer faced the problem of Mitchell’s rose-tinted view of the plantation South and relations between slaves and white families. The Estate is said to have attempted to deflect writers’ attention from the murkier sides of the slave and Reconstruction South, forbidding references to miscegenation, mixed-race characters and unorthodox sexualities. The popular southern novelist Pat Conroy had been invited by the trustees to tell the story from Rhett’s point of view. His ‘companion’ novel was to kill off Scarlett O’Hara in ‘the most memorable literary death since Anna Karenina threw herself under a train’. However, Conroy refused to accept any censorship of subject matter, claiming that the Estate’s proscription of homosexuality and miscegenation meant his novel would begin with the line, ‘After they made love,

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Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, “Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?”’ The novel was never written, but this witty comment is a reminder of the racial silences and evasions within the original, and the impossibility of creating a successfully transgressive sequel.16 The exception to this is African American writer, Alice Randall, who in 2001 – against the wishes of and despite a plagiarism court case by the Mitchell Estate – published her novel The Wind Done Gone with a cover proclaiming it to be “The Unauthorized Parody of Gone With the Wind”. Randall’s satirical look at GWTW (described by British critic John Sutherland as ‘a brilliant meditation on a modern myth’)17 ensured a distinctly unromantic perspective on the South’s various sexual and racial secrets and hypocrisies. The book was not published outside the United States and to date there is no film or TV version.18 However, perhaps sensitive to criticism of the novel’s racial myopia, and aware of the forthcoming 12 Years a Slave, the Margaret Mitchell Estate commissioned Donald McCaig to write a second GWTW-themed novel, this time a prequel about the figure of Mammy. Ruth’s Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind gave Mammy the Biblical name Ruth, and a backstory beginning in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). The first two-thirds describe her story and the final third is a first-person account by Mammy herself. As one African American commentator wryly said, ‘Don’t you just love how, in the 21st century, a 73-year-old white man can say “I want to give Mammy a voice” and the powers that be all think it’s a great idea?’19 The roll call of sequels, references and allusions to Gone With the Wind is testimony to its popularity and cultural sticking power. Using accessible narrative and characterisation, this book and film underline and interrogate for diverse audiences the meanings of the South and its heritage. Pernicious as its racial politics may be, GWTW challenges some religious and social orthodoxies, creates believably modern characters faced with recognisable dilemmas, and has addressed readers and audiences across time. Its opening spoke

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volumes to audiences weary of a long Depression, in the early days of World War II. The front page of the Atlanta Constitution, 14 December 1939, had two headlines the day after the film’s premiere – the larger, ‘CHEERS GREET FLASHING-EYED SCARLETT’, the smaller, ‘Nazi Pocket Battleship Battered, Driven to Neutral Port’.20 In her memoir, The Net of Dreams, Julia Salamon tells of her mother reading GWTW numerous times before she was sent to Auschwitz, and reading it aloud to her bunkmates as a form of mental escape.21 Molly Haskell reminds us that Joseph Goebbels banned the book and the movie and that, after liberation, the film’s opening was greeted with ecstasy, while Gavin Lambert relates that in Amsterdam and Vienna, ‘they wept like southerners after the premiere in Atlanta’.22 Each re-premiere of the film over the decades has received similar euphoric tributes. It is hard to think of another film heroine who is so instantly recognisable and compared repeatedly with powerful reallife figures like Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton. It is certainly the only film to be known universally by its initials, GWTW.

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1 ‘Selznick’s Folly’: How Gone With the Wind Was Made The story of the crazily chaotic yet miraculous gestation of Gone With the Wind has been told many times. Referred to early on as ‘Selznick’s Folly’ because of the audacious ambition of the project, this production of the newly formed Selznick International Pictures (SIP) generated national and international excitement long before its premiere. David Selznick was highly respected for his prestigious MGM adaptations of classic texts, such as Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities (all 1935), and a year following GWTW he triumphed again with Rebecca (1940). He had his own theory of adaptation, which required scrupulous fidelity to the original, and he was recognised as a master of the art. The only departure from this was when he saw a conflict between ‘beauty’ and ‘historical authenticity’, in which case the latter was sacrificed, or where the censor intervened (as with the dramatically altered ending of Rebecca, to ensure the murderer hero Maxim de Winter [Laurence Olivier] was absolved of his crime). David Selznick’s sons recounted the process in their own film, Gone With the Wind: The Making of a Legend (1988). It revels in detailing the early competition for film rights, Selznick’s drawn-out and controversial casting decisions, the many changes of screenwriter and director, his obsessively stubborn insistence on adapting the novel as faithfully as possible, and then the ambitious and elaborate sets and costumes, spectacular effects, long delays in filming, on-set squabbles, nervous breakdowns and other problems. So much public anticipation was generated that Warner Brothers was able to garner attention for its ‘spoiler’ movie Jezebel, which, to Selznick’s fury, came out a year before GWTW, piggy-backing on the later film’s prepublicity. Set in ante-bellum New Orleans, it features a headstrong

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and rebellious southern belle (Bette Davis). Although in black and white, the film uses similar characterisation and scenes to those in GWTW, and gave Davis the chance to play a version of the role Selznick had denied her. He retaliated by refusing to cast Jezebel’s leading man Henry Fonda as Ashley. Gone With the Wind was the work by which David Selznick wished his cinematic career to be judged. Produced by an intensely literary man with a passion for the faithful adaptation of novels, GWTW drew from and gestured to other art forms. It opens with a ten-and-a-half-minute ‘Overture’, heralding an operatic-style work. A long, complex film divided into two main parts and punctuated by an intermission, a seven-minute entr-acte and approximately four minutes of exit music, it foregrounds its own theatricality. The film resonates with an emotive and stirring score as well as musical scenes of parties and military bands. It is a very literary film, repeatedly enlisting titles and script (sometimes humorous) to describe rather than show action: the letter to Scarlett breaking the news of the death of her unloved husband Charles Hamilton (Rand Brooks), not from battle but measles followed by pneumonia; the Gettysburg casualty lists distributed to worried families; titles such as ‘SIEGE’ and ‘SHERMAN’; the cheque signed by Scarlett O’Hara Kennedy denoting her hasty marriage to Frank. In the scene of womenfolk awaiting the return of Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye) and Ashley Wilkes from their Ku Klux Klan-inspired violent attack on Shantytown, Melanie reads aloud from (not Les Misérables, as in Mitchell’s novel) David Copperfield, a nod to the Bette Davis as whiplashing southern belle in Jezebel (1938)

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film Selznick had produced in 1935 from Dickens’s original. He knew the book was fresh in readers’ memories and thus his audience would be ‘passionate about the details’ and critical of plot alterations or the miscasting of key characters.23 Selecting the leading male actors was a relatively straightforward job, compared to that of choosing his Scarlett (see Chapter 3). Although Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn were in the frame, the popular choice for Rhett was overwhelmingly the King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, but for various contractual and other reasons it took a year to secure him (for a role he did not want). In a memo to John F. Warton, SIP’s vice president, 20 September 1937, Selznick discussed three choices – Gable, Cooper and Ronald Colman, referring to the latter’s lack of ‘the virility and bite that are so essential to a satisfactory Rhett’.24 Gable was paid well for his virility and bite, and for most audiences, he deserved every cent. But in order to secure him, Selznick had to agree to his father-in-law List of Confederate soldier casualties issued following the Battle of Gettysburg

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Louis B. Mayer’s demand that MGM distribute the film and take a handsome share of the profits. The casting of Ashley Wilkes was less straightforward, though it seems that Selznick settled on Leslie Howard in the absence of anyone better. His concern about Howard was his age (forty-six when playing a man at least two decades younger) but the Anglophile producer described him as ‘an unusually intelligent actor’ and was certain this ‘English matinée idol would deliver a great performance’.25 Like Gable, Leslie Howard had little enthusiasm for his role, accepting it only on being offered the position of associate producer on Intermezzo, and has usually received a lukewarm critical response. The Selznick brothers’ film about GWTW shows the elaborate lengths to which make-up and hairdressers had to go to give the wrinkled Howard appropriately youthful looks. It was no easy task to convert Margaret Mitchell’s massive novel into a screenplay, and it took seventeen screenwriters to do so. The author refused Selznick’s repeated requests to adapt her book into film (in vain did he invite her and her husband to Bermuda for a ‘King of Hollywood’ Clark Gable as Rhett Butler

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short break so they could work through the script), and he then hired highly respected playwright Jane Murfin. She was ditched quickly when it emerged Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist/screenwriter Sidney Howard was available. According to Steve Wilson, Alfred Hitchcock – hired on a seven-year contract by Selznick – was also consulted on aspects of the screenplay. The extreme length of the script led Selznick to consider expanding one film into two or even three and – because of rising costs – making it in black and white. He also considered two intermissions after the first cut which lasted four and a half hours and, rather endearingly, insisted upon one intermission to give the audience a toilet break. Sidney Howard observed that Mitchell did everything ‘at least twice’, and he cut ruthlessly (even so, producing a first draft that lasted five and a half hours). Selznick, however, intervened and demanded changes that eventually drove Howard away. His obsession with being faithful to the text produced a final word from Howard: ‘Yes, I’m through. It’s not a movie script. It’s a transcription from the book.’ The script was then reworked by Leslie Howard plays Ashley Wilkes, with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara

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sixteen other writers, including Academy Award-winning Ben Hecht and (briefly) F. Scott Fitzgerald, who told his editor Maxwell Perkins he was forbidden to use any words except for Margaret Mitchell’s, with the book regarded as ‘Scripture’. Selznick’s refusal to relinquish control meant that he could not find a writer willing to complete a script to his requirements, and he later claimed the majority of the script was his own work (though in fact it was mainly Howard’s original, something tacitly acknowledged in the final credits).26 Although the final script raises few twenty-first-century eyebrows, in the late 1930s it was seen as daring and even subversive. The restrictive Production Code (known as the ‘Hays Code’) was applied to scripts before they were committed to film, and in the case of Gone With the Wind many concessions were demanded – including the proscription of any representation of rape, toning-down battle and childbirth scenes and obfuscating the fact that Belle Watling (Ona Munson) is a prostitute. In a long letter from the Hays Office, Joseph I. Breen requested scenes of the dead and dying be ‘not shot as too realistically gruesome’; he forbade moaning or crying during Melanie’s childbirth; and made numerous suggestions about removing any whiff of sexual suggestiveness, adultery, rape and provocative costume. The letter also advocated that the term ‘niggers’ be used only by black characters, replaced with ‘darkies’ when used by whites.27 Butterfly McQueen credits herself with persuading Selznick to abandon the ‘N’ word altogether. The most contentious issue for the Hays Office was the word ‘damn’, which the Hays Code specifically prohibited, but on which Selznick insisted for Rhett’s exit line. In the novel, Rhett says, ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn’, but Sidney Howard included the ‘Frankly’, which gives a splendid rhythm to the statement. After a protracted correspondence, and having secretly filmed two versions of the ending, Selznick finally wrote a long letter to Will Hays arguing the word ‘damn’ was not an oath or a curse, but here (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) a ‘vulgarism’. His strongest and most heretical argument was that the ‘punch’ at the end of the picture must

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follow the three hours and forty-five minutes of ‘extreme fidelity to Miss Mitchell’s work’.28 The Hays board debated the matter and – in the end – amended the Code so the word ‘damn’ would be discretionary. Despite Selznick’s small triumphs and compromises, when the film first came out in 1939, plenty of nations outside the United States wished to ban it, believing it to be a potentially corrupting vehicle for American capitalist values, or censor it for excessively sexual or suggestive scenes. As with other American films, the Third Reich, Nazi-occupied Europe, the Soviet Union and Communist China all banned it (though it circulated on black markets everywhere). Eire – notorious for cultural censorship – objected strongly to the sexual appeal and agency of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and demanded many cuts of scenes or imagery relating to sex, bodies, desire, reproduction, childbirth and miscarriage – though ironically they were happy with all the racially sensitive material. Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’

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This resulted in an unsuccessful top-level intervention with the censor by the American ambassador to Ireland, David Gray, followed by edits and cuts reluctantly agreed by Selznick, who later complained to Kay Brown that the Irish censor board had ‘ripped [GWTW] to pieces’. This followed a similarly high-profile request by Selznick to the American ambassador to England, Joseph Kennedy, to intercede over proposed English cuts.29 As with the script, David Selznick’s hands-on perfectionism and meticulous attention to detail, often communicated by interminable memos or telegrams, were qualities his production team and actors both admired and found utterly maddening, leading as they did to many a delay, over-spending and the firing of screenwriters, directors and others. There was a tension throughout filming between his desire for both ‘beauty’ and ‘authenticity’. He was frustrated that Margaret Mitchell, herself a stickler for detail, refused to advise him on dialect, costume, characters’ behaviour and so on, but instead he engaged two Atlanta figures she recommended as historical advisors – Wilbur Kurtz (Civil War and Atlanta expert) and Susan Myrick (southern culture and mores). They offered guidance on local specifics such as the layout of downtown Atlanta, the plants in bloom at certain times of year and dialect expressions used by black and white characters. Myrick also advised on the sensitive issue of the southern accent, so Selznick proposed accent classes for all the characters. That said, Clark Gable flatly refused even to attempt to sound southern, Leslie Howard tried fairly half-heartedly, but Vivien Leigh managed magnificently. Evelyn Keyes (Suellen, Scarlett’s sister) opined that Leigh had the best southern accent in the whole picture.30 It is impossible to exaggerate the level of personal attention the producer invested in small details. For instance, in an interview with Hollywood commentator Barbara Paskin, Ann Rutherford (Scarlett O’Hara’s sister, Carreen) described a small scene in which she and her sister Suellen were picking cotton. For about a week, she related, Selznick was waiting for the right kind of sunrise. Finally, at 3 am, the two women were driven forty miles to some cotton fields outside

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Hollywood that Selznick had arranged to be planted. He left instructions that she and Evelyn Keyes were to busy themselves picking cotton before daybreak, since he wanted them to look dirty and tired, with scratched hands. She recounts, ‘By the time they got the right sunrise we were the most bedraggled-looking, flea-bitten, scratched young women you could imagine. But he was that attentive to detail.’ Evelyn Keyes reported that he even brought in red dust from Georgia to put on their shoes and clothes. He insisted on layers of beautiful petticoats that would not be visible beneath their plain Civil War dresses because he wanted them to feel like rich plantation owner’s daughters.31 For Scarlett’s return to the ravaged Tara, he insisted on fifteen different dresses in various states of disintegration; the last few were rolled in a barrel with glass, stone and sand to produce the heavily worn effect.32 In the Laurence Olivier Papers, there is a black and white photograph of Leigh in one of these tattered costumes, slumped in a chair. On the back she has written to Scarlett O’Hara’s sisters Carreen (Ann Rutherford) and Suellen (Evelyn Keyes) pick cotton

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her fiancé, ‘Picture of a v. dirty girl – this is how your “celestial” one looks in the remains of “Tara” just before going to see Rhett in Gaol!’33 Under Selznick’s direction, costume designer Walter Plunkett even got round the fact that Vivien Leigh did not have the green eyes of the novel’s Scarlett by ensuring her costumes contained green which – when the hot lights hit – reflected green in Leigh’s blue eyes. Many cinematographic elements of the film were the grandest and most spectacular ever seen. Selznick employed several screenwriters and directors, two film editors, a composer and shadow, and a large crew of specialists in fire, lighting, costume and so forth. Wunderkind art director William Cameron Menzies was the most significant figure in the whole process. Called by Selznick ‘production designer’ (a role he had fulfilled on the producer’s earlier films), Menzies was in charge of all visual aspects of the film, from sets and costumes to cinematography and special effects. Working with art director Lyle Wheeler, Menzies produced the complete script in sketch form with detailed concept pictures, designed, masterminded and directed some of the best scenes. Jack Cosgrove produced a whole series of new special-effects techniques, using false frontages and paintings on glass for the grand houses. To open the film, Selznick wanted the biggest titles ever. Supervising Film Editor Hal Kern designed them so that the first word, GONE, filled the screen, followed by the other three, WITH THE WIND, sliding across to flag the epic grandeur to come. Filming began on 10 December 1938 with the burning of Atlanta sequence, during which old sets from King Kong (1933), The Garden of Allah (1936) and others were torched, using gas jets, smoke machines and tractors, with doubles for Rhett and Scarlett and dummies for the sleeping Melanie and Prissy. At the time, there were only seven Technicolor cameras in existence, and they were all used, involving many local fire departments, and alarming residents in the area who thought MGM was on fire. This spectacular sequence created the most dramatic filmed conflagration anyone had ever seen, while the ninety-foot ‘pull-back shot’ of dying and

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Atlanta burning; the dramatic crane shot of the wounded and dead in Atlanta as the Confederacy begins to lose the war

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wounded laid outside the makeshift Atlanta hospital was the highest and most ambitious undertaken in Hollywood, involving a construction crane borrowed from the Long Beach shipyards, 997 extras and 680 dummies. The score by Max Steiner, who also composed the music for Jezebel, interspersed military, patriotic and southern folk tunes with original music, and remains one of the most recognisable and much-hummed film scores. As the production became ever grander, Selznick sacked his first director and good friend George Cukor for lacking ‘the big feel, the scope, the breadth of the production’ (apparently favouring the more intimate scenes and female characters, though apparently Clark Gable had a problem with Cukor’s homosexuality). Distraught, Vivien Leigh wrote her then-husband Leigh Holman, ‘He was my last hope of ever enjoying the picture.’34 The varied use of Technicolor is particularly impressive, because it moves from the glorious array of colours in the early barbecue and Atlanta Bazaar scenes, to the muted and faded browns and dirty creams of army uniforms and bandaged wounded in

Scarlett at the Twelve Oaks barbecue surrounded by beaux who will soon die in the Civil War

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Widowed Scarlett dances with Rhett Butler at the Atlanta Bazaar; Scarlett steps among the dying and dead bodies outside the makeshift hospital in Atlanta

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hospital, and the threadbare, unwashed dresses and grubby clothes of the newly dispossessed. Finally there are the vibrant hues of Reconstruction Atlanta, with the pretentious stained glass, elaborate decor and bling of Scarlett’s and Rhett’s marital home, with its inhabitants’ rainbow wardrobes. Because GWTW focuses so heavily on the home front and thus the domestic lives of once-affluent white southerners, Victor Fleming makes considerable use of threshold spaces such as front doors, windows, balconies and porches.35 In particular, he returns repeatedly to that familiar trope of southern film – the staircase – as site of significant action, as well as a suggestive thematic link between the everyday and the nocturnal, linking social relationships and sexual desire, reason and passion. There is the Twelve Oaks stairway where Scarlett and Rhett first set eyes on each other, and on the road to Tara from burning Atlanta, Scarlett returns there to see the stairway wrecked and the vandalised house open to the sky. Then there is Aunt Pittypat’s (Laura Hope Crews) staircase where Scarlett The ostentatious Butler marital home in Reconstruction Atlanta

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Scarlett climbs the stairs at the Twelve Oaks barbecue, observing Rhett Butler (photograph by Clarence Sinclair Bull, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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Scarlett confronts Prissy on Aunt Pittypat’s stairs about childbirth

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watches jealously as Ashley and Melanie go up to bed during his furlough, and where she later angrily rebukes and slaps Prissy for lying about her knowledge of childbirth. The Tara staircase is where Scarlett murders the rapacious Yankee soldier and, in the marital Atlanta home, Rhett carries a remonstrating Scarlett up red-carpeted stairs for a night of sexual passion. On his return from Europe, they argue, she falls down those stairs and suffers a miscarriage. And after their daughter Bonnie’s (Cammie King) death, Mammy leads Melanie up that staircase describing the suffering of and recriminations between her master and mistress. In the film’s final scene, Scarlett pursues Rhett downstairs to beg him to stay, and when he leaves her for good, she slumps onto the bottom stair, vowing to get him back. As with other spaces, these staircases suggest the liminal and unstable nature of the characters’ lives and aspirations. The red stairs in Atlanta presage passion, danger, death – and are matched by the memorable red gowns Scarlett wears to the fraught birthday party, and to drink and fight with Rhett later that night. Red, associated initially with prostitute Belle Watling, is the colour associated with Scarlett herself as her sexual morality is condemned by her community and she is awakened to unfamiliar sexual pleasure. Indeed, the bordello style of her bedroom with its curtain swags and elaborate lamps – echoing Belle’s salon – suggests the anti-romantic materialist compact she made with Rhett by marrying him, and – in line with her shifting class position – allies her ironically with that other working woman. The film’s design also underscores the dark and threatening elements of war and family breakdown through repeated use of chiaroscuro. Stark contrasts and thematic linkage of colour and blackness remind the audience of the human costs of the conflict, and suggest the racial tensions at the heart of the Civil War. For instance, there are the ominous shadows cast by Scarlett and Melanie in Atlanta’s makeshift hospital, and the enlarged image of Dr Meade (Harry Davenport) threateningly leaning over a Confederate soldier’s leg about to be amputated; then poignant shadows of Gerald and

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Melanie Wilkes and Scarlett O’Hara nursing in Atlanta’s makeshift hospital

Gerald O’Hara impresses on his daughter the importance of the land of Tara

At Tara, torched by Sherman’s troops, Scarlett vows ‘never to be hungry again’

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Scarlett together in a wrecked and looted Tara as he distractedly counts his (worthless) Confederate bonds. In the final scenes, shadows of grotesque furniture overlook the drunken row between Rhett and Scarlett, and ghost-like figures play on the walls of the various deathbeds and houses of mourning. Before the War, the silhouetted duo of Gerald and Scarlett against the red sky and earth is heart-rendingly echoed by the solitary figure of Scarlett uprooting a radish from Tara’s ravaged earth and declaring she’ll ‘never be hungry again’, while in the film’s final shot she stands alone, a tiny figure defiantly facing the future. Walter Plunkett’s costume design is one of the glories of Gone With the Wind and has often been cited as a main source of audiences’ visual pleasure. Selznick considered others, but was so impressed by Plunkett’s sketches, he settled for the man he and George Cukor had previously worked with, who had a distinguished pedigree in film, including King Kong and The Adventures of Tom

Scarlett in ruffled white frock, fleeing the Tarleton twins who have revealed Ashley's imminent engagement to Melanie

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Sawyer (1938). Plunkett made approximately 110 costumes for the four main characters alone, having an eye for outfits that would both reveal character and also tell (often ironic) stories. Scarlett’s first two dresses – the white ruffled frock in which she greets the Tarleton twins (Fred Crane and George Reeves), and the green-sprigged, lowcut creation with huge sun-bonnet over flowing hair, in which she attends the Twelve Oaks barbecue – adorn the region’s most eligible and self-obsessed southern belle in confident times. They contrast strongly with the more modest dresses of other women of her class, and of course the drab and dark habits of slaves. Her mother’s wedding dress decorated fussily with about 150 silk leaves, in which she miserably marries Charles Hamilton, is swiftly followed by the severe black dress, hat and chignon Scarlett grumpily wears as a new widow, telling her mother such an ensemble means ‘her life is over’. Rhett’s gift of a green velvet bonnet from Paris, a welcome change from mourning clothes, gives Scarlett extra poignancy as she wears it Scarlett in mourning dress delightedly tries on the bonnet Rhett brings her from Paris

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while jealously watching drearily dressed Melanie greet Ashley at the station. Indeed, Scarlett’s gloriously elaborate hats – designed by top milliner John P. John – function in different contexts both to set the heroine apart from other women in times of hardship, and to emphasise her narcissism and the personal vanity she shares with Rhett Butler. As the story proceeds, and the War makes sartorial extravagance impossible, the similarity between everyone’s dress underlines the somewhat uneasy race and social class flattening brought about by war. The elegance of renegade blockade-runner Rhett, and the increasingly flamboyant costumes in bright pinks and reds sported by his mistress Belle Watling, as well as ex-overseer Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory) and his ‘white trash’ wife Emmy Slattery (Isabel Jewell), remind the audience of those profiteering from war, and the class shifts involved. A signifier of Melanie and Ashley’s compassionate integrity is the new tunic Melanie makes from cloth sent her by a mother whose dying son she had nursed

Outside the jail, Scarlett in ‘curtain dress’ meets Rhett’s mistress, elaborately adorned Belle Watling

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through to death. Scarlett tries to upstage this by making a sash that she provocatively ties round Ashley’s waist. A reminder of the way characters are being forced to adapt is that Scarlett and other white women lose their hooped skirts in favour of long drab dresses. And when Scarlett goes to the hospital hoping to fetch Dr Meade to deliver Melanie’s baby, she wears over her very plain, petticoat-free, homespun dress – almost identical to Prissy’s – a sun-bonnet very similar to that worn at the Wilkes’ barbecue, battered and worn at an awkward angle without a bow. Make-up emphasises this, too. For instance, in the Atlanta evacuation scene, Leigh described how, twenty times in one day, the make-up man ran to wash her face then ‘dirty it up again to just the right shade of Georgia clay dust’.36 Reduced to prostituting herself to get hold of jailed Rhett’s ‘millions’, Scarlett throws off her much-worn shabby day dress for the baroque glory of the green velvet hat and dress made from Tara’s curtains. After failing to get Rhett’s support, and following her opportunistic marriage to Frank Kennedy, she returns to Tara in a modest, matronly brown silk dress buttoned up the front – a The burgundy ball gown Scarlett wore to Ashley’s birthday party (courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin)

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deliberately sub-fusc outfit by way of apology for stealing Suellen’s beau. Later, during the sexual stand-off in her marriage to Rhett, and defined by the community as Ashley’s whore, she is adorned in the stunningly vampish burgundy velvet evening dress selected by Rhett to shame her at Ashley’s birthday party. This moment of her greatest humiliation is expressed to perfection by a provocatively gaudy dress – tight-fitting, feathered, sequinned and deeply cut to reveal her decolletage. And throughout the film, with each family death, the recourse to black mourning clothes reminds us of the slaughter of young lives in that terrible War and its aftermath, as well as the deadly impact on those left behind. Selznick was similarly attentive to the men’s costumes, especially those of Clark Gable. In a memo, Selznick praised Gable’s own dress style, commenting that Walter Plunkett’s choice of Rhett’s costumes fitted badly, especially round the collar. He noted that Gable has to bend over a lot because of the difference between his and Vivien Leigh’s heights. He observed that a man with a large neck Rhett embraces Scarlett, showing a perfectly fitted collar

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should wear collars ‘slightly large so that they don’t press against the neck and make it look as though it is bulging’.37 In war-torn Atlanta, Rhett’s smart navy blue jacket and cream trousers, then a white suit, contrast starkly with the threadbare ochres, greys and blacks of war-ravaged citizens. Gable’s dramatic cravats remind us of this character’s refusal to conform to the mores of his class, even at its darkest hour. Enabled by his lucrative blockade-running and – until late in the day – refusal to fight for the Confederacy, Rhett Butler maintains a stylish wardrobe through the South’s greatest crisis and, after the War, flaunts his ill-gotten wealth with increasingly dapper attire.38 On 15 December 1939, Gone With the Wind received its premiere, not in the customary Hollywood but in Margaret Mitchell’s home town, Atlanta, at Loew’s Grand Theatre decorated to resemble the Wilkes’ plantation house, Twelve Oaks. The Mayor declared a three-day city holiday. All schools and public buildings were closed, and locals lined up eight deep to see the stars arrive for the show. Accompanied by new wife Carole Lombard, Clark Gable

Official programme of the GWTW premiere in Atlanta, 15 December 1939 (courtesy of Keith Lodwick)

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arrived in his own plane with ‘Clark Gable, Rhett Butler’ emblazoned on the side, and Vivien Leigh was there with her secret fiancé Laurence Olivier (who – since both were still married to others – was brought in to trail his starring role in Selznick’s next film, Rebecca). A few Confederates from the Civil War were there in wheelchairs, and bands on all corners played ‘Dixie’. Girls in hooped skirts lined the streets joining a parade of thousands through town to the movie theatre. A special edition of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper was devoted to the film, and Ann Rutherford said there was dancing in the streets for three days and nights. Margaret Mitchell shared the general delight in the film, claiming she had ‘a dripping wet handkerchief’, and congratulating David Selznick and ‘absolutely the perfect cast’.39 As Evelyn Keyes said, ‘Atlanta became Gone With the Wind’.40 Of course, not all Atlanta, because the city was still rigidly racially segregated and no black citizens were invited. Furthermore, in spite of Selznick’s unease and Clark Gable’s The Atlanta premiere, with (l to r) Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick, Irene Selznick (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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protests, none of the black actors was a guest. On the eve of the premiere, a grand ball was held, and white guests were entertained at the Junior League ball by the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, one of whom – posed on top of a cotton bale – was ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.41 It is impossible to exaggerate the euphoria surrounding this film, after its various premieres around the US and in other countries. It gathered superlatives from major newspapers and minor critics, with hardly a word of dissent (apart from a small minority of left and African American organisations and publications). On 29 December 1939, the New York Times’ Frank S. Nugent asked rhetorically, ‘Is it the greatest motion picture ever made?’ and Hollywood’s Hedda Hopper enthused, ‘It took them two years to make “Gone With the Wind.” It will take you 20 years to forget it.’ The Hollywood Reporter, 13 December, described it as the ‘Supreme Triumph of Film Martin Luther King (on a cotton bale) performs with the Ebenezer Choir at the Atlanta premiere ball (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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History’, while one London critic in April 1940 said, ‘it needs an entirely new set of superlatives to do justice to its greatness’.42 In Vivien Leigh’s scrapbooks of cuttings, I can find only two dissenting voices (though of course she may have excluded any from liberal or African American groups): both describe the film as ‘too long’ and the Beverly Hills Liberty felt the film ‘never moves you deeply … a superficial study in lovely Technicolor’.43 The main plaudits were addressed to the surprising new star whose casting had caused so much controversy. Newspapers vied to express their admiration of Vivien Leigh. Today’s Cinema felt Leigh could claim ‘most credit for the superlative excellence of this film … not once is she wrong’. The actress is praised for being ‘so beautiful and vicious, gay and treacherous, brave and cruel … a lovely sinner who puts a down on men who love her’. That journal also noted that when the GWTW crew of electricians, grips, make-up men and carpenters watched Leigh rehearsing some of her most dramatic scenes, they broke into spontaneous applause. ‘They are the world’s severest film critics’, it claimed. The Los Angeles Examiner echoed this description: ‘No actress was ever called on to play a more exacting role nor one that demands such sustained characterization. She is by turns beautiful, ugly, aristocratic, common – but always a flame.’ Harris Deans in Sunday Graphic, 21 April 1940, found the performance ‘superb and unforgettable. I have three hats and one cap. I raise them all to her.’44

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2 ‘The Greatest Star England Ever Gave Hollywood’:45 Britain and the Search for Scarlett While Gone With the Wind is always discussed as a quintessentially American story, the history of its publication and subsequent triumph as book and film across the globe owes not a small amount to Britain. From the earliest negotiations about the novel, this country played a key role. There has long been a close, mutually advantageous relationship between US publishers and film production and their British counterparts. It was important that Mitchell’s book be published widely in Britain and its then colonies (South Africa, Australia, India); the British publishing firm, and parent company, of the Macmillan Company of New York, was central to this. Macmillan and Co.’s special relationship with the New York company led to a publishing deal of great reciprocal advantage and – when the film was being cast – producer David Selznick enquired how the book was selling in England since English sales would ‘have a bearing on whom they cast as Scarlett’.46 Foreign markets were crucial to the development of Selznick’s scripts, casting, production and marketing. He stressed that the success of the book and film in Europe would influence casting decisions, especially regarding new faces.47 There were, however, some wrangles over the book and film when they first came across the Atlantic in the 1930s. The book was published on 30 June 1936 in New York, then 1 October in London. Warmly welcomed as saving New York Macmillan’s fortunes, which had been at a low ebb in the mid-1930s, it was regarded with some scepticism at first by British Macmillan. Once its selling power was realised, it was seized on with enthusiasm, especially when adopted by the US Book-of-the-Month Club, guaranteeing mammoth sales.

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The publisher’s reader’s report, by Sir John Squire, is of historic interest in its assumptions about what is appropriate subject matter for a British readership, Squire’s unthinking misogyny and his reluctant recognition of the international appeal of the book that was to make publishing and film history: This novel is about 420,000 words long – equal in length to six ordinary novels – and it is about the American Civil War & the background of it in the South. Could anything sound more unpromising? But, although the author’s style is no more than good and efficient, and although her central character, Scarlett O’Hara, is a selfish &, to the reader, unattractive, girl, there isn’t a line that isn’t interesting … when one finishes one feels that one has left a circle of people whom one has known all one’s life.48

Sir John went on to say that this book, that ‘reads like truth’, just might be as successful in America as Anthony Adverse (a popular novel, 1933, by Hervey Allen, now long forgotten, though it was made into a successful film starring Olivia de Havilland) and that it ought to sell in Britain if the reviewers could be persuaded to read it. George Brett, President of the Macmillan Company of New York, wrote Daniel Macmillan: I must confess that it’s been more fun, if also indeed harder work, than anything I have had to play with since I have been in the business. It has enabled us to experiment with selling methods. It has cost us fabulous sums to push the book to its present gigantic sale, but it’s proved a very profitable venture and I am afraid everyone in the Macmillan Company, your humble servant included, is feeling rather smug over our ability to put the book over as we have.49

Smug was certainly the word, especially as editor Harold Macmillan (later British Prime Minister) saw off the founder/director of William Collins Publishers of Glasgow in the race to contract the novel. Collins wrote angrily to Harold Macmillan, protesting that he

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believed his company had been given first refusal of Mitchell’s book. Macmillan contacted Harold Latham, New York Macmillan vice president, to say he was sorry to hear Collins was distressed since the two companies had done good business in the past. However, ‘my impression was that he was rather an excited young man who may well be allowed to cool off a little’.50 The usual gentlemanly practices of British publishing went by the board as everyone fought to secure this valuable property, and the transatlantic relationship of the two Macmillan companies proved crucial to this. Valuable property though it was, there were questions over whether it was wise to sell it during World War II, for fear the subject matter might deter possible book-buyers, and the War made payment of British royalties in dollars very difficult. London Macmillan became very proud of the high sales, especially ‘amid all the distractions of the times’.51 The American company had allayed doubts, but later there were similar qualms about distribution of the 1939 film. The president of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association, Harry Mears, described the film as ‘one of the finest [spectacles] ever produced’, but warned fellow exhibitors, ‘The horrors of war are so emphasized that the psychological effect upon the public may not be good in times when we are fighting for our own existence.’ Nor was this an idle point. In July 1940, as the War became critical, revulsion against war films made GWTW flop in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney. There was also a practical problem with GWTW. From August 1940, air raids in heavily affected cities, such as London, meant audiences were reluctant to travel far to a cinema, while in Coventry, the Rex theatre, boasting 2,562 seats, and due to show the film on 26 August, was destroyed in an air raid the night before. When transferred to another local cinema, it was scheduled earlier than other performances (12.15pm and 4.15pm) so audiences could return home before dark.52 Nonetheless, the film ran for four years at London’s Empire, Leicester Square, described by one journalist as ‘part of the regular war-pattern

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of London; something curiously secure and solid and blast-proof in the middle of the turmoil’.53 The film was an immediate hit in Britain, as in the United States. This, despite very high ticket prices and the absence of a supporting programme, as well as serious disputes over distribution venues and high rental charges by MGM – with questions even being asked of the Secretary to the Board of Trade in Parliament. Transatlantic relationships – commercial, critical and personal – have thus played a key role in the work’s global success. Margaret Mitchell’s Irish South, articulated especially through Gerald’s emphasis on the importance of the red earth of the legendary sacred site, Tara, ensured a ready-made audience in Eire, while Selznick used Vivien Leigh’s (fictitious) Irish ancestry to counter accusations he had cast a non-American actress in the lead role. And then there is the significance of the film’s British leads. Following the British premiere of GWTW on 13 March 1940, the Bystander magazine gloated over the fact that the two Oscars for Best Actor that year went to the British Robert Donat (Goodbye, Mr Chips) and Vivien Leigh, and many critics and audiences were thrilled to see three British actors in GWTW’s leading roles – with Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes) and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes) joining Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. The year 2013 saw the centenary of Leigh’s birth, and there was much hoopla around this, since Vivien Leigh was one of the UK’s most beautiful and charismatic actresses, married for a time to Britain’s bestknown actor and founder of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier. The British Portrait of Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland as Ashley and Melanie Wilkes

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Film Institute released for national distribution a gorgeous digitally restored print. The Victoria & Albert Museum purchased a huge Leigh archive of letters, scrapbooks, papers and other personal effects, and organised a symposium and modest display to publicise this acquisition. There was a Leigh exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery as well as a smaller, more personal one at Topsham Museum, Devon, where Leigh had met and married her Devon-based first husband Leigh Holman (whose name Vivien adopted for her professional career). The Holman family donated a house to the town of Topsham, and Leigh’s daughter Suzanne – who never lived with the actress after her early affair with Olivier – handed over memorabilia, including Scarlett’s white nightgown worn after her night of passion with Rhett, to furnish a ‘Vivien Leigh room’. Since the book’s publication and the film’s premiere, Britain has made a minor contribution to the film’s literary and theatrical legacy. I have described the Mitchell Estate’s commission of three sequel novels, and their attempt to ban the ‘unauthorised’ parody by African American Alice Randall. But British voices are part of the story.54 Scrapbook showing cuttings collected and painstakingly pasted in by Leigh’s mother (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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Lady Antonia Fraser, British historical novelist, and author of a brilliant prequel short story to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, was approached by the Estate to write a sequel novel. She declined, but proposed her fellow writer, Emma Tennant, who was duly commissioned. The story of Tennant’s rejected manuscript and brutal treatment by the Estate, followed by her draft novel locked in a vault, never to be read, echoes the experience of American biographer of Vivien Leigh and would-be sequel-writer, Anne Edwards.55 Most extraordinary, however, was the decision in 2008 by renowned British theatre director Trevor Nunn (successful Shakespeare interpreter and creator of hit musicals such as Cats and Les Misérables) to produce a musical version of Gone With the Wind in London. With the benefit of history, he said, his production aimed to give Mitchell’s black characters ‘a voice in this work of music theatre, which they will not previously have had’, focusing on the perspective of the slaves around whom the Civil War was fought. The concluding song, called ‘Gone With the Wind’, Nunn described as ‘the fulcrum moment … by then, these words mean something different, no longer what was lost but what must and shall never return’.56 Unusually, this British musical was written by an American academic, Margaret Martin, who – with an unlikely combination of academic rigour, liberal conscience and musical obsession – wrote script, music and lyrics. The musical Scarlett’s nightdress worn the morning after Rhett carried her to bed (image by N. Toyne, © Topsham Museum Devon)

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Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara

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tackled head-on those racial and political elements of the novel that David Selznick had softened – so it included clear references to the Ku Klux Klan, avoided cardboard African American characters such as Prissy, and celebrated the freedom of slaves and a harmonious utopian multicultural world. The production opened in April 2008 and closed two months later, panned by critics for its dull worthiness. Without doubt, England’s greatest contribution to Gone With the Wind was its star, Vivien Leigh, who won the part of Scarlett O’Hara against heavy odds and considerable competition. David Selznick had a flair for publicity and engaged the public when choosing actors. He relished casting unknowns, thus making new stars for his production company. For The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he held a nationwide search for the boy star, interviewing thousands – including boys in orphanages – before settling on Tommy Kelly. Preparing for Gone With The Wind, Selznick’s shrewd story editor and talent scout, Kay Brown, toured two Hollywood scouts round colleges, Junior Leagues and theatre groups. Hundreds of wannabes turned up for auditions, often in ante-bellum costume or even blackface. Alas, Brown and her colleagues discovered no significant talent, with the exception of Alicia Rhett who played India Wilkes. Selznick proudly claimed that casting this film had become ‘something of a national game’.57 By the end of 1936, David Selznick’s head of publicity claimed to have received more than 75,000 letters from readers of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, telling the director who should play Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell herself wrote dozens of letters to friends and strangers complaining about being accosted in the streets of Atlanta and told who should play, and who should be ruled out of playing, the lead role. She admitted to favouring Miriam Hopkins, but resolutely refused to intervene in the casting process. In its Golden Age, Hollywood’s most renowned female stars buzzed around this honeypot, even for smaller roles. Judy Garland was considered for the part of Carreen, Scarlett’s sister; Tallulah Bankhead for prostitute Belle Watling. Olivia de Havilland, under

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contract at Warner Studios, read the part of Melanie Wilkes secretly for Selznick, then met Jack Warner’s wife for tea to ask her to intervene on her behalf. Actresses from Katharine Hepburn to Joan Crawford made it known they wanted the lead role and, by the end of 1938, Hollywood’s finest female stars (Bankhead, Margaret Sullavan, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy and more) were under consideration. Hepburn was rejected for lacking the ‘sex qualities’ of Scarlett, and Bette Davis had to settle for Jezebel.58 For Selznick, this was both a dilemma – selecting from the top actresses or risking a new face – and a great asset, since the pre-publicity for the film caused by his $50,000 ‘Search for Scarlett’ ensured healthy box-office receipts. When he announced in early 1937 that Norma Shearer was his Scarlett, public response was so negative that he was forced to issue a statement denying it. (With great generosity, Shearer was one of the first people to send a telegram of congratulations to Vivien Leigh when she secured the role.) Selznick then favoured Paulette Goddard, who made many screentests, but in the end her

Telegram from Norma Shearer congratulating Vivien Leigh on getting the role (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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cohabitation with Charles Chaplin, her Jewishness and reputation for being difficult, ended her chances. Thousands of women wrote to Selznick, or turned up on his doorstep, to claim the part. They declared affinity with Scarlett, empathetic understanding of her sufferings and sacrifices, citing their southern origins and/or physical attributes that matched those in the novel. As a result, women felt personally involved in the casting of its protagonist, and this helped to increase the female audience. From the beginning, this canny producer and his first director George Cukor (renowned as a women’s director) understood this was a film women would take to their hearts. Vivien Leigh was cast as Scarlett late in the day, after production had begun. The legendary story is that while Selznick and other senior executives watched the burning of Atlanta at night, his brother Myron Selznick brought his newest client Leigh to the event, introducing her as ‘Scarlett O’Hara’. We are to believe the rest is history – that Selznick looked into her Scarlett-like green eyes (no, they were blue-grey) and saw his woman. He was indeed struck by that first look, but he already knew of Leigh, having seen two of her films, Fire over England (1937) and A Yank at Oxford (1938). Even after this first meeting, he insisted on screentests to measure her against Goddard, Jean Arthur and Joan Bennett. He later justified his controversial choice on the fallacious grounds that Leigh’s parents were French and Irish, just like Scarlett’s; that the South prided itself on English ancestry so she would be acceptable to them; that the southern accent is ‘basically English’; and that Leigh’s physical resemblance to Mitchell’s Scarlett meant she was ideally suited to ‘one of the most trying roles ever written’.59 Given the pre-feminist times in which she lived and worked, Vivien Leigh was something of a man’s woman, spoken for, adored and dominated by men in her life – without nurturing female presences to counter the patriarchal phalanx that surrounded her. Born in 1913, she enjoyed an idyllic childhood in India with wealthy parents, but was deposited at the age of six in a Roehampton convent

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school, two years younger than the other girls, and did not see her mother again for two years. Perhaps unconsciously she repeated that abandonment when, in order to consort with Laurence Olivier, she left young daughter Suzanne with her devoted husband Leigh Holman. Her second marriage to England’s most celebrated actormanager, which lasted from 1940 until Olivier petitioned for divorce in 1960 in order to marry Joan Plowright, elevated them to the status of world celebrities, their home at Notley Abbey becoming the centre of a glamorous international set of film, theatre and literary figures. Despite her greater global profile, Leigh always deferred to Olivier’s genius and talent, and lost out on a potentially major Hollywood career when he brought her back to England, where he was more at home in the theatre and could avoid feeling threatened by her screen success. Her beauty and charm attracted men, but they undoubtedly led to her being underrated. George Cukor is often quoted as having dubbed her ‘a consummate actress hampered by beauty’.60 To her great distress, critic Kenneth Tynan – not known for his kind tongue – wrote vicious reviews of Leigh, continually comparing her adversely with her husband whom he idolised. She suffered from poor physical and mental health, developing bipolar disease early in her adult life, a condition probably misdiagnosed by male doctors, who at that time understood little about the nature of bipolar disease and its impact on female demeanour and sexuality. In her mid-40s, she contracted tuberculosis of which she died aged fifty-three in 1967, a time when the disease had been all but obliterated. Until recent scholarship unveiled new information from the Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh Archives, the actress was represented in biographical and popular discourse as vulnerable, needy, neurotic – her performances often judged in that light, as if she were playing herself rather than performing. It is often implied that her two most celebrated roles reflect the divided self that was Vivien Leigh the woman – with her strained appearance in the most challenging times of Scarlett’s struggles attributed not to her

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versatility but to the actress missing her lover Laurence Olivier. In the two films for which she won Academy Awards, GWTW and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), she is the embodiment of different but complementary aspects of the notorious southern belle. This mythic figure saw its advent in plantation romances of the early nineteenth century but has persisted into many a popular film and TV treatment such as Jezebel, The Golden Girls (1985–92), Steel Magnolias (1989) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The belle, who retains a strong hold in southern culture to this day, is generally white, beautiful and usually rich (though in modern versions these qualities are much reduced or parodied), and she is on a pedestal proclaiming an ideal, uncorrupted, pure South. She has to maintain an orthodox ladylike appearance, which involves considerable performative posing rather than spontaneity, manipulation of others, especially men, a concern for appearances and a tendency to sexual and emotional hypocrisy. As Florence King wrote in her Confessions

Poster for A Streetcar Name Desire (1951), starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando

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of a Failed Southern Lady (1985), ‘No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.’61 But within a patriarchal South this all comes at a price, and the youthful eligible southern belle can quickly be transformed into the broken and bitter figure of an ageing unmarried belle whose beauty and sexual allure have gone, whose role in society is now an embarrassment and whose mental health is unstable. So in Vivien Leigh’s contrasting parts (separated by twelve years), Scarlett and Blanche DuBois, she was southern belle glorified and demonised – Scarlett the ‘survivor South’, a reluctantly brave, entrepreneurial and defiant icon of the Old South fighting off defeat and braving loss, and Blanche DuBois the ‘victimised South’, a depressive, sadomasochistic postwar New South. The two warring sides of a southern femininity that was increasingly difficult to inhabit, and of course the pathology of the bipolar actress herself.62 But in both films, Leigh demonstrates a range and complexity of characterisation that show just how limited such an assumption can be. In Streetcar, she expresses the vulnerability but also sly cunning of a woman who has survived by dissembling to others and wrapping her own fragile self in romantic scenarios. Leigh delivers a versatile and heartbreaking performance that moves between high camp comedy and grand guignol, and sustains the audience’s sympathetic affection. In Gone With the Wind, from the first scene when Scarlett appears almost as a parody of the white southern belle (white skin and dress on a white house’s porch, flanked by pale-skinned southern beaux), Leigh demonstrates a light touch Vivien Leigh as the vulnerable Blanche DuBois in Streetcar

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concealing absolute control. Her ostentatious frivolity thinly masks a steel magnolia’s determination to thwart Ashley’s plans to marry his cousin rather than herself. This scene shows Leigh’s ability to portray a woman set on survival against all odds, brimming with intelligence and sexual confidence, as well as unwitting humour – all qualities she develops to great effect as the story unfolds. In both films, embodying the two women’s imperiousness, mendacity and self–aggrandisement, she displays a considerable talent for comedy. Despite Selznick’s intention that Prissy be the one comic character in GWTW, I believe Scarlett herself is the figure most likely to raise from the audience a wry smile or gentle laugh. Critic Molly Haskell points out that high romance ‘emanates from the male figures rather than the female’,63 and it is noticeable that romantic men fail Scarlett at every turn. Her father, who instils in her a reverence for the red earth of Tara, becomes demented after her mother’s death. Ashley Wilkes proves to have little courage or imagination when it comes to both love and work. Rhett abandons her to go to war after the escape from burning Atlanta, leaving her alone to face the derelict Tara, her dead mother and hopeless family, then later (after their best-ever sex) fleeing to Europe with their daughter, and finally walking out the door at her most vulnerable moment. And women, who have to take over every practical and emotional aspect of the home front while men are off fighting for a lost cause, can offer Scarlett limited solace. Her stoical mother dies after caring for sick ‘white trash’. Melanie, whose physical frailty means she can only offer minimal support as the women struggle through war and Reconstruction, dies in childbirth, leaving Scarlett to deal with a diminished Ashley. At the end of the story, the only strong surviving maternal figure she has is her loyal ex-slave Mammy, who is allowed no vulnerability of her own. Vivien Leigh conveys the cool realism, desperation and gumption of a woman at her absolute limits, while also producing humorous effects by making Scarlett stand too much on her own dignity and take herself a little too seriously. She speaks both

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specifically for the white female southern upper class but also for a 1930s generation emerging from the hungry years of Depression, facing fascism and Nazism, and about to enter a terrible war. She also speaks for the women who have to hold families and homes together, whatever is happening in the wider world. In the famous ‘never be hungry again’ scene, Scarlett stands alone, an extended family and freed slaves represented as dependent on her – and she rises magnificently to the challenge. A steel magnolia becomes a transgressive, epic feminist heroine. Outside Britain, Vivien Leigh had a modest reputation for her film roles, though Alexander Korda was preparing her carefully for a successful Hollywood career. In Britain, she was acclaimed more as a stage actress – idolised as a great beauty and later as one half of a celebrity couple. She too thought of herself as an ‘actress’ rather than a film star, having that snobbery about the theatre that was characteristic of British actors and audiences until the 1960s. She had Vivien Leigh as epic feminist heroine

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a sophisticated interest in literature and culture – the key to her respect for and engagement with language, different accents and a fidelity to words on the page. When praised for her authentic speech in GWTW, Leigh said, ‘I learn lines easily and I’ve always had an ear for languages and accents’ – something she proved repeatedly in her roles as a Georgia peach in Gone With the Wind, a Mississippian in A Streetcar Named Desire, and a Virginian in Ship of Fools (1965). The book Gone With the Wind was a perfect text for a bookish budding actress: divided into five parts and two volumes, it echoed both the Victorian novel with its strong character and narrative development, and also the five acts of a tragic drama, designed to appeal to her dramaturgical instincts. In 1937, when acting at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre, Leigh gave each member of the cast a copy of the book she so admired. Identifying with Scarlett O’Hara long before she came to play her, she learned several chunks of the book by heart. There was a deep bond with David Selznick through their mutual commitment to the original novel, and an empathy with the heroine which sustained her through filming. This contrasts with Leslie Howard, who failed to read the book and was begged by Selznick to read at least the ‘paddock scene’ so he could understand how to play it. It also explains some of Leigh’s conflicts with the decidedly unliterary ‘journeyman’ director Victor Fleming, who replaced the emotionally responsive ‘auteur’ George Cukor (fired by Selznick).64 When she was agonising over her motivation, Fleming famously told her, ‘Just ham it up’, and he once snapped at her to ‘stick that script up [her] royal British ass’.65 The role she had most coveted was the hardest of her life. She faced a ‘Vendetta against Vivien’,66 the wrath and jealousy of every major Hollywood screen star who felt she deserved the part, and the scorn of powerful figures like columnist Hedda Hopper (though not southern commentators, who were relieved that at least she was no damned Yankee). When asked about her knowledge of the book, she said the only thing she did not understand was the reference to ‘June bugs’.67 The film’s shooting schedule shows her appearing in virtually

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every scene, yet she was paid only a fraction of the fee afforded Clark Gable (roughly $25,000 to his $120,000), and worked gruelling twelve-hour days for almost six months. She sorely missed lover Laurence Olivier and was allowed to visit him only a couple of times; there was a pregnancy scare and an accidental overdose. Devastated by the firing of George Cukor, she (and Olivia de Havilland) continued to consult him secretly when the macho Victor Fleming took over direction. Fleming, a close friend of Gable’s, had a brusque manner, which alienated the female actors and led to a brutal regime during the closing months of filming. In the famous ‘Row and Rape’ scene when Rhett Butler drunkenly picks Scarlett up and carries her upstairs for rough sex, there were approximately twelve takes before the shot was satisfactory. Clark Gable was flagging, and Fleming asked him to do it one more time. ‘Thanks, Clark,’ he said, ‘I really didn’t need that shot – I just had a little bet on that you couldn’t make it.’68 Leigh thus had to put up with male buddy humour as well as a high degree of careless sexism within a merciless schedule. Hal Kern relates that every night at 11.30 pm Leigh begged time off from filming to enjoy a half hour phone call with her fiancé, so relentlessly did her producer and director keep her on the go.69 And so, with her commitment to Margaret Mitchell’s story and strong artistic discipline, Leigh helped ensure the consistency and seamless continuity that sweep the story onwards – despite all its disparate elements, many different scriptwriters and two directors with such different styles. She binds together the contrasting halves of the film – first, the nostalgic white-dominated Old South and national epic of war and Reconstruction culminating in Scarlett’s defiant cry, ‘I’ll never be hungry again’, second, the melodramatic family romance ending with Bonnie and Melanie’s deaths, Rhett’s departure and Scarlett’s own isolation. Her own ambivalence about the character she knew so well, having read the novel repeatedly, suggests why she was successfully able to inhabit this figure and engage the sympathies of a female audience. She wrote:

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I lived Scarlett for close to six months, from early morning to late at night … She needed a good, healthy old-fashioned spanking on a number of occasions … . Conceited, spoiled, arrogant … . But she had courage and determination, and that, I think, is why women must secretly admire her – even though we can’t feel too happy about her many shortcomings.70

Gone With the Wind was an immediate critical and popular success, and Leigh was universally praised – even by former critics like Hopper – and awarded the Best Actress Academy Award against strong competition. Many years later, British novelist and critic Angela Carter made fun of Vivien Leigh, writing of her ‘anorexic, over-dressed Scarlett … one of the least credible of Hollywood femmes fatales, most of whose petulant squeaks are, to boot, audible only to bats …’.71 Her verdict goes against the majority view for, despite the horrified early reaction to her casting from Hollywood’s stars and newspaper columnists, at the first screenings everyone was won over and concurred with author Margaret Mitchell’s view that she was ‘MY Scarlett’.

Two cuttings from Vivien Leigh’s stage and screen scrapbooks (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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In 2013, British journalist Hannah Betts compared her favourably with ‘Aniston, Theron, Jolie and their ilk’, describing them as ‘milksops’: ‘Forget Taylor, Monroe and Hepburn, here was an English star who took on the greatest in Hollywood’s pantheon and showed them how it was done.’72 Vivien Leigh was fêted and idolised from GWTW onwards. How many other British actresses were painted by Augustus John and satirised by Ronald Searle?73 In 1999, the American Film Institute named Leigh one of the twentyfive greatest female stars in Hollywood history. But while she played many more roles in film and theatre, and won a second Best Actress Academy Award for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, she became identified in the public’s mind with only one character. Everywhere she went, she was Scarlett, and when she died, the papers screamed, ‘Scarlett O’Hara Is Dead’.

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3 The Racial Politics of Gone With the Wind In May 1996, fashion magazine Vanity Fair published a playful article, ‘Scarlett ’n the Hood’, turning the race and gender tables in a knowingly postmodern way. Karl Lagerfeld recreated the famous movie poster with Black British Naomi Campbell as Scarlett O’Hara and Charlton Cannon as Rhett Butler. The shoot continued with the pair elaborately costumed as the iconic couple (she in Christian Dior green taffeta, he in Vivienne Westwood velvet and fake fur), while white designer Gianfranco Ferré played Mammy in an Hermès headwrap, and the fictional ‘Tara’s gardener’ was shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. This was one of a series of spoofs, parodies, camp masquerades and performances of racial crossover that GWTW has generated over the years. The problem with such playfulness is that it appears to brush aside the weighty political issues that cannot be avoided when considering this well-known work. William Faulkner famously said, in Requiem for a Nun, that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ This was especially true for Faulkner’s own Deep South, where the past has a tendency to feature and resonate more than in other forward-looking parts of the United States. Like other southern writers and film-makers, he knew that the South’s troubled and bitter history remains alive and kicking, not least in events and discussions about the Civil War (known by conservative southerners as ‘The War Between the States’), slavery and its legacy in racial tensions across the nation. For modern audiences, Gone With the Wind’s historical interpretation of these matters remains a problem. They must acknowledge a blatantly white southern perspective on the nation’s most divisive and damaging war, in which more Americans were killed than in all other American wars, from the War of Independence

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to Iraq and Afghanistan. With an unabashed romanticism that does not represent Margaret Mitchell’s pragmatic, polemical novel, Ben Hecht’s initial intertitle presents the planter class as Walter Scottstyled descendants of cavaliers, ‘Knights and their Ladies Fair’ in the ‘last bow’ of ‘the Age of Chivalry’. Defeated Confederate soldiers are later referred to as ‘tattered cavaliers’. Soon after the film’s release, black modernist poet Melvyn B. Tolson attacked the film’s racism and its apparent claim to be ‘the story’ rather than ‘a story of the American South’.74 In her 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Native Guard, American mixed-race poet laureate Natasha Trethewey included a scathing poem, ‘Southern History’, about a teacher in a senior-year history class showing the film of GWTW as a ‘true account’ of slavery and the Civil War. In 2015, following a series of brutal police killings of African Americans, and the Charleston church massacre of nine people by a gunman whose website featured a photograph of himself Part of screenwriter Ben Hecht’s excessively romantic lines at the opening of the film

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posed with a gun and Confederate flag, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick called for the film to no longer be screened.75 The mythification of the Confederate South followed closely the line of D. W. Griffith’s hugely successful The Birth of a Nation, which is recognised as the first truly ‘spectacular’ American silent film. A twelve-reel film in two parts, with an intermission, it was praised for its technical innovations, impressive length (just over three hours) and Joseph Carl Breil’s stirring musical score of classical and southern themes that accompanied it in theatres. Despite many early silent films and 1920s and 30s treatments of the subject (and with significant flops such as King Vidor’s So Red the Rose, 1935), movie audiences never warmed to the theme. But southern audiences were sufficiently important to ensure a spate of South-friendly films, including white southern cheerleading perspectives and racial stereotyping. Pro-South films were far more numerous than pro-North, so from 1911 onwards the ‘public memory of the Civil War’ was controlled by a southern bias that argued the War was about states’ sovereignty rather than slavery, and that the gracious and successful character of the Old South – the ‘Lost Cause’ – was violently shattered by a brutal, vindictive North. Of one of these, The Littlest Rebel, a Variety journalist suggested its dialogue would ‘make the South purr with pride’.76 For the growing female audiences for which Hollywood now catered, Civil War films were less appealing than melodrama and romance; Griffith’s and Selznick’s epics were the only two major commercial successes in the genre, and Gone With the Wind includes no combat sequences. The bloody details of war are suggested by the sound of desperate cries, scrolling down of casualty lists, the brief but powerful scenes of the wounded and dead in Atlanta’s makeshift hospital and the talk of returning soldiers and Rhett and Ashley. GWTW established a pattern of Civil War films that concentrated on the home front (thus primarily women) and ignored or sidelined issues of race – from Tap Roots (1948) and Shenandoah (1965) to

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Cold Mountain (2003). Only in 1989 with Glory was there a focus on actively resistant African Americans fighting in the War on the Union side. Gone With the Wind attracted considerable criticism before it was even made. Selznick’s office received protests that the film was ‘un-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, Reactionary, Pro-Ku Klux Klan, pro-Nazi and Fascist’.77 After consultation with the Hays Office, a form letter was sent to critical correspondents assuring them there would be nothing unAmerican or prejudicial to any race or creed. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), set up in 1909 following a race riot in Illinois, had forged a strong identity after its objections to the racial content of The Birth of a Nation. Its opposition gave that film fuel, but also helped develop the organisation’s solid national base. (Selznick briefly considered the film’s director, D. W. Griffith, as director for GWTW). Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Selznick on 28 June 1938 warning him that the ‘confederatised’ story of the Reconstruction period erased from history the role and significance of the Negro, urging the producer to engage an African American historical advisor. Though responding with great sympathy, Selznick did not follow his advice and appointed the music advisor Hall Johnson instead. Furthermore, he asked his assistant Kay (Katharine) Brown to write to Walter White on 9 January 1939 to justify not appointing a ‘Negro advisor’ by reassuring him the film was in no way proslavery or anti-Negro. His reasons are very revealing: Mammy and Uncle Peter (Eddie Anderson) were ‘treated very loveably [sic] and with great dignity’ while Prissy was ‘an amusing comedy character’ and Pork (Oscar Polk) ‘an angel’.78 Those patronising words, despite best intentions, speak volumes about the manner in which slavery and the enslaved and free characters were treated in the film. To a contemporary audience, the comic relief provided by all these characters’ silly voices, mumblings and/or pathetic responses to crises is very offensive.

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In February 1939, as filming was underway, the Pittsburgh Courier published an article condemning the forthcoming film for its treatment of the Negro, predicting it would be worse than The Birth of a Nation. Stung by this, and distressed to think the reputation of liberal Jews like himself might suffer, Selznick was supported by MGM’s head of publicity, who had reassured the article’s author Earl J. Morris there would be no ‘objectionable epithets’ about Negroes, and nothing in the film ‘objectionable to Negro people’.79 Selznick is on record as saying, ‘I feel so keenly about what is happening to the Jews of the world that I cannot help but sympathize with the Negroes in their fears about material which they regard as insulting and damaging.’80 A charm offensive, including invitations to visit the set, calmed the situation and ensured no further serious criticisms before the film appeared. And while Selznick wished to keep the ‘N’ word to be used to and about one another by the ‘house servants’, he was finally persuaded that the risk of alienating his African American Mammy scolds Scarlett, to no avail but to comic effect

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audience was too great. The term ‘darky’ was used instead, appeasing actors and critics alike. Sensitivity around the vocabulary used to describe people of colour is still alive and well in the twenty-first century. During an interview on a 2015 US television show, British film actor Benedict Cumberbatch was reviled on social media for his reference to ‘coloured actors’.81 In early correspondence with scriptwriter Sidney Howard, Selznick emphasised that they must be ‘awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger’. He recommended that they omit reference to the Ku Klux Klan, thus avoiding ‘an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times’.82 The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Realm of California, had already eagerly offered GWTW’s production manager technical advice on Klan signs, symbols and actions. The problem of removing any direct reference to the Klan – despite the raid providing an exciting episode in the film’s quieter second half – is that it obfuscates the murky racial politics of the white characters, Frank Kennedy and Ashley Wilkes, aided and abetted by Rhett Butler. These men seem to be involved in a secretive revenge plot understood by all the white women except Scarlett (perhaps to emphasise her naivety and wilful blindness). In the convict camp episode, Selznick substituted a white man for Margaret Mitchell’s African American rapist (having freed slave Big Sam [Everett Brown] save Scarlett), so the racist nature of the raid is rendered invisible. Moreover, as Mitchell’s biographer Darden Asbury Pyron points out, the film certainly aggrandised and ennobled Mitchell’s South, with Ben Hecht’s ‘land of Cavaliers’ prefatory titles providing ‘Pure schmaltz. And a pure violation of Margaret Mitchell’s vision.’ In Pyron’s interpretation, Selznick simplified the racial and class complexity of the novel (omitting Dilsey, the mixed-race mother of Prissy, and adding gratuitous scenes of fieldhands with Big Sam’s comic ‘Quittin’ time!’ call), in order to produce nostalgia for ‘the innocent, lost world of the plantation South’. This distorts Mitchell’s

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Rhett brings home wounded Ashley (feigning inebriation) following their fatal attacks on convicts

The white rapist (black in the novel) attacking Scarlett in the convict camp

Freed slave Big Sam saves Scarlett

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more realistic vision of an Old South of ‘conflict and inner disorder … a place waiting for a disaster to happen’.83 While the liberal Selznick was uneasy throughout filming about the way slaves and freed slaves were represented, he was even more uncomfortable about their exclusion from the Atlanta premiere. His advisors warned about the risk of alienating white southerners, and the adverse treatment those actors would receive in a segregated city. While Hattie McDaniel’s photograph featured in the New York and Los Angeles film programmes, it was excluded from Atlanta’s. Inevitably, when the film came out, there were attacks from the left and from African American organisations and writers. The communist press condemned its pro-capitalist, anti-black propaganda, and compared its treatment of black characters to that of The Birth of a Nation. Distinguished Trinidadian critic C. L. R. James called Selznick’s film ‘dangerous’, arguing that it distorted American history and therefore ‘must be exposed and boycotted’. He argued it was the duty of all revolutionaries to point out the film’s ‘gross historical falsifications’, and to counteract the popular perception that this was authentic history.84 There were pickets at cinemas and at the Washington premiere, while black dramatist Carlton Moss pronounced all the black characters appalling stereotypes. Following Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, some critics in the African American press praised McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen and Oscar Polk. Critic Donald Bogle singled out Hattie McDaniel for her strength, commanding voice and confidence.85 While recognising her fine performance, Leonard Pitts, Jr suggested we imagine ‘a love story set against the last days of Auschwitz between, say, a Nazi guard and a secretary, depicting none of the horrors of the camp’, and asked rhetorically, ‘Might not you begin to feel that using the Holocaust as a backdrop for somebody else’s boy-meets-girl tale is just faintly obscene?’86 At the time, however, critical voices were in the minority. The majority of press coverage was overwhelmingly positive, praising everything about the film and making no reference to

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its inflammatory political stance. This was a ‘Supreme Triumph of Film History’87 and there are merely occasional respectful nods to Butterfly McQueen, ‘the little Negro girl, relieving the tension of war and childbirth somewhat with her earsplitting shrieks’, and Hattie McDaniel, ‘faithful slave’ and ‘plain-spoken Mammy’, who interacted well with Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett. Hedda Hopper wrote that ‘Hatty [sic] broke my heart.’88 White critics and audiences seemed oblivious to the fact there was no historical basis for the unconditionally loving old Mammy figure, and the black characters are allowed no subjectivity beyond their devotion to the white O’Haras (together with the repeated casual reference to them as ‘slaves’ despite the historical reality that for the second half of the film they are free men and women). In Tara McPherson’s words, while trying to mitigate the racism of the novel, Selznick ‘failed to understand the complex history and powerful pull of the mise en scène of southernness he sculpted’ and succeeded in soft-selling an image of ‘the Grand Old South’.89 Or, as one newspaper headline following the 1939 premiere had it, ‘“GWTW” Yankee Victory and a Dixie Triumph’.90 Apart from narrative decisions about the Klan, the language for black characters and so forth, Selznick faced a challenge in casting. Many African Americans wrote to Selznick offering their services, and Eleanor Roosevelt requested her maid Elizabeth McDuffie be considered for the part of Mammy. That role, however, went to an experienced stage and film actress, Hattie McDaniel. The woman who won the 1940 Oscar for Supporting Actress was already established in Hollywood for minor roles in southern films. A daughter of former slaves, at the age of fifteen she joined her father’s minstrel troupe and, when invited to perform on Denver’s KOA station, became the first African American woman to sing on American radio. Moving to Hollywood to join two of her siblings, she won small, sometimes singing, film roles, usually as a housekeeper or maid (for instance, with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935). Much quoted is her riposte to African American critics who accused her of repeating her Mammy role in the movies

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by saying, ‘I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week, than be a maid for $7’.91 Nonetheless, her Oscar brought her no larger or more dignified roles and, apart from a starring radio show part in 1947, she had a limited film career until her death of cancer in 1952. Awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she was inducted posthumously into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, and in 2006 was the first black Oscar winner to be celebrated with a US postage stamp. It is shocking to realise that for the next fifty years the Academy failed to honour black actresses, until Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress for Ghost. When Mo’Nique followed suit in 2009 for Precious, she appeared as McDaniel had done for the ceremony – in a blue dress with gardenias in her hair – and paid tribute to her predecessor as role model. However, the 2015 film awards ceremonies in Hollywood and Britain provoked criticism for their snubbing of nominees of colour. Following the year in which 12 Years a Slave was richly rewarded, the Grammys, Golden Globes, Baftas and Oscars barely reflected racial diversity. The low number of Mammy and Scarlett in conflict

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nominations for the acclaimed film about Martin Luther King, Selma (2014), directed by African American Ava DuVernay and starring Black British David Oyelowo, made cynics remark that Hollywood was back in business as usual, favouring white male directors and stars. McDaniel has the largest ‘house servant’ role in the film, appearing at crucial junctures to offer practical support to Scarlett, and moral judgments on her behaviour – with her comic refrain, ‘Ain’t fittin’, ain’t fittin’.’ Her role is to produce the white southern belle and later matriarch that the ante-bellum South demanded of its women. She expresses horror at Scarlett’s trying on a fancy hat while in mourning; insists on accompanying her to Atlanta where her mistress intends to prostitute herself to a supposedly rich Rhett Butler to pay Tara’s taxes; fumes silently at Scarlett’s plotting an expedient marriage to her sister’s fiancé, Frank Kennedy; and at first disapproves bitterly of the third marriage to Rhett Butler. As a slave, then freedwoman, the unnamed Mammy’s labour is naturalised throughout the film. We rarely see her do anything but fuss over or scold Scarlett and other characters, while the meal preparation, constant attendance on dressing and physical care, sewing of the green velvet curtains, and nuts-and-bolts labour for a grieving household, all take place off screen. Her sole expressions of resistance are the constant mumbling under her breath (to comical effect) and, the morning after Rhett and Scarlett’s night of passion, her complaint of a bad back. Like all the black characters, she is rarely seen in close-up. There are two scenes in which McDaniel escapes from the comic fusspot stereotype she plays throughout. The first is following Bonnie Blue’s birth, when she and Rhett celebrate the event. In a scene of genuine equality, the white employer faces Mammy, then pours and shares with her a glass or two of brandy. Noticing her rustling, he makes her admit she is finally wearing the red petticoat he bought her in New Orleans. In a daring break with racial conventions in southern film, he flirtatiously asks her to pull up her

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In an unusual scene of racial equality, Rhett and Mammy drink together

Mammy leads Melanie upstairs, describing the terrible recriminations following the death of Bonnie Blue

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skirt so he can see it; giggling coyly, Mammy complies. Because of the relaxed nature of the encounter, McDaniel is humorously theatrical rather than comical, amusing but not minstrel-like. The second scene that allows McDaniel to express emotional depth – indeed, the only scene in which she is provided with a substantial monologue – is the long slow walk upstairs with Melanie Wilkes following the death of Bonnie Blue. Probably the first tragic film speech by an African American actor, Mammy gives a tearful description of Rhett’s near-madness, his shooting of the pony that threw Bonnie to her death, his threat of suicide and Scarlett and Rhett’s terrible mutual recriminations. The only witness of the couple’s angry words, she says ‘It lak ter turn mah blood cold, whut dey say ter one ’nother.’ Taking charge of a hopeless situation, she has ‘fetched’ Melanie to persuade Rhett (locked in his room with the body) to allow Bonnie to be buried. For a few intense minutes, Mammy is the emotional centre and narrative driver of the story, albeit by involving the white woman she knows will have influence over Rhett. Her faltering but coherent narrative uttered through tears – an unusual sight indeed in 1930s southern films – undoubtedly influenced the Academy’s voters to give her the Award for Best Supporting Actress. Hattie McDaniel never criticised GWTW and always refused to participate in civil rights activities. In her Oscar acceptance speech, claiming this to be one of the happiest moments of her life, she said she hoped to ‘always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry’. By contrast, Mammy’s fellow ‘house servant’ Prissy took a much feistier line. One of the most eloquent critics of the film’s treatment of slaves and slave motifs, Butterfly McQueen was herself denounced in later years by some African Americans as an ‘Uncle Tom’. Thelma MacQueen was a modestly successful New York stage actress by the time David Selznick discovered her, and had changed her name to Butterfly McQueen following an appearance in the ‘Butterfly Ballet’ of the playlet Aunt Sophronia at College. Aged twenty-eight at the time (and known for her comically high-pitched

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squeaky voice), the actress was first believed by one of Selznick’s representatives to be ‘too old – too fat – and too dignified for the part’.92 Selznick himself disagreed, and – unlike with other parts – appears to have considered no other actress for the role. The film’s first director, George Cukor, was unkind to McQueen, urging her to accept being slapped by Scarlett O’Hara and to eat watermelon. She fought back, refusing a ‘piccaninny’ headscarf in favour of her own colourful hair bows, protesting against the black actors being crammed into one car rather than the white actors’ limousines and objecting to restroom segregation on the movie backlot. While she claimed David Selznick sympathised with her feelings, and Clark Gable supported her (though Vivien Leigh was no ‘sister’ and Hattie McDaniel told her she complained too much), McQueen hated the whole experience. She told Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, ‘I didn’t want to be that little slave. I didn’t want to play that stupid part. I was just whining and crying. I was a stupid girl. That’s what Prissy was. Hahahahahaha.’93 Indeed, Margaret Mitchell disliked the performance; saying playfully that this was the one part she would like to play, she claimed her Prissy was ‘shiftless’ but not ‘stupid’.94 Donald Bogle valiantly defends the role, arguing that her performance ‘seemed to provide an outlet for the repressed fears of the audience’, and represented a ‘unique combination of the comic and the pathetic’.95 Many viewers found it excruciating to see a twenty-eight-year-old theatre actor reduced to playing a foolish and irresponsible piccaninny to provide the film’s main comic relief. Her bullying and slapping by Scarlett O’Hara, the amusement expressed Butterfly McQueen plays slave Prissy

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towards her by Belle Watling’s household (including Rhett Butler) and her irritating feebleness on the long road to Tara, all stick in the modern gullet – as they did in hers. She repeated this ‘handkerchief head’ role several times in films such as Mildred Pierce (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946), but following her part as Vashti in the latter, turned her back on foolish maid roles, quitting Hollywood – and a possibly lucrative career. In his 1965 autobiography, Malcolm X described going to see the film in his home town, Mason, Michigan: ‘I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug’. Two decades later, Alice Walker echoed this when rebuking a feminist friend for appearing at a women’s ball dressed as Scarlett O’Hara: ‘My trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head’.96 Scarlett hits Prissy for lying about her midwifery abilities (simulated following Butterfly McQueen’s objections)

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Butterfly McQueen continued to be in demand at different periods when GWTW was reissued. Refusing to be associated with the film at the height of the 1960s civil rights era, she was prepared to recite the ‘birthin’ babies’ line on a US panel show in the 1970s, and participated in the 1989 fiftieth anniversary celebrations. By that time, she had obtained her BA degree in Political Science, undertaken social work in Harlem, toured a one-woman show, and played the role of Queenie in a touring version of Showboat (ironically, the role Hattie McDaniel had made famous in the 1936 Hollywood film). I recall my own disquiet, watching Butterfly McQueen in 1989 on BBC TV, interviewed by Terry Wogan during her fiftieth anniversary tour. Responding sharply to Wogan’s patronising questions, making some strong political points about slavery, and singing a little ditty to Max Steiner’s Tara theme, she seemed to have been set up as the minstrel laughing-stock for a white British audience. 12 Years a Slave, winner of three Oscars including Best Picture, was hailed as a milestone in black artistic success and truth-telling about the institution of slavery. Although many others had tackled the subject, none seems to have hit the international nerve in the way McQueen managed to do. With an African American US President serving a second term of office, numerous countries trying to make reparation for the slave trade, and slavery and global awareness of the tragic consequences of racial divisions, you would imagine GWTW to be dead in the water. In 2014, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, was forced to change the proposed GWTW theme of its summer ball because students complained the film was racist. St Edmund’s student Mamusu Kallon, from Sierra Leone, described GWTW as ‘a film that glamorises the romantic dreams of a slave owner and a Ku Klux Klan member while rendering the horrors of slavery invisible’. The college changed the theme. In Rebecca Wells’s bestselling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), the young Vivi, visiting Atlanta for the 1939 film premiere, is horrified at the way her black maid is barred from the celebrations and badly treated by privileged white women. This

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recalls the shocking exclusion of all black actors from that glittering event, and the separate tables occupied by white and black actors during the 1940 Academy Awards ceremony at which Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar. Marking some small progress in Hollywood, in 2014 Lupita Nyong’o, who won hers for 12 Years a Slave, was seated at a top table, indisputably star of the whole show. I have already mentioned the horrified reaction of the Margaret Mitchell Estate to African American novelist Alice Randall’s parody of GWTW, The Wind Done Gone, a decidedly unromantic story in which all the black and white characters are related and end up buried together. The phenomenally successful TV series Roots (which broke all viewing records in the 1970s) was widely understood to be a riposte to GWTW from the perspective of the Mammys, Prissys and other unnamed slaves in the original work.97 In 2014, the film of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, covering eight years of the 1960s Biafran war, was referred to by its star, Thandie Newton, as ‘Gone With the Wind in Nigeria’. All these liberal, progressive novels and films about slavery are intertextual challenges to GWTW, frequently adopting its most successful elements (focus on family, the land, power relations and physical and emotional closeness between master and slave/servant) and in the case of a film like Spielberg’s The Color Purple, emulating the original film’s production values – soaring musical score, lavish, colourful design and sweeping landscapes. This last film, however, caused its creator considerable disquiet. When Alice Walker, who wrote the novel, heard Spielberg claim Gone With the Wind to be ‘the greatest movie ever made’, she reflected on her own first viewing in a segregated theatre and her feeling that it is ‘a film in which one spoiled white woman’s summer of picking cotton is deemed more important than the work, under the lash, of twenty generations of my ancestors’.98 In recent years, film and literary scholars have argued that white characters are drawn towards, and identify with, qualities in black characters that they wish to possess or emulate. Toni

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Morrison, Richard Dyer, Tara McPherson and others have discussed the ways whites perform, masquerade and mimic blackness in literary and film texts. This can be seen in both Jezebel and GWTW, with sexualised, strong women Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh taking on physical ‘weary loads’. Recent critics have noted the dubious whiteness of the two ‘outsider’ southerners, Irish immigrant-turnedplantation master Gerald O’Hara and renegade Rhett Butler of swarthy features, ‘insolent’ and ‘impudent’ non-received status, and ambiguous role in the black stereotype of rapist (described in the novel’s ‘rape’ scene as ‘a terrifying, face-less black bulk’ and in the film bathed in dark shadows).99 The inability of whites to extricate themselves from blackness (that which Toni Morrison identifies in white American writers like Twain and Hemingway as ‘a real or fabricated Africanist presence … crucial to their sense of Americanness’) is articulated in many narratives of racial ‘passing [for white]’.100 Despite the virtual absence of overt reference in novel and film to miscegenation (sexual relations between races, a widespread practice in the ante-bellum South), it emerges as a subtext of both. The close relationship between Scarlett and Mammy (praised by conservative critics, and castigated as patronising racism by others) suggests that Mammy – seen as having power over Scarlett as enforcer of norms of southern behaviour and etiquette – must shape Scarlett into a white lady of the planter class to ‘[maintain] Tara as the space of the family and of white rule’.101 Talking of the final scene of the book, when Scarlett yearns to return to home and Mammy, the mother who has nurtured her, Tara McPherson suggests that for the white woman (author and character), ‘blackness becomes a shadowy source of comfort and security, a desirable space of safety’.102 I am struck by the way this intense and profound relationship is deliberately silenced at the conclusion of the film. In Scarlett’s final crisis following Rhett’s abandonment, she hears the voices of the three (white?) men in her life – her father Gerald, Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler, all reminding her of the

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beloved red earth of her restored plantation home, Tara, which will allow her to rebuild her strength. There is no mention of Mammy. Whether he knew it or not, Selznick may have found a final vision of white–black family harmony and unity too politically radical for audiences in segregated pre-civil rights American society.

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4 Scarlett and Rhett – Destined or Doomed? What do we expect of a great love story? The first requirement is a fascinating and engaging couple who deserve each other. They must have a powerful on-screen chemistry that makes the audience yearn for consummation. Naturally, the course of true love must not run smoothly, for how else could suspense, sexual excitement and emotional tension be sustained through a full-length film? With most great romances, there is initial spark and conflict, followed by a long process of partings, misunderstandings, rejection and frustration, culminating in a great love that we hope will endure. Often there is a monumental and sometimes impossible challenge (think of Jane Eyre’s heroinical struggles before she captures Rochester, the heartbreaking partings in Casablanca (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945), or the sadomasochistic trials through which Fifty Shades of Grey Ana Steele must go to win her Christian Grey). Gone With the Wind, often dubbed ‘the greatest love story of them all’, is a romance with an original twist. ‘Destined or doomed?’, asked John Wiley, Jr, in an essay about the love affair in a seventy-fifthanniversary booklet.103 The lovers, Scarlett and Rhett, meet as Scarlett is throwing herself into the arms of another man, Ashley Wilkes, whom she will claim to love until the final sad, bitter scenes. Rhett is playful and sardonic but clearly smitten; Scarlett is attracted and seduced but careless of others’ feelings, reluctant to let go of her adulterous love and succumb to Rhett’s excessively erotic masculine power. The trials they face, the battle of wills and negotiation of gender roles are worthy of many a Hollywood romantic couple – from Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. At their first meeting, Scarlett declares, ‘Sir, you are no gentleman’, while Rhett retorts, ‘And you, Miss, are no lady.’ When Scarlett arrives at the Atlanta jail to persuade Rhett to give her money,

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Rhett asks suspiciously (understanding she is role-playing), ‘Scarlett, can it be possible … that you’ve grown a woman’s heart?’ The film ends not (as in a conventional romance) with their marriage, but with a post-marital separation. A tempestuous short-lived union is followed by a series of misreadings of each other’s desires, culminating in Rhett’s departure with that memorable final phrase. When I asked women whether Scarlett would get Rhett back, the younger remained optimistic (‘Surely she would think of something’), but older women said they knew when a man had had enough, and Scarlett had surely tested him to the limit. Margaret Mitchell was asked repeatedly whether they got together again. She wrote the final chapter first, and in her copious correspondence with readers always said their guess was as good as hers (though she had indicated to her editor, Harold Latham, that she would make any changes he required ‘except to make a happy ending’).104 She never wrote another novel and set her heart against any sequel. As I discussed earlier, in recent decades the Mitchell Estate has ignored her wishes – to considerable commercial advantage.

Rhett Butler’s first appearance, at the foot of the Twelve Oaks stairs

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Vivien Leigh was matched for glamour, sex appeal and riveting performance by Clark Gable, who was a very popular choice for this great romantic hero and played Rhett Butler to perfection (despite making no attempt to sound southern). Each time I watch the film in the cinema, women in the audience sigh ecstatically at Gable’s first appearance at the foot of the stairs, eyes twinkling with playful lust. Scarlett whispers that he gazes at her as if he knows what she looks like without her shimmy, and we shiver with delight. The volatile sexual and emotional chemistry between the two – familiar from many romances – gives the film that powerful seam of passion denied, restrained and then fully expressed during one night of sexual bliss. The women who wrote to me about their memories of Gone With the Wind felt anguish over the conflicts and tragedies in that great love affair, especially the drunken sexual encounter and Scarlett’s miscarriage after falling downstairs, then the death of their precious daughter Bonnie Blue, and Rhett’s final walk out of the door. They recognise the battle of wills in a fractious but intense love match, and mourn the parting of the ways.

After Bonnie Blue’s tragic pony-riding fall, Rhett holds her lifeless body in his arms

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Literary and film critics have examined GWTW’s love triangle through various theoretical and historical prisms, though they share with Mitchell’s biographers a conviction that the work interrogates and subverts orthodox gender roles and expectations. Feminist critics have noted Scarlett’s masculinist traits and increasing rejection of conventionally feminine behaviour and feelings. Cora Kaplan, for example, writes: Her femininity is masquerade, for behind it lies a scheming active masculine ambition to survive and get ahead … . Unsentimental and asexual in most of her dealings with men, an unwilling mother, Rhett must convert her to sexuality, and by taking the child away, to some measure of maternal feeling.105

Most recently, critic James A. Crank applies queer theory to the novel, suggesting that this is ‘a romance anxious about the expectations of romance’, Scarlett and Rhett both resisting the roles assigned to them as southern men and women, and thus taking pleasure in ‘transgressing codes of gender, class, race, and sexuality’. He argues that their attraction is based not on desire but on ‘a shared perspective, a ruthlessness and cynical detachment from the social order of the “Old South”’.106 Quoting queer theorists, he suggests that as Scarlett O’Hara is masculinised, her love object Ashley Wilkes is feminised. His love of poetry and philosophy contrasts markedly with Scarlett’s no-nonsense pragmatism, and in the end he is revealed as a coward and a pitiable failure. Ashley was described to me by GWTW enthusiasts with terms most damning of a ‘real man’: wet, wishy-washy, wimpish, nambypamby, niminy-piminy, lacking balls.107 More attractive is Rhett, whose tough masculinity and sexual prowess never seem in doubt, and who navigates between the worlds of women and men with great aplomb. Defining himself in feminine as well as masculine terms, he knows how to choose a bonnet and be an empathetic and hands-on parent as well as display the piratical skills of gambling, blockade-

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running and being a prostitutes’ familiar. As James Crank points out, there is a strong ‘bromance’ between masculine southerners fighting for their regional identity, and yet (until late in the day) this is rejected by Rhett, as are sisterhood and female solidarity by Scarlett. As an unorthodox love story, GWTW breaks with many conventions of character and narrative. First of all, this is a story about various kinds of love – for parents and children, lovers, friends and comrades. Scarlett’s love for and desire to please her mother (a self-sacrificing plantation mistress who dies caring for others) is complemented by the ambivalent and uneasy sisterly love she comes to share with her most uncritical and forgiving supporter, Melanie. Most enduringly, there is the love of land, earth, home. From the first scene in which Gerald O’Hara and his daughter Scarlett are silhouetted against the red sky and earth of Georgia, the film suggests that an abiding love for your homeland is what stabilises and grounds you. Paradoxically, most of the film’s action takes place many miles away from Tara plantation itself, in and around Atlanta. Scarlett manifests no interest in real sods of earth except when she has to feed a household, and seems more attached to the lucrative businesses she develops and the home comforts she has always enjoyed. Only at the end of the film, having lost those closest to her, does she finally understand the sustaining nature of a specific place on the earth that will always be home. Nevertheless, throughout both book and film, the mythical associations of the Tara built by an Irishman on American soil are invoked to give a family story the power of an ancestral saga, and the love story a resonance beyond the individuals involved. Romance scenarios normally require a female protagonist who is steady, loyal and true to her own heart, while the male protagonist is ostensibly ambivalent and hard to tame (and always inscrutable). Rhett Butler joins a pantheon of enigmatic heroes such as Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy, Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, Bridget Jones’s Diary’s Mark Darcy and Sex and the City’s Mr Big. Margaret Mitchell’s love triangle persists throughout the book and film, and is

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resolved only ambivalently by the denouement. By no means steady and true, Scarlett’s affections move unpredictably between two men who embody different philosophical and practical responses to the challenges of major historical crisis, and whom she needs in different ways as her own story develops. She clings obstinately to the Ashley Wilkes she knew all her untroubled early life because – despite his many vacillations – he values Tara, retains a loyal commitment to Old South white values, and shares her nostalgia for a golden age of white privilege and youthful irresponsibility. Utterly humourless, and with little appetite for excitement or challenge, he yearns for poetry and a quiet privileged life with Melanie at Twelve Oaks Plantation. In the new post-bellum world she is forced to inhabit, Rhett Butler represents a cool realism she comes to embrace as her only means of survival. He is a pragmatist, gambler and bounder, who appeals to Scarlett because of his pariah status, irreverence and illgotten gains. And, as every woman will tell you, he has an infectious sense of humour that makes him an attractive lover and relaxing companion (the only person to make Scarlett smile, laugh and eat spontaneously). There is lively banter between them, with Rhett using ironic wit, often at Scarlett’s expense. While Melanie and Ashley idealise and make constant allowances for Scarlett’s behaviour, and Mammy understands but judges her harshly, Rhett is the one character who confronts Scarlett friskily about her fake southern belle-ness, refusing to be beguiled. And yet even Rhett cannot be relied on to act with consistency, since he too abandons her at a critical moment, joining the Confederate Army to fight for a ‘lost cause’. Scarlett’s prescient comment that Rhett can imagine her without her shimmy is metaphorically true throughout the whole story, and a source of much of the humour and pathos (in the novel we are told ‘He read her like a book’).108 At Atlanta’s Monster Bazaar, knowing that Scarlett married Charles Hamilton to arouse Ashley’s jealousy, Rhett comments wickedly on ‘how much’ Hamilton meant to his new widow. When Scarlett visits Rhett in jail and claims to be prospering,

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he observes her field-ravaged hands and tells her, ‘You can drop the moonlight and magnolias, Scarlett’. His proposal, going down theatrically on one knee and mouthing clichéd sentiments to persuade her to marry him, is designed to appeal to Scarlett’s sense of the absurd as well as her self-serving rationalism. His suggestion that she – who expresses distaste for marriage – marry him ‘for fun’ breaks all the codes of southern courtship. Her admission that she is agreeing partly because of money gives this relationship a quirky honesty that comically subverts the faux-chivalric tradition of their contemporaries. But this is also a love story set in violent times. The context of the family story is one of warfare, the destruction of land and property and the brutalities of the Reconstruction period. Selznick’s story tells of one woman’s grappling with a new social order and dealing with her own post-traumatic stress. On a recent viewing, I counted no less than ten acts of physical violence committed by Rhett proposes to Scarlett in mock chivalric mode

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Scarlett (plus many a verbal lash). She slaps Ashley Wilkes in the library for rejecting her advances and Prissy in the Atlanta house for admitting she can’t ‘birth babies’; on the road to Tara, she thumps Rhett as he leaves her to join the army; when returning to Tara, she whips the stumbling horse to death; slaps Suellen for claiming she hates Tara; murders the Union soldier who threatens to attack and/or rob her; throws a clod of Tara’s earth at Jonas Wilkerson, the exoverseer who offers to buy Tara; pummels and bites the jailed Rhett when he tells her he has no money to give her; hits and tries to shoot her would-be rapist in Shantytown; and finally lashes out at Rhett when – bringing Bonnie back from Europe – he reacts sardonically to the news of her pregnancy. What are we to make of all this violence, and how does Vivien Leigh convey the emotional driver behind each act? As in the novel, Scarlett is forced to perform a feminine identity about which – given her élite upbringing as southern belle – she feels understandably

Scarlett slaps her sister Suellen in the cotton field for claiming she hates Tara

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bewildered and rebellious. Not only does she repeatedly break the rules of her class by declaring love to another woman’s husband, she is forced into proactive roles within and beyond her family – acting as midwife to Melanie’s baby, struggling to bear the burden of breadwinner for the Tara community, confronting a threatening Union soldier and facing a sneering husband when pregnant. Her angry hurling of a china ornament after Ashley’s rebuff, her weeping in Rhett’s arms after the childbirth, her stunned realisation ‘I guess I’ve done murder’ as she drags the soldier’s body away and her weary assertion to Frank Kennedy, ‘I’m the head of the house now’, all speak of a figure who is reshaping herself and being redefined in a world in which former certainties no longer apply. Rhett Butler underlines this gender shift, telling her the two of them are ‘not gentlemen and we have no honor’. Vivien Leigh, physically and emotionally strained throughout the gruelling process of filming, conveys the frustration of having to face continual, apparently insoluble challenges and – given her formation as southern belle – the difficulty of coping except through a grotesque parody of masculinity that manifests itself in violent acts. Such acts may also be seen as a cry for help to everyone who keeps asserting how strong and resilient she is. The main scene in which she meets her match is colloquially known as ‘Row and Rape’. This follows Scarlett’s disgraced appearance at Ashley’s party after being discovered (innocently, for once) in his arms, when both she and Rhett resort to the brandy bottle for comfort. In a fiery exchange between a somewhat chastened Scarlett and drunken Rhett, the latter ominously taunts her and threatens murder. Scarlett gives as good as she gets and, after anguished argument about her relationship with Ashley, in which Rhett’s jealousy is matched by her haughty and defiant disdain, he tells her that after she has turned him out of her bed while dreaming of Ashley, ‘this is one time you’re not turning me out!’ Then follows the notorious staircase ascent with a protesting Scarlett borne upwards into the darkness. The next scene sees Scarlett alone in bed

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the following morning, smiling, confirming her satisfaction by singing two lines from the folk song ‘Ben Bolt (Oh Don’t You Remember)’, and giggling to herself as she recalls the previous night. Some women find this scene deeply disturbing, as it apparently affirms the misogynist claim that women desire to be raped. Others, however, see this as a clarifying crisis in the relationship, when both protagonists unite in an explosively unguarded and sadomasochistic act of mutual pleasure. A friend said to me that the book and film got it wrong, that Rhett would never have left Scarlett following that mutually satisfying night. I disagree. Both lovers have so much invested in their own defensiveness and fear of commitment that any long-term partnership is probably doomed; opening up completely to each other unnerves Rhett, who emerges as the more vulnerable of the two, leading to the beginning of the end. Margaret Mitchell’s novel describes this event in explicitly racialised language, repeating imagery of darkness, savagery, brutality and shame, with Scarlett Rhett carries Scarlett upstairs for passionate sex (colloquially known as ‘Row and Rape’)

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expressing a desire to ‘hold the whip over [Rhett’s] insolent black head’, suggesting that powerful white desire for blackness that – as I have outlined earlier – some critics feel suffuses GWTW.109 The screenplay sanitises the novel’s vocabulary, making this scene an alcohol-fuelled marital fight with a sexual resolution, though one of the film’s most terrifying moments is when Rhett holds Scarlett’s head with his large hands, looms over her and threatens to smash her skull ‘like a walnut’ to remove thoughts of Ashley. Contemporary preoccupation with and feminist debates about the scale of domestic violence must render this encounter deeply troubling and, as with the film’s racial myopia, the sexual politics of this scene need interrogation. As the film moves towards its dramatic final scenes, the faltering sexual and emotional chemistry between Scarlett and Rhett is superbly sustained. Her sudden clear-sighted recognition of Ashley’s real love for Melanie and her own passion for Rhett are

After losing everyone, Scarlett defiantly cries, ‘Tomorrow is another day’

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contrasted with his hardening coolness and congealing bitterness. One of Leigh’s greatest strengths throughout the film is her ability to convey a powerful intelligence and dawning understanding, and the poignancy of Rhett’s departure is underlined by her eventual clearsightedness, alas too late. The denouement, in which Scarlett is thinking fast rather than emoting, rationally planning her next move as the survivor she has always been, offers hope to the audience that all is not yet lost. Far from being a tragic victim of a doomed love affair, we know that the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara will be fine, whether or not Rhett returns, perfectly capable of thinking about it tomorrow which, as she keeps reminding us, is another day.

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Exit Music Time after time, in newspaper, TV and film research bureau surveys, Gone With the Wind is accorded top billing as an all-time audience favourite. In the ‘greatest love story’ category, it beats films such as George Cukor’s and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1936, 1996), William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Otto Preminger’s Forever Amber (1947) and Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (starring Vivien Leigh, 1945), and is often cited as and voted one of the best films of all time. In 1940, it swept the board at the Academy Awards, and for half a century held the record for the only Award given to an African American actor. So what is it that makes Gone With the Wind a classic film? Does it stand up as a timeless, archetypal masterpiece? Will it outlive other films – even those more politically progressive and relevant to contemporary societies? The word ‘classic’ is problematic, associated as it with the notion of a ‘canon’ (something literary and film scholars have questioned over the years – particularly when examining who is actually making these choices). However, if a film may be regarded as a classic because of the reverence accorded it – its influence on other film-makers, the number of popular culture references and the familiarity audiences have with its characters and key events and dialogue – GWTW would win hands down. Few other films have penetrated so deeply into the vernacular. Even those who have neither read the book nor seen the film will know the names of Scarlett and Rhett, and recognise the famous lines, ‘Frankly, my dear …’ and ‘Tomorrow is another day’. No other historical romance or epic has received such acclaim. And yet, among serious film critics and organisations, GWTW is rarely accorded the status of ‘classic’. For instance, in a recent poll by the BFI of over 800 critics, programmers,

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film scholars and distributors on the greatest films of all time, GWTW did not make the cut.110 Given the long, bloody history of racial oppression and race relations that continues to haunt and divide the American people, it is perhaps understandable if critics steer clear of GWTW hagiography. However, many feminist critics and film enthusiasts believe that GWTW has been snubbed for the pantheon because it is a ‘woman’s film’. As a war film without battle scenes, with a young woman protagonist and at its heart a complicated love triangle, adored and obsessed over especially by white female audiences (though women of colour count among its fans), assumptions and prejudices about ‘romance’ consign it to the female melodrama corner. Well, so what? Women love it, for reasons I have discussed earlier. It boasts probably the largest, and one of the most complex and transgressive female film roles most of us have ever seen; its lead character teeters on the edge of major historical change, a cosseted society falling away beneath her feet while she deals with life’s major emotional, economic and social challenges; audiences can speculate endlessly about whether Scarlett ever gets Rhett back; it has some of the best cinematography of all time, with visual and auditory feasts at every turn; the witty and clever screenplay, amazing costumes and luscious mise en scène are of the highest order. Its very popularity with women has done it no favours in a masculinist construction of film’s canon, but for female (and indeed many male) audiences those reasons are certainly sufficient to justify its longevity. Molly Haskell claims it is a ‘small miracle’ this ‘woman’s film’ has grown into ‘something profoundly American, a canvas that contains, if not Walt Whitman’s multitudes, at least multiple perspectives’.111 For Cora Kaplan, the work resonated with women because ‘the pre-Civil War South did serve as a sort of pre-capitalist site of family romance, a mythical moment of settled traditional social relations that the Civil War destroyed forever’. Because of the poison of slavery, Kaplan argues its illusory historical landscape must be disrupted ‘so that the South could enter modern industrial

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Laurence Olivier, photographed by his wife Vivien Leigh, in a boat inscribed with Scarlett’s familiar exclamation, ‘Fiddle-dee-dee’ (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

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capitalist society’. For her, ‘Gone With the Wind encourages the reader to regress, insists that she moves on’.112 Though discussing the book rather than the film, Kaplan’s words hit a nerve. For me, as for so many others, this epic film addresses apocalyptic and politically charged events in ways that allow my fantasies to flourish and expands the scope of my historical and emotional understanding, as well as providing sensory delights and satisfactions. That is no mean feat.

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Notes 1 David O. Selznick to Will H. Hays, 20 October 1939, in Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 246. 2 The Civil War (or ‘War between the States’ as the Confederates called it) lasted between 1861 and 1865; it was started by a militant Confederacy of seven southern states that seceded from the Union, and ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865. Reconstruction is the period between 1865 and 1877 during which the South was reintegrated within the Union and the slave system was dismantled. The terms ‘ante-bellum’ and ‘post-bellum’ refer to the periods before and after the Civil War. 3 Quoted in Stephen Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), p. 22. 4 Willie Lee Rose, 'Race and Region in American Historical Fiction: Four Episodes in Popular Culture’, in William Freehling (ed.), Slavery and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 130. 5 Steve Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), p. 279. 6 See Darden Asbury Pyron, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Kendra Bean, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait (Philadelphia, PA and London: Running Press, 2013). 7 David O’Connell, The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (Decatur, GA: Claves and Petry, Ltd, 1996);

Stuart M. Kaminsky, Tomorrow Is Another Day (Sutton: Severn House, 1996); Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind; http://www.thescarlettletter.com. 8 Quoted in Rose, ‘Race and Region’ in American Historical Fiction, p. 4. See www.albertmohler.com/2005/12/19/ cutting-through-the-cultural-chaos-themeaning-of-brokeback-mountain/. 9 Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of ‘Gone With the Wind’ (New York: William Morrow, 1965), p. 30. 10 For a discussion of the Celtic mythology in Gone With the Wind and its sequel, see Helen Taylor, Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), Chs 1 and 2. 11 Pyron, Southern Daughter. 12 Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago, 1989, 2014). 13 Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI, 1992, 2012). 14 David Selznick to Katharine Brown, 1 February 1940 and 7 October 1941, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 272–3. 15 Daniel Cross Turner and Keaghan Turner, ‘Why Gone With the Wind Isn’t: The Contemporary Blowback (Or, Scarlett O’Hara Is Undead, and We Don’t Feel So Good Ourselves)’, in James A. Crank (ed.), New Approaches to Gone With the Wind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 16 See http://www.nytimes.com/1998/ 11/05/ books/making-books-rhett-andpat-conroy-aim-to-have-the-last-word. html.

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17 John Sutherland, ‘A Satirical Take on Gone With the Wind? You Might as Well Burn the American Flag,’ G2, Guardian, 7 May 2001, p. 6. 18 For a fuller discussion of sequels and rewritings, see Taylor, Circling Dixie, Chapter 2, and ‘The South and Britain: Celtic Cultural Connections’, in Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith (eds), South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), pp. 340–62. 19 Ronda Racha Penrice, quoted in Jocelyn McClurg, “‘Ruth’s Journey” Reimagines Gone With the Wind’s Mammy’, USA Today, 12 October 2014; Donald McCaig, Ruth’s Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). It is unfortunate, to say the least, that McCaig’s title is the same as that of Ruth Glasberg Gold’s memoir of a Holocaust survivor, Ruth’s Journey (1996). 20 Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive, Theatre & Performance Collections, V&A Museum, London. 21 See https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/04/ donald-w-miller-jr-md/gone-with-thewind/. 22 Gavin Lambert, quoted in Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, p. 12. 23 David Selznick to Sidney Howard, 6 January 1937, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 159. 24 Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind, p. 34. 25 David Selznick to Mr O’Shea, 20 October 1938, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 184.

26 Pyron, Southern Daughter, pp. 380, 384, 386. 27 Wilson, The Making of Gone with the Wind, pp. 289–90. 28 David O. Selznick to Will H. Hays, 20 October 1939, in Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 245–6. 29 Amy Clukey, ‘Pop Plantations: Gone With the Wind and the Southern Imaginary in Irish Culture’, in Crank, New Approaches to Gone With the Wind. 30 BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour, Gone With the Wind, 13 December 2014, Made in Manchester Productions. Southerner Leonard Pitts, Jr described the accents as ‘so bad I root for one of Sherman’s shells to blow the actors into the arms of a dialogue coach’, ‘Where’s the Glory?’, TV Guide, 23–29 December 2000, p. 28. 31 BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour. 32 Vivien Leigh, ‘My Scarlett Days’, in Movie Mirror, n.d., Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive. 33 Laurence Olivier Papers, British Library, quoted in unpublished talk by Lisa Stead, ‘Vivien Leigh and Creative Labour: Gender, Archives and Visibility’, University of Reading, Henley Business School, 9 February 2015. 34 Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 211. 35 Susan Courtney, ‘Ripping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons from Streetcar on Gone With the Wind’, in J. E. Smyth (ed.), Hollywood and the Historical Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 53–4. 36 Vivien Leigh, ‘I Lived “Scarlett” for Six Months’, n.p., Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive.

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37 Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, pp. 220–1. 38 Gable was an elegant dresser and fine mover, but apparently could not dance. It is amusing to reflect that, in the Bazaar scene when he flings Vivien Leigh round the room, he had to be placed on a moving platform. 39 Margaret Mitchell, in Gone With the Wind: The Making of a Legend (Elstree Ltd, 1988). 40 Barbara Paskin, ‘Witness’, BBC World Service, 15 December 2014. 41 Since 1939, there have been numerous attempts by wealthy and influential figures to keep the legacy of Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind alive in the city, exploiting tourism opportunities and memorialising the work that has brought Atlanta such international attention. This project has, however, been much contested in this modern multicultural city that claimed in recent decades it was ‘too busy to hate’. See Jennifer W. Dickey, A Tough Little Patch of History: Gone With the Wind and the Politics of Memory (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014). 42 Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Cinema, 10 April 1940. 46 British Library Macmillan Archive Add. MS 54865, f.98. 47 David O. Selznick to Messrs Whitney Wharton and Miss Brown, 25 September 1936, quoted in Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind, p. 7. 48 B. L. Macmillan Archive, second part. Readers’ reports vol.28, f.821 (31 March 1936); George Brett to Daniel Macmillan,

1 December 1936, B. L. Add. MS. 54866, f.2. 49 George Brett, ibid. 50 B.L. Add. MS. 55310, f.79. 51 Harold Macmillan to George Brett, 29 January 1940, B.L. Add. MS. 55315, f.430. 52 Allen Eyles, ‘When Exhibitors Saw Scarlett: The War over Gone With the Wind’, Picture House no. 27 (2002), p. 29. 53 Cutting (no name or date), MM/REF/PE/AC/1202, Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. 54 Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (New York: Warner, 1991); Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007); Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 55 See Anne Edwards, Scarlett and Me (The Marietta Gone With the Wind Museum, 2011), and an account of Tennant’s experience in Caroline Scott, ‘Bestoftimesworstoftimes’, Times, photocopied article sent by Emma Tennant to Helen Taylor, citation unknown. 56 Lisa Gregoire, ‘Gone With the Wind Isn’t Music to Everyone’s Ear’, New Nation, 28 January 2008, p. 5. 57 Behlmer, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 165. 58 Ibid., p. 188. 59 David O. Selznick to Ed Sullivan, in ibid. 60 See http://vivandlarry.com/vivien/ remembrances/george-cukor.

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61 Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (London: Black Swan, 1985), p. 10. 62 For a very interesting analysis of the two films, and the ways Streetcar deconstructs the ‘monumental screen heroine’, Scarlett, see Courtney, ‘Ripping the Portieres at the Seams’, pp. 49–70. 63 Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, p. xii. 64 These terms for the two men appear in Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, p. 33. 65 Bean, Vivien Leigh, p. 60. 66 Theatergoer Weekly, 18 February 1939, Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive. 67 Atlanta Journal, 14 January 1939, in Vivien Leigh Archive. 68 Leigh, ‘I Lived “Scarlett” for Six Months’. 69 BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour. 70 Leigh, ‘I Lived “Scarlett” for Six Months’. 71 Angela Carter, “The Southern Belle as Business Woman in Waiting’, Observer, 3 January 1982, reprinted in Observer New Review, 4 January 2015, p. 5. 72 Hannah Betts, ‘Vivien Leigh Archive’, in V&A Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2013, p. 65. 73 Daily Mail, 8 March 1961, p. 7, featured an article about an unfinished portrait of Leigh by Augustus John, completed in 1942, ‘The Face in the Dust’; Ronald Searle drew a cartoon for Punch of Leigh and her husband Sir Laurence Olivier, 23 January 1957; both in Bristol University Theatre Collection. 74 Tolson quoted in Turner and Turner, ‘Why Gone With the Wind Isn’t’. 75 As this book went to press, political pressures forced the removal of the Confederate flag from the South

Carolina state capitol building, a major symbolic defeat for southern racial divisiveness. 76 Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 112, 91. 77 William Wright to David Selznick, quoted in Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind, p. 18. 78 Wilson, The Making of Gone With the Wind, p. 105. 79 Ibid., p. 119. 80 Quoted in a TV documentary, 1988, in Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered, p. 22. 81 See http://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2015/jan/26/benedictcumberbatch-apologises-after-callingblack-actors-coloured. 82 David Selznick to Sidney Howard, 6 January 1937, in Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 162. 83 Pyron, Southern Daughter, pp. 389–91. 84 Quoted in Clukey, ‘Pop Plantations’. 85 Quoted in Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered, p. 25. 86 Pitts, ‘Where’s the Glory?’, p. 29. 87 Hollywood Reporter, 13 December 1939, in Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive. 88 Unnamed newspaper, 12 April 1940, and To-Day’s Cinema, 5 April 1940, Scrapbook in Vivien Leigh Archive. 89 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 63. 90 Ibid., unnamed newspaper. 91 Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered, p. 31. 92 Mr Bundamann, quoted in ibid., p. 7.

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93 Quoted in ibid., p. 16. 94 Quoted in ibid., p. 18. 95 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), pp. 126–7. 96 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 113; Alice Walker, ‘A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved’, in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (London: Women’s Press, 1982), p. 118. 97 For a fuller discussion of the phenomenon of and controversy surrounding Roots, see ‘Everybody’s Search for Roots’, in Taylor, Circling Dixie. 98 Alice Walker, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 282. 99 See Joel Williamson, ‘How Black Was Rhett Butler?’, in Numan V. Bartley, The Evolution of Southern Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 87–107; Sinéad Moynihan, ‘“Kissing the Road That Chastised Me”: Scarlett, Rhett and Miscegenation in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936)’, Irish Journal of American Studies vols 13–14 (2004–5), pp. 123–37 (Moynihan refers to the way immigrant Irish were called ‘niggers turned inside out’, p. 125); Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York and London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 911.

100 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1993), p. 6. For recent discussions of ‘passing’ narratives see Julie Nerad (ed.), Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). This includes a chapter on Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. 101 McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, pp. 58, 55. 102 Ibid., p. 58. 103 John Wiley, Jr, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Ben Nussbaum (ed.), Gone With the Wind: 75th Anniversary of the First Blockbuster Movie (Irvine, CA: 1-5 Publishing, 2014), p. 55. 104 Margaret Mitchell to Harold Latham, 27 July 1935, quoted in Pyron, Southern Daughter, p. 312. 105 Cora Kaplan, ‘The Thorn Birds: Fiction, Fantasy, Femininity’, in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 119. 106 James A. Crank, ‘Queer Winds’, in Crank, New Approaches to Gone With the Wind. 107 See Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, p. 110. 108 Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, p. 912. 109 Ibid., p. 918. 110 See http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50greatest-films-all-time. 111 Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, p. xiii. 112 Kaplan, ‘The Thorn Birds’, p. 119.

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Credits Gone With the Wind USA/1939 Directed by Victor Fleming Produced by David O. Selznick Screenplay by Sidney Howard [based on the novel] ‘Gone With the Wind’, a ‘story of the Old South’ by Margaret Mitchell Photographed by Ernest Haller This Production was Designed by William Cameron Menzies Supervising Film Editor Hal C. Kern Musical Score by Max Steiner © Selznick International Pictures, Inc. Production Companies a Selznick International picture Selznick International in association with MetroGoldwyn-Mayer … present released by Loew’s Incorporated Scenario Assistant Barbara Keon Production Manager Raymond A. Klune Assistant Director Eric G. Stacey

Special Photographic Effects Jack Cosgrove Art Direction by Lyle Wheeler Interiors by Joseph B. Platt Interior Decoration by Edward G. Boyle Associate Film Editor James E. Newcom Costumes Designed by Walter Plunkett Technicolor Associates Ray Rennahan Wilfrid [Wilfred] M. Cline Technicolor Co. Supervision Natalie Kalmus Assistant Musical Director Lou Forbes [Sound] Recorder Frank Maher Historian Wilbur G. Kurtz Technical Advisers Susan Myrick Will Price uncredited Co-directors George Cukor Sam Wood Unit Manager William J. Scully Locations Manager Mason N. Litson Assistant Directors Ridgeway Callow Arthur Fellows

Dialogue Director B. Reeves Eason 2nd Unit Director William Cameron Menzies 2nd Unit Assistant Directors Harve Foster Ralph Slosser John Sherwood Chico Unit Director Chester M. Franklin Southern Backgrounds Director James A. Fitzpatrick Continuity Lydia Schiller Connie Earl Casting Directors Charles Richards Fred Schuessler Contributing Writers Ben Hecht Jo Swerling David O. Selznick John Van Druten Oliver H. P. Garrett Eastern Story Editor Katharine ‘Kay’ Brown Research Lillian K. Deighton Photography Lee Garmes Associate Photographic Effects – Fire Lee Zavitz Camera Operators Arthur E. Arling Vincent Farrar Gaffer James Potevin

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Electrical Superintendent Wally Oettel Key Grip Fred Williams Still Photography Fred Parrish Assistant Film Editors Richard L. Van Enger Ernest Leadly Montage Director Peter Ballbusch Interior Decoration (replaced) Hobe Erwin Set Decorator Howard B. Bristol Scenic Department Superintendent Henry J. Stahl Property Master Harold Coles On-set Property Master Arden Cripe Greens Roy A. McLaughlin Drapes James Forney Special Props Maker Ross B. Jackman Tara Landscaped by Florence Yoch Mechanical Engineer Roy D. Musgrave Construction Superintendent Harold Fenton Wardrobe Master Edward P. Lambert Wardrobe Associate Marian P. Dabney

Costumes Elmer Ellsworth Make-up/Hair Styling Monte Westmore Make-up/Hair Styling Associates Hazel Rogers Ben Nye Vivien Leigh’s Hair Styles Sydney Guilaroff Vivien Leigh’s Hats John Frederics Wigs Max Factor Associate Colour Supervisor Henri Jaffa Technicolor Tests Karl Struss Additional Music/Orchestrations Adolph Deutsch Hugo Friedhofer Heinz Roemheld Additional Stock Music William Axt Franz Waxman Soundtrack ‘Selznick International Theme’ by Alfred Newman; ‘(I Wish I Was in) Dixie’s Land’ by Daniel Decatur Emmett; ‘Katie Belle’, ‘Under the Willow She’s Sleeping’, ‘Lou’siana Belle’, ‘Dolly Day’, ‘Ring de Banjo’, ‘Massa’s in de Cold Ground’, ‘The Old Folks at Home (Swanee River)’, ‘Beautiful

Dreamer’ and ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ by Stephen Foster; ‘Sweet and Low’ by Joseph Barnby; ‘Ye Cavaliers of Dixie’ (trad); ‘Taps’ by Daniel Butterfield; ‘Maryland, My Maryland’ (based on the German Christmas carol ‘O Tannenbaum’) (trad); ‘Irish Washerwoman’ (trad); ‘Garryowen’ (trad); ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ by Louis Lambert [Patrick Gilmore]; ‘Weeping, Sad and Lonely (When This Cruel War Is Over)’ by Henry Tucker; ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag’ by Harry McCarthy; ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ by Charles Wesley, Felix Mendelssohn, William H. Cummings; ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Boys Are Marching)’ by George Frederick Root; ‘Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)’ (trad); ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ by Stephen Foster, performed by Butterfly McQueen; ‘Marching through Georgia’ by Henry Clay Work; ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ by William Steffe; ‘Yankee Doodle’ (trad); ‘Stars of the Summer Night’ by

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Isaac Baker Woodbury; ‘Bridal Chorus (Here Comes the Bride)’ from ‘Lohengrin’ by Richard Wagner; ‘Deep River’ (trad); ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ (trad); ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ (trad); ‘Ben Bolt (Oh Don’t You Remember)’ music by Nelson Kneass, from the poem by Thomas Dunn English, performed by Vivien Leigh Dance Directors Frank Floyd Edward Prinz Sound Thomas Moulton Sound Effects Fred Albin Arthur Johns Stunt Doubles Clark Gable: Yakima Canutt Jay Wilsey Paul Hurst: Frank Fawcett Vivien Leigh: Lila Finn Aline Goodwin Cammie King: Richard Smith Riding Doubles Thomas Mitchell: Carey Harrison Vivien Leigh: Hazel Warp

Dance Double for Vivien Leigh Sally De Marco Stand-in for Vivien Leigh Mozelle Miller Publicist Russell Birdwell Publicist for Atlanta and New York premieres Howard Dietz Assistant to Howard Dietz William Hebert Trailer Supervisor/Narrator Frank Whitbeck CAST At Tara The O’Hara Plantation in Georgia Thomas Mitchell Gerald O’Hara Barbara O’Neill [O’Neil] Ellen O’Hara, his wife Their Daughters Vivien Leigh Scarlett O’Hara Evelyn Keyes Suellen O’Hara Ann Rutherford Carreen O’Hara Scarlett’s Beaux George Reeves Stuart Tarleton Fred Crane Brent Tarleton

The House Servants Hattie McDaniel Mammy Oscar Polk Pork Butterfly McQueen Prissy In the Fields Victor Jory Jonas Wilkerson, the overseer Everett Brown Big Sam, the foreman At Twelve Oaks The Nearby Wilkes Plantation Howard Hickman John Wilkes Alicia Rhett India Wilkes, his daughter Leslie Howard Ashley Wilkes, his son Olivia de Havilland Melanie Hamilton, their cousin Rand Brooks Charles Hamilton, her brother Carroll Nye Frank Kennedy, a guest and a Visitor from Charleston Clark Gable Rhett Butler

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In Atlanta Laura Hope Crews Aunt ‘Pittypat’ Hamilton Eddie Anderson Uncle Peter, her coachman Harry Davenport Doctor Meade Leona Roberts Mrs. Meade Jane Darwell Mrs. Merriwether Ona Munson Belle Watling, brothel madam and Paul Hurst Yankee deserter Isabel Jewell Emmy Slattery Cammie King Bonnie Blue Butler Eric Linden amputation case J. M. Kerrigan Johnny Gallagher Ward Bond Tom, Yankee captain Jackie Moran Phil Meade Cliff Edwards reminiscing soldier L. [Lillian] KembleCooper Bonnie’s nurse in London Yakima Canutt renegade Marcella Martin Cathleen Calvert

Louis Jean Heydt hungry soldier holding Beau Wilkes Mickey Kuhn Beau Wilkes Olin Howard carpetbagger businessman Irving Bacon corporal Robert Elliott Yankee major William Bakewell mounted officer Mary Anderson Maybelle Merriwether uncredited Zack Williams Elijah Tom Seidel guest at Tara Ralph Brooks James Bush gentlemen at Twelve Oaks Phillip Trent gentleman at Twelve Oaks/bearded Confederate on steps at Tara Marjorie Reynolds gossip at Twelve Oaks Martina Cortina Inez Hatchett Azarene Rogers Sarah Whitley housemaids at Twelve Oaks Albert Morin René Picard

Terry Shero Fanny Elsing Billy McClain old Levi Tommy Kelly boy outside the Examiner office Ed Chandler a sergeant at hospital George Hackathorne a wounded soldier at hospital Rosco Ates a convalescing soldier at hospital John Arledge a dying soldier at hospital Guy Wilkerson wounded card player at hospital Joan Drake Jean Heker hospital nurses Tom Tyler commanding officer at evacuation Frank Faylen soldier aiding Doctor Meade Frank Coghlan Jr exhausted boy at evacuation Lee Phelps bartender at siege Ernest Whitman the carpetbagger’s friend William Stelling returning veteran William Stack minister

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George Meeker Wallis Clark Yankee poker-playing captains Adrian Morris carpetbagger orator Blue Washington renegade’s companion Si Jenks Yankee on street Harry Strang Tom’s aide Eric Alden Rafe Calvert Daisy Bufford Ruth Byers Frances Driver Naomi Pharr housemaids at evening prayers Kelly Griffin Bonnie Blue Butler, newborn Julia Ann Tuck Bonnie Blue Butler, 6 months Phyllis Callow Bonnie Blue Butler, age 2 Ric Holt Beau Wilkes, 11 months Gary Carlson Beau Wilkes at Scarlett’s marriage Luke Cosgrave bandleader Louise Carter bandleader’s wife Kernan Cripps Chuck Hamilton W. Kirby H. Nellman

Yankee soldiers in shantytown Ned Davenport one-armed soldier Edythe Elliott general’s wife Evelyn Harding Jolane Reynolds Suzanne Ridgeway cancan girls Lee Murray drummer boy David Newell Cade Calvert Fred Warren Frank Kennedy’s clerk John Wray prison gang overseer Patrick Curtis Melanie Hamilton’s baby Emerson Treacy Trevor Bardette Lester Dorr Ben Carter Ann Bupp Production Details The ‘burning of Atlanta’ sequence was filmed on 10 December 1938. Principal photography began on 26 January 1939 and continued until 15 February 1939 (18 days) under the direction of George Cukor. Shooting re-started on 2 March 1939 under the direction of Victor Fleming. Sam Wood replaced the ailing Fleming in late April 1939

for 24 days before Fleming’s return in May. Principal photography was completed on 1 July 1939 although Fleming continued with sporadic additional shooting between July 1939 and 11 November 1939. Locations include Chico, Calabasas, Paradise, Malibu Lake, Simi Valley, Triunfo, Agoura and the Reuss Ranch in Malibu Lake (all California); also Busch Gardens in Pasadena; Woodland Hills and the Ahmanson Ranch in West Hills (Los Angeles, California) and Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino National Forest. Some footage seen beneath the opening credits was filmed in North Little Rock in Arkansas and in Georgia. Studio interiors and back-lot shooting took place at Selznick International Studios in Culver City (California). Budget estimated as $3,957,000. 35mm; 1.37:1 (1967 re-release 70mm prints in 2.20:1); in colour (Technicolor); sound (mono – Western Electric Recording; later re-issued with a Perspecta ‘pseudostereo’ track); MPAA: 5729

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Release Details US theatrical release by Loew’s Incorporated from 17 January 1940. Running time: 220 minutes / 20,300 feet. US premiere in Atlanta (Georgia) on 15 December 1939; in New York City (New York) on 19 December 1939 and in Los Angeles (California) on 28 December 1939 US theatrical re-releases on 31 March 1942, 21 August 1947, 3 June 1954, 10 October 1967 (70mm), 18 September 1974, 3 February 1989 and 26 June 1998 UK theatrical release by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on 18 April 1940. BBFC certificate: A (with cuts). Running time: 220 minutes UK theatrical re-releases on 10 September 1968, 12 March 1969 (70mm) and 22 November 2013

Longer reported running times include the added music; specifically the overture (10m 31s), entr’acte (7m) and exit music (4m 15s) Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

ACADEMY AWARDS Best Picture Director Victor Fleming Actress Vivien Leigh Supporting Actress Hattie McDaniel Art Direction Lyle Wheeler Cinematography (Colour) Ernest Haller Ray Rennahan Film Editing Hal Kern James Newcom Writing (Screenplay) Posthumous award to Sidney Howard SPECIAL AWARDS Use of Colour William Cameron Menzies Irving G. Thalberg Award David O. Selznick

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Select Bibliography Bean, K., Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait (Philadelphia, PA and London: Running Press, 2013). Behlmer, R., Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Bogle, D., Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bantam Books, 1974). Bourne, S., Butterfly McQueen Remembered (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008). Bridges, H., Gone With the Wind: The Three-day Premiere in Atlanta (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011). Bridges, H. and Boodman, T. C., Gone With the Wind: The Definitive Illustrated History of the Book, the Movie, and the Legend (London: Simon and Schuster, 1989). Courtney, S., ‘Ripping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons from Streetcar on Gone with the Wind’, in J. E. Smyth (ed.), Hollywood and the American Historical Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 49–70. Crank, J. A. (ed.), New Approaches to Gone With the Wind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). Dickey, J. W., A Tough Little Patch of History: Gone With the Wind and the Politics of Memory (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014). Dyer, R., White (London: Routledge, 1997). Edwards, A., Vivien Leigh: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).

Edwards, A., Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983). Fox-Genovese, E., ‘Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman’, American Quarterly vol. 33 no. 4 (Autumn 1981), pp. 391–411. Harwell, R. B. (ed.), Gone with the Wind as Book and Film (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983). Harwell, R., Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind Letters, 1936–1949 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987). Haskell, M., Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Kaplan, C., ‘The Thorn Birds: Fiction, Fantasy, Femininity’, in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 117–46. Kirby, J. T., Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Leff, L. J., ‘The Search for Hattie McDaniel’, New Orleans Review vol. 10 nos 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1983), pp. 91–8. Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. McCaig, D., Ruth’s Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). McPherson, T., Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

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Mitchell, M., Gone With the Wind (London and New York: Macmillan, 1936). Moynihan, S., ‘“Kissing the Rod that Chastised Me”: Scarlett, Rhett and Miscegenation in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936)’, Irish Journal of American Studies vols 13–14 (2004–5), pp. 123–37. Myrick, S., White Columns in Hollywood: Reports from the GWTW Sets (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982). Pyron, D. A., Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture (Miami: University Presses of Florida, 1983). Pyron, D. A., Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Randall, A., The Wind Done Gone (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Ripley, A., Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (New York: Warner, 1991). Stevens, J. D., ‘The Black Reaction to Gone With the Wind’, Journal of Popular Film vol. 2 no. 4 (1973), pp. 366–72. Stokes, M., American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Taylor, H., Scarlett’s Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago, 1989, reprt 2014).

Taylor, H., Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Taylor, H., ‘The South and Britain: Celtic Cultural Connections’, in S. W. Jones and S. Monteith (eds), South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), pp. 340–62. Topsham Museum Society, Vivien Leigh: The Topsham Connection (Topsham: Topsham Museum Society, 2013). Vertrees, A. D., Selznick’s Vision: Gone With the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). Vivien Leigh Archive, Theatre and Performance Collections, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Walker, A., The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (New York: Scribner, 1996). Wells, Rebecca , Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). Williamson, J., ‘How Black Was Rhett Butler?’, in Numan V. Bartley (ed.), The Evolution of Southern Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 87–107. Wilson, S., The Making of Gone With the Wind (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).

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