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Atlanta history, gone with the wind?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The man that spoke the first lines in the “Gone With the Wind” movie died last week. Fred Crane, who played one of the red-headed Tarleton twins, along with George Reeves, died of complications from diabetes on Thursday. He had been the last living male actor with a credited role in the film.
“Gone With the Wind,” the movie and the book, seems to be dying off, fading from our collective memory, if it was ever there at all. I read it in high school, during a summer of reading epics that maximized my amusement between library trips. I saw the movie soon after, but only once. (Four well-done hours. But seriously — four hours.) I hardly remember the role of Atlanta, beyond burning.
Love or hate its politics, meaning and legacy, “Gone With the Wind” meant a lot to this city, once upon a time. It was written here and the movie debuted here. Margaret Mitchell was born here in 1900, and died at Grady Hospital in 1949. She wrote for The Atlanta Journal.
Ann Boutwell of Margaret Mitchell House pointed out that the book sold one million copies within months of publication.
Where can you find the history still? The house where Mitchell grew up is gone; so is the Loew’s Grand Theatre, at the corner of Peachtree and Forsyth, where the movie premiered in 1939.
Loew’s Grand Theatre
The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, which is the restored building where Mitchell lived while she wrote “Gone With the Wind.” About 50,000 people visit here every year, especially from Japan and the United Kingdom. (The truest fanatics have a nickname, MM House told me: Windies.)
Oakland Cemetery Margaret Mitchell was buried here, along with several family members.
There are other signs: the apartment on Piedmont Avenue where Mitchell lived when she was struck by a car while crossing at Peachtree and 13th Street. The Georgian Terrace Hotel, where a reception for the movie premiere of “Gone With the Wind” was held.
Everything I’ve read about the premiere suggests it was Atlanta’s coming out party, complete with finicky stars, massive crowds, historic costumes and one of the saddest stories of the time: intense racial segregation, so much so that the black stars of the film weren’t invited to its premiere. (For a brief look at that, check out this Q&A with Gary Pomerantz, author of “Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn.” Or hey, just pick up that book.)
The film made its New York debut four days later.
Gone With the Wind premiere, 1939
Behind the jump, I attached a story by reporter Jim Auchmutey. I pulled it from the archives and posted it here because it was published in 1989 for the 50th anniversary of the premiere, well before AJC.com was helping stories live online forever. The story recreated that week in Atlanta history.
That’s a lot of history to be forgotten.
Dec. 10, 1989
GWTW’ AT 50: Frankly, debut was 3 days that rocked Atlanta
By Jim Auchmutey (Who still works here! Yea for us!)
It had been 75 years since the Confederacy lost Atlanta. The city wasn’t taking any chances this time.
In the summer of 1939, when an MGM executive let it slip that the long-awaited world premiere of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” might take place in New York instead of Atlanta, the Junior League was horrified. A delegation descended on Mayor William B. Hartsfield’s office.
“His Honor, a passionate Confederate and a stout defender of Atlanta’s civic rights and honors, leapt eight feet in the air, ” Miss Mitchell wrote a friend. ” ‘This was the worst outrage since Sherman burned the town … said the Mayor, for in a large way, the book belongs to all of us.’ “
Most Atlantans - the white ones, anyway - really did feel that way.
The sentiment had been building since the publication of Miss Mitchell’s novel and the sale of screen rights to producer David O. Selznick in 1936. During the next three years, Atlantans avidly followed the signing of Clark Gable, the Great Scarlett Search, the titanic ego clashes that seemed to land a different director on the set each week.
Atlanta not get the premiere? Of course Atlanta would get the premiere, Mr. Selznick assured Mayor Hartsfield. If the movie was Mr. Selznick’s show, the premiere was Mr. Hartsfield’s, and the first-term mayor planned to make it the biggest blowout of nostalgia, boosterism and sheer joy in Atlanta history.
Far more important things were happening in the world. Overseas, the Soviet Union was invading Finland, and Nazi Germany was digesting Poland. But for the Depression-weary nation, and for Atlanta in particular, it was a time of tunnel vision. A time when a story announcing the presentation of a Scarlett O’Hara portrait to the High Museum of Art appeared on the same page above the small headline “Negroes’ Plight in City Deplored, ” which ran next to a tiny story about 2 million Jews being moved to a “special reservation” in Poland.
Oddly, one person who did not share the “GWTW” mania was Miss Mitchell. At first, she even refused to confirm that she’d attend the premiere, saying she might pass because her father was ill and she wasn’t feeling too well herself.
Besides, she got queasy thinking about all the hoopla starting again, the give-me-your-autograph hounding she took for a couple of years after the book came out. It got so bad that once, while she tried on a dress at Rich’s department store, a covey of curious women ripped open the curtain and one cried, “She’s small-breasted like a boy!”
But the Selznick agents persisted, and the author finally told them she’d be there.
As the appointed day of Dec. 15 approached, the city readied itself as busily as the filmmakers, who were still editing the movie. Men grew 1860s-style whiskers, women made hoop skirts, and the papers reported a spurt in corset sales (most ladies had to let them out). At 560,000 people, the metro area was one-fifth its present size - no bigger than today’s Knoxville, Tenn. But it was big enough to make noise.
“Hollywood is almost afraid of Atlanta, ” the Constitution fretted, warning citizens not to rip the clothes off their screen idols’ backs.
“Any moment now, ” wrote Constitution columnist Ralph McGill, “I expect to see a small boy running down Peachtree Street and hearing him shouting, ‘Flee for your lives, the dam has burst.’ “
The first cracks appeared Dec. 13, a Wednesday, at Candler Field as the first planeload of stars emerged to the first of countless renditions of “Dixie.” “Oh, they’re playing the song from the picture!” Vivien Leigh chirped, whereupon a quick-witted publicist attributed it to Olivia de Havilland, apparently thinking it wiser for the remark to come from Melanie rather than the all-important Scarlett.
Motorcycle cops escorted the group to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where they briefly met reporters at a cocktail party. Miss Leigh, the center of attention, was watched closely by her paramour, Laurence Olivier, who grew weary of explaining that, no, he wasn’t in the movie. Married to others at the time, the couple was registered under her name. There was no registration for Mr. Olivier.
Afterward, Mr. Selznick’s party visited Miss Mitchell at her 17th Street apartment in Midtown. The author had welcomed the visitors to Atlanta by sending pots of blooming azaleas to their rooms. Now, facing the woman who brought her Scarlett to life, Miss Mitchell found her more knowledgeable about Southern history than her “Dixie” remark suggested. The author was pleased.
Then came the King.
The next afternoon, Thursday, Miss Leigh and the others were spirited back to Candler Field to await the arrival of Clark Gable; his wife, Carole Lombard; and MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer, who, upon hearing “GWTW’s” running time, was said to have blurted, “They’d stone Christ if he came back and spoke for four hours.”
The MGM contingent had flown separately in part because Mr. Gable didn’t want to endure Mr. Selznick’s company. He blamed the producer for insulting his pal Victor Fleming by suggesting that other directors who’d worked on the film be mentioned in the credits as well. Mr. Fleming, who had threatened to boycott the premiere (as had Mr. Gable), had a legitimate excuse for not attending: His old friend Douglas Fairbanks Sr. had just dropped dead.
On the airport tarmac, the band once again struck up “Dixie, ” and the stars were swept into limousines.
As the motorcade sped north on Stewart Avenue, Rebel yells rent the air with increasing frequency. Up Whitehall Street to Peachtree, where sidewalks had been coagulating with spectators since noon, the cars slowed and the celebrities beheld a city gone delirious. Confederate flags hanging from every building, streamers twisting through the sky, bands at every other intersection, craning fans 20-deep held back by 2,000 police and National Guardsmen - 300,000 people in all, twice as many as fought on both sides of the Battle of Atlanta. Hollywood Boulevard had never looked like this.
With dusk gathering, the parade squeezed through the human tunnel to the Georgian Terrace, where a platform and a battery of searchlights had been erected. There, the governors of four Southern states were introduced to the crowd, as well as any actor Mayor Hartsfield could lay hands on. The exhausted Mr. Gable repaired to his suite.
But there was little time to rest. The ball started in two hours.
The Junior League had been planning its charity gala for months. Atlanta architect Philip Shutze had outfitted the stage of the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium to resemble a plantation house, complete with 18- foot Ionic columns. An anteroom was given over to a bazaar like the one in the movie, with Civil War relics and all manner of Confederate bric-a- brac (“Buy a Hanky, Beat a Yankee, ” read one sign).
More than 5,000 worthies, many in hoop skirts and tight breeches, attended the affair, which was broadcast on the NBC radio network. The guest list read like royalty: Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, McAdoos, Paleys, Rickenbackers.
Everyone wanted to be there - even the ambitious young pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. arranged for his young adult choir, Mrs. King at the organ, to sing spirituals before the tuxedoed white folk. The choir came dressed as field hands, looking like so many Aunt Jemimas and Big Sams. A few days later, Daddy King’s colleagues in the Atlanta Baptist Ministers’ Union voted to censure him, partly because he took part in a segregated function but mostly because liquor was served.
One celebrity who did not attend was Miss Mitchell. The announced reason was that she wanted to conserve her strength for the premiere. The real reason, some Atlantans knew, was that when she was presented as a debutante 20 years before, the Junior League had not invited her to join. As God was her witness, Peggy Mitchell got even.
Come Friday, though, she would no longer have the luxury of privacy.
Premiere day was time for visitors to pay their respects.
At 10 a.m., Mayor Hartsfield picked up Mr. Gable and Miss Lombard and squired them about the Northside for a two-hour tour. Then it was back to the hotel, where the mayor followed the couple to their suite and showed them a 16mm film he had made about Atlanta. No wonder Miss Lombard called him “Cyclorama Bill.”
Gov. E.D. Rivers got his turn later when the actors called on the executive mansion, then in Ansley Park. The governor made Mr. Gable a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia militia. Miss Leigh remained a civilian.
Meanwhile, Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett’s sister Carreen, slipped away to the Confederate Soldier’s Home in southeast Atlanta, where a uniformed veteran of the Army of Northern Virginia leaned on his cane, looked her up and down and said, “My, you’re a pretty child.” She snuggled his head in her fox coat.
The day did not start well for Miss Mitchell. At a luncheon for her publishers, Macmillan, someone pulled a chair out from under her as she was about to sit, and she plopped on the floor. When the doctor who taped her torso mummy-tight asked for her autograph, she refused. Then she arrived late at her first command performance: a cocktail party at the Piedmont Driving Club where she was to appear with the cast.
The Selznick motorcade arrived at 5:30 p.m., sirens blasting. Half an hour later, there was no sign of Miss Mitchell. Finally, at 6:10, she walked in, and as cameras flashed, Rhett met his maker. Though they were born within three months of each other at the turn of the century, the tall Mr. Gable seemed more mature as he crooked his neck to gaze down at the 4-foot-11 author, looking girlish in a big-bowed hat. He guided her into a room where they spoke for five minutes. There really wasn’t much to say.
Two hours later, black limousines delivered them to the Loew’s Grand, which had commanded the confluence of Peachtree and Pryor streets since opening as an opera house in the 1890s. Outside, 30,000 people stood cheering as the actors arrived, said a few words and disappeared into a white-columned facade. Miss Mitchell came last, a little woman in a pink gown in a blinding scene illuminated by anti-aircraft lights so bright that someone from Ball Ground, 50 miles north, called the newspaper to report a strange glow on the southern horizon.
Inside, 2,031 ticket holders - most of whom had paid an extravagant $10 - found their seats. Like everything else, the arrangement of the principals had been carefully orchestrated, with Miss Mitchell asking not to sit near Mr. Selznick because she figured he’d be too nervous. She ended up next to financier John Hay Whitney, who underwrote most of the $4 million production. Her husband, John Marsh, was beside Mr. Gable and Miss Lombard. Someone complained of a dry throat, and Miss Mitchell passed out cough drops.
Mr. Marsh couldn’t help but notice Mr. Gable’s tenseness.
“He was so anxious for the thing to be a success, ” he later wrote, “and we couldn’t keep our minds on the picture for wanting to tell him, ‘There, there, Capt. Butler!’ “
Then, at 8:45, half an hour late, the chandeliers began to dim very slowly and the old opera house fell quiet. People noticed Miss Mitchell and Mr. Selznick leaning forward as the screen filled with the words “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields …” She despised the word “cavaliers, ” but she was in a generous mood tonight.
Her story had come home.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: History
Comments
By Chris
August 28, 2008 9:40 AM | Link to this
Thank you so very much for writing this story. It made me happy and sad this morning. The premier of GWTW was the biggest thing Atlanta has ever experienced, maybe until the Olympics arrived. Just imagine being in that crowd, in downtown Atlanta after dark! No shootings, killings, robberies, looting or anything else like we have now. If a crowd like that assembled now, God help us. It is a shame that this city has turned into a soulless, hollow shell of what it used to be. Now we are the hip hop capital, there’s something to be proud of, good grief.
This city has no history left. Where the Battle of Atlanta was fought, now it is an interchange! GA Pacific occupies the Lowes Theater site. Nothing left, look for it in books and b&w photos online, a city Gone WIth the Wind.
By Rusty
August 28, 2008 9:51 AM | Link to this
This was an informative article.I agree with the first post wholeheartedly.Atlanta is a black city now with no appreciation of anything historical thats not about Martin King and the civil rights era. Keep your eye on Stone Mountain.
By Atlanta Archie
August 28, 2008 9:55 AM | Link to this
The Ballrom at the Piedmont Driving Club is still there and intact. They held a grand breakfat the day after the premiere. The famous picture of Maragaret Mitchell, Clark Gable, and Vivien Leigh that was on the front page was taken in the PDC. Yolande Gwinn tells an amusing story of how that all came about…She also broke the story that Leigh and Lawrence Olivier were going to marry…I’d recomend her book *Yolande’s Atlanta” if you’d like to know more…
The Menaboni panels from Shutze’s Mirado Room at the Capital City Club, are still hanging in the halls there, (there are also sketches from the Movie’s production) The room was completed in time for the premiere….It’s a shame it’s now gone
By Atlanta Archie
August 28, 2008 10:06 AM | Link to this
Anyone interested in more about the premiere, spend a day going through the old newspapers (Constitution and Journal) at the History Center…The town was in a definite fever pitch, every debutante in town was hauling out her Great Aunt, or Grandmother’s old dress and getting their picture taken in the paper…Also many of the design magazines, House Beautiful, Home & Garden, The Federalist, etc. featured Atlanta homes and the movie interiors in their 1940 issues….
By SAG
August 28, 2008 10:28 AM | Link to this
Great story! Those visiting our city for the first time would never realize all of the rich history Atlanta has experienced before the city changed into what it has become. There’s much more to the history of Atlanta than MLK and the over-inflated legacies of people whom streets are named after that didn’t do anything to qualify such adulation. Atlanta once had such class!
By RamblinLonghorn
August 28, 2008 10:41 AM | Link to this
Rusty: Atlanta it was a White city prior to that with no appreciation for History that wasn’t related to some imagined civil war glory.
What’s your point?
By RamblinLonghorn
August 28, 2008 10:41 AM | Link to this
Rusty: Atlanta was a White city prior to that with no appreciation for History that wasn’t related to some imagined civil war glory.
What’s your point?
By Sam
August 28, 2008 10:45 AM | Link to this
The Atlanta Municipal Auditorium, where the Junior League Ball was held, was located in what is now Alumni Hall, part of the Georgia State University campus located at the corner of Courtland and Gilmer.
By Garden Hills Native
August 28, 2008 11:23 AM | Link to this
My mother was in the crowd outside of Loew’s Grand the evening of the premiere. She was enthralled with the whole event and even built a large scrap book of all of the newspaper and magazine clippings regarding it, which I have today. I also have her copy of the novel which also has several other clippings stuck between the pages.
By BPJ
August 28, 2008 11:53 AM | Link to this
Read accounts of civil-war era Atlanta (including GWTW), and you will read about a constantly changing city. Or, click on the link in Ms. Gumbrecht’s text entitled “the apartment on Piedmont Avenue”, scroll down and read the description of early 20th century Atlanta, particularly the major changes in Midtown in Ms. Mitchell’s lifetime. Atlanta has been a constantly changing place throughout its existence; that’s very American.
And I think American is a good thing. I’m not nostalgic for the segregated Atlanta of the past, when blacks were said to “know their place”, and “uppity” ones could be publicly lynched. I’m grateful that MLK and others (including Mayors Hartsfield and Allen) worked to change this city for the better.
By the way, any visitor wanting a sense of Atlanta’s rich history should start with the Atlanta History Center Museum.
By itsme
August 28, 2008 12:18 PM | Link to this
The Atlanta area has so much history, but so much of it is in peril. Anyone who cares should support saving the Solomon Goodwin house on Peachtree Road in Brookhaven. This home dates back to the early 1820s. Contact the DeKalb History Center for more information. By the way, cemetery is spelled cemetEry. Thanks for a great article
By Rusty
August 28, 2008 12:28 PM | Link to this
BPJ, would that be the same William Hartsfield whos’ name was attempted to be stripped of the airport by the widow of Atlantas’ first black Mayor? “we want the whole thing,we want Hartsfields name off our airport”. Remember that? She wanted Hartsfields name off! Thats Atlanta now.
By Jamie Gumbrecht
August 28, 2008 12:37 PM | Link to this
Atlanta is a diverse city with a lot of inward-looking populations that dominate in certain areas or ways, but I think we ought to be careful, lest we start to believe that our histories are not intertwined, that the histories of Margaret Mitchell and Martin Luther King Junior don’t somehow touch, for instance. They do literally, and in ways that require a longer view. The fact is that if we’re here, we’re here together, and we’re all impacting each others’ lives. Regardless, we ought to document and remember as much of it as possible; it might not seem necessary to all of us at this point, but it will matter to someone someday, just as the events in this post are worth recalling now.
By Historicus
August 28, 2008 1:17 PM | Link to this
Wonder why Grant Park is so hilly? It was a Confederate fort.
Check out the Cyclorama. Oakland Cemetery. Atlanta History Center. History can be found, but its a strain.
Outside Atlanta you have Madison, Kennesaw Mountain, Pickett’s Mill State Park, Historic Roswell
By BPJ
August 28, 2008 1:28 PM | Link to this
Yes, I do remember the foolish attempt to take the Hartsfield name off the airport; I also recall that the effort did not succeed. The Mayor appointed a task force which came up with adding Maynard Jackson’s name to Hartsfield’s, thus honoring both men who had a lot to do with the airport being the success it is. That’s Atlanta now; indeed, Atlanta at its best has often involved compromise & conciliation. Several commenters here would benefit from reading the book mentioned above, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn.