This is the story of a woman who, like Charles Darrow, rose to fame and fortune on the strength of a single glorious creative act. Like Darrow, she was an obscure middle-class citizen before she performed that act. Like him, she rose to the pinnacle of success a an absolutely dazzling speed. Also also like him, she never had to work again; in fact she did nothing else that was noteworthy during the rest of her life. It was as though, in both their cases, those momentous and isolated acts of creation left them drained of all further will or capacity to generate new ideas.
The one very interesting difference in their two stories is that the woman tool several years to turn her magnificent idea into a completed act, while Darrow took no more than a few days. The woman’s idea lay fallow, in fact, for years after it was essentially finished. She didn’t want to carry it to the public market, perhaps because she feared it would fail. When it finally did get to the market, however, it succeeded so fast and on such a massive scale that it became one of the great instant-success legends of all time.
The woman’s name was Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell. The thing that she created was a novel titled Gone With the Wind.
She began writing it in 1926, at the age of 26. Her reason for doing so are unclear. She was never able to give a lucid explanation. She evidently wasn’t motivated by a wish for fame or money, for later events were to suggest that she didn’t particularly want to have the novel published. Her official biographer, Finis Farr (official in the sense that the family gave him access to the novelist’s letters and papers after her death), also fails to come up with a good explanation. In his Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta he seems to say that she was interested in Civil War history. The novel appears to have been a sort of hobby. If that is true, it was to become perhaps the most profitable hobby in history.
Margaret Mitchell, not quite five feet tall, lived in Atlanta Georgia. She had begun her career as a local newspaperwoman of minor distinction. A year after marrying advertising executive John Marsh (her second husband), she injured her ankle and had to give up her newspaper job. She never went back.
Neither of her two marriages produced any children. This fact has given rise to some strange, and in many cases goofy, psychoanalytic speculations. Cocktail-party analysts say she produced the novel because she couldn’t produce a baby. Be that as it may, the absence of kids gave her a lot of time and a lot of solitude when she quit her job. Alone in a small apartment all day long, she sat at a sewing table and produced Gone with the Wind.
It was the story of a woman named Pansy (later renamed Scarlett) O’Hara, whose character matures and hardens during after the siege of Atlanta in the Civil War. The novel was essentially finished late in 1929, just as the stock market was beginning a disastrous crash and the national economy was running downhill into the worst depression of modern times. The manuscript was enormously and unmanageably long, more than 2000 dog-eared pages stuffed into envelopes and file folders.
After completion, the manuscript sat around, slowly turning yellow, for six years.
There are several versions of what happened in those six years. One version is that Margaret Mitchell submitted the ponderous manuscript or pars of it to several New York publishers, and that they took one horrified look at its bulk and shipped it back to Atlanta. If this story is true, it might be that Gone With the Wind gave a boost to the nation’s sagging economy in that gloomy period. The shipping company – Railway Express, perhaps – might have derived a fair income from hauling those pounds of paper up and down the eastern seaboard.
This version of the story cannot be verified. The novelist herself steadfastly denied it later. If there were in fact some publishers who turned the book down, they could be counted on to keep quiet about their ghastly error forever afterward. The editors who turned it down were undoubtedly fired in due course, and they too – assuming they valued their professional reputations – could be counted on to keep their mouths shut. All of them (if the story is true) were in the same acutely embarrassing position that Parker Brothers was when it turned down Monopoly. The difference was that, unlike the canny and fast-thinking Salem gamesmaker, those sorrowful publishers didn’t seize a second chance.
Another version of what happened during those six years is that hardly anything happened. According to Harold Latham, the editor who finally bought the novel, Margaret Mitchell didn’t submit her manuscript to anybody. It simply sat and mouldered. Finally, in 1935, Latham turned up in Atlanta, hunting possible books for The Macmillan Company. He heard about the long-buried novel through a chain of fluky circumstances, thought it sounded promising and asked to see it. Margaret Mitchell at first denied its existence, but then changed her mind and handed it over. The editor bought a suitcase to hold it and staggered on board a train with it.
It didn’t take Latham long to realize the suitcase was loaded with dynamite. There was something about the novel (nobody has ever explained it satisfactorily) that clutched a reader and held him tight through all those hundreds of thousands of words. Macmillan offered the novelist a standard royalty late in 1935, and she signed.
It took nearly a year to get the massive manuscript trimmed to a reasonable size and set in type. The book, when published on June 30, 1936, was slightly more than 1000 pages long. The retail price was $3.
That was a high price for a book in those days. Most novels were selling for $2 or $2.5. Despite that, success was instant and overwhelming.
Macmillan had done clever and thorough job of pre-publishing the novel, and the advance reviews had been enthusiastic. People all over the country were waiting eagerly to see this “greatest work of fiction ever published in America,” as one kind reviewer called it. When the novel finally reached the bookstores, the effect was like that of throwing meat scraps to a pack of starving dogs. Many bookstores ordered new shipments the day after the first batches arrived. Macmillan instantly ordered a second large printing, then a third, a fourth, a fifth …. It quickly became evident that this conventional approach of separate “printings” wasn’t going to supply the demand, and the printing plant was simply instructed to manufacture the books continuously. Before long Macmillan had two printing plants working literally around the clock, on three eight-hour shifts.
Three weeks after publication there were 176,000 copies in print. Two months later the figure had reached 330,000; it was 700,000 after four months’; and a year after publication, the figure had almost reached one and one-half million. One store sent in a single order for 50,000 copies. The average novelist is delighted if his book sells 50,000 copies, or even half that many, in its entire lifespan. Never before in publishing history had a book sold so many copies so fast.
Margaret Mitchell’s royalties were piling up at such an astonishing rate that Macmillan hired extra accountants to keep up with the figures. Publishers normally pay authors’ royalties once or twice a year, but this wasn’t a normal situation. To stay ahead of the game, the desperate accountants began paying Margaret Mitchell five or six times a year. The average check was more than $50,000, and in some months the lucky lady from Atlanta opened her pay envelope and fund herself gazing bug-eyed at unreal amounts like $100,000. In those days, of course, a dollar could buy roughly what three to five dollars buy today.
Meanwhile Hollywood producer David Selznick was making a movie out of the book. He paid Margaret Mitchell a flat fee of $50,000 for the film rights. Some of her legal and financial advisers later grumbled that she should have held out for a percentage of the gross instead of accepting a flat fee, for the movie went on to gross millions of dollars and was in fact the pinnacle of Selznick’s moneymaking career. The novelist pointed out, however, that she was already earning more money than she could possibly spend – and, what’s more, was in confiscatory income-tax bracket. Of every dollar she earned in the late 1930s, probably about 50 cents went to the U.S. Treasury. Tax rates jumped sharply in the early 1940s, and if she had participated in the movie’s gross she might have found herself paying taxes at the macabre rate of 82 cents or even 91 cents on the dollar. Her question: “What’s the sense?”
How much money did she earn, all told, from her single great action of creation? Biographer Farr tiptoes past this question, as do other tellers of this astounding tale. Farr implies – but doesn’t actually say – that the novelist herself wasn’t greatly impressed with all the money and that, therefore, it would have been rude of him to speak into her bankbook. Another of Farr’s problems may be that he wrote the biography in collaboration with the late novelist’s brother, and the brother might have been reluctant to reveal details of the family finances. However, we are conducting an inquiry into instant success, and we have already determined that our definition of that phrase includes the perhaps grubby – but nonetheless fascinating – element of money. So, at the risk of seeming rude, Let’s pry into Margaret Mitchell’s cash flow.
As of today, more than 23 million hardcover copies of the book have been sold, including about 5 million in 25 foreign translations. But let’s limit our inquiry to the income Margaret Mitchell might have earned during her lifetime.
The diminutive novelist was struck by a car while crossing an Atlanta street in August 1949, and she died a few days later. Up to that time, in approximate figures, her book had sold some seven million copies, of which roughly four million were in the English-language edition.
Her royalty contract was complicated, with sliding scales of percentages and with extra complexities in the case of foreign rights. To add to our difficulties, the price of the book varied through the years and also, of course, varied from one country to another. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable, and probably isn’t too wide of the mark, to guess that her average royalty might haven been somewhere between 30 and 40 cents on each of those seven million copies. Thus, in round numbers, her lifetime earnings from direct sales of the book were probably in the range of $2 million to $3 million.
Unfortunately the U.S. Treasury dipped into those earnings with a large bracket. Margaret Mitchell was not a millionaire when she died. But she had a glorious taste of instant success.