Interviewer: Tell us why particularly you decided to do this documentary?

Pamela Roberts: Well, to be honest with you, I had never read Gone with the Wind, and I knew that the book was turning seventy-five years old, and I knew that I was here in Atlanta, and that I’d better read the book. So I read it, and I thought, “You know what, if anything this is better than the movie,” and that’s saying a lot!

Interviewer: That is saying a lot.

Pamela Roberts: So I got interested in who the person was that could of written such a book. And when I got into Margaret Mitchell’s life. It was an amazing journey, and I have decided that she is more interesting than Scarlett O’Hara.

Interviewer: Wow

Pamela Roberts: But I do think that only Margaret Mitchell could have created a character like Scarlett O’Hara.

Interviewer: Well you certainly are telling a powerful story, who knew how sexy she was, that she was a flapper, and that she really enjoyed life, and was a bit of a feminist.

Pamela Roberts: She was a feminist, you know, you’ve seen the fact in this documentary that her mother was a suffragist, and, basically, you know, that meant Margaret Mitchell was ahead of her time. Because she was born into, well, a family that educated her in a way so that she could understand what to do as a young women growing up in ways a lot of young women couldn’t do, so she was ahead of her time.

Interviewer: As a documentary maker you have to tell the truth, and you chose here to really delve into an area where some people might not have wanted to hear this story.

Pamela Roberts: And you are talking about the issue of race. Basically how this all began for me, is that I learned that Margaret Mitchell was secretly giving money to educate African-American doctors. It blew me away, and in a way I worked backwards, because here is a person who wrote a book that is racially polarizing, and not wanting to be in a class with a black student when she is in college. What happened in her life from the beginning of that to the end? What was the arch of change? And who knows exactly, we weren’t there with her every step of the way. But this documentary told the truth, and I got some pushback from people who said, “Don’t tell that story let’s just celebrate Gone with the Wind.” Well we don’t do that at Public Broadcasting, we have the integrity of telling like it is, what happened.

In my opinion, Margaret Mitchell, she was writing so much as a reporter that she was able then to be used to writing in a certain way, and I think that it was important for her. So I encourage people to read the columns that she wrote for the Atlanta Journal. Because a writer doesn’t come from nowhere. They have to have that time where they develop their craft and she had that chance through actually being a reporter which is very interesting. She became a great storyteller.

Interviewer: And as you have said, Pam, Margaret Mitchell was even more of a character than Scarlett O’Hara.

Pamela Roberts: She was! Pat Conroy has just said that this went on to become the most popular novel in America in the twentieth century. And it is hard to believe that it is still a best seller. It sells a quarter of a million copies each year all over the world; it has been published in a thousand editions, there are new editions coming out all the time. So there is something about what she was able to do with this story that transcends basically what most writers can do. In fact Pat Conroy told me after the interview he said, “All of us as writers wish we could have that one success.”

Interviewer: That one novel.

Pamela Roberts: It was really amazing what she accomplished.

Interviewer: Well I can tell you this documentary is surely a success.

What gave you the idea for your book [Scout, Atticus, and Boo]?

Director Mary Murphy. Photo by Chris Carroll.

This all started as a documentary. When I was a producer at CBS News, I suggested stories about To Kill a Mockingbird but they were always turned down. My bosses would say, “No interview with Harper Lee, no news.” I read the novel again after I started my own production company. Freed of the demand for news, I thought about it differently. The novel was the story, not the novelist. How the novel came to be, its impact, influence, and enduring popularity—all that was a phenomenon well worth exploring. I started researching, reporting, and setting up interviews. By the time I cut twenty minutes of what was to become my documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird, I knew I had too much great material that would never make it onto the screen. I wanted to make the entire interviews available; hence the book.

What was the most surprising thing you learned from the interviews?

What I found most surprising was not one specific thing but how wonderfully wideranging all the responses were, whether it was Reverend Thomas Lane Butts, once the pastor of Harper Lee’s church in Monroeville, Alabama, saying the novel gave him comfort when he was organizing a bus boycott and confronting the Ku Klux Klan in Montgomery, Alabama, or Oprah Winfrey saying it was the first book she encouraged other people to read—in other words, her earliest book club selection. There seems to be an unlimited supply of fresh commentary about To Kill a Mockingbird. Every time the camera rolled, I heard something I had not heard before. This continued when I visited schools, libraries, bookstores, and film festivals after my book was published and the documentary released. Readers of all ages were eager to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and share their own experience. This was true in schools from Upper Arlington High School in Columbus, Ohio, to the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. It happened at libraries in Waterford, Connecticut, to Steamboat Springs, Colorado; in bookstores from Partners in Westport, Massachusetts, to BookPeople in Austin, Texas. And it was the case at film festivals from Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. I think this explains why the novel endures to this day. It has something for everyone, something meaningful and memorable.

How did you decide on the interview subjects?

Some of them had already written about To Kill a Mockingbird, like Wally Lamb and Scott Turow. Both are bestselling novelists and have the added perspectives of being a teacher (Lamb) and defense lawyer (Turow), so I approached them early on. I read historian Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, and knew she would provide historical context and had a personal story to tell about her connection to the film. I wanted to speak to a civil rights leader, and Andrew Young agreed. In some cases I had a hunch. I read the memoirs of James McBride and Rick Bragg and thought I saw To Kill a Mockingbird’s influence on their work.

Some interviews were the result of sheer serendipity. I was at a book convention to interview novelists Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus and ran into Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch. When I told him about my project and asked if he had any authors I should talk to, Pietsch pointed me to Mark Childress, who was born in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee’s hometown. I did a lengthy interview with Childress the same day. He was especially eloquent about how the novel helped to fuel the civil rights movement and gave white Southerners a way to question the system. Childress also had corresponded with Harper Lee herself and told me about it. He is a great presence in the documentary and it was my good luck to be able to include him.

Were the interviews difficult to get?

It is a testament to the novel that most of the writers I approached were only too happy to talk about its influence. They were easy to schedule and generous with their time. The people closest to Harper Lee were the hardest. The novelist’s older sister, Alice Finch Lee, and her close friends Michael and Joy Brown, the couple who aided her financially so that she might quit her job and write full-time, have up until now declined to give full interviews. It is a point of pride for me that they decided to answer my questions.

In both cases, it took time. After a few letters and a viewing of a rough cut of the documentary, Miss Alice agreed to see me. We had a delightful visit in her law office in Monroeville. Miss Alice tutored me in Alabama history, politics, soil, family history, and the Mitford sisters, among other things. Then she allowed me to return with a camera crew. When I interviewed her, Miss Alice was ninety-eight. She is deaf and on-camera questioning presented challenges. Miss Alice needed to be able to see my lips up close. You cannot see it onscreen but there were only about twelve inches of space between my face and hers.

The interview went on for five hours and Miss Alice never flagged. She is a remarkable person and, quite apart from her talented younger sister, she is a role model who has made a little history herself. One of the first women to be admitted to the bar in Alabama, Miss Alice is the oldest practicing attorney in the state. She has been a great mentor and support to women who want to become lawyers, including Tonja Carter, now one of her partners at Barnett, Bugg, Lee & Carter. Miss Alice also has held many posts within the United Methodist Church. Like anyone her age she has ailments and health issues, but does not complain. Miss Alice has a sharp memory and a good sense of humor, and enjoys keeping up with news, especially splashy murder and criminal trials. It has been a privilege to be in her company and I visit her as often as I can.

It was a privilege to interview Joy and Michael Brown. They are Harper Lee’s closest friends in New York City, and if not for their generosity at Christmas in 1956, giving her a year off from working for what was then known as the British Overseas Airways Company so that she might write full-time, To Kill a Mockingbird might never have happened. The Browns agreed to talk to me after my book went to the printers, and so their interviews appear only in the documentary.

Harper Lee wrote about the couple in an affectionate essay for McCall’s magazine, but she never named them: “They were a handsome pair, healthy in mind and body, happy in their extremely active lives. Common interests as well as love drew me to them: and an endless flow of reading material circulated amongst us; we took pleasure in the same theater, films, music, and we laughed at the same things, and we laughed so much in those days.”

Lee met Michael Brown first. A native of Mexia, Texas, Brown moved to New York after returning from overseas at the end of World War II and worked at temp jobs while finding his way as a composer/lyricist. Through a family friend, he met Truman Capote. “We got along very well,” Brown told me. “I thought he was phenomenal. I’d never met anyone quite like that. And his writing really amazed me.”

Brown and Capote stayed in touch. And out of the blue one day came a letter from Tangiers, where Capote was visiting the photographer Cecil Beaton. In his tiny handwriting, Capote said he had a shy friend from Monroeville, Alabama, who was moving to New York. Her name was Nelle Harper Lee. Would Brown kindly look after her? “Had she been a dreadful person, out of comradeship with Truman I still would have looked after her as best I could,” Brown said. And dreadful she was not. Brown, who is ninety now, with receding white hair and dancing hazel eyes, happily remembers meeting her at the Park Avenue apartment of Capote’s mother and stepfather: “Nelle and I were instant friends. Looking back on it, I can see why. We both came from small Southern towns; we both read books at an early age; we both loved New York. So here we were with similar backgrounds, blending Scotch, Irish, and English tribes. We had been brought up under parallel circumstances. Because of the death of my mother, my ten-years-older sister had taken care of me, while Nelle, too, had an older sister who took charge of her. Our respective fathers were gods to us, hers a lawyer, mine a doctor, and they were wonderful gods, indeed.”

Brown would soon abandon working as a typist for Billboard magazine to become a successful performer of his own words and music at New York’s most prestigious supper club, Le Ruban Bleu, where in his very first engagement he broke the house record with a run of fifty-four weeks. What made him different as an entertainer was that as often as not, his work was satiric, depicting such disparate real-life luminaries as Judge Crater, Lola Montez, and Tammy Faye Baker. “Lizzie Borden” was his first nationally known hit, followed by “The John Birch Society,” which later morphed into “The George Bush Society” to the same melody. Brown, it turned out, also was destined to have a literary success of his own. His children’s stories about Santa Mouse first appeared in 1966 and have remained popular every Christmas season since then.

In due course Michael met Joy Williams, a beautiful graduate of George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. Balanchine subsequently brought Joy into the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Later she joined Roland Petit’s Les Ballets de Paris as a principal dancer and met Margot Fonteyn, with whom she remained close friends for the next forty years.

Michael and Joy married, lived in a brownstone house on the east side of Manhattan, and had three boys, Michael, Kelly, and Adam. Lee was an intimate friend of the whole family and became an integral part of it. “We thought back then that Nelle Harper essentially was a writer,” said Joy Brown, who at eighty-three is a striking figure with a ballerina’s carriage, hair swept up around her head, and pale blue eyes. “She was not going to spend her life working as an airlines clerk while hoping to become something else.”

Lee shared some of her writing with her friends. “We read character sketches that she wrote about people in Monroeville,” said Michael. “And they were unusually perceptive. How could two people like Truman and Nelle be such close friends as children and grow up to see things the rest of us couldn’t envision? She just amazed us.”

In the fall of 1956, the Browns had a financial windfall when Michael created a show for an Esquire magazine presentation and the couple decided they could afford a special Christmas present for their friend. “I thought, here we have this bit of money, so why don’t we see if Nelle Harper could take some time off?” Joy remembered.

The rest, as we now know, is history. “Of course it tickled me,” Joy said. “They were going to publish five thousand copies, for Heaven’s sake!” At Lee’s insistence, the present became a loan and was paid back in full long ago. “At a time when we really needed the money,” Michael stressed. The Browns, who have never spoken publicly about their gift, would never dream of saying how much it was. The couple’s humility is plain to see. “We are not responsible for what occurred,” Michael said emphatically. “She was a writer to the depths of her soul. It would have happened with or without us. All that we did was hurry it up a little.”

The three friends remain as close as ever. When they talk, they do not spend a lot of time marveling about what happened, but it does come up. A few years ago, Miss Lee and Mr. Brown made a quiet trip to the New York Public Library so that Lee could look something up in Capote’s papers. They took a bus; children of the Depression do not take taxis. Returning from the library, as they walked along Forty-second Street in the anonymity of pedestrians, Brown remembered Lee’s speaking in genuine wonderment at the book’s phenomenal success. After all those years, it had still not quite sunk in.

Did you get to meet Harper Lee?

Harper Lee has famously scrawled “Hell, no” on the top of interview requests and sent them back, so I was not expecting much. Her literary agent turned down all my requests. There are many questions I would love to ask. But short of her telling me what’s what, I do think her sister and the Browns have added a great deal to the record. They bring new facts, anecdotes, and history. They have shared Harper Lee’s thinking and given us new insight into the writing process, why the novelist stopped speaking publicly, and why no second novel was forthcoming.

What has been the reaction to Scout, Atticus, and Boo?

When I set out to make a film and write a book about To Kill a Mockingbird, I knew high school English teachers would be a part of the audience but I didn’t know just how enthusiastic they would be. To Kill a Mockingbird was never assigned to me in high school and maybe that is why I became a student of it later in life. As a teenager, I may have missed the chance to savor the novel with the help of a teacher, but I am more than making up for it now. No one knows more about why Harper Lee’s first and only novel remains so popular than the teachers who teach it. They are a big part of the reason.

I showed an excerpt of the documentary and gave a talk at the 2010 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and the appreciative response was overwhelming. That led to many speaking engagements at schools across the country. It has been a tremendous experience.

Margaret Mitchell

The following interview with Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind was conducted by Mrs. Medora Perkerson, of The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, broadcast over radio station WSB, Atlanta, Georgia., July 3, 1936, on The Atlanta Journal. This is the first time this interview has been published in a digital format.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, I have read your book Gone With the Wind with a great 
deal of pleasure, but I know that many of our listeners are not familiar with it. So can you tell us, briefly, just what the book is about?

MISS MITCHELL: I am glad to tell you, Medora. My novel is the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time.

MRS. PERKERSON: Many critics are saying that your book sums up the whole story of the South and what the war and Reconstruction did to the South and to Southern people. The title of your book, Gone With the Wind means that the ante-bellum civilization was swept away by the tornado of war, doesn’t it?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, Medora, that is the meaning of the title, naturally I would be glad if people thought that the book did tell the story of the whole South. But that isn’t the kind of book I tried to write. It is a book about 
Georgia and Georgia people, — especially North Georgia people. There are incidents in the book which take place in Savannah, Charleston, Macon and New Orleans, but nearly all of the action takes place in Atlanta and at Tara, the plantation home of Scarlett O’Hara, the heroine. Tara was in Clayton County, near Jonesboro, Ga. The story begins on the plantation in the period when the old style Southern life was at its height. Then the war comes, and Scarlett O’Hara goes to Atlanta to live. Thereafter, she experiences what Atlanta experienced during the war years — the thrills and excitement of the boom town that Atlanta became when the war changed it from an obscure small town into one of the most important cities in the South, then the increasing hardships as the Confederate cause waned, then the alarm of Atlanta people as they saw General Sherman’s army advancing steadily on the town, and ‘finally the terrifying days of the siege, the capture of Atlanta by Sherman and the burning of the town. Scarlett O’Hara goes through all those experiences and, after the war is over, she comes back to Atlanta and does her part in the rebuilding of the city. She lives through the terrible days of Reconstruction and the story carries her, and Atlanta, up to the time when the Carpetbaggers had been run out of Georgia and people could bean living their normal lives again.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, how did you happen to know so much about the wartime activities of Atlanta?

MISS MITCHELL: My brother, Stephens Mitchell, had written an excellent Article in the Atlanta Historical Bulletin on the war-time industries of  Atlanta. I used much of his material. I also used facts I myself dug out of old newspapers of the war days and old diaries and letters of the period. I was surprised and thrilled to see how vital a part Atlanta played during the war, how important Atlanta was to the Confederacy. Atlanta wasn’t a big town in 1861. The population was only twelve thousand. But the little town had four railroads and they crossed here. And so Atlanta could draw supplies from the deep South to send to the armies at the front. The railroads connected Atlanta with the ports of Savannah, Charleston and Wilmington. The four railroads of Atlanta could feed the armies in Virginia and in Tennessee, Due to its safe position behind the lines. Atlanta was excellently suited for base hospital purposes and it had dozens of hospitals. In fact, eighty thousand sick and wounded passed through the Atlanta hospitals during the war. Overnight, there sprung up in Atlanta all kinds of war industries, for the South had to manufacture most of her war materials. There were pistol factories and percussion cap factories, tanneries and boot makers, saddle and harness factories. There were machine manufacturing shops and there were iron rolling mills where the armor plate for war ships was turned out, as well as the iron rails for the rail-road tracks. There were wagon shops and hat and cap factories and every type of industry needed to support an army in the field. Little Atlanta was terribly 
important to the Confederacy.

MRS. PERKERSON: General Sherman seemed to realize that, didn’t he?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, Sherman knew that he had to take Atlanta. If he hadn’t succeeded, Grant could never have defeated General Lee in Virginia. For as long as Atlanta was drawing supplies from the deep South and sending them to Virginia, General Lee’s army could still stay in the field. As I road all these facts about the importance of Atlanta I wondered why they had never figured in fiction. And I wondered why the fighting around Atlanta was almost entirely omitted from novels. So much has been written, in fiction, about the campaigns in Virginia, so little about the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta. And that campaign between General Sherman and General Johnston has always held more drama for me than any of the campaigns in Virginia, for General Johnston was far outnumbered from the start but he fought almost every day for months, slowly being driven back toward Atlanta but handling the retreat in a masterly way. I always thought it a truly heroic campaign and so I wrote about it.

MRS. PERKERSON: Did you get all of your information about the Sixties and the Seventies from research? How did it happen that you, a very modern person, knew this era so well?

MISS MITCHELL: Medora, I can answer that question best by saying that I grew up at a time when children were seen and not heard. That means that when I was a child I had to hear a lot about the Civil war on Sunday afternoons when I was dragged hither and yon to call on elderly relatives and friends of the family who had fought in the war or lived behind the lines. When I was a little girl, children were not encouraged to express their personalities by running and screaming on Sunday afternoons. When we went calling, I was usually scooped up onto a lap, told that I didn’t look like a soul on either side of the family and then forgotten for the rust of the afternoon while the gathering spiritedly refought the Civil war. I sat on bony knees, fat, slick taffeta laps and soft, flowered muslin laps. I did not even dare wriggle for fear of getting the flat side of a hair brush where it would do the most good. I should add, while I’m talking about knees and laps, that cavalry knees were the worst knees of all. Cavalry knees had the tendency to 
trot and bounce and jog in the midst of reminiscences and this kept me from going to sleep,

MRS. PERKERSON: It was lucky for your book that those cavalry knees did keep you awake, wasn’t it? Otherwise you’d have missed a lot of material you used in your book, wouldn’t you?

MISS  MITCHELL: Yes, fortunately for Gone With the Wind I had to stay awake. So I heard about fighting and wounds and the primitive way they were treated, how ladies nursed in hospitals, the way gangrene smelled, what substitutes were used for drugs and food and clothing when the blockade got too tight for these necessities to be brought in from abroad. I heard about the burning and looting of Atlanta and the way the refugees from the town crowded the roads and trains to Macon, and I heard about Reconstruction, too. In fact, I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn’t believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions.

MRS. PERKERSON: I don’t suppose children growing up now will ever get as excited about the Last Cause as we did who listened to grandmothers and grandfathers tell about firsthand experiences.

MISS MITCHELL: No, and I think they are missing a lot. I am glad that I grew up at a time when there were plenty of old veterans in Atlanta. Certainly I could never have written my book without my memories of those old men, when I was a little girl and rode my pony every afternoon, my boon companion was a fine old Confederate veteran. He looked exactly like a stage Confederate — white hair and goatee, jimswinger coat, and a habit of gallantly kissing, ladies’ hands, even my own grubby six-year-old hand. He and a young lady who had reached the beau age were the only two people in my part of town who owned horses. And we three went riding together. Atlanta wasn’t so big then and it didn’t take long to reach dirt roads and the country. We never went riding in the country that we didn’t pick up some other old veteran to ride with us: Frequently we had several veterans with us. The families of the veterans and my mother encouraged us to ride together in the belief that we’d keep each other out of mischief.

MRS. PERKERSON: And did you?

MISS  MITCHELL: No, Medora. I regret to say that we didn’t. There was still plenty of fire and dash left in the old boys. They still had hot tempers and bullheads and they still dearly loved a fight. The day seldom passed that they didn’t have a heated argument about the Civil War. And the day seldom passed when the young lady who accompanied us didn’t turn her horse and race for home. She realized, oven if I didn’t, that the company of quarrelsome old gentlemen was no place for a lady.

MRS. PERKERSON: I’ll bet you didn’t go home.

MISS MITCHELL: No, I didn’t, for at the age of six I was not concerned about being a lady. Besides I was too fascinated by the way the veterans shouted at each other. On these occasions, too, I was seen and not heard. I couldn’t have been heard, even if I had wanted to speak, for it would of taken the lungs of the bull of Bashan to be heard above their tumult.

MRS. PERKERSON: What did they quarrel about?

MISS MITCHELL: Oh, every subject under the sun, especially the particular regiments to which they had belonged in the Confederate army. Each one bragged about his own regiment and low-rated all the others. For instance, I recall one time when we flushed an old gentlemen who had been with Wheeler’s cavalry. He was a tough, wiry, little old fellow. And another veteran who had been in Stuart’s Cavalry remarked that the boys in Wheeler’s cavalry were worse chicken thieves than Sherman’s men ever were. Of course, after that insult, they went at each other at the top of their voices and with their riding crops. The language they used was highly entertaining and very instructive to a small but interested girl. They talked about the Civil war all the time, refought old campaigns and argued about the tangled, bewildering muddle of politics of the Reconstruction days. Their remarks about the carpet baggers and scallawags of reconstruction days were also forceful and of deep interest to me. The young lady who went riding with us always turned her horse toward home why they got on the subject of Reconstruction, so how could I help knowing about the Civil war and the hard times that came after it! I was raided on it; I thought it had all happened just a few years before I was born.

MRS. PERKERSON: Perhaps that is why you made it so real in Gone With the Wind. And I think the thing we are all most proud of is that you have given the complete picture, not just one side of the old South and war and Reconstruction. It is all there in your book and it all comes alive. A lot of people are already saying that you must have taken some of the characters from real life. One of your characters, Aunt Pittypat is exactly like one of my relatives, and I’ll bet Charleston is going to rise up in a body and denounce the dashing Captain Rhett Butler of your book, not only because of his refusing to go into the Confederate army but for what he said about making money out of the wrecking 
of the Confederacy. Did you take any of your characters from real life?

MISS MITCHELL: No, not a single character was taken from real life. In the first place, I wouldn’t know how to go about taking a character from life, and in the second place, made-up characters are so easy to handle. They will obey the author and do just what the author wants, whereas characters taken from real people are apt to be obstinate and unmanageable and to insist on having their own way.

MRS. PERKERSON: Your heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is not at all like the usual Civil war heroine. She was just as shocking in her era as the flapper was in the jazz age. Was it your idea that Scarlett was the product of her time, just as the flapper was the product of the period following the World War?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, wars have a way of changing women, whether the women are dressed in hoopskirts and pantalets or in knee-length skirts and bobbed hair. The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things.

MRS. PERKERSON: They say that a good woman has no history, or, at least, no one is interested in her history. But in your book, Gone With the Wind, I found Melanie Wilkes, your other heroine, who was a sweet, gentle character, almost as interesting as Scarlett. Melanie and Scarlett went through the war and Reconstruction, side by side, and it was fascinating to see how the same set of circumstances produced such contrasts in character. The experiences that hardened Scarlett O’Hara and made her unscrupulous simply made Melanie Wilkes more of a lady, she could do anything she wanted to do, and not shock people as Scarlett did, simply because Melanie remained a lady… that seemed to me to be the real theme of the book, how different characters reacted under the stress of circumstances.

MISS MITCHELL: If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose is the theme of survival. What quality is it that makes some people able to survive catastrophes and others, apparently just as brave and able and strong, go under? I have always been interested in this particular quality in people. We’ve all seen the same thing happen in the present depression. It happens in every social upheaval, in wars, in panics, in revolutions. It’s happened all the way down history from the time the barbarians sacked ancient Rome, And before that, I suppose, some people survive disasters. Others do not. What qualities are in those people who fight their way through triumphantly — that are lacking in those who do go under? What was it that made our Southern people able to come through a war, a Reconstruction and the complete wrecking of all our social and economic 
systems? I don’t know. I only know that the survivors of the Civil war used to call that quality “gumption.”

MRS. PERKERSON: Another thing that seemed to interest everyone I talked to about this book is the reality given by small details. Take the night Scarlett O’Hara went to Melanie’s party, just after she had been discovered in a compromising situation with Melanie’s husband. You had Scarlett wear a jade green watered silk dress with a large bustle adorned with pink velvet roses. It wouldn’t have done to describe this dress so minutely if ladies hadn’t worn rose covered bustles at that particular time, would it?

MISS MITCHELL: Indeed it wouldn’t! The bustle came into style in 1868, replacing the wide hoop skirts of the war days. If I hadn’t gotten the date of the bustle correctly, lots of old ladies would have written me indignantly — saying that they never wore rose covered bustles at that time. I had to do a lot of work on such small details as this — because I was very anxious to have Gone With the Wind accurate — not only in large historical facts but in the very smallest ones too.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, where did you find out all the thousands of small details?

MISS MITCHELL: I read the files of old newspapers from 1860 to1878 and I read hundreds of old magazines, diaries and letters. And I don’t know how many hundreds of books I consulted. Those books were on every subject from Mid-Victorian architecture to how far a Confederate rifle would shoot. But best of all sources of information were my father and my late mother. Although both my father and my mother were born long after Reconstruction days — they know as much about those troublous times as though they had lived through them themselves, When they were children, they too had listened to the stories of the old folks and they remembered those stories and retold them to me. I think my father knows everything in the world about the Civil war, especially that part of the war which was fought in Georgia. I believe he knows where every battery was placed in the Atlanta campaign, the exact name of the officer commanding it, what the officer’s mother’s mother’s maiden name was, and whether the officer was shot in the right leg or the left. My mother knew just as much as he did. What was even better, she knew about the social history of the sixties and the manner, of that day. She had kept her ears open when she was a little girl and she could tell me, for instance, what was considered genteel during the Civil war and what was considered fast. She knew what our grandmothers ate and how they dressed and what songs they sang and how long a young man must know a girl before he started calling her by her first name — with “Miss” preceding it, of course.

MRS. PERKERSON: Thank you, Peggy, for telling me about the background of Gone With the Wind, I hope everyone has enjoyed it as much as I have.

Allan Gurganus: I think I read it when it came out and I was a junior high school age kid. And I remember the title was extremely beautiful, I thought the title was what everything a title should be…an invitation, a mystery, and uh I loved mockingbirds and there was part of the cult of living in the South, there’s always one on every corner just singing its little gullet out.

One of the things that struck me initially as someone who lived in a town of 24,000 was…I felt the permission to write about small-town life, and the permission to feel that huge international drama, all the circumstances of truth, justice, and the American way, could be played out in a town of 2,000 souls. And could be played out by a single just man who stands up to be counted.

He…Atticus resembled a lot of the, sort of Harvard educated lawyers who had gone away to school and come home. Faulkner is full of those people too, who seemed in those days to be the real aristocrats, I mean, the people who could have done anything but chose not to leave, the people who had a kind of comprehensive vision of the sociology of the town and were amused by it and forgave it and…defended the wrongly accused.

I was close enough to Scout’s age to be attracted both to the child-likeness of the boys and the sagacity of the adult perspective, I think it’s one of the things that’s not quite understood about the book, is that Lee manages to be a child and an adult, the analysis of the town is very, very shrewd and, like, with the wisdom of an 80 year dowager who’s seen it all. And yet, the boys can be very, very fresh and very innocent, and beguiling and Huck Finn like.

I think Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have a lot in common and I think she learned a lot from Twain in terms of a child’s critical vision of the hierarchy, of the system.

Cab Calloway: Sketches director Gail Levin

hi de hi de hi de hi!!!…

…as popular as this Minnie the Moocher refrain still is and as often as it is evoked by even today’s most popular stylists, it should not eclipse another classic piece, equally evocative of the illustrious and inimitable Cab Calloway, the anthem of Sportin’ Life, it ain’t necessarily so…

Calloway had a unique ability to actually “be” his music…  he inhabited every note, every nuance, making him singularly exciting as both “l’homme spectacle” and a sort of natural wonder… Sportin’ Life, the irrepressible and seductive dandy of PORGY & BESS, seemed ordained for him – ready for his slick and effortless moves, his beguiling and infectious personality…  one suspects Cab just had to move over a little to let Sportin’ Life out!…  so as we think about a film evoking the ineffable grace of Calloway, his style, his longevity, his indelible effect, that slithery, willowy guy that is Cab, was also every role he ever touched…   his life did not imitate his art – his life was his art!…

The colorful (pardon the pun) and extraordinary effect of Cab Calloway has been oddly overlooked in terms of a comprehensive, yet exuberant, film on his unparalleled life and times — his enduring place in the entertainment canon… though he easily comes to mind and appeared in countless cameo’s and performances in other people’s works, cartoons and shorts, it is now time to reprise this force of nature on his own terms…

As has been stated in the treatment, Calloway was a constant ambassador for his race and his music… a consummate musician and performer, he charmed audiences across the world with a light touch, a glistening smile, endless bravado and elegant musicianship…

And he embodied another rare characteristic – the ability to never lose his edge nor to become tired to the public…  for decades the “hi de hi de hi de ho” of Minnie has only continued to enchant and to captivate – always welcome and always keeping audiences panting for more…  the perfect example being Cab’s appearance in the 1980 homage to all things cool, hip and actually Black in America – the Blues Brothers!…  a gigantically popular film still, this gushing love affair with the legacy of Black music and musicians does, like Cab, have it’s own mythology, it’s own continuing cult…  and the advent of it’s thirtieth anniversary in 2010, is itself reason enough to look again at the fab Cab…

So it is our desire here to resurrect  Cab… to shine a new light on him, dust off his legend a bit and regard him as not only a triumph of his times but a timeless emblem of them as well…  The journey of the Black entertainer in America is one fraught with disgrace and struggle, racism and intolerance and a sort of “otherness” that often left the Black stars in a quandary trying to reconcile their place within the complexities of American society and the American audience…  One need only think of Harlem’s famous Cotton Club – entertainers adored by white audiences, yet expected to sit on the back of the bus…

The European’s, however, were something else… Seemingly color-blind and ever reverent in the face of genius, Black entertainers and in particular musicians, enjoyed enormous acceptance and adulation creating a sort of schism in their own consciousnesses…  We are reminded of people like Josephine Baker, the Dexter Gordon character of ‘round midnight, the good-will tours of Dizzy Gillespie as examples of a very uneven world…  lionized across the ocean, marginalized at home…

This film is filled with the opportunity to re-immortalize Cab Calloway… Of course we will access and hope to invoke the vast archival material, not simply from the Calloway estate but from others as well, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie – all of whom count in the journey… And all equally exposed to the various cultural attitudes that surrounded Black entertainers on both sides of the Atlantic…

And along with the unearthing of material we think may never have been seen or heard before, we will hope to create yet another Cab persona – another animated “take” on him – which will enliven him to audiences that do not know him and will just add to the lore among those who do…  two great caricaturists – Steve Brodner in the US and Cabu in France – will put their pens and their personalities to new evocations of Calloway bringing art and animation as a very real element to the film…  We anticipate their interpretations on audio tracks, repositioning within the music and within created scenarios to bring a surprisingly new dimension to an appreciation of the uniqueness of this creature, Cab Calloway…  if one simply looks at his sinuous moves, his innate rhythm, his musicianship he entices the artist to come along…  he is an abiding subject so again, not only do we want to revisit him, we want to recreate him, if you will…

The film’s opening sequence will immediately lead us into the dance. Back to the street  in Harlem today (could be the original Cotton Club location, the Apollo theatre or another yet to be determined…)  we are watching the great American caricaturist Steve Brodner as he draws a lifesize depiction of Cab Calloway… Wwe will construct a vast canvas right on the street, integrated right into the actual fabric of Harlem. The idea is again to bring the street to life and Cab to life anew – and to elicit  responses from people watching. Some people will, of course, know immediately who Cab was – others will hopefully become interested and be curious as to what we are doing and who he was…

Perhaps as Brodner draws, people will sing or scat or just improvise what they may know of Cab’s repertoire – so maybe we will hear a few “hi de ho’s”  or “it ain’t necessarily so” or “yo Cab” or something entirely originally inspired… And we will actively encourage this participation from onlookers. We may create some way of playing Cab’s music and mixing it in, but we will hope to generate a great happening. And from this living canvas will emerge a new portrait of Cab, who will step off that page and be dancin’ in the street! This spontaneous scat symphony of art and music will fade across to Cab  in the Cotton Club, 1934…

Aside from these artistic and animated renderings, it is also our hope to reunite the Blues Brothers band and to incorporate new performances from other musicians, getting their “take” on this masterpiece of movement and emotion that is Cab Calloway…  new artists like Ne-yo, a pop and r&b, sometime rapper or classic jazz masters like Jon Faddis or Marcus Roberts who grew up in the echo of Calloway’s particular genius…  melding the performances with a sort of “animated documentary” approach, infusing the archival material with spontaneous eruptions of memory and moment, will give this film a very “in the present” feeling…  not another biopic in that sense of interview and recollection, but a re-invigoration of the whole Calloway presence and a reprise of a timeless virtuoso…

Cab Calloway, as the French say, “l’homme spectacle,”  and as the Americans say, “showman!”

Gail Levin