Give Us Tomorrow: Searching for a Sequel to “Gone With the Wind”
Culver City, 1940. Amidst the runaway success of Gone With the Wind, one question inundated Selznick International’s publicity department. “Did Scarlett get Rhett back?”
“I do not have a notion of what happened to them and I left them to their ultimate fate,” Margaret Mitchell sighed “with two such determined characters, it would be hard to predict what would happen to them”. Undeterred, impresario David O. Selznick wrote to his assistant: “If we can’t get a sequel, I would still be delighted to have a story called The Daughter of Scarlett O’Hara with Vivien playing the daughter. Don’t you think we might persuade Mitchell to write such a novel, or a novelette, or even as a short story?”.
Further suggestions were even more far-fetched. If the author was not prepared to write the official continuation, he pleaded with her to sell the rights to the characters (“in the manner of The Thin Man”). Selznick felt that a Mitchell Cinematic Universe would be more profitable than “making all the other pictures we can think of combined”. A possibility she refused to entertain.
But, surely, tomorrow is another day?
After Margaret Mitchell’s death in 1949, her brother Stephens Mitchell continued to reject offers. But by the 1970s, he started to reconsider. Perhaps, he recognised that as Margaret had written her last chapter first – and had to make Scarlett culpable for Rhett’s departure; there was an opportunity of revisiting these characters. Was Peggy too harsh on her heroine? Were her earlier comments made in the spirit of finality to stave off a tenacious Selznick? Maybe a sequel could work, providing it stayed true to Scarlett’s personality and the historical events of the Reconstruction South. Fearing a deluge of poorly-written books with plot lines inappropriate to his sister’s sensibilities once Wind lapsed into the public domain; Stephens Mitchell entered negotiations with the studios.
MGM and Universal partnered on Gone With the Wind II: Electric Boogaloo. The rights came to producers David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck, then coming off the double whammy of The Sting and Jaws. “It’s a bit scary,” Zanuck said “but we think our picture can be just as big and well made or we wouldn’t be taking it on”. “We’re confident it is a practical enterprise,” Brown added “we have the time and resources to carry the story on. A continuation of Gone With the Wind would be too hazardous to tackle without confidence”.
Insisting they were not looking for performers who resembled Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, rumours swirled that Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen were under consideration for Rhett. Potential Scarletts included Jacqueline Bisset, Marisa Berenson and Genevieve Bujold. (“Oh dear,” Olivia de Havilland exclaimed from retirement in Paris “do you realise that poor Melanie will not be in it?”)
Biographer Anne Edwards was commissioned to write a treatment. A “screen story” which would then serve as the basis for the film’s novelisation. She called it Tara: The Continuation of “Gone With the Wind”. Tara was to have opened with Melanie Wilkes’s funeral and, in consequence of Scarlett’s continued affections for Ashley, Rhett’s departure to Belle Watling. But following Belle’s death in a yellow fever epidemic (and Ashley’s marriage to Beau’s governess); Scarlett and Rhett reconcile – to attend the dying Mammy. After the tragedy of Ashley’s death in a Ku Klux Klan raid and a Klan attack on Tara itself (where Rhett dies heroically protecting Scarlett), the novel was to have ended with Scarlett’s vow to rebuild the plantation in his memory.
James Goldman, Academy Award-winner for The Lion in Winter, wrote two screenplays (one of them independently of Edwards’s book). The first was intimate and under two hours; the second, a grand epic mimicking the original. “I took Rhett out the door and had him say, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’. Then I followed him down the street. The audience had to bite the bullet right at the very beginning, or leave”. Adding a fourth husband for Scarlett and sparing Rhett’s life, Goldman reunited the couple at the nation’s Centennial in 1876. “It was the perfect popcorn movie,” his widow affirmed “it had everything!”
Although Brown and Zanuck were delighted with their writers’ outputs, MGM was cool. The deal collapsed – and Tara was shelved.
When the option on Tara expired, a lengthy court battle ensured that it was the Mitchell Estate (and not the studios) who retained the rights to a follow-up. These proceedings also smoothed out the ambivalence over whether a film sequel had to necessarily predate a literary one. In any event, the great success of Gone With the Wind on television had shown that a miniseries might be a better format when it materialised. Hoping to put the debacle behind them, the Estate approved a new continuation from a different author. After considering eleven others (including Sidney Sheldon and Mary Higgins Clark), they settled on Alexandra Ripley, known for romantic historical fiction, in 1987.
If I were a Southerner, I dare say I’d be stripped of my citizenship if I confessed to liking the eventual book which she called Scarlett. To escape the racist attitudes of the South, Alexandra Ripley brought her heroine to Ireland – and abandoned her there for hundreds of pages. The reviews were scathing. A columnist in Richmond, Virginia judged that Ms. Ripley “don’t know nothin’ ’bout writin’ sequels” while Molly Ivins of the New York Times quipped that there were more probable plot lines on Gilligan’s Island. All of this was crushing for Ms. Ripley, who spent years researching Scarlett (a book likened to “the most unnecessary commercial product since the automatic card shuffler”). For the rest of her life, she had extraordinarily good reason to be bitter.
The “plot” of Scarlett, after all, had been developed in consultation with the Estate, who wanted to ensure the original’s integrity. Under the custodianship of three elderly lawyers, the Mitchell Trust refuted references to incest, miscegenation and sex between people of the same gender. (The phrase “miscegenation”, liaisons between people of different ethnic groups, denotes their extremely archaic views.) What’s more, Alexandra Ripley couldn’t so much as blow her nose without being accused of leafing storylines from Anne Edwards’s aborted Tara. Indeed, the postponement of Scarlett’s release date by a year fuelled speculation that Ripley and her team of ghost writers were hastily rewriting the book so as to fully differentiate it from Edwards’s copyrighted manuscript (hence Scarlett’s rather unlikely relocation to Ireland). It was The Rise of Skywalker of its day! In spite of everything, Scarlett sold extraordinarily well in 1991.
Attempting to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, the makers of the TV Scarlett ditched the second half of Ripley’s novel and in so doing; offered the most flagrant misrepresentation of Ireland since Darby O’Gill. Abandoning the quasi-accurate Fenian uprisings for a murder plot (and Scarlett’s trial at the Old Bailey), the eventual miniseries with Timothy Dalton and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer proved a disastrous flop. For reasons that seemed good to the filmmakers, a number of bodice-ripping sex scenes were added – as was the pathetic split point where Scarlett’s paternal grandmother, all fire and brimstone (and speaking in tongues), delivers her baby on All Hallows’ Eve.
Originally, producer Robert Halmi wanted to abandon Ireland altogether – and perhaps take Scarlett to San Francisco. Moving west, after all, was a common experience for families who’d lost in the Civil War. Having paid so much for the rights to Alexandra Ripley’s novel, Halmi felt he could make of Scarlett what he wanted. He saw it as nothing more than a doorway to the Gone With the Wind brand name. The Mitchells did not see it that way. They reminded Halmi that they were not permitting a second sequel, but an adaptation of the one they authorised in ‘87. Halmi would have to adapt Scarlett’s first half faithfully – but would be given leeway when it came to the problematic Irish scenes.
When Alexandra Ripley passed on writing another volume, the Estate approached Lady Antonia Fraser, doyenne of London’s literati and the author of several historical biographies and crime novels. Lady Antonia declined – but recommended her friend Emma Tennant, known in America for Pemberley, her sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
Setting her book in 1878, Emma Tennant wanted to trim the canon of Alexandra Ripley’s minor characters; change the name of Scarlett’s daughter from Cat to Cathy (“I can’t stand the name Cat”) and really bring life back to our heroine. The book was to have opened in Paris, where Scarlett and Rhett are quarreling. Back in the United States, they settle in Washington with Scarlett becoming the mistress of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and Rhett embroiling himself in Boss Tweed’s nefarious dealings. After a run-in with the mob, Scarlett absconds to Tara (leaving Rhett to his fate) and rekindles her liaison with Ashley with whom she has a dalliance in a Grecian temple.
Although many in the publishing world were ecstatic about Ms. Tennant’s book, the Estate thought it too British in its sensibility and promptly fired her. Like Anne Edwards, Emma Tennant spent years researching a book that was crushed by stipulations and rules. Indeed, during the subsequent legal wranglings, it came out how close Alexandra Ripley was to walking on the first sequel. “When I chose Tara as my title,” Emma Tennant lamented, unaware of the Edwards connection “the lawyers exchanged significant glances. They must have been thinking: ‘Here’s another one to be thrown to the wolves’”.
Marooned without an author, the Estate approached Pat Conroy, of The Prince of Tides fame, in 1998. Conroy wanted to write something with genuine literary aspirations: a novel from Rhett’s point of view. He called it The Rules of Pride: The Autobiography of Capt. Rhett Butler, C.S.A. But Conroy fought over editorial control (one of his early suggestions was killing Scarlett off) and despairing of the Estate’s attitude, joked about his opening sentence. “After making love, Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, ‘Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?’”
Conroy got his revenge. Three years later, when the trust tried to block the publication of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (which told the story from a slave’s perspective), twenty leading authors, including the famously reclusive Harper Lee, signed a letter supporting Ms. Randall – with Pat Conroy attaching his personal affidavit. (“Estate-approved fan fiction” is too grand a term for the eventual Rhett Butler’s People (2007) and Ruth’s Journey: A Novel of Mammy (2014) by Donald McCaig. McCaig confessed to never having even read Gone With the Wind prior to completing the Conroy project.)
While the ending of Gone With the Wind isn’t explosive, Rhett’s delivery of “My dear, I don’t give a damn” (the word “frankly” bringing an offhanded quality to the film) and Scarlett’s response of “I’ll think of some way to get him back; After all, tomorrow is another day” seals their characters’ fates in a Shakespearean way. It’s a vicious circle that will go on forever between them – and it’s something that no writer, no matter how inventive their story lines, could ever take to a further level. Margaret Mitchell expressed the view that while Scarlett may have found a way back to Rhett’s bed; she never found another place in his heart. It was for this reason that she would not write (or authorise) a sequel in which the two reunited – which was, of course, what everyone wanted.
Still, I wouldn’t object to reading their further adventures. As long as it doesn’t take them to Ireland.
I vividly remember the anticipation with which I waited for the release of Ripley’s SCARLETT when I was in middle school. All I remember of reading it was, however, was increasing disappointment (I think I finished it though) which was only compounded by the miniseries
Looking back, I think this whole affair was a kind of “cultural loss of innocence” in which I realised that powerful commercial entities did not always have sound artistic judgments!!