Helen Taylor - Gone With the Wind

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Gone With the Wind

Helen Taylor

Helen Taylor 2015

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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.

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ISBN 9781844578719

Contents

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 Leighs 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 Squires publisher readers 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 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.

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 air-conditioned movie theatre which happened to be showing a film I had first seen as a teenager. As the credits rolled to Max Steiners 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 selfs 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 Scarletts Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans, both as