Quote of the Day (Margaret Mitchell, on Taxes and Other Inconveniences)

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”—American novelist Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), Gone With the Wind (1936)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ In Which a Certain Classic Movie Is Sent Up)

“I saw it in the window and I just couldn't resist it!" —“Starlet O'Hara” (played by Carol Burnett), wearing a “dress” she created from pulling down a drape, in “Went With the Wind” (a Gone With the Wind parody), in The Carol Burnett Show, Season 10, Episode 8, original air date November 13, 1976, written by Rick Hawkins and Liz Sage, directed by Dave Powers

Quote of the Day (Olivia de Havilland, on the Agony of Losing an Oscar)

“When I returned home on Oscar night, aged 23 and the loser of the award…. I was convinced there was no God.”—Olivia de Havilland, on losing for her role in Gone With the Wind, quoted in Missy Schwartz, “The Last Star,” Entertainment Weekly, Jan. 3-Feb. 6, 2015

Well, I’d say she more than made up for it: She eventually took home two of the coveted statuettes, for challenging roles in To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949), not to mention still more nominations for Hold Back the Dawn (1941) and The Snake Pit (1948).

All hail Olivia de Havilland, who turns 100 years old today in Toyko to British expatriates (including, notably, an actress). The public celebrates, as cult figures, stars who burn out way before they should. But a deserved honor belongs to those who endure.

And who, after all, has endured more than de Havilland? I don’t mean just surviving to her grand age (making her not only, after Luise Rainer and George Burns, the only Oscar winners to live to 100, but the only one of the 50-odd cast members with speaking parts in Gone With the Wind who survives). I also mean enduring:

*the attempt by her studio, Warner Brothers, to destroy her career, when they suspended her for turning down roles and lengthened her contract, only to have her sue and win her freedom;

*the bitterness of younger sister Joan Fontaine, who wrote about their estrangement in her memoir;

*the blandishments of her charming but rakish co-star of eight films at Warner Brothers, Errol Flynn;

*the loss of her son at 41, as well as an ex-husband she nursed in his dying months.

The marvelous film blogger Self-Styled Siren’s post on de Havilland—part of a larger tribute she wrote for Sight and Sound—discusses the star’s two-year lawsuit against Warner Brothers, a legal move that none of her colleagues dared to openly support at the time. When she triumphed, unlike good friend and fellow star Bette Davis in her own unsuccessful battle with the studio, the article notes, “Jack Warner … found out that his all-purpose flower-like ingénue was tougher than Jezebel.”  

Quotes of the Day (The Fall of Atlanta, Seen by Gen. Sherman and Scarlett O’Hara)

"The next morning [Confederate] General [William J.] Hardee was gone, and we all pushed forward along the railroad south, in close pursuit, till we ran up against his lines at a point just above Lovejoy's Station. While bringing forward troops and feeling the new position of our adversary, rumors came from the rear that the enemy had evacuated Atlanta, and that General [Henry W.] Slocum was in the city. Later in the day I received a note in Slocum's own handwriting, stating that he had heard during the night the very sounds that I have referred to [explosions]; that he had moved rapidly up from the bridge about daylight, and had entered Atlanta unopposed. His letter was dated inside the city, so there was no doubt of the fact. General [George] Thomas's bivouac was but a short distance from mine, and, before giving notice to the army in general orders, I sent one of my staff-officers to show him the note. In a few minutes the officer returned, soon followed by Thomas himself, who again examined the note, so as to be perfectly certain that it was genuine. The news seemed to him too good to be true. He snapped his fingers, whistled, and almost danced, and, as the news spread to the army, the shouts that arose from our men, the wild hallooing and glorious laughter, were to us a full recompense for the labor and toils and hardships through which we had passed in the previous three months.”— William Tecumseh Sherman, The Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1875)

“Then a strangely incongruous sight struck her [Scarlett O’Hara’s] eyes….Men, women and children, black and white, hurried, hurried with straining faces, lugging packages and sacks and boxes of food — more food than she had seen in a year. The crowd suddenly gave a lane for a careening carriage and through the lane came the frail and elegant Mrs. Elsing, standing up in the front of her victoria, reins in one hand, whip in the other. She was hatless and white faced and her long gray hair streamed down her back as she lashed the horse like a Fury. Jouncing on the back seat of the carriage was her black mammy, Melissy, clutching a greasy side of bacon to her with one hand, while with the other and both feet she attempted to hold the boxes and bags piled all about her….Scarlett screamed to her, but the tumult of the crowd drowned her voice and the carriage rocked madly by.

“For a moment she could not understand what it all meant and then, remembering that the commissary warehouses were down by the railroad tracks, she realized that the army had thrown them open to the people to salvage what they could before the Yankees came.”—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)

The destiny of the United States changed utterly on this day in 1864 when the mayor of Atlanta surrendered his city to Union forces. Only 10 days before, Union armies had appeared so stalled on all fronts that Abraham Lincoln felt obliged to compose a message detailing how he intended to cooperate to preserve the Union with former General George B. McClellan if, as it seemed increasingly likely, “Little Mac” and the Democratic Party defeated Lincoln in the fall Presidential election.

The day after this transportation hub of the Confederacy capitulated, though, General William Tecumseh Sherman had written Gen. Henry Halleck, the de facto army chief of staff, “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

So, it soon became apparent, was Lincoln’s victory. Writing this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal, historian Fergus Bordewich notes that Lincoln’s running mate, Andrew Johnson, botched Reconstruction when he succeeded to the Presidency after the Great Emancipator’s assassination, but that the consequences would have been “momentous” if their ticket had lost in November 1864:

“Although he expressed a willingness to continue the war if necessary, in practical terms McClellan's victory in the election would likely have led to European recognition of the Confederacy, Southern independence, and the forcible return to slavery of the hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had fled to the Union armies for safety.”

For all the many—and enormous—differences between the two passages above, they are united in one feeling: astonishment. Sherman is jubilant that the three-month siege of Atlanta is over, that it’s all ended now—both the foot-by-foot, thrust-and-parry campaign of maneuver against  wily, defensive-minded Confederate’s Joseph E. Johnston and the pitched battles of the latter’s offensive-minded but recklessly brave replacement, John Bell Hood .

Astonishment of a different sort underlies Scarlett O’Hara’s feelings about the fall of the city in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone With the Wind. With a news blackout existing in effect, most city residents had little idea of the progress (or lack of same) of Confederate arms. Now, it appears, for Scarlett and thousands of others, Armageddon is at hand.

Besides the different perspectives of victory and defeat (not to mention nonfiction and fiction), these passages are also marked by different perceptions of order. For Sherman, a peacetime banker whose world was profoundly darkened by the Panic of 1857—and whose wonderful subsequent appointment as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy had come to an end because of secession—the victory, he thought, meant the consolidation of the prewar order.

Scarlett, however, senses that disorder is at hand, in the cry repeated throughout this chapter: “The Yankees are coming!” A city that had, in a real sense, gained much of its influence throughout the war as the site where so many had fled from Union troops in Tennessee and Mississippi was now experiencing its own refugee crisis.

Neither the capital of Georgia nor even its largest city, Atlanta had leveraged its position as a railroad hub, so that by 1863 its population had reached 20,000, making it the 12^th-largest city in the Confederacy. As Sherman had pressed harder in the spring and summer of 1864, however, the population had fallen back to roughly 3,000. That was the state of affairs when Sherman issued one of the most controversial orders of the war.

The Union general believed that Confederate refugees had acted as a drag on the advancement of Union armies in Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and New Orleans. Now, foreseeing that “sutlers and traders” were about to descend on Atlanta, too, he decided to take a step that even his dispassionate explanation a decade after the events in his memoirs failed to mitigate: “to remove the entire civil population, and to deny to all civilians from the rear the expected profits of civil trade.”

Sherman’s relocation order worsened an already perilous refugee crisis. Moreover, the steps taken by his troops to cripple the South’s war effort—machine shops, foundries, railroads, depots—blended in the mind of the region with the destruction left by Hood. (To ensure that the Union captured nothing of consequence from the city’s railroad stock, the latter blew up over 80 railroad cars filled with ammunition, in the process wrecking homes whose losses would later be ascribed to the Yankee and his men.)

There is another aspect of Margaret Mitchell’s evocation of havoc. The chaos seems at first to affect everyone the same, both black and white. But  Mrs. Elsing’s black mammy, Melissy, proves as utterly incompetent at protecting her mistress’s precious food supply as Scarlett’s maid Prissy is in assisting Melanie Wilkes’ childbirth. Melissy's failure also prefigures Mitchell’s (and the racist white South’s) belief that blacks will be even more irresponsible in running state governments during Reconstruction.

Mitchell’s gripping narrative of the fall of Atlanta laid the marker for perhaps the most vivid scene in the 1939 film adaptation. But, like Sherman, she never realized the pathos of the African-Americans who were also swept up in the maelstrom engulfing Atlanta in September 1864—and who would find themselves with even less protection from the storm when the federal government withdrew its troops from the South beginning in 1877. 

(For more on the movie Gone With the Wind and its treatment of blacks, the Irish, and Reconstruction, see this earlier post of mine. See this link for another post describing, in more detail than the current one, Sherman's unrelenting four-month campaign to take Atlanta.)

Quote of the Day (Laurence Olivier, on Vivien Leigh)

“I started to rehearse Streetcar on 29 August 1949. I think I can say that I was helpful to Vivien’s performance of Blanche; I hit on the practical notion that as by changing one feature one can create a whole new face, so by the alteration of one major characteristic, not hitherto associated with you, you can become another person with a different personality. I noticed at the first rehearsals, by the reactions among the company, that Vivien's unexpected, much deeper, much rougher voice had impressed them. I watched, fascinated, the strange new person that grew from this one dominant change of key. I thought, if her critics had one grain of fairness, they will give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgment be distorted by her great beauty and Hollywood stardom. As it turned out, they were not so bad as usual, but clearly reluctant in their approval. Her colleagues and the public were unanimously eulogistic in their praises.”—Laurence Olivier, describing directing wife Vivien Leigh in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography (1982)

This passage speaks volumes about the relationship between Sir Laurence Olivier and the second and most famous of his three wives, Vivien Leigh, born on this date 100 years ago in India. You see the loving protectiveness that sustained him through two decades of marriage to a woman he correctly described to later lover Sarah Miles as “a manic depressive, schizophrenic, nymphomaniac”; admiration for a fellow actor’s skill; an emphasis on how external characteristics, rather than the dredging up of personal experience, informs a role; and, perhaps, at least some competiveness between the two (he was “helpful” to the performance of an actress who, he also told Miles, “wasn’t good enough in the theatre [to be designated by the queen as ‘Dame’]. She would never even bother turning up for her voice production classes.”).

Streetcar came halfway through one of the most storied—and sad—marriages in film history. (For the denouement, see my prior post on the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, set against the background of their crumbling relationship.)

The “Hollywood stardom” to which Olivier referred came to Leigh as a result, of course, of Gone With the Wind. She wasn’t exactly right for the role of the Southern belle to beat all Southern belles (the novel’s first sentence, after all, is, “Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were"). But with her kind of looks onscreen (in the words of friend Jesse L. Lasky Jr., “hair stirred by the breeze, eyes like fire opals beneath the circle of her wide-brimmed black hat”), who would dare quibble? So she won the role, after the most publicized talent search in movie history, along with her first Oscar.

The dominant characteristic of Scarlett is her indomitability in the face of catastrophes that crush nearly everyone else near and dear to her. Leigh made only nine more feature films after Gone With the Wind and, with the exception of the younger, spirited half of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), none of the roles reflect Scarlett’s strength.

Her London triumph as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, along with her central part in the greatest Hollywood blockbuster of them all in GWTW, gave her the leverage to win the role in the film adaptation from the actress who originated Blanche on Broadway, Jessica Tandy, and to take home her second Oscar in 1951. 

But this film, like others in these years, mirrored her offscreen stormy love life and fragile mental condition. (Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning stint as the Joker in The Dark Knight, it raises the issue of how far an actor with mental-health issues can go in exploring a dark role.)

The role of Blanche--fearful of losing youth and beauty--has to be among the most harrowing an actress can play. Ten years later, another Tennessee Williams property would expose, even more pitilessly, Leigh’s insecurity: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, about an aging actress who takes up with a young Italian gigolo.(Again, art seemed to mirror life: Leigh had an affair with her miscast co-star: Warren Beatty, already establishing a reputation as a lothario.)

A couple of years later, Miles, who had some unhappy experiences with Leigh during the shooting of the film, met the actress again. It soon became apparent that Leigh did not have a clue about her misbehavior to the younger woman, and she apologized. At that point, Miles notes with pity, in a recent article in The Daily Mail, she glimpsed a “ravishing beauty now ravaged by life.”