Posted on 12/05/2009 3:15:09 PM PST by BigReb555
December 15, 2009, is the 70th Anniversary of the movie 'Gone with the Wind.'
(Excerpt) Read more at huntingtonnews.net ...
“The Rest of the Story” from an article by Wes Pruden November 1994. I can’t find it online so I’m pasting it from where I typed it into a Word Document years ago.
The Scarlett story that will not die
There actually was a Rhett Butler, and a real Scarlett O’Hara, and their lives - particularly Rhett’s - were actually lived pretty much as Miss Mitchell described them.
Rhett’s real name was Rhett Turnipseed. The Turnipseeds, like the Rhetts and Ravenals and the Pinckneys and Middletons, were and are a fine old South Carolina family, with many tributaries flowing in unusual ways to many interesting places. Rhett was a Pinckney on his mama’s side and has kin who live in Washington to this day. He was a brevet colonel in Hampton’s South Carolina Legion, which for a time was attached to Hood’s Texas Brigade. This may be confusing today, though it was not then, because Confederate regiments were often transferred hither and yon, and the Texas Brigade, Lee’s favorite, included regiments from several other states. The regiment that actually made the Texas Brigade famous, in fact, was the 3rd Arkansas, which left a goodly number of its men in Bloody Lane. The scene in Atlanta, where he finally dispatched Scarlett, whose real name was Evelyn Louise Hannon, actually happened, too. Once in uniform, Col. Turnipseed struck up a friendship with one of the officers of the 3rd Arkansas, and this friendship stood him in good stead, as we shall see.
After the War, Rhett went to New Orleans, where he ran a crap game in a private room above the old Claiborne Oyster House, and later drifted through the mean, hard places in the Reconstruction South. Nursing a dreadful hangover, he stumbled into Nashville on Easter Sunday morning 1871 and was converted in a Methodist revival meeting at the Ryman Auditorium - the Ryman Auditorium that would become the mother church of country music.
He stayed in Nashville to take divinity studies at Vanderbilt University and became a Methodist preacher, assigned to a riding circuit in rural Western Kentucky. Late in the decade - some Turnipseed family historians put the date as late as 1878, when Evelyn-cum-Scarlett would have been in her late 30s - Rhett the circuit-riding reverend rode into St. Louis to retrieve a young woman from his flock who had run away to seek employment in an Olive Street seminary for young ladies.
You can imagine his astonishment when the madam turned out to be, yes, the same Evelyn Louise Hannon. Naturally, being the spiteful Scarlett everyone of a certain age came to know and love, she refused to hand over the girl, the most popular in the house. Rhett Turnipseed (a.k.a. Butler) challenged Scarlett to a game of cards, putting up as his stake the recipe for barbecue sauce given him by his old friend in the 3rd Arkansas.
The parson held a royal straight flush, drawing an ace, a king, a queen, a jack and a 10 in a suit of spades. This hand has not been seen since in either St. Louis or on the river, but the story has a good end. The girl became the matriarch of a leading family of her state. Scarlett got religion, too, and opened a home for half-breed foundlings in the Cherokee Nation, and died there in 1903. There is a marker in the Methodist cemetery in Tahlequah. Lying next to Scarlett is a stone of Batesville marble inscribed “Unknown, 1832-1901.” Spread beneath the dates is an engraving of a royal straight flush.
Absolutely. Selznick ordered the doors locked. No one could go in and no one could go out. How exciting it must have been to be in the audience that night.
I have never seen it.
Just sent a text message to my DamnYankee wife (the one who, while visiting my still-Southern relatives, bought me a battle-flag and learned to love grits) - I am going to see it soon.
(Tapadh leat, a'Ghraidh! Tha MORAN gaol agamsa ortsa!)
Believe it or not Olivia de Havilland is still alive (she is 93). She died in the movie but is easily the longest lived of the main cast.
Wonderful movie. I confess though I’ve never read the book. I thought Scarlett was so tragic and wonderful. Later in life I read a biography of Vivien Leigh to find that her own life was tragic. Melanie was great but I liked the conniving Scarlett but she was a dang fool. Too bad they don’t really make “big screen” movies anymore.
Ah, you and I must be sisters from another life. Your GWTW history is pretty much like mine. I wanted to be Scarlett too (my uncle called me ‘Crimson O’Toole)!!! Thought it would be a wonderful thing to have an entire herd of male admirers! Later, I thought Melanie was the stronger, better one to emulate although I still admire Scarlett’s feisty, flirty personality.
I too got more out of the book as I got older, realizing the depth of Rhett’s love for Scarlett and catching the little tale-tell mentions of him watching her like a cat at a mousehole. I’ve probably read it a hundred times, my cousin sent me a beautiful hardback copy of it when I was 16, inscribed ‘a copy less likely to wear out with many readings’. I first read it when I was in 5th grade, at age 10. And my mother took me to see it a year or two before that.
Never did like Ashley, I thought Scarlett was a fool in that respect. But I was probably the only girl in my HS who had a poster-sized movie still of Rhett on my bedroom wall.
Other than that, if you ever watch the screen tests for Scarlett, there is no comparison. Vivian Leigh was hands down the best they auditioned and the role came out as the went along.
And Max Steiner's best theme, IMO, was composed for "Captain Blood."
At the end, when he said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," the audience actually gasped.
It was a "time machine" response.
Mammy had more common sense than all the white characters put together.
I only liked Ashley later. Now, I have nothing but compassion for his situation.
But even now, I do not understand why Scarlett was so insistent on Ashley. I thought Mitchell's explanation of that was probably the weakest part of the book. (My opinion only)
But, Mitchell's wrote the ending first. The book was always supposed to be about a husband leaving his wife. To do that... Scarlett needed to be obsessed with Ashley.
Or any other color, for that matter.
The novel is rich in supporting characters. Mammy, Dilcey, Pork, Uncle Peter, Belle Watling, Aunt Pittypat, India and Honey Wilkes, the Tarletons, Dr. Meade, the triumvate of women in Atlanta: Mrs. Merriweather, Mrs. Meade, Mrs. Elsing, Will Benteen, etc. The list goes on. All so richly drawn and complete.
The first time I ever saw this movie I was all of 4 or 5. I remember having to be taken to the bathroom during the burning of Atlanta!
I first read the book at the age of 9 and it gave words to the feelings first stirred by the movie even at that tender age.
Of course being raised by a mother who was born in Arkansas of family that came there straight from Georgia after the War of Northern Aggression, some of my love of the South is in the blood.
I grew up near where Margaret Mitchell spent her summers and based the novel Gone with the Wind (in the very real city of Jonesboro).
Just last year we went to Fox Theater and I would walk around that grand place and think “Just imagine, Rhett and Scarlet were HERE! Maybe where I’m walking right now!”
Of course I know that isn’t their real names, but even though I’d been to the Fox so many times, for some reason it just struck me at how magnificent that must have been.
She wasn’t in love with him for him, she was in love with him because he wasn’t in love with her. She could have any man she wanted, and yet she wanted the ONE who didn’t love her. And she only loved Rhett after he had enough of her.
Thanks - I’ve never heard of the Rhett book - I’ll have to get it! Would LOVE to know all his mother thought of Scarlett! LOL.
GWTW is still my favorite film of all time. I first saw it in theater around 1963, ’64 as a teenager. It was the first time it had been shown since 1939 and I too, remember the women in the audience sighing when Clark Gable first appeared on the screen (some two or three years after his death). The women, like my mother, were teens themselves when it first came out. They aren’t any movie stars like Gable, The King, today.
It was years before they finally showed GWTW on television, then of course I bought the VHS tape version, and later the DVD when it came out
Dilcey is my very favorite character in the book; I won’t watch the movie because it left her out entirely.
The best movie ever! I first saw it in the late 60’s I believe and have the movie on DVD and STILL watch it when ever it’s on TV.
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