Gone With The Wind - 73.02 (Part Two)

The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to part one.

His offer for the rights of Gone With the Windaccepted, Selznick went to Hawaii for a vacation with his wife, and started to read the novel he'd bought. He returned to find it a runaway best seller and already part of the national psyche.

At this point he'd made only one definite decision, that George Cukor should direct the picture. Circumstances propelled him quickly into making another. Thousands of letters from readers and movie fans were arriving at the company's office, and 99 percent of them demanded that Clark Gable play the part of Rhett Butler. Gable was also Selznick's first choice, but the star was under exclusive contract to MGM and Selznick's relations with his father-in-law, Louis Mayer, were approaching another crisis.

Early in September, 1936, Irving Thalberg caught pneumonia. He died two weeks later, and the Emperor at once made a firm offer to Selznick to become second vice president of MGM. He wanted to play vice president in charge of production to his young rival's second vice president, and he wanted Gone With the Wind for MGM.

Selznick turned down Mayer's offer, explaining that he wanted to continue running his own company. Mayer then suggested that MGM would be interested in buying Gone With the Wind,with David as producer. The Gable situation was not mentioned; cunningly, the Emperor talked only of his casting ideas for the other leading parts -- Joan Crawford as Scarlett, Maureen O'Sullivan as Melanie, and Melvyn Douglas as Ashley. Selznick said he'd have to think about it. Meanwhile, he began exploring other possibilities for Rhett. Gary Cooper had already occurred to him, and he approached Sam Goldwyn, to whom Cooper was under contract. Goldwyn unequivocally refused to loan him out. Selznick next thought of Errol Flynn, the movies' top swashbuckler since Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade,and under contract to Warner Brothers. This time he was offered a package instead of a refusal. Bette Davis, also the property of Warners', had begun an ardent campaign for the role of Scarlett, but she wouldn't play Scarlett to Flynn's Rhett.

Going through the other names most frequently mentioned in the letters, Selznick found that Warner Baxter had strong support from his native South; but he was too old, and lacking in sex appeal. Incredibly, Basil Rathbone had a sizable percentage of the remaining 1 percent, but Selznick dismissed this idea as well. Ronald Colman, under contract to the company, he had previously discussed with Kay Brown. In her first excitement over the book, she had called Colman long- distance and read him a few passages. "Ripping!" said the actor. "Oh, it's topping, absolutely topping!" Implacably British, he was really out of the question, but the fan magazines for a while took up his cause. Interviewed, he always replied that he thought Gable would be a better choice. (There is no record that Colman was ever considered for Ashley -- perhaps the physical contrast with Gable would not have been strong enough -- but he could certainly have mastered a Southern accent as well as Leslie Howard, and might have been a more interesting choice.) Reluctantly, Selznick had to admit that Gable was a necessity and he went back to MGM.

Not unexpectedly, the terms were stiff. MGM would lend Gable at a figure considerably above his usual salary, and provide half the financing (estimated then at $2,500,000), in return for the world distribution rights through its parent company, Loew's, Inc., and half of the total profits.

Mayer knew, of course, that he had the power for a shakedown. His son-in-law needed not only Gable, but money. In fact, with three pictures in various stages of production at the time he went back to MGM, Selznick did not have enough capital to make Gone With the Windon his own.

"My son-in-law is one smart fellow," said Mayer when he heard that Selznick had accepted the terms. The only problem was that Gable at first refused the part. Always lacking confidence, and with a habit of initially turning down roles that proved to be among his most successful (in Mutiny On the Bountyand It Happened One Night),he was frankly terrified at the prospect of Rhett Butler. The fact that he had been cast by popular vote only increased his alarm. "Too big an order," he told Selznick, "I don't want any part of him," and suggested Ronald Colman. But by the terms of his contract with MGM, he was in no position to turn down the role unless he went on suspension, and for private reasons this was no time to risk unemployment. Gable was still married to, though separated from, a Texas matron seventeen years older than himself; he had just fallen in love with Carole Lombard and they wanted to marry. Rhea Langham Gable was determined to exact vengeance by demanding an enormous divorce settlement, and, like Mayer with Selznick, she knew that she had the power for a shakedown. Her lawyers were already mentioning a figure of almost $300,000, a heartache for anyone to part with and a tragedy for a naturally frugal man. On salary to MGM at $4000 a week (the additional money demanded by Mayer for his services in Gone With the Windwould all go to the studio), he needed financial assistance from his employers. So, after protracted negotiations that were really a series of legal blackmails, with MGM and Mrs. Gable as the winners, he signed for the part.

The deal with MGM meant that Selznick would have to hold up production of the picture for at least two years. Since his company had a contract with United Artists to distribute all his pictures until the end of 1938, Gone With the Windcould not be released by MGM until after that time. The real problem was how to keep the public's interest in the project alive.

Out of this dilemma came the idea of a nationwide talent search to find an unknown to play Scarlett O'Hara. When he thought of it, Selznick was certainly not convinced that he wantedan unknown -- even after shooting began he was still considering stars for the lead -- and the search in the end yielded nothing except a girl in Charleston, Alicia Rhett, to play the part of India Wilkes, Ashley's unpleasant sister; but as an attention-getting device it was brilliant.

The most publicized and richly absurd moment of the search occurred on Christmas Day, 1937. What appeared to be an outsize package was delivered to Selznick's home by liveried messengers. Ribbons and paper were ripped away to disclose a replica of the novel in its dust jacket, out of which stepped a young girl in crinolines. "Merry Christmas, Mr. Selznick! I am your Scarlett O'Hara!"

Not surprisingly, the possibility that an unknown might be chosen to play Scarlett also had its effect on the stars and their fan clubs. As in the case of Gable and Rhett Butler, letters poured in from all over the country -- from Europe, too, since the novel was repeating its triumph there -- suggesting almost every leading lady of the moment. Many of the ladies suggested themselves. Of the write-ins, Bette Davis was easily the most popular candidate, with 40 percent of the vote, but her refusal to play opposite Flynn had taken her out of the running. The loss of the role haunted her for years. In the 1920s, when Cukor ran a stock company in Rochester, New York, he had employed her for one season, then let her go because there were no more parts he considered suitable for her. In Davis' mind the idea became fixed that he never liked her and always favored Katharine Hepburn for the role. As late as the 1960s she gave out interviews saying that if Cukor had really wanted her, a deal could have been made with Warners' excluding Flynn, and in her autobiography, The Lonely Life(1962), insisted, "His thumbs were down. By such intangibles are careers affected." Cukor has never been able to understand this. "Imagine," he commented to me, "since she became this great tragedienne and important person, I've been constantly reading that she was fired by George Cukor! And I'd really been awfully kind to her.... "

The long obsession reveals Davis' inconsolable desire for the part -- which was indirectly rewarded. Discovering a story whose Southern heroine had obvious affinities with Scarlett, she persuaded Jack Warner to let her make it in 1938. The year before Gone With the Windwas a candidate for awards, she won her second Oscar for Jezebel,to Selznick's considerable annoyance.

Katharine Hepburn, the imagined cause of her downfall, was in fact a self-announced contender, one of several stars who either suggested themselves to Selznick or put their agents to work. Because of her association with both Cukor and Selznick, she was thought for a while to have the inside track; but although Cukor was receptive, Selznick doubted whether she had the sex appeal to enthral Rhett Butler for so many years, and was worried because at the time motion picture exhibitors were labeling her "box-office poison." He offered to test her, however; but she refused. Then, for a heady day or two, it seemed as if Hepburn had been endorsed by Margaret Mitchell herself. The author had declined to state any preference for an actress to play her heroine, but one day a friend asked her opinion of Hepburn. "I enjoyed her in Little Women," she said, "and thought she looked very pretty in hoop skirts." The remark somehow reached a reporter on the Atlanta Journal,which printed a story that Hepburn was Margaret Mitchell's personal choice for the role. When other newspapers picked it up, the author issued a public retraction, apologizing to the star for any misunderstanding that might have arisen, and repeating, "I have never expressed a preference and never will."

Another widely publicized candidate was Norma Shearer, with whom Selznick had discussions concerning the part, but her fans created an outcry at the thought of an actress renowned for her sweet and ladylike qualities playing a Southern minx. Ed Sullivan joined the protest in his column, and in spite of encouragement from an editorial in the New York Times,Shearer graciously withdrew from the race. It became another example of a star's career being deeply affected by not playing Scarlett. Long impatient with her refined image, Shearer now pressured MGM for the femme fatalepart in Idiot's Delight,in which she played opposite Gable immediately before he started Gone With the Wind.

The list of actresses who wanted to play Scarlett, or were touted for it by the fan magazines, press and radio commentators, and their agents, is amazing not only for variety but incongruity. The story begins with Scarlett at the age of sixteen, and yet among the serious contenders were Shearer (thirty-seven), Miriam Hopkins (thirty-five), Tallulah Bankhead (thirty-four), Joan Crawford, Jean Arthur, and Irene Dunne (all thirty-three). Some of these were actually tested. This is a comment, of course, from a society that is much more conscious of age (or youth) than were the 1930s. The most popular figures of that time were women rather than girls. In Jean Arthur's case, one suspects the test to have been partly a sentimental gesture, since Selznick was in love with her before he married Mayer's daughter. An original and charming actress, she was clearly too old for the part, with no hint of the Southern belle in her temperament, and the test looks strained and embarrassing. So does Bankhead's, for mainly the same reasons; demureness was never her stock-in-trade. Miriam Hopkins, who read for the part but didn't make a test, came from the South and had recently starred in the movie Becky Sharp;the similarities between Thackeray's heroine and Margaret Mitchell's had been pointed out in several reviews. She had a strange, powerful intensity and, like Shearer, could create the illusion of physical glamour. You feel she might have got away with Scarlett on the stage.

Other actresses tested were Joan Bennett (from Little Women), Paulette Goddard, the young Lana Turner, who had just attracted attention in her first, small movie role in They Won't Forget,and a New York model called Edythe Marriner whom Irene Selznick spotted at a fashion show. Loretta Young was also a favorite possibility with Selznick for a while. To see the film on the contenders is to see why Cukor and Selznick continued to hold out. Some are instantly out of the question: Lana Turner at sea, dazed and ringleted. Edythe Marriner -- who changed her name to Susan Hayward after the test -- looks right; she was nineteen then, with a slight resemblance to Vivien Leigh, but there's already a career-girl toughness in her screen presence. Paulette Goddard, recently launched by Chaplin in Modern Times,is the only one who comes close. Chaplin had sensed her gaminequality and brought it out very effectively in his film; in the test it is still there, appealing but somehow too city-ish for the daughter of Tara. Still, for a while she was under the strongest consideration, and then almost signed.

Of all these, Hopkins was the most hotly tipped by the press, and coincidentally she had also worked in Cukor's stock company. He admires her talent but says he never felt she was right for Scarlett. Other names tossed into the arena were Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan (both represented by Myron Selznick), Claudette Colbert, Ann Sheridan, and Jean Harlow, but here we seem to enter the land of delusion and publicity gimmicks. And when Selznick asked the other studios to suggest any actresses they might have under contract, RKO came up with a twenty-seven-year-old unknown called Lucille Ball. "Are you kidding?" was her forthright reaction, but the casting agent pressed a vocal coach on her and arranged a reading with Selznick. He was polite but noncommittal. A few years later, she was sent for an equally unsuitable audition to Orson Welles, for the part of the girl whom Citizen Kane tries to turn into an opera singer.

Publicity made it appear that Selznick spent most of his time from the end of 1936 to the fall of 1938 supervising the search for Scarlett, auditioning and looking at tests. In fact, the search for a script was to prove equally exhaustive. He first engaged the Broadway playwright, Sidney Howard (They Knew What They Wanted, The Silver Cord, Dodsworth), to write a basic draft. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize. Howard had all the prestige credentials and some familiarity with movie technique, since he had previously worked with Goldwyn. Selznick's only doubt -- which was to prove justified -- was whether the distinguished Easterner would be amenable to the producer's exacting methods of work. "I have never had much success with leaving a writer alone to do a script without almost daily collaboration with myself and usually also the director," he wrote in a cabled memo to Kay Brown, who was negotiating the deal with Howard in New York. "Anything you can do to make Howard available for conference with us during the actual writing of the script will, I think, be safeguard.... " However, like many New York playwrights, Howard was not fundamentally interested in writing for films, and didn't care for California. He agreed only to come out to Hollywood for meetings with Selznick and Cukor, then went back East to work. He wrote to Margaret Mitchell, expressing delight with his assignment and asking for help on the Negro dialogue. Once again she refused to be involved. Howard embarked on what he considered a well-paid craftsman's job, and performed it with skill and considerable speed, structuring a series of master-scenes from the half-million words of the novel in two months. While basically sound, clearing away many repetitions and disposable minor characters, it still presented a problem; it was over four hundred pages long, almost six hours' running time on the screen.

Selznick's first reaction was to consider making the film as two pictures. Faced with his principle of adhering faithfully to a classic, he was alarmed that further cuts might betray it. He had been thinking in terms of a picture that would run about two and a half hours, but Howard's first draft, with all its omissions from the book, made it clear that Gone With the Windcould never be contained within this length. The idea of two separate pictures was dropped when Selznick learned that theater owners reacted unfavorably to it, instead, he asked Howard to come back to California and discuss with Cukor and himself more drastic ways of cutting the material down to size. At these talks, several new and deep incisions were made. They agreed to exclude from the film all members of the O'Hara family not living at Tara (in the book, neighboring plantations are thick with them); Selznick wanted to lose Scarlett's second marriage, to Frank Kennedy, but both Cukor and Howard were against this, so they dropped only the child of that marriage and, at Cukor's insistence, Scarlett's child by her first marriage as well; all the Ku Klux Klan episodes were thrown out, and Howard was reproached for having added some scenes showing Rhett as a blockade runner. In this way the script was cut by another seventy pages or so, and Howard went home again.

Selznick then laid the script, such as it was, aside. Sporadically, over the next few months, he checked all the favorite scenes and lines that he'd noted in his own copy of the novel, to see if Howard's structure allowed for them all; but he made no move to engage Howard or anyone else to proceed with further writing. When Cukor inquired about this, the reply was somewhat evasive: "I am weighing every line and every word most carefully.... We are also double checking against our Story Department's notes on things that they missed from the book." Struck by Howard's comment at their last meeting that Margaret Mitchell "did everything at least twice," he ordered an assistant to make a complete index of the book, listing the main characters and what happened to them, how many times Rhett talked about the war and Ashley about the dissolution of the South, and so on, with the idea of eliminating repetitions and choosing the best passages of dialogue to combine from related scenes.

So by the end of January, 1938, Howard's original draft was effectively on the shelf, along with piles of suggested cuts and revisions. Part of the reason for this was that although Selznick was on the whole pleased with Howard's progress so far, he was displeased by the writer's refusal to stay out in California indefinitely and continue to work under his supervision. Already, in the back of his mind, Selznick was casting about for a more amenable successor, but in the front of his mind were several pictures he was committed to produce, and he had no intention of relaxing his detailed personal control over any of them. Justifying his methods of total control, Selznick declared that a film, to be a work of art, had to bear a personal signature, like a painting. In this way he expounded the auteurtheory years ahead of his time, with the difference that to him the auteurwas the producer and not the director.

The casting of Melanie and Ashley was only slightly less problematical. Anne Shirley, who suffered sweetly in Anne of Green GablesandStella Dallas,Andrea Leeds, who attracted attention as the suicidal young actress in Stage Door,and Elizabeth Allan, the gentle mother in David Copperfield,were tested first. None quite hit the mark. Geraldine Fitzgerald and Priscilla Lane were considered, then dismissed. Selznick then approached Janet Gaynor, but the actress had decided to give up her screen career. One day Joan Fontaine, only twenty years old and under contract to RKO, where she'd had little success, came to see Cukor under the impression he wanted her to read for Scarlett. When she found he was considering her for Melanie, she told him the part didn't interest her -- but suggested it might interest her more famous sister, Olivia de Havilland. The idea interested Selznick and Cukor as well, and she came to the producer's home for a reading. De Havilland has described the experience: "George read Scarlett's lines while I read Melanie's. For some reason, George had to stand clutching some velvet curtains. He was absolutely marvelous -- I'm sure it was his performance that got me the part." Both Selznick and Cukor agreed that she was the Melanie they wanted, but Warners' had to be approached again, since the actress was under contract there. At first Jack Warner refused a loan-out on any terms; like others in the industry, he felt that Gone With the Windwas a foolhardy project and predicted, "It's going to be the biggest bust of all time."

In spite of the demure parts in which she'd been cast so far, nice virginal girls in love with the dashing Errol Flynn, de Havilland was spirited and shrewd. She went to work on Warner's wife, knowing her influence, and played a very effective tea-and-sympathy scene with her one afternoon at the Brown Derby. Mrs. Warner's influence was brought to bear on her husband, negotiations were opened, and a deal signed.

For Ashley, Selznick's first choice had always been Leslie Howard, then at the peak of his reputation as a "sensitive" leading man in movies and the theater. After The Petrified ForestandOf Human Bondage,he played Hamleton the New York stage, then went back to England to give his best performance in the film of Pygmalion.Howard at this time was writing a play (which he never finished), and wanted to produce and direct. Approached by Selznick on his return to Hollywood, the actor's response was lukewarm. He was not interested in reading Margaret Mitchell's novel, and in fact never did so; when Selznick showed him a few scenes from the script, he remained unimpressed. Knowing the actor's other ambitions, Selznick offered him a package deal, with a job to follow as associate producer on a forthcoming picture. Howard finally took the bait, giving the usual reason in a letter to his daughter in England: "Money is the mission here and who am I to refuse it?"

The forthcoming picture was to be Intermezzo.During the fall of 1938, Selznick also found time to follow up another tip from Kay Brown, who had seen Ingrid Bergman in the Swedish version, and to sign the actress to a contract. His schedule, it seemed, could never be full enough, and he embarked on plans for an American remake.

By November, 1938, ten months after the final meetings with Sidney Howard, there had still been no progress on the script, and there was still no Scarlett; but a date had been fixed for the start of shooting. The deal with MGM specified that Gable had to begin work during the second week of February, 1939, and there was no guarantee that he would be available for more than twenty weeks, which was less than the established shooting schedule. (In case it is wondered how a schedule could be established without a script, Selznick had given his production department a list of all the principal scenes and sets that would definitely be included in the picture, and on this basis the department worked out a shooting period of approximately twenty-two weeks. Simultaneously, the many background and incidental shots not requiring direction of actors would be done by second units.) Now pressed for time, Selznick announced that a single sequence, the burning of Atlanta, would be shot on December 10, 1938. He planned to use the following two months' until Gable was available, on further preparation and on scenes without Rhett.

During November, too, he came to a decision. Paulette Goddard would be his Scarlett O'Hara, and her agent was contacted. However, at this time Chaplin and his star were openly living together, and no one was certain whether they were married. In more paranoid circles of the movie industry and the middle classes, Chaplin's alleged left-wing views in Modern Timeshad caused the first stirrings of the unpopularity that led to his eventual exclusion from the United States. Now the cry of an "immoral" private life was raised. When it became known that Goddard was on the verge of being signed, women's clubs all over the United States fired salvos of protest, and Selznick felt obliged to ask his Scarlett whether or not she was Chaplin's wife. Goddard insisted that a ceremony had occurred at sea, in the harbor of Singapore, while they were on a cruise to the Orient. (In My Autobiography,published in 1964, Chaplin states briefly, "During this trip Paulette and I were married.") Unfortunately, Goddard couldn't produce a marriage certificate or any official evidence that the wedding had taken place. Deciding not to risk a scandal, Selznick reluctantly ordered the search to continue.

In the meantime, he turned his attention again briefly to the script. After Margaret Mitchell refused his offer to inspect the existing material and give her opinion of it, he engaged Oliver H. P. Garrett, a screenwriter with whom he'd previously worked at MGM, to collaborate with him on further revisions to the structure and continuity. This job began on the train to New York, where Selznick had to go for a week of business meetings. Together they made some more cuts and reworked several major scenes -- the barbecue at Twelve Oaks, the meeting of Rhett and Scarlett at the Atlanta Bazaar, the escape from Atlanta, Ashley's return from the war, and the new events leading up to the death of Frank Kennedy. Like other writers who followed him, Garrett was limited by being allowed to work only on isolated sequences, by the fact that Selznick was still uncertain about how long a film he wanted, and by the warnings not to tamper with a classic: "The ideal script, as far as I am concerned, would be one that did not contain a single word of original dialogue, and that was one hundred per cent Margaret Mitchell, however much we juxtaposed it." A difficult order when Selznick also demanded the invention of an occasional scene not in the book.

Like his successors, Garrett was employed only for a week or two, and never knew which of his ideas had been accepted until he saw the finished picture. Until the middle of January, 1939, other writers -- including John van Druten, Scott Fitzgerald, and the scenarist Jo Swerling -- were brought in to work in the same piecemeal way. In spite of his demands for close collaboration, Selznick seems to have been unwilling to work with his writers for more than a few days (or nights) at a time, and to have remained curiously indifferent to the confusion his methods created. As late as a day before the start of principal photography, a note to Whitney tells him not to worry about "the seemingly small amount of final revised script.... It is so clearly in my mind that I can tell you the picture from beginning to end, almost shot for shot."

While the mounds of unrevised pages continued to grow, he began conferring with Cukor on the casting of supporting parts. Lionel Barrymore was their first idea for Dr. Meade, but the actor was by now confined to a wheelchair, and they chose Harry Davenport instead. Selznick asked Kay Brown to sound out Tallulah Bankhead (now officially rejected as a candidate for Scarlett) on whether she would play Belle Watling, the Atlanta madam; Bankhead's reply, though not recorded, can be imagined, and the role went to Ona Munson. Hattie McDaniel was tested and cast as Mammy, Thomas Mitchell signed for Scarlett's father, and Barbara O'Neil (after Lillian Gish turned the part down) for her mother. Laura Hope Crews, a specialist in silly old women, landed Aunt Pittypat after Billie Burke was rejected as silly but not old enough.

The production team was already at work. For his designer, Selznick chose William Cameron Menzies, with whom he'd already been associated on Tom Sawyer,and who had other notable achievements to his credit, from the silentThief of Bagdadwith Fairbanks to Things to Comein England, which he also co-directed. According to Cukor, Hobe Erwin (who made the charming sets for Little Women) was also importantly involved in early conferences on the visual aspects, and influenced the general approach. Since both Menzies and Erwin are dead, this is one of several production matters that cannot be totally cleared up. Erwin has no credit on the film, and only worked on it for a few weeks before being replaced as art director by Lyle Wheeler; but this in itself is no reason to doubt Cukor's claim that he contributed vital ideas. On the other hand, there is the evidence of Menzies' involvement with the film throughout, his direction of several sequences, the color sketches for all the major camera setups in every scene that his assistant, McMillan Johnson, made under his supervision, and the sets he designed that were executed by Lyle Wheeler.

Lee Garmes, the cameraman assigned to the picture, had done brilliant innovative work throughout the 1930s, a pioneer in the development of low- key lighting, rich and muted halftones, seen at their most spectacular in the Von Sternberg- Dietrich films Morocco, Shanghai Express,andDishonored.A cable from Selznick reached him in London, where he'd been working for several months with Alexander Korda on a project now in a state of collapse. This was Cyrano de Bergerac,to star Charles Laughton; by coincidence, Garmes (who was going to direct it) had just tested Vivien Leigh for Roxanne. Disagreements between Korda and Laughton caused the film to be abandoned Garmes remembers that Selznick's cable astonished him, since he was convinced that Gone With the Windmust at least have started shooting. After his agent checked that it was not so, Garmes returned to Hollywood a day too late to film the burning of Atlanta, with which production began. He then worked on the picture for seven weeks, after which he had differences of opinion with Selznick and was replaced. Although he shot almost a third of the picture, and Vivien Leigh's tests, he received no credit.

For the costumes Selznick turned to Walter Plunkett, with whom he'd already worked on Little Women,and who had the eerie task of creating petticoats and crinolines for a nonexistent Scarlett. For the interiors, Joseph B. Platt, head of a large designing firm, was brought out from New York. He created special wallpapers and carpets, and supervised the choice of antique furniture. Both he and Plunkett worked in close collaboration with Menzies, evolving color effects and motifs for different scenes. Naturally, Selznick attended all their conferences and gave his seal of approval to the sketches.

Tara was to be built on the studio back lot, where various sets from The Last of the Mohicans, King Kong, The Garden of Allah,andLittle Lord Fauntleroywere still standing. Selznick's production manager, Raymond Klune, suggested that instead of clearing them away, they should be reassembled, repainted, and then burned as Atlanta. Since this was to be a night scene, and much of the detail would be obscured by raging flames, it took only a few false fronts to prepare them for destruction.

While the old sets were being readied for buming, Selznick had another brief attack of interest in the script. With another Russian friend, Jo Swerling, who had written the screenplay of the studio's recently completedMade for Each Other,he went to Bermuda for a week. Notes were taken but no writing was accomplished. Returning to Hollywood, he was momentarily alarmed by Eddie Mannix, a vice president of MGM, who told him that the buming of Atlanta could be carried out much more effectively by the use of model shots. Menzies and Raymond Klune emphatically disagreed, and after some hesitation Selznick allowed the original plan to proceed.

The night of December 10, the night of the fire, was cold. Seven Technicolor cameras -- all that were available in Hollywood at that time -- had been positioned to cover the burning, of which there could obviously be no retakes, and the setups and lighting were worked out by Ray Rennahan, the cameraman-adviser supplied by Technicolor. Pipes carrying gasoline had been run through the old sets; 25 members of the Los Angeles police department, 50 studio firemen, and 200 studio helpers were standing by with equipment and 500-gallon water tanks in case the flames should get out of hand. Sets of doubles were engaged for Scarlett and Rhett, who would be seen in various long and medium shots as they escaped from the city with Melanie, her newbom baby and Prissy the maid hidden in the back of the wagon. A special lookout platform had been built for Selznick, his mother (Lewis J. Selznick had moved to California in the early thirties and died soon afterward), and friends. Myron was expected, but had warned he might be late since he was entertaining some clients at dinner.

There was something Napoleonic in the image of the thirty-seven-year-old producer elevated on his platform, surrounded by a court, waiting to give the order that would set a world on fire. However, since Myron was late, the signal was delayed -- like almost everything else connected with the picture. After an hour, Ray Klune told Selznick that it was impossible to keep the police and fire departments waiting any longer. Intensely nervous -- what if Mannix should prove right, and the highly publicized funeral pyre should fail to make its impact on the screen? -- the producer gave his signal. The famous old sets of dried wood blazed willingly. Cukor called the first "Action!" on Gone With the Wind,and the doubles of Scarlett and Rhett made their escape past the burning structures of King KongandThe Garden of Allah.

As the sparks flew upward and the buildings began to tremble, Selznick knew that Mannix had been wrong. He turned to Raymond Klune and apologized for having doubted him. And to some Los Angeles residents, always fearful of natural disasters such as earthquakes and holocausts, the overpowering glow in the sky announced that the city itself was on fire. A few dozen people hastily packed suitcases, got out their cars, and started driving toward the desert.

As the fire began to wane and the shooting ended, Myron arrived, slightly drunk, with his dinner guests. He led them up to the platform, ignoring David's reproaches and excitedly seizing his arm."I want you to meet your Scarlett O'Hara!" he said in a loud voice, causing everybody to turn around.

Selznick looked from the acres of burning rubble to a young actress standing beside Laurence Olivier. Firelight seemed to accentuate the hint of pale green in the light blue of her eyes, the green that Margaret Mitchell has ascribed to the eyes of her heroine. He knew that she was Vivien Leigh, an English actress, and that she and Olivier were in love. He also knew that several months ago her name had been mentioned to him by one of his talent executives, and he'd screened two pictures she made in Britain,Fire Over Englandand A Yank at Oxford,and thought her excellent but in no way a possible Scarlett. Seeing her now, the moment turned into a scene from his own A Star Is Born. "I took one look and knew that she was right -- at least right as far as her appearance went," he said later. "If you have a picture of someone in mind and then suddenly you see that person, no more evidence is necessary ... I'll never recover from that first look."

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