The Women Behind the Wind

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Scarlett’s Younger Sister: When I interviewed Evelyn Keyes in Montecito a few years ago, we talked not only of her role in the film classic Gone With the Wind, but her famous marriages and love affairs.

But when I sought a new conversation recently, Keyes, 91, was ill. Then, last week, I learned that she had died of cancer at the luxury retirement home where she lived.

I’d been reading Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister, her 1977 tell-all memoir (and there was plenty to tell). If talent could be absorbed via passionate romances, Keyes, a fine actress, might also have become the greatest director-producer-writer in the history of Hollywood.

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Keyes was married to directors Charles Vidor and John Huston, unsuccessfully hustled by legendary Columbia studio mogul Harry Cohn, had a three-year love affair with bombastic showman producer Michael Todd, and a romance with Kirk Douglas, and wed irascible bandleader-author Artie Shaw.

Keyes put up with one heck of a lot from some of the strong-willed, arrogant men she was attracted to. She arrived in Hollywood as an 18-year-old from a deprived childhood in Georgia. In her book, she described how actor Anthony Quinn was immediately attracted and likewise. Sparks flew. But “God himself” director Cecil B. DeMille, who had signed her, called Keyes in. “Stay away from that half-breed,” he ordered. She obediently did.

DeMille also demanded, “That Southern accent must be eliminated at once.” He signed her at $50 a week. Producer David Selznick, working to cast Gone with the Wind, considered her for the Scarlett role. He “chased me once around his office, in a rather obligatory fashion, as if his heart wasn’t in it,” she wrote. “(Perhaps the new drug, Benzedrine, that he was swallowing like popcorn, affected his performance.)

“I met Alfred Hitchcock there too, freshly arrived in America to film Rebecca. (Laurence Olivier too, who had arrived with a companion destined to make history herself.) Hitchcock said to me, in that slow English voice, ‘I have one pa-ht left to cah-st, the vil . . . age i . . . di . . . ot. Wou . . . ld you li . . . ke to play it?’” Keyes reaction: “Ha ha.”

“On January 2, 1939, I was told the GWTW role of Scarlett’s sister, Suellen, was mine, depending on who played Scarlett.” Later that month, Olivier’s companion, none other than Vivien Leigh, was signed for the Scarlett part, ending a long search. “I was in,” rejoiced Keyes. Then she had to relearn her Southern accent. She was 22.

“For a good six months I would be traipsing to some GWTW set, going to balls, picking cotton, sobbing when Scarlett took my fiancé for herself, working with all three directors who made the film, first with George Cukor, replaced by Victor Fleming, and when Fleming suffered a nervous breakdown, with Sam Wood, who took over.”

In one scene Scarlett had to slap Suellen because she complained. “And she didn’t pull her punches. My cheek wore the imprint of Vivien’s fingers for the rest of the afternoon.”

No sooner had the film classic wrapped up than DeMille dropped her. But Keyes went on to appear in 38 more films, many of them of the B variety. Ann Rutherford, the second Scarlett sister, is also alive. Vivien Leigh died in 1967. Fleming broke into movies as a stunt man and driver with Flying A studios in Santa Barbara in 1912. When Selznick offered Fleming a percentage of the profits rather than a salary for directing GWTW, he famously replied, "Don't be a damn fool, David. This picture is going to be one of the biggest white elephants of all time.” Fleming took over directing from George Cukor but after ten weeks under producer Selznick's micro-managing supervision, Fleming pretended to have a nervous breakdown. Sam Wood took over while he "recovered" and then they co-directed. Six directors in all worked on this monumental production, and Fleming received sole billing only because his contract required it.

Almost Gone: It took a quirk of fate and a lucky visit for the novel on which the movie was based, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, to see the light of day and go on to sell over 28 million copies.

Mitchell, born in Atlanta, began writing a weekly column for the Atlanta Journal, one of the paper’s first female columnists. Her first marriage ended when she discovered that he was a bootlegger.

During the 1920s she wrote dozens of articles and interviews and profiles of Civil War generals. Bedridden after breaking an ankle, she began reading historical books her second husband brought home from the public library. After she’d read them all, he suggested, using her nickname, “Peggy, if you want another book, why don’t you write your own?”

So she typed away on her old Remington, calling her heroine “Pansy O’Hara.” Tara was “Fontenoy Hall.” Writing for her own amusement, she wrote the last chapter first and then skipped around. Her husband proofread.

With her ankle healed, she lost interest in the project in 1929. According to lore, she modeled the Rhett Butler character after her first husband, whose last words to her supposedly were, “My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

In 1935, MacMillan publisher Harold Latham was scouring the South for promising writers and Mitchell agreed to show him around. When he asked if she’d ever written anything, she didn’t mention her unpublished novel. Later, a friend cracked, “Imagine anyone as silly as Peggy writing a book.” Irked, Mitchell went home, found the yellowed envelopes holding the disjointed story and gave them to Latham as he was about to leave town.

Then, arriving home, she wired him, "Have changed my mind. Send manuscript back.” But he’d already read enough to know it would be a blockbuster. Ten years after the movie burst onto the screens, Mitchell was killed by a speeding off-duty taxi driver in 1949, the same year Fleming died.

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