Frankly, It's Not Worth a Damn

By R.Z. Sheppard

Gone With the Wind, book and movie, may be as close to a perpetual-motion machine as the entertainment business is likely to get. Margaret Mitchell's 1936 best seller and David O. Selznick's Technicolor extravaganza have sustained each other for more than 50 years. Readers beget viewers, and countless moviegoers have been seduced at the bookstore. All this adds up to 28 million copies sold and still counting. The 3 3/4-hour movie, owned by Ted Turner since he bought the MGM film library in 1985, has become the eternal flame of popular culture. It is a safe bet that somewhere in the world, day and night, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara flicker across a screen.

It is no mystery. The newspaper feature writer from Atlanta had an energetic style and a story that mated the War Between the States with the War Between the Sexes. It was a hard act to follow, even for Mitchell, who died in 1949 after she was struck by a car on Peachtree Street. She had steadfastly refused to write a sequel, preferring the icy finality of Rhett's, "My dear, I don't give a damn" (Gable threw in the "Frankly"). Yet Scarlett's final aria, "Tomorrow is another day," left the door open.

Where it has remained on rusting hinges until last week. Scarlett (Warner Books; 823 pages; $24.95), the carefully prepared, shrewdly promoted novel by Alexandra Ripley, is finally out in the U.S. and 40 other countries. Warner Books paid $4.9 million for the American rights and has backed up its bet with print orders totaling nearly 1 million copies. The William Morris Agency, representing Ripley and the Margaret Mitchell estate, sold the foreign rights for $5 million more. William Morris' Robert Gottlieb believes film rights could sell in the "high seven figures." Scarlett is the first published sequel to Gone With the Wind, though it is not the first one written. Fifteen years ago, Leigh's biographer Anne Edwards wrote Tara: The Continuation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. It was to be the basis for a joint film venture by Universal Pictures and MGM. When the deal soured, Edwards was left with an unpublishable manuscript, since its copyright was linked to the release of the film.

Here is a publishing phenomenon that bears watching: the book conceived, produced and marketed like a theatrical property. The deal came first, the writer came second, and then the publicity machine passed them all. The project was draped in a gauze of secrecy that, now removed, reveals no great surprise. The book is a tease. Rhett and Scarlett remain rascals and opportunists. He continues to profit from the defeat of the Confederacy; she shrewdly expands her Atlanta business interests and plots her slippery husband's recapture. For those who were on Mars last week, the most famous bickerers in literature since Petruchio and Katharina get back together again. Although her contract with Mitchell's estate provides for a sequel to the sequel, Ripley says she will not write it. But tomorrow is another day.

Once again publicity foreplay is more exciting than what goes on between the covers. The managed anticipation that preceded Scarlett's publication was enlivened by the intricacies of copyright law and the persistent, though unconfirmed, rumor that Sidney Sheldon had been a candidate before the Mitchell estate settled on Ripley, 57, a native of Charleston, S.C., and author of three solid historical romances. There was also the confirmed rumor that Ripley threatened to quit when told by her editor that the first draft of Scarlett was not commercial enough. Finally, there was the author's disarming candor. "Margaret Mitchell is a better writer," Ripley said. "But she's dead."

Despite the helping hand of Jeanne Bernkopf, one of Manhattan's most experienced free-lance editors, Scarlett still needs a story stronger than girl chases boy. The excessive number of extended and inconclusive family gatherings recalls Mitchell's comment in Gone With the Wind: "When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel 20 miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month." Scarlett could also use a dose of Joyce Carol Oates' gothic intensity.

It takes the reader only a few pages to realize that Ripley has had to / forfeit the novelist's right to create her own characters. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara sprang from everything Mitchell knew and felt about a time that was still fresh in her region's memory. Ripley's self-imposed handicap shows in the dialogue. Mitchell gave her sardonic hero the best lines, hard- bitten and vivid in the Raymond Chandler style. "I've seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol," he says to Scarlett. "They evoke no ardor in the male breast." Ripley's Rhett is frequently wordy and inelegant: "You're dead weight -- unlettered, uncivilized, Catholic, and an exile from everything decent in Atlanta. You could blow up in my face any minute."

More fireworks would be welcome. Gone With the Wind played against the most important event in American history, the war that swept away the feudal South and laid the foundations for the modern nation-state. Scarlett begins in 1873, during the late Reconstruction. It is not a romantic period. The first half of the novel finds America's original Material Girl, now 30, shopping and socializing in Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston, where she bumps into Rhett Butler, a wealthy scalawag. She still wants what she cannot have: him. He still plays the can't-live-with-'em, can't-live-without-'em game. Following a sailing mishap, they make impetuous love on a beach. He lowers his mizzen and rejects her once again. She soon discovers she is pregnant and goes to Ireland.

Why? Scarlett wants to get in touch with her Irish roots, and Ripley wants to get her away from the freed slaves and budding Klansmen of the Reconstruction South. Pushing a complex reality under the Old Sod solves the problem of having to create substantial roles for black characters. When hired to write the book, Ripley insisted on a contemporary treatment of race, specifically the avoidance of dialect. Her method is to retain speech patterns while providing elocution lessons.

The result is an Eddie Murphy parody: "What this little girl need, I say, is a hot brick in her bed and a mustard plaster on her chest and old Rebekah rubbing out the chill from her bones, with a milk toddy and a talk with Jesus to finish the cure. I done talk with Jesus while I rub, and He bring you back like I knowed He would. Lord, I tell Him, this ain't no real work like Lazarus, this here is just a little girl feeling poorly."

While Scarlett errs on the side of political correctness, Gone With the Wind -- its minstrel-show dialogue intact -- still sells like buttermilk biscuits. The irony does not seem to disturb the Mitchell estate. Ripley, a seasoned professional, apparently understood what she was getting paid so well to do: write the book that was doomed from conception to be endlessly compared to the original. Scarlett is the South's new Lost Cause.