TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100791/1007470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.4 KB | 154 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 72

Frankly, It's Not Worth a Damn


In the sequel to Gone With the Wind, Rhett and Scarlett reunite,
she heads for Ireland, has a baby and leaves the reader wondering
why tomorrow ever came

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.