This was the first significant victory for Mary Rose Taylor, the chairman of the Margaret Mitchell House, Inc., Foundation, who has championed the efforts to save the house. Taylor looks like a typical Buckhead Society matron: a former University of North Carolina homecoming queen, she is tall, blond, carefully coifed and married to a successful real-estate developer. But she considers herself a product of the sixties and the civil-rights movement. A former television journalist, she worked for “60 Minutes” in the late sixties, was once married to the talk-show host Charlie Rose, and has been an anchorwoman for one of Atlanta’s main television stations. She played an important role in Mayor Campbell’s 1994 election campaign. “I see the Mitchell House and the debate surrounding it as a symbol of Atlanta’s inability to deal with its past,” she says. “I want to use the past to stimulate greater candor about racial relations, not to glorify the antebellum South.”
Taylor has never read Gone with the Wind before moving to Atlanta in 1980, and hadn’t seen the movie since her first date, at the age of sixteen in 1961. She didn’t learn about the existence of the house until 1987 and was surprised to discover that there was no monument commemorating Mitchell. After all, the book has sold some thirty, million copies, and the movie has been seen by hundreds of millions.
Along with Coca-Cola, Gone with the Wind has been Atlanta’s most successful export product and is potentially one of its biggest tourist attractions. (Gung-ho tourists have been known to visit Oakland Cemetery in search of the grave of Scarlett O’Hara.)
Mitchell’s apartment house on Peachtree and Tenth Street dates back to 1899, Taylor tells me. Mitchell moved into an apartment on the ground floor in 1925 (she was a writer for the Atlanta Journal at the time), and she wrote most of Gone with the Wind there, before moving out in 1932. “It was an elegant nineteen-century home,” Taylor says. “This area was still very attractive and fashionable when Margaret lived here. She called it the Dump, but that was part of her off-the-cuff humor. She referred to her office as the Black Hole of Calcutta and to the cafe when she ate lunch as the Roachery.” The house became a hippie hangout in the sixties, and in 1979 it was abandoned. In her effort to save it, Taylor formed a not-for-profit organization in 1990. “Andy Young advised me to form a board that was fifty per cent African-American and sixty percent female.” Taylor says, “But I think I probably would have done that anyway.”