Gossip Friday: On the set of Gone with the Wind

From May 1939:

We said we didn’t believe it.

“Tell us,” we said, “that Greta Garbo is hunting autographs; that Shirley Temple has been sent to reform school; that Jimmy Cagney is baking a cake. Tell us anything. But don’t tell us ‘Gone with the Wind’ is actually shooting!”

“Come over and see for yourself,” said the Selznick-International man.

How could we resist making “The Wind”, as Hollywood knows it, our first stop on the monthly set circuit? After these months of waiting and waiting–false hopes, phony Scarletts, reluctant Rhetts and so forth–a mere peep at the champion never-never movie in actual production is like a preview of the millennium.

We won’t go into the strung-out saga of what double-trouble Selznick has had getting “The Wind” blowing. Or the countless hopefuls who have paraded past the test camera, or the ballyhooed search for Scarlett which ended quite unspectactularly one day when a green-eyed English girl named Vivien Leigh on a vacation to Hollywood visited Selznick studio and heard a big man clap his curly head, point to her and say, “Good Heavens–there’s Scarlett!”

That’s all history–and so, of course, is “Gone with the Wind,” which is the polite way of saying that you ought to know all there is to know about Civil War classic by now.

What we are surprised to learn, as we go marching through Georgia to Selznick’s, is that for months and months they’ve been shooting parts of this picture, without, of course, the stars. For instance, the spectacular burning of Atlanta, fiery and realistic in Technicolor, is all salted away in film.

The scene we take in today, however, is a Confederate ball and bazaar; the one, you’ll remember, where Scarlett shocks all of Atlanta by jitterbugging in her widow’s weeds with that handsome Charleston scamp, “Rhett” Gable.

First of all, a report on Vivien Leigh. Hollywood already has agreed she’s the happiest choice any one could have made. Even swamp angels from deepest Dixie put their okay on her accent. Vivien is petite, with dark ringleted hair and genuine, 18-karat green eyes. We have looked right in ’em and we know. She has a mischevious, slightly petulant mouth and every movement of her trim body says sexily, “Watch out.” Yessir, we are on Vivien’s side–definitely.

Gable looks like a real Big-Man-From-the-South. In a black frock coat, starched bosom and ruffles, he makes a menacing, impressive Rhett, and he’s a little pleased about it, too, we think. He pratices a waltz in one corner.

“If I had known,” says Gable, after a few turns, “I’d have to dance the first thing in this picture, I would have seen my lawyer. After ‘Idiot’s Delight’ I see where I’m going to be typed.”

We have a feeling that everybody is trying too hard to make “Gone with the Wind” a super-colossal epic. One scene we watch takes twenty-seven times until Olivia De Havilland, who has been doing most of the blowing up, is in tears.