Some time ago, our daughter asked me if I had any idea why she would associate Orange Crush with every drive-in theater she passes. She no longer goes to drive-ins and she doesn’t even like Orange Crush. I immediately knew the answer, but I marveled that memories could actually imprint themselves on a child at such a young age.
She was about 18 months old when the classic Gone with the Wind film, starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable, was playing at a drive-in in Dallas, Texas. Since my husband and I had never seen the movie, we decided we could put our daughter to sleep in the back seat while we watched the film. After all, she went to bed early each evening. Of course, that night, the child was mesmerized by all the sights and sounds around her.
Eventually, she wanted something to drink and I had brought nothing for her. Her dad went to the concession stand and came back with an Orange Crush in a glass bottle. A whole new experience, she loved sipping through a straw. Finally, she fell asleep and we watched the rest of the movie.
While Gone with the Wind has never ranked among my favorite novels, I have great respect for its Georgia author Margaret Mitchell whose own life, cut short at age 49, was as tragic as that of her characters. A reporter for The Atlanta Journal, she began her thousand-page book while she was recuperating once again from a reoccurring ankle injury.
After Lamb in His Bosom, by Caroline Pafford Miller, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1933, the first novel by a Georgian to win such this honor, Mitchell wrote a letter to the author, cousin to my mother-in-law. In it Mitchell said, “Your book is undoubtedly the greatest book that ever came out of the South about Southern people, and it’s my favorite book.” While the two Georgian authors wrote about the same time period, Miller’s book focuses on the lives of Georgians who did not live on plantations, those who scratched a living from the soil. Their story differs greatly from that of Mitchell’s Tara Plantation.
The success of Lamb had sent Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham in search of more Southern writers; thus, he discovered Mitchell, whose classic took the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. In 1940, the movie, based on this best seller, was released. The film, which premiered at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta December 15, 1939, garnered ten oscars.
In both the book and the movie, my favorite scene is the one in which Scarlett takes down a drape to make herself a new dress. The visual image of such action, plus the dramatic dialogue between the heroine, clad in her “new” gown, and Rhett Butler is memorable.
However, it was the vision Bob Mackie had for comedian Carol Burnett to portray the heroine that really etched the scene in my mind. In 1976, The Carol Burnett Show introduced a skit entitled, “Went with the Wind.”
For this skit, Mackie designed a curtain rod reinforced makeshift dress of green velvet trimmed with heavy gold cord and tassels. When Burnett, decked out in the outfit, descended the opulent staircase, the studio audience roared. But "Starlet’s" punch line even upstaged her garment. When “Rat Butler”, played by Harvey Korman, asked where she found the gown, she, with a straight face, said, “I saw it in the window and just couldn’t resist it.”
In reflecting on the now famous scene, Burnett says, “We (Mackie and Burnett) went into a room and there was that curtain-rod dress. I couldn’t speak. I was laughing so hard I was crying and saying, ‘this is the funniest gag I think I have ever seen in my life’...When I came out in the curtain-rod dress, that was one of the longest laughs we ever got, and that was the genius of Bob Mackie.”
Mackie responds, “I think it’s going to be engraved on my tombstone: I created the curtain-rod dress for Carol Burnett.”
Although I had led a grandchild, who was less than enamored with a school assignment to read Gone with the Wind, to the Internet to search for this skit, I hadn’t thought about the scene in several years. Then, our children gave us the complete DVD set of Carol Burnett shows. Many are as funny and timely now as they were in the 1970s.
Also, I recently learned that Mackie, in 2009 at Burnett’s insistence, donated the infamous green drapery dress with curtain rod to the National Museum of American History, Entertainment History division, of the Smithsonian. It now resides in those stately halls with a rare pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and one of the early Kermit the Frog puppets.
Memory is a funny thing. We never know when one may appear; we’re often unaware of what prompts a memory from seemingly nowhere. And we puzzle why one memory prompts another.
Neither Mitchell nor Miller could recall, from personal experience, the events within their award winning novels. They were 20th century women who researched 19th century facts, listened to the stories of old timers, and drew on their own imaginations to weave their tales of the South.
Burnett and Mackie mixed and matched ideas and depended on the memories of the folks in their audiences, to prompt great fun. Because the audience knew the plot of GWTW, the curtain rod across Burnett’s shoulders resembled the good humor of an inside joke. I cannot think of another fictional scene that has prompted so many memories for me. Perhaps, Tennessee Williams says it best. “Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.”
2013
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