‘Gone’ Girl: When ‘Scarlett’ Dared to Continue the Story of ‘Gone With the Wind’

Roughly 300 people were lined up outside B. Dalton Bookstore in Atlanta, Georgia, anxiously waiting for the store to open at midnight. Once inside, they were greeted by employees wearing costumes that harkened to the antebellum South, serving pecan tarts and mint julep punch. The theatrics were secondary to the real attraction: Customers made a beeline for the store’s display of Scarlett, an 823-page tome that was expected to be the publishing sensation of the fall, if not the decade.

“I just have to see what happens to Scarlett,” one reader exclaimed, carrying the $24.95 novel off to the register.

Scarlett was Scarlett O’Hara, the heroine of one of the most popular—and controversial—works of the 1930s. Gone With the Wind was an epic romance set against the backdrop of the Civil War. The 1936 book by Margaret Mitchell earned a Pulitzer Prize; the 1939 film version won multiple Academy Awards. Mitchell had sworn off writing any sequels, yet here it was: the continuing adventures of Scarlett and beau Rhett Butler, making a belated arrival in 1991.

Everyone involved in Scarlett knew the risks—a follow-up to Gone With the Wind was inevitably going to be harshly critiqued. But the heirs to the Mitchell estate had good reason for attempting it. So did Alexandra Ripley, the author who those same estate handlers had handpicked to imagine what life would be like for Scarlett and her suitors.

Judging from the line outside B. Dalton, the risky bet was about to pay off. But not everyone gambling on a Gone With the Wind sequel would have a happy ending. As one reader put it, “Tomorrow is here, and it’s just plain awful.”

1. Wind Resistance
2. The Search for Scarlett

Wind Resistance

Margaret Mitchell owed her success to an ankle injury. The 25-year-old reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine was recuperating when she began thinking about a novel set in Georgia during Reconstruction. The story of plucky Scarlett O’Hara and her search for love amid the tumult of the period occupied the next decade of her life before she found a home for the finished manuscript that came in at a brick-like 1037 pages. Published in 1936, Gone With the Wind went on to sell 7 million copies by the time the film version was released in 1939.

All of it was enough for Mitchell, who never wrote another book and wasn’t interested in a continuation of the story, a position she maintained until her death in 1949. But the promise of a financial windfall inevitably stirred conversation within the Mitchell estate. In the late 1970s, her heirs and MGM—which had released the 1939 film adaptation and was weighing a sequel—commissioned a second novel inelegantly titled Tara: The Continuation of Gone With the Wind from author Anne Edwards.

The estate, however, was said to be lukewarm to the manuscript, which was also caught up in an ensuing legal quagmire between the Mitchells and MGM. (It wasn’t until 1984 that a judge ruled the Mitchell family retained screen rights.)

By this point, the Mitchells felt it was best to abandon the Edwards novel and start fresh. And while there was certainly a monetary incentive to produce a sequel, they also weighed the reality that in 2011, the copyright to Mitchell’s original work was due to expire. The estate could watch unauthorized works get produced or act now and have some measure of control. They chose the latter.

They also chose Alexandra Ripley. The novelist had written several historical accounts of the South, making her a natural choice to walk in Mitchell’s footsteps. The idea of resurrecting such iconic characters, which seemed daunting, didn’t appear to faze Ripley, who first read the book when she was 12.

“There are two reasons why I’m doing this book,” she said. “I can’t resist it, and as soon as this is done, I will be able to write anything I want to.”

Initially, the Mitchell estate asked her to write an outline for a $25,000 fee. When they were satisfied with that, Ripley wrote two chapters. The material was used in 1988 to land a publisher, Warner Books, which paid a $4.94 million advance for publication rights. Ripley received 15 percent of that sum, along with a share of any profits that followed.

The dealmaking was relatively simple; the actual writing was not. Ripley labored on a draft that was met with a deluge of notes and suggested revisions from editors. Irritated by the feedback, the author effectively went on a four-month work strike.

“They wanted me to send Scarlett and Rhett out to California!” Ripley bemoaned. “They said that Gone With the Wind was irrelevant to the sequel! And while they didn’t come out and say it needed more sex, when they got to the sex scene on the beach, they wrote, ‘At last! At last! This is what we need!’ Their critique was screamingly funny ... I was murderously angry.”

Ultimately, Warner enlisted a new editor, Jeanne Bernkopf, who seemed better suited to Ripley’s temperament, and work resumed.

From Ripley’s point of view, Scarlett was one-half a Mitchell pastiche and one-half a Ripley original. (To ensure some style continuity, Ripley re-read Wind six times and copied some passages by hand to get a feel for Mitchell’s approach.) The first part of the book sees Scarlett O’Hara traversing the South and once more pondering a future with on-again, off-again love Rhett Butler. But in the second half, Ripley spirits Scarlett off to Ireland to smuggle guns and raise a daughter—a plot more in line with the author’s own interests, even if Scarlett retained her folksy rhetoric. “(My stars,” Scarlett remarks, “this country’s positively peppered with castles.”)

Scarlett was originally intended for publication in 1990, but editorial delays bumped it to the following year: Warner was forced to cancel a planned debut at the American Booksellers Association in Las Vegas, where they had planned to recreate Tara along the Vegas Strip. The shift prompted some publishing industry insiders to suspect the book was a dog; others felt that offering up a belated sequel to such a well-known work was an exercise in futility.

The controversy only fueled anticipation for Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, which finally arrived in bookstores in September 1991. The response, however, was mixed: Readers looking to be swept away and who were disinterested in taking too critical a view were generally pleased. But, reviewers found Ripley’s work to be a largely uninteresting affair.

“During the course of a stunningly uneventful 823-page holding action, Ms. Ripley dares to turn the swashbuckling Rhett Butler into a mama’s boy and Scarlett O’Hara into a fatuous socialite with a near-pathological love of parties and shopping,” New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote. “And the once-dignified Ashley Wilkes has emitted ‘the cry of a soul in torment, filled with loneliness and fear’ by page 7. The reader is as apt to be ‘swept by a tide of anger and outrage’ as Ms. Ripley’s heroine often is herself.”

Critics also found fault in the characterization of Scarlett, once an obstinate and feckless character who had seemingly become a docile and fretful figure. “This Scarlett wants to be happy, not to run lumber mills or stores,” wrote Russell Miller of The Los Angeles Times. “She wants others to be happy, as well—‘their own way.’ Margaret Mitchell’s heroine hobbled home to Tara, swearing she’d never be hungry again. Ripley’s smuggles guns to Galway, then shops till she drops.”

Of particular interest to observers was how Ripley would handle the racial text of the work. Both the original book and film took a casual, largely uncritical view of the contentious Reconstruction that marked the South, though the film eliminated some of the book’s more offensive remarks, including derogatory racial slurs.

Ripley’s solution was inelegant. The character of Mammy, which earned Hattie McDaniel an Oscar during a segregated ceremony in 1939, dies early in the book. “I do sort of avoid any Black-white interaction,” Ripley said. “I didn’t see that there was any need to express that. It had nothing to do with the story I was telling.”

Such omissions were largely brushed aside. Scarlett was almost predestined to be a success, and it met expectations: 1.25 million copies were printed in 18 languages and in 40 countries. It remained the top-selling book for 16 weeks. By 1996, 2.2 million copies were sold in hardcover.

As with Mitchell’s book, there was a huge appetite for an adaptation. In the end, Hungarian producer Robert Halmi (Lonesome Dove) won the film rights for $9 million. The names of actors like soap star Susan Lucci and Tom Selleck were bandied about for the lead roles.

To the surprise of some, Halmi wasn’t overly interested in remaining faithful to the Ripley novel.

“I didn’t buy the novel,” he said. “I bought the name Scarlett.”

The Search for Scarlett

To stir up anticipation for the 1939 film, producer David O. Selznick and MGM played up their search for the perfect actress to portray Scarlett O’Hara. The press was eager to go along, reporting on the studio’s progress. Ultimately, the role went to British actress Vivien Leigh.

Halmi was happy to pay homage. After acquiring the screen rights to Scarlett, he launched an international hunt for the “new” Scarlett. In 1992, he even produced a syndicated television special, The Search for Scarlett, that featured numerous hopefuls vying for the part. (Halmi drew the ire of stations when the show ended without any of them being selected; Halmi insisted he simply hadn’t found the right performer yet.)

Ultimately, the role went to Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, a British actress best known for the steamy potboiler Scandal. She was also the wife of the late actor Val Kilmer (Tombstone, Top Gun).

“It’s definitely daunting,” Whalley-Kilmer said. “We had some baggage that comes with this one, and some big shoes to fill. But, I think we all reached the same conclusion, that at a certain point, you just have to leap in and do it. Otherwise, you would never leave your house.”

Equally daunting was finding Rhett Butler. Halmi was fortunate in that actor Timothy Dalton was no stranger to fielding criticism for taking on well-established roles. He had replaced Roger Moore as James Bond and starred in two of the franchise’s films, 1987’s The Living Daylights and 1989’s License to Kill. Stepping in for Clark Gable was almost tame in comparison.

The outspoken Dalton seemed to have little reverence for the source material. “I never saw this movie before four years ago, and what shocked me about it is what an extraordinary soap opera it is,” Dalton said of the original film during a press conference. “Here was this bit of legend and myth in cinema history … and it was like the original and greatest [primetime television dramas] Dallas and Dynasty. I mean, it is.”

Nor was Dalton particularly enamored with Scarlett O’Hara. “And the other thing, I suppose, that honestly struck me is how this man could possibly cope with this [expletive]. I mean, Scarlett’s a monster. I mean, she is.” (The press conference went on for a bit longer before a CBS publicist stepped in and asked for a final question that would let the event “end on an up note.”)

To the surprise of some, Dalton and Whalley-Kilmer hadn’t been hired for a feature film. Scarlett was being adapted as a made-for-television miniseries, for which CBS had paid Halmi $20 million.

“Television is a perfect place and the best place for the story, and I will have much more audience, about 100 times more audience, than the feature would ever give me,” Halmi said.

Perhaps Halmi had heard of the tortuous process involved in adapting the original, in which Selznick had reportedly locked the film’s writers in a room in an effort to trim down the opus into a manageable length. Or maybe Halmi wanted to avoid the scrutiny that would accompany a major theatrical release, dismissing it as too big a target to paint on the project.

In either case, the Scarlett miniseries wasn’t about to offer significant fidelity to the book. CBS had conducted market research to get a better idea of what plot elements were important to viewers. Ultimately, a murder trial was added, along with several scenes that were not in the Ripley version.

Scarlett was a four-night, eight-hour affair that CBS hoped would catapult it out of the ratings doldrums. The miniseries aired in November 1994 and was a modest success but fell far short of the blockbuster television event the network was banking on. It earned an average 18.5 rating, with 26 million viewers tuning in for the installments. That was enough to beat an episode of NBC’s smash ER one evening but not enough to trump two episodes of Seinfeld on another night.

CBS had promised advertisers a 24 rating. When that didn’t materialize, the network had to make good on its vow by offering free commercial space, a penalty that cost the network $3 million to $5 million. (It’s possible the channel was hampered by a legal technicality: They couldn’t use the Gone With the Wind title to promote the TV sequel because mogul Ted Turner owned its advertising rights.)

Reviews were also modest at best. “Every now and then Rhett refers to Scarlett as ‘my dear,’ and there are innumerable variations on Scarlett's famous exit line, ‘Tomorrow is another day,’” wrote Washington Post critic Tom Shales. “All these little touches in the William Hanley script are designed to convince the audience that yes, it really is looking at Scarlett and Rhett. But it’s an illusion within an illusion. Gone With the Wind was a lament for a lost culture. Scarlett is mainly, if unintentionally, a lament for the lost culture of Hollywood, for the fact that no indeed, they don't make ’em like they used to. Of course, we knew that already.”

Still, the Scarlett book and miniseries were both successful enough to justify more. Like Mitchell before her, Ripley had no interest in writing a follow-up, preferring to return to her original work. Instead, the Mitchell estate recruited writer Emma Tennant, who had written a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Her manuscript for Tara, delivered to St. Martins Press in 1996, fell short of expectations—it was deemed “too British”—and was never released.

It would over a decade before a new book in the franchise appeared. (Officially, anyway: The Wind Done Gone, a 2001 unauthorized parody by Alice Randall, retold the events of the original from an enslaved person’s point of view.) Rhett Butler’s People, a 2007 novel by Donald McCaig, acts as a revisiting of the original book from the perspective of the title character, though it ignores the continuity established in Scarlett. McCaig returned to the world once more with Ruth’s Journey, a 2014 book focused on Mammy.

Some readers enjoyed the titles as they had enjoyed Scarlett; others prefer Gone With the Wind be left alone. Even Alexandra Ripley was duly aware of the seemingly thankless task that anyone who dared to follow in Mitchell’s footsteps faced. She once offered a brutal—if accurate—summation of picking up where the famous author once left off.

“Yes, Margaret Mitchell writes better than I do,” Ripley said. “But she’s dead.”

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