Shut Up, Scarlett!

Everett On the 70th anniversary of Gone With the Wind, Stanley Crouch revisits the controversial film—and recalls the time his grandmother shouted down Vivien Leigh in the theater.

As those interested in our popular culture should know, this is the 70th anniversary of the release of the 1939 Gone With the Wind, which the estimable Molly Haskell so recently praised in her book, Frankly, My Dear. Good for Haskell, but I always realize that I have never liked Gone With the Wind and have liked it less and less over the years because there is no evidence to support what critic Richard Schickel correctly called “the South's yokel notion that it once supported a new age of chivalry and grace.”

Yet I have found that there are unexpected others who do adore the film. One of them included a black college student of mine named Hubert. On a privileged California campus during the black studies heyday of pretentious hostility toward white people, Hubert nearly stunned me in the early 1970s by unabashedly loving the film because Clark Gable was “sharp as a motherf—.” Obsessively having seen the film a number of times, Hubert had counted every one of Gable’s costume changes and could run each of them down. That’s actual Americana for you, always stronger than race politics.

When Vivien Leigh slapped Butterfly McQueen for being what Rhett Butler called “a simple darkie,” the white audience roared with laughter. But Day-Day was appalled.

My mother also liked GWTW because she thought that Gable was “almost as handsome as Duke Ellington.” However, grandmother, whose married name was Matilda Ford but was nicknamed Day-Day, did not have a taste for the most famous cinematic lie about supposedly refined rednecks since 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. As was her patented way, Day-Day made her distaste for the movie shockingly and audibly clear one afternoon among well-to-do white folks.

In 1954, there was a re-release of the first blockbuster, and it was being shown at the fancy Carthay Circle Theater in West Los Angeles. My mother was very excited about taking her mama, my baby sister, and me out to a movie house much better than the Lincoln Theater on Central Avenue, which was near our home in what is now known as South Central Los Angeles. That section of town was just the “East Side” then, and the Lincoln, which had already seen its glory days of Negro jazz bands, comedians, jugglers, dancers, and magicians, was run down, as were all of the movie theaters in the working-class black community. None of them showed first-run movies.

On Saturdays at the Lincoln, popcorn boxes folded flat were thrown into the air during intermission. Kids hooted, screamed, and shouted as one sat back in worn seats with feet sometimes turned on their shoe edges because the floors were sticky from spilled sodas and whatever else made them sticky. There were advertisements that had been shown so many times that they were crackling, hissing images. Among them were 7-Up advertisements in which we could see Negroes living the way middle-class black people do in television advertisements now. These advertisement black people were quite exotic to all of us because we knew no one anywhere in Los Angeles who lived as 7-Up told us that they did: families traveling together to spacious parks and playing games we did not know in very neat casual clothes but never once eating any barbecue, which usually went with black family outings to the park. Odd. Maybe there was another state where one could find Negroes like those. We didn’t know.

So traveling out to the Carthay Circle Theater in West Los Angeles on San Vincente Boulevard was a big deal. Only first-run movies were shown there, and people dressed up to attend them. The Carthay Circle had been highly regarded since the Spanish-style film palace had opened in 1926 but was to be destroyed and replaced by a bland office building in 1969, nine years after my grandmother died and more than a decade following the afternoon that Day-Day proved herself much more ready for Scarlett O’Hara than either Hattie McDaniel or Butterfly McQueen.