Scarlett’s Southern seducation

THE familiar film theme music swirled on the night air like barbecue smoke. As the tune worked its magic, hairs bristled on backs of necks. Hands with handkerchiefs dabbed at moist eyes. Fists punched the air. Gone With The Wind was being shown again in the state of Georgia.

SEDUCTION Georgia is just as seductive as Gone with the Wind SEDUCTION: Georgia is just as seductive as Gone with the Wind

Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler were not being played by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, however, but by animated cartoon cows, projected against the 1,700-foot granite face of Stone Mountain Park. Not everyone was impressed. “There are some things that you don’t make jokes about,” snorted the aggressively perfumed elderly lady beside me.

Stone Mountain lies in the rural backyard of Georgia’s capital city of Atlanta, where the real Gone With The Wind premiered on December 15, 1939. Generations have followed the story of Scarlett to the end of the Civil War and the defeat of the slave-owning Confederacy. Atlanta, destroyed by the advancing Union Army, is where Scarlett claws at the scorched earth, famously vowing: “As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again.”

Rhett’s closing line to Scarlett – “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” – was voted America’s greatest movie quote of all time.

Winner of 10 Academy Awards, Gone With the Wind is arguably the first true Hollywood blockbuster. Margaret Mitchell, born in Atlanta, wrote the novel on which the film is based. Never mind that it was shot in California; across Georgia, in this its 70th anniversary year, it is celebrated with pride – and reverence.

Riding the Gone With The Wind tour bus through Jonesboro, 15 miles south of Atlanta, the swirling music struck up once more. “Hi y’all,” drawled a recorded female voice. “I’d like to welcome you to Clayton County, the official home of Gone With The Wind.” Jonesboro, we learned, is the railway town that inspired the novel. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s family, Mitchell’s ancestors came as migrants from Ireland. By 1861, her great grandfather Philip Fitzgerald owned 2,300 acres of Clayton County farmland – the plantation immortalised as “Tara”.

Here, in the Battle of Jonesboro, the Union Army cut off supplies to Atlanta and forced the surrender of the city. New for the anniversary year, the film-themed tour bus paused at Jonesboro’s cemetery, where soldiers’ gravestones poignantly form the shape of the Confederate flag. By clapboard houses, on the gloriously named Rhett Butler Drive, we stopped for snapshots.

In the Road To Tara Museum, the film ran continuously alongside a mighty collection of Gone With The Wind memorabilia. A prized exhibit is the magnificent scale model of the Tara mansion, with the finger-sized figures of Scarlett and Rhett posed beneath its white columns.

In Atlanta itself, I explored the house that was the home of Margaret Nunnerly Mitchell from 1925 to 1932. By the leaded glass window, the vivacious Twenties “flapper” wove her family heritage into a literary phenomenon.

The adjoining Gone With The Wind Museum tracks the story its publication in 1936 to the premier of the film, at the nearby, long-demolished Loew’s Grand Theatre. Newsreels bellowed the story of the night that Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable came to town. I stayed in the Renaissance-style splendour of the nearby Georgian Terrace Hotel and stood in the same Grand Ballroom where Hollywood A-listers partied until dawn. Mitchell shared the triumph. Sadly, on August 11, 1949, she was struck by a car, just three blocks from her home. She died five days later.

Civil War Atlanta is long since gone. In its place soars the gleaming high-rise city of 520,000 people that hosted the 1996 Olympic Games. To experience the small-town rural Georgia of Scarlett’s time, I rode south. In Madison, I strolled a living treasure trove of classical-columned, white antebellum buildings. A leading citizen was a family friend of the Union Army Commander, General Sherman, so Madison, one of eight towns in Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, remained untorched.

Sherman’s “March to the Sea” culminated at Savannah, on Georgia’s Atlantic Coast. The two-and-a-half square miles of public squares, overhanging oaks and preserved colonial houses forms one of America’s largest and most glorious historic districts. From my room at the early 19th-century River Street Inn, I listened to a busker’s trumpet as the riverboats ambled down the Savannah River. General Sherman was so besotted with Savannah’s beauty that he wrote to President Lincoln to “present” him the city as a gift.

The general didn’t mention the southern food. At Mrs Wilkes Dining Room, on West Jones Street, I had the $16 lunch, sharing a table “family style” with nine strangers. “First, you got the greens and the black-eyed peas,” said one of the regulars, on a guided tour of the serving dishes. “And there’s the squash casserole, the world’s best fried chicken, cornbread pudding, cabbage, sausage, pineapple salad, okra, macaroni cheese, string beans, roast pork, beef stew...”

I skipped dessert, telling the waitress: “I will never be hungry again.”

GETTING THERE:

British Airways (0844 493 0787/www.ba.com) offers return flights from Heathrow to Atlanta from £331.

Georgian Terrace Hotel (dialling from UK: 001 800 651 2316/ www.thegeorgianterrace.com) in Atlanta offers doubles from £90 per night (two sharing), room only.

The River Street Inn (912 234 6400/www.riverstreetinn.com) in Savannah offers doubles from £90 per night (two sharing), room only.

Gone With The Wind bus tours (770 478 4800/www.visitscarlett.com) are available from £15pp.

Explore Georgia: 01444 483767/www.exploregeorgia.org

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