To borrow the breathless prose of a vintage movie poster, it took 50 years and cost nearly $5 million . . . but it looks as if the sequel to ”Gone with the Wind” finally will be published. That`s how much Warner Books agreed last week to pay for the rights to a second epic installment of Margaret Mitchell`s 1936 Civil War romance.
The untitled sequel to ”Gone with the Wind” (let`s refer to it as
”GWTW II”) will be written by Alexandra Ripley, a Virginia novelist who attended Vassar College on a scholarship from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Ripley, 54, was chosen from among a dozen applicants by Mitchell`s heirs, partly on the evidence of ”Charleston” and the three other historical sagas she has written since 1981.
Executives at Warner Books made their winning bid of $4.94 million after getting a look at only two chapters, or 40 pages, of the sequel. An unspecified share of the proceeds will go to the Mitchell estate.
Despite its blockbuster price, ”GWTW II” was not quite a match for
”Whirlwind,” the James Clavell colossus that brought an even $5 million. Still, the cost of ”GWTW II” accelerates considerably if you include the amount paid to novelist Anne Edwards for a sequel commissioned more than a decade ago but never published.
After Monday`s auction, there was nothing but jubilation at the offices of Warner Books, where publisher Laurence J. Kirshbaum joked that he`d bought the rights to the sequel because he ”wanted to be the first to know what happens to Rhett and Scarlett.
”I can tell you how it begins,” Kirschbaum said: ”Rhett makes Scarlett a promise, then immediately reneges on it. She gets furious, and they`re fighting their private civil war all over again. . . . By the time the curtain came down on Chapter 2, I was hooked.”
That wasn`t the reaction from a number of rival publishers. According to the head of one publishing house, he and ”a lot of other publishers were turned off by the moral implications” of a sequel to Mitchell`s classic, though money implications surely must have figured into that equation.
By one calculation, Warner will have to sell 250,000 hardcover copies and 33 million paperbacks before realizing a profit. Mitchell`s original has sold only 25 million copies.
In either case, the publisher said he was not exactly blown away by the opening chapters of Ripley`s manuscript. ”It was clever, it was fun, the author had done her homework,” he said. ”But the sample chapters lacked texture, any sense of time or place. All they had was Scarlett.”
Mitchell herself had adamantly refused to write a sequel herself, insisting that her novel had a ”natural and proper ending.” An angry Rhett walks out on the brazen but resourceful Scarlett, whose last words are:
”Tomorrow, I`ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”
For ardent fans of the novel and film, not to mention hungry publishers, producers and agents, it seemed as if ”tomorrow” would never come. Mitchell was struck and killed by a taxi in 1949, but her heirs waited until 1976 before agreeing it was time for Rhett and Scarlett to make a comeback. At that point, Edwards was hired by film producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to write the book, with publication contingent on making the movie.
But when the movie fell through, so did Edwards` sequel, ”Tara: The Continuation of Gone with the Wind.”
Ripley figures that writing the additional 1,000 or so pages of ”GWTW II” will take 18 months. After the auction, she wasn`t taking calls from reporters. But in an interview in the current issue of Life magazine, she indicated that the sequel would be steamier than the original, with more than an occasional ”damn” or ”fiddledeedee” and possibly a scene or two with Scarlett and Rhett rolling in the cotton. But no graphic sex, she promised, and no mo` dat minstrel dialect that was spoken by black characters in Mitchell`s novel.
So far Ripley`s name is a household word only in New York publishing houses. But ”this unquestionably will be the biggest publishing event of 1990,” Kirshbaum said, ”and Alexandra Ripley will be right up there with with Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz and Andrew Greeley.”
