Frankly, It's Not Worth a Damn

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Gone With the Wind, book and movie, may be as close to a perpetual-motion machine as the entertainment business is likely to get. Margaret Mitchell's 1936 best seller and David O. Selznick's Technicolor extravaganza have sustained each other for more than 50 years. Readers beget viewers, and countless moviegoers have been seduced at the bookstore. All this adds up to 28 million copies sold and still counting. The 3 3/4-hour movie, owned by Ted Turner since he bought the MGM film library in 1985, has become the eternal flame of popular culture. It is a safe bet that somewhere in the world, day and night, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara flicker across a screen.

It is no mystery. The newspaper feature writer from Atlanta had an energetic style and a story that mated the War Between the States with the War Between the Sexes. It was a hard act to follow, even for Mitchell, who died in 1949 after she was struck by a car on Peachtree Street. She had steadfastly refused to write a sequel, preferring the icy finality of Rhett's, "My dear, I don't give a damn" (Gable threw in the "Frankly"). Yet Scarlett's final aria, "Tomorrow is another day," left the door open.

Where it has remained on rusting hinges until last week. Scarlett (Warner Books; 823 pages; $24.95), the carefully prepared, shrewdly promoted novel by Alexandra Ripley, is finally out in the U.S. and 40 other countries. Warner Books paid $4.9 million for the American rights and has backed up its bet with print orders totaling nearly 1 million copies. The William Morris Agency, representing Ripley and the Margaret Mitchell estate, sold the foreign rights for $5 million more. William Morris' Robert Gottlieb believes film rights could sell in the "high seven figures." Scarlett is the first published sequel to Gone With the Wind, though it is not the first one written. Fifteen years ago, Leigh's biographer Anne Edwards wrote Tara: The Continuation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. It was to be the basis for a joint film venture by Universal Pictures and MGM. When the deal soured, Edwards was left with an unpublishable manuscript, since its copyright was linked to the release of the film.

Here is a publishing phenomenon that bears watching: the book conceived, produced and marketed like a theatrical property. The deal came first, the writer came second, and then the publicity machine passed them all. The project was draped in a gauze of secrecy that, now removed, reveals no great surprise. The book is a tease. Rhett and Scarlett remain rascals and opportunists. He continues to profit from the defeat of the Confederacy; she shrewdly expands her Atlanta business interests and plots her slippery husband's recapture. For those who were on Mars last week, the most famous bickerers in literature since Petruchio and Katharina get back together again. Although her contract with Mitchell's estate provides for a sequel to the sequel, Ripley says she will not write it. But tomorrow is another day.