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Two Georgia Counties Feuding Over a Tara Theme Park : ‘Gone With the Wind’ Stirs New Battles

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Times Staff Writer

For a while it appeared that the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Gone With the Wind” next year might turn out to be a little on the dull side, but--hold on!--the folks down in Clayton and Coweta counties are about to provide the fireworks.

A fierce feud is shaping up between the two counties in the rolling red-clay-and-pine country just south of Atlanta over which one should get to build a “Gone With the Wind” theme park.

Promoters in both are drawing up proposals that call for the same central attraction: a replica of Tara that would incorporate the actual movie-set facade of the world’s most famous antebellum Southern plantation.

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But Clayton County boosters say that there can be just one Tara and that placing it in Coweta County would be akin to--well, changing the formula of Coca-Cola.

“Margaret Mitchell, in fact, placed Tara in Clayton County in the book,” asserted Richard Chatham, president-elect of the county Chamber of Commerce. “And, if you remember the film, in the scene after Scarlett O’Hara marries Frank Kennedy to save Tara from the tax collectors, she is shown making out a $300 check to the Clayton County Tax Commission-- not the Coweta County Tax Commission.”

The response to that in Coweta County is: “Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn.” Coweta County promoters believe that Clayton County, which has had the project under consideration for more than a decade, has been dilly-dallying long enough and should produce or get out of the way.

Coweta County has already chosen a site--a long-neglected but still impressive 64-acre private park in Roscoe known as Dunaway Gardens--and is busily lining up potential developers, financial backers and community supporters.

“You just have to see Dunaway Gardens to believe how perfect it would be as Tara,” said Carolyn Busby, president of Dunaway Gardens Restoration Inc., which is spearheading Coweta County’s efforts. “What we’d like to create is a kind of Old South version of Colonial Williamsburg or Old Tucson, with all the beauty and romance of ‘Gone With the Wind’--not a ‘Six Flags Over Tara’ thing.”

Coweta County’s Risk Told

Coweta County may be risking the ire of millions of “Gone With the Wind” fans around the world by tampering with their favorite novel and film.

Author Mitchell, an Atlanta journalist who was in her mid-30s when the book was first published on June 30, 1936, was a stickler for historical and geographical accuracy. And the countless devotees of her work--the one and only novel she ever had published before her untimely death in 1949--uphold her high standards.

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A private study done for the Clayton County Chamber of Chamber found that the authenticity of location ranks high in importance among respondents to a survey who favored a “Gone With the Wind” theme park.

But Coweta County is banking on the willingness of “Gone With the Wind” aficionados to tolerate a measure of geographical inaccuracy for the opportunity, as one Coweta County booster put it, “to finally touch the columns that Scarlett and Rhett touched.”

Historian Adds Authority

Franklin Garrett, Atlanta’s official historian and a frequent arbiter in such matters, is lending his considerable authority and influence to Coweta County’s campaign.

“If Margaret Mitchell were alive, she would argue that Tara was a figment of her imagination and didn’t really exist anywhere,” said Garrett, who knew the author personally and was a pallbearer at her father’s funeral.

Predictably, Garrett’s comments do not sit well with folks in Clayton County. “Tara may have been a figment of her imagination,” Chatham countered, “but she placed it in Clayton County--and that’s where it should be.”

Another Clayton County loyalist, who asked to remain anonymous, said snidely: “If Coweta County wants to capitalize on somebody’s literary fame, why don’t they pick on Margaret Anne Barnes and leave Margaret Mitchell alone.”

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He was referring to the author of “Murder in Coweta County,” a book, and later a television film, based on the true story of the murder of a tenant farmer at the hands of a prominent land baron in 1948.

Betty Talmadge in Middle

Caught in the middle of the controversy over reconstructing Tara is Betty Talmadge, a prominent Georgia businesswoman and ex-wife of former U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge. She bought the movie facade of Tara seven years ago for $5,000 from a Georgia developer and has offered it to Clayton County, where she lives in an antebellum estate dating from the 1830s. That estate was reputedly Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Twelve Oaks, the fictional home of Ashley Wilkes.

But just last week, she consented to entertain a delegation of Coweta County backers at her home and listen to their pitch.

“The important thing to me is to have a credible memorial to Margaret Mitchell--one of museum quality,” she said. “And it’s got to have Rhett, Scarlett and Tara, of course.”

Although promoters in neither county care to talk about it, the allure of big money plays a strong part in keeping Clayton and Coweta counties on a collision course. Both counties have been looking for development projects to boost their sagging economies--and a “Gone With the Wind” tourist attraction is seen as just the ticket.

‘Money-Making Machine’

“ ‘Gone With the Wind’ is a money-making machine that just won’t stop,” said Norman Shavin, an Atlanta author of a series of popular books on local history, including “The Million-Dollar Legends: Margaret Mitchell and ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”

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Since its publication nearly half a century ago, “Gone With the Wind” has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 27 different languages. Even today, more than a thousand copies are sold daily in the United States alone.

The movie, which premiered Dec. 15, 1939, at the since-demolished Loew’s Grand Theater in downtown Atlanta, has been seen by more than 200 million persons and was listed by Variety last year as the top-grossing film of all time--above even “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The home-video version of the film, which reached shops last March, was an instant hit despite its steep $89.95 price. More than 300,000 of the double-cassette tapes have been sold for total sales of well over $27 million.

“ ‘Gone With the Wind’ has done in the home-video business what it did in the movies,” said Richard Gersh, who heads his own public relations firm in New York. “It is still the blockbuster.”

Expected to Do Well

A “Gone With the Wind” theme park could probably be expected to do equally well--particularly if it is a first-class attraction that fulfills the romantic fantasies of tourists and conventioneers in the Atlanta area.

“A lot of visitors ask us where Tara and ‘Gone With the Wind’ are,” said Diane Kimball of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau. “They don’t think it is fictional; they think it’s the real thing.”

Until it closed three years ago, the closest thing to a “Gone With the Wind” museum was a downtown Atlanta souvenir shop that featured a wax figure of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and sold, among other items, “Gone With the Wind” toilet seat covers. But it went out of business after a rash of complaints from mail-order customers alleging that their purchases had not been delivered.

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Proposals for a “Gone With the Wind” memorial have often been advanced since the movie premiere but have failed to materialize. The biggest obstacle to their success has been the author herself, who spurned attempts to exploit her novel and its characters, and the guardians of her estate, who have followed that course.

Against Tourist Attraction

“Margaret Mitchell was a very private person and didn’t want any tourist attractions based on her book,” historian Garrett said. “She’d probably take a very dim view of the efforts now in Clayton and Coweta counties to establish a museum.”

In December of last year, when the Atlanta Constitution reported that attorneys for the estate had given their approval to Clayton County’s project, Joseph Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s nephew and one of the two surviving heirs to her estate, called the newspaper to take issue with the account. He said the project would be built “over my dead body.”

Since then, however, he has said that he would not stand in the way of either proposal--Clayton’s or Coweta’s--although he added: “I’m still leery of any plans.”

Oddly enough, the movie Tara--the stately, romantic Tara that has become an internationally recognized icon of the antebellum South--bears little resemblance to the Tara of the novel.

In the book, Margaret Mitchell describes Tara as “a clumsy, sprawling building” that had been built “according to no architectural plan whatever.”

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Bears Selznick’s Imprint

David O. Selznick, who produced the film, ordered the white columns for the movie Tara, knowing that the public would not accept a Southern plantation as real without them.

“These movies have nothing to do with the South,” said Dan Carter, professor of Southern history at Emory University in Atlanta. “They use the South to get across the message of the movie, and the South is very adaptable. It is a region of myths. What was shown in ‘Gone With the Wind’ wasn’t what Southern plantations were really like.”

Researcher Diana Rector contributed to this story.

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