‘I liked her snotty attitude and her clothes.’ : Scarlett O’Hara and Liberation of Women in the Tammy Era

Sandy Lewis saw “Gone with the Wind” the first time at the perfect age--14.

“It was at the Winnetka Drive-In in Chatsworth,” the 28-year-old Encino woman recalls. Like any non-demented person, Lewis loved the movie, “even the war scenes,” but, most of all, she was enthralled with its hoop-skirted heroine.

“I liked Scarlett,” says Lewis, who saw the grand old epic at another Valley drive-in four years later. “I liked her snotty attitude and her clothes.”

Exactly.

Scarlett is one of the best-loved teachers of American girls. If you’re female and see the movie at just the right time, that is, when your hormones have just begun to thrash you at regular intervals, Scarlett addresses many of the most urgent issues that have recently broken out in your mind.

Scarlett offers good counsel in almost every scene. You’re sitting there, right, trying to cure pubescence with popcorn and wondering, as you inevitably do lately, “Will any boy ever like me or do I have to get a personality transplant?”

Males in the audience can only see Mammy tightening Scarlett’s stays as she clings to the bedpost. But teen-age girls get all that, plus Scarlett’s comforting and illuminating advice as clearly as if it were printed like subtitles across the bottom of the screen.

Scarlett’s answer is “yes” to the boys, “no” to the need for the operation. “But,” she adds, “don’t forget to comb your hair.”

If Lewis was delighted with Scarlett in 1972, imagine her impact a decade or two earlier when I first encountered her. In the era of Annette Funicello, Scarlett wasn’t just a spiffily dressed freethinker, she was a revelation.

The year I first saw the movie the contemporary media were hell bent on convincing every hapless Girl Scout that the greatest good was to be Tammy in love, as long as you were in love with somebody--Pat Boone would be perfect--who didn’t scare your parents. Doris Day was calling the cultural shots, remember. You spit-shined your circle pin and waited by the phone.

A girl with excess energy and a certain indecorous inclination could aspire to be perky. Perky was OK as long as you were also pert, a word of uncertain meaning that appears nowhere but in high-school yearbooks of the time. But a girl who overdid it and cranked all the way up to spunky was in trouble deep.

Spunky girls had a tragic tendency to end up at pajama parties on prom night, setting each other’s hair instead of swooning to the tune of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” as God had intended.

Uppity women, or girls, as young females were then called, cried a lot more than the pert, perky Stepford girls.

But Scarlett O’Hara raised the distinct possibility that being female could be as exciting as being your older brother, something most of us had never dreamed of before. And Scarlett didn’t stop at spunky. She was a veritable vixen, a genus of enviable creatures who danced even in mourning and, if other people didn’t like it, well, fiddle dee dee.

Even in the age of “The Donna Reed Show” little girls knew in their bones that freedom was too high a price to pay for society’s approval--that poor, popular Tammy had been grossly overcharged.

Scarlett offered a viable alternative and offered it in dresses to die for. Not content merely to be mistress of her fate, she shamelessly tinkered with the fates of others. And yet--and this was the truly miraculous part--instead of being punished for her willfulness, instead of being shunned, she was the queen of the Twelve Oaks barbecue.

Other women didn’t like her much, but she practically needed baker’s numbers to keep track of her gentleman callers. Guys like Rhett Butler didn’t want to lavaliere Tammy. They queued up to ask Scarlett to the prom.

In retrospect, I see a resemblance between Ms. Scarlett and Gloria Steinem. Both women orchestrate their own lives, and yet both seem to understand that you double your chances at whatever your notion of success by the simple expedient of shaving your legs.

Scarlett is a feminist (of sorts), but she is also a realist in a world in which men are obstacle, opportunity and reward. She gets on quite nicely, thank you, when every male in Georgia is off somewhere losing the Civil War. But she wakes up smiling when they get back.

What Scarlett has that so few women of the ‘50s had was stature; that and the finest wardrobe money could buy. She was as large as Rhett, as heroic, albeit awfully self-centered and frequently mean as a snake.

Scarlett made the best case against Donna Read.

Power, she promised, could be a woman’s headiest perfume.