Cast and Fans Toast ‘GWTW’ Anniversary

Compared to the 1939 Atlanta premiere of “Gone With the Wind”--when Georgia’s governor declared a three-day holiday and stars such as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh swept in by train to attend all-night balls--the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 50th anniversary celebration of the film was a modest affair.

Only about 10 of the original cast of more than 60 are still alive, and most of the survivors turned out. Instead of dances and Mardi Gras-style parades, the celebrants Saturday night were content to eat jambalaya and sip mint juleps under heat lamps inside a courtyard on Wilshire Boulevard. The hit of the event were nine Pennsylvania housewives who arrived wearing exact replicas of Scarlett O’Hara’s dresses.

But the stories shared by some of the film’s survivors, at the celebration and in interviews last week, evoked the memories of that 1939 premiere, probably the most eagerly awaited in American film history. Their anecdotes restore as much luster to the film as Turner Entertainment’s lab technicians, who painstakingly re-created the movie’s fading colors and sound track in the 1950s print screened Saturday night.

The survivors talked about Leigh’s last-minute success in securing the most coveted role in Hollywood at that time, that of Scarlett O’Hara, and the British actress’ slavish devotion to the film’s first director, George Cukor. They talked about Gable’s almost casual attitude toward the film--the opposite demeanor of his co-star--and his annoyance at Cukor’s concentration on the female characters. After filming was well under way, producer David O. Selznick fired Cukor and brought in Victor Fleming, a man’s man and a good buddy of Gable’s.

“Both women (Leigh and Olivia de Havilland) were bereft when Cukor left,” recalled Ann Rutherford, 71, who played Scarlett’s sister Careen. “They went to his house at night (after Fleming replaced him). He would feed them a light dinner and rehearse them until they were brainless. . . . If not for Cukor, I doubt that you would have seen those hair-raising performances from these women.”

Fred Crane, who played one of the Tarleton twins, was so young and naive when he landed his part in “Gone With the Wind,” his first film, that he caught himself calling the director “Mr. Zukor.” Crane, 70, later left the movies and went into broadcasting, where he was a regular radio personality on KFAC. Rand Brooks, who played the smitten Charles Hamilton, Scarlett’s first husband, hated his part so much that he voted for “Of Mice and Men” in the Academy Award race that year. “It was an asinine role,” he said. “That role hurt me in some ways, it sort of typecast me after that.”

Brooks, 70, turned out for the reception, but he said he didn’t intend to sit through the entire screening. “I’m the biggest laugh in the show--maybe Butterfly gets more--and that hurts,” said Brooks, who left show business 23 years ago to run a private ambulance company.

Butterfly McQueen wasn’t thrilled about her character, either. “Prissy is stupid and backward and lazy, “ said McQueen, whose voice is still just as high-pitched as the teen-age slave she portrayed. But the role has garnered McQueen plenty of public attention at every “Gone With the Wind” anniversary. The 78-year-old actress arrived at Saturday’s event passing out pre-written autographs from a manila envelope, and received a standing ovation before the screening.

But as the survivors of “Gone With the Wind” talk about themselves and their colleagues on the set, the conversation somehow always circles back to one man--the obsessive, arrogant, brilliant perfectionist David O. Selznick.

“I was crazy about him,” said Brooks. “But he drove some people crazy.

“They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” he added, a bit wistfully.

“This was Selznick’s baby,” said Rutherford. “His word was law, and woe betide any actor who interjected an extra if , and , or but .”

When Selznick appeared one day in the wardrobe room, Rutherford thought she was doing the producer a favor when she lifted her skirt and suggested that muslin petticoats would serve just as well as the expensive lace she was wearing under her Southern Belle dress.

Selznick wasn’t impressed. “He fixed his beady eyes on me,” she recalled, “and said, ‘You are not to forget that you are the daughter of one of the richest plantation owners in Georgia.’ ”

At another point during the filming, a Selznick assistant picked up Rutherford and Evelyn Keyes, who played Scarlett’s other sister Suellen, at 3 in the morning and drove them to a cotton field 40 miles east of Hollywood. The women were told to start picking. When Rutherford asked why, she was told that Selznick “wants your hands to be thoroughly bitten up” by the time the scene starts.

Selznick’s memos were legendary, and Rutherford is proud to say that she prompted one of them. The young actress cornered Selznick on a train and insisted that the women in the film had to let their eye-brows grow in.

Mitchell’s description of “the raven-wing sweep of Scarlett’s eye-brows,” said Rutherford, was in danger because the studios routinely altered their actresses’ natural looks, which inevitably included a severe eyebrow plucking.

A minor detail, perhaps. But just the sort to provoke a flurry of paper from Selznick’s office.

Rutherford said she sees red every time she hears talk of a remake of “Gone With the Wind.” “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” she said. Judging by the enthusiastic response of Saturday’s audience, the film fans seem to agree.

“It’s a Goya, a Rembrandt,” Crane said dramatically in his best radio voice. “It has the ineffable essence of something that’s going to live forever.”