The Importance of Bein’ Scarlett

A newcomer needs to know two things about Atlanta in order to survive. Every street is named Peachtree, and every woman might as well be named Scarlett.

It’s an exaggeration, of course. But in a place where reality often feels exaggerated--the heat, the history, the hospitality--hyperbole serves a purpose. Just as there are two kinds of tea offered everywhere you go here, so there are two kinds of truth--sweetened and unsweetened. Or put it this way: Like raw cotton, truth in the South must be stretched to reach its full potential.

Scarlett Hinson proves this rule. Though the bare facts about her are telling--top model, 22 years old, winning charm--the deeper truth requires a touch of overstatement, because Scarlett Hinson is a self-made fiction, a strainer of credulity, a 14-foot-tall Southern belle who talks lahk thee-yuss and has more suitors than Georgia has peaches.

While many Southern women admit to subconsciously emulating Scarlett O’Hara--the seductive heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s melodramatic and Talmudic novel of the South, “Gone With the Wind”--Scarlett doesn’t pretend to be Scarlett. Scarlett is Scarlett. Scarlett has carefully, deliberately, weirdly morphed into the South’s most iconic literary character, tapping into a power so vast, an allure so alarming, that the masquerade may say more about the South than it does about her.

So today is something of a holy day for Scarlett. Today, more than 200 theaters nationwide begin showing a revitalized print of the 1939 film version of “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest blockbuster in American film history, the second-biggest blockbuster in Atlanta history, after the Civil War. Today, it’s better than ever to be Scarlett, because suddenly she’s more than just the center of attention. She’s a current event.

And yet, the world is burning all around her. By day she’s Scarlett the model but by night she’s a registered nurse (think of Scarlett O’Hara, bandaging the Confederate wounded), and the two careers compete for her precious time, playing havoc with her nerves. In the days to come, she must choose one, but yes-or-no decisions vex her like nothing else.

Also, she must decide what to do about her boyfriend, who fends off the relentless onslaught of rivals, the slavering hordes of men, the Sherman-esque march of men, men, men. She’s under siege, and he’s overwhelmed.

“I don’t know what I do to men,” Scarlett says one day over coffee, sucking air into her lungs as if being laced into a corset, then letting it out in a long, thin sigh. “I just listen to them, and I look them right in the eye, and they all fall in love with me.”

Seven men want to marry her. She ticks off their names the way Santa calls his reindeer. There’s the Swedish golfer. There’s the 65-year-old surgeon. There’s her manager, a sweet man, who recently put a strain on their working relationship by confessing that he’d fallen in love with her. It seems the Scarlett O’Hara quality that Scarlett Hinson most admires isn’t her independence, her fierceness, her grittiness in the face of adversity, but her unerring ability to drive men insane.

Her parents did this to her. Robert E. Hinson and his wife, Beverly, didn’t just name their only daughter Scarlett. They read to her every night from “Gone With the Wind.” They sat her down and made her watch the film so often that she forgets the number of times she’s seen it, and still she vows to be among the first in line today at the “THEE-ay-ter.” They allowed her to attend her senior prom with a boy named Ashley (think of Scarlett O’Hara pining for the dashing dreamer, Ashley Wilkes) and they let her spend time during her formative years with her great-aunt Dot, an acquaintance of Mitchell.

Finally, the parental clincher. The one thing Mr. and Mrs. Hinson did to ensure that their daughter would become a red-haired gray area between fact and fantasy: They let her leave home. They let her leave Marianna, Fla., a small town at the nexus of two rivers and four prisons, where almost everyone knew Scarlett by her middle name, Brandy. They let her come to Atlanta, a city that is either perpetually afire or else just feels like it, where every street is named Peachtree, where Scarletts reign supreme.

Stonewall, Maddox Are No Scarletts

Students of the Deep South tend to splutter when trying to describe the central role that Scarlett O’Hara plays in the lives of Southerners. The “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” contains as many mentions of “Gone With the Wind” as of Lester Maddox, Andrew Young and Stonewall Jackson combined.

Scarlett O’Hara, that cosseted cross between Barbie, Princess Di and Amy Fisher, represents a primal form of power, a flirtier brand of feminism. In 1989, when Atlanta celebrated the 50th anniversary of the film adaptation of “Gone With the Wind,” one academic put it bluntly: “Scarlett embodies the bad girl that burns at the core of most of us, the greed and hunger that no amount of civility and adulthood can ever entirely repress.”

A Web site devoted to Scarlett O’Hara and “Scarlett Fever” has been visited by 70,000 people, many taking time to answer the question, “Do you think you’re Scarlett?” Writes one woman: “I have always been a daddy’s girl (He even calls me ‘Miss Scarlett’), I like to tease men, and yes, I can be selfish at times.”

Scarlett O’Hara impersonators earn $500 an hour leasing their corseted waistlines for corporate functions, flashing their frilly pantalets and fluttering their undulant eyelashes. There is a Southern journal devoted to Scarlett lovers, called “The Scarlett Letter.” There are two salons in Atlanta called Scarlet O’Hair. Mitchell’s house is an Atlanta shrine, the “birthplace” of Scarlett O’Hara, visited daily by reverent tourists and locals.

Scarlett O’Hara’s “the type of woman you want to be more like but you don’t want to be just like,” says Melly Meadows, 27, who travels the world playing Scarlett O’Hara on behalf of the Georgia Department of Tourism. “She’s the type of woman every man falls in love with. It’s the untouchable. Every man wants her but can’t have her.”

Into this Scarlett-crazed, Scarlett-drunk, Scarlett-replete region rides Scarlett Hinson, looking nothing like the raven-haired, green-eyed Scarlett O’Hara (her eyes are blue, her hair the color of Georgia clay) but acting exactly like her, because that is what she’s been trained to do by her culture and her kin. She flirts. She vamps. She ignores the dark side of Scarlett O’Hara--the lying, the scheming, the racism--and draws on the Scarlett myth, as certain wealthy Southerners draw on the old family trust: dependent on it for survival but only dimly aware of whence it all comes.

Her buggy is a Mitsubishi 3000GT, blood red, which she drives fast, cracking the whip on its panting V-6 horses. “Yeah-boy!” she says when excited, though her favorite phrase derives from Scarlett O’Hara’s famous flustered expression, “Fiddle-dee-dee.” When filling gaps in her drawl or lulls in her mood, Scarlett will say, “Dah-dee-dah-dee-dah.”

She’s saying it a lot today, because she’s tired. The phone woke her, as it often does, jangling around the clock. (She might get fewer calls if the last four digits of her number weren’t so easy to remember, spelling out S-C-A-R.) Most of the calls come from men who want to marry her, patients who wish they had the energy to marry her and her boyfriend, who would marry her tomorrow, if only.

Scarlett is driving her car and moaning, not from fatigue but because she always moans when she drives. On the car stereo she plays vocal exercises, to tame her Southern accent. She fears she may need to tone down her “y’alls” and “darlins” if she becomes an actress. Scarlett would love to be a starlet.

“There are three major vowel sounds that begin with the front mouth muscularity,” says a British voice on the tape. “The first is the English long ‘o.’ ”

“Ooooh,” Scarlett says, voice redolent of magnolia.

“Ooooh,” the British man says again.

“Ooooh,” Scarlett says, sounding like Lady Bird Johnson on Valium.

Adding to Scarlett’s weariness is her job at the hospital. As the only nurse on staff who wears baby pink scrubs, she draws scowls from co-workers, stares from male patients, many of whom overcome excruciating physical pain just to flirt with her.

“Can I tell you something?” she says. “I had this male patient, and I was putting a catheter on him, and that’s a very painful procedure, you know, but he just kept smiling and smiling and smiling.”

It wasn’t long after she moved to Atlanta in January 1997 that people began to notice Scarlett. How long could Madame Bovary hide in rural France? Or Anna Karenina in Moscow? She was standing in a nightclub, surrounded by men, when a stranger overheard her and couldn’t believe his ears.

“She was Scarlett O’Hara!” says Josh Goodhart, owner of Jezebel magazine, which strives to be a Southern Vanity Fair. “She looked like she was dressed for a play!”

Goodhart told Scarlett he was looking for someone to grace the cover of his magazine, and when she said her name was really, truly, legally Scarlett, the deal was all but done.

(Scarlett doesn’t know--in fact, would faint if she knew--but in 1938, Warner Bros. made a notorious and shameless knock-off of “Gone With the Wind” called “Jezebel.”)

Soon, Scarlett had all the work she could handle. She sometimes made $1,000 a day as one of Atlanta’s top commercial faces, a bright talent known to everyone in the city’s fashion community. Now, squealing up to her modeling agency, L’Agence, she admits feeling guilty about letting all that momentum die. But what could she do? Nursing was a calling, for which she trained hard at Florida State University. She just couldn’t quit. “I get to meet so many people at the hospital,” she says, “and help ‘em and looove ‘em!”

She wonders if she should quit now, though. Stop nursing and model full time--does she dare? Decisions, decisions. Dah-dee-dah-dee-dah. Lost in her thoughts, she missteps and tumbles halfway down the stairs that lead to her agency. “Oh my Lord!” she says. “That’s just like in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ when Scarlett fell and lost the baby!”

Tired Butler to Her O’Hara

Playing the role of Rhett Butler in Scarlett’s novel life is her boyfriend of 18 months, Tim Furey, a 27-year-old New York-born commodities broker who also looks tired, because the most valuable commodity he’s got is the one he refuses to trade: Scarlett.

“Everyone falls in love with Scarlett,” he says, spitting her name with perfect Clark Gable exasperation. “Keeping them away, that’s my job.”

Scarlett took Tim home not long ago. She wanted him to meet her family, to see the Tara-like spread of 50 acres where she grew up. The homecoming did not go smoothly, however. Her granddaddy refused to come to the house because Tim is a Yankee. Her daddy marched Tim straight out to the shooting range to show him what a crack shot his daughter was. (Think of Scarlett O’Hara gunning down the Yankee deserter.) Then the family sat Tim down and made him watch “Gone With the Wind.”

More memorable still was when Tim took Scarlett to his home turf and finagled her onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Scarlett happened to be wearing a dramatic dress that day, with a neckline as wide as the Chattahoochee River.

“The market stopped,” Tim says. “You could hear whispers and whoops all around the stock exchange floor.”

“I never had so much attention in my life!” Scarlett says. “I’ve had a lot of attention in my life. I’m not bragging on myself, but, honey, the crowd parted like the Red Sea!”

Tim suspects that men around Scarlett are powerless, like witless bugs in the thrall of a porch light. Maybe Scarlett is doing something to give off that compelling light? A tilt of the head, a lilt in her voice? (“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful,” Mitchell wrote, “but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm. . . .”)

“She’s going to be a hard life for somebody,” says Phillip Vullo, a fashion photographer who shot Scarlett when she was vying to star in the 1994 “Gone With the Wind” sequel, “Scarlett.”

It’s a part she should have gotten, says her mother. “They should have chosen Scarlett of Marianna,” says Beverly Hinson. “She can charm anyone.”

“When I first met her,” says Douglas Hill, president of Axis Model Management Inc., “she had this subtle way of making you think, ‘Gosh, she really likes me!’ And then the next minute, she’s off and gone and you’re standing there in a dusty street wondering which way her buggy went.”

If Tim dreads that moment, if he can see the dusty street now, he doesn’t let on. But Scarlett does.

“I love Tim, I really do,” she says one day when he’s not around. “I mean, he’s a really good person and I’d never want to hurt him. . . .”

But isn’t she bound to devastate him?

“Probably,” she says with a titter.

They broke up once.

“Four days, I didn’t hear from him,” Scarlett says. “I was like, Golly, that’s surprising. But that Friday night, honey, he came knocking on my door. ‘Scarlett! Scarlett!’ And the next day, my family was coming to town, and my house was dirty, and my little maid guy couldn’t come over to clean it. So Tim cleaned my house! It was so sweet of him! He did everything! He even cleaned my toilet!”

Hair Salon Opening in Hot ‘Lanta

Scarlett has made a decision!

Not about Tim. She’ll think about Tim tomorrow. Or the next day. Or whenever. Dah-dee-dah-dee-dah. But for today, she’s decided to quit nursing and dedicate herself to modeling.

Relieved, she resolves to celebrate, kick up her platform heels, start a little fire in Atlanta, honey. Wearing a dress as flimsy as a battle-torn Stars and Bars, she attends the grand opening of a new hair salon, in a strip mall on the north side of town, Tim in tow.

The salon is located in a space that used to be a video store and the guests are mostly gay, thus neutralizing her natural powers. Tim loves it.

“I can handle her in a room like this,” he says, smirking.

When the party degenerates into a fashion show with sullen models walking down a makeshift runway as if suffering from displaced hips, Scarlett scoffs.

“Notice how many of the girls have dyed their hair red!” she asks rhetorically.

Disgusted, she tells Tim to take her to a Moroccan restaurant across town called Imperial Fez. She wants to see belly dancers. Tim obeys.

Upon entering the restaurant, a handsome couple, they turn many heads. (Think of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler scandalizing polite society at the big charity ball.) Taking a table in the center of the room, they seat themselves on fluffy pillows and watch the belly dancers, Tim uneasy, Scarlett mesmerized.

“Imagine a place like this just off Peachtree Street!” she says. “Only three blocks from the Margaret Mitchell House.”

(When Scarlett visited the Margaret Mitchell House, which she calls “the place where I was created,” she gazed at photos of Clark Gable. “Look!” she said, holding out her bare arms as she stood before Gable’s creased, crinkly face. “I have chill bumps!”)

Everywhere, half-naked women wiggle their exposed midriffs, but most of the men are sneaking looks at Scarlett. When she downs a glass of plum wine and jumps to her feet to join the dancers, the air crackles with danger and fear, as it must have at Ft. Sumter.

Something irrevocable could happen here tonight.

Rafih Benjelloun, the owner, comes to Scarlett’s table and sits by the warm indent her feet left in the pillows. He watches her dance, unblinking. A large man in a flowing robe, he says the Arabic love song in the background is about the power of woman over man.

“You ask for my eyes, I give you my eyes,” he says, translating the song, his voice faint and disjointed, as if he were under a spell. “You ask for my heart, I give you my heart. What else you want? Oh, you are the moon, give me just a piece of you as you travel, so that my brain will be at ease. You become my order-giver. I obey.”

When Scarlett returns to the table, Benjelloun tells her his name, invites her to call him Rafih, asks her name.

“Scarlett!” she says.

“Scarlett?” he says, mouth falling open. “Like the Scarlett? Oh, I love that! Oh, bless you!”

Shaking her long red hair, Scarlett tells him that a patient once taught her three words of Arabic. “He taught me how to say, ‘It is hot,’ in Arabic. I wonder why he would teach me to say, ‘It is hot.’ Hmm, maybe he was saying, ‘She is hot!’ ”

She laughs. Rafih gulps. Tim frowns.

While Scarlett eats lamb with her hands, and while Tim looks on testily, Rafih waxes rhapsodic about the power of mythical women down through the ages to enthrall men--and about the many Scarlett O’Hara-type figures in Arabic culture.

“Woman is the most gifted creature,” he says. “Woman is like the ocean. If she can channel her power, woman give birth to many things. . . . Woman is the university. Woman is the school.”

Scarlett listens, finding the lecture more interesting than the sitar music. Finally, her face says, they’re playing my song.

“A beautiful woman is the most powerful thing in the world,” she says, licking her fingers, causing Rafih to agree gravely.

Minutes later, Scarlett declares herself stuffed. She rubs her belly, and it seems almost possible--could it be?--that she might say those words, that magic walk-off line, which Scarlett O’Hara delivers at the close of the Civil War, before the end of an era:

“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”

It would be perfect, classic--sublime. It would make Rafih dizzy and bring the night to a dramatic resolution. But, alas, this is 1998, not 1868, and this is Scarlett Hinson, not Scarlett O’Hara. So Scarlett aims her blurry blue eyes at the dishes arrayed before her and moans:

“Y’all! This food is gonna go straight to my thighs!”

Researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this article.