There was nothing perverted or creepy about it THEN. Unmarried females of twenty or twenty-one, even in 1960s America, were considered old maids, and this was a century after the Civil War started. When my youngest maternal great-grandmother married at the age of sixteen in Fulton County, Georgia, it was considered normal, and when one of my other maternal great-grandmothers married she was much younger. In those days in Spain, when the older sisters married, all of them did whether they were sixteen or not. It was a village custom when all the girls reached puberty. This particular great-great-grandfather was a tyrant who wanted all of his daughters married and out of the house before they were too long in the tooth. I suppose he needed the dowry money.
When this movie, GWTW, was filmed in the late winter of 1938/spring of 1939, the stars were not considered too old for their roles: Vivien Leigh was twenty-five; Clark Gable was thirty-eight, Olivia de Havilland was twenty-two, but Leslie Howard was at least forty-four, and was made to look like twenty-five-year-old Ashley Wilkes with tons of pancake makeup. Since Ashley is thirty-seven by the time the novel ends, this wasn't so hard to manage. Vivien Leigh was perfect for the role of Scarlett and seemed ageless in the part.
Today any woman of twenty-six could portray sixteen-year-old Scarlett O'Hara simply because she would pass for a teenager, provided she was believable as the character. I had no problem with Joanne Whalley Kilmer playing the title role in the mini-series Scarlett in 1994 because she wasn't that much older than Leigh had been in 1938. My chief concern then was that Mrs. Kilmer wasn't wearing green contact lenses.
Today, however, no Western man of thirty-three could date a girl of sixteen without raising a ruckus (or being put in jail), but it seems that a few men several decades ago did raise that racket and still managed to get away with Professor Humbert type behavior: Fortyish Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, lived with underage Mandy Smith from the time she was thirteen until he married her when she turned eighteen in the early 1990s.
Soon thereafter Woody Allen caused a firestorm when he fell in love with his common law wife Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn, who may or may not have been at least eighteen when he first had lascivious thoughts that turned into carnal consummation of the no-no variety. Woody at the time was more than twice Soon Yi's age. Today, of course, they are husband and wife. It still seems shocking, and was totally scandalous in 1992.
One who didn't raise a ruckus was tennis great Ivan Lendl, who had simply waited until his longtime girlfriend Samantha Frankel reached the age of seventeen, whereupon they began to live together without parental chaperones. She first caught his eye when she was fourteen, but he did later marry her.
Another who raised eyebrows, but who never suffered the consequences, was the married modeling executive John Casablancas, who was well into his forties when he left his second wife to live full-time with fourteen-year-old cover girl Stephanie Seymour. He didn't go back to his wife (a model whom he married in 1978 when she was only 19), and he didn't wed his teenage Lolita, but he helped make Seymour one of the all-time great catwalk queens. In 1992, he married his third wife, yet another model, who was then just seventeen. He was still married to wife number three when he died in 2013 at age seventy with no regrets.
All of these couplings occurred in the extravagant 1980s and early 1990s when Jerry Lee Lewis's ruinous marriage to his thirteen-year-old second cousin in the late 1950s had long been forgotten, and when twenty-five-year-old Elvis Presley's wooing of fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu was considered off-limits lest it damage the King's lofty reputation. Only Woody Allen got hammered in public, and Soon Yi was twenty-one in 1992. No wonder Allen seems bitter. I can't blame him. All these other rascals got away with it.
Vivien Leigh herself was married, when she was barely seventeen, to a wealthy British lawyer, Leigh Holman, who was fourteen years her senior, and gave birth to her only child, Suzanne Holman, when she was just eighteen. She was born Vivian Hartley to a rich English family living the colonial life in Darjeeling, India before the First World War. After her marriage, Vivian Holman left a lucrative career as a fashion model and became a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. She wanted a stage name that sounded better than Hartley or Holman, so she changed one letter in her first name and took her husband's first name as her last. She fell in love with the married Laurence Olivier, became an overnight sensation on the boards, made several films with her lover, who soon took her to Hollywood to meet his agent Myron Selznick, the brother of David O. Selznick, the producer of GWTW. The rest as they say, is cinematic history.
Just imagine the scandal if the public had ever learned that their precious Scarlett was living in sin with a married man, which she was during the entire production of GWTW. Truly amazing.
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