Gone with the Wind grossed twenty-six million dollars in its first six months; the equivalent amount in 2014 dollars would be more than four hundred million. The movie received eleven Academy Award nominations. As it swept across the major cities of America, it was met with raves. “The mightiest achievement in the history of the motion picture,” declared The Hollywood Reporter. Indisputably, America fell in love with Gone with the Wind.

Reaction was indeed mixed among black Americans. Many loved the movie as much as white audiences did, but others felt as did the reviewer for The Chicago Defender, who called the movie a “weapon of terror against black America.” Yet it did pave the way for African American actors and actresses—including Hattie McDaniel, who won the first Oscar awarded to an African American in motion-picture history for her performance as Mammy. When she was called an “Uncle Tom” by the NAACP for playing the role, she said, “I’d rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one.”

At the Oscar ceremony on February 29, 1940, Gone with the Wind won Best Picture of 1939 and swept the top performance awards, with the exception of Best Actor. Clark Gable did not win for his performance as the dashing, unforgettable Rhett Butler.

The war in Europe was closing in on the United States, and Hollywood studio moguls—so shamefully in collusion with the Nazis to preserve their overseas profits—were about to stop playing dodgeball. War movies would soon emerge from the movie industry. It wasn’t long before France fell to the Nazis, in the spring of 1940, shaking up the Western world. Winston Churchill announced in the House of Commons that the battle of France was over, adding, “I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.”

The world was slipping into war. And Hollywood began changing fast.

Leslie Howard did return immediately to Britain to help with the war effort when England declared war on Germany—he was no vacillating Ashley Wilkes. He died at the age of fifty, in 1943, when his plane was shot down by the Germans, leaving unresolved questions as to whether he had been on a secret spy mission for Britain.

Carole Lombard threw herself into the war effort after Pearl Harbor, giving it her all, pretty much the way she did everything. She traveled around the country selling war bonds, and was in great demand, until tragedy struck.

Carole was returning home to Hollywood after speaking at a war-bond rally in 1942 when her plane slammed into a mountain. All aboard died in the fiery crash, including Carole and her mother. The actress—at that time, one of the highest paid in Hollywood—was only thirty-three years old.

To switch off my writer’s cap for a moment, I must admit I became very fond of this woman, who has lived all these months in my imagination—and I mourn her.

Clark Gable was devastated by Carole’s death. I find myself imagining how he might have received the news. I see him in a darkened room, head down, sitting alone, unable to cry, unable to rewrite the script that had snatched his wife away.

Clark was known as a womanizer, but his marriage to Carole was clearly a happy one. And the key to that was Carole. She had recognized for some time the diffident, shy man inside the glamorous shell of Rhett Butler as someone who craved love and honesty, and she set out to give it to him. When she died, a shield that kept Clark safe was surely gone.

Shortly after her death, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces and flew several combat missions. He married twice more, and died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

Vivien Leigh—who married and later divorced Laurence Olivier—went on to a stellar career, but also, plagued by health problems, died in her fifties.

As of May 2014, Olivia de Havilland remains the last surviving member of the legendary troupe of actors who made Gone with the Wind one of the most memorable films in history.

And I add a salute here to Frances Marion, a brilliant, trailblazing screenwriter, whose name is barely remembered today. She and Mary Pickford were partners in the making of many Pickford films, and her humor and desire to help other women in the business of screenwriting deserve more recognition. She died in 1973, at the age of eighty-four.

About Carole and Clark. It’s no secret that Hollywood marriages spun out of fantasy tend not to survive in reality. But I will risk this observation: even though they did not have a long marriage, they shared both the ability to laugh at themselves and a certain common sense about life, traits that might have given them a better chance to endure than many other Hollywood couples of that time—or any other.

That may be my fantasy. But, after all, this is about Hollywood.

As for my fictional characters? I think Andy would throw himself into rescue work and go wherever he could feel his efforts were worthwhile. I like to think he would possibly have been able to save some in his family, and to survive. And I believe he would do his best to return to Julie.

And Julie? Julie is one version of Everywoman—that girl in any generation at any point in history who strikes out with a small arsenal of choices and expands them to search for—if not always to find—what she wants. She grows, she changes. And at a certain point, the reader salutes her on her journey, and wishes her well.

Hope so.

I do.

Kate Alcott