Susan Myrick
1893-1978  Despite a journalism career with the Macon Telegraph that spanned half a century, Susan Myrick is best known as the technical advisor for the film "Gone With the Wind" (1939). She also held many other titles in her long and colorful life—educator, soil conservation advocate, civic leader, amateur theater doyenne, and painter.
Susan Dowdell Myrick was born on February 20, 1893. She was the fifth of eight children born to Thulia Whitehurst and James Dowdell Myrick at Dovedale, a family plantation in Baldwin County near Milledgeville.
Myrick met Margaret Mitchell at the Georgia Press Institute in Macon in 1928 (the year Emily Woodward founded the annual meeting), and they became close friends. When the filming of "Gone With the Wind" began, Mitchell wanted no part of the Hollywood scene but worried nevertheless that her book would be given the stereotypical Hollywood treatment of the South. She lobbied for Myrick, her trusted friend and colleague, to oversee details of the film. A Selznick Studios telegram on December 10, 1938, asks Myrick to report to work as the "Arbiter of manners and customs of times as well as [to] tutor members of cast both white and Negro in accent, [according to the] characteristics of each class and time." Taking a leave of absence from the Telegraph, Myrick arrived in California in January 1939 to begin her $125 a week job.
Despite sixteen-hour days at the studio, Myrick sent columns back to the Telegraph in the form of chatty letters, which describe behind-the-scenes doings on the film set. She was victorious in vetoing such improbable scenes as cotton being chopped in the month of April and Scarlett O'Hara, the main character, carrying a dish of olives (which were not grown on antebellum Georgia plantations). Her major defeat was that Scarlett wears a bonnet during a scene in which she dances with Rhett Butler inside the armory—Myrick's argument was that no proper southern woman would have worn a hat indoors at an evening party.
After the film's completion, Myrick addressed audiences nationwide about her advisory role for the production, becoming known as the "Emily Post of the South" for her expertise on southern manners. When the film premiered on television in 1976, she participated in WSB-TV's preshow production.
Myrick died on September 3, 1978, and was buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville.
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