Davis had one problem, though; there wasn't anything in Jonesboro or Clayton County to market. In the phone book, there were forty-seven listings under Tara, including Tara Billiards, Tara Church of Christ, Tara Dermatology Center, Tara Sanitation. The only thing missing was Tara.

"Margaret Mitchell's great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had a place near here," Davis said. "But that's it." Nor did modern Clayton County much resemble the countryside Mitchell described in her novel as a "pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers." Now a fast-growing bedroom suburb of Atlanta, Clayton County's "savagely red land" had been plowed under for subdivisions and shopping malls. Also, like Peachtree Street, the setting for Gone With the Wind was no longer an exclusive address. "Just about every county in Georgia already tries to cash in on the whole hoop-skirt thing," Davis said.

On the way out, we paused at a lobby exhibit of Gone With the Wind memorabilia. Beside a movie still of Vivien Leigh I noticed a picture of a woman who looked remarkably like her. "Who's that?" I asked. "Oh, that's Scarlett O'Hara," Davis said. "The professional one, I mean. She won some pageant a few years back and she's pretty much been Scarlett ever since.

Her real name was Melly Meadows--short for Melanie, just like Ashley Wilkes's wife--and she lived nearby. So I gave her a call and arranged to meet at her home office just off Jonesboro's main street. The young woman who greeted me on the porch wore tight blue jeans and a loose, open-necked blouse. But there was no mistaking her resemblance to Scarlett, at least as portrayed by Vivien Leigh: alabaster skin, slim waist, oval face, cupid-bow mouth and long dark hair tied back with an emerald-green ribbon.

"I'm so happy you came by," she said, gently shaking my hand. "Here, let me give you my brochure and business card."

Embossed on the card was her photograph in antebellum dress and Melly "Scarlett" Meadows printed in both English and Japanese. "Southern Belles & Gentlemen also available," the pamphlet said. Melly invited me to join her on the porch swing. "I've sort of become Scarlett O'Hara Incorporated," she sighed.

Melly Meadows was a self-made Southern belle. After years of being teased by classmates about her resemblance to Vivien Leigh, she entered a Scarlett look-alike contest at a local mall and beat forty other wannabes (her sister was runner-up). After that, she started donning her hoop skirt for local charity events. Before long, she'd been hired to appear at business breakfasts, ribbon cuttings and other promotional events around Atlanta. She'd gone on to promote everything from Vidalia onions to tourism in Atlanta to Coca-Cola in Japan. In a good year she cleared $50,000.

Now in her early twenties, Melly was planning for life after Scarlett, and had begun studying at a local college. "I want to be a Christian evangelist," she said. This seemed like quite a jump, from belle to Bible student. But Melly didn't think so. "I stick to best-selling books," she explained.

Actually, Melly hadn't read Gone With the Wind until recently. Nor did she study the book for beauty tips; apart from staying out of the sun to keep Scarlett's "magnolia-white skin," the look came naturally to Melly. But hoop skirts took some getting used to. Her antebellum attire weighed over twenty pounds and was hard to walk in. At first, Melly said, she often knocked over chairs and plants. And once, while sprinting across a rain-soaked plantation yard for a TV commercial, she'd run up her hoop and collapsed in the mud.

"You realize real quick that it wasn't all that glamorous back then," she said. "With all those hoops and crinolines and pantalets, women were probably sweaty and stinky most of the time."

Nor did the costume transform male admirers into bold Rhett Butlers. Melly noticed that men tended instead to become shy and respectful. 'Anyway, it's hard to get very close to someone in a hoop skirt." Melly had also learned to deflect unwanted advances with Scarlett-like brass. "I just smile and say, 'You're a blackhearted varmint' or 'I should slap you in the face!"'

Melly kept an office in the modest brick bungalow where she still lived with her mother. She led me to a back room equipped with a fax, laser printer and five telephone lines. "With rollover and voice mail of course," she said. "I have a cellular phone when I'm on the road."

She booted up her computer and showed me a file called "Belles." It listed thirty-some women she'd trained as stand-ins. "If someone calls with a job and I can't do it," she explained, "I tell them, 'I can book you someone else.' I subcontract Rhetts, too." She even had a Mammy on tap. I asked if she felt any discomfort with this aspect of her Old South role. "Not really," she said. "Scarlett was disrespectful to everyone. She's often mean, a bit harsh. If anything, she was nicer to her slaves than she was to her children."

Melly, though, did find some qualities in Scarlett with which to identify. "I like her flair for business, that's a similarity. And I'm fairly feisty." Melly also shared Scarlett's fondness for shocking behavior. Once, at a formal event welcoming Japan's royalty to Atlanta, Melly fell to chatting with the Empress. "I thought to myself, gosh, their life is awfully structured," Melly recalled. "So when she asked me if I wore a corset, I said in a loud voice, 'Do you want to see my underwear?"' Then Melly lifted her skirt to reveal red pantalets. The gesture pleased the Empress and made Melly an instant celebrity in Japan.

Melly had since visited Tokyo several times and now spoke Japanese well enough to make small talk with admirers. "Once I was speaking Japanese to a tourist in Atlanta and a woman gasped, 'Oh my gosh, the Japanese have even bought Scarlett O'Hara!"'

Like Mary Ann, the woman I'd met at the tourist office, Melly sensed a special Japanese affinity for Gone With the Wind. "In some ways, their culture is similar to the Old South," she said. "Traditional women wear kimonos and are admired for their delicate nature, while men are tough and strong." Melly showed me a Japanese newspaper profile of her and translated the headline: "Miss Scarlett, A Traditional Japanese Girl."

Melly sensed another kinship between nineteenth-century Georgia and twentieth-century Japan; both rebuilt themselves after being ravaged by war. "Their symbol of royalty is the phoenix, just like Atlanta," she said.

It so happened that Melly had a date the next night with a Japan-ese tour group. So I caught up with her again at a Southern-themed restaurant in Atlanta. Melly stood in the parking lot wearing a hooped taffeta skirt, lace gloves, and emerald-colored earrings that matched her green velvet belt and purse. A bus pulled up and twenty-five Japanese surged toward her, talking excitedly, bowing and posing beside her for pictures. Melly pointed the toe of her white shoe and pulled up her skirts to reveal red pantalets. The tourists laughed and clapped. Then she turned around and looked seductively over her bare shoulder in an uncanny mimic of Vivien Leigh. For the moment at least, Melly Meadows seemed a very long way from Bible school.

The group moved inside to a formal dining room, and Melly sashayed between the tables, making chat in Japanese. I asked the group's tour guide, a man named Daijiro, to translate her banter.

"You are so handsome, you look like Clark Gable."

"What is your company?"

"I am very fond of your Emperor and Empress."

Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and veg-etable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. "We want to see the history and beauty of America," Daijiro explained.

I asked him why Gone With the Wind had such strong appeal in Japan. "You must understand the times," he said. "In the l930s we saw American movies, then during the war we didn't. These movies came back after the war and Gone With the Wind was the most popular. I think it gave people hope to see this woman fighting so hard to build her land back. Also, she stands by her family, which is something we admire."

He paused. "There is something else, but this is just my idea. I think people watched the movie and thought, 'This is the real America, a wonderful place, not the one we fought in war.

The food arrived and the tourists dipped tentatively into gumbo and cornbread. Daijiro watched Melly for a moment, then added, "Scarlett's strength fascinates us. But inside we feel more like Mela-nie Wilkes, who is polite and kind."

Listening to Daijiro, I sensed another kinship between Japanese and Southern culture; they shared a subtle, mannered code that often seemed contradictory and confusing to blunt, unmannerly outsiders like myself.

As the main course arrived, Melly waved good-bye. "Oh fiddle-dee-dee!" she sang out, swishing from the room and down the restaurant's grand staircase. Her mother waited out front in a minivan with the engine running. Melly had another appearance that evening and was already late.

I offered Melly my arm so she could hoist her hoop skirt into the van. "Why, you're a true gentleman, even if you are a Yankee," she drawled, swinging the van door shut. Her mother sped off, leaving me alone in the parking lot with the faint fragrance of verbena lingering in the warm Georgia night.

Melly Meadows left me with something else: a curious tip. Despite what I'd heard at the Chamber of Commerce, Tara was still in Clayton County. Melly knew only vague details--"a big old house belonging to a crazy old lady"--but she passed on a name: Betty Talmadge, the elderly ex-wife of former Georgia governor and senator, Herman Talmadge.

Betty Talmadge lived seven miles west of Jonesboro on a narrow lane that dead-ended at a Greek Revival plantation house. By the entrance stood a precise miniature of the mansion, about the size of a doghouse. A sign on the front said "Rabbit E. Lee" and a bunny hopped out to sniff at me. Then a large, one-legged woman appeared across the lawn. "I'm Betty," she shouted. "Lost my leg a few years ago from a blood clot. Let me show you my house."

Betty sprinted across the lawn on her crutches, leading me onto the mansion's verandah. "I'm told they hid grain in here so the Yankees wouldn't steal it during the War," she said, tapping one of the columns with her crutch. "Good story. Who knows."

Betty clumped inside, across wide pine boards covered with a needlepoint rug. "I quit smoking on June 8th, 1970, at 8 P.M.," she said, admiring the carpet. "My needlework took off after that." She also showed me a glass case filled with flowers sent to her by Pat Nixon as thanks for a luncheon Betty hosted for the First Lady after her husband's resignation. "Pat was nice. I liked Dick, too. He got caught, that's all."

This casual view of political scandal had family roots. Betty's father-in-law, Eugene Talmadge, was a long-time Georgia governor who once told voters, "Sure I stole, but I stole it for you." He also liked to warn political foes, "I'm just as mean as cat shit." Southern politics didn't produce characters like that anymore, least of all in Georgia, whose most recent governor of note was a pious peanut farmer from Plains.

Betty led me into another room, adorned with paintings of herself as a young Washington hostess. "Done yesterday, as you can tell," she dryly observed. "Washington was fun back then. People had wild parties. Drank too much and fooled around." She shook her head. "Those days are gone. Gone with the wind, you could say."

Grateful for an opening, I nudged the conversation around to my literary search. Betty laughed. "Oh, this isn't Tara, it's Twelve Oaks. I've got Tara, too, but that's another story." The story of Twelve Oaks (the Wilkes family estate) began with a 1973 New York Times piece, which Betty had carefully preserved in plastic sheeting. It reported that the Talmadge estate was "believed to have been Margaret Mitchell's model for Twelve Oaks." The reporter offered no further details. Nor did Betty.

"Margaret Mitchell, like all writers, may have pushed it or pulled it a bit," she said. "But this is the house. Or that's what I tell people." She smiled and put the newspaper clip back in its folio. " The New York Times is the paper of record. If it prints something, it must be true." I couldn't help wondering if Betty herself had been the unnamed source of the Times anecdote, but it seemed rude to ask.

Betty had turned the story to good use. In 1975, without warning, her husband filed for divorce. Then he was reprimanded by the Senate for financial misconduct and voted out of office. Returning to Georgia, Betty found herself a downwardly mobile divorcee rattling around an eleven-room mansion in the countryside. Echoes of Scarlett again.

"I was a small-town girl who married at eighteen," she said. "You were considered an old maid if you got to twenty-two without a husband. The only advice my mother had was this: 'You just be a lovely complement to your husband."' She laughed. "I swallowed all that. But my mother never told me what you do when you're fifty-three and your husband takes off."

What Talmadge had done was become a hostess again, this time for pay, feting businessmen and foreign tourists with dinners at her alleged Twelve Oaks. Her set-menu "Magnolia Supper" included Scarlett Carrots, Rhett Butler biscuits and abra-Ham Lincoln. "The social secretary for Ladybird Johnson taught me to name dishes," Betty said. "It's a conversation starter. You'd be surprised, but a lot of prominent people are ill at ease socially. It loosens them up."

This cutesy habit extended to her animals; hence Rabbit E. Lee, whom I'd met at the door. Talmadge took me out back and intro-duced her other farm creatures: Ulysses S. Grunt, Clark Gobble, Scarlett O'Hen, the Honorable John C. Cowboun. "I'll do anything to make my Yankee friends smile," Betty said.

I steered the conversation back to Tara. Betty said that fifteen years ago, she'd learned that the farmhouse owned by Margaret Mitchell's great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had become vacant and fallen prey to vandals. "I decided as long as I had Twelve Oaks, I might as well have Tara, too." She bought the derelict house over the telephone for $1,000.

Betty pointed across a field at what looked like a pioneer cabin, perched at the fringe of pine woods. This was the Fitzgerald place, or all of it that Betty had salvaged; she kept what remained of the house's grander Victorian addition in storage. I gazed at the building and felt a twinge of disappointment. Betty's home at least was an antebellum mansion, Twelve Oaks or not. But this weatherboard shack looked like it might once have belonged to the Slatterys, the "swamp trash" who lived down the hill from Tara, not to the O'Haras.

But the story didn't end there. Soon after buying the Fitzgerald place, Betty heard that the facade of the Hollywood Tara was for sale. Its aged owner, Julian Foster, had purchased the movie set twenty years before in hopes of creating an antebellum Disneyland in Georgia. His dream never materialized and the rotting facade had become an albatross. But Foster, a paranoid man, refused to disclose Tara's location. "He kept saying, 'I'm the only person who knows where it is. That's my insurance,"' Betty said.

In the end, Foster took Betty on a circuitous drive that ended at a barn in the north Georgia hills. She bought the set for $5,000, one fiftieth the cost of Tara's construction in 1930s Hollywood. But before she could take possession, Foster died. "I contacted his widow," Betty said. "She said the sale was still on, but I was now the only per-son who knew where to find Tara."

Betty had a poor sense of direction, and after a week-long search by car and small airplane she still couldn't find the barn. It was only through a canceled rent check for the shelter that she finally tracked Tara down. "I got it," she said, "or it's got me, I'm not sure which."

The set was built of plywood, composition board, and papier-mâché (supplies "you could get at Sears," one of the set's creators confessed in an interview after the movie's release). Nonetheless, an appraiser hired by Betty had compared the set to other Hollywood props--the tail from the lion costume in the Wizard of Oz, the piano in Casablanca, the HMS Bounty--and set Tara's value at $1.2 million. "I guess I should feel rich, but I don't," Talmadge said. 'At least not yet."

Betty hoped to peddle Tara, the Fitzgerald House and Twelve Oaks as a package, forming the core of a theme park like the one Julian Foster had dreamed of creating. But she hadn't found any takers. So Tara remained in storage--where, exactly, Betty wouldn't dis-close. "I'm like Foster," she said. "I don't tell anyone where it is. That's my insurance."

But she agreed to show me pictures of the set, which was now in pieces: a door, a few columns, a papier-mâché brick. It looked the way Tara might have if Sherman's men had burned the place down after all. Betty, though, hadn't surrendered all hope. Seeing me to the door, she smiled defiantly. "Tomorrow, as they say, is another day."