• ‘Gone With the Wind' Tara door at Margaret Mitchell House going up for auction

    By: Rodney Ho, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution







    The Margaret Mitchell House is preparing to relinquish it. 



    Who currently owns the door is unclear. The museum on the sign says Gene Talmadge loaned the door but it doesn’t state which one. Gene Talmadge Jr.  died in 2014. Gene Talmadge III is still alive. 


    Talmadge Jr. filed for Chaper 11 bankruptcy protection the year he died and assets are still being sold off five years later. In January, 2019, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of Georgia approved the sale of the Tara door in court documents. 


    The tourist site in Midtown still has one other notable set piece: a huge portrait of Scarlett O’Hara hanging in Rhett Butler’s bedroom and on loan from the Atlanta Board of Education. 

    A separate lot of set pieces from the movie such as windows, shutters, doors, porch posts and railings will also be put up for auction at a likely starting bid of $15,000, Chanes said. They could use some restoration, he noted.

    The door’s history is bit circuitous. 

    After the movie filmed, the “Tara” set stayed at Selznick International Studios in Culver City, Calif. until Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu Productions, then owners of the lot, had it dismantled in the spring of 1959.

    Julian M. Foster, an Atlanta-based real estate developer, took most of the best parts of the set, hoping to reconstruct it on 300 acres in north Georgia as a tourist attraction But legal complications with the Mitchell family precluded that from happening. 


    Then he died unexpectedly. Foster’s widow agreed to sell Talmadge the door for the bargain price of $5,000 but she had no idea where it was. Talmadge hired an airplane and pilot and eventually figured out where it located. 

    Like Foster, she had grand plans to create a “Gone With the Wind” theme park, but efforts by multiple developers in the 1980s never came to fruition. Clayton County voters in 1987 soundly defeated a referendum for a one-cent sales tax largely to fund a $23 million “GWTW” park. 


    ''When people go west, they're looking for cowboys and Indians," Talmadge told the AJC in 1992. "When they come to Atlanta, they're looking for Rhett and Scarlett, and I've got the closest thing to it."



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