THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 26, 1994 TAG: 9412260050
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
``Scarlett'' author Alexandra Ripley reveals a dirty little secret when she talks about her new historical romance novel about a tobacco industry robber baron, ``From Fields of Gold.''
Ripley has profited immensely from passion. Writing the sequel to Margaret Mitchell's ``Gone With the Wind'' has made her a millionaire. Her previous three love tales set in the Old South also were bestsellers.
And when she was an editor 25 years ago, she got her first book printed by telling a publisher she would to disclose to his wife that he was having an extramarital affair with another employee.
But history is her strong suit.
``History excites me,'' Ripley said in her regal Deep South accent. ``I make up characters who will be affected by the history.''
``Scarlett'' was almost universally panned after its 1991 publication and critics ridiculed the television miniseries based on the book when it aired in November. But Ripley was praised for her meticulous historical detail.
To get the feel of life as a tobacco farmer, she walked the fields and picked tobacco leaves and even participated in The Worm Squirm at a tobacco festival in rural North Carolina. That involves a race between those fat, disgusting two-inch tobacco worms, each with his own tiny white number.
Her previous novels focused the Southern aristocracy, but this one gives her the chance to get ``down to earth'' with characters from a struggling tobacco farm and a Tidewater Virginia plantation ruined by the Civil War.
To get the patent on the first cigarette-making machine, tobacco farmer Nate Richardson agrees to marry the inventor's spinster granddaughter, Francesca ``Chess'' Standish. Even though he's secretly in love with his preacher-brother's beautiful young wife.
Ripley said the idea for the book came to her while she was reading a biography of James Buchanan Duke, who became filthy rich and got a university named after him after forming a tobacco industry monopoly.
``Buck Duke started in the field, plowing and planting, and 12 years later he founded American Tobacco Company, which was the largest monopoly in the world,'' she said.
Ripley, a Charleston, S.C., native who now lives in a historic farmhouse in Fluvanna County, dyed her hair during the promotion of ``Scarlett'' ``so people wouldn't recognize me.''
Representatives of Margaret Mitchell's estate asked Ripley to do a sequel to the sequel, but she declined.
``I made more money than I ever thought I would ever see in my life,'' she said of the book, which sold 2.5 million copies before the miniseries. ``But that's not the point. I figure I did the hard part going from `I don't give a damn' to bringing those two back together again. Then I wrote an ending that any writer can pick up and go anywhere with. But I don't want to be that writer.''
The estate chose British author Emma Tennant to write another chapter in the lives of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.
Ripley said she doubts a British woman can have the background to pull off a story about a 19th-century Southern belle. ``Perhaps I am being unfair, but if not I will be able to say all sorts of nasty things about it when it comes out and that will be fun.''
Frankly, Ripley has grown tired of Scarlett and much prefers Chess, a ``From Fields of Gold'' character she likens to herself.
``I wanted (Chess) her to be a woman of intellectual curiosity, which Scarlet never was.''
But she appreciates the fame and fortune she received writing about the icon of American literature because it has allowed her to write her own books.
For her next project, Ripley wants to write a trilogy with characters based on the history of the farmhouse she and her second husband, a retired professor, are renovating ``thanks to Scarlett.'' ILLUSTRATION: AP photo
Alexandra Ripley, who wrote ``Scarlett,'' the sequel to ``Gone With
the Wind,'' much prefers the leading lady in her new book, ``From
Fields of Gold.'' The character, Chess, appears in a new tale of the
Old South, this one about a struggling tobacco farm and a Tidewater
Virginia plantation ruined by the war.
by CNB