In April 1936, a few weeks before “Gone With the Wind” was published, the novel’s author was the guest speaker at a Saturday breakfast in downtown Macon.

She had friends here. They knew her as Peggy, Peggy Marsh. Her novel would bear her now famous maiden name: Margaret Mitchell.

An article in the next day’s Telegraph -- a piece written by one of her acquaintances, fellow newspaper columnist Blythe McKay -- described how “Margaret Mitchell Marsh, tiny, brunette, clad in spring-like apple green suit and wine hat that shaded her animated features, enchanted the more than 200 guests with her informality and her subtle humor.”

Now, 75 years and a couple of months after that visit, a documentary about the world renowned author, “Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel,” will be shown at the Douglass Theatre on Wednesday evening, the night before its television premiere on GPB. A panel discussion on the writer’s life and work will follow.

The film set out to capture the spirit of a homegrown literary hero, one who didn’t put on airs -- a quality made evident at her breakfast appearance here before the Macon Writers Club in 1936.

In the audience that morning at the Hotel Dempsey, a freshman from Bessie Tift College named Eleanor Boterweg, a Perry girl whose maternal grandpa was sheriff of Houston County, sat and watched Mitchell, who had been a last-minute fill-in for the club’s scheduled guest speaker.

Boterweg, who died in 2002, once described the scene to her son, Tom Low of Brunswick, telling him how Mitchell, then 35, took off the corsage she was wearing and stuck it in a water glass.

“My mother said that was just a nervous thing,” Low recalled last week by phone. “My mother said (Mitchell) was so cute, that she had never spoken in public and she really entertained the crowd.”

According to the Telegraph’s account by McKay, Mitchell began by explaining why she was there in words that, three quarters of a century later, lend a glimpse into the unpretentious Atlantan’s gift for understatement: “I have written a book that covers Atlanta and the rural section around it from 1861 to 1873 -- a story of peace, war, reconstruction and a return to normal life.”

Pamela Roberts, the GPB documentary’s executive producer, says the film may dispel some misconceptions about Mitchell.

“We think, ‘OK, she was probably just a little housewife who sat down in her apartment and churned out this great big book.’ Then you find out that she is this very forward-thinking modern woman who is essentially, without ever using the term, an early feminist,” Roberts said.

“You’ll learn that Margaret Mitchell was really complicated and yet delightful. ... She didn’t take herself too seriously. She didn’t ever say, ‘I’m a great writer.’ ... Never bought a house, never bought fancy clothes, never bought new car. ... She sounds like a saint. But on the other hand, she’s a swearing, just this rebellious person who just doesn’t care what society thinks about her. ... She really is a rebel for all time.”

One of the reasons Mitchell came to Macon in the spring of 1936 to discuss her about-to-be-published epic -- besides a close friendship with Telegraph reporter Susan Myrick -- may have been to get a sense of how the locals might take to it.

Filmmaker Roberts, though not referring to Mitchell’s Macon visit, said, “Number one, she wanted to make sure that Southerners liked ‘Gone With the Wind.’ She really didn’t care too much about the reaction of any other part of the world or the country, but she sure cared about how Georgians and Southerners viewed her book. I mean, she was an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Georgian. She didn’t want to live anywhere else. She had no interest in traveling anywhere else. This was her home and she loved it. She made no apologies for it.”

Mitchell, who died Aug. 16, 1949, after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta, shared some of her wit and down-home charm with her Macon audience in 1936.

McKay’s piece on Mitchell’s talk to the Macon Writers Club noted how Mitchell, in her speech, made mention of a last-minute query, a telegram, from her novel’s publisher: “Question here did Southerners use tooth brushes in 1864.”

“No,” Mitchell said she’d replied in a wire, “they picked their teeth with Bowie knives.”

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.