By TONY FARRELL | Special correspondent

She had worked so hard to lose it, that unmistakable sound and rhythm of her native Virginia accent.

But now here she was, standing outside Selznick International Pictures in New York, where scores of young women hoping to audition for the lead role in “Gone With the Wind” had just been told to vacate the office so the weary staff could break for lunch.

The halls slowly emptied, but the slim, poised brunette remained. As the echo of excited voices finally faded away, she turned and opened the door.

“Who are you?” asked Helen Flagg, one of the production’s casting directors.

The young woman drew in a breath, tipped up her chin, summoned up the gentle cadence and lilt of her beloved Richmond, and spoke.

“I am Scarlett O’Hara,” she said. “And God has sent me.”

Nearly eight decades later, the memory of that singular moment still makes Em Bowles Locker Alsop shake her head and laugh.

Alive and well and living in Richmond today, Em Bowles Locker was a St. Catherine’s School graduate and rising senior at Vassar College in the fall of 1936 when a weekend train trip to New York with college friends turned into a “Gone With the Wind” odyssey that would culminate 16 months later in a studio screen test for the film’s title role.

At the Selznick office that day, Flagg sized her up quickly, Em Bowles recalls, then whisked her to another room where Katherine “Kay” Brown, producer David O. Selznick’s chief story editor, was on the phone bawling out an actress.

“She had a very blasphemous vocabulary,” Em Bowles said with a laugh, “and she used words I’d never heard a lady use before.”

Brown immediately hung up and watched as Em Bowles moved about the room at Flagg’s direction.

“They said, ‘My God, you’re graceful!’ ” Em Bowles remembers. “Well, I’d always been graceful. Virginia ladies were graceful.”

Brown then opened a copy of “Gone With the Wind,” published only the previous June, and asked Em Bowles to read the passage where Scarlett flirts with the Tarleton twins and the scene where Scarlett puts on her bonnet upside down.
Brown immediately picked up the phone and dialed Selznick in Hollywood.

“David, darling, you’re not going to believe who’s sitting in my office,” Brown told the boss. “Scarlett O’Hara to the life.”

Brown then put Em Bowles on the line so Selznick could hear her speak.

“You see, they had had great difficulty with the voice, and they hadn’t had anybody come in with a voice that was semi-cultivated,” says Em Bowles. “The voice was the thing.”

***

As Richmond’s living link to one of the greatest motion pictures of all time, Em Bowles can recall the events leading up to the 1939 release of “Gone With the Wind” as if it were yesterday.

The film premiered in Richmond at the Loew’s Theater (now Carpenter Center) on Feb. 2, 1940, 75 years ago next week.

Only don’t expect Em Bowles to tell you how old she is.

“When I was growing up, a lady would never mention her birthday,” she says. “And I have held to that.”

Em Bowles first learned of Margaret Mitchell’s seminal Civil War-era novel in August 1936 on her way home from Camp Michigamme in Michigan, where she had spent the summer working as a sailing and drama instructor.

During a stopover at Vassar-friend Mary Morley Crapo’s house north of Detroit, Em Bowles noticed a book opened and turned upside down sitting next to the fireplace. It was “Gone With the Wind,” and Mary was convinced that Em Bowles would make the perfect Scarlett in the movie, which was already in the works.

Once home in Richmond, Em Bowles picked up her mother’s new copy of the novel.
“I took it back to Vassar with me and almost flunked out the first month because I was reading it!” she says.

Later that fall, on the train ride to New York, Em Bowles and her college friends sat knee-to-knee in facing seats as the hills and trees of the Hudson Valley flashed past. One friend was the niece of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the financier who had optioned the movie rights to “Gone With the Wind” for Selznick.

“She was telling everybody how the offices in New York were swamped every day with thousands of girls who wanted to play the role of Scarlett O’Hara,” Em Bowles remembers. “And she just happened to mention the address.”

The girls unanimously urged their Richmond friend to try out for the part — though Em Bowles was not just another pretty face with genteel Southern manners. She was a seasoned amateur actress who had already spent three years acting with Vassar’s well-known Experimental Theater.

“In improvisations, I could be a 13-year-old one minute and a 30-year-old the next, and people would just gasp,” she recalls. “I had a natural talent. And I take no credit for it. The Lord gave it to me.”

Her work had even drawn the attention of New York talent scouts, including S. Sylvan Simon, a Warner Bros. agent who regularly visited Vassar. Simon had already offered Em Bowles a seven-year studio contract during her sophomore year, which the young student turned down in favor of completing college.

Such contracts, standard in the era of the Hollywood studio system, allowed producers to build stables of young actresses they could draw upon for multiple films.

As the train pulled into Grand Central, the other Vassar girls readied themselves for a day of big-city sightseeing. Em Bowles reminded herself of the Selznick office address.

“I went as soon as we got off the train.”

***

In voice, posture and disposition, Em Bowles Locker may have seemed the perfect belle of Margaret Mitchell’s antebellum South. But beneath her Southern charm was a will of iron.

After she auditioned for Brown, conversation quickly turned to a possible screen test — and the customary seven-year contract.

With the search for the perfect Scarlett only beginning, Selznick knew he couldn’t neglect adding new actresses to his studio stable. He also reasoned that if one of those actresses eventually won the role of Scarlett, he could hold her to the terms of her original contract for subsequent movies even after she became famous in “Gone With the Wind.”

But Em Bowles again refused the contract, chiefly because it called for heavily publicizing the Scarlett candidates before the final choice was made.

“I was shy of the publicity because of my upbringing,” she says. “I required a certain control. A lady didn’t have her picture in the paper in those days except when she was married, when she traveled abroad, and when she died.

“Why they put up with me I’ll never know. Imagine wanting to limit publicity when you wanted to have the most conspicuous role in history.”

***

In the meantime, the search for Scarlett accelerated.

Following orders from Selznick to generate publicity for the film, as well as identify fresh faces with authentic Southern roots for the role, Brown and Tony Bundesmann, a Selznick cameraman, traveled through the South hoping to find Scarlett among college students, amateur thespians, Junior League members and society debutantes.

The Southern tour, which passed through Richmond as well as the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary and Sweetbriar College, quickly turned into a madhouse, with thousands of women besieging the Selznick team at every stop.
Over the course of several Southern swings in the year that followed, hundreds of Scarlett candidates across the South were briefly filmed in black-and-white, sitting on stools and answering a few short questions.

Nearly every famous, young New York and Hollywood actress also campaigned for the role, including Lucille Ball, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Lana Turner and Tallulah Bankhead.

***

Before graduating from Vassar in June 1937, Em Bowles returned often to the Selznick offices to rehearse scenes from the novel (the movie’s screenplay was still being written) and discuss contract terms for the screen test. With help from her Michigan friend Mary Morley Crapo, she also hired a New York law firm to reach a suitable deal.

“Gone With the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell even chimed in that summer about Em Bowles’ continuing resistance to a seven-year contract.

“I can’t help but wondering what her reasons are,” Mitchell wrote in a letter to Brown. “Probably she is engaged and intends to get married soon. It seems a pity if she really is a good prospect.”

Selznick ultimately offered Em Bowles a rare, “personal” one-year contract that restricted all publicity and could be renewed at the end of 12 months if she wished.
Of the thousands of young women who had originally vied for the film’s leading role and the hundreds filmed briefly during the production team’s tour, only 32 ultimately received official studio screen tests.

Of those 32, only 20 — most of them New York and Hollywood actresses — were tested on color film, wearing full makeup and costume, and performing a “Gone With the Wind” scene from memory with a supporting male actor.

And of those final 20, one hailed from Richmond.

***

When Kay Brown, who had become a lifelong friend, came to Richmond 30 years later to visit Em Bowles, she divulged what had happened Feb. 15, 1938, the day of her screen test at the Famous Players-Lasky (now Astoria) Studios in New York.

“It took them an hour to make me up and get the hair exactly right,” Em Bowles recalls. “I was astounded that it took so long.”

To test for Scarlett, she wore a deep green dress with a low-cut neckline filled with lace fichu that had been worn earlier by Goddard and Hepburn. But the Selznick team didn’t have to struggle with the dress the way Mammy does with Scarlett in one of the film’s famous scenes. Shocked and delighted by Em Bowles’ tiny waist, the wardrobe staff had to rush to take the dress in.

The screen test scene, directed by Bundesmann and drawn from novel excerpts, featured Scarlett declaring her love for Ashley Wilkes early in the novel. Richard Carlson, a seasoned Hollywood actor, was flown in from California to play opposite Em Bowles as Wilkes.

“It was quite a lot of dialogue with a lot of movement,” she recalled. “But at the last minute, Tony told me to sit in a chair, not move a muscle, not have any expression on my face.”

“And, of course, I didn’t know any better,” she says. “If it had been on the stage, I would have said, ‘Well, that’s crazy!’ because I knew stagecraft. But I knew nothing about film.”

The lack of energy and passion in her one-and-only screen test effectively ruined Em Bowles’ chances of winning the role of Scarlett O’Hara.

Three decades later, Brown revealed the truth. Brown told her that Bundesmann confessed before his death in 1967 to purposely sabotaging Em Bowles’ test at the request of Edith Marrener, a young actress who also tested for the part and with whom he was rumored to be having an affair. Marrener, barely known in Hollywood at the time, later changed her name to Susan Hayward.

***

By the end of 1938, as the world now knows, David O. Selznick finally found his Scarlett.

“No one was more thrilled and delighted by the appearance of Vivien Leigh, who was really perfect for the role,” recalls Em Bowles. “She was an experienced English actress, and young enough. All the American actresses were a little too old. It made a big difference, just two or three years.

“Not for a minute have I had a regret,” she adds, “because I had talent, but I had no experience — no technique, no knowledge, no professional film exposure.”

Still certain of her abilities, Selznick offered Em Bowles the role of each of Scarlett’s sisters as production on the film ramped up in 1939. But after the excitement of testing for the lead role, she decided to turn down the opportunities.

“He offered me a film contract every year for three years,” she recalls. “He was always so solicitous and kind and interested in helping me.”

And in a twist of circumstance worthy of an Oscar-winning screenplay, Em Bowles learned later that British-born Leigh, unfamiliar with American Southern accents, had been given the voice track from Em Bowles’ failed screen test to study as she crafted Scarlett O’Hara’s speaking voice.

“That’s what I was always told,” she says, marveling at the role Leigh ultimately played in the classic film. “She used my soundtrack to capture my accent.”

***

Exhilarating though her time with “Gone With the Wind” had been, Em Bowles never returned to film or stage.

Of the final 20 hand-picked actresses who tested for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, she is the only one who did not go on to act professionally — though her special bond with the film continued.

When the movie opened in New York in January 1940, David Selznick invited her to meet and greet the celebrities who poured in.

“I was then escorted by the oldest-living Confederate veteran and the oldest-living Union veteran to the front row and seated in the center,” she says.

Then, from her front-row seat, her chin tipped up, Em Bowles Locker, along with countless stars and special guests, watched as the first color film to win an Oscar filled the enormous screen.

At the “Gone With the Wind” premiere in Richmond the following month, she led a procession from Capitol Square to Loew’s Theater and spoke to the audience about the film and her special part in bringing it to life.

Later, at a special celebration of the film at the John Marshall Hotel, she and childhood friend Frank McCarthy — a Virginia Military Institute graduate who would go on to serve as a wartime aide to Gen. George Marshall, assistant secretary of state and become a producer for the motion picture “Patton” — led the Grand March and Exhibition Waltz.

In the years that followed, Em Bowles modeled for the John Robert Powers Agency in New York and served as head of its special vocational school for models. She went on to work as an assistant to actress Helen Hayes; freelanced for The New York Times, Saturday Evening Post and Atlantic Monthly; edited a book on Woodrow Wilson; and was the only woman among seven commissioners appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower to the Woodrow Wilson Centennial Celebration Commission in 1956.

For the film’s 25th anniversary in 1964, she was invited by the mayor of Atlanta, where “Gone With the Wind” premiered in December 1939, to appear with actress Olivia de Havilland, who played Melanie in the film. She traveled again to Atlanta in 1989 for the movie’s 50th anniversary.

***

Em Bowles returned to Richmond for good in the early 1950s and married second husband Benjamin P. Alsop Jr.

Mother to one daughter from a first marriage, she remains active in Virginia cultural and historical causes. In 2009, she proposed the idea of the Virginia Women’s Monument, a project approved by the General Assembly and due to break ground in Capitol Square this year.

She still drives herself to monument commission meetings.

Looking back, Em Bowles ventures only a guess at what special Southern quality the Selznick team saw in her more than three-quarters of a century ago — and what caused her to walk away from the stage and screen forever.

“I had been brought up never to look in the mirror, except to make sure every hair was in place, every hem straight, or to see that the line in the back of your stocking was straight,” she says.

“But you must have no conceit or vanity at all, and you had to live up to the greatest excellence you could in whatever it was that you were doing.”

The dulcet voice is a blend of determination and humility all but gone with the wind in this bold, new century. But it sounds perfectly natural coming from a daughter of Virginia already looking forward to birthday number ...

Come now, Em Bowles, as God is your witness, won’t you please tell?

“Do the arithmetic,” she laughs, adamant to the last.

“A lady never says.”