Savannah Gets Boost From ‘Midnight’ Book
When John Berendt was working on his book, people would ask him, “Are you writing a bestseller?”
“Are you crazy?” Berendt would reply.
Against all odds, Berendt’s book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (Random House, $25), made the bestseller list.
Nearly three years after it was published, “Midnight” is still a bestseller. It’s done so phenomenally well in hardcover - more than a million copies are in print - that the paperback edition waits and waits.
If you somehow missed the “Midnight” express, it’s the book that put Savannah, Ga., on the map.
Berendt’s work of “literary nonfiction” revolves around the four murder trials of Jim Williams, an acerbic Savannah antiques dealer charged with shooting his young male lover. But it’s Savannah’s Old Southern charm and its eccentric citizenry that Berendt captures so well, from a voodoo priestess named Minerva to the outrageous black drag queen Lady Chablis. Chablis has become such a celebrity thanks to Berendt that she penned her own memoirs - “Hiding My Candy” - earlier this year.
Berendt says he is delighted that his book has boosted the careers of pals like Chablis, who have joined him on an eight-city “Midnight in the Garden Jazz Tour” this month.
“I have gotten something I never expected to get out of my experience in Savannah,” Berendt says during a telephone interview from New York, where he lives.
“I think it’s only fair Savannah got something in return. The major thing Savannah has gotten is a huge bump in tourism because of the book, and that’s brought the city money. And although this book is about a whole lot of quirky people and strange events, it’s a very sympathetic and affectionate portrait of Savannah, and I think Savannah understands.”
Berendt, a magazine editor and columnist (he was once editor of New York magazine), first visited Savannah in 1982, lured by cheap airfares and a desire to briefly escape Manhattan. Seduced by the city’s architecture and its idiosyncratic ways, Berendt pretty much moved to Savannah for five years to write his book. In the Savannah Berendt discovered, society ladies compared notes on their husbands’ suicides, and Minerva, the voodoo priestess, cast spells so Jim Williams might beat his murder rap.
Berendt’s first agent told him “Midnight” was too local to sell. He got a new agent, and Random House bought the book, publishing it in January 1994. Good reviews and word-of-mouth got the “Midnight” bandwagon rolling.
Nearly three years later, Berendt, 56, has had plenty of time to reflect on why his first book has reached such a large audience.
“It reads like a novel,” he says. “I wrote it in the spirit and shape and form of a novel, so it’s entertaining. It’s real, which makes it even more stunning, because these crazy, strange things are actual; I didn’t make them up. They’re not the product of a weird mind. It’s about a magically beautiful American city that most people didn’t know anything about, but they can go to it if they want. There it sits, undiscovered. The narrator is nonjudgmental, and believe me, that’s important.”
Perhaps readers, too, are less judgmental than Berendt expected. “Maybe by now the public has heard enough about drag queens and homosexuality that they’re not shocked by it,” he says.
Next up for “Midnight” is a movie version to be directed by Clint Eastwood next year.