MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF FACT AND FICTION

Before publication in February 1994, commercial expectations for Midnight were modest. The first printing was a moderate 25,000 copies, but as booksellers quickly talked it up to their customers, and delighted readers talked it up to other readers, Midnight became a word-of-mouth smash. It entered the New York Times bestseller list in March 1994 and has been there, with a few gaps, ever since — 134 weeks in all, 78 printings, and no end in sight. Over 1.1 million hardcover copies are in print. And almost three years after publication, no date has even been set for release of a paperback edition. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is, without a doubt, the publishing sensation of the decade.

Midnight has become a Macarena for middlebrows, a cultural-commercial craze whose epicenter is Savannah. In the storied old port city, it is now called, simply, “The Book.” Random House publicist Pamela Cannon says The Book has stimulated a 46 percent increase in tourism to Savannah and added 24 new businesses and 1,500 new jobs to the local economy.

One local bookshop alone has sold 15,000 copies of The Book. Clint Eastwood, soon to begin directing the movie version, dropped by John and Ginger Duncan’s map-and-print store on Monterrey Square to view John’s slide show based on The Book. The Duncans have sold 6,000 copies. “We sold 33 yesterday,” said Ginger, clutching a fistful of dollars. A shop called The Book is dedicated exclusively to the sale of Midnight epiphenomena. A local news documentary about the book is screened in the front room. A recording of the book’s elderly pianist/singer Emma Kelly plays on the cassette deck elsewhere. The audio-cassette version of Midnight plays in the back room, also the home of the childhood library of Jim Williams, the Savannah host-with-the- most whose four trials for murder form the heart of the narrative. And prominently displayed alongside signed copies of The Book are copies of Hiding My Candy, the autobiography of Lady Chablis, the local drag queen made famous by The Book. For Hiding My Candy, the 8th-grade dropout pocketed a $ 100,000 advance from Simon and Schuster.

And the two distinctive visual icons associated with the book — the “Bird Girl” statue on the cover and the facade of Mercer House, Williams’s lovingly restored Italianate mansion — have assumed a multiplicity of merchandisable forms in the shop: postcards and breast pins, tie clips, watercolors, note cards, and coffee mugs.

Midnight has so reawakened interest in the songs of Savannah-bred Johnny Mercer, whose images of moonlit southern mildness form a recurring motif in The Book, that a New York impresario has staged an eight-city ” Midnight in the Garden” Jazz Tour dedicated to Mercer’s music. Catching up with it in Jacksonville, Fla., on a Tuesday night, I found a sellout crowd of thousands transfixed by the concert of Mercer songs keyed to readings from The Book by Berendt, Chablis, and others. The sound system fed back and Chablis rubbed some lines, but for a jazz concert based on a prestige book, the midweek sellout was impressive. After all, we do not listen to jazz or read books anymore in America. Much less in Jacksonville.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil deserves its astonishing success. It is compulsively readable, a fascinating mix of an In Cold Blood-style true crime story, a comedy of manners, and a wonderful evocation of the eccentricities, beauties, and legends of a grand old city gone to seed and then reborn.

The Book is a murder mystery nested in a framework of interlocking character sketches. Williams, a gay antiques dealer with a discerning eye and an acid tongue, is accused of murdering his young lover, Danny Hansford. Williams’s humble country beginnings are lacquered under an aristocratic finish acquired during decades of restoring Savannah’s neglected architectural splendors and picking through the auction houses of the world for priceless objets d’art.

The second male lead is Joe Odom, the charming scapegrace who keeps his sang-froid in hot water: former tax lawyer, cocktail pianist, squatter in temporarily unoccupied mansions, a Rhett Butler for our time. Odom’s love interest is “Mandy,” a big-haired lounge singer and voluptuous ex-beauty queen once crowned Miss BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) in Las Vegas.

Low comedy is provided by Lady Chablis, the self-mythologizing black drag queen. Dark presences — like Luther Driggers, a hapless chemist with a vial of deadly poison, and Lee Adler, a crass, self-promoting historic preservationist — are offset by light ones (Emma Kelly, the sweetly self- sacrificing elderly piano player Mercer dubbed the “Lady of 6,000 Songs”). And Berendt himself is a character, the bewitched outsider who secures a social niche in the Odom circle and by degrees penetrates the city’s secular rites and ruling myths.

A completely original work, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil reads like a near-great novel. And that is not surprising, for although it is classified as non-fiction, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is not all fact. In an author’s note at the end of the book, Berendt openly acknowledges the fictional license he allowed himself in manipulating time sequences: “Though this is a work of non-fiction, I have taken certain story- telling liberties, particularly having to do with the timing of events. Where the narrative strays from strict non-fiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened.”

But while the grumbling of the publicity-shy Savannah aristocracy about the book’s spilling of secrets has occasionally amused the press, little attention has been paid to the secrets of the author’s storytelling liberties in his book. Have these liberties been limited to the timing of events, as Berendt suggests? Or did he take additional liberties with character and context?

One of the risks of taking fictional storytelling liberties with the representation of real people in a work of non-fiction is that it may create containment problems down the road. What is an author to do if one of his characters revolts against her fictionally modified alter ego and insists on telling the truth?

 

II

Berendt freely discussed with me the book’s most structurally significant chronological alteration: the illusion that his own years in Savannah coincided in time with the the entire saga of Jim Williams’s arrest and four trials for the murder of Danny Hansford.

In reality, Berendt did not meet Williams for the first time until 1982, after Williams had already been convicted of murder the first time and released pending appeal. What’s more, Berendt did not move to Savannah to collect material for his book until 1985 — after Williams’s second conviction for the murder. In fact, Williams was out of jail and living in Mercer House during Berendt’s five years in Savannah.

“What I did in the first chapter — when I’m sitting with Williams and in comes Danny Hansford, screams, takes a drink, and leaves — that had actually happened on a previous occasion,” Berendt explains. “Jim was having drinks with somebody else. Jim told me about it and so did somebody else. So I reconstructed it, put myself in there. The first evening in Mercer House is a combination of a lot of stories he told me. Then afterward, I meet all these people — Joe Odom, Chablis, Lee Adler. I met all these people, obviously, after the murder, but they don’t impact the murder at all, so I simply put them right after my meeting with Jim, and it seems as though I met them before the shooting and I didn’t, but so what? All of those meetings with people were actual meetings. They took place in ’85 or later, and they are pretty much verbatim what happened with those people and me.”

Berendt concludes somewhat mysteriously: “I, in fact, am the only fictional character in the book until I catch up with myself.”

I had no reason to doubt the truth of his remark until I met Nancy Hillis. Nancy Hillis appears in the book as “Mandy.” The Judy Hollidayish character is painted into Berendt’s canvas during her daily commute. She drives to Savannah from her (fictionalized) home in Waycross, Ga. — with her knees, while layering her face in bright makeup, doing her hair and nails, and watching her soaps on the television on the seat next to her.

In the book, Mandy is the love interest of the thrice-married Joe Odom, the charismatic lady-killer whom Berendt has called “the glue,” the “link” in the narrative architecture. The two are lovers and are to be wed. Joe calls Mandy his “fourth wife in waiting”; only her pending divorce is holding the marriage up. But, explains Joe Odom, “there’s no telling when that will happen, because her attorney’s a lazy cuss who hasn’t gotten around to filing the papers yet. I guess we can’t complain about it, though, because I’m her attorney.” The two open a nightspot together, Sweet Georgia Brown’s, which ultimately fails when Joe is evicted for non-payment of rent.

Nancy Hillis says Berendt’s portrayal of Mandy, Joe, and their relationship deviates in important ways from the truth. The deviations begin with the book’s delightfully comic account of Berendt’s introduction to Joe Odom — through Nancy/Mandy — and the festive entourage centered in Odom’s townhouse at 16 East Jones Street. Mandy is the first to appear; she arrives at the door of Berendt’s apartment in search of ice. After getting acquainted, she invites him to accompany her back to Joe’s nearby house, a source of honky- tonk music and all-hours merriment that has aroused Berendt’s curiosity.

“I certainly didn’t meet [Berendt] the way he has it in the book,” Nancy Hillis told me. “I met him because he was best friends with Joe Odom and he was one of Joe’s entourage. I never knew Joe when he lived on Jones Street, which is where he has me entering. I didn’t meet [Joe] until he lived on 101 East Oglethorpe.” (Readers will remember this last address: It was the house Odom surreptitiously occupied while its owner was away in Europe.)

I asked Berendt whether the meeting happened as described in the book. “Not exactly, no,” he hedged. “It didn’t happen that way. . . . You see, somebody else came to me with the bit about the ice and the electricity.” The truth is somewhat more prosaic: Berendt met her through Joe Odom, a contact in Savannah provided to Berendt by a mutual friend before the writer ever arrived in town.

More important, Hillis says that “the romantic relationship between Joe Odom and me just didn’t exist.” She says they never planned on getting married: “We were business partners and I loved him dearly like a brother.” Odom would have made an odd choice for a husband, she explains, given that she understood what was obvious to those in Joe’s circle: Joe was not strictly heterosexual.

“I always knew that Joe did not like girls,” Hillis says. “It’s just something you knew. Joe did not, I don’t think, think of himself as homosexual, but he certainly dabbled in that neck of the woods. It’s not that simple, because some people don’t wear their sexuality on their sleeve. And we did not have a relationship that I found it my business to ask him. I already knew.

“I know some of the things he said. For instance, a very good-looking guy came in and Kathleen, who was our cocktail waitress and managed our bar, and I both just went, ‘Goodness, he’s so good looking! Joe goes, ‘Yup, best I ever had,’ and we went, ‘What?’ “‘Oh, yeah, girls, he’s left-looted: Y’all don’t need to be looking over there.’ Those were his exact words. Now what would you think?”

Joe Odom died in 1991, and his death certificate identifies “H.I.V. infection” as the underlying cause of the pneumonia that overcame him. Although Odom’s AIDS death preceded publication of Midnight by more than two years, it is not recorded in the narrative.

Hillis believes Berendt suppressed this information because it would have complicated his depiction of Odom as a heterosexual. “I have been point-blank asked by people . . ., ‘When and why did Joe die?’ And I say a disease that a lot of my friends died of, and that’s AIDS. I try to be just as nice as I can . . . but I’m not gonna lie. And John can’t stand that.”

According to Hillis, the author tried to conceal the cause of Odom’s death at a public discussion of the book in Savannah. “He was asked the question from the audience, ‘What did Joe die of?’ And he said, ‘Some sort of cancer, maybe leukemia.'”

When I asked him about the omission of Odom’s death, Berendt replied, ” First of all, I couldn’t get that information.” He then added a reason that rendered the first answer moot: “Joe was alive when the book ends. The book was over when Jim [Williams] dies, and Jim died years before Joe. He didn’t die in the span of time the book covered. So that’s the end of that one.”

That would be the end of that one if Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil were a conventional non-fiction narrative. But Berendt liberally compresses radically varying timespans to make them appear contemporaneous in Midnight. For example, a character named Serena Dawes interacts with Berendt in the book despite the fact that the real-life model for Serena died in 1974, more than a decade before the author’s move to Savannah.

So maybe the question of why Odom’s death was omitted should be left open.

In my interviews with him, Berendt quickly conceded the question of Odom’s sexual orientation. “He was bisexual,” Berendt said, and appeared to claim, alternately, that he had misperceived the relationship between Nancy Hillis and Joe Odom — and that his omission of the other side of Odom’s sexual identity was a permissible exercise in dramatic selectivity. “The gay part of his life is absolutely uninteresting,” Berendt said.

“By the end of my being in Savannah, I knew that [Hillis and Odom] were not at all [romantically involved], they weren’t even speaking,” Berendt told me. “First, I was under the impression that there was some romantic stuff. Joe could easily go to bed with women and did. And I thought that that’s what was going on. And when I portrayed their relationship I seized on that part of their knowing each other. That I will concede, that it did not continue that way, and I now wouldn’t be surprised to learn there was no sex. Here the portrayal of them is what I would say is of a short period of time — the way I saw it — and indeed may not be correct even for that time. That license there — I thought that that was kind of a nice story. That’s more license than I took with any other characters.”

Hillis thinks that extra-literary calculations were at work, that Berendt made Joe heterosexual and coupled him with her to keep Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil from being dominated by characters from the city’s gay subculture and thus relegated to a gay marketing ghetto. It is true that the book is drenched in the gay subculture. Its central event is the shooting of a young gay man and the four trials of his older male lover on the charge of murder. A drag queen is perhaps its most memorable supporting character.

So if Odom, too, had been portrayed as gay, perhaps that would have upset the delicate balance Berendt strikes in the book between gay and straight Savannah, upper crust and demi-monde. It is also true that Savannah is home to a thriving gay community. The book touches on the important early role of the gay community (discreetly referred to as the city’s “bachelors”) in the restoration of the city’s historic district. But for the most part, the story’s gay characters are not viewed as residents of a gay world. The author seems most comfortable alluding to the city’s gay life through kitschy indirection, like his references to a prominent Savannah resident’s efforts to spy on Williams’s annual gentlemen-only parties.

At first, some things Berendt told me seemed to lend credence to Hillis’s theory that he had masked Odom’s sexual identity behind a heterosexual relationship with Hillis to balance out the book’s other characters. “There was certainly enough in the book already on the subject of homosexuality, with the black drag queen and the gay murder,” Berendt said, “and it wasn’t strictly required of me to bring that out in someone who’d been married three times, and his homosexuality was not really a factor in the time I met him.”

But later, Berendt hotly denied heterosexualizing Odom for commercial reasons. “No one can accuse me of shying away from the theme except possibly you,” he said. “Random House was not concerned about the gay aspect of it, because they didn’t think it was a ‘gay book’ as such. It’s got gay material in it for sure, and I think it’s really stretching the point to suggest that I didn’t put in all the gay things because I didn’t want to overdo it and make it a ‘gay book.'”

But to Hillis, no other explanation makes as much sense. “Now that he’s acted so ugly, I’ve asked myself, ‘Why did he put me in the book? If he despises me this much? Why did he make me famous?’ And as I sit back and reflect, it’s got to be because he needed me to make it a rounded book and sell to a larger audience. It was a business decision.”

 

III

Did she say “ugly”? According to Hillis, Berendt’s behavior toward her since the book s publication has been characterized by rude slights that have escalated into personal warfare both open and covert. She cites many examples.

“What’s she doing here?” Berendt demanded as he turned his back on Hillis when she appeared at his discussion of the book in Savannah. (The organizer of the event, Jeannie Sims of a firm called At Your Service, confirmed Hillis’s account.) The author reduced Nancy’s mother’s elderly caretaker to tears in an angry phone call in which Berendt threatened to take Hillis to court for producing a tour map of Savannah related to the book (the caretaker took the call because Hillis was absent from the house). And he has spread unkind gossip about her to reporters and mutual friends.

Some of this behavior she writes off as the result of a specific grudge: She says Berendt thinks she turned Joe Odom in to the authorities for forging her name on bad checks against her account. (She denies ratting out Odom.) But she attributes much of Berendt’s hostility to a vindictive effort to marginalize and punish her efforts at literary whistle-blowing.

As is true with most contretemps between two people, it is difficult to determine the precise accuracy of certain stories; it also may be that the stories are accurate, but perceptions are awry. Take Hillis’s account of an encounter between them before a taping of the Oprah Winfrey show. “When I showed up at Oprah, he tried to tell me what to say,” she recalls. “He said he didn’t want me bringing up that Joe and I didn’t have a relationship. The way he said it was, ‘If she asks you any questions about you and Joe getting married, just laugh and say, ‘Oh, Joe was gonna marry everybody.’

“I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, John.’

“He said that it is not imperative to the book. He said [the producers] don’t want any ‘negativity.’ I said, ‘I’ve never been negative.’ He said, ‘Well, you don’t follow the story line, and that’s negative.'”

One could interpret Berendt’s behavior as an innocent act of cajolery, whose purpose was to induce Hillis to conform to his literary portrait of her and Odom. Hillis, however, thinks Berendt was edging toward unseemly pressure tactics. “He tried to convince me that he was the reason I got asked to be there, and I should listen to him,” she recounts. “He said, ‘I talked to them about you coming.’ But I could tell when I walked in the room he was shocked I was there. He thought it was just he and Chablis.”

Berendt agrees he was utterly surprised to find Hillis preparing to appear on the show, but rejects the rest of her account. “When she showed up, she said, ‘What am I gonna say if they ask if we had a love affair?’ I said, ‘Say whatever you want, you were involved at first for sure.’ That’s all I said.” He said it was “absolutely not true” that he told Hillis he had gotten her the Oprah booking.

Hillis interprets another encounter with Berendt at another media event — in Savannah before a taping of Good Morning America — as a veiled attempt at blackmail. She said Berendt, in a whisper, purported to have knowledge of a specific private incident in her life. Hillis interpreted the remarks, made in the moments before a taping for national television, as an implied threat of public exposure. “It was meant to scare me away, meant to make me run,” she says. Berendt remembered the encounter but said he never mentioned the private incident to her, in a whisper or otherwise, though he did mention it twice to me in the course of one interview. Hillis denies the private incident ever happened in the first place, and ultimately, Berendt told me he would not challenge Hillis’s denial.

Even so, Berendt makes no effort to conceal his distaste for Nancy Hillis. ” Be careful,” he warned me, “because she has had problems with the law, and she’s also had problems with the truth.” He would not go on the record with details about her alleged legal problems because of his lack of firsthand knowledge, but accused her of misbehavior. “She’s carrying on a war with everybody,” he said. “She’s been telling everybody that all the books in Savannah that are signed by me in all the bookstores are fake signatures and I didn’t sign them.” Then he asked: “Do you know anyone else who would do something like that?”

He also said Hillis had charged a premium for his signature on the copies of Midnight she sold from her store, a practice he considers “dishonest.” He finally stopped signing her books when she persisted despite his warnings to stop: “At that point, someone told me she was forging the signature. I said, ‘Nancy, I don’t know if it’s true. If it is, stop it.'”

Since this article concentrates on the claims of one significant character about the misrepresentation of herself and a now-deceased major character, it is far from an exhaustive investigation of the reliability of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as a whole. Berendt, a one-time writer for Dick Cavett who edited New York magazine for two years in the 1970s, reminded me of this article’s limited scope. “You really haven’t done a thorough investigation of the accuracy of the portrayal of the characters, except for Nancy, who has an ax to grind,” he said after rattling off a list of other characters in the book who have not challenged the accuracy of his portrayals.

“You really do not have the standing to do what you seem to be doing,” he continued. “You’ve got to talk to all those people. I now take exception to this, because you have just spoken to one disaffected person and I’m willing to tell you that I took a moment in her relationship with Joe and seized on that, but you’ve got to now talk to all the others. I will personally object if you don’t. . . . If you are going to report on her complaints with me, that’s certainly fair enough, but you also have to say that you didn’t talk to any of the other major characters.”

Fine. Here’s the rundown: Jim Williams and Joe Odom are both deceased, so I could not talk to them. Lee Adler, Williams’s rival, declined to be interviewed. I did talk to Dorothy Williams Kingery, Williams’s sister, who challenged Berendt’s funny account of her brother’s efforts to carry on his antiques business after his murder conviction without letting business associates know that he was calling from jail. (Berendt said Williams himself was the source of this account, which he later corroborated with a source in Europe whom Williams called on business while in jail.) She also called the author’s account of her brother’s reliance during his legal battles on Minerva, the voodoo queen, “greatly overdrawn.”

“How would she know?” Berendt responded. “She wasn’t even in Savannah then. . . . I wouldn’t say I embellished it much.”

I also talked to Spencer Lawton, the district attorney who prosecuted Williams. “There’s a great deal about the conduct of the Williams case that [Berendt] either missed because he was unaware of it, or chose to miss,” Lawton said. He is depicted in the book as something of a bumbier who, it is insinuated, prosecuted Williams for murder rather than lesser charges at the instigation of his largest campaign contributor, Lee Adler.

Lawton declined to provide a detailed critique of the author’s account of the case; Berendt says he took particular pains to be scrupulously accurate in his account of the Williams legal case and would try to respond to any specific claims Lawton might make about inaccuracies. I made no attempt to interview Chablis, or singerpianist Emma Kelly, or the chemist Luther Driggers, or Sonny Seiler, Williams’s trial lawyer.

 

IV

Has any real harm been done, even to Nancy Hillis, by the way Berendt played around with the truth in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? While somewhat resentful at her exclusion from the Midnight concert tour and other promotional activities, she has nevertheless embraced her distorted reflection, Mandy. And, like many others in Savannah, she has capitalized on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by selling tie-in products like a video and a tour map.

Moreover, Berendt himself describes the book as an “entertainment,” which was Graham Greene’s term for the popular fictional thrillers he set in exotic places. Berendt’s exotic travelogue-true crime tale certainly is an entertainment, and its impressionistic style might suggest that readers are not to take his account of Savannah as a definitive one except in mood and spirit.

But the distinction between an impressionistic style and a hard-factual style is one that will only resonate with the kind of literary audience Berendt had in mind when he wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. “I was only thinking of the critics,” the longtime Esquire columnist says. “I thought this is not a mainstream book: It’s got a gay murder in it, a black drag queen, a city nobody knows.”

Now that the book has gone through 78 printings and raised property values single-handedly in an entire city, Berendt must bear the burdens of his book’s phenomenal success even as he enjoys its fruits. For one of the reasons people have taken such pleasure in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is that they understandably assume that the book’s wild stories are all the more amazing and amusing because it’s all true. While I find disquieting the way in which Berendt acknowledged and then breezily shrugged off a series of small deceptions in his book, and would have more confidence in him had he been more forthcoming about some of the larger ones, I am inclined to believe his strenuous denials that he fictionalized other segments of his book as freely as he did the Joe and Mandy story.

But by fiddling with the truth in a book that has become influential, even if he did not expect it to be influential, Berendt has done his readers a disservice. And he has done himself a disservice as well, because small doubts about the reliability of an author in one part of his text may provoke unwarranted doubts about his reliability in other parts.

There is another moral problem here. Real-life people portrayed in popular books have to live with the portraits that have been drawn of them, and if those portraits are fictionalized, they may lose some control over the stories of their own lives. They are entitled to restore some of that control without being carped at by the author.

But given Berendt’s hyper-aesthetic moral detachment from the events and the characters he portrays in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, maybe this isn’t so surprising. “I do not express my opinion anywhere in the book, practically,” Berendt says. “I thought I’d be criticized for not making moral points. I never say, ‘This is good and this is bad.’ I describe the light in Savannah filtering through the live oak trees and the Spanish moss.” Berendt’s narration is presented in moral monochrome: murder and charming social vignette sit side-by-side in the text, and those who fetishize the mascot of the Georgia Bulldogs seem just as eccentric as those who commune with the dead in graveyards at midnight.

Indeed, so rigorous is the narration’s neutrality that readers may be surprised to learn Berendt is convinced that his central figure, Williams, was indeed guilty of the murder of his young lover. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, he’s guilty,’ because so what?” Berendt explains. “This is really kind of a portrait, and ambiguity is sometimes better than being flat-out and saying what you think.”

Daniel Wattenberg is a contributing editor at George. His article “Was Punk Rock Right Wing?” appeared in the August 26 issue of The Weekly Standard.