Booknotes

Mr. JOHN BERENDT, AUTHOR, "MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL": I'd--in an interview, the same as on the book--on the flap on the jacket, we didn't want to say who shot whom. I did want to say there was a shooting here and there's a murder trial, but because the murder happens in the middle of the book, I didn't want to reveal who got it and who did it. So there's one thing I don't say. But there's--and--you know, books ought to have a little bit of suspense as you go through, and there's quite a bit--minor suspense, major suspense, and you don't want to burst any of those bubbles beforehand or in an interview.

Mr. BERENDT: Right now, 86th printing. Random House--oh, you would think, `Why don't they publish them all right away--print them all right away?' It costs something to store a book in a warehouse, and Random House has--and most publishers, I guess, have it down to a science how many they need for the next few weeks and Random House--every publisher has a code--and you're pointing to Random House's right there--and you can tell because the first 10 printings have no letter, no A, B, C. The teens have a B, the 20s have a C in it. And then you take the C or the D or the E or the F to get what decade it's in, and then the lowest digit is the second number. So if it's C987654, then it's 24th printing. That's the code. And that's just Random House, and others have other codes.

Mr. BERENDT: Twenty-five thousand. It was going to be 30. They cut back all their books--this was January '94. They cut--they did 25,000, then quickly another three. And then they were doing five and seven and a half and ten and twelve, and now it's up to the 150 and that sort of thing. But they know what the demand is- the bookstores are going to order--this is a science I don't know much about, but the publishers know. So they print enough, hopefully, to satisfy the demand.

Mr. BERENDT: No. I mean, I--people would ask me when I was writing this book, `You think it's gonna be a best-seller?' And I'd say, `You kidding? Look what's in it, the strangest kind of people.' I mean, a black drag queen, a man who has a bottle of poison that could kill everybody in Savannah if he put it in the water supply, and on and on--odd, quirky kind of people. I was hoping for critical acceptance. First I wanted people to say--or critics to say, `Yeah, it's a book. This man, who writes columns and magazines and articles, has written a book.' Then I hoped they would say, `It's a good book,' and possibly, `It's a very good book.' But I wasn't really thinking of sales.

I hoped I would--yeah, I didn't get an advance, so I was writing a column in Esquire and other magazine things while I wrote it, and I was even. I wasn't in debt and I just hoped that the book would be critically accepted and it might make a little money, but I didn't really even think about best-sellerdom. It didn't occur to me to even hope for that.

Mr. BERENDT: That's a statue in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, and it's in a family plot. It is not a headstone, it's not a tomb, it's ornamentation. And when Random House was designing a cover, I said, `You ought to take a look at Bonaventure Cemetery, one of the most beautiful places in the world.' So they sent a local Savannah photographer out there. I thought that was very good karma. Here I was, a New Yorker. I'd come down to Savannah, written a book about Savannah and gone back to New York. And for Random House to select a photographer from Savannah I thought was great because it allowed Savannah to have some creative input into the book.

Anyway, he went out to Bonaventure Cemetery for two days looking for something that captured his interests and he found this girl on the second day. He had a very, very tight schedule. He had five days to get the photograph. And he saw her and he took her picture, and he did funny things in the darkroom to make her stand out, and it's a magically, seductively beautiful photograph. It's mysterious. It just captures exactly what I would've hoped for in a cover.

Now as you--no, a lot of authors have approval of the cover. That doesn't mean you can design it, but it does mean you can say, `No, I don't want that one. Let's do another one.' I was worried that I would see a cover that was OK, that I couldn't reject but that wouldn't help the book. This cover is sensational, beautiful, wonderful cover. I couldn't've hoped for anything better.

Mr. BERENDT: What happened when the book came out is that tourists went out to Bonaventure by the hundreds, posing with this statue. The family that owns the plot was horrified--I can understand why--and they removed the statue and it's been gone for three years. However, recently, I understand--I'm very pleased about this--the family has donated the statue to the local art museum, the Telfair Academy, and it will reside inside the Telfair and it will draw a lot of people to the museum and that will help support it. And that's a--lovely, I think. It's become an icon that represents Savannah, and you can see it on T-shirts and cups and charms and pins and flags and all sorts of tie-in items that people in Savannah are manufacturing to go along with this.

Mr. BERENDT: Almost exactly a million and a half--1,500,000--a staggering number and we've kept it in hardcover for that reason.

Mr. BERENDT: All right. I am the narrator of the book. I'm a New York magazine editor and writer, go down to Savannah by chance on a trip with friends, and I'm overcome by the beauty of the city. It's a wonderful, magical city. And so I went back to New York, and three years later...

Mr. BERENDT: It was 1982. Three years later I decided, Well, I've --you know, I've been writing magazine columns and I never was able to get deeply into anything. I would, you know, skitter along the surface and every month I'd have to do something different. It was very challenging and lots of fun, but I'd wanted to wallow in something I could get in deeply. I knew that I'd have to write a book if I was gonna to do that. Question: What should the book be about? And I looked at a lot of subjects and I thought back to Savannah, and I thought, `What a wonderful place to set a book.' The city is unusual, it's undiscovered--it was undiscovered. And the people I met were extraordinary. And I also knew about the murder case.

The way I wrote the book, I took the liberty of putting the shooting in the middle of the book so that you have met all the relevant characters and you knew all about Savannah before it happened. So you were surprised, as a reader--as surprised by this shooting as the people in Savannah were. But, in fact, I knew before I started I had that to work with. So that is what you do. You--it's really a portrait of Savannah with a murder case thrown in. It all sort of ties together. It's actually a lot of different stories and the trick was to make it all sound like one. There were many ways I was able to do that. The subtitle of the book is "A Savannah Story," even though it's hundreds of them.

And the characters in the book--there's a chapter about a character--but he appears in several other chapters later. So in that way, reappearing characters tend to pull this together into a community, tightening that community. And, of course, the murder case is a continuing threat after it happens.

And there's one character named Joe Odom, who pops up regularly, commenting on my progress through Savannah, making funny jokes about my writing this movie, and never pays attention to the fact that it's going to be a book. To him, it's a movie. We're all gonna get to be in it. If we're in what he's writing, it will turn into a movie and we'll all be in it. So from the beginning through the end of the book, there's this sort of Greek chorus of this character, a real person, commenting on my progress. So it all pulls together, and it's a narrative about my experiences in Savannah and a lot of unusual things happening.

Mr. BERENDT: He died in January 1990.

Mr. BERENDT: Well, the first--the papers--what happened is that he came down--he was at home. He came down to get the paper and make himself some tea or coffee, and he collapsed behind his desk and died--what everyone thought at first was a heart attack. But the irony is that he died in the very spot where he would have fallen if Danny Hansford, the man he killed, had actually fired a gun at him, as he claimed, and hit him. He'd have fallen right where he eventually died nine years later.

Mr. BERENDT: I happened to be in the Atlanta airport on my way from Miami up to Atlanta, through Atlanta to Savannah. I'd gone to Miami for--I don't know, I forget what. And I got the word that he had died. So I--and I was on my way back to Savannah anyway, and I went back and--so he died. In fact, that's the end of the book. Well, there you go, there's some suspense right there. But the--before--what happens before is suspenseful, so...

Mr. BERENDT: I--he was very forthcoming. He was one of the best interviews I ever had in my professional life in magazines. I mean, he was very forthcoming, he was very funny, very articulate and, like many Southerners, a wonderful storyteller. That's the one thing I noticed about Southerners--they tell stories all the time. The story might last one sentence, but it's part of the tradition of communicating; you tell stories and it's charming. It enlivens life and it certainly enlivens literature. So I borrowed that technique in telling the story. The narrative style of my book is storytelling. And so he was terrific.

I wasn't--we weren't bosom buddies by any means, but he was very friendly with me. I read him a couple of chapters. He agreed to cooperate with the book, but I said to him, `You know, you may cooperate and all that, but you won't see the book until it's published. You will have no editorial rights.' But as I was writing it, I would read him chapters that I knew he wouldn't have any problem with, and a couple of them about himself. And he was very pleased and impressed, and he said, `You know, when I agreed to let you do this book, I didn't know whether you were going to do a cheap, sensational book or a very careful literary one. I didn't care because I wanted my story out. But now I see you're doing a very careful job and don't you let anybody rush you,' he said, which I thought was very good. And so--and I didn't let anybody rush me. I didn't have an advance. I didn't owe the book to a publisher. So I took my time, and it took seven years.

Mr. BERENDT: He was 59.

Mr. BERENDT: It turns out to have been AIDS. I did not know. He had a double life. He'd married three times and he died of AIDS. He died after the time frame of my book. I didn't include it. I thought--I could have, but I thought that's just one more issue to put in the book that's very full already, so I didn't.

Mr. BERENDT: Yes.

Mr. BERENDT: They're both alive.

Mr. BERENDT: They live outside Syracuse, New York, in a town called Manlius. And they really did instill in me a great respect for literature and for books and for writing. My mother wrote a novel in 1951 that was based on our family. It's called "Small World" and she used her maiden name, Carole Deschere, and Simon & Schuster published it in 1951. And my father has, for 30 years, been writing a book and--a very scientific book, philosophical book, and he's still doing it.

And--so anyway, but I've always--writers were always held in great esteem in—at home, and reading. My father read to me and my sister. He read "The Swiss Family Robinson" and he read "Tale of Two Cities," a number of other books.

Mr. BERENDT: Well, they're thrilled by it. And, in fact, my mother wanted to--and father wanted to see every clipping that there was. And I said, `You know, I'll give you a fax machine, it's a whole lot easier, instead of going and mailing something every time there is something.' `No, no, we don't want a fax machine.' They don't--the whole technology thing was horrible. So I said, `Trust me.' So I gave them a fax machine and they can't live without it now. So I send them everything that comes by that I can, you know, get my hands on, I fax to them. So they've kept in touch and we talk all the time. So they feel very much involved and they're thrilled, of course, with what's happened.

Mr. BERENDT: Oh. It's beyond words. It's a thrill.

Mr. BERENDT: Really?

Mr. BERENDT: That's a great thrill because I'm a fan of his, as you can imagine. You know, somebody said to me--you know, when the book came out, it got good reviews and then it got onto the Best Seller List and people said, `How do you feel?' I said, `I feel wonderful.' And then something else might have happened and, `How do you feel now?' I said, `You can only feel so good and nice things happen all along.' Now that, what you just told me, is just a thrill, and I feel as good as I can possibly feel and I'd probably bust if I felt any better.

And it--what it is, actually, I spent seven years doing this, taking a long time, and friends were saying, `Are you ever gonna finish this book?' And people in Savannah thought after a while that I wasn't really writing one. I mean, I'd gone down there in '85, and by '88, '89 there was no book and there were rumors in Savannah that I really wasn't writing one, that I was becoming an eccentric, just like all the other people in Savannah, and my quirk was that I was supposedly writing this book I really wasn't writing.

And I--you know, it began to be a little bit pressure-filled. I mean, friends were saying, `Do you think you'll ever finish? This is getting to be serious now.' So now that--I did spend the seven years and the book has been received very well. I feel that I didn't waste a moment, that all--every moment of those seven years was well-spent.

Mr. BERENDT: Well, I wrote a column for Esquire...

Mr. BERENDT: ...every month. And I wrote annual reports for big corporations on occasion, two or three a year, and that was very good to do if you need to earn some money. So that pretty much covered my expenses. I mean, it didn't provide any extra, but it meant that I could live fairly comfortably in Savannah, you see. Life is--or has been not too expensive.

Mr. BERENDT: Born in Syracuse. My parents were both Manhattanites. They were born and raised in Manhattan, moved up to Syracuse. My father represented an industrial coatings company and traveled a bit in central New York, so we lived in Syracuse, a nice, medium-sized town for some little kid to grow up in. And I went to public schools in Syracuse and then I went to Harvard and was on the Harvard Lampoon, and came to New York to get a master's in English literature. And I was approached by Harold Hayes, who was the editor of Esquire then--'61, the end of '61--and I was asked if I wanted to be an editor of Esquire. And, of course, I did want to be. He said, `Well, we've got other candidates. Here's six months of Esquire. Critique them and give me 20 ideas for pieces.' And Esquire then was in its great glory days. It was a large-sized magazine and Norman Mailer was writing for it, and every name you could think of.

So I didn't--I thought, `Well, it's funny. He called me up. I don't think he's got any other candidates. But I'll go on home and I'll'--and I went home and I--up to Columbia and I wrote a critique and I wrote 20 new ideas and I handed them in. And he said--what he had said originally is, `When you give them to me, I'll get back to you in two weeks.' And I thought to myself, `I'm going to make these so impressive that he'll have to call me up the next day and give me the job,' which he did. But I later learned--when I had lunch with him, an old high school friend of mine, Michael Herr, the author of "Dispatches"...

Mr. BERENDT: He does. And I'll get to that in a minute. Mickey--we call him Mickey. He calls me Johnny; for me, he's Mickey. We grew up from, you know, grade school right through high school and I admire him enormously. He said, `When did you get your job at Esquire?' And I said, `December.' He said, `Well, that's when I was up for it, too.' So it turns out the only two candidates were two men who had gone to high school together, grammar school and high school together. Neither one of us knew that the other one was a candidate. And he went on to write "Dispatches" and several pieces of that appeared in Esquire in the '60s, and it's a classic.

But you mentioned--he did write a blurb on the back. There are four blurbs. Two people I knew beforehand and two I had never met. So that's the--that's how blurbs work. Sometimes you ask a friend, tentatively. Well, Mickey asked me if he could read my book, and he did and he said he loved it. And then I told my editor at Random House that Michael Herr loved my book. She said, `Do you think he'll write a blurb?' I said, `I can't ask him to do that. I just--I'd be so embarrassed.' She said, `Well, I don't know him as well as you do.' So I called him up and he said, `I was waiting for you to ask. Of course I'll write a blurb.'

Mr. BERENDT: Berendt, yes.

Mr. BERENDT: Bubbly quote.

Mr. BERENDT: I think so. He's held in great esteem. I think all of the four people who--and, you know, if you're--there's certain things that make you buy a book. You've heard--maybe you've read a great review, an interesting review; maybe a friend has said, `You're going to enjoy this book,' you're not sure. You go to a bookstore and you hold the book, you look at it and maybe you do it two or three times in a bookstore. The cover might tip the balance. Certain things tip the balance. If you've been told good things, you hear good things, something might tip the balance and make you think, `All right, I'll read it.' And that's where a blurb that catches your eye or impresses you might come into play. I don't think, because of a blurb, you go out and buy a book, but it could be one of those things that just make you buy it rather than put it back on the shelf.

Mr. BERENDT: Well, that's the title I came up with. Because I was an editor at Esquire, we always spent a lot of time thinking of just the right title for the pieces. And so I gave all of my chapters titles, just to add more atmosphere. Well, in one of the chapters I go with the murdered defendant and his voodoo priestess--I mean, a law--a very expensive lawyer, but he also hedged his bets and hired a voodoo priestess. Well, she took us to what she called the flower garden, because he wanted her to put a curse on a district attorney. So--there it is, Chapter 18, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

Well, she said to me and to him, `We're going to go to the garden,' she said, which is the graveyard. And she said, `We have to go at dead time. Now you know about dead time. Dead time lasts one hour--half-hour before midnight to a half-hour after midnight. First half-hour's for doing good. Second half-hour's for doing evil. Seems like we need a little bit of both tonight. We best be on our way.' So that's in that chapter. And I sat down, I wrote the chapter, I thought, `OK, title. I should call it "The Garden." "The Garden's" a wonderful image. She called it sometimes the flower garden, but "The Garden"'--loved the word `garden.' And midnight--I mean, `And at the stroke of midnight,' she said, `you can scoop up graveyard dirt. It's powerful stuff to throw on someone's porch to put a curse on them.'

So I thought, `Well, we were there at midnight. "Midnight --Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."' I mean, all of this seemed to have come from what she had told me. And I put that down as a title for a chapter and I thought, `Ooh, wait a minute. You know, that's--Savannah is a garden city of these wonderful squares, and it's got good and evil.' And I thought, `What could be better? I mean, `midnight's' also a very evocative word.' It's an eight-word title, very long--longer than most others. I thought, `Well, this may not be commercial.'

So when I sold the book to Random House, I said, `I'm not going to be a prima donna. If you don't think "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is commercial, it's too long, tell me and I--and we'll--I'll try to think of another word,' and they said, `Don't change it on our account. We think it'll work.' And on top of that, my editor said, `You're going to have to have a subtitle to explain what this is about.' So I said, `That's easy, "A Savannah Story."' And originally, that was going to be on the cover. That would've made 11 words. But the designer of the cover, Carole Carson, who's utterly brilliant, decided it didn't need to be on the cover. "A Savannah Story" is inside on the title page.

Mr. BERENDT: Very conservative--not politically conservative, but socially conservative. We wore, you know, white bucks, chino pants, button-down collar. This was the '50s; this is what you did.

Mr. BERENDT: From high school in '57, from college in '61. And Syracuse was--I mean, it was very conformist. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to such crazy, weird characters. I'm delighted by them because they break the mold, their freedom, they, you know--and it's something that--it's--not unsafe, but, you know, I mean, I'm not--it's hard to say 'cause Syracuse was a very conservative place. People live according to the book.

Mr. BERENDT: Not that book, but the book.

Mr. BERENDT: I did. I was one of the editors of the Nottingham Crimson--not Crimson, Bulldog--it's the Harvard Crimson. Nottingham Bulldog. It's amazing how many schools have bulldogs for mascots--many, many, many, many. I don't know why. I guess it's tough--I mean, team tough.

Mr. BERENDT: Sort of, yes.

Mr. BERENDT: By people in my class, but Mickey Herr, Michael Herr was thought to be a genius then and he was. He was a wonderful writer. My experience as a writer was one of learning and getting better and better and better. Michael Herr started from a very high level of brilliance in writing, was someone I always admired, but the message of my career is that you can get better. Well, he has gotten better, too, but, I mean, I really became--I was awkward and I didn't quite--now--and as I went along writing for Esquire--and with a brilliant editor, Harold Hayes, running Esquire and wanting all of us to be able to write in the style of Esquire--the voice--he kept saying, `Voice--the voice, the tone of Esquire was to be knowledgeable and irreverent.' And that was the personality of Esquire in the '60s. And he insisted that all of its editors be able to write in that style.

And we also--all of us--we signed articles, we edited them, but we also wrote features that were unsigned in the magazine, so they were the house voice. We all had to be able to write that way. And among the editors then was David Newman, who, with Robert Bent wrote "Bonnie and Clyde" and did the "Superman" movies. So we--he had a pretty interesting staff put together in the '60s. And Clay Felker was on board. He later founded New York Magazine. It was an exciting place to be.

Anyway, I developed writing talents at Esquire that I didn't have. I mean, getting as much as I could onto the page in as few words as possible, keeping the reader interested--it's all entertainment, even if it's deadly serious, not a laugh in the piece or the book. I consider writing to be a form of entertainment and I use the word in the best possible sense--to seize the read--get hold of the reader's attention and keep it. In a magazine, there are all kinds of things competing for attention. There are ads, there are cartoons, there are other pieces you can flip through. Someone reading a magazine is not as committed to reading the magazine as someone who sits down with a book is committed to reading the book.

Mr. BERENDT: I applied and crossed my fingers.

Mr. BERENDT: I had been a good student. Also, I had extracurricular activities. Harvard was interested in a well-rounded student, not just...

Mr. BERENDT: I was on the track team--I was not very good, but I was on the track team. I was on the newspaper, on the--various little things like that. And I had--I was a volunteer worker after school at various places in Syracuse and I was a good student. So I had a number of the other things besides grades, too. And also, you're interviewed by the traveling representative, and if you can make a case for the fact that you're not just a grind and a successful one at that, I suppose, they were more interested in you.

Mr. BERENDT: I studied English literature, like half of the other people. This was what you did when you didn't know what you wanted to be. At first I thought I wanted to be an architect. I loved to design. So I went and talked to the head of the architecture department. And he laid out all the courses I would take as a freshman, a sophomore, a junior and a senior. I said, `Thank you very much,' walked out and never went back because I wanted to pick my own courses. So English literature was something I wanted to do anyway. I wanted to read English literature and--it allowed me a certain amount of freedom in picking other subjects I could study. But if I had been --you know, an undergraduate headed for an architecture degree, it was all laid out and that was too rigid for me, so I didn't do that. I thought, `Well, if I want to be an architect, I'll do that later.'

Mr. BERENDT: The Harvard Lampoon.

Mr. BERENDT: Harvard Lampoon--well, I went out for it. What you do is you go out for the Lampoon as an undergraduate and the competition goes on for a number of weeks and you write--each week you write a short story or an essay or as--in my case, I wrote doggerel poetry.

Mr. BERENDT: Oh, yes. It had to be--the Lampoon was funny. It hoped to be funny anyway. And I was selected. And then we had what was called Phool's Week in which you are humiliated. It's their form of, you know, what fraternities do in other colleges. It was a little more elevated. We were told we had to wear black eye patches and walk around Harvard in a black suit for a week, which we did. And you could see these people in black eye patches--I almost got hit by a car crossing the street. But--and we had to do things like--one of the--we call `phools,' P-H-O-O-L-S, as I remember. This is the great institution that Robert Benchley was on and that John Updike was on.

But nevertheless, you had to go through this humiliating few days. I don't know that they still do it. I don't think so. And play little tricks in public, like lock all the gates of Harvard Yard, all 19 gates, with big chains just before night classes were released so that big crowds would gather at each gate trying to get out. Well, this was hilariously funny to undergraduates. So that's how I went out for the Harvard Lampoon. And then for my--for four years I was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. And it culminated in 19--just before I graduated in 1961.

We had done--in my junior year, we had done a parody of the Saturday Review, a magazine most people don't know about anymore, but it was a wonderful literary magazine. We did a parody of it, and the editors of Mademoiselle in New York saw that parody and liked it a lot. And they got in touch with us just in my senior year and said, `Would you do a parody of us, of Mademoiselle, as our July issue? You be the editors of our July issue. We'll pick the clothes, but you can parody us with the photographs and the articles, and we'll pick the clothes because we want to sell these clothes through the magazine.' And we said, `Of course.'

They brought five of us down to New York and we did a parody of Mademoiselle. There was--and that was the July 1961 cover--or, rather, issue of Mademoiselle. And it was kind of smart of them to do that because the July issue of all magazines is not a good sell. So they got a lot of interest in that July issue by simply having us do it. And we had a girl--a very beautiful model on the cover wearing the Tam o' Shanter, or whatever they had picked for her. And she had a fly on her nose and people would try to brush it off on the newsstand.

So it attracted a lot of attention and articles were written in newspapers about it, and that's where Harold Hayes of Esquire thought of hiring one of these people. So he called Mademoiselle, he said, `Which of the people who did that do you think I should go and have a look at?' And they said, `Well, John Berendt.' As it happened, I had just then, that summer, graduated from Harvard and was in New York at Columbia about to get a master's in English, and he saved me from that.

Mr. BERENDT: I didn't. No. I'd be a teacher if I had.

Mr. BERENDT: I was at Esquire from the end of '61 through '69. Then I worked f...

Mr. BERENDT: I didn't write a column then. The column I did starting in '82. I always--when I left Esquire in the end of '69--I'd been there seven or eight years--I always kept touch because it was like my home, my first home as an adult. And I would write pieces through the years after that even when I was writing for Dick Cavett. I wrote--I would pre-interview people for--first, David Frost and then Dick Cavett. And then I freelanced for about four years. And then I wrote--then I became the editor of New York Magazine for two years and that was...

Mr. BERENDT: The editor. That was a wildly exciting period of time.

Mr. BERENDT: Clay had left, you see, and Rupert Murdoch had bought the magazine and installed Jim Brady as editor and he was there nine months and then he went over to the New York Post, and I was hired as editor. I was an old friend of Clay Felker's, and I still am a good friend of Clay Felker's. But I took over and for two years was the editor. And it was very exciting. It was a weekly magazine, very high pressure. And I probably didn't delegate authority as much as I should have. I wanted to control every word that--I wanted to make sure that we didn't cut too much out of that piece I loved because I wanted to, you know, have -- you know, as much going for us as possible. And I really did oversee everything. So I was there two years and then I was fired by the publisher. It turned out who--he wanted to be an editor, but he hadn't been brought up to be one.

Mr. BERENDT: That was Joe Armstrong. And Rupert Murdoch, after a few months of him, got him--sent him on his way.

Mr. BERENDT: Yes.

Mr. BERENDT: No, I had been fired--oh, it felt --I felt terrible and I felt it was unjustified. And I have a feeling that Rupert Murdoch thought so, too, because shortly after that, he asked me if I would write his annual report--and I did it twice--for the New--the News Corporation. That was fascinating. I got along with Rupert very, very well.

Mr. BERENDT: Oh, I don't think we agreed politically, but he wasn't sticky about that. He and I respected him on certain important levels. I mean, he said to me at one time--you know, he publishes The Sun, the News of the World, these two bare-breasted newspapers in Britain--and the New York Post can be pretty racy--but he also has The Times of London and various other quite respectable publications.

He said to me--after I'd written his annual report and showed him the draft, we were in London together, he said to me, `The secret is, John, I've never been ashamed of anything I've ever published.' And it's interesting. The New York Daily News had tried to go up against him. The Daily News was a morning paper, the Post was afternoon. The Daily News was locked in a battle with him, and they opened an afternoon paper to go head-to-head with Murdoch in New York.

And he was a pretty racy afternoon paper. He called it the popular press. It wasn't down market. He'd call it the popular press. It's a nice way to describe something like that. But the Daily News went after him head-to-head and they were ashamed of the kind of raciness they were gonna have to do and they didn't do it. They pulled back. They put out a morning paper in the afternoon, which doesn't fly, not in New York.

So he - and while I was writing this report, they closed the Daily News afternoon paper. And Murdoch said to me, `They were ashamed of it. They weren't behind it. I'm not ashamed of what I do. It has an audience. I may not like it, but it's for them. If the audience likes it, then I'm not ashamed of it.' Interesting.

Mr. BERENDT: After the book came out, you mean?

Mr. BERENDT: Oh. I thought you mea...

Mr. BERENDT: Yes.

Mr. BERENDT: Yeah.

Mr. BERENDT: Why did it become so successful? Well, basically, Random House tells me it's a word-of-mouth thing, meaning that it doesn't really need the media. Well--but it does. I mean, I can see that when I go on, for instance, "Good Morning America," sales of the book the next week spike. And I don't mean just "Good Morning America," but any national television or radio does have an impact. But you can do that just so many times. If the book doesn't deliver to enough people, doesn't, you know, strike a chord, people won't talk about it.

And I must say that while I was writing this, as I mentioned earlier, I was aware of its being an entertainment. And I wanted to say everything I had to say, but I wanted to hold the reader. And each chapter--I wanted in each chapter for the reader to get something out of it--a little thrill, a little surprise, and so it's manipulation, but the kind of manipulation that --you'd be a fool not to put into a book that's supposed to hold people's interest.

And what you have is a lot of elements in this book that prompt people to talk about it. There's this incredibly seductive city of Savannah that people--generally had not heard much about. There are amazingly wonderful characters with ironic senses of humor that I had not encountered before. The Lady Chablis, Joe Odom and Jim Williams, three characters, larger than life--I didn't have to help them in order to make them.

You know, Philip Roth -- wrote the book "Counterlife" and he has a major character who's a novelist. The novelist complains that most people are not fully formed literary characters. They don't give you much to go by except the initial impression, then it's up to the writer to make them compelling and interesting. Well, that may be true, but if you're a novelist, you can make up anything you want. You can start with a germ of an idea. If a person suggests something to you, you can add to it.

I stumbled into a mother lode of literary characters in Savannah that--who needed no help from me to be absolutely depositable in a book as they were and speaking in the way they spoke. So I was lucky. A lot--that's luck.

Mr. BERENDT: Yeah. I'll tell you--no. There were certain very--to me, very important--there was--Jonathan Yardley had a rave review in The Washington Post that amazed me because I know how prickly he can be. And I even wrote him a letter and I said, `I know how sparing you are of such praise,' and I said, `All I can say is thank you,' and he wrote me a nice letter back.

Mr. BERENDT: Very early. It was within a couple of weeks. The New York Times Daily did not deign to review my book. And it's...

Mr. BERENDT: Never did. The Sunday Times didn't review it and didn't review it, and Random House said, `You know, you ought to look at this. This book is getting good reviews all over the country.' Now a publisher can do that. They can say, `Please look at the book.' Well, now they can't control the reviews. The review could damn the book. But they can say, you know, they have--they know the people at the book review, so they can say, `Look at this book. You should look at the book.'

Well, it had been looked back by a pre-reviewer who didn't know what to make of it. But the second in comma--I'm told--this is only thirdhand. I'm told the second-in-command of The New York Times Review--Book Review took it home, read it, and said, `Yeah, we gotta review this.' So they gave it to a reviewer, a newspaper reporter in Houston, who loved it, and there wasn't a single negative word in the review. It was a lovely review.

Mr. BERENDT: Yes. But also, Random House sent a copy of the book--before it was published, they sent it to "Good Morning America," and it just happened to land on the desk of someone who read it and who loved it and who got in touch and said, `We would like John Berendt to do--take us on a tour of Savannah, meet all these characters.'

So they were talking with me on the phone and I would tell them who would be good to include and after a while, after several days of this, I said, `By the way, who's going to interview me?' They said, `Nobody. After talking to you, we can tell that you're gonna be a guest reporter, guest correspondent.' I said, `Well, great.'

So I think it was the first week the book was out, "Good Morning America" had me on for a good six to eight minutes--I forget--and I--they pre-produced it and they taped it, they did a beautiful job. And they--I went around Savannah going to major characters and major--well, you're outdoors in Savannah. It's a beautiful setting. And that had to be important in getting the word out quickly.

So I would say--and The New York Times finally--as I say, they did review it in the March 13th issue of the--which was about six weeks after the book had come out...

Mr. BERENDT: '94. But it already had been on the best-seller list, so without The Times, it got on anyway. And so those two--well, those few that I've mentioned were certainly important. And it all--cumulative. I also was on "This Old House," which is amazing, 'cause they don't ordinarily talk about books. What happened was that for some reason the producers of "This Old House" decided to go and redo a house in Savannah. I don't know if it was because of my book or not, but they were gonna spend seven or eight weeks in Savannah, in a town house, completely redoing it, as they do, showing you how to do the doorsill and the--I don't know--plasterboard or whatever.

And they took a house right across the street from Mercer House where the shooting happened in a beautiful square, Monterey Square. And they asked me to come onto one of the programs and take them on a tour of Savannah. So I did. I showed up and they said, `We'll do six or seven minutes.' So we started out and we got to six or seven minutes, it was going beautifully. They said, `Let's keep on going.' So for 18 minutes, I was on "This Old House."

Well, what we did not know at that point was that that was the biggest --that was the PBS show with the biggest ratings on PBS, because you get not only the PBS viewers, but you get all the house-building viewers who join PBS to watch it. Ten million viewers watched "This Old House." It was a year and a half ago. So we were well into it--the book's run on the best-seller list, but amazingly, that was a very powerful show. So there--yes, I would say media certainly helps. And also, the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which caught some eyes here and there, too.

Mr. BERENDT: Very well. That just came out last week, so we don't know about that. That's the unabridged. But the one you held up first, the abridged one, has--that has a--you know, Publishers Weekly has--an audio best-seller list and that's been on it for many, many weeks. They have--Random House has sold 70,000 of those and it pains me because it's abridged. So now we have the unabridged, which I prefer, naturally, as an author, I would prefer the unabridged, which…

Mr. BERENDT: I didn't read it. I wanted to, but my agent said, `You're gonna be in a--in the studio for a month. You'll hate it.' Besides, the people who did the unabridged--it was first done by Recorded Books, which is a different company. Random House, knowing I was pained by an abridgement, bought the unabridged version over there from Recorded Books and has repackaged it as their own unabridged book.

Mr. BERENDT: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BERENDT: I don't think so. Daniel Wattenberg, who's the writer--oh, they do say it. What is it? `The hottest non-fiction book of the '90s.' I like that. That's about all I liked about that piece. What he did was to go to Savannah and talk to people in the book and he came across one character who took issue with my portrayal of her. I must...

Mr. BERENDT: Mandy. I should say--and it's perfectly fair to say so--that she said that, you know, she was--she had no choice but to be public about who she was because people came after her to see her because she was a character in the book. Actually, her name isn't Mandy. She could easily have remained private. Her name is something else. At any rate...

Mr. BERENDT: Nancy Hillis. Yeah.

Mr. BERENDT: Perfectly nice person, but she has been very active in promoting her appearance in the book. She opened her house to tourists for $5 a tour and she gave the tour, she had a gift shop. She flew to California to ask Clint Eastwood if she could be in the movie--Clint Eastwood is directing the movie. So she's been very energetic in promoting herself as Mandy, which I applaud. I mean, I don't blame anyone in the book for saying they're in the book and making money from it. I mean, I encourage any character who wants to, to go ahead and, you know, use it. It's perfectly fair.

She was annoyed at me because we had did a jazz show. I was approached by the organizers of the New York Jazz Festival and asked if I would take part in a jazz show called "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," based on Johnny Mercer's songs. And Johnny Mercer was a Savannahian. And they said, you know, Margaret Whiting will sing and Gerry Mulligan--when we first--Gerry Mulligan would open the thing, playing a solo, "Midnight Sun." And I said, `Of course.' And I would read a couple of passages.

We then took that on the road last fall to eight cities in 10 days. Now Mandy was sorely peeved at me because she wasn't included in this road show of Johnny Mercer's songs. She is a singer and she wanted--now I had nothing to do with selecting who would be in it, but she was sorely peeved. And that's probably why she unloaded on me and said that a lot of what I had in the book about her was exaggerated or even untrue.

Well, I don't--I didn't exaggerate that much about her. I mean, she said that she did not have an affair with Joe Odom, another character. My impression was that she had a brief one. But, you know, that was my impression. I built on that for the...

Mr. BERENDT: Yeah.

Mr. BERENDT: Well, that--I haven't figured out why they did it because it really--there's--what--`Where's the beef?' is what most people said after reading that supposed exposé. The author of the piece spent, I think, he said later, 20 minutes with this character. And I have to say that when this came out--shortly after this came--hit the stands, it was revealed that this character had, in real life, been promoting herself as a former Miss Tennessee.

Well, the Tennessee branch of the Miss America Pageant found out about it and told her--and sent her a letter and said they would sue her if she continued to promote herself as a former Miss Tennessee because she had not been. So that does speak to her credibility somewhat.

Mr. BERENDT: It's over 100 times. Never at this length, I must tell you, on air.

Mr. BERENDT: I'm amazed at the inaccuracies that creep into print. There are interviewers who tape interviews with me, and I can tell when they haven't listened to the tape because there are certain locutions I simply never utter and they find their way into print. And on occasion, recently, I have very politely asked if I could hear the quotes attributed to me--no offense meant, but it's very easy to get things wrong. And I have been horrified when I've seen a draft of a piece using words I haven't uttered in describing certain things involving other people. So I've been able to correct some things. But that has astonished me. But there have been several really wonderful pieces. I'm not saying that they were that laudatory, but they were very beautifully written and funny and--no, but I've --there's been a lot of good writing, but I have been struck by how much inaccuracy I've seen.

Mr. BERENDT: The movie is--the target date is November 21st, which is astonishing. Clint Eastwood, who's marvelous--I mean, he was in Savannah from May 5th to June 15th shooting in Savannah, and then he went to California to do some indoor shots for the next month and he was finished by the 14th of July. That's fast. He's famous for being fast and he's very--he's always ahead of schedule and under budget. And now he's editing the film and, by God, he may very well be done in time to release it November 21st, which means, Warner Bros. tells me, that he'll have to have a finished print by November 1st. Scary. It's scary how fast...

Mr. BERENDT: Well, I guess I'll see it shortly after November 1st. I have been very careful not to be too present during this. I was asked early on if I would write the script and I knew that that was the bad thing to have--that I shouldn't. I'd have to tear my book apart, leave things out, compress things. And the book works. I had no assurance that my script would work. So I thought, `Let's leave well enough alone. Let's let someone else do it.' And John Lee Hancock, who's a very good writer, took it and wrote a script, and he did make certain changes. I knew he would. I knew he'd have to.

For one thing, they told me, you know, `The movie of this book, it's gonna be hard to get it all in.' Well, I knew that. If they put everything into a movie, it would be 25 hours long. That'd be the movie I'd write, 25 hours. And so they're smart they didn't hire me. So they said, `You can't have four trials.' There were four trials in this, all about the same shooting. `You can't have four trials in a movie. It just--you can't hold the suspense. So we'll have one.' I said, `Hmm. Really? I mean, you can't ever have a story that has more than one trial? Can't you do a trial in half a minute, sort of a flashback?' `Can't do it.'

Also they said, `You're a passive narrator in the book. That works for a book very well because the reader can sort of look through your eyes and identify with you. But in a movie, you can't do that. You can't have voiceover. You can't have somebody wandering around through Savannah, as you did, barely getting involved in the story but being in the present all the time. You have to get more involved.' And I said, `Well, gee, I really can't write this book--or this movie. But I understand what you're gonna have to do, go and do it.'

I did say to them, `If you want my character more involved, one route you can take is that I did'--I didn't report this in the book, but I did get so fascinated with the murder trials that I would advise Jim Williams, for the third and fourth trials, certain things he should ask his lawyer to put emphasis on and a character or a witness or two to call. And--so I was more interested in the defense strategy simply because I was fascinated by it.

So I said, `You can go that route and make the'--John Cusack plays me in the movie, by the way--`you can make him more involved in the strategizing.' Well, they may have gone a little too far, I don't know. But on that level, you can be--the narrator could become more of the story.

Mr. BERENDT: Well...

Mr. BERENDT: Yes.

Mr. BERENDT: The question was: Was it...

Mr. BERENDT: ...self-defense?

Mr. BERENDT: Was it self-defense? In the book, I never say what I think about anything. You can tell I'm delighted by all these characters, but I never say, `This is good and that's bad.' I never say that 'cause I realized early on when I started experimenting with how the tone--how the narrator should speak, I realized, `These characters are so wonderful. Just let them tell their stories.'

So when it got to Jim Williams, I felt the preponderance of evidence against him was convincing. I knew him very well. He did, at one point, confess to me, a semi-confession in the book--that is on tape, I have it--where he says, `It didn't happen the way I said in court that it happened.' His story to the DA and in court and all the trials was that he and Danny Hansford--here I am, ruining the suspense, but still, there's plenty of things that are suspenseful in the book. They went out to see a violent horror flick, came back at midnight and were drinking. And Danny Hansford flew into a rage, as he was wont to do--and he was a 19-year-old kid and Jim was about 50--flew into a rage, kicked in the TV set, smashed a few other items and Jim went to call the police. And they grappled a bit, and so he didn't call the police, he called a friend and they sort of talked a bit.

Danny Hansford then went out of the room, smashed a clock, did a little more damage in the house--smashed a grandfather clock, that is, came in with a gun and shot at Jim, said, `You're--I'm leaving tomorrow, but you're leaving tonight,' shot at him twice and missed. Jim then grabbed a gun from the desk drawer, fired at him and killed him--three times, bang, bang, bang.

The DA said it didn't happen that way. What happened was that Jim Williams shot and killed Danny first. Shot him, walked around the desk, two more shots into his--back of the head and the back--in his back, and then went and did the--Jim Williams faked the damage in the house, and then he got another gun and pretended--and shot at his own position from where Danny Hansford had been standing, faking two shots from Danny Hansford. That's what the DA said. And then he put the gun under Danny Hansford's hand.

Well, there are about nine serious points of evidence that support the DA. I won't go into all of them, but the defense was able to knock down a couple of them. But I find it troubling that there is still some evidence that is not accounted for by the defense and it seemed to me that Jim Williams was provoked, definitely, by Danny Hansford. Hansford was running wild. A month earlier, he had taken a gun and fired it into the floor of Mercer House, setting a precedent for himself that he would grab a gun in Mercer House, that Danny would, the kid would.

So anyway, my--I hope I'm not getting too confusing here, but--throwing too much evidence around. But I felt that--I was convinced that, while provoked by an outburst of anger by Danny Hansford, Williams was not shot at first. That's my own private opinion.

Mr. BERENDT: Seven years. I would interview people constantly. The first year, I interviewed people on tape and without tape--I mean, really heavy interviewing to get it all right away. And I didn't do any writing the first year.

Mr. BERENDT: I was in Savannah. I moved to Savannah in 1985. From '85 to '86, I just interviewed, researched, spent hours at the Georgia Historical Society reading up. And I hadn't written anything. Then I began to write and talk and see things happen. As I was--so from '86 to '90 in Savannah, I was writing and researching and finding--I always carried with me a little notebook, and I always do, right here. This is always in my back pocket.

Mr. BERENDT: Yes. Always in the back pocket, so that I'd be ready. I was going to be in Savannah three weeks at a time. I decided at the outset I'd go down there for three weeks, spend three weeks there, then come back to New York for a few months, write, and go back down there for three weeks. Then I realized when I was down in Savannah that things would happen if I was simply there and it would make sense to stay in Savannah. So I got a full-time apartment in Savannah and for five years I was there. And things just happened.

You know, I would go and I'd meet people trying to get some information about things I knew about, but in the course of everyday events, I'd stumble on something that was wonderful and I felt should be in the book. So I really put myself in Savannah. I was in no hurry. I didn't owe anybody the book or the money back or the advance back 'cause I hadn't gotten any. So I wrote--I got an apartment, and I describe an apartment in the book that's a carriage house downtown. Actually, I wasn't there for very long. I moved--after I was in that place, I moved to another apartment in an apartment house. I didn't want to go into housekeeping detail, so I left that move out of the book.

But I was on a fourth floor of a small apartment building that Johnny Mercer's father had built. And I had a view of all of downtown Savannah, the historic district. I was just above treetop level, so I had near, medium and distant views of steeples and cupolas and trees, and I could see summer storms barreling up the Savannah River, big clouds in the summer. It was just wonderful. I was right on Forsyth Park, a very beautiful park. So I wrote there while I was--most of the time I wrote right there looking out at all of this.

Mr. BERENDT: I had a computer. I wrote on an early Apple. Then I kept upgrading as I went along. And that's where I wrote, taking my time. I'd get up, first thing I would do, I would have coffee and sit right down. Unpresentable--no shower and...

Mr. BERENDT: I'd get up around 8 or 9, and I would--I'd write or I would organize notes or I would make appointments to see people, but always would start--always do some writing. And, of course, every month I'd have to do my Esquire column. So I'd break away and do research for my Esquire column and write that. And then when I sent that by FedEx, and later by fax, when I had a fax, when faxes became, you know, widespread, then I'd turn back to the book, and sometimes it would take me two days to get back into the rhythm of it because I'd have to steep myself into the information on the chapter I was working on and get into the rhythm and the flow and the ambiance and I'd start out and it wouldn't work. For two days sometimes it would take me to come down from having written the Esquire piece to get back into the book.

Mr. BERENDT: I have been looking and I've told all my friends, `Even if you think it's a hairbrained idea and you have one for me, please tell me.'

Mr. BERENDT: I haven't decided. I've looked all over. I've been all over. I've--in fact, I'm going in a week to Venice. I've spent several months in the last two years in Venice. At first, I went in February of '96 and I wanted to look for a book--I mean, you talk about magical cities--well, Venice has been discovered, but it's this wonderful, wonderful town--city. And I realized immediately that my Italian isn't very good and it would be very frustrating to write a book in Venice because it's hard to get information, if you are a reporter, as I am, you know, to ask specific information--you know, and people talk too fast. It was--I became depressed. But I was fascinated by Venice, as I have always been. I went back in June of '96 looking for not a book now but maybe an article for The New Yorker and I thought I could focus on not just the Fenice and fire but other things--but particularly the English-speaking expatriates of Venice--fascinating story.

So I went back again this past February interested in the Palazzo Barbaro, which was owned by an American family for 100 years and a lot of films have been shot in it. "Brideshead Revisted" was shot, part of it, in there; "Wings of the Dove," which comes out this fall, part of it was shot there; Henry James stayed in the Palazzo Barbaro. It was owned by a Boston family. A fascinating story. But then I realized not quite what I wanted, even for an article.

Then I stumbled on something really marvelous and it relates to a Henry James short story--actually a novella called "The Aspern Papers," set in Venice. It's about an old, old woman and her maiden niece who lived in a broken-down palazzo in the far distant quarter of Venice. She had been the mistress of a great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, for that read, Lord Byron. And Henry James wrote this wonderful story. Into Venice comes--and this is, like, 1880s it's supposed to happen. Into Venice comes a scholar of Jeffrey Aspern's who didn't know that this mistress of Jeffrey Aspern's was still alive. But now that he knows she's alive, he wants those papers because she must have a treasure trove of Jeffrey Aspern's papers.

So he schemes and plots and gets into the house--convinces the two old ladies to let him rent a room and he'll fix up their cars and would--actually, well--all he wants is the letters of Jeffrey Aspern. Well, one thing happens after another and the old lady dies. And he confesses to the young `old maid' niece that he wants the letters and he's a scholar and she says, `You can have them if you marry me.' And he's horrified and he said, `No, no, no,' and he leaves the house and he wanders for a day on the Lido and he comes back and he says, `Yes. I've decided. Yes, I will marry you.' She says, `It's too late. I burned the letters, every one of them. It took an awful long time. There were a lot of them.'

Well, something along those lines has happened again in Venice, and it's not an easy story, and I'm gonna try to get it. I'm gonna go after, in a week from now, trying to get it.

Mr. BERENDT: I don't know. Whenever I get the idea for it, it will take a long time to do it. I'm very slow and very ponderous and very careful.

Mr. BERENDT: Thank you.