NEW YORK — “I was beguiled by Savannah,” John Berendt wrote 30 years ago, having no idea at the time the influence that proudly isolated old city on the Georgia coast, the one Margaret Mitchell called “that gently mannered city by the sea,” would exert on his life. Nor, yet stranger, the influence he and his book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” would in turn come to have on Savannah. Some within the coastal empire would say that Berendt, in concert with Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros.
, saved Savannah, if salvation can flow from tourist dollars, a restored urban core and an embrace of a juicy soupçon of murderous infamy. How? It wasn’t that Berendt discovered or changed Savannah so much as he described its contradictions far better than anyone else: its shabby squares lined with impossibly gorgeous townhomes, its genteel embrace of Southern transgression, its intimate isolation, its intolerant tolerance, its disdain for the very different Charleston, South Carolina, its unique hold over both Old South blue hairs and blue-haired art students from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Before “Midnight” became a phenomenally successful work of (mostly) non-fiction, lasting an astonishing 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and before it became a 1997 Hollywood movie staring John Cusack and Kevin Spacey, Savannah preservationists could rarely stop the wrecking balls aimed at the city’s heart.
“Midnight” changed everything. The.