Word: berendt
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...only taken the LADY CHABLIS two years to move from the suburbs of contempt to the metropolis of fame. John Berendt anointed her America's second most famous drag queen (after RuPaul) when he wrote of her in his best-selling blockbuster Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, soon to be a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Several TV appearances and lots of press later, the belle of Savannah, Georgia, is doing what all divas of a certain age do: releasing memoirs. Hiding My Candy doesn't just relate Chablis' life, but also offers recipes, a lexicon...
Clint Eastwood says he won't star in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. However, he will direct the tale of a murder set in Savannah, Georgia. Producer Arnold Stiefel, who bought the screen rights for a modest $300,000 before John Berendt's book became a best seller, couldn't be happier: "It's good nobody in Hollywood has time to read...
...read books that have intrigued me, but nothing like this," says Dan Hendricks of Tyler, Texas, who recently went to Savannah to "follow the book." Like other students of Berendt's eerie travelogue, Hendricks stopped in at Club One to see the Lady Chablis, the former Miss Gay Georgia who provides wry commentary in the story on Savannah's racial climate. With the help of a bookstore owner, Hendricks also found Jerry Spence, who appears as a hairdresser to several other characters, and got his autograph. "Not a day goes by that people don't ask me to sign their...
...tremendous popularity of the book is something Berendt, a former editor of New York magazine and current columnist for Esquire, had not anticipated. A native of Syracuse, New York, he got the idea for his book three years after he took a weekend trip to Savannah in 1982. But the first literary agent to whom he submitted his manuscript turned it down, claiming it was too local and uncommercial. "When I was writing it people asked me if I thought it would be a best seller," says Berendt, "and I said, 'Are you kidding?' I thought it would...
...publisher did. The book's authentic popularity has been boosted by an aggressive publicity campaign. Random House sent Berendt on an unusually extensive 38-city media tour and several times has sent him to Savannah to shepherd reporters on a personalized author's tour. Cathie Matthews, a real-estate broker from Little Rock, Arkansas, saw the promotional ingenuity up close. When she bought the 400,000th copy of the book in December, inside she found a hand-written note from Berendt, telling her to call Random House for a free trip to Savannah. She paid her visit last week. Berendt...