Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  Emma Adler’s mother was Emma Walthour Morel, a large and domineering woman known around town as “Big Emma.” Big Emma was one of the richest people in Savannah, being the largest stockholder in the Savannah Bank, and she had a forceful personality. As one family friend put it, Big Emma was the sort of person who wasn’t happy unless she had a table to pound on. Stories about her had become legend in Savannah. At home, she kept a padlock on the refrigerator to keep the help from stealing the food. She would get up from the table ten or fifteen times in the course of a dinner party to go into the kitchen and unlock and relock the refrigerator. Later on, after the guests had left, John Morel would slip into the kitchen and tip the help generously in an effort to soothe feelings bruised from an evening of Big Emma’s abuse.

  Well into her nineties, Big Emma could still be seen driving around Savannah at the wheel of her Mercedes limousine with her German shepherd sitting next to her on the front seat and an ancient black chauffeur, dressed in full livery, sitting in back. The chauffeur, who had worked for Mrs. Morel for more than thirty years (and for her mother before that), was permitted to drive her smaller car but not the Mercedes limousine. No one but Big Emma was permitted to drive that one; it was her exclusive domain. One recent noontime, she drove downtown to the headquarters of the Savannah Bank on Johnson Square to sign some papers. Before setting out, she had called ahead and told the bank’s trust officer to meet her with the papers by the curb in front of the bank. She was in a hurry, she said, and did not want to be kept waiting. Twenty minutes later, Big Emma turned the corner into Johnson Square, the massive German shepherd sitting at her side and the old uniformed chauffeur cowering in back. She drew up to the trust officer, but never quite came to a complete stop. The trust officer trotted alongside the limousine, handing papers through the window, pleading, “For heaven’s sake, Emma, stop the car!” Big Emma glided along at eight or ten miles an hour, scribbling on papers and handing them back, one by one. They were halfway around Johnson Square when she handed the last document back to the trust officer, rolled up the window, and sped off.

  Of all the tales told about Big Emma Morel, the one most often repeated was her vociferous opposition to the marriage of her daughter to Lee Adler on the grounds that he was Jewish. Big Emma was vehement. She bellowed. She orated. She pounded on tables. She would not listen to arguments that John Morel, her own husband and Little Emma’s father, was one-quarter Jewish himself. When Little Emma stood her ground, Big Emma turned sullen. She refused to take her daughter to New York to buy her a wedding dress. Lee Adler’s mother took her instead. At the wedding rehearsal, Big Emma stood as far away as she could from the Adlers. Then at the reception after the wedding, she refused to let the Adlers join the receiving line. She froze them out. That episode was still remembered today, twenty-five years later. And it was the reason why the man standing outside Cynthia Collins’s house with his hands in his pockets compared Emma Adler favorably with her mother.

  At seven-thirty on the dot, a beaming Cynthia Collins opened her front door wearing a long black dress and carrying a black lace fan. “Come in, everybody,” she said cheerfully. Her guests filed in and wandered among the card tables set up in the living room and the dining room. As soon as they found their place cards they sat down, and within minutes the tables were full. Conversation subsided to a muted hum, and the sound of shuffling cards swept through the house like autumn leaves blowing across a lawn.

  Not being a bridge player, I joined two other nonplaying guests—a man and a woman—in a small library off the living room. The man had long white hair and a benevolent smile fixed on his face. He was, I gathered, a much-respected figure in the community. The woman was perhaps forty and smoked a pale blue cigarette. Across the room, two maids in crisp black-and-white uniforms stood beside pitchers of Manhattans, martinis, sherry-and-tea punch, and water. Cynthia Collins came into the room, flush-faced and smiling. “Well, the first rubber’s started on time, so I can catch my breath for a moment. I hope y’all didn’t wait outside very long in that awful heat.”

  “The curbside chatter was all about Lee and Emma,” said the woman with the blue cigarette.

  “You know, I thought about Lee this afternoon,” said Cynthia, “while I was writing out place cards for tonight. You still have to be careful who you put with whom, because of the uproar over the Hyatt. Even now. We have Lee to thank for that, of course.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said the other woman. “It was dreadful. At the height of it, you couldn’t go to cocktail parties. You couldn’t do anything. People got into such awful arguments. It was easier to just stay home.”

  “My sister-in-law and I are not on speaking terms to this day,” the white-haired man said solemnly. “However, I must say I’m rather grateful for that.”

  Cynthia Collins glanced discreetly at her watch. “Water!” she whispered to the maids.

  “It’s always all or nothing with Lee,” said the other woman. “If he can’t have his way, then nobody can. He follows a scorched-earth policy.”

  “And he does shout,” said Cynthia.

  “My dear, he does more than that. Don’t you remember that business with the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  “Lee had a disagreement with one of the other members of the board of the National Trust and pulled a pistol on him at a formal dinner. I think it was in Chicago. A couple of years ago.”

  “Oh, that’s right!” said Cynthia. “I’d forgotten. But it was a toy gun, as I remember. The way I heard it, Lee didn’t actually accost the man. He presented the gun to him and suggested he shoot himself with it.”

  “Maybe that was it,” said the other woman.

  “People were aghast. There had apparently been some kind of shooting in the poor man’s family not long before, which made it positively ghoulish. Jimmy Biddle was president of the National Trust at the time. He stepped in and told Lee he was completely out of line and to take his seat. It was all very tasteless and embarrassing.”

  “I guess that’s what I was thinking about.”

  The white-haired man sat back in his chair, casting his eyes from one woman to the other like a spectator at a tennis match.

  Cynthia turned to me. “We must sound very catty to you,” she said, “but years ago Lee was our hero. We were his disciples. Because of Lee, we all moved downtown when it was still slummy and not very safe. It was exciting. The Hartridges even bought a townhouse next door to a whorehouse on Jones Street. In those days, Lee was doing something magnificent. He was an idealist and a purist. He was saving downtown. Of course, he didn’t actually move downtown until much later. He and Emma stayed out in Ardsley Park where it was safe, while the rest of us moved downtown and pioneered. The Cunninghams, the Critzes, the Brannens, the Rhangoses, the Dunns—the whole board of Historic Savannah lived downtown, except for Lee. The Adlers didn’t stick their necks out. They talked one game and played another. And now all he seems to care about are those damned awards and cozying up to people like Prince Charles.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He became impossible to deal with,” said Cynthia. “He was never much for democratic procedures in the first place. When he was president of Historic Savannah, he did just as he pleased and rarely consulted the board beforehand. It all came to a head with the Hyatt. We were all against the hotel. It was originally supposed to be a fifteen-story building that would have towered over City Hall. The whole board voted against it, including Lee. Then the board took a second vote on whether to make their opposition public. They voted to wait until they’d had a chance to talk with the developers. But Lee was adamant. He wanted a public confrontation right away. The board held firm. Since he didn’t get his way, Lee decided to launch his own attack against the hotel. First he withdrew his annual contribution to Historic Savannah—seven thousand dollars, which he’d earmarked for the director’s salary. That was typical of Lee, by the way, to specify some high-profile use for his donation instead of givi
ng money with no strings attached the way other people did. That’s Lee, the one-man show. If he can’t run it, he doesn’t want any part of it. You can hardly blame the board for throwing him out of Historic Savannah.”

  My ears pricked up at this. “I thought it was Lee Adler who broke with Historic Savannah,” I said, “not the other way around.”

  “Lee was definitely voted out,” said Cynthia, “and what made it so poignant was that the people who voted him out were his friends and disciples. And the vote was unanimous. The minutes of that meeting have disappeared from the files—mysteriously—but you can ask Walter Hartridge about it. He was president at the time. He and Connie are playing bridge in the next room.”

  “The saddest part,” said the other woman, “was that things would have worked out a whole lot better if Lee hadn’t stirred things up on his own. At one point, the developers offered a compromise that was better than what we finally ended up with.”

  “I had the impression,” I said, thinking back to what Adler had told me, “that Adler quit Historic Savannah over a disagreement concerning housing for blacks in the Victorian district.”

  At this, the other woman stubbed out her blue cigarette. “I can’t take it anymore!” she said. “It makes me so damn mad! Cynthia, I don’t care where we are on the schedule. I’m ready for a drink.” She went over to the table and poured herself a Manhattan.

  “Lee Adler did not quit Historic Savannah! He was thrown out,” said the woman. “That was in 1969. He didn’t start Savannah Landmark in the Victorian district until something like five years later. One had nothing to do with the other. Savannah Landmark is nothing but an ego trip. Of course, he pretends it’s more noble than that. He portrays himself as a preservationist with a social conscience. He says he’s creating a racially mixed neighborhood. Bull! He’s creating a new black ghetto. It’s not true integration. It’s segregation all over again.

  “Lee was devastated when he was forced out of Historic Savannah. He’d been president for six years. It was his life. He had to show Historic Savannah that he could do it on his own somehow, and he seized on the Victorian district as his vehicle. He hit on a scheme to use government money to buy and restore historic houses for subsidized tenants. It had nothing to do with pious social aims. It was just a way of financing a preservation project with himself at the head of it. He says he’s restoring houses without displacing longtime residents—as if the Victorian district was historically black, or even mixed. Well, it wasn’t. Until the middle of the nineteen-sixties, it was a white, middle-class neighborhood. If Lee hadn’t been so damned stuck on himself, the private marketplace would have taken care of the Victorian district. And, believe me, blacks would still have been well represented downtown. Public housing is needed, I’ll grant you, but the Victorian district is about the worst place for it.”

  The woman explained that the houses in the Victorian district were mostly wood-frame dwellings, which meant that the fire insurance was very high and that the houses had to be repainted every three years or so because the intense humidity made the paint peel quickly. “Costs like that are indefensible in publicly subsidized housing,” she said.

  “And Lee’s not doing fine restoration work at all,” she went on. “He’s gutting the houses and ripping out nice little Victorian touches, like stamped-tin ceilings. And he’s not keeping the houses in good shape. Take a look at them—all of them, not just the few he likes to show off. The paint is peeling, the porch railings are broken. Two or three years after they’ve been restored, his houses blend right in with the unrestored houses next to them.”

  Through the door I could see the maids moving from table to table, collecting the empty water glasses.

  “And if I may be so bold,” the woman went on, “what’s so damned awful about gentrification? Gentrification was fine with Lee when it suited him in the historic district. He’s stopped gentrification all right, and he’s also killed real estate values in the Victorian district. It’s a buyer’s market, but there are no buyers. In the name of preservation, Lee Adler has stopped preservation cold.”

  But Adler had told me, I said, that restoration in the Victorian district had encouraged private investment there.

  “That’s a flat-out lie, and no one knows it better than Lee Adler. One of his sons bought a house on Waldburg Street and restored it magnificently. But when the time came to sell it there weren’t any takers. His asking price was $135,000. Now it’s down to $97,000, and still nobody wants it, because it is smack-dab in the middle of a black slum.”

  “Outside Savannah,” said Cynthia, “people think the Victorian district has been a great success, because that’s what Lee tells them. They all swallow his line. Prince Charles is just the latest in a long line of chumps.”

  “What’s really irritating,” the other woman said, “is the way the Adlers have set themselves up as moral arbiters. It makes me want to scream. I’m tired of Lee’s noble pretensions. And I’m sick of Emma’s Eleanor Roosevelt act. What have we done to deserve it?”

  “Plenty,” said the white-haired man.

  The two women looked at the man in surprise. He was still smiling his benevolent smile.

  “Lee is a prominent member of Savannah society, is he not?” the man asked gently. “He belongs to the Cotillion Club, which sponsors the debutante balls. He’s one of the fifteen distinguished gentlemen in the Madeira Club, where he and the others deliver learned papers over epicurean dinners and fine Madeira wines. He belongs to the Chatham Club, where he can go for drinks and dinner and look out over the rooftops of the historic district he’s been so instrumental in preserving.”

  The two women nodded cautiously, unsure what the man was driving at.

  “He plays golf at the Savannah Golf Club,” the man went on. “So Lee Adler is one of Savannah’s elite. At least, you would think so. But he isn’t really, is he? In Savannah we have our little way of drawing the line—of saying, You shall come this far and no farther, you are not really one of us. We have the Oglethorpe Club as our way of saying this. And we have the yacht club.”

  The man spoke softly, like a kindly professor. “Lee Adler is Jewish. A great many of his good friends belong to the Oglethorpe Club and the yacht club, but he does not.”

  “But the Oglethorpe Club does admit Jews,” said the woman. “Bob Minis is a member.”

  “Yes. Bob Minis is one of the oldest members of the Oglethorpe Club, and he’s very well liked. He’s also the great-great-grandson of the first white child born in Georgia, which makes him a living relic of Georgia history. He’s Jewish, but not overly Jewish. Both of his wives have been Christians, and so have most of his friends, and his children have been raised as Episcopalians. Bob Minis gives good value as a member of the Oglethorpe Club. Apart from being delightful company, he enables us to say, as you have just said, ‘But we do have Jews in the Oglethorpe Club.’”

  The man folded his arms and looked at each of us in turn, as if to assure himself that his point had been received. “On the other hand,” he went on, “there is Lee Adler. Cold-shouldered by the Oglethorpe Club and tossed out of Historic Savannah. What is he to do? He must do something brilliant, something absolutely ingenious. In my opinion, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Through his work in the Victorian district, he has not only made a comeback as a historic preservationist, he has wrapped himself in a morally unassailable issue: housing for poor blacks. If you oppose him, you’ll look like a racist. Lee’s Savannah Landmark project may be unrealistically expensive. His restorations may be shoddy. He may have depressed real estate values in the Victorian district. He may have created a new black ghetto. He may even be in it, as some people suspect, for the money and the recognition. But nobody can stand up and say so, and that’s why it’s so brilliant. Lee Adler has achieved his objective: He has regained his position as one of America’s leading preservationists, and in the process he has rubbed our noses in the issue of race.”

  “I don’t believe he’s si
ncere about blacks,” said the woman with the blue cigarette. “Not one of the clubs Lee belongs to—at least none you’ve just mentioned—has ever had any black members.”

  “True,” said the man, “and for that matter, I suspect the blacks themselves may wonder if Lee and Emma are sincere. For instance, if you read Emma’s newspaper article about Prince Charles carefully, you will see something very curious. Emma twits the members of the Washington press corps who were present at the meeting for being interested only in ‘frivolous speculation about Prince Charles,’ rather than in the issue of housing. But then she carries on at great length about the sweet black cook she took with her and how the cook had made a basket out of pine needles for the prince and that she had worried for weeks about how to present it to him. Emma did not find fault with the cook’s somewhat childlike preoccupation with her basket, though the basket didn’t have anything to do with the issue of housing, either. Emma appears to have a double standard. One for educated journalists and one for simple black cooks. From this, one might draw the conclusion that Emma has a patronizing attitude toward blacks.”

  A satisfied smile spread across the face of the woman with the blue cigarette. “Mmmmm,” she said.

  “I think the blacks know where they stand with Lee and Emma,” the man went on. “They also know, probably, that no one here tonight has renovated three hundred apartments for poor blacks or taken their black cook to meet Prince Charles. The blacks know that the Adlers are doing something for them, whatever their motives may be. And, in return, the blacks are doing something for the Adlers.”

  “What on earth are they doing for the Adlers?” asked the woman.

  “They’re giving the Adlers their vote,” he said. “In the last election, you may remember that Lee and Emma supported Spencer Lawton for district attorney against Bubsy Ryan. The Adlers were among the largest contributors to Lawton’s campaign. One can assume Lee passed the word to the black ministers that he was supporting Lawton. Presto, the black Ministerial Alliance, which had backed Ryan in the past, switched over to Lawton. Lawton won the black vote, and the black vote gave him his margin of victory. So whether he planned it or not, Lee Adler emerged from his crisis with a black-power base. And with the district attorney grateful to him for his help. This makes Lee a political power. It makes it impolitic for any city official to op pose Lee in any of his little housing ventures.” The man raised his eyebrows as if to say, “I rest my case.”