I met Eggleston in Memphis in the early '60s, shortly after he had come there from his native Mississippi. He was already reputed to be a "serious" photographer. His progress over the decades, however slow and frustrating it's seemed at times to him, has been astonishing. The prince of a matriarchal Southern empire (his mother, two sisters, one wife and many female admirers), he has moved with assurance all along, paying scant heed to naysayers.

One afternoon in 1967, Eggleston, a beautifully groomed and attired young man with dark hair and eyes, dropped in on John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, with a suitcase of color slides. It was as if Eggleston was turning himself in to the authorities. A result of this meeting, nine years later, was Eggleston's one-man show of color photographs at the MoMA, only the second in its history. In his introduction to "William Eggleston's Guide," a hardcover book published by the museum to accompany the show, Szarkowski referred to Eggleston's pictures as "perfect," to which the highly offended New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer responded, "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly."

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"Yeah, honey," Mercer said, "and that's the way we're gonna leave it!"

Leaving Savannah's potential untouched, it turns out, was too much to hope for. John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," known in Savannah as The Book, is now The Movie. Also The CD. And there will be, if there aren't already, the postcards, T-shirts, coffee mugs ... you name it.

Savannah, that grand old lady with outer garments of wrought-iron lace and flowing tresses of Spanish moss, is a secret place no longer. And the muffled sound you hear emanating from Bonaventure Cemetery is Johnny Mercer's body spinning in its grave.

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