After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (5 page)

The Lady Chablis
photo by Jeanne Papy

Another aspect of Jim’s gay Savannah were the bachelor parties he would have for his gay friends, many of whom were designers, decorators and antique dealers from the Savannah, Hilton Head and Charleston areas. There was always one big Christmas bash for the bachelors when he lived in Mercer House, but I heard about other parties when I interviewed Mike Hawk several years ago. He told me about the smaller Sunday parties. It was illegal to buy alcohol in stores on Sunday. Restaurants even needed special licenses to offer drinks, and could only offer them after church was over, at 12:30 PM. Jim’s solution to this alcohol access problem was to have his gay friends in for drinks and conversation.

In the 1970s, Jim’s many years of hard work started to pay off. Mercer House, purchased in 1969, had been transformed into an aristocratic showplace. His antiques business was thriving, and—perhaps most importantly—his place in Savannah society continued to rise.

Of the scores of homes Jim restored during his career, Mercer House at 429 Bull Street was his greatest triumph. Ironically, Mercer House was never the home of any members of the Mercer family, including songwriter Johnny Mercer. Construction of General Hugh W. Mercer’s house was started in 1860, but was not completed until almost 10 years later. The house had various owners over the years. At one time, it was the home of the Savannah Shriners Alee Temple. In 1967, the Historic Savannah Foundation bought the house to prevent it from being torn down. The property, which included the main house, a carriage house and gardens, took up the entire block from Bull Street on Monterey Square to Whitaker between West Gordon and West Wayne. Two years later, Jim bought the house, which was in unfortunate shape, but still structurally sound, and spent the next two years restoring it. In the upstairs ballroom, Jim installed the huge pipe organ that he had bought years earlier from the Masonic temple. The basement became the workshop for Jim’s antique restoration business. Under the management of gifted artist and shopkeeper Barry Thomas, Jim’s craftsmen restored the fruits of his frequent antiques-buying trips abroad.

Mercer House
photo by Jeanne Papy

According to his friend Joe, the antiques business was much more profitable to Jim than restoring historic homes. His largest clients were from out of town: DuPonts, Rockefellers, Kemper Insurance executives, and even Jacqueline Onassis. Over time, he had built up such an exclusive group of buyers for his antiques that the house and shop were only opened for rich clients, who would fly in on buying expeditions. For example, Jim would buy items like Napoleon’s carriage crest, Chinese porcelain, Flemish tapestries, a leather desk folio made for Czar Nicholas II, and elaborate treasures that the House of Fabergé had crafted for the Russian czars. Jacqueline Onassis offered Jim $90,000 for a tiny green jade Fabergé box with rubies and diamonds, but he refused. Once, on a trip to Caribbean island of Grenada, Jim was offered a magnificent antique hand-carved four-poster bed carved with a nutmeg design for a price of $200. At Jim’s request, the man came up with almost 20 similar carved beds priced between $200-$300, each for Jim to export and sell at a huge profit.

The story of Mercer House and its treasures is inextricably wound up in the famous Christmas parties Jim gave. Usually, there were two parties: One for the doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs and society friends, and one for Jim’s bachelor friends, including antiques dealers and other design professionals, salon owners and various gay and bisexual friends. They were elaborate affairs with excellent Low Country food and drinks, gorgeous flower arrangements, engaging entertainment and perfect southern hospitality. These parties were the big Savannah social events of the year.

Joe went with Jim on one of his trips to London for a Fabergé auction and then to Geneva. They flew first class and stayed at the Ritz. Jim had a lot of friends in Europe. At night, they would be picked up in a Bentley and driven to the exclusive Crockfords Club, where they could gamble in a casino upstairs.

Crockfords Club. London
photo by Debonairechap

According to Joe, Jim was “Hitler crazy.” He had Nazi guns, knives, flags and paraphernalia everywhere. Once, when a film company producing a Civil War movie was creating a nuisance in Monterey Square, Jim hung a Nazi flag out of a Mercer House window so that the filmmakers wouldn’t film his house. Later, when someone reminded Jim that a Jewish temple was across the square, he apologized for any offense. The mistake came back to haunt him repeatedly.

Jim developed a unique position within Savannah’s social structure. Even though he was a rebel, respect and admiration for him continued to grow. Most of the people I interviewed liked Jim very much and agreed that he was very hard-working, not just as a deal-maker and expert, but as a man who actually restored antiques himself. His hands were calloused from working on the furniture he restored. No one doubted his high intelligence and pragmatism. A number of people said he was the most interesting person they had ever met. He had a great sense of humor, was a terrific host, and made his friends feel comfortable whenever they were in his presence. Jim was frequently described as charismatic and very much the southern gentleman. Though he was criticized for being gay, Jim was very conservative in his thinking in other ways—a southern chauvinist, according to one individual. Several people noted his genuine interest in people and a willingness to help people he liked. One friend said that if you shared a subject in which he was interested, he’d pick your brain. He’d learn from you.

Jim donated a number of valuable antiques to the Telfair Museum and cash to the Humane Society.

To be sure, there were downsides to his personality as well. The most common negative comment was that he was controlling and manipulative, a complaint frequently leveled at very successful people. There were also some significant issues with his business ethics, which I will address in the next chapter.

Carol Freeman was one of Jim’s good friends. “He had a tremendous sense of humor, very dry wit and he was very smart,” she told me enthusiastically. “He always had such a positive attitude and he had such a tremendous sense of humor. He kept me in stitches.”

Jim was known for his parties and, after meeting Jim, Carol went to all of them. “His parties were fabulous,” she reminisced. “He was the consummate host. He really knew how to entertain. And he was so handsome, always looking so elegant.”

Mercer House party
photo by Jeanne Papy

In 1972 or 1973, Jim first showed up on her radar. She had gone to Mercer House to see a sideboard that Jim had. They got to know each other that day, sitting there on the veranda.

Carol looked at herself in those days as a kind of rebel, much as Jim was. She was not born into Savannah society, but her husband was. For a while, she rebelled, but then, she said, she straightened up: She learned to play golf, participated in the children’s theater, the golf club, and most of the other activities in which Savannah society wives in that era were expected to participate.

Carol laughed as she told me about Jim’s box of 5×7 file cards. Jim had personal handwritten notes on file cards for all the people who had ever been to his parties. He used them as the basis to decide who would be invited to his next party and who wouldn’t. The kind of thing that would keep you off the invitation list was having a party and not inviting Jim. According to Carol, Jim knew everything going on socially in Savannah. Jim took great pleasure in deciding who he would favor and who he would “punish,” but it was all in fun, and not at all malicious. He was mischievous.

On the first day of his trial, he suggested to Carol that they go to the staid, exclusive Oglethorpe Club for lunch. Bachelor sons of Gordon, Georgia, barbers were not members of the Oglethorpe Club, but Carol and her husband were. It was just like Jim to poke at Savannah society mores.

“Savannah was bizarre in a quiet, genteel way,” Carol told me. “Some things were simply not discussed. People covered each others’ asses. Homosexuality was not accepted and not discussed. Old Savannah hasn’t changed much. They don’t care about money so much, just old families.”

One of the best times Carol had with Jim was when they went in Jim’s Jaguar to the polo matches at Rose Hill Plantation in Bluffton, South Carolina. He told Carol just what to wear. They were role-playing, after all. “We took a beautiful tablecloth, fine crystal, and the Czar’s silver,” Carol said. “If you have it, flaunt it,” Jim told her.

As Carol talked about how much fun she had with Jim, it was clear that she dearly missed him: “He was kind, genteel, thoughtful, thoroughly enjoyable and a great friend.”

Hairdresser Joel Moore gave me insight into Jim’s personality. Joel had been rehearsing the opening of his new salon, which was adjacent to the Peachtree Spa, which was for women only. For the opening, Joel had persuaded the spa to open its pool for the festivities, but only to women. Jim Williams had stopped in at the rehearsal with his friend Iris Mock, but for some mischievous reason, he decided to strip off his clothes and swim naked in the pool.

One man that I interviewed was David Sands, a talented designer and decorator who knew Jim professionally. Sands had wealthy clients who would buy Jim’s antiques. During the interview, I mentioned that I toured Mercer House and noted that so many items in Jim’s favorite downstairs room were prints, statues and other artistic renderings of predatory birds and other animals. Did this artistic collection provide some insight into Jim’s character? Not so, Sands told me. Jim was a naturalist and loved paintings, prints and statues of animals, including a framed wasps’ nest and a turtle shell. Jim was never a hunter of animals, though—only a fisherman, he explained.