The Lady Chablis was a beloved nightclub performer and public figure in Savannah. Known to locals as “The Grand Empress,” “The Queen of Savannah,” and “The Doll,” she obtained minor celebrity status after appearing in the 1997 film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The Lady Chablis first found a national audience with the publication of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in January of 1994. Loosely based on a high-profile murder that occurred in Savannah in 1981, the Southern Gothic-styled novel quickly rose to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, propelling Chablis, whose likeness figures prominently in the book, and the city of Savannah itself into the national spotlight. At the time of the release, Chablis had recently resumed her stage presence in Savannah after residing for a brief time in Columbia, South Carolina, and was performing at The Edge and at her “home” club, Club One. Her depiction in Midnight, known by locals as “the book,” garnered Chablis appearances in USA Today, People,and Entertainment Weekly as well as on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Oprah. Readers and audiences appreciated her bawdy, improvisational banter, which often referenced her transgenderism (her “T,” as she called it) and contrasted colorfully with her appreciation for pageantry and refinement.
Chablis, who was almost thirty-seven at the time of the book’s release, had been a stage performer since about the age of seventeen, when she made her debut at the Fox Trot bar in Tallahassee, Florida. A year later, in 1974, Chablis moved to Atlanta and began performing in clubs and competing in drag balls under the moniker “The Lady Chablis.” The name was suggested to her by her mother as a child and became her legal name (first name “The”) sometime around the Midnight film release. The practice of “vogueing” and the drag “walk” popularized by celebrities like RuPaul derive from a tradition that can be traced to the nineteenth century in Harlem, where lodges or “houses” run by drag “mothers” and “fathers” provided a venue for people to dress and perform in drag. Although Chablis was transgender and not strictly a drag queen, her drag performances reportedly earned her the titles of Miss Chez Cabaret, Miss Gay World, Miss Dixieland, and Miss Peachtree State during the 1970s and 1980s.
Berendt’s initial meeting with Chablis, which took place in 1989, is immortalized in a scene that appears in both the novel and its screen adaptation. Berendt had been residing in Savannah since 1985, when he began working on the book, about a year after Chablis first arrived to begin preforming at the Friends Lounge. Nearly a decade later, and two years after the book’s release, Chablis published her life story, Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah. The following year, Chablis played the character modelled after herself in the film adaptation, which was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred John Cusack and Kevin Spacey. Critics delighted in Chablis’ eccentricity, her offbeat turns of phrase, and scene-stealing performance. As a result of the success of both the film and book, audiences from around the world were inspired to travel to Savannah to watch Chablis perform until her death.
Chablis’ final performance was at Club One on August 6, 2016. She had been battling pneumonia for several months before succumbing to the illness at Savannah’s Candler Hospital on September 8, at the age of fifty-nine. Her death inspired an outpouring of remembrances from local and national media outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and many others. In her New York Times obituary, Berendt remembered her as both his favorite and the most popular “character” from his book. A commemorative showing of Midnight was held as part of a memorial for Chablis at the Lucas Theater in Savannah two months later. Attendees, who numbered in the hundreds, remembered her as the “one of the first transgender performers [to be] accepted by a general audience.” She was interred in her hometown of Quincy, Florida.
