There will be very few genuine bronze Bird Girls besides the original four. So I thought the Bird Girl would be at home here, and I gave this copy to the Club. Sylvia was the daughter of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a charter member of The Cliff Dwellers and designer of the original Kiva at the top of Orchestra Hall. The arms must have been broken off somewhere in transit and been carelessly glued back on, probably when she was on loan to a big function in New York after she came back from Hollywood. If you look closely, you will see that her arms are on backwards (thumbs in front, not in back). So, for a price, I let them have an epoxy-fiberglass copy, to be returned to me when she had played her small part. You can see why I was shocked to see the Bird Girl referred to as “Rebecca” in the January 2001 newsletter! And I marvel at how the name arrived at the Cliff Dwellers?Ī few years after the book came out, Warner Brothers made a rather second-rate movie of Midnight, and they wanted a Bird Girl to use in the film. By threatening a law suit, all full-sized statues were eliminated, all except one grotesque version called by its makers “Rebekah.” They have been sold as such. But my real worry was that someone would make a full-sized “copy” and sell it as the actual Bird Girl. I am the holder of the copyright on the Bird Girl, so I was not happy about all these small souvenirs of Savannah. Bracelets, tie pins, dish towels, key rings, candles, doormats, etc. The original statue from the cemetery is now in the Telfair Museum, but the image has been sickeningly commercialized. The book has made its author famous, and the photograph has made its photographer famous, but the two together have made the Bird Girl very famous indeed. On the book jacket is a marvelous picture of the Bird Girl taken in the Savannah cemetery by Jack Leigh, a superb local photographer In 1994 a book about Savannah came out called Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, which has had a stunning success. An original edition of four bronzes was sold at the time, one of them to a family in Savannah who put it in their family plot in the Savannah cemetery. The statue of the Bird Girl was made by my mother, Sylvia Shaw Judson. The full-size replica made for that film is the one that is on extended loan to the club. It is the famed Bird Girl, whose statue has become forever associated with the John Berendt bestseller, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” and the subsequent movie. A recognizable figure of a girl with outstretched palms stands motionless in full view of diners at the Cliff Dwellers.
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