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| original draft of opening page |
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| Director David Perry |
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| Author and narrator Truman Capote |
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| Capote as a young child |
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| Capote kissing Geraldine Page at a party |
A CHRISTMAS MEMORY – made for TV A USA (51 mi) 1966 d: David Perry
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than thirty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today, the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
Among the better Christmas movies to play on television, where this was an annual holiday event in the late 60’s, right alongside annual screenings of Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), which was a holiday staple before it was snatched up from private domain, or Menotti- Amahl and the Night Visitors, 1955 YouTube (46:13), a film that always used to play on Christmas Eve. Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, A Christmas Memory (a christmas memory. - now voyager.) remains one of Truman Capote’s most anthologized short stories, one that Capote called his personal favorite and his most perfect work. Part of a circle of American writers that included Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Terry Southern, James Jones, and many more, Capote’s work reflects America of the late 1940’s and 1950’s, deeply engaged with the social anxieties of the postwar years, as his writing captures the isolation, marginalization, and persecution of those who deviated from or failed to achieve white middle-class ideals and highlights the artificiality of mainstream idealizations about American culture. After publishing his first novel in 1948 at the age of 24, Other Voices, Other Rooms, he was already being compared to William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. Elevating the art of the novella, Capote was as well known for his lifestyle and flamboyant mannerisms as he was for his novels. With a versatile career as an author, playwright, screenwriter, and actor, his literary style ranged from an early take on Southern Gothic to comedy, while revolutionizing the genre of true crime with In Cold Blood (1967), yet his extensive use of description is nothing short of mesmerizing, informing us of a writing technique that would insure a timelessness in his works, “One, never use slang, it dates your work and you want to always make it classic, two, never take notes, and I forgot the third one, but I have it somewhere in my notes.” Drawing on his youthful experience in rural Alabama when his mother left him with relatives while she looked for work in New York City, one of the few relatively secure periods in an extremely unstable early childhood, this is an idealized recollection of a remembrance of a happy childhood, not unlike Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, free ...), recorded by Thomas in 1952, Dylan Thomas - A Child's Christmas in Wales, A Story YouTube (19:52), while Capote reads his own story in 1959, Truman Capote Reading His "A Christmas Memory" - Original ... YouTube (37:00). While the story appeared earlier, and was reprinted in The Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, it was this made-for-television release that originally aired on December 21, 1966 on ABC Playhouse, eloquently narrated by Capote himself in that distinctive high-pitched nasal whine, that established the story’s enduring popularity, where perhaps no other piece is as fondly remembered by so many. The original production was in color, but subsequent broadcasts were in black and white. This ode to the American South is what Terence Davies achieves in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Set in rural Alabama during the Depression in the 1930’s, this tender and strangely personal story of a seven-year-old boy named Buddy (Donnie Melvin) and his aging cousin’s holiday traditions was made into an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television movie starring Geraldine Page as his older cousin in her 60’s who is never identified by name, but only as “my friend.”
The nostalgic mood has prompted some critics to dismiss the story, including playwright Tennessee Williams, who characterized the story as saccharine, overly sentimental, or even repulsive, though Capote himself described it as a catharsis which helped him to deal with his experiences as a child in the South. It contains darker elements such as loneliness and loss, poverty, social isolation, sorrow, and death, which demonstrate that the innocence of childhood may protect young people from the elements of the human condition, but not remove them from it. The story is also an example of a common theme in Capote’s writings, a friendship forged among social outcasts, many of which are eccentric women. A largely autobiographical story, the idiosyncratic woman is based upon Nannie Rumbley “Sook” Faulk, the oldest of four adult cousins who was reclusive and many considered peculiar, perhaps even developmentally disabled, who suffered from the trauma of losing a close friend at an early age, but Capote describes as his best friend, providing a special warmth, as she was able to relate to him in ways others couldn’t, living in a small home with other distant relatives who didn’t approve of them or pay much attention to them. What’s so incredible about the story is that it documents a relationship that many gay men encountered in their childhood, a loving, eccentric older female relative who takes him under her wing when his family and friends abandon him due to his “otherness.” As the leaves fall in late November, a woman looks out the window and exclaims, “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!” She is speaking, of course, to Buddy, an iteration of the author as a “sensitive boy.” A surprisingly subversive ideological project at work, Capote’s presentation of male characters forces us to rethink gender roles, as Buddy revises the traditional coming-of-age narrative in which the male protagonist demonstrates their self-worth through masculinity, while Buddy romanticizes the traditionally female sphere of domesticity. Geraldine Page is a national treasure, an iconic actress and one of the great legends of the American stage, only 42 at the time, yet playing a woman in her 60’s, refusing to wear any trace of make up in a heart-wrenching performance, beautifully described by the narrator, “In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except the funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.” From the maker of DAVID AND LISA (1962), which uniquely examines mental illness in a manner that is so distinctively humanist that French director Jean Renoir called it “a turning point in world cinema," this beautifully textured narrative bears a strange resemblance to Jason Robards in Fred Coe’s A THOUSAND CLOWNS (1965) made about the same time, as both fervidly avoid the tedious conventionality of ordinary life by transcending the tyranny of normalcy, where it’s all about the personal touches you bring to your life that make all the difference. Genuine authenticity is the key, refusing to sell out to convention or bow down to the latest trends, remaining true to yourself, even if that means being shunned by others, where being a uniquely heartfelt version of yourself is what makes this storybook presentation so memorable, as there’s an art to being human.
Who are our cakes for? Friends. Not necessarily neighbor-friends; indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we’ve met maybe once... perhaps not at all. People who’ve struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J.C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o’clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud ‘whoosh.’ Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch. Young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture – the only one we’ve ever had taken. Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes.
This film marvels at the now forgotten custom of fruitcake baking and then sending them as holiday gifts through the mail, getting at the source of why it was such a special handmade gift during the Depression when people were too broke to buy conventional gifts, as it reminds us of why we give and what we have to be thankful for. The visual acuteness and simplicity of style looms large in this film, as there is nothing artificial about this presentation, and nothing diluted either, where the authenticity of emotion and the surety of vision is in every line. It’s so short, so sincere, and yet so touching, as it manages to balance the sought-after intimacy of the performances with Capote’s spare narration, conveying that youthful excitement where every day is an adventure bringing something new, where having a friend to share it with is all that matters in the world. Buddy, his cousin, and their dog Queenie have developed a special relationship symbolized by the baking of fruitcakes on a cast-iron stove, foraging the nearby fields for fallen pecans, while scraping together spare change from contests they’ve entered or selling jars of jams, jellies, and preserves they’ve made from berries and flowers they’ve picked, which they use to buy all the necessary ingredients, including a rare bottle of whisky from the local bootlegger, a Native American Indian man named Haha Jones. Having a few sips leftover, they decide to celebrate, even giving a few spoonfuls to the dog, becoming all warm and fuzzy inside, getting the giggles as they sing and dance around the kitchen, only to be rudely interrupted and scolded for their sinful behavior of setting such a poor example for a minor child by her devoutly pious sisters, who seem to have perpetually built-in frowns on their faces, as they simply never smile. The small details on display are stunning, as “his friend” is genuinely hurt by their accusations, weeping that night in bed, never wanting to be the cause of anyone’s unhappiness, so Buddy lifts up her spirits by reminding her they have to go cut down a tree the next day. But it has to be the right size, one tall enough that Buddy can’t reach up and grab the star sitting on top, so they cut out decorations from colored paper and tinfoil and sprinkle the tree with shredded cotton, making it look like snow. Buddy makes his cousin a kite out of old newspapers, and he suspects she is making him one as well, just as they did last year, as their annual tradition is flying kites together on Christmas day, offering them a sense of joy and liberation, even if only for a brief moment, which seems to place them perfectly in harmony with the surrounding cosmos lurking so far beyond. While there is a cheeriness about the untainted bond between them, this is also a sad and increasingly poignant tale, as anyone who has lost someone feels what Capote projects, the mixed emotions between that everpresent Christmas cheer and the grief that sits on your heart, becoming an elegiac love letter to Christmas and those lives we have lost. We learn this was their last Christmas together, as a none-too-pleased Buddy was shipped off to military school the following year “by those who know best,” presumably to make a man of him, which he characterizes as “a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons.” Told entirely in flashback, “home is where my friend is, and there I never go,” and there she remains, puttering around the kitchen, bringing these memories back to life, where this all happened some time ago, where it’s been years since she passed away, yet she remains alive through the evocative imagery of the story, as Buddy finds himself walking the grounds of his school and looking up at the sky, “As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.” Suffering from drug and alcohol abuse, habitually in and out of rehabilitation clinics, Capote died at the age of 59 in the home of comedian Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne in Bel Air, who read the final passages of this story at the eulogy, reminding us all of the transcendent power of the written word.
Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory - Starring Geraldine ... entire film may be seen on YouTube (48:15)
