A Christmas Memory (1966 TV Movie): Starring Geraldine Page, with Truman Capote narrating: See It at the WEJB/NSU Theater, Complete, Free, and Without Commercial Interruptions

A Christmas Memory (1966 TV Movie): Starring Geraldine Page, with Truman Capote narrating

I saw this on TV when I was eight years old, and I still remember quite a bit of it, especially the two protagonists getting drunk while making Aunt Sook’s annual fruitcake, and the casual cruelty of Sook’s well-to-do sister. I have not yet taken the time to view this again, beyond determining that the sound and visual quality are both poor. It was recorded off the TV with a primitive device, and, as the man who posted it at youtube (whom I thank), has never been put out on vhs, dvd, or blu-ray.

Truman Capote was, in his day, America’s greatest short story writer, which is not backhanded praise. Time was, the short story was America’s gift to the world. The problem, however, was that you couldn’t make a living out of writing short stories. And so, writers would pad out short stories into books, “novels.”

(Hemingway went down a different path: At a young age, after publishing a collection of short stories—In Our Time—he wrote bestselling novels which were turned into big-budget prestige pictures starring the likes of Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. However, Hollywood people also read “Papa’s” short stories, and saw such magic in them that they turned them into big-time pictures, sometimes even—in the case of The Killers, in 1946—masterpieces.)

Capote, to my knowledge, did not write padded out short stories, yet still managed to make money off of intensely moving short stories, sometimes with protagonists which were female alter egos of the flamboyantly effeminate homosexual Capote, e.g., “Like Children on Their Birthdays.” His short story collections became bestsellers, and he got deals for theatrical and tv movies, most famously for his “novella,” first published by The New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, in 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and then turned into an Oscar-winning 1961 movie starring Audrey Hepburn as a high-priced prostitute named Holly Golightly, by Blake Edwards, George Axelrod, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer.

However, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was, ultimately, a literary prank on Capote’s part (more anon). He was looking to get out of the heart-tugging short story business, and get into a sort of tough journalism. The following year, when he saw a brief item on the slaughter of four members of a Kansas farm family, the Klutters, he would see his in. Eventually, he would write the best-selling “new journalism” reports and book, In Cold Blood, which would lead to a successful, multi-Oscar-nominated, 1967 movie written, directed, and produced by Richard Brooks, and starring Scott Wilson and future murderer Robert Blake as the killers.

But this story, A Christmas Memory, was Capote at his peak.

Its star, Geraldine Page (1924-1987), who was every bit as eccentric as Capote, was one of the world’s great actresses, and was at home on the stage, her original home, the silver screen, the small screen, and the radio. On Broadway, she was nominated for four Tonys, but never won. On TV, she was nominated for three Emmys, winning two, both for Truman Capote stories—for this, and for The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968). And though she was not at home on the silver screen, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, opposite the big cowboy, in her first picture, John Farrow’s Western, Hondo (1953) (in spite of the Academy’s contempt for moviedom’s greatest and most profitable genre), and would ultimately be up for eight Oscars, four each for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, eventually winning a last hurrah Oscar for Best Actress for the Horton Foote story, A Trip to Bountiful (1985), about an old woman who makes a bus trip for a last visit to her hometown.