Truman Capote & Geraldine Page Share "A Christmas Memory"

Here's the best copy I've found on YouTube:

I love finding these treasures, thank you for posting. Your blog looks good as well!

I bought the book, A CHRISTMAS MEMORY, in 1966 for my grandmother that Christmas. It was a beautiful, special edition. I was 14. I can't wait to see this. Thank you!

I love to return to reading the original short story written by Capote every Christmas season. Beautifully vivid and touching.

Thanks for the comments. Also, on YouTube is an audio recording Capote did of the book...

Sweet story!?! More like rip your heart out story, it’s brutal, but saying that it’s also great and the movie was very well done. It’s reminds me a bit of the original Walton’s movie before the TV show. I like this Beth Peck picture book version for reading.

I remember watching this with my mom when I was a gayling. She introduced me to so many old movies and actors I had no clue about as a child in the 80s. Fond memories.

cant watch it anymore. so emotional. reminds me of those gone.....

but is the best !!!!

Love that story but haven't read in years. This year I will.

I love it when Geraldine Page as Sook reads her list of ingredients for the fruitcakes to the grocery owner... as only Gerry can!

The story is also performed as a play. It can be a wonderful, touching and bittersweet experience. I've seen two theatre company productions, I'd see it annually if it were performed in place of A Christmas Carol.

Gosh, I haven’t thought about Capote’s Christmas Memory in decades. Like R7, I watched it with my mom, who loved it. I’ll make sure to watch it this weekend. Thanks, OP!!

I’ve never been able to watch Page- something about her is off and cloying to a point of distraction.

Truman's voice in the narration kills the movie for me.

A story, a play, a movie. This interests me. Thank you OP, and especially r1. But I'm enjoying all the posts here. I wondered about Capote's reading voice. I like authors reading their own work though there may be better readers and better voices.

Capotes' short stories are his best work.

R16 why is that I wonder. Did he not have the discipline or life circs to sit down to produce longer work? Was it because he was not taken seriously as a 'Writer' in his lifetime? Did his being gay have anything to do with it?

I like him.

I think (r17) that Truman was great at writing his short stories because they were so personal.

As he got older, he became what we now call a fame whore.

The society he wanted so desperately to be a part of turned on him. And he did that to himself.

I never really "got" his master work In Cold Blood.

And if you read Go Set a Watchman by his bestie Harper Lee, I will never believe he didn't have a hand in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Has anyone ever seen the Patty Duke remake? Love Patty, but Page is it for me...

This is a wonderful addition to my Holiday viewing, even if from my desk rather than the couch.

R20 Why are you sitting on your desk to watch this instead of your couch?

R17 Full-length novels are very hard to do. They get exponentially harder per hundred pages.

Publishers can't sell short stories so hundreds of current novelists including the distinguished Hollinghurst do 'bifurcated narratives'.

[quote] I will never believe he didn't have a hand in To Kill a Mockingbird.

SPOiLER Question.

Are those two kites meant to be some kind of symbolism?

^Uh...

Uh-huh.

R22 Tell me more about bifurcated narratives. Or go fuck myself and google it. Your choice. I never thought about short stories being harder to sell. Sounds about right.

R18 Why would the company of society hold so much appeal for a writer. Even if they were grist for his literary mill, I shouldn't worry if he didn't tire and miss Harper and their lives back there back when. Society player artists Dominic Dunne got tiresome, Whit Stillman too. Mining the upper crust is limiting unless founded on another bedrock.

We know many artists who turned their backs on privileged backgrounds. Like Robert Aldrich. I shouldn't wonder if there aren't more less dramatic examples. I know a writer who was the other way around. She just got tired of being a socialite and gave up everything bit by bit as she preferred the company of other writers and artists.

I've noticed some authors skirt around this and write a novel that's actually a collection of connected short stories, like "Olive Kitteridge." There's been others like that, and I don't mind, actually...

So is cousin Sook a prototype for Boo Radley?

Cousin Sook was a freak in bed!

This and “A Lamp in a Window” are my favorite Capote stories. I have a beautiful illustrated version of “A Christmas Memory” I read every year. I lost two dogs this year so, may need to skip it this time around. Poor Queenie.

This "treasure" is well known, as was its previous version with Miss Page.

She famously chews the holiday scenery to the point that she's spitting antler chips like they're Buscemi's body in "Fargo" at the climax of her drunk dance scene with Buddy.

I think Cousin Sook was the forerunner to Dirty Sally!

The two kites are a literary symbol just like the two shirts in Brokeback Mountain.

Thanks y'all. I watched the film. I liked it. It's made by Frank Perry, better known here for Mommie Dearest. Katy Perry is his niece or something. I liked his film The Swimmer too.

It's a wispy wistful film, like I imagine the story is. The two leads are lovely and they pull off their friendship so very well. But the production is slapdash and the director takes lazy shortcuts. I wonder if the remakes are better. I saw what r1 posted. Its charm is that it reminds one of one's own childhood, whether it was like that of not.

I've always disliked this story in any form. It's sugary-sentimental.

Sorry.

Part of the problem is that it is meant for an hour long slot, so it didn't fit as easily into the schedule. Most annual holiday specials were either 30 min or 2 hours. I remember seeing it on some local channel when I was little, but they added tons of commercials to make it fit a two hour timeslot. It was basically unwatchable.

The film posted here and the one I saw is an hour.

Capote had nothing to do with the writing of Mockingbird or Watchman. Lee had more talent in her little finger than that bloated has-been.

Yes, "A Christmas Memory" is an hour. It probably ran in a 90 minute time slot back in the day.

R41 No, it was always meant for an hour slot. It was originally presented as an episode of the one hour anthology series "ABC Stage 67." There is a sequel show The Thanksgiving Visitor, which is also one hour and for which Ms. Page won her second Emmy. I am surprised someone never seemed to just combine the two in order to make one longer holiday movie special.

Thanks to Capote and later O'Connor and Cheever and others I grew up loving short stories. Their compactness requires perfection of how the story is presented, how each word --carefully weighed for it's necessity-- leads to the next. If a novel can get by on story and its connective tissue, a good short story is about the beauty of words; and in Capote's best works, the words are as considered as a those of a poem or an advertising slogan, each necessary, each perfect.

Capote's A Christmas Memory was one of the first things I read where the writing suggested that good short stories would be few but worth the search. Most of my favorite novels have some of that same considered quality of writing.

Geraldine Page always looked like an old, frustrated, spinster Aunt.

Though I admire Geraldine Page, I'm always surprised at how old she looked when she was actually only in her mid '40s when she made "The Beguiled" or "Whatever Happened to Cousin Alice?"

Combining both Capote holiday stories into one restored film would be a great idea, as someone mentioned previously.

There are those...

The cousin in "A Chrustmas Memory" (played by Julie Harris in the TV movie "One Christmas" whuch starred Katharine Hepburn and Henry Winkler) was also re-written as the mentally challenged in "The Grass Harp". Barbara Cook played that role in the short-lived Broadway musical, and Piper Laurie appeared in the theatrical version of the short story. There had been a play in the 1950's and a half hour TV version of the musical in the 1970's. Instead of her fruit cake, the aunt creates a cure for dropsy.

Beats the hell out of ivermectin, r47.

While we're in a homespun mood, here's my latest post, a look back at "The Homecoming: A Christmas Memory." The TV movie was so popular, that the show "The Waltons " aired the following fall. Aside from adorable Richard Thomas, the great appeal is Patricia Neal as a wonderful Olivia Walton.

I remember the Torn/Page brownstone in Chelsea in the 1970s: cracked glass, bare light bulbs, no curtains. They were like bag people.

Nobody creeps me out more than Geraldine Page and her weird face.

She (like Stanley and Dennis) was what I call "character actress pretty", r51. They were capable of being pretty on camera and beautiful (if the role called for it) on stage.

"Character actress" pretty would make a great song title! Geraldine got to be glam a few times, but indeed looked older than her years. Seems like Sandy got to be pretty in "Sweet November."

She had a look.

Kim

An appealing mug...

a girl by the name of Zetta De Voe won first place in a school essay contest- second and third place winners were Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Zetta went on to become, amongst other things, editor of the Tarzan series of comic books.

R57 She lived an interesting life. And, I don't blame her, if my essay beat Capote and Lee, I'd crow about it until I died.

Geraldine Page is a hoot in "Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?" Her landlady Claire sports Liz Taylor's Virginia Woolf wig and makes her housekeepers lives hell... until Ruth Gordon comes along!

Zetta's essay went the sexploitation route to an easy win.

"A Christmas Memory" is one of Truman Capote's best short stories. It's heartbreaking and largely autobiographical. Made me want to cry when I first read it.

Toys in the Attic

^ One of the worst examples of Page making a complete hash of a movie. She throws the plot completely off balance.

I pity poor Wendy Hiller having to contend with such a dopy brother and a psychopathic sister.