Totally Not Truman Capote Survives One Christmas in New Orleans

I don’t know that Truman Capote’s parents were really as awful as the father in this. I do know that he was basically abandoned by them as a child. He lived until the age of six with relatives of his mother’s. Then he went to New York to live with his mother and her second husband. There is no mention of his father on his Wikipedia page after his birth. I’ve found three different spellings of his first name, and apparently he outlived his famous son by three years, but Truman doesn’t ever seem to have lived with him. If the events of this story are based on reality, it’s just as well.

Buddy (T.J. Lowther) has been living in Alabama with Sook (Julie Harris), a distant cousin. She has to go help “a sick friend,” and she sends Buddy to visit his father (Henry Winkler), who is an entrepreneur in New Orleans. For which read con man. He’s living on the largesse of a number of upper class women of New Orleans and money he weasels out of upper class men. His biggest mark is Emily Beaumont (Swoosie Kurtz). She is the niece of the wealthy Cornelia (Katharine Hepburn), who knows exactly how sketchy Buddy’s dad is.

Frankly, I think, if this is based on one of Capote’s actual memories, he would’ve been better off spending the holiday with the Lees. His father needs him, but I don’t trust stories about parents who need their children. It’s not healthy for the child. Buddy’s father—no, he never gets a name—hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with a child. He said he didn’t when Buddy was a baby, but it’s clear that he doesn’t know what to do with an older child, either.

As for Buddy’s mother, she’s supposedly gone to New York to be an actress in part because she was too young to be a mother or a wife and has gone running to fulfill her dreams. And then had a breakdown because she’s too fragile, which no one will tell Buddy because, frankly, it’s nearly a century ago and boy you think there’s stigma against mental health problems now. But I’m not sure she would’ve done better being a mother than she did as an actress. Some people just have mental health problems, and while it sucks for her son, what do you do?

All in all, this isn’t terrible. Katharine Hepburn lost the first-ever SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for it—to Joanne Woodward; the other three nominees were Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson, because it was a hell of a category that year. The casting of Winkler made me say, “Wait, isn’t he Jewish?” (Yes; his parents left Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.) But he’s good in it, and posing as a goy is just one more lie for his character, I guess.