Programming: Truman and TV

When Truman Capote first viewed the TV adaptation of his autobiographical tale, A Christmas Memory, he broke down and wept. Viewers across the country also found it one of the most affecting dramas ever seen on U.S. television. Then Capote wrote The Thanksgiving Visitor, another chapter in his portrait of the artist as a young boy. As before, Frank and Eleanor Perry, the husband-and-wife moviemaking team (David and Lisa), adapted and produced the film. And once again, the result, which ABC has scheduled for Thanksgiving night, is a rare, lyrical hour for television.

Thanksgiving Visitor, set in backwoods Alabama, elaborates on Capote's glowing relationship with his only boyhood friend, an old spinster cousin named Miss Sook. She had no education and had never traveled beyond the county borders. She was "a poet of a kind but deeply suppressed. She might have been an Emily Dickinson in another culture." In the simple TV tale, she coddles young "Buddy" (as Capote is called) and tries to shield him from his dour and insensitive relatives in the parentless household. The casting, supervised by the author, is impeccable. Geraldine Page, who won an Emmy award as Miss Sook in Christmas Memory, returns in what Capote calls "one of the greatest performances I've ever seen." Michael Kearney, 13, is a touching and believable young Truman. The narrator is Capote himself—squeaky-voiced, but obviously authentic.

In the past two years, Truman Capote has become a strikingly successful light industry for the ABC network. His programs have won four Emmies and a Peabody award. Among the Paths to Eden, a bizarre, lovely tale set in a New York City cemetery, was on ABC last year (TIME, Dec. 29). Capote adapted Laura for the first (and farewell) TV performance of his friend Lee Bouvier Radziwill; it gained no Emmies, but good Nielsens. And Miriam, a TV film based on an early short story, will run next year.

Capote has also just written and directed a TV documentary on capital punishment, Death Row, U.S.A. This program was an ABC venture too, but the network has decided not to put it on the air. And that decision may well shatter the whole beautiful Capote-ABC collaboration, for hell hath no fury like a Truman scorned.

Prison Vignettes. What angers Capote most is the explanation from the ABC-TV president. The footage in Death Row, said Elton Rule simply, was "too grim." "Well," retorted Capote, "what were you expecting—Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?" Capote, who has since acquired rights to the $250,000 film, screened it for TV critics in Manhattan recently. There were chilling prison vignettes and fascinating interviews with condemned convicts, as well as a defense of capital punishment by Ronald Reagan. But the film lacked organization and a coherent point of view. With some favorable reviews to his credit, Capote obviously hopes that another network or syndicate will take the documentary and, if nothing else, embarrass ABC. It would serve them right, says Capote. "All I ever did for that damn company was win them a lot of Emmies and great distinction! What fools they've become!"