"The Tree Nobody Wanted"

[This is my Christmas story, The Tree Nobody Wanted, which I'm posting online. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the eBook version will be available on Kindle and other platforms for the holiday season. If you're new to this site, please tell me what you think of the story. And please consider the hardcover as a great Christmas gift for loved ones. It is available at tommccannbooks.com at a 50 percent reduction from the cover price.]

The Year is 1946, a year after the end of World War II.

The place is Brooklyn—the poor side, the tough side: Brownsville.

The time is Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree sellers have turned off their lights and gone home. The lots are empty, except for a few forlorn trees that nobody wanted.

An eleven-year-old boy is sent out to pick through those trees and bring one back to the apartment where his Nanny has raised him since infancy.

What follows is part fable, part remembrance, part miracle.

It’s a story of family values—even if “family” means a boy and his grandmother; a story of hope in hard times and great happiness growing from small things; a story of youth and age, rejuvenation and rebirth. It is a story of things that are not supposed to happen, but do. That’s part of the miracle.

Above all, it’s a love story—of a special kind that is the other part of the miracle.

Katharine Hepburn

Joan and I read a lot of books. We buy a lot of books, in the course of a year—hundreds. When we are finished with them, we save some, give some away to friends and family, and then throw some away. To some people, to throw away a book is sacrilegious, but we know we’ll never read or refer to some of them again, and others are just plain bad books. We have a place in Boston and a house on Cape Ann, and each has a lot of bookshelves. She and I almost never read the same book, and we try to keep them apart. In addition to keeping our books separate, each of us tries to keep together books that are related either by subject or author. I recently decided it was time to clear out some of the books to make room for others, which are piled on desks, tables, and chests of drawers.

I have about three linear feet of books on Katharine Hepburn. These are books about her, for the most part, and a couple written by her. I have this collection not because I was a great fan of her movies, but because she and I were friends for many years, and I liked her and she liked me. How we came to be friends is a story for another day, and perhaps I’ll tell it here at some point. It all started with a book I sent her that I thought would make a good script for her. She didn’t agree, but I kept a copy of the book and put it in the collection with the other Hepburn books. I was looking through the Hepburn collection the other day, and I found one book that stood out from all the others because of its size. Actually, it’s not a book: It’s a catalog of 250 pages. On the cover is a picture of Kate; the title is Property from the Estate of Katharine Hepburn. It is a Sotheby’s catalog, and it also states that the property will be auctioned off in New York on June 10 and 11, 2004. I picked up the catalog, and the same feeling of anger came over me that I had felt when I first picked it up seven years ago. “Anger” is probably not the right word. I was outraged that the property of the most private person I ever met would be pictured and itemized, next to a suggested price for each item.

Katharine Hepburn spent her entire life protecting her privacy and creating the image she projected to the world. She lived to be ninety-six years old, and toward the end of her life trusted some people to manage her estate including the things she left behind. In my opinion, there was a violation of that trust when these items—many of them very personal—went up for auction. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was not the Katharine Hepburn she chose to present to the world in interviews with people like Dick Cavett and Barbara Walters. The Katharine Hepburn I knew was polite, a good listener (would never interrupt), self-effacing, quietly intelligent, very gentle, fun to be with. I never felt that I was in the presence of a big Hollywood movie star. But she was always a very private person. For a long time I urged her to show the real Katharine Hepburn—the one I and a few others knew—to the world. I suggested she write a book in her own words without any ghost writer or editor. She was certainly capable of doing that. We talked about it at some length. She actually made a couple of starts and finished a manuscript. Of course, it was published and was on the bestseller list. Its title was Me, and despite the fact that I had a big interest in Kate as a friend, I couldn’t finish the book because it was more of the same of what she gave Cavett and Walters.

At one point I even sent her a bunch of yellow ruled pads and a dozen sharpened No. 2 Dixon pencils because that’s the way she liked to write, jotting down what she called “bits and pieces.” She wrote me a letter about it, and I am going to reproduce it here. As you will see, she talks about the “personal, personal stuff.”

Well, a lot of the “personal, personal stuff” about Kate Hepburn’s life was revealed in that Sotheby catalog and subsequent auction. It is now in the hands of strangers. What follows is just a partial list of some of the things in that catalog (descriptions beneath each):

·      Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress from her marriage to Ludlow Ogden Smith, December 12, 1928. The dress is described in detail, is on a mannequin; the suggested price is between $2,500 and $3,500.

·      A collection of Katharine Hepburn’s passports from over the years. We all know about passport photos, and some of the pictures are very unflattering. She was always very fussy about pictures of her and in life had final approval over what pictures would be released; not so in death.

·      Leather-bound address books with addresses of friends, doctors, agents, etc. Incidentally, my name, addresses, and phone numbers were in one of them that was auctioned off, and at one point, someone called me up and asked, “Who are you?”

·      A group of Kate’s hats.

·      A pair of KH’s khaki pants—single pleat, zipper closure.

·      A sculpted bust of Spencer Tracy, done by Katharine Hepburn, which she liked very much.

·      A picture of Spencer Tracy that had sat on a table next to her bed.

·      A picture of Hepburn with no makeup on, her hair in rollers of different sizes made from rolled-up newspapers and used by her on a daily basis.

·      a brush and hand mirror engraved “KHH.”

·      Her cane and walking stick collection.

·      A Victorian needlepoint runner that was noted as having been in the cottage she shared with Spencer Tracy in Los Angeles. There also was a picture of her standing in front of the needlepoint with a picture of Tracy in the background.

 And on and on for 250 pages.

As I said, it made me angry. Even now after all these years, it still does. 

"... and the Cabots speak only to God."

Even when I was a kid, growing up in Brooklyn in the forties, I heard this little poem about Boston:

Here’s to dear old

Boston,

Home of the bean and the

Cod,

Where the Lowells speak

only to Cabots,

And the Cabots speak only

to God.

In those days I never dreamed I would ever get to see Boston, much less meet a Cabot. Why would a kid from Brownsville, Brooklyn, ever go to Boston? And why would I want to meet one of those people? Or more to the point, why would they want to meet me?

In the fifties I joined United Fruit Company, a banana company (Chiquita) founded in Boston in 1899. The company underwent a name change in the late sixties, but it was very well-known—infamous, in fact—for its tough dealings in Central America and its influence in Washington. The top bananas at the company certainly didn’t enjoy the negative publicity, but the fact is the company was responsible for the creation of the colorful phrase “banana republics.” Look up United Fruit on Wikipedia, but don’t believe everything you see there: The company never murdered anyone, for example, or worked people to death. Its negative influence was grossly overstated, and the good things it did were largely overlooked. There is no denying, however, that the company did have a hand or two (or three) in overthrowing Central American regimes which were “unfriendly,” as management used to say.

 I got a job in the New York office, located on the piers in lower Manhattan (now Battery Park City). I started in about as entry level a position as one can get. I was paid $32.50 for a five-and-a-half-day work week; my title was office boy/messenger. I liked the company and saw career opportunities there, so over the next few years I learned as much as I could about the company, both in the tropics and in its international markets. I “majored in United Fruit,” according to one reporter who later wrote an article about me. My hard work paid off because a few years later, in 1960, I was invited to come to work in the company’s Boston headquarters. I was a vice president of that Fortune 500 company when I resigned in 1970.

In 1947, several years before I joined United Fruit, a Bostonian named Thomas Dudley Cabot was president of the company for a very brief period—only a few months.

A few years after I resigned to pursue another career, I wrote a book about the company and my experiences inside the organization (An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, Crown, 1974). I devoted a couple of pages to Mr. Cabot’s tenure as president, including the fact that it was short lived and, frankly, undistinguished. I even told an unflattering story about him, which I thought made the point very well. At the time I wrote the book I had never met Mr. Cabot.

Within a week of the book’s publication I received a long letter from Thomas Cabot. I was getting a lot of letters (including some from lawyers) about the book and threatening phone calls from people who were unhappy about the way I had portrayed them. Tom Cabot didn’t contact his lawyers; he didn’t call me at home; he didn’t spread the word in Boston urging his business friends to shun me or stop doing business with me. Instead, he wrote me a friendly, thoughtful, generous letter. He said I was correct in my treatment and evaluation of most things I said about him. He said he enjoyed the book but went on to say, “I hope you will pardon me if I give you a new version of some of the anecdotes which you include. Please don’t allow the corrections to impair the delightful quality of the stories in case you tell them again.” He suggested that if the book went into subsequent printings, which it did, I might want to make one or two small changes just to set the record straight.

What Tom Cabot did not say, but which I knew instantly, was that the story I told made him look foolish, and he didn’t deserve that. But my biggest mistake by far was not that I told the story in the first edition of the book. It lay in my not telling the reader what Tom Cabot went on to do after he was fired from United Fruit. He built up the Cabot Corporation; served in important advisories to several United States presidents; made large contributions to higher education both in the United States and Latin America; was very generous with his enormous wealth; and was an ardent conservationist long before Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring and before environmentalism became fashionable. [For more on his interest in conservation, see Beggar on Horseback: The Autobiography of Thomas D. Cabot, David R. Godine, 1979.]

I replied to Mr. Cabot’s letter, telling him that of all the letters I had received, and all the favorable reviews the book received, none had pleased me more that his, and, at the same time, none had dismayed me more. He called me a short time later, and we had lunch in his private dining room at the Cabot Corporation. He insisted that we get on a first-name basis, and we did despite the fact that he was almost forty years older and it was difficult for me to call him by his first name. He and I met on many other occasions in the years that followed. I got to know him over the course of twenty years—through lunches, dinners, phone conversations, events at his home. In all the times we saw each other, he was unfailingly courteous (although occasionally he would tweak me a little about how we had gotten to know each other). And he was always interested in my life, career, opinions, and family, particularly my wife, Joan, and our son, Peter. He liked to give advice to young people. He once told Peter, “Aim high, always aim high.” Another time he told a seventeen-year-old Peter, “It is not easy to be rich,” and proceeded to tell him why. Never at a loss for words, Peter said, “I’ll try to remember that, Mr. Cabot.”

Tom Cabot taught me a lesson I shall never forget. He easily could have decided I was a lifetime enemy, but he chose instead to treat me as a friend. Tom Cabot was 98 years old when he died in 1981. I still miss him, as do many others whose lives he touched.