POEPLE : Capote’s Yuletide Memory Endures : ‘It’s fruitcake weather,’ and the faithful will gather again at the Kaufmans for the annual reading of the poignant masterpiece.

There’s never two of anything.

--Sook Faulk from Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” If Truman Capote were alive, he might describe the scene of the annual pre-Christmas gathering at Catherine and Lester Kaufman’s Hidden Hills home this way:

Imagine an evening in mid-December. A coming of winter weighs heavy in the air. Consider the living room of a spreading old ranch house. A great big fireplace is its main feature, with four tall bar stools placed to one side. This evening the fireplace will commence its seasonal roar.

“Oh my,” sighs neighbor Sally Jordan from her perch on one of the bar stools. “It’s fruitcake weather.”

So begins another reading of “A Christmas Memory,” Capote’s short memoir of a cherished holiday spent baking fruitcakes with an eccentric, elderly cousin more than 60 years ago.

Jordan, owner of an educational consulting business, reads the part of Sook, the old child-woman at the heart of the tale. Catherine Kaufman, a local interior designer, assumes the role of best friend Buddy (alias Capote) at age 7. Their sons, Tony Jordan and Kyle Kaufman, narrate and provide voices for various odd characters (the mill owner’s wife and Mr. Haha Jones) who inhabit the book.

“We invited them to have minor parts, and they’ve sort of taken over,” Kaufman says of the boys’ growing participation over the past five years. “At one point they were trying to take all the best lines for themselves,” she adds jokingly.

The reading takes place every year in a cozy room decorated with a wicker baby buggy and a tiny tree covered with handmade paper ornaments, just as they are described in the book. Afterward, guests are invited to nibble on fruitcakes, biscuits, blackberry jam and chocolate-covered cherries, all favorite foods of the two main characters.

Neither Kaufman nor Jordan set out to create a holiday tradition when they suggested the first storytelling for a group of friends nearly 11 years ago. “We were working on something together one October and I don’t know how we got onto the subject of Truman, but somehow we did,” recalls Jordan, whose graying hair and craggy face oddly resemble Capote’s description of Sook.

“Catherine said, ‘Do you know “Christmas Memory”?’ And when I told her it was one of my favorites, we decided to do a reading that Christmas.” The first telling was held in 1982 in Jordan’s tiny Woodland Hills office.

“We thought it would be a one-shot deal,” Kaufman says. But the following year all 17 original guests called to inquire, “When is this year’s reading and can I bring a few friends?”

“It started to get out of hand,” Jordan adds.

These days, most of the guest list is hand-selected. “It’s like the people Truman and his friend made fruitcakes for,” Kaufman says. “They had to have touched our lives in some way.”

To accommodate the overflow each year (tonight’s reading is expected to attract 125 listeners), Kaufman and Jordan have had to relocate three times. At one point, the reading was at the Ballard Inn, a bed and breakfast decorated by Kaufman two hours north of Los Angeles. One year, it was in a theater in Granada Hills. Since 1989, it has been staged in Kaufman’s sprawling family room in Hidden Hills.

“Every year, we’ve added a new wrinkle to the event, whether it be a new location, a new prop or a new person,” Kaufman says.

Four years ago they hired a chamber orchestra. In 1990, Jean Bitterly, a Pasadena-based storyteller, was included on the program. Over the years, they’ve also turned the annual celebration into a community fund-raiser for Haven Hills, which provides safety and support to battered women and children living in the San Fernando Valley.

“The first time I went I was so impressed. It’s such a warm evening and reflects the positive side of relationships,” notes Betty Fisher, director of Haven Hills. “What have they accomplished? Well, a day or two after the event is over they pull up outside our door with a truckload or two of donations (food, toys, cash and clothing) we so desperately need. We’ve never seen anything else like it.”

Jordan believes the tale, written in 1956, has a profound influence on people.

“It’s very important because it’s about two misfits--a 60-year-old unwanted woman and an abandoned child--and the love and understanding between them transcends generational boundaries,” she says.

“That’s why it was important that our sons join us, because it was our way of sharing with another generation,” Kaufman adds.

“People tell us it’s never Christmas until they’re heard ‘Christmas Memory,’ “Jordan concludes, smiling proudly.