Our Christmas Love Story—Gene Nelson
Just a few days before Christmas, at three o’clock in the afternoon on the 22nd, to be exact, Miriam and I will be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary. And this year it’s going to be a big day. This year, jolly old St. Nick will have to crawl into the back seat while the Nelsons take over.
After all, it is not every day that you have been married for 10 years.
Every year up to now, it has seemed that somehow, without our even realizing it, our anniversary has always blended into the celebration of Christmas itself. During the war, when the very spirit of Christmas was a terrible reminder that you were separated from the ones you loved, the day was marked by a special kind of loneliness. Later, when we were settled, it was the occasion of some of our finest moments of friendship and good fellowship.
But there hasn’t been a Christmas in the last 10 years that Miriam and I have not stopped to remember our first together. That was in 1941, a horrible year for many people, but wonderful for us because we were young, married, and so terribly in love. It was a strange Christmas. Everywhere the grim tension of war was in the air and people were trying extra hard to enjoy themselves, to buy a little more than they had planned, and to be a little nicer to their fellow man. You noticed it on the streets—people celebrating with the feeling that perhaps it was the last Christmas they’d know for years, perhaps forever.
It was in this atmosphere of premeditated good cheer that Miriam and I, like many other young people, were married. I got my draft notice just about the same time the decorating crews were hanging wreaths and red-nosed Santa Clauses all over New York, and I suppose that the Christmas carols blaring from every store window and the churning crowds on Broadway had a lot to do with the ultimatum I presented to Miriam one brisk December evening. “Hither you marry me now, or I can’t guarantee whom I’ll be seeing while I’m in the army, or that I’ll be single when I get back.”
“Let’s get married right away,” she said. And even though the future yawned black, we were married the following Monday.
Our wedding day was not as spectacular as we would have liked it to be. Both Miriam and I were working—she as a specialty dancer in Panama Hattie and I as a skater in It Happened On Ice—and while Monday was my day off, Miriam had to dance in the evening show that night.
I spent most of Monday morning trying to make my room at the Hotel Belvedere look something like home. Fortunately, the management had just redecorated the whole floor, so the drapes were new. and the furniture reupholstered. The little Christmas tree I’d bought from a market on Seventh Avenue helped a lot. It looked fine once I got the lights and a box of tinsel draped over it. And Miriam’s mother helped me to bring over her clothes and her Christmas presents.
At two-thirty that afternoon, we made a mad dash for City Hall through the mobs of Christmas shoppers, and arrived just in time for our three o’clock appointment with the Judge. The ceremony, as they say, was brief but binding. Then Miriam and I, my best man, and June Allyson, who was Miriam’s maid of honor, made another dash for the Wellington Hotel for our wedding breakfast. (Actors always eat breakfast in the afternoon.) We had our pictures taken by Bruno, glowed together from the congratulations of our friends, and then suddenly, or so it seemed, it was time for Miriam to be at the theater.
I have had to kill a lot of time waiting for job interviews, or sweating out difficult takes on the set, but no three hours in my lifetime were longer than those I spent waiting for Miriam’s show to finish that night. First, I went back to the hotel to see that everything was in order. Then I walked for awhile down Broadway. Everywhere I looked, people were being impossibly happy, while for me the clock hands dragged. I went into a movie without even looking at the marquee. It turned out to be a horror picture, The Werwolf Of London! Finally I went over to Miriam’s theater to finish my wait.
When I carried Miriam across the threshold of my hotel room, lighted only by the soft glow of the Christmas tree lights, the whole world was closed out. For months, I had been hiding champagne glasses away in the top drawer of my bureau. We used them all up, toasting each other and our future, each time breaking our glasses against the radiator and crossing the stems on the mantel.
We both had to work the next day, and Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day. So we didn’t have time to do a lot of shopping for Christmas. We spent Christmas Eve with Miriam’s mother and father at the hotel, and opened our presents together after we got back from doing our evening shows. It wasn’t a lavish Christmas, but it meant a lot to us because we both had a feeling that it would be the last one, for awhile, that we would spend together in a place of our own.
The next year, it was only luck that we could be together for Christmas. I had joined the Signal Corps and was touring with the company of This Is The Army. For awhile, it looked as though we would be held over in St. Louis, but, fortunately, Miriam was able to meet me in Chicago. Two days before Christmas, we entrained for California, and we spent the holiday listening to the wheels click on the rails.
In 1943, I spent a hurried Christmas with my parents in their home in Santa Monica, actually just a few days jammed in between the Los Angeles and San Francisco appearances of This Is The Army. I called Miriam, who was working in New York, on Christmas Eve, but we couldn’t talk long.
I suppose a lot of guys spent the Christmas holidays in 1944 in bleaker spots than I did. By then, the troupe had moved to England, and on Christmas Eve we were presenting the show to another swarm of entertainment-hungry GI’s. At least, that Yuletide, I had mail from Miriam.
The following Christmas was a different story. We spent the holiday in Australia, and as far as presents and letters from home were concerned, it was just another day. I didn’t get my Christmas packages until eight months later, when we passed through Honolulu on our way home. They had followed us all over the Pacific theater, and were mashed, crumpled, and beat up. But even in August they looked good.
In 1946, Miriam and I spent our first Christmas together in three years, and in our own apartment. We had a lot to rejoice about. Our baby was due soon. I was dancing in movies, and the future looked good. On Christmas day, Miriam cooked a big turkey and we had both of our families over for dinner. It was a wonderful day.
Since we have been back together, Miriam and I have tried to combine the celebration of our anniversary and the Christmas holidays. Of course, we’ve always given one another little personal gifts on our anniversary . . . like the purple velvet fez I picked up for Miriam in Egypt, which she plans to use someday as the piece de resistance of a sleek Oriental outfit she designed herself. But in our own minds, the anniversary of our marriage is so closely associated with Christmas and the spirit of the holiday that it has not seemed to call for any special celebration.
Our son, Chris, has understandably altered the way we celebrate Christmas. When there were just the two of us, we always opened our presents on Christmas Eve. But to a child, Christmas would not be Christmas if he could not awaken to the delirious joy of discovering suddenly, with one sweep of his eyes, a room full of presents that were not there when he went to sleep. Chris goes absolutely wild on Christmas morning.
His first really meaningful Christmas was in 1949, and that holiday was for us, too, a particularly memorable event. In late November I was able to get my first long break from the pressure of work, and Miriam and I packed up and took a long-delayed honeymoon for four weeks. We drove up the coast to Oregon, through the redwoods, and then back south through the mountain lake country of Northern California. At June Lake, where we stopped for a few days, we cut our own Christmas tree and brought it home with us. On Christmas morning, I shot several hundred feet of film of Chris opening his packages, film which will always be an important part of the movie library I began the day we brought Chris home from the hospital.
Last year, we spent our first Christmas in our new house. We had a beautiful tree, with packages piled so high it took us most of the morning to open them.
On previous Yuletides, Miriam and I had always tried to make our gifts to one another extremely practical. But last year our presents were a complete surprise. Miriam gave me a new Bell and Howell movie camera that I had always admired but hesitated to buy for myself. I gave her two suede outfits, a coat and a suit that she had admired in a shop in Las Vegas when we were vacationing there.
This year, we are looking forward to a bang-up Christmas at home and we hope that Miriam’s father, who is now in New York, will be able to come out to spend the holidays with us. We intend to have a big open house for our friends, our old friends and the countless new friends that we have made in the past two years. We want to give Chris the joyous kind of, Christmas he will remember all of his life.
But also, this year, we plan to make a big personal event of our wedding anniversary. I don’t know exactly what it will be, but I’ll have to come up with something tremendous to make Miriam realize how much our 10 years together have meant to me.
I know, too, that our anniversary certainly will be a proper occasion for both of us to count our blessings, and to begin thinking about our plans for the next 10 years.
Now that my career is progressing fasten than I ever dared hope it would, Miriam and I would like to have more children and a larger permanent home to raise them in. If things keep going along as well as they have these last two years, we may get them both by our 11th anniversary. It’s certainly worth working and dreaming for.
THE END
(Gene Nelson can be seen in Warners Starlift—Ed.)
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1952
