October 5, 1961—As she had done since her Oscar-winning film debut eight years before in Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn proved positively larcenous on the big screen, stealing into the hearts of critics and audiences in what became one of the best-loved romantic comedies in American film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, premiering on this date at New York's Radio City Music Hall.Few actors have proven so impervious to the perils of miscasting as Hepburn. It wasn’t simply that she was magnificently talented or that she was thin enough to be a costume designer’s dream. No, audiences sensed—rightly so—that her warmth of heart onscreen was no act. It made them willing to give her a pass on even the most unlikely roles.
If her miscasting was truly misbegotten, as in her portrayal of a half-breed Indian in John Huston’s fascinating but wrongheaded 1960 western The Unforgiven, audiences would blame the director, the producer—anyone but her, even though she had the box-office clout to work with whomever she wanted and, to that extent, control her fate. If the miscasting was mild, as was Jack L. Warner’s idea of replacing the songstress Tony-winning songstress Julie Andrews with the nonsinging Hepburn in My Fair Lady, filmgoers were more than ready to make allowances.
Breakfast at Tiffany's belonged more to the second category. The 1958 Truman Capote novella on which it was based made no bones about the jagged edges of protagonist Holly Golightly: her profession (the world’s oldest), her substance abuse, her abortion, even, in those far more buttoned-up times, her flirtation with bisexuality. Capote had Marilyn Monroe in mind for the role, and he was not thrilled when the gamine Hepburn was offered it instead of Hollywood’s prototypical blond bombshell.
Audiences might not have had the chance to see Hepburn at all in the now-famous Givenchy little black dress. Time Magazine’s quick summary of Holly Golightly—an “expense-account tramp”—crystallized Hepburn's fears of how her acceptance of such a role would fly into audience’s perceptions of her. When the idea was first pitched, neither she nor her husband at the time, the puritanical, controlling Mel Ferrer, wanted any part of it. “You have such a wonderful script,” she said simply, “but I can’t play a hooker.” The line that changed her mind came from producer Marty Jurow: “We don’t want to make a movie about a hooker; we want to make a movie about a dreamer of dreams.”
That anecdote, and dozens of other fascinating and delightful ones, comes from a slim little book that came out last year: Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, by Sam Wasson. If you can overlook the book’s inexplicable, even infuriating lack of an index, you’ll consistently learn something new and unexpected about a movie that, for all its surface fun, was no day at the beach to get filmed, especially because of the revolutionary way it depicted sex in a romantic comedy.
Jurow was able to produce his film about “a dreamer of dreams” by slipping its more risqué aspects past the censors. In those last years before today's ratings system, Hollywood's Production Code Administration,though increasingly challenged by filmmakers, still held considerable sway over what could be shown or even implied onscreen. And so, screenwriter George Axelrod employed a trick that had worked like a charm for Alfred Hitchcock,among others: the art of indirection.
Here’s how it worked: you kept the censor’s eye off the scene you really wanted in the picture by offering up a dummy target, another scene you had no intention at all of filming. John Michael Hayes’ script for To Catch a Thief included a scene in which male characters gawk over one of those naughty French postcards. It distracted the attention of Hollywood’s censorship office from the scene that Hitchcock knew would really get people talking about his film: the passionate clinch between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, set against a background of nocturnal fireworks—a visual metaphor for sex if there ever was one.
Similarly, Axelrod knew that the censors would be primed to look out for anything involving Holly Golightly. The movie, after all, revolved around her. Even the famous opening scene, with her looking in the windows of Tiffany’s just around sunrise, could raise eyebrows: What could a woman be doing in a dress like that at that ungodly hour?
So Axelrod had the censors, as it were, take their eyes off the ball by directing their attention to the character of Paul, Holly's homosexual friend in the novella but her eventual lover in the film. Axelrod invented a character not in the book—a rich, middle-aged woman nicknamed 2E (for her apartment number), played by Patricia Neal—who employed Paul as her gigolo.
The filmmakers--including director Blake Edwards, making his first important movie--also got the censors and the public not to think too much about the implications of, say, Holly constantly going around, at all hours of the night, with a lot of strange men, by stressing that she was “a kook.” With Hepburn in the role, that became lovable kook.
The chapter on Audrey Hepburn in director-critic Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell's in It: Portraits and Conversations reads like an extended love letter to this star of his film They All Laughed. What may be the best and truest line in this section is: “in the final full decade of the golden age of movies, Audrey Hepburn became the last true innocent of the American screen.” It echoes a quote in Wasson's book from Edwards, gently putting off any questions about a relationship between himself and his star: “In those days, everyone fell in love with Audrey.”
Back to that Jurow quote about Holly being a “dreamer of dreams.” It’s reinforced onscreen, unforgettably, in the Oscar-winning song “Moon River.” Henry Mancini’s music establishes the wistful tone, but it’s Johnny Mercer’s lyrics that bring this to concise but certain life.
Among the select group of men (and even fewer women) behind the Great American Songbook, only Mercer had the rural background to help him identify with the runaway from Tulip, Texas. A transplant from Savannah, he stood a bit apart from urban natives such as the Gershwins, Arlen, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein. “Moon River” could easily complement “Skylark” in a cabaret act, as both, in conveying intense, wistful longing, evoke the country: a “meadow in a mist” in “Skylark,” “my huckleberry friend” in “Moon River.” (After toying with the names of other rivers, Mercer came up with the name of this one by finding it on a map.)
Amazingly enough, after a preview which seemed to indicate the film was running too long, a studio head broached the idea of cutting the song. Jurow's producing partner, Richard Shepherd, vowed that it would be over his dead body. The tune stayed, allowing everyone concerned to bask in its glow on Oscar night, when it won Best Song for Mancini and Mercer.
There is one blemish on the film: Mickey Rooney’s ridiculous, cartoonish portrayal of Holly’s Japanese neighbor. But nothing and nobody is perfect, and movie fans like myself love Breakfast at Tiffany’s despite that. In fact, we’re hooked from the opening credits, as you will be, too, if you watch this YouTube clip.
I’ve stressed a great deal here the ways in which Hollywood’s Holly differed from Capote’s. But in one special way, it stayed true to an important theme not only of the novella, but also of Capote’s entire work: in the words of A Separate Peace author John Knowles, when interviewed for George Plimpton’s oral history of Capote, that “there are special, strange, gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding.”
It might be a bit odd to end a post about a classic movie by writing about its literary source, but I have no compunction about doing so. The Holly Golightly of Hepburn, Edwards and Axelrod is so engraved in our memories that reading the original will not dislodge the cinematic version in any manner. The following passage from Capote’s small gem modulates skillfully from a beautiful description of an October day in Central Park to the author’s forever-melancholy recognition that rootless dreamers and free spirits are prone to what Holly calls “the mean reds”--i.e., depression:
We ate lunch at the cafeteria in the park. Afterwards, avoiding the zoo (Holly said she couldn’t bear to see anything in a cage), we giggled, ran, sang along the paths towards the old wooden boathouse, now gone. Leaves floated on the lake; on the shore, a park-man was fanning a bonfire of them, and the smoke, rising like Indian signals, was the only smudge on the quivering air. Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring; which is how I felt sitting with Holly on the railings of the boathouse porch. I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. Because Holly wanted to know about my childhood. She talked of her own, too; but it was elusive, nameless, placeless, an impressionistic recital, though the impression received was contrary to what one expected, for she gave an almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins, and parties: in short, happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.
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