Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on Those Who Made You Confident)

"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." —Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) 

The image accompanying this post comes, of course, from the 1961 film version of Capote’s small gem of a novella. Though the author hadn’t pictured Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, I can’t imagine else in the role. Largely for that reason, the film (and, in a kind of glory reflecting back, the book) holds a special place in my heart, even though there are clear differences from its source material.

Flashback, October 1964: Witty, Wise ‘My Fair Lady’ Opens

My Fair Lady, that wittiest and wisest of movie musicals, opened at New York’s Criterion Theater this week 50 years ago, on its way to cleaning up at the box office and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Over the years, it has become something of a fashion for certain film buffs to bemoan the big-screen adaptation of the 1956 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Perhaps my favorite movie blogger, “Self-Styled Siren,” even includes it on a list of the 10 Worst Best Picture Oscar winners.

I have to part company with her (and the by-no-means-inconsiderable cohort she represents), though. Within a minute of watching the film, I’m smiling and laughing; days after watching it, one of its magnificent melodies still linger in my mind. In short, it fulfills what has to be one of the functions of a movie: it moves me, in the most direct (and, in this case, joyful) way.

Why does it succeed? I’ve boiled it down to these reasons:

*Its libretto. Even many of the best of the Golden Age of Musicals in Hollywood forced viewers to endure tissue-thin stories and characters for, say, a half-hour’s worth of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in all their glory. This was not a problem for any show based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), which furnished some of his most pungent reflections on class. Yet no less than Oscar Hammerstein II, generally regarded as the greatest librettist in Broadway history, had been unable to translate this into a musical, agreeing with partner Richard Rodgers that the cold intellect of Prof. Henry Higgins wouldn’t translate well into a musical. it took librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to use the same strategy for Broadway (and, later, film) gold that John Huston had used to create his version of The Maltese Falcon when three earlier versions had failed: i.e., use the dialogue that’s already there.

*Those songs—ingenious, funny, beautiful. “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “The Rain in Spain,” “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”, “Just You Wait,” “Why Can’t the English?”, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and my favorite, “The Street Where You Live.” I’ve run through only half the show’s titles, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’ve missed a great one. How much better can it get than this?

*Sure-handed direction. Critics often speak of the Best Director Oscar won by George Cukor for My Fair Lady as a consolation prize for the movies he should have won it for (e.g., David Copperfield, The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib). But this underestimates both the obstacles he faced and the style with which he brought the whole thing off. For all the money spent ($17 million—a record for a Warner Brothers musical up to that time), Cukor shot the film on time and economically, steering the massive project through a male star (Rex Harrison) who had almost destroyed the confidence of his leading lady (Julie Andrews) on Broadway; a current leading lady (Audrey Hepburn) annoyed that she wouldn’t be allowed to sing the songs she had trained months to do; a costume designer (Cecil Beaton) constantly bent on getting his way; and a studio head (Jack L. Warner) who kept bumptiously interfering with production. As a molder of acting talent, he may have had his own take on this retelling of the tale of Pygmalion: “Anyone who looks at something special, in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever,” he told friend Gavin Lambert. That, in a sense, becomes what Higgins does with Eliza.

*The bounteous production design.  Beaton’s costumes were indeed stunning—so much so that the crew burst into applause upon seeing Hepburn in Eliza’s costume for the ball for the first time. But art director Gene Allen influenced the stylized look of the movie even more so—notably through the Ascot sequence, in which trompe l'oeil sets convey how outsider Eliza might see the race and its onlookers.

*Rex Harrison. “Sexy Rexy” could be a royal SOB when not appearing before an audience, as I discussed in a post on the centennial of his birth. But his charm was such that he was one of the few actors who could have made it remotely possible that Eliza would not walk away forever from her bullying, insensitive teacher.

*Audrey Hepburn. Warner insisted that Andrews, who originated the role of Liza on Broadway, would not have the requisite box-office pull to help the film recoup its investment, so he offered the role to Hepburn. That turned out to be a mistake when Warner was forced to hire Marni Nixon to dub his star’s voice. The revelation of that resulted in one of the great snubs in Oscar history: though the film earned 12 nominations, Hepburn’s name was conspicuously missing. Yet this was deeply unfair to the actress: Academy Award voters, before and after, have nominated other performers who had their voices dubbed (Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams) and even presented statuettes to actors who were clearly lip-synching (Jamie Foxx in Ray, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose). Hepburn’s acting, dubbed vocals or not, was characteristically marvelous.

*Stanley Holloway. In one of the great might-have-beens in film history, James Cagney turned down the role of Eliza’s father, coalman Alfred P. Doolittle. The power of the actor in that supporting role might have been such that I wouldn’t have been surprised if Warner hadn’t been tempted to retitle the project Cockney Doodle Dandy. But, three years into retirement from the silver screen, Cagney was having too much fun painting to go before the cameras again—especially if it meant more work with Warner, who had subjected him to countless bruising contract suspensions while the actor was with the studio. That opened the door to Stanley Holloway, who got to repeat his show-stopping role as Mr. Doolittle on Broadway.

Even more than most films, My Fair Lady was filled with all kinds of drama. But one of the most astonishing tales associated with it came at its premiere. Warner was set to escort the daughter of CBS Chairman Bill Paley (who had sold him the rights to the musical) to the event. But when she became sick, he enlisted the services of a call girl working the bar at the hotel where he was staying. The story goes that, Higgins-like, he passed the working girl off as “Lady Cavendish.” The ploy worked.

That anecdote would, on the surface, sound too impossible to be believed. But Warner was a womanizer, and crass. Moreover, in Hollywood, it’s always best to keep in the back of the mind this proposition: No matter how preposterous a story is, there is an at least 80% chance that it it true.

This Day in Film History (Hepburn, “Last True Innocent” of Hollywood, Lights Up “Tiffany’s”)

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.

This Day in Film History (Audrey Hepburn’s “Sabrina” Debuts, After Nightmarish Production)

September 21, 1954—The original screenwriter withdrew from the project; his successor had a nervous breakdown; the male lead, a second choice, sulked most of the time; and the director, leaving his movie studio after 18 years, was writing and shooting scenes on the fly.

Naturally, Sabrina, a modern Cinderella story created by Billy Wilder with Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and a radiant young Audrey Hepburn in the leads, became one of Hollywood’s best-loved romantic comedy classics after premiering on this date.

Anyone seeing the coziness among Wilder, Holden and Hepburn were would have mistaken this for the happiest set in the world. It’s true that William Holden got along great with Wilder—the expatriate from Nazism had lifted the actor from pretty-boy hell with edgy roles in Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17, the second of which netted him an Oscar.

As for Audrey Hepburn, everybody seemed to adore her. In particular, Wilder admired her for her professionalism and loyalty. Holden really fell for her—the married star began a love affair with her that matched their sparks onscreen.

All this left Humphrey Bogart as the odd man out, a perception that came to a head when Wilder invited Holden and Hepburn in for drinks but forgot to include Bogie (or so the director said). Whether the trio consciously excluded him or not, he never felt comfortable on the set, a situation worsened by the following factors:

* Wilder had written the part of older, stick-in-the-mud tycoon brother Linus for Cary Grant, a longtime friend. The two had long talked about making a film together, but, now that he had the chance, Grant rejected the part. In fact, he never ended up collaborating with Wilder, which the director felt was a hole in his filmography. Inevitably, that disappointment translated into how he viewed Bogie. (It didn’t help that Wilder really wanted this film to succeed; Paramount had irritated him into leaving after an 18-year association.)

* Bogart had less control over the film than his contract stipulated. In addition to $200,000, his agent won the actor script approval—a concession that turned out to be meaningless, because to secure all the leads, principal photography was moved up and accelerated. Samuel Taylor, who had contracted to adapt his play Sabrina Fair, pulled out of the film because of all the changes Wilder made in his script. His replacement, Ernest Lehman, churned out page after rewritten page until he suffered a nervous breakdown. Wilder was writing on lunch breaks during shooting, and Hepburn, at his urging, flubbed lines or feigned sickness to buy him more time.

So here you have Bogart, an established star, a professional, coming to a set where chaos reigned without the finished script. That meant he might have to read lines cold, as they’d only just been written. The star was not at all happy.

* Bogart had to endure take after take—more torture for the veteran. Wilder often required multiple takes, not because he longed for especially arty camera angles but because he demanded much of actors. Seven years later, after Wilder made James Cagney do more than 30 takes of his rat-a-tat-tat dialogue in One Two Three, Cagney decided that was his last film—until Ragtime lured him out of retirement in 1981.

With the Sabrina script a mess, Bogie was asked to do the same thing as Cagney. Oh, and one more thing: those takes increased because of his tendency to spit when speaking. How on earth could Wilder tell the actor, after a pitch-perfect line reading, that his great expectorations had ruined the backlighting?

* The difference in age and experience between Bogart and Hepburn was obvious, hideous, and unbridgeable. While solving one potential age-related problem in its leads, Paramount Studios only added another. Marvelous throaty-voiced Margaret Sullavan (perhaps best known nowadays for her collaboration with Jimmy Stewart on The Shop Around the Corner) might have been fine on Broadway in Sabrina Fair, but film cameras would have cruelly wrecked the illusion that the 43-year-old actress could play a chauffeur’s daughter.

Unfortunately, in casting the 55-year-old Bogart, Paramount had simply found another variation on the same dilemma. Bogart was a half-decade older than both the Linus of Broadway, Joseph Cotten, and the perennially youthful-looking and healthy Grant. Worse, he looked every bit his age, and more. It was said after his death in January 1957 that Bogart had refused to see a doctor about the cancer that took his life until it was far too late. Perhaps he felt the first intimations of something wrong now.

At the same time, Bogart expressed annoyance at Hepburn. It should be remembered that this was only the second starring role for the actress (who had won the Oscar the year before for Roman Holiday) and that she was only 25 years old. She admitted years later that she was “terrified” of Bogie, and he used that fear to make her feel as uncomfortable as he was, complaining about her to Holden (who took umbrage at the treatment of his lover), openly carping about her and Holden to the press, and delivering the malicious line, “She’s okay if you don’t mind 20 takes.”

* Following a period of one acting triumph after another, Bogart found himself miscast. Over the last dozen years, Bogie had expanded his range shrewdly, from murderous gangster (The Petrified Forest) to sympathetic gangster (High Sierra) to tough private eye (The Maltese Falcon) to romantic lead (Casablanca) to scruffy but lovable misfit (The African Queen). Now, he obeyed his inner siren voice advising him it was time to do comedy. Maybe it was, but not this one. An aging, unhealthy leading man would not only not look good next to the gamine Hepburn, but might even be blamed for the film’s failure. That had to rankle the justly proud actor.

* Bogart insulted Wilder and Hepburn. Wilder restrained Holden from have it out with Bogart, but felt hard pressed when Bogart turned his nasty tongue on himself and Hepburn. Hepburn’s British accent and Wilder’s Viennese one provided fodder for Bogart’s impressionistic skills. Bogart’s ultimate insult—“kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch"—became too much to stomach for Wilder, a Jew who had lost family members in the Holocaust. Bogie forget an important rule: never insult someone who makes his living through words, particularly one with a rapier tongue himself. Now Wilder trained it on the actor, saying he had examined all the “valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face.”

Whew! It’s a miracle the family got made without people getting killed. It's a further miracle that it became a success. Four decades later, when Sydney Pollack released his remake, most critics couldn’t bear even to compare it with Wilder’s original, and quickly (and unfairly, I think) dismissed Julia Ormond’s performance in the Hepburn role.

For all the animosity between Wilder and Bogart, the two managed to end their relationship on a grace note. Wilder’s visit not long before Bogart’s death led the actor to apologize for his behavior on the Sabrina set, explaining that he was going through a difficult time.

Years later, in recalling the star’s painful but stoic exit, Wilder praised him as memorably as he had once insulted him: “he was very good, better than he thought he was. He liked to play the hero, and in the end, he was.”