Audrey Hepburn sat anxiously in the back of a yellow taxi.
It wasn’t the clothes — the Givenchy black dress so tailored that she couldn’t walk, nor the infamous 128.54 carat Tiffany necklace — that made her uncomfortable. It was her first take in the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in the role of Holly Golightly, a call girl so far divorced from Hepburn’s own personality that the thought of portraying her on the big screen still frightened her.
She eyed the Danish pastry in the brown paper bag on her lap with disgust. She hated pastries and had even tried to convince the director to allow her to eat an ice cream cone instead, but he insisted.
“OK quiet,” she heard. “Quiet please.”
She lit yet another cigarette to calm her nerves.
The sun had not yet set and Fifth Avenue was completely empty. Worries filled the star’s perfectly coifed head: She missed her 10-week-old son whom she left with a nanny in Switzerland, obsessed about her fragile relationship with her jealous husband, realized that she was not the first choice for the role and had heard through the grapevine that the writer, Truman Capote, was not happy with the movie’s casting choices, namely her own.
“They’re rolling,” she heard, as the cab approached 727 Fifth Ave. She opened the door, walked out into the streets, lingered outside the doors of Tiffany & Co. chewing on her pastry, and gazed languidly at the sparkling diamonds in the store’s window.
An iconic moment of cinema history was born — though it was more than that, says author Sam Wasson. In that moment, the 1960s were born, and sexual mores, fashion and the role of women would never be the same.
Who is Holly Golightly?
Capote wrote the novel between the summer of 1957 and the spring of 1958 in Bridgehampton, NY, vacilitating between cigarettes, coffee and stiff martinis. But where did this unusual woman — an free-spirited escort who was neither a whore nor a saint but something new — arise from?
He took the character from his memories of his absent mother, who left him with his grandparents as she chased dreams of landing a rich husband and living in the Big Apple, Wasson says. But there were also the socialites that Capote surrounded himself with that made up many of the characters idiosyncrasies.
Capote adorned himself with the “swans,” as he’d like to call the New York society women like Carol Marcus, Gloria Guinness and Gloria Vanderbilt, and hit the city’s most fabulous places at the time, Le Grenouille, El Morocco, 21, or private clubs like the Gold Key Club.
He was possibly most influenced by his No. 1 prize, Babe Paley, who was married to broadcast titan Bill Paley. Capote developed an intimate relationship with the woman, as she brought him along to her houses in Long Island, Jamaica, and to the most exclusive restaurants and clubs. But privately she divulged to Capote that she was an unhappy woman in an emotionally abusive relationship. Despite her almost absurd wealth, she was despondent and even tried suicide twice (Capote says he saved her life both times). Capote may not have been able to liberate Babe from her gilded cage, Wasson says, but he could make Holly free.
A Film of Second Choices
Before adapting the controversial novel to the big screen, there were many things that had to be whitewashed. No illegitimate pregnancy and miscarriage, no disappearance into Africa, no references to Holly’s lesbian experiences, and the narrator would be a hot-blooded heterosexual, not the homosexual he was in the book. The ending would be changed several times — and shot twice, one with a kiss (that they used) and the other without. Even references to her prostitution were reduced to such an extent that it goes over many viewers’ heads.
None of the movie’s central characters — the writer, the director, or the two stars — were first choices. The screenwriter George Axelrod was initially passed over because he was considered too lowbrow for the picture. The director, too, was a far third choice. Hepburn had directorial approval and wanted a more experienced director like Billy Wilder (“Some Like It Hot”) or Joseph Mankiewicz (“Cleopatra”), but finally settled on Blake Edwards
Hepburn was the fifth choice for Golightly — at best. When Truman Capote, who also insisted that he play the male lead, met with the producers of the film, he initially insisted on using Marilyn Monroe as the title character. Producers were horrified because of her dreadful reputation on set. Luckily, Monroe’s handlers decided against the choice to play a “lady of the night.” Producers threw around other big names like Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds before deciding to go with Hepburn. But even Hepburn didn’t think she was right for the part — her teeth were crooked, entirely wrong for close-up shots, and she had a miniscule bust and a round face. While Monroe, was 37-23-36, Hepburn was 31 1/2 -22- 311/2.
Then there was the character herself. “You have a wonderful script,” she reportedly said, “but I can’t play a hooker.”
And, even more importantly, after suffering two miscarriages, she had finally given birth to a healthy baby boy just weeks before. She also had been fighting with her puritanical older husband, Mel Ferrer, also an actor and a director, who had become jealous of her rapidly rising star power.
But if the $750,000 salary didn’t sway her, the directorial approval and the ability to sugarcoat certain parts of the script that disagreed with her did.
Trouble on Set
Problems quickly emerged on the shoot, especially between George Peppard and almost every member of the cast and crew. Peppard believed that he, not Hepburn, was the true star of the film. “I must say there wasn’t a human being that Audrey Hepburn didn’t have a kind word for,” said co-producer Richard Shepherd, “except George Peppard. She didn’t like him at all. She thought he was pompous.”
Peppard referred to Hepburn as “the Happy Nun,” for her chaste image. He was on a campaign to “lasso the spotlight,” the book says, by insisting on script changes and refusing to do anything in the movie that would make his character look bad. He got so difficult that director Edwards and Peppard almost got into a fistfight over the blocking of a scene.
Edwards and Hepburn, on the other hand, grew very close during the making of the picture, starting rumors that they were romantically involved. Wasson does not reveal if it’s true, but writes that Edwards did admit that, “In those days, everyone fell in love with Audrey.”
Edwards realized early on that the key to getting a successful performance from Hepburn was to wrest control from her husband, Ferrer. Not only did he often undermine the director’s guidance (being a director himself), but he often purposefully deflated the fragile star’s confidence. He would openly reprimand Hepburn in front of the cast, making critical comments about her looks, clothing and uncouth manners. One night, Hepburn put her elbows on the table during a dinner with the crew — Ferrer jabbed her elbow with a fork and announced to the table, “Ladies do not put their elbows on the table.”
Finally, the director gave her an ultimatum: “Either choose him or find a new director,” Wasson writes. She chose the director, and ended up divorcing her husband several years later.
‘I Wanted to Throw Up’
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was by-and-large a critical and commercial success, landing five Academy Award nominations (though it won only two, for score and original song).
More importantly it ushered in a new type of woman in the wake of the buttoned-up and sexually repressed 1950s. Now there was a woman — a delicate and wholesome-looking one — who was single, young and sexual without being condemned for it. Holly’s character lived in her own apartment, loved fashion and men, and behaved in a “kooky” manner, as the movie studios dubbed it.
Young women immediately identified with Hepburn and her character, buying little black dresses and proudly proclaming, “I’m a Holly.” Even now, modern heroines like Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City” owe a debt to Holly and Hepburn.
But Capote had nothing but nastiness to say about the movie. “The book was really rather bitter and Holly Golightly was real — a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. The film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly,” Capote said in a 1968 Playboy interview. Decades later, he even told a journalist that it was “the most miscast film I’ve ever seen. It made me want to throw up.”
Just as Capote turned his back on the film, so his real-life Hollys turned their backs on him. Many of his “swans,” including his prized Babe Paley, would tire of the way he would use their lives as fodder for his art. Even still, on his deathbed, the two most important women — and the two women who most closely shaped Holly — would be the two names he said: “Mama, Mama,” and “Beautiful Babe,” his mother and Paley.
“Both were preserved in Holly Golightly,” Wasson writes. “Of all his characters, he always said, she was his favorite.”
Fifth Avenue, 5 a.m.
by Sam Wasson
HarperStudio