Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (15 page)

Apparently, Peppard felt his nascent star status granted him certain behind-camera benefits unavailable to other, regular actors. Years after their divorce, Elizabeth Ashley would refine the point in her book. “George was never one of those actors who believes his job is to take the money, hit the mark and say the lines and let it go at that,” she wrote. “He felt that as an above the title star he had the responsibility to use his muscle and power to try and make it better, and that has never stopped in him. He was unrelenting about it, to the point where a lot of directors and executives came to feel he was a pain in the ass.”

It's true that Patricia Neal's character was fuller in the shooting script than in the final cut, but exactly how responsible George Peppard was in the thinning of 2E is anyone's guess. Scenes and parts of scenes can be excised for any number of reasons, and while senseless ego is often one of them, it doesn't fully explain what goes on behind closed doors. At the end of the day, what Blake cut of 2E, he cut for the sake of his production. Whether it looked like defeat, improvement, or compromise undoubtedly varied with what (i.e., who) got slashed, but as the director of a major motion picture with major conflicting allegiances, Edwards's reasoning was always multidetermined. He was as much an on-set regulator as a behind-camera storyteller. When, for instance, Neal suggested that they might play a scene with Peppard sitting on her lap—an interesting suggestion, appropriately condescending to the actor's character—Peppard recoiled in absolute horror. He said
he
would never do anything like that. Yes, interjected Neal, but would
Paul
?

“On one occasion,” said Patricia Neal, “Blake and George almost had a fistfight. We were trying to block a scene and George wanted to change everything that Blake had planned, and George got so terrible that Blake almost hit him. I got them to stop, but I think George got his way. I hated him from that moment on.” Ultimately for Edwards, handling Peppard was easier—and more complicated—than it looked to cast and crew. “I liked George,” he mused, “he was such a ham, so vulnerable really. He was an ex-Marine and all that stuff, and I'd tease him unmercifully. And he'd try and tease me back but didn't have the wit for it. As a consequence, I always thought he was a piss-poor actor.”

United by a common struggle, Patricia Neal and her director developed a strong working relationship. “I loved Blake,” she said. “We got along
splendidly
. He had a fabulous sense of humor. Once I did something wrong and he wanted to torture me, and he made me do it again, and again, and again, and again, but he was so funny about it, I practically forgot I was being tortured. That was a gorgeous man, a delicious man. He'd take me home for dinner with his children and his wife and we all had just a marvelous time. I can't tell you how much fun he was—
great
fun—and a beautiful director, too.”

The bond between Patricia Neal, her husband—the author Roald Dahl—and the Edwardses was not available to Peppard, presumably marginalizing him even further. “I think the problem with George,” offers Patricia Snell, “was that he came to the film thinking that everyone thought him really terrific. Soon people discovered that he had no social grist with things.
He was difficult. He didn't always seem to try hard enough. And Roald didn't like him either. That kind of colored a lot for Pat Neal.” Mysteriously, news of Peppard's alienation made its way to the press. Met with accusations of stubbornness, “forgetting his lines, ignoring appointments, and passing up old friends,” the actor explained himself to a reporter from
Screen Stories
. “My whole world fell apart in one day,” he confessed. “First, the couple who had been running our house for several years announced they were divorcing, and quit. Then, my six-year-old son came down with the measles, and quarantine laws barred me from going home to Chula Vista. I dislike living in Hollywood, so checking into a local hotel every night had me running around in crazy circles.”

AUDREY & MEL & BLAKE & AUDREY

In the evening, after the day's shooting had ended, Edwards was accustomed to rehearsing Audrey for the next morning's scenes. Ideally, run-throughs would give her the confidence to make spontaneous but informed choices before the camera, when her anxiety was at its highest. Her instincts, Edwards observed, were impeccable, and each evening's rehearsal would end upbeat, on a note of mutual understanding. In New York, the process went smoothly—Audrey would come to the set the next day ready to apply what they had arrived at the evening before—but ever since they got to Los Angeles, Blake noticed that their headway wasn't carrying over into the shoot.

Between one day and the next, Audrey was changing her mind—or, more likely, having it changed for her. She had not the confidence (or the bad manners) to revoke
Edwards's notes on her own, suggesting to Blake that Mel was counterdirecting her at home. Of course, there was no way for Edwards to be certain that Mel was staging a subtle mutiny, but he had his suspicions. Like most everyone else on
Tiffany's,
Blake saw what the press didn't: the Ferrers as they truly were.

Mel was not shy about openly reprimanding Audrey. They all saw it. Some thought that he even enjoyed it. Jurow overheard the critical remarks Mel made about his wife's clothing and demeanor the few times he'd appear on the set to take her to lunch. “He was very tricky with her, you know,” Patricia Neal recalls. “He wanted her to do things as properly as she could, and boy she did! He invited us to supper once after shooting, and we had our drinks, had our supper, and then
left
. She had her bedtime and he wanted her sticking to it.”

One evening after the day's shoot, at a Japanese restaurant with various members of the cast and crew, Audrey made the mistake of putting her elbows on the table. Mel was seated next to her, and when he saw this, he picked up a fork, slipped its prongs under her elbows, and said—in a voice loud enough for all to hear—“Ladies do not put their elbows on the table.” It was the sort of oppressively awkward moment that can only be met with silence. Audrey was stricken, and the table, mortified. Nothing was said. She simply removed her elbows and put her hands in her lap.

Audrey seemed to have a bottomless reserve of the benefit of the doubt, and the more she gave to Mel, the less she had for herself. But she wanted the marriage to work. So if he said it was right, then it probably was. That meant that if she saw
it another way, or felt differently, she was probably wrong. Of course it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time she didn't have to work so hard at love. Having a family was enough. Well, now she had it, and Mel had given it to her. So why was there a problem? Was she not satisfied to be satisfied? Maybe Mel was not the only one at fault for what was happening. Maybe she had pushed him to it. But couldn't that mean he pushed her to push him?

Audrey's willing selflessness depleted her, and her neediness kept her coming back. It was a bad combination, especially when it was paired with its exact opposite: a narcissistic man who only took, got hooked on taking, and took some more.

Blake sensed a needy side to her and attributed it to a kind of daughterly instinct. She was long without a father, he reasoned, and Mel fit the bill. The trouble was, he fit it too well and she needed it too much. “I don't know whether her men had a lasting effect on her career,” Blake said many years later, “but I'm quite sure they had a lasting effect on her personal life. She put up with terrible things. I don't think she had the fun she was capable of having.”

Edwards knew that the only way he could help Audrey overcome the wide gap she perceived between her true self and Holly Golightly would be to persuade her to go only to him, not her husband, for direction. She'd have to trust Blake, and him alone. If she couldn't manage that, she'd have to have faith in him instead. But that faith would be impossible to maintain if after hours, Mel continued to fill her mind with new ideas—even if they were good ones—about her performance. So Edwards gave Audrey an ultimatum. Either choose him, or find another director.

Audrey got it instantly. From there on out, she and Blake were in perfect sync. As the shoot progressed, Blake found he didn't need to hold his hand out to her anymore. She was doing it on her own. Buddy Ebsen saw it up close. “No two takes are identical,” he would write of Audrey's working style. “The ‘nowness' of one minute ago is gone forever and can only be played back—never duplicated. In one's delivery the timing varies by split seconds, or the weight of the word switches by audible milliseconds.” Rehearsing with Edwards gave her conviction and the permission to use it. “You know,” she said, “I've had very little experience, really, and I have no technique for doing things I'm unsuited to. I have to operate entirely on instinct. It was Blake Edwards who finally persuaded me [to become Holly]. He at least is perfectly cast as a director, and I discovered his approach emphasizes the same sort of spontaneity as my own.” Audrey was truly maturing on the set of
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. She was gaining control.

It was a new feeling, one Audrey had never known as an actress. On
Roman Holiday,
Wyler simply didn't direct her that way. The closest he came to shaping a performance was calling out “let's do it again.” And he did—over and over. Billy Wilder was a better communicator, but he was abrupt and allowed no room for experimentation. His lines had to be read as written, with a certain inflection, and he shot until he got it. Then there was Fred Zinnemann, who directed Audrey in
The Nun's Story,
her greatest performance to date—and one built largely in the editing room. Of course, Audrey gave him his material, but it was Zinnemann who created her character's elaborate texture of thought and feeling. Strategically placed point of view and reaction shots did the trick. It was a triumph
of implication, of cinematic finesse. But she and Blake worked
together
to make the performance. Holly, in effect, was their offspring.

The seamless synchronicity that held Blake and Audrey together could have led one to wonder if their relationship had progressed beyond the professional. “I can assure you that there wasn't any of that,” Robert Wolders said. “During the making of
Tiffany's,
Audrey's marriage to Mel was quite intact. I'm quite definite about that.” However, when asked point-blank if there was any kind of romance between himself and Audrey on the set, Blake responded with characteristic gallantry. “In those days,” he answered, “everyone fell in love with Audrey.”

THROWING A PARTY TO SHOOT A PARTY

When she arrived at Paramount's Stage 9 in early November of 1960, Audrey was drawn into a party that had been in full swing for days.

For all of the verbal refinery Axelrod gilded into the script, Blake maintained that
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
if it were to satisfy the second half of the hybrid genre “romantic comedy,” would have to have bigger laughs, and more of them. That's how Mickey Rooney—for better or for worse—got Mr. Yunioshi, and that's why Blake decided to turn Holly's swingin' cocktail party into an all-out slapstick extravaganza.

“The general party was only indicated [in the screenplay ],” Blake recalls, “and I had to improvise it on the set and I had a good time doing it. I asked the casting office to hire only actors—no extras. I said that there must be a lot of
unemployed actors around—not important names, not the usual background faces that you see in films. I wanted real actors because I didn't know who I was going to give things to and I wanted to be sure that they could handle it.” Convincing the studio to pay actors upwards of $125 a day when extras charge a great deal less was not an easy sell for Blake, but luckily he came out on top. Edwards got the go-ahead from the moneymen, and with the bulk of production behind him, prepped and shot one of the most expensive party scenes to date. It took him the better part of November 2 to November 9 to get what he wanted, but it would last only thirteen minutes on film.

First to arrive on the scene was choreographer Miriam Nelson. Blake had summoned Miriam (or “Minimum,” as he called her) to help him fit into place the precarious human puzzle that lay ahead. To make this thing fun and frenzied was one thing, and Blake had the gag muscle to do that on his own, but to make it frenetic and legible required the hand of someone who specialized in physical control. As Blake's choreographer on
Bring Your Smile Along, He Laughed Last,
and
High Time,
Minimum was just that someone, and in those early days of planning, she was also an extra pair of eyes and ears. “Blake wanted to dream up some crazy things to do at the party,” she said. “I think he wanted somebody to come and play, someone to try things with. That's when he was discovering all sorts of things to do, like putting the telephone in a suitcase, and having Marty Balsam kissing a girl in the shower, and all that other wild stuff. Because I was a choreographer, I helped him with some of the staging. There were no dance numbers, but we discussed stuff like who should go where and when. It
looks crazy when you watch it, but these actors had to hit their marks, and be in the right position for the dialogue to play. So that's what we did, right there on the stage before we shot. Blake worked like that, you know. Very spontaneous. Very collaborative. He thrives in the company of collaborators. One idea turns into the next and before you know it you're in the movie.”

That's how it went for Nelson. “After we finished working that day Blake said, ‘Well, you oughta be in the party scene…' So the next day, he gave me an entrance, and then he teamed me up with Michael Quinn, who he asked to wear an eye patch, and he said, ‘Go in and have an argument.' Halfway through the argument, he said to the fella, ‘Lift your eye patch and just keep arguing.' So we did, and neither one of us knew what the hell we were saying. We were just making it up as we went along.” And like any real party, people got tired, but rather than fight it, Blake used it. “When we were shooting,” Nelson remembers, “I had on my own gold brocade suit, and matching gold shoes. After a while, those shoes began to hurt me, so in between takes, I would take them off and just hold them. Blake saw this and said, ‘What's the matter with your feet?' I said, ‘Well, these shoes hurt.' He said, ‘Then don't put them back on. This is that kind of a party. Just carry your shoes.' So that's what I did the rest of the scene. I kept ripping up my hose so they had to keep replacing them.”