Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (16 page)

Blake had thrown a party to shoot a party, so that out of accident—or you might say, out of reality—he could glean from the mini story arcs that were occurring naturally all around him. Like Miriam Nelson, actress Fay McKenzie was given one of her own. She said, “Blake came up to me and said,
‘Hmmm…What am I going to do with you, Fay?' And he was thinking, and thinking, and then he said, ‘I know! Fay, you're always laughing. I'm going to put you in front of a mirror and you can laugh your head off!' So then we shot the scene, I returned to being an extra in the background, and a few days later, I said to Blake, ‘Hey, she could have a crying jag, you know.' He said, ‘Do it.' That's how that happened.” Unbeknownst to McKenzie, Blake had gone to great lengths to make her laugh. Beside him at the camera, he had stationed actor Stanley Adams, who was wearing one of the combustible hats worn in a previous scene by Helen Spring (Holly accidentally lights it aflame; a turned-over glass puts it out). When McKenzie was ready to go, Blake called action, cued the fire on Adams's head, and Fay—as she was told to—burst out laughing. Asked about this practical joke years later, Fay replied, “Blake didn't know this about me, but I am terribly, terribly nearsighted. I had no idea that he was trying to do anything to make me laugh.”

Joyce Meadows, who dances through the party in a white dress, had her bit foisted upon her. “At one point during the shoot, George Peppard reached out and pinched my butt and I let out a huge scream—a
real
scream. That surprised me! Blake didn't tell me what was going to happen, so of course he must have told George on the sly. But I don't know if he told George to pinch me specifically, or just anyone. That's the way it was. You never knew when something was going to happen.” “It went like that for the rest of the week,” Faye McKenzie said. “Blake would just kind of walk around on the set and you could see him thinking up shtick that he was going to do. Of course, the scene was written by George Axelrod, but everything in it was
pure
Blake Edwards.”

And what's a Blake Edwards party without a face-first pratfall? Such was the task of actress Dorothy Whitney, who as Mag Wildwood, was told to fall directly past the lens without lifting her arms from her side. (“Timber!”) Not an easy directive for even the most gifted physical comedian, this piece of clowning was murder on Dorothy Whitney, who all but crumpled under the pressure to get it right and do it fast. Kip King, who played the liquor delivery boy, saw everything that happened to her. “Blake had tremendous difficulty in getting Dorothy to fall. That also was really, really, really, difficult for us to watch because we saw her so scared, and he was relentless with her. She would say, ‘I can't do it, I can't do it.' Her reflexes wouldn't allow her to fall onto the mattress, but Blake needed that shot, and time was running out, and he went on and on until he got it. ‘Okay,' he would say to her. ‘Relax. Just relax. Now let's do it again.' I think it was upwards of thirteen takes. It was embarrassing for all of us to watch. He was losing his patience and began to look almost punitive. This was a different Blake. People were so stunned they didn't talk about it afterwards.”

For the next seven days, Blake led his partiers through 140 gallons of tea and ginger ale, in addition to cold cuts, dips, and sandwiches, over sixty cartons of cigarettes, and over $20,000 worth of production costs later, at last he had the party he wanted. “People were everywhere,” said Joyce Meadows. “Blake had planted us in practically every room throughout the set and signaled us with his hand when and where to move about. He would say, ‘Okay everybody, when the music goes on, I want this group of people to cross into here and mingle with this group over here.' But as far as our personal move
ments were concerned, that was up to us. He didn't give the party people specific notes, but at the beginning he said, ‘You're all a regular part of Holly's life. This is not a down-home party, but a typical Golightly party, so don't let anything surprise you. No matter what happens stay in your characters and stay in the scene.' From there, he gave his notes to the first A.D. who'd say stuff like, ‘You guys are doing great. Just keep up the conversation. Let's do it again.' You know, A.D. stuff. Blake had to save most of his energy for the dialogue scenes. You could tell that the actors were very precious to him. He would talk to them very privately and, it seemed to me, very intimately. You saw him talking to Audrey and Peppard and Marty Balsam, but you never
heard
him say anything. When he'd walk up to them, he'd put his arm around them and he'd take them to one side of the room and talk.”

“Blake makes everyone feel wonderful and appreciated,” Fay McKenzie said, “and has goofy things happening on the set. He wanted us to just have a good time, really. A lot of times that doesn't work, but he managed to do it. His sets were like parties, so it's no wonder that he's so good at writing and directing parties in the movies.” If this was going to look like a real party, then it had to evolve like a real party, and that meant bringing in a bee smoker—used by beekeepers to calm the bees—to enhance the smoky ambiance to a suitably thick end-of-evening cloud. On the last day of the shoot, Edwards replaced the ginger ale with champagne. But be warned: The trick to playing drunk, he told his cast, was to play the scene with the intention of seeming sober.

Audrey, though, drank very little. The alcohol would soften her focus, and focus is what she needed to keep up with Blake.
Wearing a beehive hairdo piled high and streaked blond with peroxide, she worked as fast as she could, digesting the director's notes with startling fluency. Edwards would assign her a move, line, or a gesture, and she would apply it right away, in a single take. Between setups, while Blake disappeared for his twenty-minute miracle naps or health food lunches, she could be seen reminiscing to a cluster of attentive players. Audrey was viewed by some as distant—in these cases, probably just taking a moment to herself before the scene—but as countless have testified, the generosity she showed to her costars was bottomless. “Everybody loved Audrey,” recalls Miriam Nelson. “She was so sweet and unassuming and nice to everybody. Some stars go to their dressing rooms between takes, but she didn't. I remember a group of us had gathered around her while they were relighting the scene, and she told us about the blitz in London. And she also told us that her mother always wanted her to have an extra pair of white gloves in case the gloves she was wearing got dirty. I remember that.”

“Everything you have read, heard, or wished to be true about Audrey Hepburn,” said Richard Shepherd, “doesn't come close to how wonderful she was. There's not a human being on earth that was kinder, more gentle, more caring, more giving, brighter, and more modest than Audrey. She was just an extraordinary, extraordinary person. Everyone should know that.”

When she wasn't on camera, Audrey might be spotted in her little elevated on-set trailer, watching the production from above. “It was like a little box two feet up in the air,” remembers Kip King. “It had a bed and a few cabinets. I talked to her standing at the door of the dressing room, two feet below her.
I was doing stand-up at the time and was trying to get her to laugh. She would smile and was always very kind. I think if she was Snow White, I was one of the dwarves. You know what I'm saying? There were human beings and there was Audrey Hepburn.” Joyce Meadows would also hang around beneath the trailer. “When Blake yelled cut,” she said, “the second A.D. walked over to the tall ladder beside me and yelled up, ‘Audrey! Get your butt down here! You're in the next scene!' And there she was, watching the whole thing from her trailer. ‘Ahhhhh!' she screamed. ‘That's right. That's me, isn't it?' I looked up and here comes this woman who looked like a toothpick dressed in black coming down the ladder to join the crowd. One thing about Audrey: she had none of that star stuff. You didn't have to say ‘Miss Hepburn.' And Blake was just as sweet. At the very end of the shoot, when I was all through, I walked out the stage door, and Blake rushed up and said, ‘Joyce Meadows.' I turned around and he said, ‘Thank you for making it a beautiful party.' I said, ‘Thank you, sir.' I was surprised he even knew my name.”

“The party scene was such a smash,” said McKenzie, “Blake and my husband [screenwriter Tom Waldman] decided it might be a good idea to do a whole movie like that. That's how the movie
The Party
came about.”

Here in the party scene was an opulent sweep of visual humor. All the surprises, gags, stunts, and reversals that had beckoned to Edwards from the silent films he adored were splayed out in kooky munificence, advancing one after the next like toys on a conveyor belt. But unlike the slapstick of Edwards's masters, Mack Sennett and Leo McCarey (directors of
The Keystone Cops and Laurel and Hardy), Blake's revisionist spin had a satirical edge. Each punch line—from the eye patch, to the phone in the suitcase, to the couple in the shower—was pointedly drawn from Holly's central theme; that the way things appear is not always the way things are. For as Holly's agent, O. J. Berman says, “She's a phony. But she's a
real
phony.” More than simply jokes, Edwards's party gags implicate all those present in the charade, gently mocking everyone too hip, drunk, or fashionably blasé to notice what is made obvious to Paul Varjak—that these nuts may be glamorous, but they don't have a clue. It's the cosmopolitan façade cut down to size, and in Edwards's comedic terms, it's sophisticated slapstick.

No one is less conscious of it than Holly Golightly, who lights a hat on fire, but notices nothing. Nor does she notice the empty frivolity of the life she leads, her true feelings about coupledom, or the man who wants so badly to love her. These are the thematic cornerstones of Edwards's
Breakfast at Tiffany's;
Capote's
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
by contrast, takes as its central preoccupation Holly's never-ending search for belonging. That's what Tiffany's is to her, and significantly, she never gets inside. But that is most certainly not the case with Blake Edwards's picture. In the movie, the director's personal interest in phoniness forms the basis of
this
Holly's story, which, because it is a romantic comedy, will resolve in love. But before it can end happily, all of the many lies, betrayals, and masks (literal and figurative) must be stripped away. So how to end it? What if all the glamour and society élan of the picture's first half came down to, say, a dark and rainy alley? Or if the image of the cage with which Edwards began the party scene was somehow…inverted…

THE END

But Axelrod's ending called for nothing of the sort. What's more, the scene wasn't really that dramatic. It didn't crescendo. It didn't sweep you up. It just ended:

EXT. STREET—(DAY)

Paul stands watching the departing car. The rain has stopped now and patches of blue are beginning to show between the clouds. At the corner the limousine stops for a light. Suddenly the door opens and Holly jumps out. She is running back toward him across the wet sidewalk. In a moment they are in each other's arms. Then she pulls away.

Together they dash up the block and into an alley in the direction Cat had gone.

Then they see him, sitting quietly on the top of a garbage can. She runs to him and gathers him in her arms.

They walk in silence for a moment, Holly carrying the cat.

As they continue to walk up the street—

That was it. But Blake couldn't hear the music swell, he couldn't see Paul and Holly pushed to the brink of their passions and beliefs, and without that eleventh-hour twist, the whole mechanism would just sputter to a halt. What it needed was some kind of imperative, the feeling of high tension followed by a crucial snap. Holly's mask ought to be ripped off her face.

All right, Blake thought, this is a scene about Holly's change of heart. She was once an independent, a free spirit, and now she wants to belong. The business of naming the cat comes to represent that transformation, sure, but this isn't
Lassie;
it's a love story between a man and a woman, so why play the climactic scene between her and an animal? Play it instead between the two of them, and that line about belonging, put it in Paul's mouth.