Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (17 page)

Now there's drama. Now there's a question in the air. Will she go with him or won't she?

The new pages were dated September 14, 1960, written six weeks after Axelrod's final draft. In the big speech, the scene's centerpiece, Blake recapitulated the image of the cage, which he featured in the first shot of the party sequence. He added the rain, changed the limousine to a taxi, and they shot it in December of 1960.

But they also shot the original ending—George's ending. That way, in postproduction, Blake would be able to see which one worked better. The final decision was his. And anyway, George was back in New York. “Blake shot both endings,” says Patricia Snell, “but he picked the one he wanted. There wasn't much George could do about it during the production, but when it was done, he put his three cents in.” What happened to the footage of Axelrod's ending—the ending that survives only in print—is a secret kept by the Paramount vaults, if it's kept anywhere at all. Perhaps it's gone for good. Perhaps not. Maybe it's mislabeled thirty feet under ground, and by some archival magic will turn up accidentally in years to come. But it's not likely. The cutting room floor is a graveyard.

THE CAT IN THE ALLEY

“As a woman,” film critic Judith Crist said in 2009, “if I could chop down my reactions, I would say that
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was a progressive step in the depiction of women in the movies, perhaps unintended by Axelrod and Edwards. The woman in me really likes Audrey Hepburn because she is successful at what she's doing, she's sort of in charge of herself, and is a realist beyond being so cute and attractive. That appeal—a woman's appeal—comes from the very basic idea of the gamine, and not just the gamine's physical being, but the idea of her cleverness. Marilyn didn't have that, but Audrey did. As a gamine, shrewdness was available to her. So she's a call girl, but we let her have it. There's even something very appealing about it. We won't admit it, but don't we, really, all secretly admire her for it? Because she gets away with it? Because she's so imperious, and at the same time is slightly, shall we say, immoral?

“If I could chop down my reactions one step further,” Crist continued, “that's the added pleasure for me as a critic, and it's at the heart of why
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is perhaps one of Audrey Hepburn's classier achievements. Her previous performances are beautifully embodied, but marked by intelligence, breeding, and middle-class grace—all qualities already familiar to us in Audrey. But not Holly Golightly. She was an impostor. That's why she's a multilayered character—Audrey's
first
. Not only that, but—and here's the woman in me again—a multilayered woman who isn't punished for her transgressions. When Bette Davis played the bad girl, she paid for it. That was the thirties-forties morality. Then there were things
in the fifties like
Love Me or Leave Me
with Doris Day, which was the beginning of redemptive “wrongdoing,” but its excuse was biography.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was different. It was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic toward a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn't have to be punished. But what's clever about the way they ended
Breakfast at Tiffany's
—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don't get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard's character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he's not long for it. Just because you're going to give the cat a name doesn't mean that the cat isn't going to go back to the alley.' You see what I mean?”

THE RAINCOAT

“Edith did the raincoat Audrey wears at the end of the picture,” Patricia Snell recalled. “I was on the set the day they shot that scene, and Audrey knew that I had loved the raincoat and wanted to give it to me, but Edith had made it so difficult for Audrey to even get the raincoat that I didn't find out until years later when Blake said, ‘Do you realize what Audrey went through to get you that raincoat?' I said, ‘No, I didn't.' You see, Edith Head didn't want anyone giving costumes away. They made about six of them, you know, because you never know what's going to happen on a set. But she finally got it and wrapped it in a box and, boy, I was so thrilled to get it. I love it.”

THE KISS

Two dressing rooms were assembled for Audrey, especially for the final sequence—one for taking off her wet clothes, the other for putting on dry ones. They were labeled “Wet Hepburn” and “Dry Hepburn.” When it came time for the kiss, Blake held out for eight takes, each one straining Peppard's neck more than the last. To give the camera the best view of the leading lady, the actor had to tilt his face just so, and the awkward angle, he claimed, threatened his look of rapture. (And the cat, meanwhile—a very, very wet cat—was stinking up the joint. That didn't make things any easier.) But they did it again (and again) with Audrey ducking into “Wet” and emerging from “Dry,” and at long last, with the warmish studio rain pouring down around him, Blake Edwards had the last shot he wanted. High-angled and wide, his camera tilted down on Paul and Holly ensorcelled in a kiss.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was now a love story. Jurow and Shepherd—their fretting about star and subject officially behind them—had their old-fashioned happy ending in the can. Axelrod had his high comedy, Blake his lowbrow elegance, and Audrey Hepburn, who said she couldn't do it, had done it.

1961

ONE OF BENNETT CERF'S DINNER PARTIES

In the days leading up to
Tiffany's
release, Joan and George Axelrod ran into Capote at one of Bennett Cerf's dinner parties in New York. As Joan told it,

ONE OF BILLY WILDER'S DINNER PARTIES

Meanwhile, George and Blake were riding a few postproduction bumps of their own. Though he swallowed Blake's ending without too much bitterness (it was sentimental, yes, but he agreed it was probably wise to give 'em what they paid for), Axelrod objected to the liberties Edwards took with the party scene. As the film's director, it was Blake's call, but with the question of authorship at stake and reputations on the line, it was going to take more than prerogatives to ease Axelrod's mind. “What Blake did with the cocktail party upset George a lot,” said Patricia Snell. “Blake just took it and ran with it and I'm not sure it's what George had in mind. It wasn't his.”

Neither, for that matter, were Mickey Rooney's scenes. They incensed George. “Each time he [Rooney] appeared I said, ‘Jesus, Blake, can't you see that it fucks up the picture?' He said, ‘We need comedy in this, and Mickey's character's
funny.' But Mickey's character is a) not funny in that film, and b) he has nothing whatsoever to do with the goddamn story. I got Audrey to agree to re-shoot the last scene, which was the only thing she was in with Rooney, so I could cut out all the Rooney stuff. However, Blake kept it in.”

“From there on,” adds Snell, “the relationship between Blake and George was difficult. They never really [pause]…we were socially their friends, we would go to their parties, and they would come to ours, but Blake and George just never quite connected after that. We would see them every Friday night at the Wilders' dinner parties, and on the surface they remained friendly but, you know, that's the game people play in Hollywood.” Had Axelrod been a producer on the picture, he could have kept a handle on his interests, but it was too late for that. All he could do now was smolder in silence.

After the fracas with Blake on
Tiffany's,
Billy Wilder convinced Axelrod to finally pack up the kids and move to L.A. “Look,” he said to George, “the time has come. You cannot sit in New York, see the finished product, then raise hell about it. If you want to be involved in the making of a picture, you've got to be out here to do it.” Billy was right. He could either stay a New York writers' snob in New York or become a New York writers' snob in L.A. where he could keep an eye on his scripts. That's what George was doing with
The Manchurian Candidate,
which he and Frankenheimer had been talking about since the early days of
Tiffany's
. This time, he'd do it right. If they made it the way they should, the way he wanted to,
The Manchurian Candidate
would be the bleakest political satire America had ever seen. George became a coproducer.

MANCINI IS READY TO SCORE

With the studio system on the outs, big changes were happening in Hollywood. The Production Code Administration was loosening its strictures, a new morality was coming to the fore, and motion pictures, formerly mass entertainment, were on their way to becoming art. Classical modes were fading fast, and Henry Mancini, whose sound struggled to keep apace with the classical giants, was on the crest of the change. Now that the studios had canceled their own orchestra budgets, Mancini was allowed unprecedented access to unconventional instruments—the sort audiences wouldn't normally hear on a traditional movie sound track.

It was the dance band sound that thrilled Mancini, but he wasn't ready to forsake the old-guard conventions entirely. What he would do in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was combine both traditions, the symphonic and the jazz, and redeem the latter by the former. But rather than use the full-blown orchestras of scores gone by, Mancini reduced the number of instruments to an ensemble small enough to foreground the guitars, harmonicas, and cha-cha beats.

At that time, most film scores weren't thought of as popular music. They were considered musical accompaniment, with little value apart from the picture. But Mancini had something else in mind. He wanted to make popular music—and he did. Weaving into
Breakfast at Tiffany's
self-contained jazz themes of ideal radio-playing (and album-selling) length, he became the first film composer to score big with the buying public. Not only did he reconceive and rerecord cues especially for
the sound-track album, Mancini advertised his catchy melody throughout the picture. He made “Moon River” a major thematic recurrence in
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
which only helped the tune, and the album, climb their way to the top of the charts.

After Audrey saw the film with the finished score, she wrote:

Too bad that Marty Rackin, who had reservations with Mancini from the word go, completely disagreed.

THAT FUCKING SONG

Breakfast at Tiffany's
had just previewed at a little off-road theater near Stanford University, and Audrey, Mel, Blake, Jurow,
Shepherd, and Henry Mancini were piled in a stretch limo headed back to Rackin's suite in San Francisco.

For the most part, the preview had been a success. The proof was in the response notecards the audience had filled out; none of them seemed to indicate that there was any serious problem with the picture. The only real issue seemed to be the picture was running just a little too long, but other than that, the company ought to have been riding high for the forty-five-minute trip back into the city. And yet, not everyone in the caravan was at ease. Mel's jealousy was as high after a good preview as it ever would be, and as Fay McKenzie observed, this one was no exception. “After the preview,” she said, “when everyone was telling Audrey how great she was—and she was, so wonderful—Mel said to her, [terse] ‘I liked your hat.' He said it loud enough for everyone to hear and it made us all so uncomfortable. But Audrey just about laughed it off. I think probably to put us at ease.”

When they got to the hotel, Marty Rackin was the first to speak.

“I love the picture, fellas,” he said, tapping out his cigar on an ashtray, “but the fucking song has to go.”

He was standing in front of the fireplace, with one long arm stretched across the mantle. They were all seated before him. No one spoke.

“The song had been an issue for Rackin for some time,” said Shepherd. “It wasn't about Audrey's voice, it was something else. He wanted to use the music of a guy like Gordon Jenkins, whose album
Manhattan Tower
had been a bestseller a few years earlier. But by that point we were all against it. After the screening in San Francisco, the only thing I wanted
to change was the Mickey Rooney stuff. I had told this to Blake on several occasions, but he stood by it. He thought he was funny. But he could have gotten the same laughs from a Japanese actor. It disgusts me to think about it. And Marty [Jurow] didn't like it either. But we never went to the mat about it. That night, in Rackin's suite, it was obvious to all of us that he was way, way off base about ‘Moon River.' Having been a studio head myself, I can only say that I think you're often inclined, instinctively, to comment, even when you don't have anything to say. Rackin was in that position.”

In Warren Harris's biography of Hepburn, Mancini says, “Audrey shot right up out of her chair and said, ‘Over my dead body!' Mel had to put his hand on her arm to restrain her. That's the closest I ever saw her to losing control.” But Mancini was mistaken; hostility, it's safe to say, was not in Audrey Hepburn's repertoire. What's more likely is that she protested silently or with a few tactful phrases, especially if Blake Edwards, who set the tone for the group, was himself keeping it all inside. “I looked over at Blake,” Mancini reports in his autobiography. “I saw his face. The blood was rising to the top of his head, like that thermometer when I put a match under it. He looked like he was going to burst. Audrey moved in her chair as if she were going to get up and say something. They made a slight move toward Marty, as if they were thinking about lynching him.” Clearly, Mancini's accounts are at odds.

It turns out it was Shepherd who saved the song. “I said, ‘You'll cut that song over my dead body!' And Rackin heard that. The issue was resolved that night.”

The song stayed. Swell music, fade out, the end.

Kind of.

THE KOOK

Despite all the precautions taken by the production, from casting to scoring, to ensure that Holly would appear proper and well behaved, it's hard to forget all the evidence to the contrary, from Capote's novel to Givenchy's dress, that suggests Holly is a wild thing at heart. Though the picture ends when she kisses Paul in the rain, we cannot forget that to get there, she has forsaken her family, abandoned her husband, gone out with a lot of rich foreign men, and, worst of all, had a really good time throughout.

Paramount's Publicity Department knew this, and they were afraid. Afraid that all the euphemisms would be lost on ticket buyers, that they'd believe Audrey Hepburn had made an indecent movie and stay home in front of their TVs, where they were safe. To reassure the unsure, they built a campaign around “kook.”

Derivative of cuckoo, “kook” was one of many pieces of fifties slang to give nonconformist eccentricity a positive spin. There was also “insane” and “mad,” as well as “crazy,” which had been in circulation since the crazy twenties, and as one might expect, made the idea of difference—a wildly pejorative concept in midcentury America—into an emblem of cool. Good jazz was
craaazy
. So was rock 'n' roll. But by the end of the fifties, kookiness had been appropriated into the mainstream; Madison Avenue spluttered it across print and radio, the TV show
77 Sunset Strip
borrowed it for hepcat Gerald Lloyd Kookson III, and the musical comedy
Bye Bye
Birdie
saw a throng of moist teenagers rioting under signs of “Birdie You're Really The Kookiest.” But what did it mean exactly?

Careful to make clear the distinction between a Beat kook—which the studio urged readers to acknowledge Holly was
not
—and a fun kook—the kind nervous parents might enjoy—Paramount publicity whitewashed the term of its seditious connotation. Their press releases were quite clear about the distinction:

Once on the set, an interviewer caught Audrey in the middle of knitting a sweater for Mel. She was quick to reassure the reporter—as he is quick to reassure his readers—that Holly was not the sort of part they might think it was. “When you publicize this unusual role,” she was supposedly overheard saying to Blake, “please make it clear that I do not play a trollop; I play a kook.” The British version of
Photoplay,
a well-circulated film fan magazine, reminded girls that there was no cause for alarm: