Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (18 page)

Just in case the point wasn't clear enough, Paramount issued regular statements to the press underlining the not-so-subtle facts of the Audrey-Holly discrepancy, facts such as these:

So don't worry, moms.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is just a simple love story about a simple fun-loving girl.

THE POSTER

Before he got the call to design the
Tiffany's
poster, Robert McGinnis illustrated paperback book covers, romances mostly. His women were typically slender, idealized, but with a hard edge that made them more elegant than voluptuous. “I preferred the more intelligent look of the fashion models of the early sixties to the Playboy types,” he said. “That's how I could stand out from the other artists. They were doing, you know, a lot of blondes, a lot of Marilyns.”

Somewhat out of the blue, McGinnis got a call from the art director Paramount had hired to design the
Tiffany's
poster. He asked McGinnis, who had no film poster credits to his name, if he was interested in contributing a few illustrations. “The art director told me that all they wanted was a single figure, just this girl standing, but with a cat over her shoulder, and that she would be holding her long cigarette holder. They sent me a few movie stills to work with and I said, ‘Sure, why not?'

“The stills weren't really any good, so I sort of had to take a few leaps of my own. I was shooting pictures of a model for a book cover I was doing, and had her pose with the little orange cat I had back in those days. I put the cat on her shoulder, but the cat wouldn't stay, so she had to put her right arm up to hold it there. That was an accident. I didn't tell the model to put her hand there. It was just the only way she could keep the cat in place. That right there was the missing piece and it was the only variation from the many movie stills they gave me. Most of the photographs showed her with that hair, wearing those diamonds, and wearing that dress, so in the end, I didn't really stray too far from what they wanted and the direction they gave me.

“I did give the figure a little more through the hips and the bust, to idealize her just a little more. But the art director wanted more leg showing. In the photographs I got, Audrey's dress was long, all the way to the floor. But I was told to make her sexier, so I exposed that leg. That came from the art director, but I'm sure he got it from the studio. He told me they wanted to establish that
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was a movie about the city. They wanted a couple embracing with the skyline in the background, which they wanted to contrast with the elegance in the main figure of Audrey. But the main thing was the cat. They really wanted that cat in there.”

McGinnis didn't know it, but that cat, which was so important to the studio, was—as their explicit definition indicates—part of their spin on “kook.” Without it, the figure of Holly in the
Breakfast at Tiffany's
poster reads as simply seductive. The presence of the cat quite cleverly plays against that potentially alienating feature—and here's the key—without negating it.
The studio's idea to contrast Holly with the couple embracing in the background substantiates the same tension.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is kookie, the poster says, but the good kind, the kind with an old-fashioned ending.

A TRÈS EXCLUSIVE ENTERTAINMENT

The West Coast premiere was held at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood on October 17, 1961. The invitation—if you were lucky enough to get one—was dipped head to toe in Tiffany blue with a two-inch-tall Holly caricature drawn at the bottom right.

In addition, the envelope contained a little card:

In attendance that October evening, a year and two weeks after cameras turned on Fifth Avenue, were Nat King Cole, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Dennis Hopper, Buster Keaton, Ernie Kovacs, Alan Ladd, Charles Laughton, Jerry Lewis, Karl Malden, Jayne Mansfield, Lee Marvin, Groucho Marx, Eva Marie Saint, and Marlon Brando. Wink Martindale was the master of ceremonies.

Audrey, when she saw the movie, told her agent Kurt Frings it was the hardest—and best—thing she had ever done. But what would the critics think?

WHAT THE CRITICS THOUGHT

The
New York Times
(“wholly captivating”) and
Variety
(“surprisingly moving”) came out with hearty thanks for an all-around good time. A few quibbles were noted, but they were easily overcome by Audrey's addictive appeal, the supporting performances, and for
Times
critic A. H. Weiller, a pair of inspired scenes: “A word must be said for the wild party thrown by Miss Hepburn and her visit to Tiffany's in which John McGiver, as a terrifyingly restrained clerk, solicitously sells a trinket for under $10: Both scenes are gems of invention.” The uncharmed critics thought of
Tiffany's
as a soft comedy with a limp ending, but none were livelier, or more prophetic, than Brendan Gill. His
New Yorker
review, which began, “
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is one of those odd works that if they were any better would be a lot worse” ended with, “Millions of people are going to be enchanted with this picture; I will try not to feel lonely in my semi-detached enchantment.” If only the human body could learn to shrug and applaud at once.

No one seemed quite clear on the faithfulness of the adaptation. To one critic it was true in spirit, but not in fact; to another it was fact, not spirit; to this one it didn't matter because the picture worked; to that one, it mattered because it didn't. In the muddled free-for-all, moral agenda was often fobbed off as comparative analysis. As always, the central question was, was the film's Holly too clean or too dirty? Too sweet or too
sultry? All manner of answers poured forth, but for Penelope Gilliatt, the correct response was, keenly, both and neither. She wrote, “The achievement of the film, as well as its hedging flaw, is that one leaves this unquestioned at the time.” Jurow and Shepherd would have been happy to read Arthur Knight on the subject, who noted, “Blake Edwards and his talented crew have touched a tawdry romance with true glamour…”

Clean may have won the
Saturday Review
, but it was far from pervasive. Out of the cacophony came one Irving A. Mandell, whose letter to
Hollywood Citizen-News
unearthed all the contentious taboos Team
Tiffany's
tried their best to bury. He wrote, “The
Tiffany
picture is the worst of the year from a morality standpoint. Not only does it show a prostitute throwing herself at a ‘kept' man but it treats theft as a joke. I fear ‘shoplifting' will rise among teen-agers after viewing this.” Lest we forget. Just when the Production Code was beginning to look archaic, folks like Mr. Mandell appeared to crash the party. Writing of
Tiffany's
and the film
La Verite,
with Brigitte Bardot, Mandell asserts, “Neither picture has a story which makes sense. There is nothing in either to make one sympathetic with the main characters (these women cannot possibly be called heroines).”

WORKING GIRL

When she graduated from Brandeis University in 1959, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the future cofounder of
Ms. Magazine,
was in need of a heroine. Right out of school, she started looking for a job in publishing, but found, despite her qualifications, that she couldn't get one. “I had a BA in English,” she said, “and an
American Literature cum laude and distinction and all these other things, but when I opened the
New York Times
want ads, I couldn't apply for the jobs that I was qualified for because I could only apply for the job in the ‘Help Wanted: Females' column. All the junior editor jobs were in the men's column.”

Letty finally landed a secretarial job at Simon and Schuster. A year later, she moved to a small publishing house called Bernard Geis Associates where she advanced from assistant director of publicity, promotion, advertising, and subsidiary rights to director of each department. She was twenty-one. “I would take these editors out to lunch, but I had to establish charge accounts in these restaurants so men didn't see me signing the check. It was considered emasculating. I had to do all kinds of things to mask what was happening to make the men feel comfortable.”

As the person in charge of promoting the soon-to-be-best-selling
Sex and the Single Girl
, Pogrebin trained author Helen Gurley Brown for her various interviews and media appearances. The two spent a great deal of time together, and before long, they forged a connection. “Helen was already married by the time I met her, but before that, she had led this fabulous single life for thirty-seven years.” In her book, Brown was trumpeting a life of good times for the bachelorette, offering advice on everything from how a girl could add sensuality to her apartment, to advocating premarital sex, and even outlining ways to leave Manhattan for a rendezvous with a married man. It was racy, with an overarching idea of modern womanhood that looked ahead to
The Feminine Mystique
. But with more mystique. “Betty Friedan might have been embarrassed
to have Helen's book on her shelf,” Pogrebin said, “but she definitely knew about it.”

“I used to go to work in high-heeled shoes, gloves, hat, matching bag,” she added, “and was very careful to always wear my hair in a bun. If my hemline was too high, I'd be sent home to change my dress. What I'm saying is, the demands of convention were merciless. I can't tell you what it was like, to be haunted by this set of feminine ideals wherever you went. Just imagine this: when I finally got married, I was the last one of my friends, and I was only twenty-four.”

ONE OF SWIFTY LAZAR'S DINNER PARTIES

When he wanted to, Truman could pour it on. “Sometime after the movie came out,” remembers Patricia Snell, “I met Capote at one of Swifty Lazar's dinner parties and I drove him back to the Bel-Air Hotel because he was acting, you know, so
nuts
. He was drunk or on drugs or something. He had created such a scene at Swifty's party and I lived by the hotel, so I took him. On the ride home he said, [slurring] ‘it was a great, great thing to have your husband do the picture…' He told me he was thrilled with the end result, that he was really, really happy with the movie. Of course, I knew what he really thought.”

For the rest of his life, when it didn't serve him to ingratiate, Capote would state his true position—a highly valid one—without reserve. “The book was really rather bitter,” he said in a 1968
Playboy
interview, “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. It bore as much resemblance to my work as the Rockettes do to Ulanova.” Decades later, with a few beverages in hand, Truman really let loose to journalist Lawrence Grobel. When asked what he thought was wrong with the adaptation, he replied,

They didn't offer it to Truman. They offered it to a writer who wouldn't fight their changes.

“Truman was strongly opposed to the screenplay,” Shepherd said. “But I only found out about that after the picture
was released. We never had any day-to-day dialogue with him about the screenplay, directly or through his agent. Frankly, I don't recall having a single face-to-face meeting with Truman until the picture was going into release. After he acquired the novel, neither did Marty, but we were not obligated to share the development of the script with him.”