Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (7 page)

What the public didn't know, however, was that deep down, beneath his brash, frat house raunch, George Axelrod wanted to be Noel Coward. He wanted to write old-fashioned high comedies of the beautiful rich standing on balconies at midnight uncorking one another with wit and
quelques cuvées de prestige
. But he was too late. America was already at war with its natural urges, and movie wit was paying the price. Now, the slightest whiff of anamorphic tit and the country collapsed into puerile hysteria. In came Jerry Lewis, but for a price: sophisticated romantic comedy—the kind so prevalent in the thirties and forties—became a total anachronism. “In the Eisenhower years,” Norman Mailer wrote, “comedy resides in how close one can come to the concept of hot pussy while still
living in the cool of the innocent.” It regressed Hollywood's depiction of adult men and women considerably.

So George Axelrod was depressed. What he didn't know was that Truman Capote was coming to his rescue.

TWO YEARS IN THE LIFE OF TRUMAN CAPOTE

In the spring of 1955, only months after he and Babe met on that jet to Jamaica, Capote began to think seriously about
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. He took a cottage on Fire Island with his partner, the writer Jack Dunphy, dug in, but didn't get very far. There were distractions—namely, a piece about an American opera company that planned to take
Porgy and Bess
into the Soviet Union—and Holly was tabled. What he required, if Truman was really to get into
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
was the peace and tranquility he found at the seaside. Only there could he maintain the total concentration he needed to compose a longer piece, which is what
Tiffany's
was turning out to be.

For the next two years, Capote flitted from Russia, to Peggy Guggenheim's in Venice, to his new apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and to Kyoto, where, in 1956, he trapped Marlon Brando into a drunken interview and sold it to
The New Yorker
for a cushy sum.
Tiffany's
waited in a drawer.

THE PRODUCERS

Marty Jurow wore his black hair slicked back and combed neatly off to the side. He wasn't a tall man, but he was rugged and packed a punch. Maybe he got it from Brooklyn, where he
was born, maybe from Harvard Law, or maybe he got it from all those years he spent at New York's top entertainment law firms. One look at Jurow, and the suits on the other side of the boardroom table got the picture: this guy knew the angles. At the age of forty-seven, well before he and Richard Shepherd produced
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
Marty Jurow was already a show business veteran.

At thirty years old, Richard Shepherd was a lithe and dapper up-and-comer. After graduating from Stanford, he landed a first-rate agenting gig at MCA looking after the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Brando. But Shepherd was restless and taking meetings in skyscrapers had lost its appeal. What he wanted was to be out in L.A. making movies from the trenches. He wanted to get his hands dirty. So off he went.

Marty, meanwhile, had decided to do the same. Why not team up? With Jurow's extensive show business experience and Shepherd's immaculate client list, they could really make something of it. Great idea, but there were two things missing: money and material.

Money came first. They got it from Shepherd's father-in-law, producer William Goetz, and formed Jurow-Shepherd Productions. Then they struck a multipicture deal with Paramount and started looking for material. They started to read.

WHAT TRUMAN CAPOTE DOES IN BED

Truman finally got back to the seaside in the summer of 1957. He, Jack, and theatrical designer Oliver Smith rented a massive Victorian house in Bridgehampton and settled down to work. Sailaway—that's what the house was called—stood over the
water on stilts, and when the tide rose, the house did indeed look as if it were being carried off to sea. Truman liked it that way; the crash of the surf was a kind of metronome for him, especially at night when he did most of his work, lying in bed. There, culled from the fan of notebook pages he had spread out around him like a paper quilt, he transcribed
Breakfast at Tiffany's
onto typewritten pages.

The hardest part of writing was getting up the nerve to start, but when he did, Truman gave it a good four hours, dividing his hand between the keys and a cup of coffee, or as the afternoon wore on, mint tea, sherry, and by dusk, a row of tall martinis. Between sips there were puffs of cigarettes. If it got late and Truman needed to rest, he might look to Colette's paperweight. It helped him to slow his mind. “When it's a quarter to two and sleep hasn't come,” he once wrote, “a restfulness arises from contemplating a quiet white rose, until the rose expands into the whiteness of sleep.”

Truman wrote
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
as he did the bulk of his oeuvre, with a cold, almost scientific precision. He scoffed at impulse, at writers who hadn't mapped out the whole thing beforehand, preferring instead to plan, reconsider, and plan again before he so much as sharpened a single pencil. With
Tiffany's
he intended to evolve his style away from the florid swirls of, say,
Other Voices
and move toward a more measured, more subdued prose style. Out went the likes of “he was spinning like a fan blade through metal spirals; at the bottom a yawning-jawed crocodile followed his downward whirl with hooded eyes,” and in came a new technique, literal and direct. The page, he told those who asked, was no longer his playground; it was his operating room, and like a surgeon—like
Flaubert, one of his heroes—he endeavored to keep surprises to an absolute minimum.

He wrote of a nameless narrator, and of a thin, outspoken eighteen-year-old called Holly Golightly. And she does indeed go—from man to man and place to place—lightly (the permanent message on her mailbox reads, “Holly Golightly, traveling”). As he wrote Holly, Truman was discovering that, though she shared many qualities with the women he knew, she was unlike any woman Truman had ever met. She said what she wanted, did what she wanted to, and unlike the swans, outright refused to get married and settle down. It isn't just that she was a wild thing, though she most definitely was, it was that independence was the full mettle of her life, and she earned it by selling herself.

Holly was a high-class call girl, an American geisha. To her, a life without love was an occupational necessity. Try to cage her and she'd fly away, just like she flew away from Doc Golightly, the ex-husband she left back in Tulip, Texas. Freedom is what she's after, and in New York City Holly finally finds it; she cuts off her hair, speaks frankly about fucking, and is unrattled by the fact that the narrator, whom she calls “Fred” after her own brother, is gay. (She even admits to being a “bit of a dyke” herself.)

Though it's never explicitly stated, “Fred” is indeed a homosexual. Truman codified it somewhat, but it's in there for the taking. (Of Fred, Capote wrote, he “once walked from New Orleans to [the fictional] Nancy's Landing,” and Holly calls him “Maude” in the gay slang of the day.) That means that he and Holly are bound to one another by their sexually unorthodox dispositions. Unlike Holly and her lovers, they
share an intimacy that isn't tethered to their erotic or financial needs. In other words, they can love each other
freely,
the way no two married people can.

Challenging the sanctity of heterosexual dominion, Capote is suggesting that the gendered strictures of who makes the money (men) and who doesn't (women) might not be as enriching as the romance between a gay man and straight woman. This isn't because he believed platonic relationships were somehow ideal, or because he considered straight people bores, but because in 1958, with wives across America financially dependent upon their husbands, being a married woman was a euphemism for being caught.

Capote isn't whipping out any political pistols here, but he's certainly packing heat. In truth, he was more interested in observing a trend, being, in a sense, a journalist. “Every year,” he explained, “New York is flooded with these girls; and two or three, usually models, always become prominent and get their names in the gossip columns and are seen in all the prominent places with all the Beautiful People. And then they fade away and marry some accountant or dentist, and a new crop of girls arrives from Michigan or South Carolina and the process starts all over again. The main reason I wrote about Holly, outside of the fact that I liked her so much, was that she was such a symbol of all these girls who come to New York and spin in the sun for a moment like May flies and then disappear. I wanted to rescue one girl from that anonymity and preserve her for posterity.”

Truman finished
Breakfast at Tiffany's
in the spring of 1958 and expected to publish it that summer in
Harper's Bazaar
. But he didn't. They turned him down. Truman Capote, rascal
genius and cause célèbre of the literary world, and they turned him down.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
, TRAVELING

Apparently, it was a problem of language. Carmel Snow, the editor to whom Truman had promised the manuscript, had been fired, and in her place, the Hearst Corporation had installed Nancy White, a sort of unimaginative company cog. She objected to some of Capote's colorful usage (“dyke,” “hell,” “damn”), and most of all, to his heroine's free spiritedness. Truman was horrified by White's objections but acquiesced, and together they reached a less-colorful compromise. “The Bazaar is printing it in their July issue,” he wrote to his friend Cecil Beaton, “though they are very skittish about some of the language, and I daresay will pull a fast one on me by altering it without my knowledge.”

As it turned out,
Bazaar
altered nothing but their intention to publish. Just as they were about to send the cleaned-up Nancy White version of
Tiffany's
to press, the magazine backed out once and for all. No, they said, with a heroine as openly carnal as Holly Golightly,
Breakfast at Tiffany
's was just too risqué for their publication. Truman, naturally, was outraged and vowed never to associate with
Harper's
again. He and Jack took off for Greece.

Truman was in Athens when he received the telegram from
Esquire
. The magazine offered to buy
Breakfast at Tiffany's
from
Harper's Bazaar
for the two thousand dollars they'd paid for it, and put up an additional thousand dollars just to sweeten the deal. (Truman said yes.) By the time he and Jack returned
to New York in October of 1958, Random House had published
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
and
Esquire,
in its November issue, had serialized the novel in full.

On the whole, the book was well received, but no one was more ecstatic than Norman Mailer. “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him,” he wrote. “He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
which will become a small classic.” There was, however, a bit of dissent. Several critics found the novel—and Holly herself—disconcertingly slight, and even shallow. “Whenever Capote tries to suggest the inner life of his heroine,” wrote Alfred Kazin, “the writing breaks down. The image of the starving hillbilly child never comes into focus behind the brightly polished and eccentric woman about town in her black dress, pearl choker, and sandals.”

Was Capote fazed? Hardly. He was too busy sunning himself in the spot-and limelights.

THE REAL HOLLY GOLIGHTLY

After the publication of
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
modish women all over New York began to announce—some with evidence and others without—that
they
were Capote's real-life inspiration for Holly. Thus began what Truman called “The Holly Golightly Sweepstakes.”

Just about everyone, it seemed, had biographical ties to the novel, but no claim was nuttier, or less factual, than that of the twice-divorced former Greenwich Village bookstore
owner Bonnie Golightly. She sued Capote for $800,000, charging him with libel and invasion of privacy, claiming that Truman shaped Holly from facts about her life he picked up from “mutual friends.” “Besides a broad Southern accent acquired from her Tennessee upbringing,” noted a February 9, 1958, item in
Time,
“Bonnie Golightly points to some other evidence. Like Capote's Holly, she lived in a brownstone on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, with a bar around the corner on Lexington. Like Holly, she is an avid amateur folk singer with many theatrical and offbeat friends. Like Holly, Bonnie says: ‘I just love cats. The cat thing corresponds, and all the hair-washing and a lot of little things hither and yon.' One bit of Hollyana to which Bonnie makes no claim: ‘I've never, absolutely never, had a Lesbian roommate.'”

Upon learning of Miss Golightly's claim, author James Michener wrote a letter to Random House in Truman's defense. “The suit brought by the young woman in New York is patently false,” he wrote, “because I happen to know without question that Truman patterned Holly Golightly after a wonderful young woman from Montana….” When Michener showed Truman the letter, Capote instructed him to burn it immediately. “I've been afraid she's going to sue, too!” he cried.

Michener had met the woman in question, a “stunning would-be starlet-singer-actress-raconteur from the mines of Montana,” through Leonard Lyons, columnist for the
New York Post,
when she had been hanging out with him and Truman in the fast and wild pre-
Tiffany's
days. “She had a minimum talent,” Michener recalled, “a maximum beauty, and the rowdy sense of humor. Also, she was six feet, two inches tall, half a head taller than I, a head and a half taller than Truman.”