Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (8 page)

In the end, neither woman sued; Bonnie was ridiculed back to reality and the Montana-made starlet rode it out only as far as she could. Thanks to her newfound notoriety, the actress transferred some of Holly's aura to herself (which Holly, ironically, had borrowed from her), spun in the sun for her mayfly moment, and then, like Truman's mother, up and disappeared. But was she, or any of the other women who stepped forward, the
real
Holly Golightly? When the question was posed to the book's author, he answered a simple no. “The real Holly Golightly,” he said, with a portentous pause, “was a girl exactly like the girl in
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
with the single exception that in the book she comes from Texas, whereas the real Holly was a German refugee who arrived in New York at the beginning of the War, when she was seventeen years old. Very few people were aware of this, however, because she spoke English without any trace of an accent. She had an apartment in the brownstone where I lived and we became great friends. Everything I wrote about her is literally true—not about her friendship with a gangster called Sally Tomato and all that, but everything about her personality and her approach to life, even the most apparently preposterous parts of the book. For instance, do you remember, in the beginning, where a man comes into a bar with photographs of an African wood carving of a girl's head he had found in the jungle and the girl could only be Holly? Well, my real-life Holly did disappear into Portuguese Africa and was never heard from again. But after the war, a man named John La Touche, a well-known song lyricist and writer, traveled to the Belgian Congo to make a documentary film: and in a jungle village he discovered this wooden head carving of Holly. It's all the evidence of her existence that remains.”

“Truman mentioned such a woman to me too,” remembers Gerald Clarke, Capote's biographer. “But in the version I heard she was Swiss. He even gave me her name. I could never find any of his friends who remembered her, however. Did she exist? Probably. But was she Holly Golightly? I doubt it. If she did exist, I suspect she was just one of the many.” Indeed there were many, and as Clarke has witnessed, new ones keep popping up all the time. “A few months ago,” he said, “a reporter from
Newsday
called me. She was writing an obituary of a woman who had told her family that
she
was the model for Holly. I had never heard of the woman, but the reporter told me that she was the right age, had been a model, knew Truman, and so on. There were lots of women like that in those days, and my guess is that Holly owed something to any number of them.”

At that time, there were few girls in fifties literature quite like her. Though it may not seem so at first glance, lurking beneath Holly's hedonism, a kind of uptown beatnik is crying to get out. She may not wear berets or play the bongo, but she speaks in “hep”s and “crazy”s, cares not a thing for domestic propriety, and like a girl out of Kerouac, is hell-bent on freedom. But not just in terms of ubiquity, of going lightly. It was the American sleepwalk that Holly—and her Beat brethren—were running from. In fact, the term “beatnik,” coined by journalist Herb Caen only months before the publication of
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
pinned the suffix “nik” to “beat” after the Russian satellite
Sputnik I
. What could be more anti-American than that? Not that Holly was a polemicist; she'd never get on a soap-box to argue for anything other than having a good old time.
But in her reckless love of individuality, whether she knows it or not, Holly rustles with the fervor of the next generation.

It would be three years until Truman's creation shook loose the complacencies of Babe Paleys across America—and it would take the film for it to happen—but until then, the Holly of the novel would be viewed as a salacious other—not a normal person, but one of the world's weirdos, one of
them
. In 1961, Audrey Hepburn, the good girl princess, would change all that. With the movie of
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
she'd bring Holly home.

1958-1960

JUROW AND SHEPHERD MAKE THEIR MOVE

Midway into production on
The Hanging Tree,
Jurow-Shepherd's first movie, Marty Jurow was handed the reader report on
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. The book was still in galleys, so there was no sales record yet, but even a fool could see it wasn't the kind of story that screamed box-office success. “Well-written, off-beat, amusing,” the coverage said. “But it is unfortunately too similar to Isherwood's work [
Goodbye to Berlin
], dramatized as
I Am a Camera
. The type of character is the same. Only the incidents and chronology are different, and in any event this is more of a character sketch than a story. NOT RECOMMENDED.”

But Jurow was curious. So was Shepherd. “We thought there could be a feature there,” he said, “because the story of
how a girl comes from Tulip, Texas, and gets involved with a guy in New York was at its heart a love story and could even become a marketable romantic comedy. It has an opening act in that sense, and ultimately had a potential conclusion if they got together, but we weren't sure. There were problems.” Maybe somewhere there was a movie in it. Maybe.

Jurow called Capote's agent, Audrey Wood, to set up a meeting with Truman in New York. Wood let Jurow know there were already a few offers on the table, but Marty couldn't be so sure. Was that a bluff? Was she bullshitting him? Probably not. Even outside of literary circles, the name Capote had serious cachet; his talent had earned him prestige, and his flamboyance made him into a star. In Hollywood, that combination made
Tiffany's
highbrow plunder, and it would earn the one who got the rights a sizable chunk of clout. As Jurow knew, that made
Breakfast at Tiffany's
a good investment, even if they ended up never making a movie out of it. Just having it in their possession would be a victory.

Jurow got on a plane to New York as soon as he could. The trick was to see Capote in person, and waste no time in doing it. Who knew how many executives Truman had already met with or how much they had offered him? Or was it already over? At the very moment Marty took his seat in first class, Truman could have been dangling his pen over someone else's dotted line.

Jurow knew he could handle the negotiation. Though his production company did not yet have the swagger of other, older production outfits, or a fat wad of box-office receipts to flash around like a VIP pass, they did have one very formidable lure: both Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd were
seriously connected. “I had a good relationship with Audrey Wood since we had met at MCA,” Shepherd explained, “and I don't mind saying that Marty and I had represented some very important, very bankable clients from the days when we were agents. Audrey knew that and Truman did too.” Should
Breakfast at Tiffany's
get that far into preproduction, Jurow-Shepherd was only a rotary call away from the biggest names in town.

And if that didn't hook Truman, they had other lures. Shepherd said, “The fact that Marty and I were developing Tennessee Williams's
Orpheus Descending
[which became
The Fugitive Kind
], and were willing to go with Anna Magnani, who Tennessee wanted, as opposed to Ingrid Bergman, who wanted to do it with [producer] Sam Spiegel and who would be better for the studio, meant a lot to Tennessee, I'm sure, and I think it's probably why he ended up selling us the rights to his play. My guess is that even though we hadn't produced a lot of movies, Audrey Wood looked upon us as producers who would remain respectful to her writers.”

As the senior, more experienced member of the team, Jurow was chosen to go to New York. He had since proven he knew how to be clean in the boardrooms, and if need be, dirty when it counted. Nothing for him was without precedent—or so he might have told himself as his plane took off from LAX—but he had never sat across the table from the bulldog Truman Capote.

Of course, he had heard the stories. He knew that Capote had New York society at his feet, that Bill Paley called him Tru-Heart (others called him the Tiny Terror), and that somehow, by charm, wit, or genius, when it came to seduction, he was an absolute pro. Who would set the terms of the deal
was anyone's guess, but Jurow, as he told Shepherd before the flight, had committed himself to winning the property. He would be the one doing the seducing.

Best, he thought, to steer clear of story discussions. Writers wanted promises about the adaptation, and promises Jurow couldn't make. He could, however, promise to remain “faithful.” That one was always up for interpretation. If it came to it, Jurow decided, he would sincerely pledge his commitment to what was written. He would assure Capote that he and Shepherd wanted only to be loyal to his ideas about
Tiffany's,
with, of course, the single (
ahem
) caveat that there are certain very minor things that work on the page that just don't work on the screen. Surely Truman, as an occasional screenwriter, understood that. Jurow knew the way to get what he wanted was to keep the other guy sure
he
was getting what he wanted. If he was a writer, that meant letting him talk and talk. They'll deny it between their gulps of booze, but all writers love nothing more than the sound of their own voice. They crave the spotlight, and Capote more than most. Just look at the way he posed for photographers. Deep down, the guy was nothing but showbiz, and nobody could play that game better than Marty Jurow.

They were to meet at the Colony Restaurant on Madison and Sixty-first. Marty got there early, gave his name to the maître d' and was led to a corner of the room designated for Mr. Capote. The table, Marty discovered, had its own telephone, a select coterie of personal waiters, and as one of them revealed, a private stash of wine reserved just for Truman. Just then, a nasally chirrup shot out from across the room. Marty looked up. There was the leprechaun Truman Capote, bounc
ing ahead, extending a grin to his admirers, and catching air kisses thrown at him from all ends of the restaurant. Yes, Marty thought, he was looking at a picture of pure showbiz, an entrance staged and costumed to Truman's exacting perfection. If you could measure a man's ego by the length of his scarf, then this one had no end. He had been right to come to New York.

Over the next several hours, as Truman's eyes radared the premises for socialites and celebrities, Marty Jurow listened to the little man's monologue on who he saw and who saw him, and about Marilyn Monroe, that sweet dear baby, who was sent down to earth to make married men crazy and, according to Truman, play Holly Golightly. Here Marty turned on his practiced smile and tried to change the subject. But Truman held on. He told Jurow how he had known Marilyn for something like ten years, that he had met her around the time of her first speaking role, and that they were very fond of each other. Beneath all that sex and glamour, Truman said, Marilyn had something touching about her, something simple. She would be perfect for the role of Holly. (“Don't you think, Mr. Jurow?”) She was Truman's first choice.

He and Marilyn were very close, Truman continued, which would make things a lot easier. They were always seen together at El Morocco, either canoodling in a corner or, of all ridiculous things, dancing. So as not to tower over him, Marilyn would kick off her little shoes and twirl around in her bare feet. “It's true!” Truman said, laughing. “It's true!”

Marty listened (incredulous), nodding his head, and when he could, inserted a few words of carefully chosen praise about the book. It wasn't easy to keep Truman on subject, but Marty
made his pitch when the time came, pledging his—and Richard Shepherd's—loyalty to what was written, dropping choice details from the coverage he had reviewed in the cab over. Truman listened, beaming at the morsels of praise he ingested between chews. As Marty went on, it became clear to him that he had Capote right where he wanted him. For the moment.

“You know, of course,” Truman said, “that I want to play the male lead.”

Marty took a breath. If he stalled for a moment to figure out if Truman was joking, he could buy enought time to calculate his next move. All he needed to see was the slightest tremor turn up at the corner of Capote's mouth. Then Jurow would know that he needed to laugh. But there was no tremor, only silence. Marty was on his own.

“Truman,” he said, erring on the side of flattery, “the role just isn't good enough for you.”

Truman said nothing.

Marty waited. He'd have to fill the silence.

“All eyes will be on Holly Golightly,” he added, “through every frame of this picture. The male lead is just a pair of shoulders for Holly to lean on. You deserve something more dynamic, more colorful.”

Did that work? In the hush that followed, Jurow had no way of telling. If Capote smelled the bullshit—and God knows it was getting thicker by the second—it would all be over.

“You're right,” Truman said. “I deserve something more dynamic.”

The next day, with Paramount's approval, Marty closed the deal for $65,000.

MARILYN

On the plane back to Los Angeles, Marty found himself seated next to Marilyn Monroe. At that time, only months away from the release of
Some Like It Hot,
Marilyn had achieved breathtaking fame, and a level of sexual and commercial desirability few other Americans had (or ever would). She had heard all about
Breakfast at Tiffany's
from Milton Greene, her photographer-cum-producer-cum-partner-cum-confidant, and though she had not read the book, she was interested in playing Holly. It was something Marilyn said she'd have to discuss with Paula Strasberg, her personal acting coach and, along with Greene, career adviser. She said she'd talk it over with them, but what she really meant was she'd have to get their permission. She was, as Truman said, very much the little child under all that creamy come-hither; weary enough to know human iniquity, but too timid to defend herself against it. “I've never had a home,” she once confessed to Truman. “Not a real one with all my own furniture.” There was more than a little Golightly in that.

But Jurow wasn't convinced Marilyn was right for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. Holly had to be sharp and tough, and as anyone who saw Marilyin could sense, she was about as tough as a tulip. It was difficult to imagine a personality like that living like Holly, all on her own in the big city.

And there were the very practical facts of film production to consider. Marty knew that Marilyn was notoriously irresponsible, and to a producer, that meant expensive. He'd heard
stories about her on
The Seven Year Itch
. Wilder said dealing with her was a kind of hell, like pulling teeth. His picture fell nine days behind schedule (at $80,000 a day), and not just because of Marilyn's chronic lateness, but because of her strange, almost pathological block against remembering dialogue (she might require up to forty or fifty takes to complete a single line). “It's not that she was mean,” Billy said. “It's just that she had no sense of time, nor conscience that three hundred people had been waiting hours for her.” Jurow didn't want that on his hands; and yet, he knew Marilyn could sell tickets. So maybe she'd bring in more than she'd cost them. Wilder thought she was worth it, but with a big proviso: she couldn't always hit the right notes. One minute she had the precision timing of Judy Holliday, and the next she was mugging like crazy.

Days later, Jurow got a phone call. It was Paula Strasberg. “Marilyn Monroe will not play a lady of the evening,” she told him. Case closed.

Maybe. “I remember it this way,” Shepherd said. “We both knew Marilyn was interested, but neither of us really saw her in the part. Because she was at one time a client of mine, I was the one who had to call her and tell her we were going to go with someone else. It was beyond question one of the hardest calls I've ever had to make. But she took it fine. ‘Okay,' she said. And that was it.”

Before they could consider any other actresses, Jurow and Shepherd needed a great script, something so good that every doubt an actress would have about the raciness of the project would be washed away the moment she started reading. But before the script could be great it had to be good, and considering the difficulty of the adaptation, just converting Capote's
novel into movie terms—a story with three acts, relatable protagonists, and a concrete romance—would be a challenge for any screenwriter, no matter how experienced.

In January of 1959, Jurow and Shepherd set out to find one.

THE GAG WRITER

Since the day his wife gave him the novel, well before he got the news of Capote's deal with Jurow-Shepherd, George Axelrod had been dying to adapt
Tiffany's
. The book had all the elements he was drawn to: wit, a progressive sensibility, and sophistication up the wazoo. Just about everything Hollywood thought George wasn't.

Like most other successful actors, directors, and writers in pictures, Axelrod was typecast by his success and unable to break free. Executives considered George capable of writing his particular kind of movie—the lowbrow
The Seven Year Itch
kind—and nothing else. He had cornered the market, and now the market was cornering him.

It's a testament to his enthusiasm that he went ahead anyway and pitched the idea to Fox. That's when George found out that Jurow-Shepherd had beaten him to it. From there he went directly to Paramount, eager and hopeful that if the book had already been optioned, he might be able to finagle himself into the job. But Jurow and Shepherd flat out turned him down. Not uptown enough, they said.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was going to be a class picture, not a yuck job.

If they were making a comedy with Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe, then, yes, they'd get George, but that wasn't what they wanted for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. Worse than that, as
a screenwriter he was a real liability. After
The Seven Year Itch,
the name Axelrod was such a red flag to the protectors of the Production Code that putting his byline on a script about a call girl might just shut down their production for good. So, no: Jurow-Shepherd needed to tread lightly, which is why they were after as genteel and well mannered a writer as they could get. George Axelrod was not that writer.