by Sam Wasson
They met only a few months before he began to work on Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Paleys were off to their Jamaican estate for a long weekend with the David O. Selznicks, when Selznick, who had enjoyed Truman’s company in the past, suggested they might have a bit more fun if they brought Capote along. Paley, who thought they were talking about President Truman, agreed and the invitation was made. Quelle chance! Capote was used to traveling in fast circles, but weekending with two of the world’s media monarchs and their wives was about as fast as it got (outside of Hollywood and royalty). He couldn’t pass it up.
“When I first saw her,” Capote said, “I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved.” By the time the plane touched down in Jamaica, Babe and Truman had become enmeshed in each other’s lives. He was her ears, eyes, and sometimes mouth, her escape from the humdrum whir of society, and a guide through intellectual terrain Babe had never explored. Like Holly would be to the unnamed narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Babe was to Truman the crème de la crème of sheer fabulosity. If each of his swans, as Truman would write, was an artist “whose sole creation was her perishable self,” then surely Babe was a masterpiece.
Their relationship was perfect. She would lead Truman in and out of restaurants all over the world, like a pet or talking accessory or personal therapist that she couldn’t shop, drink, or cry without. And Truman needed her, too. She looked great on him. They looked great on each other. “I was madly in love with her,” Truman said to Gerald Clarke. “I just thought she was absolutely fantastic! She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life. She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about. I consider her one of the three greatest beauties in the world, the other two being Gloria Guinness and Garbo. But Babe, I think, was the most beautiful. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century, and with the single exception of Gloria, who was sort of neck-and-neck with her, she was also the most chic woman I have ever known.” She was voted one of the best-dressed women in America fourteen times over.
Babe was so chic, in fact, and so commanding in her elegance, that once after removing her scarf on her way to lunch, she nonchalantly tied it around her handbag only to discover that within a matter of weeks, women all over New York were doing the very same. She was almost embarrassingly rich, owning over one million dollars’ worth of Harry Winston, Cartier, Tiffany’s, and Van Cleef & Arpels, most of which, like her $50,000 emerald ring and $75,000 diamond necklace, she kept locked away in her husband’s bank. If she wanted to wear them, Mrs. Paley had only to interrupt Bill at the office (“I’m sorry, darling, but…”) and he would discharge a limousine and secretary for the pickup. Waiting for the jewels to arrive, Babe would sit in the foyer, drawing L&M cigarettes from a twenty-four-carat gold case, which she smoked, demurely, out of her ivory holder. She burned through two packs a day, but her lips never touched a single cigarette.
She dressed up for her husband. That’s why he’d built her a labyrinthine dressing room of hidden closets containing over a hundred drawers, each one lined with pale blue stripes and labeled according to their contents. There were six that held nightgowns alone: silk nightgowns, old chiffon nightgowns, new nightdresses, cotton nightgowns, thin nylon nightgowns, and winter nightgowns. Of course, there were other closets at Kiluna Farm, their eighty-five-acre Long Island estate; the house in Jamaica; and the St. Regis apartment where she threw her fabled dinner parties. Naturally, Truman became a resplendent fixture at every one. He coached her through precarious turns in conversation and chimed in at dull moments with a choice anecdote or literary equivoque, which he displayed as precisely as Babe had the baby vegetables.
Everything Babe served she served for Bill, though he was closer to gorger than gourmet. (After the war, Paley met Billy Wilder in Bad Homburg. Using a broken toaster, Billy remembers, they would grill steaks specially granted to them by the general’s post exchange, and Paley would shovel them down one after the next. “The Germans have a word,” Billy said, “essen, which means to eat. They also have fressen, which means to devour. That suited him much better.”) Paley was often seen to devastate upwards of eight meals a day, and Babe, as his connection to the kitchen, devoted herself to his satisfaction. She would spend literally days searching every shop in Manhattan from Lexington Avenue to Chinatown in hectic pursuit of le food juste.
Pleasing her husband was Babe’s number one purpose. At each dinner party, she had at her place a small notepad encased in gold. In it she would note anything that had disappointed or satisfied him, be it about food or books or ideas exchanged. Those who were seated beside her husband were of unique value to Babe, and had been assigned specifically, both in service of her purpose and his amusement. At the evening’s end, when her guests were preparing to leave, she would corner them at the door. “Did he mention the olives?” she would ask, pen in hand. “They’re new. Did he like them?” Mrs. Paley would write it all down.
She was, in short, everything Truman’s mother, and Holly Golightly, had wanted to be. But Nina was dead, and Truman, though he threw himself into the swans, would never find peace. Neither, for that matter, would his beautiful Babe. Though she had New York society’s full attention and Truman’s fervent devotion, she was down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.
For all of her minks and earrings and vacations and dinner parties, Babe was unhappy. It was her marriage. Love had long since fled the scene (if it was ever truly there to begin with), and whatever warmth their guests had observed in Bill and Babe was, like the green and gold on their Louis Seizes, only a part of the upholstery. Since the beginning, the wife had been compliant, tending to Bill’s directives with the precision of a star secretary, always sure to put her face on well before he woke up in the mornings, and keep her differences of opinion to herself. But it was never enough. At Bill’s request, the children and their governesses were housed primarily at Kiluna, where they saw their parents on certain weekend visits and then only in the moments between guests. When they were together, Bill instructed Babe not to embrace the children or even touch them, and she obliged. Babe obliged.
All this she told to Truman. She couldn’t speak freely to most of her intimates, and to journalists, Bill had told her to confine her remarks to dressing and entertaining, but to Capote, who poured out his own heart to her like a barrel of quicksand, Babe was real and candid. She confessed that they had stopped having sex entirely. Not since the early fifties, she gathered, had they slept together. It wasn’t that Bill was no longer interested in sex—he openly flirted with many of her friends (Carol Marcus among them)—it was that he wasn’t interested in her. Like his children, Bill’s Babe was for looking, not touching.
Later, Truman told Gerald Clarke that Babe was so unhappy she had twice tried to kill herself. Once she took pills, once she slashed her wrists, and both times Truman (he said) had saved her. More than once, Babe told Truman she had to get out. At the end of one such talk, sitting with Babe in the Paleys’ Manhattan apartment, Truman urged her to stay put.
“Bobolink,” Truman whispered—it was his pet name for her—“Bill bought you. It’s as if he went down to Central Casting. You’re a perfect type for him. Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world. Accept it and be happy with it.”
It was not often that Babe let anyone see her cry, but this was an exception. Truman was an exception.
She told him that she needed to rest, that she needed to think it over. Would he permit her that? Would he occupy himself for a couple of hours while she napped? Yes, he said. Yes, darling, of course.
A couple of hours later, Babe woke up and returned to Truman. Her face was made. “You’re right,” she said.
And that was that.
Babe was caught. Truman would fashion Breakfast at Tiffany’s so Holly Golightly wouldn’t be.
GEORGE AXELROD DREAMS OF RICH PEOPLE SAYING WITTY THINGS AND SCREWING
George was depressed. His next assignment, an adaptation of Bus Stop, only made him feel worse. In one scene, Axelrod had Don Murray’s character—a cowboy who wants to prove how literate he is—break into Marilyn Monroe’s room and recite the Gettysburg Address as he’s screwing her. Of course, the Breen Office nailed him on it, and made Axelrod rewrite the scene sans sex. It depressed him further.
No wonder he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a play about a writer (named George) who sells his soul to a devilish agent (named Irving “Sneaky” LaSalle). No wonder Fox bought the rights for Jayne Mansfield and scrapped the showbiz setting for Madison Avenue, effectively transforming Axelrod’s revenge piece into a movie about a nebbishy ad man that the world believes is sleeping with a large-breasted movie star. It was a theme Axelrod had introduced in The Seven Year Itch—about a nebbishy book editor with the hots for his upstairs neighbor (played in the movie by Marilyn Monroe)—causing Axelrod, somewhat ruefully, to label his specialty: Boobs and boobs. Dumb guys and curvy girls.
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.”
