by Sam Wasson
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.”
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.
4
TOUCHING IT
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, bouncing 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.
