by Sam Wasson
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.
THE SERIOUS WRITER
They went with Sumner Locke Elliott. He was what they meant by a serious writer. The producers contracted him to fly out to L.A. for a week’s worth of story conferences, from which he would produce a sixty-page dramatic outline. If they deemed the outline satisfactory, Elliott would proceed into the screenplay; if not, the contract stipulated the deal would be finished without any future commitments. In Hollywood parlance, it was called a cutoff. Elliott signed.
THE GAG MAN GAGGED
Axelrod called Capote. They had only met a couple of times.
“Truman,” George said, “they won’t use me. They don’t think I’m serious enough.”
“Well, bullshit,” Truman said. “They don’t know how to do it, you know how to do it.”
But Capote’s hands were tied. He told Axelrod that he was not at all involved in the film’s adaptation or production—that he had sold the option on the novel and that was that. And in any case, he was trying to write a book about the massacre of a Kansas wheat farming family. It was very unlike him, yes, but he couldn’t resist the appeal of inventing a whole new type of literature, and he had reason to believe it would be his masterpiece.
George was right back where he started.
THE SERIOUS WRITER GAGGED
Until now, Sumner Locke Elliott had been a novelist, playwright, and a prolific TV writer with almost three dozen credits to his name. But in ten steady years of working in the business, he had never seen one of his feature scripts produced. That may have been tough on the writer, but it was all right by Shepherd and Jurow, who lowered their payment accordingly. From their perspective, the fact that Elliott was a gay, New York–based writer only sweetened the deal and hinted at the possibility of cultivating that certain Capote something. At least in theory.
Upon receiving Elliott’s treatment in April 1959, a distressed Richard Shepherd wrote a memo to Paramount studio chief, Y. Frank Freeman, including the following:
Suffice to say we are all immensely disappointed in Elliott’s efforts. Disregarding its length and its peculiar physical format, we are most disturbed by its episodic, disjointed, fluffy and even ephemeral tone. Elliott, to our way of thinking, has seriously failed to capture the warmth, the zest, the humor, the beauty and, more important, the basic heart and honesty that is Holly Golightly. The young man he has written is petty and unattractive in character, borders on the effeminate, which we all detest, and as is the case with Holly and the whole piece, is almost totally devoid of the humor and contemporary flavor that is absolutely vital for this picture.
Most important, however, a dramatically sound story line and point of view is either non-existent or certainly not clear. Capote’s book provides a marvelously wonderful character study of a fascinating girl, surrounded by almost equally interesting people and locale.
Our task has been and continues to be one of converting this character study into a clear-cut dramatic story line with an even clearer audience point of view.
We spent considerable time and effort in story conferences with Elliott with the primary objective of making certain that the dramatic line and point of view in his treatment would be clear. Somehow, as is so unfortunately often the case, the result did not equal the expectations.
All of us are convinced that we are correct in assuming that the boy and girl get together at the end of our story, that Holly’s problem, which is the principal one, is in some way resolved through the understanding, love and strength of the boy. This requires a completely different kind of male character than has been given to us by Elliott and a far more solid construction of the dramatic elements of the piece.
We therefore are of the singular opinion that a different man should be put on the job. One with infinitely more experience in dramatic construction, with a contemporary understanding of these people to say nothing of an appreciation for comedy that is not so perfumed. Our gamble on Elliott in the hopes of getting a proper script on the more economical basis did not pay off. There is som
e consolation, however, in the fact that we protected ourselves with a proper cut-off period.
Elliott was off the movie, leaving Jurow and Shepherd with no script and one hell of a tough adaptation.
THE PITCH
Only days later, George got a call from his agent, Swifty Lazar. Elliott was out, he said. They thought his script lacked pizzazz, not to mention a clear story line, and Jurow-Shepherd was looking for a replacement. The production company was anxious to move forward, he said, and fast. Was George still interested?
Was George still interested?
Yes, he was still interested.
Hold on, Swifty said. It wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t in the bag. Jurow and Shepherd, the agent explained, were now looking at some very experienced, very “respectable” writers. Their new list included some of the most accomplished in the business: Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin’ in the Rain), Charles Lederer (His Girl Friday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Samuel Taylor (Sabrina, Vertigo), Julius Epstein (Casablanca), Ernest Lehman (Sabrina, Sweet Smell of Success), the redoubtable Kanins (Adam’s Rib), and of course, George Axelrod (Boobs and boobs). The writer they hired would bypass treatment and go directly to screenplay, meaning if he or she could pitch Jurow and Shepherd an idea they liked—a romantic comedy—with a clear-cut dramatic story line and less effeminate male lead, then, for the right price, the gig was theirs. All George had to do was figure out the right angle, go in for a meeting, and knock ’em dead. Swifty hung up.
Axelrod was almost ready. He had been thinking about Tiffany’s for so long, and knew the trick was to make the picture more of a traditional romance, structurally speaking. To do it, he’d have to invent a stronger conflict, some impediment to the love story, which the lovers had to overcome to be together. Otherwise, the movie would be over in one scene; they’d meet, get coupled, and that would be it. So what would keep these two mutually attracted people apart? If Axelrod couldn’t answer that, his story would go the way of Elliott’s, and it would be back to boobs for him.
If Axelrod were writing for Doris Day and Rock Hudson the problem of finding the conflict would come ready-made. The guy wants to get the girl into bed and she wants to stay out of it—until they get married. And when they finally do, the movie ends. But in Holly Golightly, who isn’t guarding her virginity like it’s Fort Knox, Axelrod had to grapple with a heroine who was anathema to the genre. If only he could lick the conflict, he could easily be at the forefront of a new kind of romantic comedy. Not one about 1950s people who shrink from sex before marriage, but one about modern people who embrace it.
Axelrod would have to flip the paradigm. Where Doris Day struggled with abstinence, Holly would struggle with promiscuity. Thus commitment, not desire, would be at the heart of Holly’s conflict—that much Axelrod could bring over from the novel—but what then would prevent the newly heterosexual male from running away with her? If she slept with everyone, why wouldn’t she sleep with him? The most obvious answer was the one right in front of George: the same thing that prevents her from running away with him. He’s a gigolo, too. That’s it. And he can’t afford to pay for a night with her, and she can’t afford to pay for a night with him, and when they do finally get into bed together after he’s just slept with his sugar mama, he’s just too tired to make a move. Ergo they just lie there. So their conflict? Leaving a steady life of fiscal security for one of love. Going from being “owned” to being free. Making the late fifties into the early sixties.
It was three o’clock in the morning when George Axelrod turned to Joan in bed and said, “I’ve got it! I know how to do Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a movie!”
At last, Axelrod would pitch a sex comedy with sex. It probably wasn’t something that Paramount would be immediately comfortable with, but if Jurow wanted uptown, this was it: a contemporary romantic comedy for the modern generation.
AUDREY’S RETREAT
On May 20, 1959, just weeks after Audrey’s thirtieth birthday, the Ferrers announced they were expecting once again. But tragically, while shooting The Unforgiven in Mexico that June, Audrey miscarried a second time. The emotional burden, she said, was unbearable, the worst of her life. “I blamed God,” she said. “I blamed [director] John Huston. I was a bundle of anger and recrimination. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t have children. Mel and I were so much in love.”
She retreated to her home in Lucerne, and with the encouragement of her physicians, began to consider returning to work. Most scripts, however, didn’t appeal to her. Despite protestations from her agent, former boxer Kurt Frings, Audrey turned down the (quite prestigious) leading parts in both West Side Story and Cleopatra. Only No Bail for the Judge, the film Alfred Hitchcock announced would be his next, piqued her interest. But she had reservations about the material. The role of Elizabeth—a British barrister who sets out alone to acquit her father of murdering a prostitute—was quite blatantly at odds with her traditional persona, which, in the years since Sabrina, had maintained its conservative stance.
Audrey was still very much the party-less party-line girl. In 1956, aiming to take on a “serious” part as a dramatic actress, she played Natasha in the woefully stilted War and Peace, which earned her good reviews, but did nothing to her status quo. Funny Face, released in 1957, pointed her in the right direction, as did Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, released the same year. But both films paired Audrey with considerably older men (Fred Astaire and Gary Cooper, respectively), which kept her star securely hitched to the idea of adolescent love-worship and romantic fantasy, and the boat went unrocked. As Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story, Audrey did battle once again with the opposing forces of duty and desire, and for a time, it looked like rebellion. But she can’t have her church and eat it too. “How can I be a good nun,” she asks, “if I can’t get the Congo out of my blood?” Like Princess Ann of Roman Holiday, Sister Luke must divest herself of one in order to have the other. “I think I’ve been struggling all these years, Reverend Mother,” she says, nobly. “In the beginning, each struggle seemed different than the one before it. Then they began to repeat, and I saw they all had the same core: obedience without question, without inner murmuring. Perfect obedience as Christ practiced it, as I no longer can.” The urge to resist ethical mandates is there, and is indeed compelling, but Audrey’s conviction to reverse them is not. Green Mansions followed in 1959, and a year later, she played the denim-skirted Rachel Zachary in John Huston’s western The Unforgiven. The spirit of her individuality remained problematic in each.
All the more reason, Frings advised Audrey, to expand her repertoire. Taking No Bail for the Judge, he said, would allow her to grow in new, darker, more challenging directions; and with the added benefit of working for Mr. Hitchcock, she wouldn’t have to worry as much about public approval. They understood his name meant quality, no matter how perverse his films.
Audrey saw Frings’s point and agreed to the picture. But after signing the contract, she learned that Hitchcock and writer Samuel Taylor had added a new scene, what looked alarmingly like a rape scene, and Audrey wanted out of the picture. In a cleverly timed announcement, she made public—only seven months after her miscarriage—the news of yet another pregnancy. This time, Audrey said to the press, nothing, not even Alfred Hitchcock, would endanger her baby. Children were “indispensable for a woman’s life and happiness.” Films were far from her mind.
“I’m told the pregnancy transported her,” her son Sean said, looking back. “All she wanted was to be a mother and have a family. Here it was and she wasn’t going to let anything stop it.” Robert Wolders agreed. “She loved family more than her career,” he said. “That was far more important to her than movies.”
ROMANTIC COMEDY
After hearing George Axelrod’s pitch, Marty Jurow made it clear to Paramount that he was not interested in vetting other writers. George was it.
Hours later, Shepherd cabled Swifty in Europe for the price on Axelrod (Joan Axelrod said, “They offered him
Rhode Island and a piece of the gross”), and in a week—this was vintage Swifty—the papers were signed. George would write a first draft screenplay in fifteen weeks, followed by two weeks of consultations with Jurow and Shepherd, four weeks of revisions, and then two additional weeks of consultations on the rewrites followed finally by three weeks for second revisions. For all this—a combined total of twenty-six weeks of work—he would receive $100,000.
Now all George had to do was write the damn thing. Plied with long cigars and a few vodkas (neat and chilled), he put some kind of an outline down on paper, and in the loosest possible form. Too many details at this stage could kill the energy he needed to save for the screenplay itself. In the meantime, he’d turn those scene ideas into scenes, scribble them down on notepad paper, cut away the slack, and then, when he got the feeling he had something good, something that couldn’t be said better, he’d transfer them to his Olivetti, which stood proudly on his desk beside his favorite photograph—a shot of him and Marilyn on the set of Bus Stop squeezing the hell out of each other.
