by Sam Wasson
He took out Capote’s brittle edge and replaced it with soft-focus pluck. Out went the bitchy exchanges between Holly and Mag Wildwood. Out went her illegitimate pregnancy and miscarriage. Out went the scene when she saves the narrator from a rogue horse and out went her flight to Brazil with Jose and eventual disappearance in Africa. Anything of the know-how and resilience Capote instilled in his heroine was now out of step with the new Holly, who Axelrod was turning, quite deliberately, into a cockeyed dreamer à la Princess Ann in Roman Holiday and Sabrina in Sabrina. Playing up the Tulip, Texas, girl was a good move, strategically speaking; not only did it cater to Audrey’s screen personality, but as a discretionary precaution, it also would help the audience forget that their lead was turning tricks in her spare time. Better a bunny rabbit, George thought, than a shark.
He added a scene in which Holly and Paul (formerly the narrator, or “Fred”) try to get a Cracker Jack ring engraved at Tiffany’s. In its subtle satire and whimsy, the scene represents the kind of high comedy Axelrod wanted in the script (it remained his favorite scene in the picture). In utilitarian terms, the scene develops the embryonic love story, tightening the emotional connection between Holly and Paul. We see they’ve formed a conspiratorial bond crucial to the translation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s from one kind of story to another—character study to romantic comedy, homosexual to heterosexual, platonic to erotic.
Axelrod finished the script in July of 1959. He two-finger typed the whole thing.
A month later, Jurow-Shepherd submitted it to the Production Code Administration for review. “Most sex comedies involve men cheating on their wives,” George said about his script. “Well, I’m striking a blow against the double standard.” Exactly how hard he struck, and whether or not the blow was acceptable in the first place, was now under the jurisdiction of a man with the deskbound name of Geoffrey Shurlock—Hollywood’s new moral watchdog.
A LITTLE MORE THIGH
Since his appointment in 1954, Shurlock followed a slow but intentioned process of moral realignment in Hollywood, instigating the Production Code’s first major rewrite in the twenty years since its inception. The new Code was less a symptom of a new loosening in America’s values than it was—like all changes in Hollywood practice—about the bottom line: selling tickets. In the 1950s, Hollywood was in the midst of an industry-wide panic over the threat of TV, and tried every trick in the book (CinemaScope, 3-D, AromaRama) to lure people from the comfort of their living rooms. An increase in moral latitude was one such trick, and with the ascension of Geoffrey Shurlock—a man in the business of doing business—producers and directors with an eye on a dollar and a hand up a thigh saw an opportunity to force the door. Push too hard, however, and one loses his picture’s popular appeal. Alexrod knew this. After the debacle of The Seven Year Itch, he knew the idea was finesse, to push without looking like you’re pushing.
DOING IT FOR MONEY
It was a game of red-tape limbo, but by this time, Axelrod was something of a pro. He preemptively booby-trapped the script, overemphasizing Paul’s sexual activity in a bait-and-switch effort to reroute Shurlock away from Holly. (Richard Shepherd had seen this move before: “I knew certain writers who would specifically try to lead the Code offices astray by putting something in there that they knew was going to be too hot, just to lead them off the scent.”) There were a few Golightly morsels calling out to be nixed (Chapter 1,” Shurlock wrote, “Holly should be wearing a full slip rather than a half-slip and brassiere” later, she must specify that her marriage to Doc had not ended in divorce, but had been annulled; and her scenes of undressing must be “handled with extreme care to avoid an attempt to exploit any partial or semi-nudity”), but these were relatively minor in comparison to Paul’s provisions, which Shurlock outlined with exacting care and detail.
One scene in particular—eventually cut from the finished film—stood out from the rest. Intended to follow the brief exchange between Holly, Paul, and a new character—called 2E, her apartment number—outside their brownstone, the dubious scene lays out Paul and 2E’s sexual arrangement quite clearly, and it reveals in the process an aspect of Paul’s backstory taken directly from Axelrod’s own. “I couldn’t bear the idea of you…prostituting yourself…sitting in a little cage in Hollywood,” 2E says, “writing movies that would make us both cringe when we saw them later…. Let me be your Hollywood, Paul…your own personal, tender, loving Hollywood….”
PAUL
And what do you get out of it?
2E
Satisfaction, darling. Just satisfaction. And maybe the feeling of pride, when the book is finally done, of seeing the dedication page that says: ‘For 2E, Without whom…’
During this, she has very gently begun to unbutton his shirt.
PAUL
And that’s all?
2E
Well, almost…
She draws him to her and kisses him. When they break she very gently pushes him away from her and toward the bed.
2E
It’s not so bad, is it? Really?
PAUL
I suppose there are tougher ways to earn a living…
2E
(softly)
You bet there are, darling. You just bet there are.
She begins to unbutton her blouse.
Cut! Hold it right there. “The relationship between 2E and Paul as presently described is unacceptably blunt,” Shurlock wrote. “In this regard, we call your attention to the following unacceptable details: she has begun very gently to unbutton his shirt…[and she very gently] pushes him away from her and toward the bed.”
There was more. Later, after the off-screen event takes place, Holly is on the fire escape, looking in at them through the window. From her point of view, we see “Paul is asleep in bed. In the single light from the bed lamp we can see that he is smiling benignly in his sleep.” That too had to go. So did the following seemingly harmless piece of business: “2E, dressed for the street, is coming out of the bathroom. She moves about the room, straightening up. Emptying ashtrays and clearing away glasses.” Shurlock wasn’t objecting to cigarettes and alcohol, but to the suggestion that 2E and Paul spent time in the apartment before he fell asleep. With that bit of ligature, Shurlock knew that the audience could draw conclusions about the event preceding Paul’s bedtime; without it—and without the adverb “benignly”—Holly would be watching nothing more precarious than a man asleep in his bed.
Cuts of this sort continued in other forms throughout the script. They might have whitewashed their affair beyond all recognition and obscured the story entirely if it weren’t for Jurow-Shepherd’s secret weapon, waiting like a Trojan horse at the gates. Confronted with Shurlock’s order to slash various indispensables—lines of Holly’s like “Three hundred? She’s very generous…is that by the hour?” and “I was just trying to let you know I understand. Not only that, I approve”—the producers could argue that, in the face of Capote’s homosexual rendering of the narrator, it was essential they take certain pains to maintain the viewer’s sense of Paul’s “red-blooded” heterosexuality. Otherwise, they would leave themselves vulnerable to sexual deviance of another kind. Better that than that. Shurlock, after all, had explicitly warned against it: “There should be no attempt,” he wrote, “to give Mr. Smith [a character cut from the film] the mannerisms usually associated with a homosexual.” He’d fallen right into George’s trap.
INT. MR. SMITH’S DOORWAY—(DAY)
As Paul climbs the stairs, Mr. Smith, two flights above, opens his door and calls down.
MR. SMITH
Roger? Is that you Roger?
PAUL
No, it’s me…Paul…
As Paul comes up the stairs, Mr. Smith eyes him curiously. He’s seen him somewhere before—but where?
PAUL
Sorry to bother you, old man, but you see I used to live in this apartment…before you took it and I’d heard you’ve done such fabulous things with it that I…
&nb
sp; MR. SMITH
You’re very kind, but I’m really just getting started…I haven’t even put up the drapes…actually when you rang I thought you were someone else…
PAUL
Roger?
MR. SMITH
Yes. Actually, Roger’s bringing the drapes.
With homosexuality explicitly off-limits, Axelrod’s evocation of Paul would have to err on the side of hetero just to be safe. George used the opportunity to insinuate something bolder.
In the moment after Paul and Holly step into their brownstone (after they steal Halloween masks), they share a lingering, almost awkward silence. In George’s draft, Holly is the first to speak. She says, “I just thought of something that neither of us has ever done. At least not together…” (Sex, naturellement.) But the line was cut, as was the decision to set it upstairs in Paul’s apartment because, in Shurlock’s words, “this story cannot handle an affair between Paul and Holly.” Shurlock’s summary of the final screenplay read, “Paul’s novel, which has Holly for its heroine, is accepted and he and Holly celebrate. They end up spending the night together. Paul realizes he has fallen in love with Holly and breaks with 2E.”
The battle over Paul and Holly’s sex life was a battle too crucial for George to lose, but by September 1960 it was all over. Shurlock had spoken: Paul and Holly would not be sleeping together.
Without sex, George feared, Breakfast at Tiffany’s would come apart. His vision of a sophisticated high comedy, of a picture that said the truth about adults in and out of bed, would slop into a tawdry mess of phony urges. He’d be back to The Seven Year Itch. Back to Bus Stop, Rock Hunter, and all the rest.
That is, unless Jurow and Shepherd could cast the picture right. If the right actress—and it wasn’t Marilyn—could find a way to lend this whitewashed Holly some subversive carnal knowledge, then he’d get away with it. They all would.
A LONG SHOT
If Jurow and Shepherd were to go by Capote’s description of Holly, they’d have to find a skinny girl with a “flat little bottom,” “hair sleek and short as a young man’s,” and “a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.” And there was another consideration: the producers knew that as alluring as Capote’s creation was, their Holly would have to be a whole lot gentler. That’s the only way they could move this material through production.
Whomever they cast couldn’t discharge sex like Marilyn, nor could she be young and innocent without provoking cries of Lolita. Furthermore, as a “good” call girl—not the Elizabeth Taylor kind that gets killed off at the end of Butterfield 8—Holly couldn’t be too seductive. Not alluring enough, however, and the character would have no call-girl credibility at all.
How to do it? Strike a middle: cast Holly just a little against type. Find an actress who wasn’t automatically associated with sex. Then make her sexy.
There were a few names. Jurow and Shepherd entertained the possibility of Shirley MacLaine, but she had already signed on to Two Loves at MGM. There was some talk of Rosemary Clooney, and even Jane Fonda, but casting her at twenty-three would raise too many eyebrows. Then who would it be? In 1960, the biggest women at the box office were Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Sandra Dee. None were right.
It was a long shot, but they would go for Audrey Hepburn.
5
LIKING IT
1960
GETTING TO FIRST BASE
Of course, Marty Jurow knew Audrey Hepburn would never go for Holly. And yet it wasn’t the rejection that was the hard part, it was making the offer. You couldn’t just call up Audrey and offer her the part. You had to call Frings, her agent. Then you had to wait for him to call you back. If he called you back. Then you had to convince him that it was worth presenting to Audrey, and you’d probably have to do it quickly before he got another call from a more notable producer with a more reasonable offer. Jurow would have been lucky to get that far, and in fact, most producers would have considered a minute of Frings’s attention equal to an hour of anyone else’s, but Marty aimed higher. He would cut out the middleman and go straight to Audrey herself.
Tiffany’s would be a delicate pitch, and Frings could mangle it in translation. He could fail to summon compelling enthusiasm when the moment came, or what’s worse, forget about it in the wake of other projects that took priority in his mind. And Jurow wasn’t going to wait around for that. If Audrey was going to turn down Tiffany’s, she was going to have to turn him down in person. At least then he would know that they had tried everything.
THE SEDUCTION
“Mr. Frings is in a meeting right now, can I take a message?” “Mr. Frings is in with a client, he’ll have to call you back.” “Oh, hello, Mr. Jurow. Yes, I did give him your message. Can he reach you at the office?” “I’m sorry, Mr. Frings has gone to lunch.” “Yes, he’s still at lunch, Mr. Jurow. Would you like to leave a message?”
Finally, they spoke. It was Frings himself who told Jurow it wasn’t going to happen, that his client would not be playing a call girl, and thanked him for his interest. But Jurow wouldn’t leave it at that.
“Frings was pretty sure Audrey wouldn’t do it,” Shepherd said, “so he didn’t want to bother her with the script, but I guess Marty caught him on a good day. Who knows? Marty could talk.” With Frings’s go-ahead, Jurow and George Axelrod went off to pitch Audrey in person. Jurow would present the case, and Axelrod, in the likely event that Audrey resisted, would be stationed to turn her around. As a writer, he was better positioned to defend the nobler points of Holly’s character, and if need be, he could even make accommodating changes right there on the spot.
Marty began his trip with a stopover in New York. He met Y. Frank Freeman and Barney Balaban, Paramount’s top executives, at Dinty Moore’s, a Broadway hangout with a honey of a bar. They knew where Marty was headed—and they let him know they weren’t optimistic—but seeing him in person so eagerly explaining his angle made the whole venture seem to them more ridiculous than ever. What Jurow was endeavoring, they said, was a reckless expenditure of energy and resources. But Marty held out. “What if she said yes?” he asked. “What if we’re all wrong?” Then he’d be a hero. He would be remembered as the one who did what Hitchcock didn’t have the guts to do: the one who got up, went over, and told Audrey exactly why she needed to do the movie.
With Axelrod at his side, Jurow flew to the south of France where Audrey had joined Mel, who was hard at work on a movie. There, for about a week, Jurow and Axelrod tried to persuade a very pregnant Audrey Hepburn that far from damaging her career, Holly would only expand it. But as expected, Audrey blocked their every move. She told them she wanted to be with her family. She wanted to stay at home and raise the baby. And anyway, Mel had made up his mind about Capote’s book long ago. “Audrey’s reluctance was wrapped up in Mel’s feelings that she shouldn’t take the part,” Robert Wolders recalls. “Before either of them read the screenplay, when Breakfast at Tiffany’s was just a book, he had trepidations about her playing the part of the call girl, especially after he had heard that Marilyn had been up for consideration for the part. He didn’t quite think it would be good for Audrey’s image.”
“Oh, Martin,” Audrey said to Jurow. “You have a wonderful script”—pause—“but I can’t play a hooker.”
There were two ways to take that one. Either Jurow could insist that Audrey had underestimated herself as an actress, or—and here is why he brought Axelrod with him—he could suggest they entertain the possibility of certain small rewrites that downplay the hooker angle in favor of that other side of Holly, the wholesome Tulip, Texas, side. He went for Texas.
“We don’t want to make a movie about a hooker,” he assured her, “we want to make a movie about a dreamer of dreams.”
To drive home his point, Jurow went so far as to suggest that if Audrey didn’t see Holly as the cockeyed romantic she truly was, then maybe she was the wrong choice for the part after all.
That got her.
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Okay, Audrey said, if she took the part—if—she couldn’t play it as written. What about sugaring some of the innuendo in the script, like this whole collecting fifty dollars for the ladies’ room business? Couldn’t they change it to “Powder Room”?
Axelrod knew he hadn’t flown across the world to say no to Audrey Hepburn, so he kept his mouth shut and let her work it out for herself. “She kept fighting to have the character softened,” he said later, “making the actor’s fatal mistake of thinking they are going to endear themselves to an audience by doing endearing things if the character is tough. Humphrey Bogart never made that mistake, and they loved him for his toughness. You should have loved Holly Golightly for her toughness…” Axelrod gave in, but he knew he had to; the moment Audrey asked for the change, it was as good as granted.
