by Sam Wasson
She said she’d think about it. Jurow and Axelrod thanked her and left.
GETTING TOGETHER
Privately, Audrey was more direct. She told Frings the part frightened her, and not just because of what Holly did in the powder room, but because of what the role demanded of her as an actress. Were she to accept, Audrey knew that this time she couldn’t trade in on charm alone, nor could she sing and dance the part away like she did in Funny Face. She wondered if she could even express the blank look of integrity people said she mastered in The Nun’s Story, a performance, she thought, that owed as much to Fred Zinnemann’s clever cutting as it did to her “work.” That wasn’t acting, it was a magic trick. But playing Holly was a different thing entirely. Actually playing an extended drunk scene, getting into an absolute rage, and evincing a deep depression (the “mean reds,” as the script said) were simply out of her range.
All this she poured into Frings, and Frings listened, nodding, yessing, and that’s-true-Audreying, waiting until her excuses ran out before he began his speech. Holly isn’t anti-Audrey, he explained, but the first step toward the new Audrey. The year 1960 was upon them.
Frings knew that if his client wanted to stay prescient, she would have to dip a toe in uncharted waters. If after accepting the role she wanted to assure the public that she was only playing a character, and that she wasn’t to be confused with that wild girl up on the screen, then they would use the press to make it so. That might even make her seem more of an actress and earn her higher esteem with the critics. “Look at the transformation!” they would write. “Look how far she’s come!” (Did he mention they were offering $750,000?)
Naturally, Frings continued, he would make sure she was well taken care of. They’d get director approval.
CHANGING PARTNERS
At the moment, John Frankenheimer was going to direct Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A highly accomplished television director, Frankenheimer had his name on nearly thirty teleplays for Playhouse 90 by the time he got Tiffany’s. So stellar was his reputation, that when he was brought on, it didn’t worry Jurow and Shepherd that he had directed only one theatrical feature (The Young Stranger in 1957). As a hot, young New York director—and a particularly resourceful one at that—he seemed a perfect fit for the material; hopped up like a kid, but sturdy as a pro.
For three months, he and Axelrod worked on the script, casting and recasting the parts in their minds. In between discussions of their problematic second act, they came across a New Yorker review of the Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate and agreed that it was everything the studios were afraid of—everything, in other words, they wanted to see in a movie. But first came Tiffany’s.
It was around that time that Frings called Jurow with his verdict. It came in the form of an ultimatum. “Audrey will do the picture,” he said to him. “But not with Frankenheimer.”
Frings’s list of approved directors—A-list only—included Wyler, Wilder, Cukor, and Zinnemann, but no Frankenheimer. “Pressure was brought to bear,” the director said, and “that was that.” He was off the picture.
BEACHSIDE INTERLUDE
Meanwhile, Truman Capote, vacationing with his lover Jack Dunphy along the Spanish Mediterranean, was apprised of Paramount’s casting decision. They were way off the mark, he thought, but there was little he could do about it now. Privately he would scoff, feign apathy, or affect whatever pose earned him the most admiring glance, but now, with Audrey Hepburn in his midst, it was time to play the diplomat. The birth of Audrey’s son Sean, on July 17, 1960, gave him the perfect opportunity.
Dearest Audrey,
With two such parents, I’m sure it must be a most beautiful little boy, wicked-eyed but kindly natured. My life-long blessings on the three of you–
May I say, too, how pleased I am that you are doing “B. at T.” I have no opinion of the film script, never having had the opportunity to read it. But since Audrey and Holly are both such wonderful girls, I feel nothing can defeat either of them.
I am spending the summer here (until the end of Oct.), and then going somewhere in Switzerland—the point being that I am working on a new book, and plan to stay abroad until I’ve finished it.
Please give my love to Mel.
Mille Tendresse
Truman
Had he stayed abroad to write that new book, In Cold Blood, Truman would have been away for six straight years.
MR. AUDREY HEPBURN
At her home in Switzerland, surrounded by her husband and new, nine-pound baby boy, Audrey Hepburn could rest, at last, knowing she had achieved nothing short of her life’s purpose. “With the baby I felt I had everything a wife could wish for,” she said, years after she gave birth to Sean. “But it’s not enough for a man. It was not enough for Mel. He couldn’t live with himself just being Audrey Hepburn’s husband.”
He grew angry. “It’s true that Mel was puritanical in his outlook,” said Robert Wolders. “Audrey Wilder told me that after they made Love in the Afternoon, the cast was at a restaurant, and Audrey spilled something on her dress and said, ‘Oh, shit, I’m so sorry!’ and Mel was so angry with her for using an expletive that he walked out. He just walked out.” A woman shouldn’t say such things.
AUDREY’S NEW MAN
Back in Hollywood, every director on Frings’s list was called, and every one was either uninterested or otherwise engaged. Billy Wilder was already into One, Two, Three, Joseph Mankie-wicz had just settled into the idea of doing Cleopatra (God help him), and the others passed outright, leaving Jurow, Shepherd, and Frings no choice but to enter the second rank of proven, but not yet prized directors.
That’s when Shepherd suggested Blake Edwards, the director of, most recently, Operation Petticoat. Shepherd admitted the picture itself was nothing special—a frivolous maritime sex comedy with a few standout slapstick moments—but it was one of the highest-grossing films Universal had ever had ($8 million), and what’s more, it starred Cary Grant. Though he was, artistically speaking, a midlevel director in 1959, the fact that Edwards successfully managed Grant made him very attractive to Kurt Frings, who worried about Audrey Hepburn, who worried about Holly Golightly.
Though Roman Holiday was almost a decade in the past, Audrey still very much relied on the firm hands of strong directors to help shape her natural personality into full, textured performances. But with more experience came, paradoxically, more insecurity, and each director found he had to work harder on Audrey than the last. “My mother was very Victorian,” she said later in life, “and brought me up not to make a spectacle of myself.” But had she gotten used to it? Was performing any easier? “It gets harder and harder,” was her reply. “I really die a million deaths every time. My stomach turns over, my hands get clammy. I do suffer. I really do. I wasn’t cut out to do this kind of thing, I really wasn’t.”
By proving to Frings that he could handle a star of Cary Grant’s magnitude, Blake Edwards earned himself the job of a lifetime. “It was really a big step up for Blake, a huge, huge step,” said Patricia Snell, Edwards’s wife at the time of Tiffany’s. “It was like the beginning of a whole other world. They liked Operation Petticoat and the Peter Gunn series on television, which he had created. That was really an amazing show at that time. Audrey saw it and the studio saw it and they thought that he might be the one to do this. But he was a young director and something of a risk. He had a new approach to everything. He had a new style.”
Through the late fifties and early sixties, Peter Gunn was the epitome of cool. Where most hard-boiled PIs were as burned out as the hoods they trailed, Gunn was an Ivy-league playboy closer to James Bond than Philip Marlowe and introduced network audiences to the next thing in soigné. With the aid of his cinematographers, Edwards developed a highly cinematic look for his show, complete with severe chiaroscuro (not the regular dull grays), eccentric angles, and disorienting camera moves. Adding to the hipness was Henry Mancini’s chart-topping theme, which used modern jazz at a time when most T
V was scored with a more formal orchestral sound. Jurow and Shepherd wanted that hip feeling for Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Blake was working on a picture called High Time when they called in May of 1960. No matter what they told him, he knew they were taking a chance.
BING CROSBY IN A DRESS
Blake Edwards, a pipe lodged in his mouth, settled down in his director’s chair stationed squarely behind the camera and took a long, slow look around the set.
What a mess. High Time, a moronic “teenage” comedy with Bing Crosby, was undoubtedly the most useless picture he’d ever made. What the hell was the studio thinking? The scene they were setting up called for Bing to dance around in a pink taffeta hoopskirt, but that wasn’t the problem (actually, it was the funniest thing in the picture); the problem was the story, the dialogue, the acting, dealing with Bing himself, and the inexorable reality that no matter what he did or how smart he was about it, there was no way Blake could clean up the mess. What do you do with a movie about a fifty-year-old widower who decides to go back to college, hang with jive talkers, pledge a frat, rally for the big game, and romance a French professor on the school hayride? All the world’s whip pans, flashy dissolves, and state-of-the-art postproduction effects—if Blake used them (and he did)—would only make him look like a plastic surgeon cutting up a corpse.
Okay, so he wasn’t yet Billy Wilder, but why did he say yes to this shit? Right: he was making money. But that was about all he was making.
High Time was proof positive that the industry was panicked about the new generation. Who were these kids? They had sex, they did drugs, and like everyone else, they went to the movies. But what did they want to see? In 1960, no one in Hollywood had a clue: the year’s top films were Swiss Family Robinson and Psycho. Meanwhile, the success of foreign films by Bergman, Fellini, and—if you wore a beret—Antonioni were challenging the home court advantage. Should the studios get artier too? Ordinarily, getting young people to the movies was a cinch for Hollywood because kids wanted to see what their parents saw. Way back when, families used to go to the movies together. That’s what Mickey Rooney was for. Shirley Temple, Depression-era antitoxin, was a box-office queen from 1934 to 1939. But this strange generation of youngsters—“teenagers” they were called—was impossible to pin down.
High Time was one of Fox’s attempts to bridge the widening generation gap. They cast rock ’n’ roll sensation Fabian, circulated posters heralding Tuesday Weld “the new teenage crush,” and dropped Crosby in for the folks. With the right combination of antic revelry and a new Mancini tune for Bing (he sings, “love, like youth, is wasted on the young”), High Time would be a film families could enjoy together. But what teenager wants to go to the movies with his mom?
Blake didn’t have an answer. He just went to work and thought about Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He agreed with Axelrod that departing from Capote’s novel was a wise choice, if for no other reason than he thought a faithful adaptation would frighten people. “It was too cynical,” he said of the book. “You touched on subjects that I believe people would be afraid to dramatize—the homosexual influence of the leading man, [and] the sexual relationships of Holly that were so amoral.”
Edwards was right, in a way. People would be afraid of a faithful adaptation. But one look around him and Blake could see that, with Hollywood in the middle of an identity crisis, filmmakers, if they were smart about it, could push all kinds of moral and artistic envelopes. Look at what Hitchcock did in Psycho. Killing off Janet Leigh in the first half hour? Making us empathize with Norman Bates, a perverted, matricidal, part-time taxidermist? Maybe Hollywood was saying bad guys weren’t so bad anymore—maybe a lot of things weren’t really so bad anymore. Like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, who wants to have sex with her boyfriend before they’re even married—or engaged—and right there in the backseat of car. But rather than think her loose, we think maybe she’s right to act “wrong”:
DEANIE LOOMIS (NATALIE WOOD): Mom, is it so terrible to have those feelings about a boy?
MRS. LOOMIS (AUDREY CHRISTIE): No nice girl does.
DEANIE: Doesn’t she?
MRS. LOOMIS: No nice girl.
DEANIE: But Mom, didn’t—didn’t you ever, well, I mean didn’t you ever feel that way about Dad?
MRS. LOOMIS: Your father never laid a hand on me until we were married. And then I—I just gave in because a wife has to. A woman doesn’t enjoy those things the way a man does. She just lets her husband come near her in order to have children.
Blake Edwards was still a year away from seeing Splendor in the Grass, but he had seen The Apartment, that year’s winner for Best Picture. Billy Wilder’s story of the white-collar schlemiel who falls for a suicidal girl was everything midcentury-American cinema was not, and proved that it wasn’t safe for the romantic comedy to be just cute any longer. Now it had to be truthful, too. “With that film we became grownups,” critic Judith Crist said. “This was not an age of innocence anymore. Suddenly we had the ability to come edging out in the open with sex. It was getting to be the sixties.” You could see it on the screen and you could hear it on the radio.
JAZZ
By this time, Henry Mancini was fluent in the unspoken language of Blake Edwards. They had been regular collaborators for several years, and now that Mancini had signed on to score High Time, he split his days between the recording stage and Blake’s set.
“Hey, Hank,” said Blake one day during High Time. “It looks like Breakfast at Tiffany’s is going to go ahead at Paramount. We’ve got a meeting with Jurow and Shepherd—they already know you’re the one I want.”
Mancini read the script in preparation for the meeting. At just about every page turn, he saw opportunities for the sort of jazzy sound he was becoming known for. Blake was right to see that Hank Mancini and Holly had nonconformist cool in common: she with her hepcats, and he with his swingin’ big band sound. By 1960, Mancini had already moved away from the more traditional symphonic approach of his predecessors. Of course, there had always been jazz in movies, but it was generally back-alley brass drenched in rotten sex. It was never pop like Mancini was pop. It was never fun.
One musical passage in Axelrod’s script—which included lyrics Axelrod lifted directly from the book—caught Mancini’s attention.
The CAMERA PULLS BACK and we see Paul typing furiously. He is about halfway down a page. A stack of completed pages rests proudly at his elbow. His concentration is intense. He is, for example, totally unaware of a SOUND that drifts lazily up through his open window. It is Holly, SINGING and ACCOMPANYING herself on the guitar. The song is a plaintive prairie melody, the words of which seem to be: “Don’t wanna live, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky.”
Mancini, should he get the job, would have to supply the music. But there was a problem. When Mancini met with Marty Rackin, Paramount’s head of production, Mancini could see that the executive was clearly uninterested in hearing his ideas. He had a totally different kind of songwriter in mind for Tiffany’s, one who wrote in the elegant Broadway style. This was to be a New York picture, he said, and Holly was very much a Manhattan girl, so she’d sing a cosmopolitan tune. What Alexrod had written in the script was just filler. Rackin wanted something hip that placed Holly squarely in the in-crowd. Mancini, he said, wasn’t that songwriter. He’d just supply the score. Not the song.
The meeting was over.
CASTING
Blake Edwards did not want George Peppard in his movie. What about Tony Curtis? he asked the studio. What about Steve McQueen? Tony Curtis wanted the part, and having been cast in three of Blake’s previous pictures, he thought his chances were good—but he didn’t make it. Mel Ferrer, he was told, didn’t want his wife playing opposite him (“Who knows why?” Shepherd said. “That was just the way Mel was.”). So Tony was out, as was Steve McQueen, who was still contracted to CBS’s Wanted: Dead or Alive. Thus the name George Peppard was thrown in once again. Tryin
g to keep an open mind, Blake went with Jurow and Shepherd to see Peppard in Home from the Hill, and from the moment the actor first appeared on the screen, Blake knew he had been right all along. “After coming out of the film,” Edwards remembers, “I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk to the producers and begged them not to cast him.” But it was two against one. Peppard was in.
Virginia Mayo read for the part of 2E and performed satisfactorily, but she was turned down. By her own admission, she was not right to play a wealthy New York socialite. That’s when Shepherd’s wife, Judy, suggested they consider Patricia Neal instead. Blake loved the idea. Though she hadn’t appeared in films since Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd three years prior, Neal was, as far as Edwards was concerned, the intuitive choice. With her high-toned cheekbones, cabaret swagger, and that throaty purr, Neal was what you’d call born to play it. There was, however, one condition: Neal would have to dye her hair red so as to stand apart from the dark-haired Audrey. Fine, she said, great (though she couldn’t wait to dye it back). Neal signed the contract in September. They didn’t even test her for the part.
