by Sam Wasson
As for Jose da Silva Pereira, Holly’s Brazilian suitor, it was unlikely Blake could do any better than the Marquis José Luis Cabeza de Vaca de Vilallonga. He had come recommended by Audrey and Mel who had spotted him two years earlier, inveigling Jeanne Moreau in The Lovers, but Vilallonga—as he would be listed in the opening titles—did not begin his career as an actor. He was a writer, and a scandalous one at that. In 1954, after an attempt at journalism and an aborted stint of horse breeding, Vilallonga offended the Spanish military censor with the publication of his novel The Ramblas End in the Sea and was promptly exiled. (Paramount publicity ate it up. They wrote, “He received word from Spain that he was to be sentenced for 178 years in prison for his repeated attacks on the Franco dictatorship.”) Vilallonga spent his exile as a part-time foreign correspondent and occasional actor, dabbling in small parts in France and West Germany until he was spotted by Hollywood and offered a contract. He turned it down, but years later, at Audrey’s request, he agreed to do Tiffany’s. It would be his first Hollywood movie.
“Casting Buddy Ebsen as Doc Golightly was due to Blake,” said Patricia Snell. “We all thought the idea was off the wall, that he was too old, but Blake said, ‘No, he’ll be perfect.’ And he was.” Throughout his career, Edwards’s eye for latent talent would produce many brilliant feats of casting, but few were as unforeseen, and indeed impactful as his feeling for Buddy Ebsen. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Ebsen had made a name for himself as a song and dance man, twinkling alongside the likes of Eleanor Powell and in Broadway Melody of 1938, a young Judy Garland. Then, in the 1940s, he practically disappeared: a contract dispute at MGM and World War II service in the U.S. Coast Guard all but removed him from the picture business. When he finally returned, Ebsen found himself in midlevel parts in B-westerns with titles like Silver City Bonanza and Thunder in God’s Country. It wasn’t John Ford; it was work. From there it was TV until the lightbulb went off over Blake Edwards’s head in the summer of 1960. There was no question as to Buddy’s strength as a performer, but could he act? Really act? Blake put his money on “Yes.” He called Ebsen out of the blue and told him that if he took the part, he would bet him a case of champagne he’d be nominated for an Oscar.
Less of a gamble was the casting of Holly’s cat, or rather, cats. Since cats, unlike dogs, seldom perform more than one trick at a time, more than a dozen were required for the film. Said trainer Frank Inn, “I have a sitting cat, a going cat, a meowing cat, a throwing cat—and so on, each one a specialist, and all the same color, you’ll notice.” All twelve cats were practically identical—“thug-faced,” as Truman described them in the novel, with “yellowish pirate-eyes”—but only one would get star billing. On October 8, the production held an open cat-call at New York’s Hotel Commodore, at which twenty-five orange-furred hopefuls appeared freshly preened and plucked. After an arduous round of auditions and callbacks, the twelve-pound Orangey, belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Murphy of Hollis, Queens, was named the winner. “He’s a real New York type cat,” Inn declared, “just what we want. In no time at all I’m going to make a Method, or Lee Strasberg type, cat out of him.”
YUNIOSHI
Late in the year, papers announced that the part of Mr. Yunioshi, Holly’s upstairs neighbor, had been given to the renowned Japanese comic Ohayo Arigatou. Though he had never worked in pictures, Mr. Arigatou (they said) was possibly the funniest foreign comedian since the great Cantinflas and had gotten the part by reciting “Casey at the Bat” in compound fractured English. In December of 1960, a Paramount press release confirmed that Arigatou had leased his family’s geisha house, whose name translated to “Have Happy Time Here Boy,” and soon thereafter, Arigatou was spotted at the World Series, rooting for Pittsburgh from the bleachers, where, sadly, he had lost every cent of his advance. He cabled Jurow and Shepherd: “I BROKE WIRE 36000 QUICK.” Thankfully, at 360 yen to the dollar, the request was only for $100. The producers paid it posthaste. Despite the reimbursement, Arigatou called Paramount collect with the news that he would not be coming to work.
“No work yet,” he said. “Study part. I Methodist actor—Lee Stlassburg Methodist actor. Take time. No hully.
“Meantime, build theater in Yokohama. Put name in rights: Ohayo Arigatou, in Bleakfast at Tiffany’s, with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.
“You want to hear me say ‘Clasey at Bat’? Now? Say good. I baseball fan, gleat actor. I go now. You tell bosses I come when leady, not before, got to start new theater, put name Arigatou in rights.”
Jurow and Shepherd were in trouble. Because Arigatou had refused to be in Hollywood for his makeup tests and English lessons, the production had stalled—for how long it was impossible to say—leaving the producers no choice but to appease the Asian Cantinflas. They would honor his demands for a bigger part. At Arigatou’s request, Axelrod wrote in a Japanese sword dance complete with exploding fire crackers. And that did it. At long last, Arigatou appeared in Holly wood.
Well, kind of. In Tiffany’s final, and most controversial preproduction publicity coup, it was announced that a “sneaky” reporter (fictionalized by publicity) had nudged his way onto the set to get a look, once and for all, at the Japanese comic genius Paramount had been waiting for. Imagine the reporter’s surprise when he discovered that all along, since the very beginning, Arigatou had been none other than Mickey Rooney himself!
Of course, no one really “discovered” anything. There never was an Arigatou in the first place. The whole thing was just a bit of eye-grabbing hogwash, a hoax cooked up by studio salesmen to arouse curiosity in the unsuspecting readers of the world. And they were prepared for something of a backlash (though they had no idea how offended the offended would be). To appease their potentially uneasy Japanese audience in the wake of the Rooney-reveal, Paramount issued conciliatory press releases confirming that Mrs. Katsuma Mukaeda, wife of the cultural information director of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles, was to act as Rooney’s coach and the film’s technical adviser.
Considering she was up against the long-standing antic rapport of Rooney and Edwards, it’s easy to understand why Mrs. Mukaeda had little influence on the portrayal of Arigatou. More than just former roommates, Blake and Mickey had been longtime collaborators, comedians with vaudeville DNA. Artistically, they were a Venn diagram with considerable overlap, like a couple of swells hocking a side-by-side act from Fresno to the Great White Way. Mrs. Mukaeda had no chance.
THE SOUND OF TULIP
Henry Mancini, meanwhile, was despondent. It was true that his talents as a songwriter were unproven, but based on the success of “The Peter Gunn Theme,” Mancini knew he was up to the task. Lyrics or no lyrics, Broadway or Texas, a tune is a tune, and he could write them. So what if his name didn’t mean standards? This was an opportunity he wasn’t ready to pass up. Writing scores for the movies had never been the most lucrative aspect of composing for Hollywood, but attaching one’s name to a song, which might go on to numerous recordings and return substantial royalties, was another matter entirely.
Hank called his agent. He told him he wanted to negotiate, to go back in there and raise a little hell. Mancini expected to hear knuckles cracking in preparation, but all he heard was silence. Though cautious, his agent’s point was a good one. From Capote to Audrey to Blake, all was in place for a major motion picture. Take what you got, he told his client, and don’t go around looking ungrateful. Still, that didn’t cut it. Far from settling him, the promise Hank’s agent saw in Breakfast at Tiffany’s only encouraged Mancini that he was right to push for the song. Rather than go back to Rackin himself (Mancini was humble to the point of being shy), he applied to Blake, and respectfully asked him, as a friend, to go see Shepherd and Jurow instead. If they heard what he came up with and liked it, then great, they’d put it in the movie and trust that Rackin would come around; if not, not. All it would cost them was time. Blake obliged, and to Mancini’s great delight, so did the producers. “Marty and I believed the song
absolutely should not have been about New York City,” Shepherd said. “It was about this girl from Tulip, Texas, and needed to sound like it.”
Here was Hank’s shot. He’d write for Audrey. He’d write directly into her range.
HUBERT DE GIVENCHY UNDRESSES EDITH HEAD
Ever since Funny Face in 1957, Audrey’s film contracts had contained a nonnegotiable standard clause stipulating that Givenchy design her costumes. Where everything else in her movies, from art direction to editing, would be handled by whomever the studio or the director had installed to carry out its mandates, this one crucial point was left to the jurisdiction of Audrey Hepburn.
Once again, Edith Head would be backup. Though she wasn’t happy about it, Edith understood there was a pragmatic element to hiring a European designer for a European shoot like Funny Face. But Tiffany’s was a New York movie. Why get a Parisian designer? Not only was it impractical, it didn’t click with the character. What would Holly Golightly be doing with high fashion clothing? Where would she get it? How could she even afford it? Patricia Neal’s costumes were to be designed by Pauline Trigere, but Trigere was a New York designer, Neal lived in New York, and moreover, she was playing a ritzy character who in reality would very likely shop Trigere. All that was beyond reasonable. But Hubert de Givenchy?
Edith had a point. With location shooting becoming more and more common in the Hollywood of the late fifties and early sixties, it made sense that films shot in Paris would have actual Parisian clothing. Rare—indeed singular—was the case when a European house would design an American picture actually set in America. It meant that teaming Givenchy and Audrey on Breakfast at Tiffany’s was without precedent. Consult Edith’s credit for the scar: her title reads “Costume Supervisor.” Head’s biographer, David Chierichetti says, “The ‘Costume Supervisor’ credit was a weird, one-time-only credit for Edith. She was a very, very powerful woman, and even though she did very little on the picture, the studio wanted to maintain some good feeling and gave her this kind of conciliatory credit. Of course, Edith was a master diplomat, perhaps a better diplomat than she was a designer, and stayed quiet when she knew she should, but she was aware that it was taste, not necessity that barred her from the picture. That hurt her terribly.”
She would provide some of Holly’s plain clothes as well as George Peppard’s changes, and, naturally, would supervise the additional costuming needs of the various ancillary players, but Audrey’s gowns—truly the film’s stylistic centerpieces—were all Givenchy.
It fell to Blake Edwards to approve Givenchy’s designs, but he knew—as far as couture was concerned—he was in over his head. He was not about to deny the inspirations of an acknowledged wunderkind, let alone the megawatt star who considered him a spiritual sibling. “I was sort of inadvertently thrown in with some of the truly great fashion people in the world,” he said, “and suddenly I was looking at wardrobe to be approved by Audrey Hepburn. And, of course, I’m not stupid, I’m not going to say ‘Well, gee, fellas, I don’t really know about those kinds of things.’ It gave me an education. How wrong can you go?”
AN OCTAVE AND ONE
For a full month, slouching on the rented piano he kept in the garage, Henry Mancini agonized over the song. What had he gotten himself into? Over and over again, he replayed, again and again, Audrey’s voice in his head. He caught Funny Face on TV a few nights earlier, and with the short range—her range—of an octave and one, tried riffing on Audrey’s rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” I could cry salty tears…. Everything he tried died on the second or third note. I could cry…. But for lack of an alternative, he stuck to it. Cry salty…cry salty tears…. But the stucking didn’t stick. Nothing did. If Mancini didn’t deliver on this, what would he say to Jurow and Shepherd, or to Blake, who’d had faith in him, who stuck his neck out? Even worse, what would he tell himself the next time he sat down with a pipe at the piano? “You’ll do it, Hank”? There were only so many times his wife, Ginny, could say it to him. Only so many more times he would let himself go on to her about what kind of song this girl would sing. Was a Broadway-style melody actually the right choice for “travelin’ through the pastures of the sky”? That didn’t seem to fit with the private moment on a fire escape. But maybe the blues would. Where have I… Maybe like a jazzy-pop thing. Or a country thing. Was that what was in her heart?
This was a time when Holly would cut through the pretense and show, for the length of a song, who she really was beneath all the sophistication. Right: beneath the sophistication. Whatever that sounded like, it had to be simple.
And then—as these things tend to happen—it came suddenly. Three notes: C, G, F. It was promising. Not a song, but a beginning. Staying within the range of an octave and one, and being careful to keep the melody all in the same key—much simpler that way—Mancini turned out the next several notes, all on the white keys. They didn’t sound bad—actually, they sounded good. At first, he went ahead carefully, mindful of not leaping too far beyond his flow, and then, as he gained momentum, proceeded half consciously. Now it was all falling out of him. A moment later it was automatic—he was taking dictation. As if they knew just where to go, as if they had been there many times before, the remaining notes obediently assumed their place on the page. Twenty minutes later, the composer looked up from the piano. The song was written.
The next day, Mancini made a record of it and took it in to Edwards. Blake loved it. Then it was to Paramount to play the tune for Shepherd and Jurow. “Hank brought a 78 record up to our office,” recalls Shepherd, “and he said, ‘Let us know what you think of it.’ He just laid it down and left. Marty and I listened to it and we thought it was terrific.”
“Who do you want to write the lyrics?” they asked.
“Johnny Mercer,” was the reply. Mancini didn’t even have to think about it.
WHAT JOHNNY MERCER DOES IN BED
Mancini had always wanted to write with Johnny Mercer, but that guaranteed nothing; so did everyone else. With a credit list that included, in part or in full, songs the caliber of “Too Marvelous for Words,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “Hooray for Hollywood” (which he wrote ironically), Johnny Mercer would have been any composer’s first choice, but fortunately for Mancini, the admiration was mutual.
For the past two years, Mercer had been longing to collaborate with Hank. The track that hooked him came off the More Music from Peter Gunn album. “Joanna” it was called, and after he heard it, Johnny Mercer did what he had been doing since his first crank of that Victrola in the parlor of his boyhood home smack-dab in the sweet spot of the South, Savannah, Georgia. That is, he put words to it. A born singer, all Johnny would have to do is stand by his own vocal instinct and wait for the humming to come out right. When it did, it was brisk and fragrant, with a lyric pitched on the outskirts of town and country, fancy but idiomatic, like Holly Golightly herself.
But by 1960, Mercer had been supplanted by Elvis, the national pelvis. As hearts sank to groin level and doo-wop regressed popular song to shoobiedoobies, the premium on Mercer’s signature dropped to an alarming low. Not only was rock ’n’ roll in the way, but like Mancini, more and more composers were insisting upon writing the songs in their movies, which relegated dyed-in-the-wool words and music men like Mercer to the bygone era. Setting lyrics to a waltz, he said, was a pointless venture, commercially speaking. At that moment in music history, when the day’s chart-toppers included Fats Domino and Paul Anka, he was right to think no one would record a waltz, but Mancini (and necessity) prevailed, and Mercer, who loved Capote’s book, and who wanted an excuse to collaborate with Mancini, said yes.
Often, Johnny would compose lying down. Stretched across a bed or along a couch with his eyes closed, Mercer would cycle words and images through his mind all without the help of paper and pen. It looked like sleeping to those who saw it, and indeed earned him the epithet lazy, but anyone who knew of Mercer’s prolificacy had to have thought
it less like snoozing than dreaming. Sometimes he’d surface with a fractured image that he’d take down with him the next time he submerged, and sometimes he’d come up with a lyric in full, a deep-sea diver with a sack of gold.
Mercer’s gentle southern demeanor only fanned the legend of his laziness, for to greet him in person, one would surely be overcome by the kind of lullaby sensation perfected by the expert porch sitters of his kin. As a young man, he, like Holly, left home for New York, and since then, whether in sleep or dreams, had never been far from the nostalgic pull of Dixie. It made Mercer a good man—sometimes a drinking man—but it also allowed him to harmonize with Mancini. Together, they were kindness incarnate, and they melted as easily as butter on mashed potatoes.
When Johnny called Hank to tell him he had lyrics, he said, to Hank’s bewilderment, he had not one version to show him, but three. That afternoon, Mancini was scheduled to lead an orchestra through a benefit dinner at the Beverly Wilshire, so he told Mercer to turn up at the hotel ballroom at about four o’clock. There was a piano in there, he said, and it would be deserted. And that’s how it happened: when four o’clock rolled around, in came Johnny with an envelope full of papers, and in came Mancini, crossing the darkened room to greet him. Hank took his seat at the piano on the bandstand and Mercer, standing beside him, pulled out version one, which began with the lyric, “I’m Holly…” But Mercer wasn’t so sure about it. They tried his second version, threw it out, and then tried his third. “Blue River” it was tentatively called, because, as he told Mancini, there had been other tunes with the same name.
