by Sam Wasson
Clean may have won the Saturday Review, but it was far from pervasive. Out of the cacophony came one Irving A. Mandell, whose letter to Hollywood Citizen-News unearthed all the contentious taboos Team Tiffany’s tried their best to bury. He wrote, “The Tiffany picture is the worst of the year from a morality standpoint. Not only does it show a prostitute throwing herself at a ‘kept’ man but it treats theft as a joke. I fear ‘shoplifting’ will rise among teen-agers after viewing this.” Lest we forget. Just when the Production Code was beginning to look archaic, folks like Mr. Mandell appeared to crash the party. Writing of Tiffany’s and the film La Verite, with Brigitte Bardot, Mandell asserts, “Neither picture has a story which makes sense. There is nothing in either to make one sympathetic with the main characters (these women cannot possibly be called heroines).”
WORKING GIRL
When she graduated from Brandeis University in 1959, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the future cofounder of Ms. Magazine, was in need of a heroine. Right out of school, she started looking for a job in publishing, but found, despite her qualifications, that she couldn’t get one. “I had a BA in English,” she said, “and an American Literature cum laude and distinction and all these other things, but when I opened the New York Times want ads, I couldn’t apply for the jobs that I was qualified for because I could only apply for the job in the ‘Help Wanted: Females’ column. All the junior editor jobs were in the men’s column.”
Letty finally landed a secretarial job at Simon and Schuster. A year later, she moved to a small publishing house called Bernard Geis Associates where she advanced from assistant director of publicity, promotion, advertising, and subsidiary rights to director of each department. She was twenty-one. “I would take these editors out to lunch, but I had to establish charge accounts in these restaurants so men didn’t see me signing the check. It was considered emasculating. I had to do all kinds of things to mask what was happening to make the men feel comfortable.”
As the person in charge of promoting the soon-to-be-best-selling Sex and the Single Girl, Pogrebin trained author Helen Gurley Brown for her various interviews and media appearances. The two spent a great deal of time together, and before long, they forged a connection. “Helen was already married by the time I met her, but before that, she had led this fabulous single life for thirty-seven years.” In her book, Brown was trumpeting a life of good times for the bachelorette, offering advice on everything from how a girl could add sensuality to her apartment, to advocating premarital sex, and even outlining ways to leave Manhattan for a rendezvous with a married man. It was racy, with an overarching idea of modern womanhood that looked ahead to The Feminine Mystique. But with more mystique. “Betty Friedan might have been embarrassed to have Helen’s book on her shelf,” Pogrebin said, “but she definitely knew about it.”
“I used to go to work in high-heeled shoes, gloves, hat, matching bag,” she added, “and was very careful to always wear my hair in a bun. If my hemline was too high, I’d be sent home to change my dress. What I’m saying is, the demands of convention were merciless. I can’t tell you what it was like, to be haunted by this set of feminine ideals wherever you went. Just imagine this: when I finally got married, I was the last one of my friends, and I was only twenty-four.”
ONE OF SWIFTY LAZAR’S DINNER PARTIES
When he wanted to, Truman could pour it on. “Sometime after the movie came out,” remembers Patricia Snell, “I met Capote at one of Swifty Lazar’s dinner parties and I drove him back to the Bel-Air Hotel because he was acting, you know, so nuts. He was drunk or on drugs or something. He had created such a scene at Swifty’s party and I lived by the hotel, so I took him. On the ride home he said, [slurring] ‘it was a great, great thing to have your husband do the picture…’ He told me he was thrilled with the end result, that he was really, really happy with the movie. Of course, I knew what he really thought.”
For the rest of his life, when it didn’t serve him to ingratiate, Capote would state his true position—a highly valid one—without reserve. “The book was really rather bitter,” he said in a 1968 Playboy interview, “and Holly Golightly was real—a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. The film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly. It bore as much resemblance to my work as the Rockettes do to Ulanova.” Decades later, with a few beverages in hand, Truman really let loose to journalist Lawrence Grobel. When asked what he thought was wrong with the adaptation, he replied,
Oh, God, just everything. It was the most miscast film I’ve ever seen. It made me want to throw up. Like Mickey Rooney playing this Japanese photographer. Well, indeed I had a Japanese photographer in the book, but he certainly wasn’t Mickey Rooney. And although I’m very fond of Audrey Hepburn, she’s an extremely good friend of mine, I was shocked and terribly annoyed when she was cast in that part. It was high treachery on the part of the producers. They didn’t do a single thing they promised. I had lots of offers for that book, from practically everybody, and I sold it to this group at Paramount because they promised things, they made a list of everything, and they didn’t keep a single one. The day I signed the contract they turned around and did exactly the reverse. They got a lousy director like Blake Edwards, who I could spit on! They got George Axelrod to do the script. I will say they offered it to me, but I don’t like to do scripts of my own work, I prefer doing scripts of other people’s.
They didn’t offer it to Truman. They offered it to a writer who wouldn’t fight their changes.
“Truman was strongly opposed to the screenplay,” Shepherd said. “But I only found out about that after the picture was released. We never had any day-to-day dialogue with him about the screenplay, directly or through his agent. Frankly, I don’t recall having a single face-to-face meeting with Truman until the picture was going into release. After he acquired the novel, neither did Marty, but we were not obligated to share the development of the script with him.”
ONE OF AKIRA KUROSAWA’S DINNER PARTIES
“When I was an agent at CMA [Creative Management Associates],” said Shepherd, “one of my clients was Akira Kurosawa. I went to Japan when he was directing his sequences for Tora! Tora! Tora! and when he realized that I had been involved with the decision to cast Mickey Rooney as a Japanese man, he almost couldn’t talk to me. I felt awful. I was so embarrassed. Here was Akira Kurosawa, one of the masters, and he had invited me to his home for dinner, where I watched his wife serve me on her hands and knees, and then [trails off]…it was…painful.”
Blake Edwards has since apologized. As for Rooney, he pleads ignorance. When the actor was alerted that a public screening of the film in Sacramento had been canceled in the wake of a substantial protest against Yunioshi, the Mick told the Sacramento Bee that he was heartbroken. He added that he hadn’t received a single complaint about the portrayal since the film’s opening.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN GOES ALL THE WAY
“When Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out, it blew me away,” Pogrebin said. “In those years, I really considered myself an alter ego of Holly Golightly. First of all, it was because she was so unlike the usual Hollywood caricature of a woman. She was a woman you wanted to be. Of course, she didn’t have a profession and I was career oriented, so that was a little troublesome, but the fact that she was living on her own at a time when women simply weren’t, was very validating to me. It was very affirming. Here was this incredibly glamorous, quirky, slightly bizarre woman who wasn’t convinced that she had to live with a man. She was a single girl living a life of her own, and she could have an active sex life that wasn’t morally questionable. I had never seen that before.” Inspired to adopt some of Holly’s kookiness for herself, Letty went out and bought a scooter, a dog, a rabbit, and a little duck.
“Back in 1961,” she says, “all we had to represent change was a young male president. But morally, nothing had changed. We were exactly in the same place. Then came Au
drey Hepburn, this very good girl—so it can’t be wrong, right?—as Holly Golightly and she was wearing these gorgeous Givenchy gowns. And they were black!” Like thousands of other American women, Letty bought one, or one like it, for herself. Before long, her closet was filled with black dresses and black hats. “That’s when I was starting to begin to think seriously about black. They weren’t pink or lime green like they were supposed to be. They didn’t have lace around the collar or little doily patterns. There was only one secretary at Simon and Schuster who wore black all the time and I thought she was dynamite. That was really something. Phyllis was her name.”
I’D MARRY YOU FOR YOUR MONEY IN A MINUTE
Letty and Phyllis were not alone. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was well on its way to grossing $4 million domestically, and $6 million worldwide. That wasn’t monster money, but it was enough to earn Jurow and Shepherd hearty handshakes around the studio. They had delivered a popular film on time and at budget. Their star was pleased, the sound track was selling, and if they wanted to impress the barons of art, they could show them the New York Times review. “See? It’s good! It says so right here!”
That year, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was nominated for five Academy Awards. There was one for Audrey (Best Actress), George Axelrod (Best Adapted Screenplay), the film’s team of art directors, and there were two for Henry Mancini—Best Score, and Best Song, which, if he won, he would share with Johnny Mercer. Jurow and Shepherd weren’t nominated, but they might as well have been; without them, those who were nominated never would have gotten their jobs. That right there was so much of producing. Putting the right people on the movie.
THE ENVELOPE PLEASE
Audrey flew to Los Angeles from Switzerland to attend the Oscar ceremony only to be confined to her hotel room with a sore throat. She watched it all in bed.
Though he wasn’t nominated, Blake Edwards accompanied his team to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the honorable Bob Hope presiding. That night, Blake didn’t have the jitters of a nominee, but he was still tense.
George Axelrod, try though he did to laugh it off—the bullshit of the business and all that—wanted to win as much as anyone else. If he were a long shot that night, he might have been able to relax more, but the cruel fact of it was George had a chance—a good chance. Three weeks earlier, he’d picked up the Writers Guild Award for Best American Comedy, for which he had been nominated three times prior (The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, and Phffft). Having never won until now, George finally had that gold-getting blend of momentum and freshness. It was just the combination to sway undecided Academy voters.
Mancini and Mercer arrived together. Their limo pulled slowly through the crush of screaming youngsters and stopped in front of the red carpet. A moment later, the door was held open, and out came Hank and Johnny, accompanied by their wives, Ginny and Ginger. But the screaming died when they showed their faces to the crowd. No, they weren’t Elvis.
Inside the auditorium, the couples took their seats on the aisle, the Mercers in front of the Mancinis. To their utter shock, they were seated on folding chairs that weren’t only hard on their backs, but creaked throughout the ceremony, which, incidentally, was the longest in the Academy’s thirty-four years of Oscar. As is customary, the nominated songs were performed. Andy Williams sang “Moon River,” which had already become his theme.
As Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse took to the stage, Mancini braced himself. Listening to the names of his fellow nominees roll by, he was reminded that he was in the company of (and up against) legends, each and every one of them. The names Rozsa, Stoloff, Tiomkin, and Elmer Bernstein were packed side by frightful side, and then there was his name—Mancini—blaring out like a bum note from a tuba. How could he even compete?
There was silence as the envelope was opened. And then Mancini heard his name again—“Henry Mancini”—this time followed by heavy waves of applause, which grew louder the longer Hank stayed frozen in his chair. Every face in the auditorium turned back toward him, Ginny kissed his cheeks, and Mancini bolted up. He was not thinking now, he was running.
Seconds later he was onstage. This was it, his first Oscar.
“I’m deeply grateful to the members of the Academy and my good friend Blake Edwards. Thank you.”
And after that, he was onstage again. But this time, Johnny Mercer was standing next to him.
“I’ve said my bit,” Mancini said, “go ahead.”
Mercer edged up to the microphone. “I’d like to say that I’m very proud that you liked our song. I’d like to thank you, Audrey; thank you, Andy; and martinis for everybody.”
“Thank you,” Mancini added.
That night, those two Oscars for Best Song and Best Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture were the only two wins for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. George lost to Abby Mann for Judgment at Nuremberg. So did Tiffany’s art directors lose, but to West Side Story. And Audrey Hepburn, along with Piper Laurie, Natalie Wood, and Geraldine Page, lost to Sophia Loren for Two Women.
Audrey smiled it off. George was devastated. But when he was asked, he told everyone that it didn’t matter. The bullshit of the business and all that.
AFTERGLOW
At the party to follow, Blake gave as many congratulations as he received. With his wife on his arm, he passed through the ballroom on the precipice of glory, offering phony and sincere strains of deference in switch combinations that surprised even himself. Handshakes, backslaps, and across-the-room waves were exchanged around like a hooker at an all-night orgy, and by the end of the evening, as he tried to remember how or when his bow tie got untied, Blake wouldn’t be able to recall what he said to whom. His wife, Pat, dutifully reminded him that the evening’s successes were rightfully his to share, and yet there was no getting around the fact that Breakfast at Tiffany’s, no matter how good, wasn’t really A Blake Edwards Movie. Yes, the cocktail party was his. The ending was his, too, but he wouldn’t tell people that. Going around claiming credit for it would just make him look greedy, and gallantry was Blake’s preferred mode of manipulation.
What Blake didn’t know was that he was on his way—and in a big way. The new Blake Edwards—the one whom Tiffany’s would inaugurate into the critical firmament—was not making movies until Andrew Sarris—who would soon become the critical firmament—formally christened Breakfast at Tiffany’s the directorial surprise of 1961. If that wasn’t sufficient indication of Blake’s potential, then his Best Director nomination for Breakfast at Tiffany’s from the Directors Guild of America surely was. Though he lost to the directors of West Side Story, there was no doubt that this recognition—Hollywood’s first formal acknowledgment of his directing—meant he had upped his ante and had been dealt a winning hand. Now, he was prepared: when the time came, Blake could wield the long leash he’d been storing up for years and make the kind of comedy he really wanted to. All he needed was the ace.
It came in the form of Days of Wine and Roses, and it handed Blake more prestige than ever, but he had no idea what he was going to do with it when he sat down with Maurice Richlin to write The Pink Panther.
THE END OF THE ROMANTIC COMEDY
As the days passed, Mel and Audrey spent more time in silence. Their marriage had become a Rubik’s Cube they scrambled and unscrambled in the dark, he turning it one way, she turning it another.
In 1965, they bought an old farmhouse in the hills above Lake Geneva. “La Paisible” (The Peaceful) they called it. There was a white picket fence, orchards, and a marvelous view of the Alps. Best of all, there was no sign of the world of film production Audrey had come to resent. My Fair Lady had wrung her dry, and here at last she could soak up her life again. But seeing his wife at rest unsettled Mel. He wanted her to work, to have more ambition—his own.
Perhaps it was to ensure herself a long period of rest that Audrey, after finishing How to Steal a Million in Paris, became pregnant once again. The new baby, she felt, would be a friend to Sean, and moreover, a salve to their marriage—the turn o
f the Rubik’s Cube they had been grappling for. But it did not work out that way. Audrey miscarried in January 1966.
Gamine parts, Mel sensed, were beginning to look strained on his wife, now thirty-seven. Likewise, Hollywood’s idea of the romantic comedy—the genre she had done so much to evolve—was growing tired, if not a little irrelevant to the politically charged sixties. Movies were now about struggles, not dreams. Their subject, reality, was taking asunder the naive glow of love, and the relevance of Audrey Hepburn, its patron saint, was falling down with it. One glance at her marriage and she would understand exactly why: romantic comedy, like any marriage, didn’t end at “I do.” The Philadelphia Story was only half of the story.
It was the other half that worried Audrey. She didn’t know if it was in her to play a real and ordinary woman. The last time she tried to revamp her image—The Children’s Hour in 1961—nothing happened. Assuming the role of a maybe-lesbian did try the limitations of her persona, but it brought her some of the worst notices of her career. Audrey assured herself that light comedy was really where she belonged, and followed it with Paris When It Sizzles, a picture so problematic, Paramount shelved it for two years, only to release it in 1964 to more awful reviews. Charade, directed by her pal Stanley Donen, came next, but it was more of the same old-fashioned stuff. So were My Fair Lady and How to Steal a Million.
