by Sam Wasson
That’s why Mel thought she should take Two for the Road. The story was not only experimental in its structure, which was temporally fractured like a film of the French New Wave, but it called for Joanna Wallace—the character Audrey would play—to use profanity, engage in adultery, and perform a seminude love scene (“If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess! If you want to make love, hats off!”) What’s more, Stanley Donen, the director, told Audrey that if she were to do the picture, she would be wardrobed not in couture but in ready-to-wear. Givenchy, he said, would be too formidable for Joanna. Of course, the character would have to have style, but it had to be relatable, or at least au moment. The gamine was out of the question.
Audrey read the treatment and turned it down. But Donen and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael, were not deterred. Script in hand, they flew to La Plaisible, where, mustering the kind of persistence Marty Jurow had himself mustered once upon a time, they convinced Audrey Hepburn to take the final leap in her career.
8
WANTING MORE
THE 1960S
THE BEGINNING OF THE ROMANTIC COMEDY
Stanley Donen said, “The Audrey I saw during the making of this film I didn’t even know. She overwhelmed me. She was so free, so happy. I never saw her like that. So young! I don’t think I was responsible. I guess it was Albie.” Albert Finney, her costar.
They began giggling the moment they were introduced, and they didn’t stop until the end of the shoot. It took acting like children to make them feel like grown-ups, and sometimes it didn’t feel like acting at all. They entered that blurry realm after acting called surprise, when actors let go of their own thoughts and feelings and, as if through intravenous transfusion, fade into each other.
In those few months of production on Two for the Road, Audrey and Albie lived a brief lifetime of romance. Whatever happened to them in the hushed moments before a take, or privately, in seaside alcoves away from the set, can only be extrapolated from what they left on film: a dictionary’s worth of silent shorthand, realized in split-second nuance. And then their romance ended quickly, as soon as it had begun.
Fearing the adultery suit Mel could bring against her, and the toll it would most likely take on her relationship with Sean, Audrey had no choice but to call it off. She and Albie parted on good terms, though the film’s cast and crew (and indeed a slice of the world’s reading population) knew better than to file the proceedings under “Just One of Those Things.”
“Audrey’s the one who asked for the divorce,” Mel said many years later. But what’s the point in assigning blame? He was her husband, she was his wife, and whatever passed between them had now passed. Once, it was true that they had loved each other.
“Two for the Road is that rare thing,” wrote Judith Crist in her review, “an adult comedy by and for grown-ups, bright, brittle, and sophisticated, underlined by cogency and honest emotion. And, far from coincidentally, it is a complex and beautifully made movie, eye-filling and engrossing with a ‘new’ (mod and non-Givenchy) Audrey Hepburn, displaying her too-long-neglected depths and scope as an actress…”
Truly, for the first time, Audrey Hepburn played a woman—not a lovely one, but a real one—with all of her defects, desires, and unrefined human pains. “Director Stanley Donen,” wrote Richard Schickel, “and Writer Frederic Raphael (who also wrote Darling) have sensibly noted that girls don’t become women just because they were sexually awakened (overnight, as it were). The process takes considerably longer.” For Audrey Hepburn, that process, which began in Roman Holiday and climaxed in Breakfast at Tiffany’s had finally reached its port of call.
From Two for the Road:
EXT. THE FRENCH-ITALIAN FRONTIER—DAY.
The Mercedes is snaking up the steep approach to the frontier station.
MARK
(philosophizing)
We’ve changed. You have to admit it.
JOANNA
I admit it. We’ve changed.
MARK
It’s sad, but there it is. Life.
JOANNA
It’s not that sad.
THE FIRST MS.
Several years later, in 1971, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, along with Gloria Steinem and several other women journalists, founded Ms. Magazine. “Holly was my formative prefeminist role model,” Letty said.
ADIEU EDITH
The last time Audrey saw Edith was in the Universal commissary a full decade after Tiffany’s. Spotting Ms. Head dining alone, Audrey popped her head over her booth and said, “Why Edith, you haven’t changed a bit!”
Edith—most likely working on her regular three scoops of tuna salad, cottage cheese, and sorbet—looked up to Audrey, who was not employed at the time, and shot back, “I haven’t had time to. I’ve been too busy working.”
It was rare that Edith, renowned for her diplomacy, would let her proverbial glasses drop before such a powerful actress, but her retort shows how deep the wound really was. Of all the stars in her hundreds of films since 1925, it was Audrey Hepburn, the most timid of titans, who hurt her the most.
Edith would not have known it then, but she was on her way to obsolescence. First she would be out of fashion, then she would be out of date. Rita Riggs was there for the change. “When Gulf & Western bought Paramount in 1966,” she said, “they filled Ms. Head’s fitting rooms with machines, and wiped her out in two weeks. They cleared out an inventory of fashion and accessories that she spent her entire career collecting. At one time, her work rooms of long tables—perfectly situated to catch the northern light—were big enough to fit twenty ladies doing rolled hems for the likes of Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford. Now they were no longer cost effective. Out they went, and Edith’s studio became the accounting department.”
Edith Head, who played it safe, who hated trends, and who never wanted to be a designer, wore white gloves, tailored suits, and her hair up in a tight chignon. She was nominated for the Oscar thirty-five times.
TRUMAN’S SWAN SONG
There are those who believe they are truly loved when they truly aren’t, and others who suspect that despite sincere reassurance to the contrary, no one really loves them at all. At some point in their lives, most people suffer from one or the other, wrongly convinced that all is well or all is not, but Truman Capote, who was good at losing love, was terribly right about both. Simultaneously overadored and falsely adored, Capote rode a carousel of affections from his first day to his last, changing horses as it suited him, even turning them against each other on his way around to the prettiest next. Unbeknownst to him, he was preparing the herd for a stampede that would one day run him to the ground. Even as he fell, he’d claim he didn’t see it coming, but no one else was surprised.
In 1975 Esquire published “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the first shaving off Capote’s much-talked-about, long-awaited maybe-masterpiece, Answered Prayers. It was narrated by Jonesy, a clear Capote surrogate, who listens as Lady Ina Coolbirth dishes society inside and out. Most of the dirt is directed at thinly veiled versions of Truman’s swans, figures like Cleo, who Jonesy calls “the most beautiful woman alive,” and the affair her husband attempts with a governor’s wife (it fails: she ends up menstruating all over the bed). All of Truman’s friends and all of Truman’s enemies—two categories that were beginning to merge—knew exactly whom the repugnant episode referred to, and when Babe read it, she recognized herself and Bill immediately, and shut Capote away—forever. Truman wrote her two long letters; she ignored them. Jack Dunphy called her at Kiluna asking her forgiveness; she rejected him.
What Truman wanted to tell Babe, if only she would have listened, was that he never intended to betray her. He wanted only to give Bill his due. Destroy Paley, he thought, in a public literary lynching, and avenge Babe’s suffering. But it didn’t happen that way—at least, not immediately.
Ironically, long after Babe and Truman stopped speaking, friends of the Paleys’ noted that the bad press Truman handed Bill had begun to pay off. Now that her husb
and was a known philanderer, Babe could turn away from him without worrying. More than simply justified, suddenly, leaving him was mandatory. And Bill began to feel it—he began to repent. As Babe fell to cancer, he spent literally millions fighting it off, catering to her every comfort. To the complete shock of his children, he even allowed himself to be seen in a state of desperation, sitting beside her on the bed as Babe, very slowly, put on her face for the last time. She died on July 6, 1978.
Truman died six years later. Among his last words were “Beautiful Babe” and “Mama, Mama.” Both had fled from him. But both were preserved in Holly Golightly. Of all his characters, he always said, she was his favorite.
END CREDITS
It started with a phone call from my agent, David Halpern. He told me I was about to get a phone call from Julia Cheiffetz, an editor at the newly formed imprint HarperStudio. An hour or so later, I was on the phone with Julia, and about fifteen minutes after that, we had an idea for a book about Breakfast at Tiffany’s. People like to throw around the phrase “I couldn’t have done it without…” and a lot of the time they’re overstating it or trying to be modest, but in the case of Halpern and Cheiffetz, I quite literally could not have done it without them. Halpern, with his patience, directness, humor, and unerring eye on integrity, is a kind of dream agent, and very likely the secret love child of Max Perkins and Swifty Lazar. What he does, he does with a finesse so refined it’s practically invisible. I don’t know how, but I think his wardrobe has a lot to do with it. And Cheiffetz: how she listened, considered, gave space, understood, challenged, soothed, had faith, and charged forth! As an editor, she readily dedicated herself to the consideration and reconsideration of what may have seemed trivial to anyone else, and, quite courageously, allowed us—both of us—to listen to the book reveal what it wanted. To me, a nervous writer stepping out onto the ledge, she was the trampoline below.
David Freeman, this book’s minder, is my first reader for the very simple reason that he probably knows more about show business than anyone anywhere in the world. He also knows how to make the best martini (about six to one), which is an essential skill for anyone who knows anything about show business to have, if only because it’s the most efficient way to assuage the inevitable feeling of hopelessness that comes from discussing it at any length. Without Freeman, I would have been on my own, and the process of writing this book would have been confined to the cramped screening room of my mind—the only place, outside of David’s house, where I can get a laugh from a joke about Geoffrey Shurlock.
For their time, recollections, and/or expert punditry, I thank Jeffrey Banks, Jeanine Basinger, Peter Bogdanovich, Chris Bram, David Chierichetti, Gerald Clarke, Robert Dawidoff, Illeana Douglas, Blake Edwards, Gene Lees, Molly Haskell, Travers Huff, Elaine Kagan, Kip King, AC Lyles, Robert McGinnis, Fay McKenzie, Joyce Meadows, Billy Mernit, Miriam Nelson, Brad Peppard, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, JP Radley, Rita Riggs, Aram Saroyan, Patricia Snell, Edmund White, and Albert Wolsky.
I want to extend my most profound gratitude to Judith Crist, Sean Ferrer, Patricia Neal, Richard Shepherd, and Robert Wolders. These wonderful people didn’t have to devote all those hours to answering my questions, nor did they have to speak honestly and personally about themselves and their work, but they did, and with the kind of trust, openness, and generosity that ensures a writer like me will have great material for his book. Thank you Judith, Sean, Pat, Dick, and Rob for giving so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And for making a call, solving a problem, or just plain lending me a hand, Karen Abbott, Sandra Archer, Tessa Dahl, Bob Dolman, Jack Dolman, Jennifer Edwards, Kate Eickmeyer, Judy Gingold, the Goldblatts, Barbara Hall, Lisa Hoffman, Noah Isenberg, Gary Khammar, Ian King, Selina Lin, Lynne Littman, Andrea Martin, Mark McVeigh, Lynn Povich, Melanie Rehak, Kathy Robbins, Jenny Romero, Sara Rutenberg, Steve Shepard, Ed Sikov, Mom, Dad, Maria and Sophie, I owe you a big lingering hug that could potentially go on too long and make you slightly uncomfortable.
At HarperStudio, my team behind the scenes was always warm, and on occasion, addictively fun to watch from afar. Thank you, Sarah Burningham, Bob Miller, Mumtaz Mustafa, Katie Salisbury, Jessica Weiner, and Debbie Stier.
And finally, Amalia—who got me sandwiches, held my hand, eased my mind, and deliberated with me over every page, paragraph, and period—we can talk about something other than Breakfast at Tiffany’s now.
A NOTE ON THE NOTES
What follows is a hybrid of traditional sourcing and open-hearted homage to those works that influenced the writing of Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. Because this book contains a considerable amount of factual re-creations, I thought it best, when citing their origins, to take the time to explain how and from where I extrapolated what I had, rather than spill out a list of endless citations. In those cases, for the simple reason that entire works, not merely direct quotations, fed the mill of my own writing, these little paragraphs seemed the most comprehensive and least clinical way of describing the unscientific process by which I set out to capture the experiences of my real-life characters.
Nonfiction of the sort I endeavored here, the kind that strives to re-create history more than merely recount it, must negotiate a perilous path between the analytic interpretation and the imaginative one. To keep them distinct is no easy task, and one hell of a slippery slope, which is why it struck me as disingenuous to present my research in an exclusively empirical form. Though, naturally, any person or work I quoted directly has been cited the old-fashioned way.
SAM WASSON
LOS ANGELES
NOVEMBER 2009
NOTES
COMING ATTRACTION
Irving A. Mandell’s remarks about Breakfast at Tiffany’s appeared in Hazel Flynn’s Hollywood Citizen-News column, February 20, 1962.
1. THINKING IT, 1951–1953
The First Holly: It’s madness to write about Truman Capote without looking to Gerald Clarke’s Capote (Linden, 1988), and thankfully, I could supplement knowledge I gleaned from Clarke’s book with knowledge handed to me from Mr. Clarke himself. The e-mail correspondence he and I exchanged proved essential to both my portrait of little Truman and his absentee mother, as well as to my investigation of the real-life Holly Golightly. Also useful were Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote (Random House, 2004); George Plimpton’s rollicking oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career (Doubleday, 1997); and Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Capote (New American Library, 1985), all of which made an impression on this book’s Capote. Each of those impressions has been sourced in more detail in the notes below. So too have those occasions when I explicitly quoted Clarke, his great book, or a voice heard in it. Without them, my own Truman would have been airless.
The White Rose Paperweight: The account of Capote’s meeting with Colette was pieced together from Nancy Caldwell Sorel’s sketch, “Colette and Truman Capote,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), as well as Truman’s own essay, “The White Rose,” collected in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote (Random House, 2007), from which I took this section’s dialogue.
Audrey Awoken: One account of Audrey’s breakfast regimen can be found in Eleanor Harris, “Audrey Hepburn,” Good Housekeeping (August 1959).
Colette Awoken: The story of Colette’s discovery of Audrey has been written about so many times and from so many differing points of view, that by now, it’s got to be 50 percent legend, 50 percent myth. How much can one be certain of? The description in this book is culled from a variety of sources (and is peppered with miscellaneous details about Colette I pulled from Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette [Random House, 2000]), including Eleanor Harris, “Audrey Hepburn,” (Good Housekeeping, August 1959) and “Audrey Is a Hit” (Life, December 1951), but none checked out better than the evocation in Barry Paris’s Audrey Hepburn (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996) for the simple reason that his presentat
ion of the meeting had more in common with all of the other variations of the scene than any of the variations had with each other (chief among them was producer Gilbert Miller’s own variation, published as “The Search for Gigi,” [Theater Arts, July 1952]). Apropos, it should be said that Paris’s account of Audrey’s life is a favorite of both Sean Ferrer and Robert Wolders. That only won Paris more of my favor. On separate occasions, Ferrer and Wolders were quite direct with me on this point (“It is the only one,” Wolders said. “It comes the closest to her”), and after considering a great many biographical alternatives, I can finally agree with them. Paris is definitive. Perhaps more so than any other movie star, Audrey Hepburn incurs in her admirers the kind of idolatrous, cliché-ridden fan writing that sounds sincere when spoken, but falls flat on the page. “Elegant,” “lovely,” and—worst of all—“perfect” are three such easy, throw-pillow-type examples, and though Paris can’t help but succumb on occasion (I can’t see how anyone could be completely exempt), his gaze is not quasi-religious. He looks Audrey Hepburn squarely in the eye, is modest with his superlatives, and maintains formal and scholarly integrity throughout.
