National Public Radio (NPR) had a lively segment on it during Saturday’s “Weekend Edition.” Maureen Dowd wrote her opinion on it for the “Week in Review” section of The New York Times today, Sunday. The subject was the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the 1961 Paramount Pictures release that, under the direction of Blake Edwards, earned Audrey Hepburn another Oscar® nomination for Best Actress. The screenplay is based on a work by Truman Capote. The two important words to keep in mind are “based on,” meaning that its faithfulness to the source material is slight. In fact, if you read Capote’s story, you won’t visualize Audrey Hepburn at all. She’d seem miscast in what became one of her best films and a feature that secured her position as actress, movie star, and fashion icon. The latter is evident in the beguiling opening credits. The black Givenchy dress. How many young woman came to New York City because they wanted to be like Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the stunning black Givenchy dress! Did it ever occur to most of those young women that, if they really wanted to live like Holly Golightly, they should’ve also watched Jane Fonda in Klute? No. Because they were beguiled by that brilliant, subtle opening. Very early morning. Probably Sunday. No one is on the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. A cab pulls up and stops in front of Tiffany’s. Out of cab emerges a slim, young woman so elegantly attired and coiffed that it almost makes you ache. She stands before a Tiffany’s window, gazing stone-faced behind sunglasses at diamonds as she has a deli coffee and morning pastry. Is the background music upbeat and signifying Manhattan like something by the Modern Jazz Quartet? Is it violins and other strings in a lush arrangement? No. It’s a wistful, melancholy theme on harmonica. Big city real estate, fashion, elegance and wealth introduced with that rather heartbroken, down-home, country sound. It lets you know that something else is at work behind those visuals and it’s that very work that makes Audrey Hepburn’s choice to play Holly Golightly so bold, so audacious. Rarely has such a 1960s movie about unpretty lives looked so, well, pretty.
In today’s column, Maureen Dowd wrote this: “Even though many of us grew up not realizing it, Holly’s a hooker.” Ms. Dowd is right, I guess. I didn’t realize it until I was a high school senior in South Central Los Angeles. When I was in gradeschool, I was delighted by Hepburn’s looks, her kookiness, her swinging party and her cat named “Cat.” But, in high school, when I saw the movie on TV again and noticed that older men from out of town were giving her $50 “for the powder room,” I knew what that meant. I also realized what was up with the unproductive writer, Paul, played by George Peppard, whose closet has been furnished by a visiting married woman played by Patricia Neal. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjac are being “paid for play.”
NPR and Maureen Dowd got into the discussion of the movie’s Holly Golightly as a new modern woman, of sorts, but both missed one big aspect — how actress Audrey Hepburn bravely flipped the script on her own movie persona. The year before “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was released, Janet Leigh was a Best Supporting Actress nominee. Leigh was “the girl next door” when discovered by retired screen legend Norma Shearer and eventually put under contract to MGM Studios. After her MGM years, Leigh kicked “the girl next door” to the curb for Alfred Hitchcock and secured her place in film history as the non-virginal Marion Crane in Psycho, for which she earned her Academy Award nomination. In a way, when Norman Bates pushed back that shower curtain, he pushed back the curtain so established Hollywood actresses could step into challenging new turf.
Audrey Hepburn had been the princess swan. She, as screen newcomer, won her Best Actress Oscar for playing a princess in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. After that, Audrey Hepburn excelled at playing the charming, smart, sophisticated young woman whose independence and intelligence could be appreciated only by an older, mature man. In Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, she turns from the sweetly irresponsible playboy William Holden to his older brother, the seemingly unromantic Humphrey Bogart character. In Funny Face, she falls for Fred Astaire, the man who changes her from Manhattan bookworm to fashion model. Again with Billy Wilder for Love in the Afternoon, she’s a cellist who brushes a young suitor aside to pursue Gary Cooper. Rex Harrison’s Prof. Higgins was older than Freddy in My Fair Lady and what did she find wrong with Cary Grant in Charade? Nothing. Even as the strong-willed nun, a scholastic over-achiever in the field of medicine who returned a ring to a beau before entering the convent, she is drawn to the stern Congo doctor played by middle-aged Peter Finch in The Nun’s Story. Unlike the corporate side of the Catholic Church, that doctor admires her feminist spirit and skills. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Hepburn breaks away from that. Holly Golightly does not have the character of her women in those other films. Holly is as empty inside as her apartment. And, this time, she needs the younger man to help her find “the same rainbow’s end” mentioned in the song she plaintively sings, Moon River (Oscar winner for Best Song). The avuncular Buddy Ebsen stars as the older man Holly had to leave in the country when she ran off to the Big City. She sets her sights on José, a seasoned South American beefcake who’s financially well off. Paul Varjac is really at the expiration date for being considered “spring chicken” and he knows it. But he is younger than José and, although not rich, he is better for Holly. With José, she would just “go pleasantly to seed” like the geisha in Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, Snow Country. Audrey Hepburn didn’t play it safe having “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” She raised the stakes and played a dark side of her box office image. It was a risk that, I feel, paid off quite well.
One more thing — to this day, I don’t think any singer has done the Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini song, “Moon River,” better than Audrey Hepburn did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.