Thinking It
1951-1953

The First Holly

Traveling was forced upon little Truman Capote from the beginning. By the late 1920s, his mother, Lillie Mae, had made a habit of abandoning her son with relatives for months at a time while she went round and round from man to high-falutin’ man. Gradually the handoffs began to hurt Truman less — either that, or he grew more accustomed to the pain — and in time, his knack for adaptation turned into something like genius. He was able to fit in anywhere.

After his parents’ divorce, five-year-old Truman was sent to his aunt’s house in Monroeville, Alabama. Now was Lillie Mae’s chance to quit that jerkwater town and hightail it to a big city. Only there could she become the rich and adored society woman she knew she was destined to be, and probably would have been, if it weren’t for Truman, the son she never wanted to begin with. When she was pregnant, Lillie Mae — Nina, as she introduced herself in New York — had tried to abort him.

Perhaps if she had gone away and stayed away, young Truman would have suffered less. But Nina never stayed away from Monroeville for long. In a whirl of fancy fabrics, she would turn up unannounced, tickle Truman’s chin, offer up an assortment of apologies, and disappear. And then, as if it had never happened before, it would happen all over again. Inevitably, Nina’s latest beau would reject her for being the peasant girl she tried so hard not to be, and down the service elevator she would go, running all the way back to Truman with enormous tears ballooning from her eyes. A day or so would pass; Nina would take stock of her Alabama surroundings and once again, vanish to Manhattan’s highest penthouses.

Had he been older, Truman might have stolen his heart back from his mother the way he would learn to shield it from others, but in those days he was still too young to be anything but in love with her. She said she loved him, too, and at times, like when she brought him with her to a hotel, promising that now they’d really be together, it looked to him as though she finally meant it. Imagine his surprise then when Nina locked him in the room and went next door to make money-minded love with some ritzy someone deep into the night. Truman, of course, heard everything. On one such occasion, he found a rogue vial of her perfume and with the desperation of a junkie, drank it all the way to the bottom. It didn’t bring her back, but for a few pungent swallows, it brought her closer.

For the better part of Capote’s career as a novelist, that bottle — what was left of his mother — would be the wellspring of most of his creations. The idea of her, like the idea of love and the idea of home, proved a very hard thing to pin down. He tried, though. But no number of perfume bottles or whiskey bottles, no matter how deep or beautiful, could alter the fact of her absence. Nor could most of the women or men to whom Truman attached himself. They could never pour enough warmth into the void.

In consequence, Capote was equal parts yearning and vengeance, clutching at his intimates with fingers of knives that he would turn back on himself when left alone. However sharp, those fingers pulled his mother from the past and put her on the page where, in the form of language, he could remake her perfume into a bottomless fragrance called Holly Golightly. That’s how Truman finally learned the meaning of permanence.

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. offers lots of savory tidbits [from the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s]. Mr. Wasson brings a lively and impudent approach to his subject.” (Wall Street Journal)

“The anecdotes are numerous and deftly told. This well-researched, entertaining page-turner should appeal to a broad audience, particularly those who enjoy film history that focuses on the human factors involved in the creative process while also drawing on larger social and cultural contexts.” (Library Journal)

“Sam Wasson is a fabulous social historian…[Fifth Avenue, 5 AM] is as melancholy and glittering as Capote’s story of Holly Golightly.” (The New Yorker)

The character Audrey Hepburn brought to life in Blake Edwards’ 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s captured the imagination of an America on the cusp of the sexual revolution. But Hepburn’s Holly is only a partial interpretation of the Holly that Truman Capote created in his 1958 novella of the same name.

In Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, writer Sam Wasson shows how Paramount made a Hollywood hit out of a story about a call girl when some magazines deemed it too shocking to serialize.

One of the first hurdles, Wasson says, was how to handle the sexual orientation of Truman’s characters at a time before the sexual revolution.

“One of the things that people forget about Holly in Truman’s novel is that she had a bisexual streak and in fact the character of the narrator — who George Peppard played in the film — was himself gay,” Wasson tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden. “We know for sure that Paramount had a great deal of difficulty translating that aspect of the novel into a mainstream heterosexual romantic comedy.”

The man in charge of that translation was writer George Axelrod, who had to develop a more conventional romantic interest and storyline for Hepburn’s Holly — something closer to the 1950s romantic comedies where the goal is to get two characters together or married so the movie can end. A tricky task, considering Capote’s original storyline.

“When you’re dealing with a call girl, they’re already getting together,” Wasson says. “So what’s the conflict that you’re going to build into the story to actually make it a feature-length film?”

Axelrod’s solution, Wasson says, was “brilliant.”

Yet like any revolution, the seeds were sown years earlier, as Sam Wasson suggests in Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, his history of the making of the 1961 film. To claim Hepburn marks a turning point from the domestic postwar years to the ’60s, with its sexual revolutions and social upheavals, is a weighty thesis to pin on shoulders as slim as hers. Yet Wasson’s thesis works because the book is not just about Hepburn, but about the collective ambitions and anxieties that fueled the making of the film, and the shifting sociocultural context of its production.

Wasson’s story begins with novelist Truman Capote, whose heroine was inspired by his capricious mother and society “swans” like Gloria Vanderbilt and Babe Paley, whom he courted. Paley, unhappily married to a wealthy but cold husband, showed Capote that, “with wives across America financially dependent upon their husbands, being a married woman was a euphemism for being caught.” Capote’s heroine, Holly Golightly, grew out of his desire to give these women freedom and immortality. Her love interest was originally platonic – a gay man much like himself – that is, until screenwriter George Axelrod got his hands on him.

Just as America’s women, the target audience of the day, were ready to see a woman with individuality and style who was morally complex but wasn’t punished for it, Axelrod and director Blake Edwards were itching to make a romantic comedy for grown-ups.

The women’s collection is priced between $395 for a tote bag to $15,500 for a “Laurelton” glazed crocodile leather satchel. But it’s the “Holly” clutches, which come in both satin jewel tones and leather, that will likely prove the biggest lure for fans of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The Givenchy dress, bought by an anonymous bidder, was one of a group of more than 40 Hepburn items offered by specialist auctioneer Kerry Taylor in association with Sotheby’s. Most of the items, dating from the 1950s and ‘60s, were entered by Tanja Star-Busmann, a lifelong friend of the Belgian-born actress. Hepburn regularly sent her boxes of unwanted clothes.

A turquoise cloche silk cocktail gown acquired by Hepburn from Givenchy’s 1966 autumn/winter collection was bought by a U.S.-based museum for 18,000 pounds, said Taylor in an e-mailed statement. It had been expected to sell for as much as 12,000 pounds.

The sale also included the bridal gown made in 1952 by the Fontana Sisters for Hepburn’s planned wedding to U.K. businessman James Hanson. At the time, the star was on location in Italy filming “Roman Holiday.” After the wedding was called off, the ivory satin dress was given by Hepburn to a young Italian, Amabile Altobella, for her marriage to a farm worker. Altobella was the seller.

The rediscovered gown, complete with a photograph of Hepburn wearing it, sold to a private collector for 13,800 pounds, beating a high estimate of 12,000 pounds.

The Hepburn lots achieved a total of 268,320 pounds, more than doubling the presale valuation of 100,000 pounds. All realized prices included 20 percent auction house fees.

A cocktail dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1966 film How to Steal a Million has been sold at auction for £60,000.

The Chantilly lace outfit, by Hepburn’s favourite designer Hubert de Givenchy, was among dozens of her dresses, hats, belts and letters being sold.

A satin bridal gown for a wedding called off by Hepburn in 1952, when the late star was 23, sold for £13,800.

Some £268,320 was raised in the auction at La Galleria in central London, with half the proceeds going to charity.