Category: The Book of Faces

We’ve added a new section to our website focusing on book excerpts. We’ve included whole book chapters, photographs, letters, recipes, poems, and other excerpts from a variety of books, some entirely about Audrey, some with just a chapter or paragraph about her.

In our Book Excerpts section, you can read a letter to Audrey from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, bake Audrey’s bran muffins from a handwritten recipe in her recipe book, enjoy a poem on How to Be a Star, read up on Audrey’s role in the success of the store Tiffany’s, the fateful events that happened when she was 22 years old, and so much more! Please check out our Book Excerpts!

Enjoy an excerpt from Joseph Campana’s charming book of poetry, The Book of Faces.

CELL

It’s the part of the film (Charade) after Audrey Hepburn has lumped ice cream on Cary Grant’s suit (though she doesn’t offer to lick it off) so he takes a shower fully dressed in her bathroom because she’s trapped him there (we can understand why) for a kiss (or something) but got (doesn’t it figure) slapstick instead.

I know that moment. Cary Grant should walk out in a housecoat with a towel wrapped around his neck, saying something funny, something irresistible. Because she’s just heard something awful on the phone. Was it about the nature of men? Always more names than fit on a passport, more features that fit in a damp bathrobe.

He doesn’t just walk in, though. Just like her husband (whose name she didn’t even know) never walked back in (someone threw him off a train). So it makes sense to see her instead, to see her everywhere (women make the best spies). When the door opens, no one’s there. She never gets to walk out of the frame (not even in Givenchy). She doesn’t get to walk into time.

No one gets to walk into the dark with eyes open. Into the shadowy closet of water where a thousand perfect souls swim like notes in the air, glimmering in a great chain that swirls upward, waiting to cycle back to life on the pulsing cell of the eye, of the mind at night, seeing what it does in the dark. No one sees angels. No one hears voices, no less explanations. Machines tick seconds on an ageless band spiraling into itself.

She picks up another cigarette (just breathe). Paces a silver cell: space without time. Savors the smolder that never kills, never burns. That’s the magic of the place (take me with you). She waits for the next one, the man who will come out of the darkness in satin. There’s always another one coming out, another one passing through.

From: The Book of Faces by Joseph Campana (Graywolf Press).

Audrey Hepburn is the ultimate inspiration to Joseph Campana in his poetry collection The Book of Faces.

This fun and fascinating book is an excellent gift for any and all poetry lovers this holiday season. Poems include Pattern of Beauty, How to Be a Star, Breakfast, First Role (Cigarette Girl), Eurydice in Rome, Sonnets for Audrey Hepburn, Dance Steps for Two Left Feet, Love in the Afternoon, and Last Love.

Read poems How to Be a Star and How to Make a Million from Joseph Campana’s The Book of Faces, as well as an interview with Joseph Campana, all from our blog archives.

“Joseph Campana’s The Book of Faces is an extraordinary debut. Audrey Hepburn (yes) is the muse and channel for his meditations on the seductions of the screen and page, the Bright Lady of his sonnets, the star and spirit who ‘drags / the miracle vapor forth.’ His poems-lovely, witty, sincere or cynical things—are haunted both by Hepburn (and her leading men) and by a fascinating array of literary specters: Catullus, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Foucault, Barthes. At times, the surface blurs till poetry wears the austere face of prose, and prose assumes the oblique face of poetry. The vocabulary is disarmingly simple, but the syntax is refracted and compressed in beautifully riddling ways. ‘Fix me a you comfort in darkness . . .’ Campana writes, and we can imagine the nectar power of that ‘you comfort,’ that cocktail. The Book of Faces is not the expected fare but something finer, more provocative, enchanting and rich.” — Alice Fulton

Enjoy an excerpt from Joseph Campana’s charming book of poetry, The Book of Faces.

HOW TO MAKE A MILLION

1. Move to Switzerland for tax purposes.

2. “Steal” the part of Eliza (My Fair Lady) from the woman who played it on Broadway and could actually sing (Julie Andrews) and demand $1,000 a week for expenses while not actually realizing that another woman (Marnie Nixon) would actually play the voice of your song. Don’t get nominated for the Oscar.

3. Make a cameo appearance as an angel in a Steven Spielberg film (Always) then turn the money over to a charity of your choosing (UNICEF). Always take a part as a nun.

4. Marry a multilinqual man more than a decade older than you (Mel Ferrer) to tell you what to eat, what to wear, what to star in, and how much to change. Let him pimp you in the Amazon with a younger man (Anthony Perkins) to make a massive flop (Green Mansions) and then shove you in a basement as a blind woman to save his career (Wait Until Dark) thus ending your marriage but earning you an Oscar nod. Don’t get the Oscar.

5. Invest, invest, invest.

6. Star in a melodrama (Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline), described as “a meretricious thriller of a type that would find its most exotic mutation in the next decade when series like Dallas and Dynasty hooked the viewing multitudes on several continents,” playing a pharmaceutical heiress half your age. Refer to this as “drawing your pension.”

7. Star as a cigarette girl, end as an angel: be a queen between.

8. Win an Oscar and a Tony for starring roles on screen and stage respectively (Roman Holiday and Ondine). Then, multiply your salary for Roman Holiday by an appropriate number with a repeating decimal (142.85142). Or, multiply your salary for Sabrina by a different by equally appropriate number with a different but equally repeating decimal (66.6). Or, total your salaries for War and Peace, Ondine, Mayerling, The Nun’s Story, The Unforgiven, and Green Mansions. Or, add up your salaries for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade, Two for the Road, and How to Steal a Million and then divide by an appropriate number that does not repeat (3). What could be better than numbers?

9. Never eat too much. Try not to eat too little.

10. Clip coupons. Buy something smaller than a mansion (nine bedrooms) preferably in a small town. Stagger your salaries into yearly payments. Have an expensive divorce (at least once or twice). Live modestly as a matron in Rome (at least once or twice). Buy a lottery ticket and test your luck. Pick your numbers — pick with care.

From: The Book of Faces by Joseph Campana (Graywolf Press).

Enjoy an excerpt from Joseph Campana’s charming book of poetry, The Book of Faces.

HOW TO BE A STAR

1. Name your goldfish George, your dog Famous, your cardinal Richelieu, your fawn Ip.

2. Collapse into (Marcel le Bon, Lord James Hanson, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Mel Ferrer, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Anthony Perkins, Peter Finch, Burt Lancaster, George Peppard, James Garner, Cary Grant, William Holden, Rex Harrison, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Andrea Doti, Sean Connery, Ben Gazzara, Robert Wolders)’s arms.

3. Try diamonds. Try Paris, try Rome. Try New York, try London. Try singing, try dancing. Try Givenchy, try Valentino. Try older, try younger. Try men, try women. Try too hard: don’t bother at all. Try flowers.

4. Take up a habit: dogs or clothes, praying or eating—don’t stop eating.

5. Learn the right tune: “Isn’t It Romantic”—“La Vie en Rose”—“Fascination”—“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly”—“Moon River”—“Charade.” Sing, and the moon’s reaching for you.

6. Arrange poignant childhood experiences: paternal abandonment, devotion to ballet, war, Nazi invasion and occupation, malnutrition, near starvation, disappearance, liberation. Arrange poignant adult experiences: depression, anxiety, anorexia, troubled marriages, miscarriages. Arrange poignant golden years: flowers, children, land mines, charity.

7. Always know which side of your face to show.

8. Make brassieres a thing of the past. Wear ballet slippers. Show a bit of neck, a bit of shoulder. Dress down before you dress up. Forget makeup. Don’t go blond. Find the right hat for the right hair. Do your own hairdo at home. Go for Givenchy. Diamonds after forty, skirts before. Go new wave if you can. Don’t just wear: live. Try Valentino, Lauren, Ferragamo. Look good in everything. Look good in nothing.

9. Be discovered by Colette, bankrolled by Paramount.

10. Encourage emulation. Inspire idolatry. Be a muse, be a nymph, be a sprite, bewitch me. Rise from obscurity. Set trends. Break habits. Make statements. Count blessings. Distribute kindnesses. Arouse devotion. Devote yourself to nobility. Ascend, ascend, ascend.

From: The Book of Faces by Joseph Campana (Graywolf Press).

When Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday, her first starring role, a British critic wrote “So flowers, please, for the enchanting Audrey – for the girl that has shown that real stars can be found.” Soon after Billy Wilder compared her to another Hepburn (Katherine) and Garbo when he cast her in Sabrina: “It’s the kind of thing where the director plans sixteen close-ups throughout the picture with that dame – that curious, ugly face of that dame.”

It’s hard to think that the ethereal Hepburn, who died in 1993 at the age of 64, would ever be considered ugly. She had a delicate beauty that glowed on the screen; but she was unusual for her time: waifish in the age of more buxom stars as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe; childlike, with a sing-songy voice and a dancer’s frame; add to that an elegance that led her to be considered one of the last stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She could bewitch audiences playing a princess on the lam (Roman Holiday,) or move them as a nun questioning her devotion (The Nun’s Story.) She could turn schlock (Wait Until Dark) into a memorable character study of a blind woman under siege; or simply enchant as the Cockney girl who becomes a lady in the ultimate musical fairy tale (My Fair Lady.) And when Hollywood tired of her, she devoted herself to public service.

It was that star quality that attracted poet Joseph Campana to devote a book of poems to her. She acts as his muse in his recently published The Book of Faces (Graywolf Press.) “There is obsession and then there is Obsession,” wrote the critic from Publishers Weekly reviewing the book. “Taking the thematic poetry collection to its extreme, Campana’s debut approaches Audrey Hepburn from every possible angle. She is paramour, foil, touchstone, teacher, queen and, ultimately, a way to talk about the act of making a self (and a poem)”.

Catching up with Campana on a recent Sunday night, he explained how he came to choose Hepburn as his muse.

“Sometimes you choose a subject, and sometimes it chooses you. I guess she just chose me. … I’ve always loved classic cinema and I had been interested in her for quite some time. I don’t quite know why I started writing poems about her. But it was her combination of elegance and reticence I suppose that interested me.”

Campana, who teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio, has had his poetry published in such journals as Poetry, Colorado Review, and New England Review. The Book of Faces is his first book of poetry, and has sold extremely well for the genre thus far. He will be reading from his volume this Sunday at the Harvard Advocate Reading Series at 4:00 pm at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA.

His relationship with Hepburn began nearly by accident: as a teenager he was home from school on a snow day and caught Charade, the suspenseful Stanley Donen romantic comedy in which she co-starred with Cary Grant.

“It was before I even really knew who she was. Charade really has everything: it’s funny, suspenseful, elegant. It’s set in Paris and we see Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy and Cary Grant in a towel. What could be better?”

It wasn’t the movies, though, that was his first love: rather it was literature, which he discovered while growing up in a small, economically-depressed mill town in upstate New York in the late 1980s – Richard Russo country, where reading, and poetry, acted as an escape from this blue collar world.

“From a very young age. I started with children’s books and graduated to mythology. From there (came interest in) various kinds of literature. In high school, where I had extraordinary teachers, one in particular got me interested in poetry. I always knew I wanted to be a writer of some kind. … My whole family read voraciously–spy novels, romance novels, science fiction. Movies came later. More so in college, I think.”

With this fascination with the movies, came his interest in Hepburn. While in college and graduate school Campana began actively seeing as many of her films as he could: From her more famous roles (The Nun’s Story, My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) to some less memorable, such as John Huston’s 1960 western The Unforgiven.

“She plays a Great Plains girl who discovers she’s Native American. … She even shoots a gun, kills some Native Americans in it. Shockingly bad in so many ways.”

He is even a fan of one of her later, and less regarded films, Robin and Marion, where she played an aging Maid Marion to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood. (Released in 1976, it was one of her last major starring roles.)

“It was an extraordinary film! She co-starred with Connery (too old to play James Bond at this point) who plays middle-aged Robin Hood. She was Maid Marion. It’s all about exhaustion, about being too old for the same old games. Maybe that’s a way of thinking of the death of an icon. Besides, Hepburn passed into the world of public service after that film.” (In 1988 she took a full-time volunteer position with UNICEF, and spent the rest of her life performing charity work in countries from Ethiopia to Ecuador.)

Campana’s favorite film, though, remains Charade.

“It’s a great film–funny, mysterious, scary. There’s an incredible scene in the film in a nightclub. The master of ceremonies tells the guests that they’re the entertainment. So they play the game where you pass an orange to someone without using your hands. When Audrey Hepburn and Carey Grant do this you think, “Do I want to be Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, or the orange in between?” Maybe that’s the source of my book…”

In preparing his poems, Campana didn’t immerse himself too heavily into the events in her life; rather saw Hepburn more as an icon, much in the same way that earlier poets related to their muses, from “statues of ancient goddesses and gods to the beautiful women and men of Renaissance sonnets.”

“I read a few biographies. I even read a really deranged account by someone convinced was Audrey Hepburn’s long lost son. So some biography enters the book, but I was investigating her as an icon, so I didn’t want to be overburdened with the responsibility of getting at the real Audrey Hepburn. I of course never knew her and my responsibility as a poet is different.”

Why the title, The Book of Faces?

“It emerged as a phrase in one of the poems, but that and the title poem came much later. Faces are interesting, of course–beautiful, strange, deranged–and whenever we think about the act of loving someone or even addressing another person we think about faces or what it means to face someone. … I guess the poems themselves are a series of individual faces, each (hopefully) with a different expression or shape or interest; but all sharing the same basic archetype.”

In the book Campana uses a wide-variety of poetic forms: canzone, sonnets, lists, dramatic monologues, even a graphic poem where the words form Hepburn’s initials, in his exploration of idolatry. Was this eclecticism intentional?

“In this case, absolutely. The danger of having one central concern or subject is, of course, staleness. Having a relationship to an icon is complicated–you look at it, dream, fantasize, it seems to look back at you. So The Book of Faces needed that range of shapes. When we love things, however real or unreal, we’re twisted into all sorts of shapes and flooded with more voices that we can handle. … Of course, I didn’t plan that out in advance. It was just the way the poems were happening. In general, I think as writers we need to really plumb the depths of language and try as many things as we can.”

In writing about Hepburn, he also tells a great deal about himself. Does he feel that poetry is the most exposed of writing genres?

“In a way, I suppose it is, if we understand poetry as being of the most imaginative of the modes of writing we have. Sometimes, it takes acts of real imagination to get at what is most vulnerable and compromising about the private and public lives we live.”

And, lastly, does Campana feel that there are any stars today who are Hepburn’s equal?

“I think there are actresses as great as Audrey Hepburn, yes. At the same time, the culture of celebrity has changed quite a lot. I mean, reality TV stars are celebrity now, and the actors and actresses most hounded by paparazzi aren’t necessarily the great talents. The popularity of today’s stars makes the phenomenon different, I guess.”

Learn more about Joseph Campana’s Book of Faces.

From: EDGE Publications, Article by Robert Nesti, EDGE National Arts & Entertainment Editor, Friday, Feb 24, 2006