“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)

“Wasson’s story is part encyclopedia, part valentine, and worth reading just to find out what exactly went into making the amazing party scene.” (The Huffington Post)

“A breezy tale of dresses and breakfast pastries, this is not…the subtexts of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — materialism, sexual freedom — were decidedly more complicated.” (Women’s Wear Daily)

“Reads like carefully crafted fiction…[Wasson] carries the reader from pre-production to on-set feuds and conflicts, while also noting Hepburn’s impact on fashion (Givenchy’s little black dress), Hollywood glamour, sexual politics, and the new morality. Capote would have been entranced.” (Publishers Weekly starred review)

“Anyone even slightly interested in Capote/Hepburn/Breakfast at Tiffany’s will delight in [Wasson’s] account.” (USA Today)

“This splendid new book is more than a mere ‘making-of’ chronicle. Wasson has pulled it off with verve, intelligence, and a consistent ring of truth…compulsively readable. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. is both enjoyable and informative: everything a film book ought to be.” (Leonard Maltin, author of Leonard Maltin’s 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen)

“Sam Wasson unfolds the dramatic story of the film’s creation. He also offers a fascinating slice of social history.” (Arrive Magazine)

“Crammed with irresistible tidbits…[Wasson’s] book winds up as well-tailored as the kind of little black dress that Breakfast at Tiffany’s made famous.” (New York Times)

“A fascination with fascination is one way of describing Wasson’s interest in a film that not only captures the sedate elegance of a New York long gone, but that continues to entrance as a love story, a style manifesto, and a way to live.” (New York magazine)

“Reading a book about a movie is seldom as entertaining as watching the film, but Wasson’s is the rare exception.” (Christian Science Monitor)

“So smart and entertaining it should come with its own popcorn.” (People)

“Wasson offers enough drama to occupy anyone for days…The whole thing reads like a cool sip of water.” (Daily News)

“[We] couldn’t put down Sam Wasson’s new book, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M…Along with juicy film gossip, the book offers behind-the-scenes insight on how Hepburn and designer Hubert de Givenchy created Holly Golightly’s iconic style.” (AOL Stylelist)

“A brilliant chronicle of the creation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Wasson has woven the whole so deftly that it reads like a compulsively page-turning novel. This is a memorable achievement.” (Peter Bogdanovich)

“Audrey Hepburn dances through the pages of Sammy Wasson’s portrait of a movie and a little black dress that were game changers at the dawn of the sixties. Both juicy and informative, Fifth Avenue, 5 AM provides the inside story while giving Hepburn her due as a true modern original.” (Molly Haskell, author of Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited)

“Sam Wasson’s exquisite portrait of Audrey Hepburn peels backs her sweet facade to reveal a much more complicated and interesting woman. He also captures a fascinating turning point in American history— when women started to loosen their pearls, and their inhibitions. I devoured this book.” (Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City)

Brit should pick up a copy of What Would Audrey Do? Timeless Lessons for Living with Grace and Style by Pamela Keogh, author of Audrey Style, Jackie Style and Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Legend.

Audrey Style took 10 years of research, interviewing relatives and Rob Wolders, Hepburn’s partner till she died in 1993 at 63 of cancer.

This is Audrey Lite, a self-help Audrey Primer like Miss Manners.

“Audrey Style, Jackie Style and Elvis were big, serious bios,” says Keogh over the phone from New York. “This is looser, rowdier and fun. What could we learn from A.H.?”

To wear undergarments, for one.

That it coincided with the meltdowns of the Lohans, Richies and Hiltons was fortuitous but coincidental. “This took so long, I was writing it way before they all blew.”

I was smitten with A.H., as are people of all demographics. She is an icon to girls and grandparents.

“The young girls know her movies. They don’t know World War II,” Keogh says. “They see her on- screen and she seems like a nice person. She is childish and grown-up at the same time. Her honesty, beauty, vulnerability and genuine guilelessness are appealing.”

A.H. is also a style icon: white shirt, LBD, ballet flats, oversized glasses and black capri pants. She was the muse for 30 years of Hubert Givenchy. An unrepentant clothes horse, A.H. stated, pre-Sex and the City, she’d “rather have more closets than a swimming pool.”

She traveled with 52 suitcases.

“That was when she was in her career prime,” Keogh specifies. “At UNICEF, she travelled with two suitcases – one for Rob Wolders – with jeans and polo shirts.”

She was a stick figure – size 2 and a 20-inch waist – but “she made non-sexy, sexy.”

“It was her intelligence that was sexy. There was a depth to her, and sophistication,” says Keogh. “She’d look at a guy and he’d fall over.”

A.H. didn’t think she was beautiful. She thought her upper arms too thin and feet (size 10) too big.

She was born in Brussels in 1929. Her mother, a Dutch baroness, wasn’t exactly a morale booster: “Considering that you have no talent, it’s really extraordinary where you’ve got.”

“That was a `wow’”, Keogh admits. “Audrey said, `My mother didn’t mean anything,’ but it was a double-edged sword. I didn’t want people to think she is a princess and was perfect. No matter what the challenge she went through, she kept up to give other women a bit of confidence and hang in there.

“The biggest misconception about A.H. is that her life was charmed and she didn’t have challenges.”

Her father walked out when she was 6. Both her husbands (actor Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, a psychiatrist) cheated on her.

“Audrey came from a very good family,” says Keogh. “It was a difficult upbringing but you had your public life and your private life and they were very separate. You behaved a certain way and didn’t go off the deep end.”

What would Audrey not do?

A.H. would never couch jump on Oprah. Heck, she’d never give Oprah an interview. She would never be in Page Six. There were no scandals, even though she had affairs (between marriages) with Sabrina co-star William Holden and Two for the Road co-star Albert Finney and dated JFK, pre Jackie.

Hepburn couldn’t be Mrs. Kennedy because she was an actress, a European and wasn’t Roman Catholic. Keogh thinks A.H. would have made a “terrific First Lady.”

“Jackie Kennedy took her style cues from A.H.,” according to designer Cynthia Rowley.

Keogh sent a copy of the book to First Lady wannabe Michelle Obama, who is “Audrey-esque” in style.

What else wouldn’t Audrey do? Be a gym rat. She smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day and rarely exercised, but weighed 110 pounds at 5 feet 7 inches.

She had trouble gaining weight, partly due to her near starvation during the war in Holland, where she famously ate tulip bulbs and tried to make bread from grass.

What would A.H. do? Get her hands dirty. She was DIY, fixing leaky faucets, replacing fuses and ironing her own signature white shirts. “She loved gardening and mucking in dirt. She baked cakes.”

It sounds like a formula for disaster but the results halfway live up to that ambitious concept. There’s no “Moon River” on the soundtrack but Salvadori’s homage is a bittersweet, funny, sporadically charming and consistently entertaining love story between two “kept” people.

And if French superstar Audrey Tautou is not exactly up to filling Hepburn’s shoes, the camera is still very much in love with her, and her wistful charisma hasn’t seemed this potent since she became a European film phenomenon off 2001’s “Amelie.”

She plays Irene, a gorgeous, conniving woman who’s not exactly a prostitute but has moved from one sugar daddy to another in her young life and, as the movie opens, is playing house with a wealthy businessman (Vernon Dobtcheff) old enough to be her grandfather.

One night in a Biarritz resort, in a late-night moment of boredom and sexual frustration, she meets and seduces Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a nebbish of a waiter she mistakes for a tycoon. Naturally, she leaves him in a huff the minute she realizes her error.

But he falls in love with her. And to stay in her league, he becomes the gigolo of a wealthy older woman (Marie-Christine Adam). From here, the movie follows Jean’s romantic pursuit of Irene, while both try to keep it a secret from their respective meal tickets.

The comedy mostly works. Salvadori loves these characters like his own children and he has a gift for comic timing, a typical Gallic sense of the absurd and a flair for the wit, sophistication and high-gloss luxury backgrounds of Golden Age Hollywood.

Elmaleh is a rising French comedy star with a Buster Keaton face whose films (“The Valet,” “Train of Life”) have so far had little success in the U.S. market. He underplays this role with just the right deadpan touch, and it should help him finally gain an audience here.

What makes Tiffany’s an appealing tale is its heroine, Holly Golightly, a charming, wild and amoral ‘free spirit’ with a latent romantic streak. Axelrod’s once-over-go-lightly erases the amorality and bloats the romanticism, but retains the essential spirit (‘a phony, but a real phony’) of the character, and, in the exciting person of Audrey Hepburn, she comes vividly to life on the screen.

Hepburn’s expressive, ‘top banana in the shock department’ portrayal is complemented by the reserved, capable work of George Peppard as the young writer whose love ultimately (in the film, not the book) enables the heroine to come to realistic terms with herself.

Excellent featured characterizations are contributed by Martin Balsam as a Hollywood agent, Buddy Ebsen as Hepburn’s deserted husband, and Patricia Neal as Peppard’s wealthy ’sponsor’. Mickey Rooney as a much-harassed upstairs Japanese photographer adds an unnecessarily incongruous note to the proceedings.

ONE of these nervous, restless marriages in which the modern young husband and wife are forever snarling at each other while they go onward and up is aptly described by Stanley Donen in a fractured cinematic style in his “Two for the Road,” which opened at the Music Hall yesterday.

So disordered is this marriage—so jangled and subject to the whim of the husband, played by Albert Finney, who is something of a brute—that the wife, played by Audrey Hepburn, cannot put it together in her mind in any kind of sequence when she ruefully reflects upon it. At least that’s what Mr. Donen and his script writer, Frederic Raphael, choose to think.

They choose to think that Miss Hepburn, in flying from England to the south of France for a trip with her rich and arrogant husband at the beginning of the film, is so peeved and unsettled by him that she can’t keep the dates and episodes straight when she looks out the window of the airplane and starts recalling the past 12 years.

She remembers how they met on a Channel ferry, she a music student going to Europe with a group of American girls for a tour in a minibus and he a poor young architect. She remembers how he joined up with them, and when all the other girls got chickenpox, she went on alone with him (carrying her luggage) and they had an affair.

Then her memories became jumbled; at one moment she’s remembering how it was when they were traveling in France with their small daughter, and at the next how it was on their honeymoon. Then she’s remembering a trip they took with an old girl friend of her husband and the old girl friend’s husband and child, all three of whom are insufferable, and at the next moment she’s remembering tomorrow.

That’s right. So mixed up are her memories and so erratic is the continuity Mr. Donen and Mr. Raphael have devised for this helter-skelter film that it isn’t quite clear at what point continuation beyond the flight to southern France breaks free of recollection, or where the past and coming events merge. In other words, it becomes uncertain who is carrying the narrative ball.

But it doesn’t really matter, because what the film has to say about the state of matrimony and the restlessness of modern husbands and wives is more in the jumble of details and the eccentricity of the montage than it is in the exposition of a rational development. The method is the message, as it were.

And the method is just a lot of dazzle—a lot of rushing around France in assorted cars, ranging from an antique MG to a Mercedes 300; swimming on beaches near St. Tropez, eating in restaurants hanging high in the hills above Antibes, visiting the posh villa of a land developer. Whether they are poor and illicit or rich and married, Mr. Finney and Miss Hepburn do get around, and every place in southern France they go looks beautiful in color and on the large Panavision screen.

But “Two for the Road” doesn’t tell us very much about marriage and life, other than the old romantic axiom that lovers are likelier to be happy when poor than when rich. It doesn’t tell us a thing about this couple when they are not in France, or why he is such a stinker, or why she sticks with him.

And a stinker he is. Mr. Finney is compelled to play the husband role as though he were a hater of women and a slave driver to boot. He is constantly needling poor Miss Hepburn, who takes it most of the time—that is, when they are young. When they are older — in those scenes—she snarls at him. And she even goes so far, when eventually she gets fed up—and so do we!—as to take an elegant French lover for a breather. But he’s no bargain, as acted by Georges Descrieres.

However, there are some precious moments of romantic charm in this bitter account of domestic discord amid surroundings that should inspire nothing but delight. And so one must seize upon them for the entertainment that is to be had, and endure the tedium of much of the picture, especially the scenes with that terrible husband and wife and their child, played by Eleanor Bron, William Daniel and Gabrielle Middleton, respectively.