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.

Once the reading world got a whiff of it, eau d’Holly made everyone fall in love with Truman, which, since his mother had left him that first time, was the only thing he ever wanted. That and a home — a feeling of something familiar — like an old smell, a favorite scarf, or the white rose paperweight that sat on Truman’s desk as he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The White Rose Paperweight

When he was in Paris in 1948, soaking in accolades for his lurid first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman was delivered by Jean Cocteau to Colette’s apartment in the Palais Royal. She was nearing eighty, but the author of Gigi, the Claudine novels, and countless others, was still France’s grandest grande dame of literature.

In full recline, Colette, racked with arthritis, no doubt smiled at Truman’s author photograph on the dust jacket of Other Voices. Staring out at her with his languid eyes and slick lips, the boy’s salacious look was one the old woman knew well; in her day, she had rocked Paris with a few succes de scandales of her own, both on the page and off. Now here was this rascal with his angel’s face — a hungry angel’s face. How delicious. She felt for sure there existed a kind of artery between them, and even before he entered her bedroom, Truman sensed it too. “Bonjour, Madame.” “Bonjour.” They hardly spoke each other’s language, but as he approached her bedside, their bond grew from assured to obvious. The artery was in the heart.

After the tea was served, the room got warmer, and Colette opened Truman’s twenty-three-year-old hand. In it she placed a crystal paperweight with a white rose at its center. “What does it remind you of?” she asked. “What images occur to you?”

Truman turned it around in his hand. “Young girls in their communion dresses,” he said.

The remark pleased Colette. “Very charming,” she said. “Very apt. Now I can see what Jean told me is true. He said, ‘Don’t be fooled, my dear. He looks like a ten-year-old angel. But he’s ageless, and has a very wicked mind.’ ” She gave it to him, a souvenir.

“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)

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.”

“If Audrey [Hepburn is] playing a call girl and George Peppard is playing a gigolo, the problem is not a lack of sex; the problem is too much sex — such that they’re so tired by the time they actually do get together that they don’t get together,” Wasson says. “You see that in that scene when [Holly] first climbs into bed with [Paul]. They’re not sleeping together — but they’re two gigolos — because it’s the end of a long day’s work. And George [Axelrod] is clever about suggesting all of this. He can’t come right out and say they’re gigolos, obviously, but the implication is strong. And it’s because of that that the movie has the conflict that it has and the legs that it does.”

But there are clues that Axelrod was in fact out to create the kind of sophisticated romantic comedy that he had always dreamed of writing. Take, for example, the scene in which Holly and Paul go to Tiffany’s — Holly’s place of retreat and imagination — to get a Cracker Jack ring engraved. They hand the ring over to the restrained salesman, played by John McGiver, and a memorable exchange follows:

Salesman: “Do they still really have prizes in Cracker Jack boxes?”

Paul: “Oh, yes.”

Salesman: “That’s nice to know. It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past. That sort of thing.”

Holly: “Do you think Tiffany’s would really engrave it for us? I mean, you don’t think they would feel it was beneath them or anything like that?”

Salesman: “Well, it is rather unusual, Madame, but I think you’ll find that Tiffany’s is very understanding. If you will tell me what initials you would like I think we could have something ready for you in the morning.”

Holly [to Paul]: “Didn’t I tell you this was a lovely place?”

The scene shows an innocent side to Holly — a character Wasson views as the beginnings of the modern woman because, unlike Scarlett O’Hara or Cleopatra, Holly isn’t punished for her sexuality. She gets away with her man and — in that little black dress — she looks good doing it.

“She’s being rewarded — that’s what the black is all about,” Wasson says. “There were not many young women, girls, who got to wear black in the movies. You think of Debbie Reynolds, for instance, and most women of this era, [they] were wearing these … little cute things with bright colors and patterns — the poodle skirt aspect of femininity. Yet here’s Audrey Hepburn with a slight element of danger coming out of this cab in this sleek sophisticated black gown.”

There’s a touch of danger in Holly, Wasson says, “and we love her for it. She makes it OK. [Holly is] a girl that you can become.”

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.

Ironically, it is Hepburn who was the most conservative. After an engagement folded under the pressure of her career, she married Mel Ferrer, an actor 10 years her senior. Jealous of her success, Ferrer chastised her publicly when she put her elbows on the table or exhibited other “unladylike” behavior. After reading “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Hepburn told coproducer Marty Jurow, “You have a wonderful script, but I can’t play a hooker.”

More cosmopolitan than Doris Day but less sensual than Marilyn Monroe, Hepburn’s popular appeal blended innocence and sophistication, hinting at the sexuality forbidden to filmmakers. Her transformation in “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina” from “good girl princess” to sophisticate, paved the way for the risqué Holly. Along the way, she sported an outré European haircut and pioneered the LBD (or “little black dress”), signaling her shift from sexual innocence to experience, and sending shock waves through the fashion world. The LBD appears in “Fifty Dresses That Changed the World,” which attributes “its most notable manifestation” to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Reading a book about a movie is seldom as entertaining as watching the film, but Wasson’s is the rare exception. His style, a “perilous path between the analytic interpretation and the imaginative one,” creates a playful tone, as does his juggling of competing story lines, a literary version of cinematic crosscutting.

Novelistic techniques like free indirect discourse enable him to slip into his characters’ perspectives, but he supports these maneuvers with documentation. His interviews are extensive. Poor George Peppard, who somehow thought “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was all about him, gets creamed by pretty much everyone, despite Wasson’s best efforts to “give [him] a fair shake.”

The one weakness is a cursory treatment of Mr. Yunioshi, the Japanese neighbor played by Mickey Rooney, whose excruciatingly racist scenes break the otherwise note-perfect spell of the film. Wasson tells a wonderfully awkward story of producer Richard Shepherd’s chagrin when confronted later by director Akira Kurosawa, but his coverage of protests by Asian-Americans (one as recent as 2008) feels a bit thin.

Wasson’s emphasis, rather, is on the film’s impact on women, who saw themselves in Hepburn’s Holly. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, cofounder of Ms. Magazine, went so far as to claim Holly as an “alter ego”: “Here was this incredibly glamorous, quirky, slightly bizarre woman who wasn’t convinced that she had to live with a man.” The validation this gave women whose lives didn’t look like June Cleaver’s is the most lasting legacy of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Elizabeth Toohey is an English professor at Principia College in Elsah, Ill., where she specializes in postwar American culture.

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.

Tiffany’s 12 largest U.S. stores will begin selling the bags in September, which may also boost sales of its current range of wallets and small leather accessories.

“A blue box from Tiffany is instantly credible as a gift,” as Steven Dennis, a former Neiman Marcus executive turned consultant, tells Bloomberg. “Smaller leather goods, those are very giftable categories.”

The biggest challenge to the brand, adds Dennis: Tiffany isn’t known as a fashion or a leather-goods purveyor, and “shoppers may seek out a known label, such as Hermès, if they’re going to spend that kind of money.”

The collection — which includes day and evening handbags for women, men’s briefcases and bags, and accessories for both — was created by the designing duo formerly known as Lambertson Truex (Richard Lambertson and John Truex), who joined Tiffany about a year ago after the brand acquired their bankrupt leather goods firm from Samsonite.

The brand’s new men’s collection, which ranges from $95 for a card case to $1,395 for a crocodile travel wallet, is in step with Coach’s brand extension into men’s accessories.

Tiffany, the world’s second-largest luxury jewelry retailer, will gradually convert its top dozen flagship stores’ floor space from “unprofitable” china and crystal to make room the leather goods.

The brand’s classic Tiffany blue has been strategically employed: it’s the shade of the bags’ leather linings, with touches of the shade also found on the color enamel of the bags’ hardware. The handbags come in an array of rich shades including Tiffany blue, with the evening bags boasting Tiffany jewelry-inspired touches to add sparkle.

The “Holly” clutch is priced at $595 and echoes the Holly Golightly character played by Hepburn in the 1961 filmed adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella.