Fifth Avenue, 5 A. M.

by Sam Wasson

  “On one occasion,” said Patricia Neal, “Blake and George almost had a fistfight. We were trying to block a scene and George wanted to change everything that Blake had planned, and George got so terrible that Blake almost hit him. I got them to stop, but I think George got his way. I hated him from that moment on.” Ultimately for Edwards, handling Peppard was easier—and more complicated—than it looked to cast and crew. “I liked George,” he mused, “he was such a ham, so vulnerable really. He was an ex-Marine and all that stuff, and I’d tease him unmercifully. And he’d try and tease me back but didn’t have the wit for it. As a consequence, I always thought he was a piss-poor actor.”

  United by a common struggle, Patricia Neal and her director developed a strong working relationship. “I loved Blake,” she said. “We got along splendidly. He had a fabulous sense of humor. Once I did something wrong and he wanted to torture me, and he made me do it again, and again, and again, and again, but he was so funny about it, I practically forgot I was being tortured. That was a gorgeous man, a delicious man. He’d take me home for dinner with his children and his wife and we all had just a marvelous time. I can’t tell you how much fun he was—great fun—and a beautiful director, too.”

  The bond between Patricia Neal, her husband—the author Roald Dahl—and the Edwardses was not available to Peppard, presumably marginalizing him even further. “I think the problem with George,” offers Patricia Snell, “was that he came to the film thinking that everyone thought him really terrific. Soon people discovered that he had no social grist with things. He was difficult. He didn’t always seem to try hard enough. And Roald didn’t like him either. That kind of colored a lot for Pat Neal.” Mysteriously, news of Peppard’s alienation made its way to the press. Met with accusations of stubbornness, “forgetting his lines, ignoring appointments, and passing up old friends,” the actor explained himself to a reporter from Screen Stories. “My whole world fell apart in one day,” he confessed. “First, the couple who had been running our house for several years announced they were divorcing, and quit. Then, my six-year-old son came down with the measles, and quarantine laws barred me from going home to Chula Vista. I dislike living in Hollywood, so checking into a local hotel every night had me running around in crazy circles.”

  AUDREY & MEL & BLAKE & AUDREY

  In the evening, after the day’s shooting had ended, Edwards was accustomed to rehearsing Audrey for the next morning’s scenes. Ideally, run-throughs would give her the confidence to make spontaneous but informed choices before the camera, when her anxiety was at its highest. Her instincts, Edwards observed, were impeccable, and each evening’s rehearsal would end upbeat, on a note of mutual understanding. In New York, the process went smoothly—Audrey would come to the set the next day ready to apply what they had arrived at the evening before—but ever since they got to Los Angeles, Blake noticed that their headway wasn’t carrying over into the shoot.

  Between one day and the next, Audrey was changing her mind—or, more likely, having it changed for her. She had not the confidence (or the bad manners) to revoke Edwards’s notes on her own, suggesting to Blake that Mel was counterdirecting her at home. Of course, there was no way for Edwards to be certain that Mel was staging a subtle mutiny, but he had his suspicions. Like most everyone else on Tiffany’s, Blake saw what the press didn’t: the Ferrers as they truly were.

  Mel was not shy about openly reprimanding Audrey. They all saw it. Some thought that he even enjoyed it. Jurow overheard the critical remarks Mel made about his wife’s clothing and demeanor the few times he’d appear on the set to take her to lunch. “He was very tricky with her, you know,” Patricia Neal recalls. “He wanted her to do things as properly as she could, and boy she did! He invited us to supper once after shooting, and we had our drinks, had our supper, and then left. She had her bedtime and he wanted her sticking to it.”

  One evening after the day’s shoot, at a Japanese restaurant with various members of the cast and crew, Audrey made the mistake of putting her elbows on the table. Mel was seated next to her, and when he saw this, he picked up a fork, slipped its prongs under her elbows, and said—in a voice loud enough for all to hear—“Ladies do not put their elbows on the table.” It was the sort of oppressively awkward moment that can only be met with silence. Audrey was stricken, and the table, mortified. Nothing was said. She simply removed her elbows and put her hands in her lap.

  Audrey seemed to have a bottomless reserve of the benefit of the doubt, and the more she gave to Mel, the less she had for herself. But she wanted the marriage to work. So if he said it was right, then it probably was. That meant that if she saw it another way, or felt differently, she was probably wrong. Of course it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time she didn’t have to work so hard at love. Having a family was enough. Well, now she had it, and Mel had given it to her. So why was there a problem? Was she not satisfied to be satisfied? Maybe Mel was not the only one at fault for what was happening. Maybe she had pushed him to it. But couldn’t that mean he pushed her to push him?

  Audrey’s willing selflessness depleted her, and her neediness kept her coming back. It was a bad combination, especially when it was paired with its exact opposite: a narcissistic man who only took, got hooked on taking, and took some more.

  Blake sensed a needy side to her and attributed it to a kind of daughterly instinct. She was long without a father, he reasoned, and Mel fit the bill. The trouble was, he fit it too well and she needed it too much. “I don’t know whether her men had a lasting effect on her career,” Blake said many years later, “but I’m quite sure they had a lasting effect on her personal life. She put up with terrible things. I don’t think she had the fun she was capable of having.”

  Edwards knew that the only way he could help Audrey overcome the wide gap she perceived between her true self and Holly Golightly would be to persuade her to go only to him, not her husband, for direction. She’d have to trust Blake, and him alone. If she couldn’t manage that, she’d have to have faith in him instead. But that faith would be impossible to maintain if after hours, Mel continued to fill her mind with new ideas—even if they were good ones—about her performance. So Edwards gave Audrey an ultimatum. Either choose him, or find another director.

  Audrey got it instantly. From there on out, she and Blake were in perfect sync. As the shoot progressed, Blake found he didn’t need to hold his hand out to her anymore. She was doing it on her own. Buddy Ebsen saw it up close. “No two takes are identical,” he would write of Audrey’s working style. “The ‘nowness’ of one minute ago is gone forever and can only be played back—never duplicated. In one’s delivery the timing varies by split seconds, or the weight of the word switches by audible milliseconds.” Rehearsing with Edwards gave her conviction and the permission to use it. “You know,” she said, “I’ve had very little experience, really, and I have no technique for doing things I’m unsuited to. I have to operate entirely on instinct. It was Blake Edwards who finally persuaded me [to become Holly]. He at least is perfectly cast as a director, and I discovered his approach emphasizes the same sort of spontaneity as my own.” Audrey was truly maturing on the set of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was gaining control.

  It was a new feeling, one Audrey had never known as an actress. On Roman Holiday, Wyler simply didn’t direct her that way. The closest he came to shaping a performance was calling out “let’s do it again.” And he did—over and over. Billy Wilder was a better communicator, but he was abrupt and allowed no room for experimentation. His lines had to be read as written, with a certain inflection, and he shot until he got it. Then there was Fred Zinnemann, who directed Audrey in The Nun’s Story, her greatest performance to date—and one built largely in the editing room. Of course, Audrey gave him his material, but it was Zinnemann who created her character’s elaborate texture of thought and feeling. Strategically placed point of view and reaction shots did the trick. It was a triumph of implication, of cinematic finesse. But she and Blake worke
d together to make the performance. Holly, in effect, was their offspring.

  The seamless synchronicity that held Blake and Audrey together could have led one to wonder if their relationship had progressed beyond the professional. “I can assure you that there wasn’t any of that,” Robert Wolders said. “During the making of Tiffany’s, Audrey’s marriage to Mel was quite intact. I’m quite definite about that.” However, when asked point-blank if there was any kind of romance between himself and Audrey on the set, Blake responded with characteristic gallantry. “In those days,” he answered, “everyone fell in love with Audrey.”

  THROWING A PARTY TO SHOOT A PARTY

  When she arrived at Paramount’s Stage 9 in early November of 1960, Audrey was drawn into a party that had been in full swing for days.

  For all of the verbal refinery Axelrod gilded into the script, Blake maintained that Breakfast at Tiffany’s, if it were to satisfy the second half of the hybrid genre “romantic comedy,” would have to have bigger laughs, and more of them. That’s how Mickey Rooney—for better or for worse—got Mr. Yunioshi, and that’s why Blake decided to turn Holly’s swingin’ cocktail party into an all-out slapstick extravaganza.

  “The general party was only indicated [in the screenplay ],” Blake recalls, “and I had to improvise it on the set and I had a good time doing it. I asked the casting office to hire only actors—no extras. I said that there must be a lot of unemployed actors around—not important names, not the usual background faces that you see in films. I wanted real actors because I didn’t know who I was going to give things to and I wanted to be sure that they could handle it.” Convincing the studio to pay actors upwards of $125 a day when extras charge a great deal less was not an easy sell for Blake, but luckily he came out on top. Edwards got the go-ahead from the moneymen, and with the bulk of production behind him, prepped and shot one of the most expensive party scenes to date. It took him the better part of November 2 to November 9 to get what he wanted, but it would last only thirteen minutes on film.

  First to arrive on the scene was choreographer Miriam Nelson. Blake had summoned Miriam (or “Minimum,” as he called her) to help him fit into place the precarious human puzzle that lay ahead. To make this thing fun and frenzied was one thing, and Blake had the gag muscle to do that on his own, but to make it frenetic and legible required the hand of someone who specialized in physical control. As Blake’s choreographer on Bring Your Smile Along, He Laughed Last, and High Time, Minimum was just that someone, and in those early days of planning, she was also an extra pair of eyes and ears. “Blake wanted to dream up some crazy things to do at the party,” she said. “I think he wanted somebody to come and play, someone to try things with. That’s when he was discovering all sorts of things to do, like putting the telephone in a suitcase, and having Marty Balsam kissing a girl in the shower, and all that other wild stuff. Because I was a choreographer, I helped him with some of the staging. There were no dance numbers, but we discussed stuff like who should go where and when. It looks crazy when you watch it, but these actors had to hit their marks, and be in the right position for the dialogue to play. So that’s what we did, right there on the stage before we shot. Blake worked like that, you know. Very spontaneous. Very collaborative. He thrives in the company of collaborators. One idea turns into the next and before you know it you’re in the movie.”

  That’s how it went for Nelson. “After we finished working that day Blake said, ‘Well, you oughta be in the party scene…’ So the next day, he gave me an entrance, and then he teamed me up with Michael Quinn, who he asked to wear an eye patch, and he said, ‘Go in and have an argument.’ Halfway through the argument, he said to the fella, ‘Lift your eye patch and just keep arguing.’ So we did, and neither one of us knew what the hell we were saying. We were just making it up as we went along.” And like any real party, people got tired, but rather than fight it, Blake used it. “When we were shooting,” Nelson remembers, “I had on my own gold brocade suit, and matching gold shoes. After a while, those shoes began to hurt me, so in between takes, I would take them off and just hold them. Blake saw this and said, ‘What’s the matter with your feet?’ I said, ‘Well, these shoes hurt.’ He said, ‘Then don’t put them back on. This is that kind of a party. Just carry your shoes.’ So that’s what I did the rest of the scene. I kept ripping up my hose so they had to keep replacing them.”

  Blake had thrown a party to shoot a party, so that out of accident—or you might say, out of reality—he could glean from the mini story arcs that were occurring naturally all around him. Like Miriam Nelson, actress Fay McKenzie was given one of her own. She said, “Blake came up to me and said, ‘Hmmm…What am I going to do with you, Fay?’ And he was thinking, and thinking, and then he said, ‘I know! Fay, you’re always laughing. I’m going to put you in front of a mirror and you can laugh your head off!’ So then we shot the scene, I returned to being an extra in the background, and a few days later, I said to Blake, ‘Hey, she could have a crying jag, you know.’ He said, ‘Do it.’ That’s how that happened.” Unbeknownst to McKenzie, Blake had gone to great lengths to make her laugh. Beside him at the camera, he had stationed actor Stanley Adams, who was wearing one of the combustible hats worn in a previous scene by Helen Spring (Holly accidentally lights it aflame; a turned-over glass puts it out). When McKenzie was ready to go, Blake called action, cued the fire on Adams’s head, and Fay—as she was told to—burst out laughing. Asked about this practical joke years later, Fay replied, “Blake didn’t know this about me, but I am terribly, terribly nearsighted. I had no idea that he was trying to do anything to make me laugh.”

  Joyce Meadows, who dances through the party in a white dress, had her bit foisted upon her. “At one point during the shoot, George Peppard reached out and pinched my butt and I let out a huge scream—a real scream. That surprised me! Blake didn’t tell me what was going to happen, so of course he must have told George on the sly. But I don’t know if he told George to pinch me specifically, or just anyone. That’s the way it was. You never knew when something was going to happen.” “It went like that for the rest of the week,” Faye McKenzie said. “Blake would just kind of walk around on the set and you could see him thinking up shtick that he was going to do. Of course, the scene was written by George Axelrod, but everything in it was pure Blake Edwards.”

  And what’s a Blake Edwards party without a face-first pratfall? Such was the task of actress Dorothy Whitney, who as Mag Wildwood, was told to fall directly past the lens without lifting her arms from her side. (“Timber!”) Not an easy directive for even the most gifted physical comedian, this piece of clowning was murder on Dorothy Whitney, who all but crumpled under the pressure to get it right and do it fast. Kip King, who played the liquor delivery boy, saw everything that happened to her. “Blake had tremendous difficulty in getting Dorothy to fall. That also was really, really, really, difficult for us to watch because we saw her so scared, and he was relentless with her. She would say, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ Her reflexes wouldn’t allow her to fall onto the mattress, but Blake needed that shot, and time was running out, and he went on and on until he got it. ‘Okay,’ he would say to her. ‘Relax. Just relax. Now let’s do it again.’ I think it was upwards of thirteen takes. It was embarrassing for all of us to watch. He was losing his patience and began to look almost punitive. This was a different Blake. People were so stunned they didn’t talk about it afterwards.”

  For the next seven days, Blake led his partiers through 140 gallons of tea and ginger ale, in addition to cold cuts, dips, and sandwiches, over sixty cartons of cigarettes, and over $20,000 worth of production costs later, at last he had the party he wanted. “People were everywhere,” said Joyce Meadows. “Blake had planted us in practically every room throughout the set and signaled us with his hand when and where to move about. He would say, ‘Okay everybody, when the music goes on, I want this group of people to cross into here and mingle with this group over here.’ But as far as our perso
nal movements were concerned, that was up to us. He didn’t give the party people specific notes, but at the beginning he said, ‘You’re all a regular part of Holly’s life. This is not a down-home party, but a typical Golightly party, so don’t let anything surprise you. No matter what happens stay in your characters and stay in the scene.’ From there, he gave his notes to the first A.D. who’d say stuff like, ‘You guys are doing great. Just keep up the conversation. Let’s do it again.’ You know, A.D. stuff. Blake had to save most of his energy for the dialogue scenes. You could tell that the actors were very precious to him. He would talk to them very privately and, it seemed to me, very intimately. You saw him talking to Audrey and Peppard and Marty Balsam, but you never heard him say anything. When he’d walk up to them, he’d put his arm around them and he’d take them to one side of the room and talk.”

  “Blake makes everyone feel wonderful and appreciated,” Fay McKenzie said, “and has goofy things happening on the set. He wanted us to just have a good time, really. A lot of times that doesn’t work, but he managed to do it. His sets were like parties, so it’s no wonder that he’s so good at writing and directing parties in the movies.” If this was going to look like a real party, then it had to evolve like a real party, and that meant bringing in a bee smoker—used by beekeepers to calm the bees—to enhance the smoky ambiance to a suitably thick end-of-evening cloud. On the last day of the shoot, Edwards replaced the ginger ale with champagne. But be warned: The trick to playing drunk, he told his cast, was to play the scene with the intention of seeming sober.