by Sam Wasson
After the fracas with Blake on Tiffany’s, Billy Wilder convinced Axelrod to finally pack up the kids and move to L.A. “Look,” he said to George, “the time has come. You cannot sit in New York, see the finished product, then raise hell about it. If you want to be involved in the making of a picture, you’ve got to be out here to do it.” Billy was right. He could either stay a New York writers’ snob in New York or become a New York writers’ snob in L.A. where he could keep an eye on his scripts. That’s what George was doing with The Manchurian Candidate, which he and Frankenheimer had been talking about since the early days of Tiffany’s. This time, he’d do it right. If they made it the way they should, the way he wanted to, The Manchurian Candidate would be the bleakest political satire America had ever seen. George became a coproducer.
MANCINI IS READY TO SCORE
With the studio system on the outs, big changes were happening in Hollywood. The Production Code Administration was loosening its strictures, a new morality was coming to the fore, and motion pictures, formerly mass entertainment, were on their way to becoming art. Classical modes were fading fast, and Henry Mancini, whose sound struggled to keep apace with the classical giants, was on the crest of the change. Now that the studios had canceled their own orchestra budgets, Mancini was allowed unprecedented access to unconventional instruments—the sort audiences wouldn’t normally hear on a traditional movie sound track.
It was the dance band sound that thrilled Mancini, but he wasn’t ready to forsake the old-guard conventions entirely. What he would do in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was combine both traditions, the symphonic and the jazz, and redeem the latter by the former. But rather than use the full-blown orchestras of scores gone by, Mancini reduced the number of instruments to an ensemble small enough to foreground the guitars, harmonicas, and cha-cha beats.
At that time, most film scores weren’t thought of as popular music. They were considered musical accompaniment, with little value apart from the picture. But Mancini had something else in mind. He wanted to make popular music—and he did. Weaving into Breakfast at Tiffany’s self-contained jazz themes of ideal radio-playing (and album-selling) length, he became the first film composer to score big with the buying public. Not only did he reconceive and rerecord cues especially for the sound-track album, Mancini advertised his catchy melody throughout the picture. He made “Moon River” a major thematic recurrence in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which only helped the tune, and the album, climb their way to the top of the charts.
After Audrey saw the film with the finished score, she wrote:
Dear Henry,
I have just seen our picture—BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S—this time with your score.
A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring. Everything we cannot say with words or show with action you have expressed for us. You have done this with so much imagination, fun and beauty.
You are the hippest of cats—and the most sensitive of composers!
Thank you, dear Hank.
Lots of love,
Audrey
Too bad that Marty Rackin, who had reservations with Mancini from the word go, completely disagreed.
THAT FUCKING SONG
Breakfast at Tiffany’s had just previewed at a little off-road theater near Stanford University, and Audrey, Mel, Blake, Jurow, Shepherd, and Henry Mancini were piled in a stretch limo headed back to Rackin’s suite in San Francisco.
For the most part, the preview had been a success. The proof was in the response notecards the audience had filled out; none of them seemed to indicate that there was any serious problem with the picture. The only real issue seemed to be the picture was running just a little too long, but other than that, the company ought to have been riding high for the forty-five-minute trip back into the city. And yet, not everyone in the caravan was at ease. Mel’s jealousy was as high after a good preview as it ever would be, and as Fay McKenzie observed, this one was no exception. “After the preview,” she said, “when everyone was telling Audrey how great she was—and she was, so wonderful—Mel said to her, [terse] ‘I liked your hat.’ He said it loud enough for everyone to hear and it made us all so uncomfortable. But Audrey just about laughed it off. I think probably to put us at ease.”
When they got to the hotel, Marty Rackin was the first to speak.
“I love the picture, fellas,” he said, tapping out his cigar on an ashtray, “but the fucking song has to go.”
He was standing in front of the fireplace, with one long arm stretched across the mantle. They were all seated before him. No one spoke.
“The song had been an issue for Rackin for some time,” said Shepherd. “It wasn’t about Audrey’s voice, it was something else. He wanted to use the music of a guy like Gordon Jenkins, whose album Manhattan Tower had been a bestseller a few years earlier. But by that point we were all against it. After the screening in San Francisco, the only thing I wanted to change was the Mickey Rooney stuff. I had told this to Blake on several occasions, but he stood by it. He thought he was funny. But he could have gotten the same laughs from a Japanese actor. It disgusts me to think about it. And Marty [Jurow] didn’t like it either. But we never went to the mat about it. That night, in Rackin’s suite, it was obvious to all of us that he was way, way off base about ‘Moon River.’ Having been a studio head myself, I can only say that I think you’re often inclined, instinctively, to comment, even when you don’t have anything to say. Rackin was in that position.”
In Warren Harris’s biography of Hepburn, Mancini says, “Audrey shot right up out of her chair and said, ‘Over my dead body!’ Mel had to put his hand on her arm to restrain her. That’s the closest I ever saw her to losing control.” But Mancini was mistaken; hostility, it’s safe to say, was not in Audrey Hepburn’s repertoire. What’s more likely is that she protested silently or with a few tactful phrases, especially if Blake Edwards, who set the tone for the group, was himself keeping it all inside. “I looked over at Blake,” Mancini reports in his autobiography. “I saw his face. The blood was rising to the top of his head, like that thermometer when I put a match under it. He looked like he was going to burst. Audrey moved in her chair as if she were going to get up and say something. They made a slight move toward Marty, as if they were thinking about lynching him.” Clearly, Mancini’s accounts are at odds.
It turns out it was Shepherd who saved the song. “I said, ‘You’ll cut that song over my dead body!’ And Rackin heard that. The issue was resolved that night.”
The song stayed. Swell music, fade out, the end.
Kind of.
THE KOOK
Despite all the precautions taken by the production, from casting to scoring, to ensure that Holly would appear proper and well behaved, it’s hard to forget all the evidence to the contrary, from Capote’s novel to Givenchy’s dress, that suggests Holly is a wild thing at heart. Though the picture ends when she kisses Paul in the rain, we cannot forget that to get there, she has forsaken her family, abandoned her husband, gone out with a lot of rich foreign men, and, worst of all, had a really good time throughout.
Paramount’s Publicity Department knew this, and they were afraid. Afraid that all the euphemisms would be lost on ticket buyers, that they’d believe Audrey Hepburn had made an indecent movie and stay home in front of their TVs, where they were safe. To reassure the unsure, they built a campaign around “kook.”
Derivative of cuckoo, “kook” was one of many pieces of fifties slang to give nonconformist eccentricity a positive spin. There was also “insane” and “mad,” as well as “crazy,” which had been in circulation since the crazy twenties, and as one might expect, made the idea of difference—a wildly pejorative concept in midcentury America—into an emblem of cool. Good jazz was craaazy. So was rock ’n’ roll. But by the end of the fifties, kookiness had been appropriated into the mainstream; M
adison Avenue spluttered it across print and radio, the TV show 77 Sunset Strip borrowed it for hepcat Gerald Lloyd Kookson III, and the musical comedy Bye Bye Birdie saw a throng of moist teenagers rioting under signs of “Birdie You’re Really The Kookiest.” But what did it mean exactly?
Careful to make clear the distinction between a Beat kook—which the studio urged readers to acknowledge Holly was not—and a fun kook—the kind nervous parents might enjoy—Paramount publicity whitewashed the term of its seditious connotation. Their press releases were quite clear about the distinction:
Let’s face it, now: what is a “kook”?
“Kook” is a word frequently employed by the offspring of this bewildered generation.
“She’s a ‘kook,’ and all that jazz,” they say. But what do they mean, dad?
At the moment, the only authenticated, self-styled kook is Miss Audrey Hepburn who claims to be one as Holly Golightly in Jurow-Shepherd’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Holly Golightly keeps a fish in a birdcage. Holly Golightly takes breakfast on the sidewalk of Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue. Holly Golightly wears clothes designed by Hubert de Givenchy of Paris. Holly has a cat whose name is “Cat.”
But what’s a kook?
Kook is not, as everybody associated with Breakfast at Tiffany’s knows, a beatnik term. Couldn’t be. The star is Audrey Hepburn, not Tawdry Hepburn.
Once on the set, an interviewer caught Audrey in the middle of knitting a sweater for Mel. She was quick to reassure the reporter—as he is quick to reassure his readers—that Holly was not the sort of part they might think it was. “When you publicize this unusual role,” she was supposedly overheard saying to Blake, “please make it clear that I do not play a trollop; I play a kook.” The British version of Photoplay, a well-circulated film fan magazine, reminded girls that there was no cause for alarm:
If you’re an Audrey Hepburn fan—who isn’t?—you may have some difficulty in picturing her as a New York playgirl. Miss Hepburn, an elegant thoroughbred, just doesn’t look like the type of girl who would live strictly for kicks. Yet here she is, turning out the performance of her life, in a new picture, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as—what the Americans call—“a real kookie dame!”
Just in case the point wasn’t clear enough, Paramount issued regular statements to the press underlining the not-so-subtle facts of the Audrey-Holly discrepancy, facts such as these:
Since Miss Audrey Hepburn has never played any part that has suggested she was anything but pure, polite and possibly a princess, a hard look at Miss Golightly is in order.
Miss Golightly is not, according to critics, an exact prototype for the excellent Miss Hepburn. Miss Golightly is, said Time, “A cross between a grown-up Lolita and a teen-age Auntie Mame.” She is, Time goes on, “an expense account tramp…who by her own countdown has had only eleven lovers.”
At the same time, regarding this surprising waif, now to be re-created by Audrey, other critics found that Holly Golightly was more to be pitied than censored. The New York Times, reviewing Capote’s book and Holly Golightly, found them “A Valentine of love.” The Washington Sun-Star called her “unforgettable.”
So don’t worry, moms. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is just a simple love story about a simple fun-loving girl.
THE POSTER
Before he got the call to design the Tiffany’s poster, Robert McGinnis illustrated paperback book covers, romances mostly. His women were typically slender, idealized, but with a hard edge that made them more elegant than voluptuous. “I preferred the more intelligent look of the fashion models of the early sixties to the Playboy types,” he said. “That’s how I could stand out from the other artists. They were doing, you know, a lot of blondes, a lot of Marilyns.”
Somewhat out of the blue, McGinnis got a call from the art director Paramount had hired to design the Tiffany’s poster. He asked McGinnis, who had no film poster credits to his name, if he was interested in contributing a few illustrations. “The art director told me that all they wanted was a single figure, just this girl standing, but with a cat over her shoulder, and that she would be holding her long cigarette holder. They sent me a few movie stills to work with and I said, ‘Sure, why not?’
“The stills weren’t really any good, so I sort of had to take a few leaps of my own. I was shooting pictures of a model for a book cover I was doing, and had her pose with the little orange cat I had back in those days. I put the cat on her shoulder, but the cat wouldn’t stay, so she had to put her right arm up to hold it there. That was an accident. I didn’t tell the model to put her hand there. It was just the only way she could keep the cat in place. That right there was the missing piece and it was the only variation from the many movie stills they gave me. Most of the photographs showed her with that hair, wearing those diamonds, and wearing that dress, so in the end, I didn’t really stray too far from what they wanted and the direction they gave me.
“I did give the figure a little more through the hips and the bust, to idealize her just a little more. But the art director wanted more leg showing. In the photographs I got, Audrey’s dress was long, all the way to the floor. But I was told to make her sexier, so I exposed that leg. That came from the art director, but I’m sure he got it from the studio. He told me they wanted to establish that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a movie about the city. They wanted a couple embracing with the skyline in the background, which they wanted to contrast with the elegance in the main figure of Audrey. But the main thing was the cat. They really wanted that cat in there.”
McGinnis didn’t know it, but that cat, which was so important to the studio, was—as their explicit definition indicates—part of their spin on “kook.” Without it, the figure of Holly in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster reads as simply seductive. The presence of the cat quite cleverly plays against that potentially alienating feature—and here’s the key—without negating it. The studio’s idea to contrast Holly with the couple embracing in the background substantiates the same tension. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is kookie, the poster says, but the good kind, the kind with an old-fashioned ending.
A TRÈS EXCLUSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
The West Coast premiere was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on October 17, 1961. The invitation—if you were lucky enough to get one—was dipped head to toe in Tiffany blue with a two-inch-tall Holly caricature drawn at the bottom right.
In addition, the envelope contained a little card:
P.S. To my pet amis…After you’ve seen that marvelous “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” I would adore to have you and your guest come right over to my apartment for Breakfast At Holly’s—my friend Dave C’s scrambled eggs, a snort of champagne and fun. Chez moi at the Hallmark House, 7023 Sunset Blvd., just a few blocks from the Chinese Theater. When you call for your premiere tickets, please tell me that you’ll join my petit bash. [Signed, in blue] Holly.
In attendance that October evening, a year and two weeks after cameras turned on Fifth Avenue, were Nat King Cole, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Dennis Hopper, Buster Keaton, Ernie Kovacs, Alan Ladd, Charles Laughton, Jerry Lewis, Karl Malden, Jayne Mansfield, Lee Marvin, Groucho Marx, Eva Marie Saint, and Marlon Brando. Wink Martindale was the master of ceremonies.
Audrey, when she saw the movie, told her agent Kurt Frings it was the hardest—and best—thing she had ever done. But what would the critics think?
WHAT THE CRITICS THOUGHT
The New York Times (“wholly captivating”) and Variety (“surprisingly moving”) came out with hearty thanks for an all-around good time. A few quibbles were noted, but they were easily overcome by Audrey’s addictive appeal, the supporting performances, and for Times critic A. H. Weiller, a pair of inspired scenes: “A word must be said for the wild party thrown by Miss Hepburn and her visit to Tiffany’s in which John McGiver, as a terrifyingly restrained clerk, solicitously sells a trinket for under $10: Both scenes are gems of invention.” The uncharmed critics thought of Tiffany’s as a soft comedy with a li
mp ending, but none were livelier, or more prophetic, than Brendan Gill. His New Yorker review, which began, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of those odd works that if they were any better would be a lot worse” ended with, “Millions of people are going to be enchanted with this picture; I will try not to feel lonely in my semi-detached enchantment.” If only the human body could learn to shrug and applaud at once.
No one seemed quite clear on the faithfulness of the adaptation. To one critic it was true in spirit, but not in fact; to another it was fact, not spirit; to this one it didn’t matter because the picture worked; to that one, it mattered because it didn’t. In the muddled free-for-all, moral agenda was often fobbed off as comparative analysis. As always, the central question was, was the film’s Holly too clean or too dirty? Too sweet or too sultry? All manner of answers poured forth, but for Penelope Gilliatt, the correct response was, keenly, both and neither. She wrote, “The achievement of the film, as well as its hedging flaw, is that one leaves this unquestioned at the time.” Jurow and Shepherd would have been happy to read Arthur Knight on the subject, who noted, “Blake Edwards and his talented crew have touched a tawdry romance with true glamour…”