Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

Sam Wasson's just-released and delightful book on the making of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is so chock-full of great anecdotes that you're sorry when it's over. For awhile, you are there - a privileged insider-witness to a marvelous bygone moment in moviemaking history - and it's with a feeling of bittersweet regret that you step from its closing pages back into a realm of noisy 3D sequels and superfluous comic book franchises. Everything you'd want to know and more is delivered in the book, from the reader's coverage producer Marty Jurow was first handed, re: adapting Capote's book for the screen ("In any event this is more of a character sketch than a story. NOT RECOMMENDED") to the guest list for the post-premiere party (including such unlikely elbow-rubbers as Dennis Hopper, Buster Keaton, Charles Laughton, and Jane Mansfield).

A delicious through-line in the book is how close the movie came to not coming out so well as it did, with such jaw-droppers as everyone's resistance to having Henry Mancini write a song for the thing (eventual collaborator Johnny Mercer's original lyric, we learn, one of three eventually presented to Mancini, was called "Blue River"). An intimate exploration of the myriad personalities in conflict and collusion when a casual classic is being created, the book is cannily adept at detailing the logic of the so many minute decisions that lead to what we now accept as inevitable. Of course Audrey Hepburn played Holly Golightly, you think, until you hear how hard Capote lobbied for Marilyn Monroe.

Wasson is a formidable researcher. He doesn't so much know where the bodies are buried as he knows where the hearts and minds are hidden. The book is written like a good novel, taking you inside the consciousness of its characters with an impressive, insight-laden believability ("Fifth Avenue"'s only recent movie-book rival in this regard is Mark Harris' fascinating "Pictures at a Revolution"). And Wasson's notes on how he arrived at, and can justify, his leaps of imagination and empathy are almost as interesting as the text itself.

Of course the book has its thesis and theories as well, positing "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and Hepburn's stylish, fresh, era-defining performance as a watershed moment in cultural history. If you're a fan of Audrey Hepburn, the book is a must-have, because Wasson's astute take on what she was about, what she was up against, and how she delivered the goods strikes me as definitive. Her spritely, near-angelic spirit comes alive in the pages of this eminently devour-able book, which is kind of an awesome dividend.

When Holiday Golightly kicks her no-name cat out of the car and on to the street, we have the real pain of mental illness, not the glamor of a New York party girl. There really isn't anything romantic about this character. She is cruel because life has been cruel to her. Her "freedom" isn't free. She is ill. Seriously ill. "Traveling" is a way of running away from herself. It isn't romantic. It isn't adventurous. It is a long slow death.

Ironically, "Cat" gets the safe home he wants when he is free of Holly. Paul gets what the reader can assume is a life of sadness because he can't give Holly the home he thinks she wants.

Men's wants of Holly and for Holly are what define Holly. We don't know anything about her other than she is a page on which men write their desires. She isn't anything of substance unless the men in her life give her form. She is the fantasy of the men she left behind and the men she is seeking. She has no defined self beyond that. Her cage--she gives Paul a birdcage--is her lack of self. If she cared about herself, she wouldn't subject herself to a life of $50 tips for the powder room. She is Marilyn Monroe with no furniture, no permanent address, no control over her life. She is a borderline personality thriving on drama, creating a storm of problems, pregnant with no hope of a life for her baby, unstable. Her future depends on handouts from men, allowing men to photograph her nude, living with other marginal people, fragile, hysterical, dependent. How in the world is this the modern woman? Jane Eyre had an education and a vocation. Holiday Golightly has nothing.

Capote based the character on his personal relationship with Marilyn Monroe. He didn't want Hepburn for the part, but he lost control of the book and the film when he sold the rights. The book is romanticized and blurred with the film. On a second, third, fourth reading, when all the Hollywood has been wrung from it, perhaps the tragedy of the characters can be revealed.

And it is a gross simplification to suggest that Paul is merely her homosexual friend. He is in love with her. And if he is a homosexual, how can that be? Perhaps that is his unspoken confusion. How can he care so much for someone that all convention says he must bed? In the movie he beds Patricia O'Neal. In the book we know nothing of his sexual life. But he doesn't sleep with Holly. Why do our reptilian brains insist that we bat for one team or another? Can't we be simply who we are? If we are not prisoners of one conformity we must be prisoners of another... It is instructive that Capote is telling us to get out of our conventional thoughts and look simply at how a person can care for another person and how that care, not sex, is rejected. Holliday Golightly can only use their relationship as far as it goes. She can only see herself sleeping with men and then only sleeping with men that can give her fleeting security in her hand to mouth view of the world. She ultimately rejects his care because it is not sexually based. She cannot love anything or anyone. She can only use people.

What is so modern about our imagined happiness for a prostitute that gives up the life for a home and a man.

If this film could be remade today, it might show the emptiness of life. Not just in New York but in being the child bride of a country vet, (today this would be seen as sexual abuse) a life in the Army for a man child too unaware of how he is used, a writer living in New York with little visible means of paying his rent, of a woman who wanders from father figure to father figure in search of someone to take care of her because she is incapable of taking care of herself. She has no skills outside the bedroom. She has no means of supporting herself. She is a prostitute who everyone wants to use and Paul only wants to love. And love isn't enough.

Why anyone finds Hepburn's characterization romantic is strange. Without the Hollywood ending the character is perfectly irredeemable. She and Paul hold the cat under her coat in the rain while professing love for each other in the face of her criminal charges and their lack of money. Her diplomat has abandoned her but her love has found her. Perhaps she can cut a deal in exchange for her testimony that can keep her out of jail. She must obey the rules to survive. Rules imposed on her. Are viewers not romanced by her new found conventionalism? Readers are sickened by Paul searching for any word of her. She travels through Africa with two men who evidently she gets medical treatment for by sleeping with a native. There is nothing modern about trading on sex. In the film, she has decided to stop staying out all night, stop being a prostitute and love one man who cannot give her money or fame. He gives up being a prostitute and decides to be a provider. Both of them are whores which says that they must stay in their station in life. Capote was making more of a comment about what happens to writers than what happens to women without an education, a career, a man.

How is Holiday Golightly the dawn of the modern woman? Being a modern woman means being able to support yourself and not depend on men to give you money for the bathroom or a cab. It is not about being a prostitute which is the world's oldest profession. It is about never having to depend on your vagina to take you places but rather counting on your brain to keep you safe.

If you are looking for a modern woman on film, look at Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night or Roselind Russell in My Girl Friday. The modern woman is not mentally ill and if she is, she does something about it. She doesn't work it as if it were somehow charming. Borderline women often evoke feelings of rescue in men who enjoy the fantasy that they alone can save her from herself. They are also drawn to the uninhibited sex borderline women are rumored to enjoy. Capote might have been the first to write about this male compulsion to save, to domesticate the wild thing and in doing so is writing about his inability to rescue Holiday or Marilyn or save himself, gay, straight, male, human, from such fantasies.

This romantic view of this sad woman in costume jewelry in front of the best known diamond store in the world, one that would rather she not enter--she cannot afford anything in the store--eating out of a paper bag after staying out all night because she has no real home, no place to go, no identity that is not pushed on her except by men--is a gross misunderstanding of what Capote was doing with this character. Holiday cannot enter Tiffany's unless Paul takes her. Women in New York were routinely suspect if they went into hotel lobbies alone. Gloria Steinem wrote about encountering this. Holiday doesn't go in dressed as a party-call girl, but dressed as an unglamorous academic looking wife on the arm of a tweedy looking man who might be her boyfriend, her husband, her rock. Her hair is not bound by a fake crown but rather down in pig tails. They look at items they can't afford. (Diamonds are a girl's best friend, aren't they Marilyn? Because men leave women like that if they ever marry them.) They can afford to engrave a ring from Cracker Jack's. A fake ring. She can't be modern because in the book she doesn't practice birth control unless she calculates the rough horseback riding incident to produce a miscarriage. She saves Paul from his runaway horse only to lose her baby. They do not connect over life, but connect over one saving the other. Paul wants to save her, but he can't. Only a society that romanticizes Paris Hilton could find pluck in this borderline personality.

When Paramount was gearing up to release "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a film that would go on to usher in an entirely new and more authentic depiction of women on screen (even if it had still had a long way to go), they had to be careful. Audrey Hepburn, the darling of such films as "Roman Holiday" (which won her an Oscar) and "Sabrina," was very conscious of her public image. Unlike other stars who carefully constructed their images, Audrey was essentially the kind woman she was perceived by the public to be. Hepburn, who could sometimes be found knitting on set, didn't want that reputation tarnished. So, unsurprisingly, Hepburn nearly turned the role of the free spirited good time girl Holly Golightly, the film she is most remembered for today.

And therein lies the crux of Sam Wasson's masterful book on the making Breakfast at "Tiffany's" and its cultural significance. At this time in film history it wasn't okay to play this type of character. On screen good girls were good and bad girls were bad. There was no gray area. But "Tiffany's" would change all that, and show the world that not only did this gray area indeed exist, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to be single and sexually liberated woman--even if you were just playing one.

Golightly, as it turns out, was an amalgam of so many of the society ladies that Truman Capote (the author of the original novella on which the film is based on) knew and socialized with, but it was Babe Paley and Capote's own mother, Nina, who most pervaded the character of Holly.

This slim volume (coming in at just over 200 pages) is also a history of Hollywood during the mid 1950s and through the filming of "Tiffany's." Not having read Capote's original novel, I was unaware that the Paul Varjak character in the film was actually Holly's gay friend in the novel. The social mores of the day dictated that the character be turned into a love interest.

I think Sam Wasson's book is clever and unique and witty in its telling of the story behind the story of how "Breakfast at Tiffany's" paved the way for a new brand of filmmaking and depiction of women on screen. Often irreverent, always engaging, Wasson's book does not disappoint.

This was the book to have honor of being my first Kindle book. I love Audrey Hepburn. I've seen this movie more times than I can count. I started with great hopes for the book. About one-quarter of the way into the book, I lost interest. Read two other books and made myself go back and finish this book. When I start removing books from my Kindle to clear the clutter, this will probably be the first to go.

I regret I bought this book. Oh, and the last 20% of the Kindle book was his thanks and notes for the book, which I just skimmed - reading only what seemed interesting. I was glad to get to this point so I would be done with this book.

It really seemed to have little substance. He tried for witty headings - like "Does Edith Head Give Good Costume." That was the first heading that seemed strange to me in a book about an elegant lady but on I read. I think the last such header was "The F'g Song" - statement made by a studio person (I would go back and get the exact name/affiliate, but I don't have enough interest in the book to look for it) about "Moon River." I have no problem with profanity or sexual content, it just seemed strange an author would use such headings in this book.

All in all, it was a boring book.

This was the book to have honor of being my first Kindle book. I love Audrey Hepburn. I've seen this movie more times than I can count. I started with great hopes for the book. About one-quarter of the way into the book, I lost interest. Read two other books and made myself go back and finish this book. When I start removing books from my Kindle to clear the clutter, this will probably be the first to go.

I regret I bought this book. Oh, and the last 20% of the Kindle book was his thanks and notes for the book, which I just skimmed - reading only what seemed interesting. I was glad to get to this point so I would be done with this book.

It really seemed to have little substance. He tried for witty headings - like "Does Edith Head Give Good Costume." That was the first heading that seemed strange to me in a book about an elegant lady but on I read. I think the last such header was "The F'g Song" - statement made by a studio person (I would go back and get the exact name/affiliate, but I don't have enough interest in the book to look for it) about "Moon River." I have no problem with profanity or sexual content, it just seemed strange an author would use such headings in this book.

All in all, it was a boring book.

This might pass muster as a Vanity Fair magazine feature, but as a book it's an embarrassment. I found it an utter waste of time. The title-- "the Dawn of the Modern woman"-- seems a desperate marketing attempt to give this thin gruel some gravitas. I read the list of interviews with some fascination, wondering what if anything the author gleaned from his time. There's scant evidence of anything in the text but a routine clip job. I hesitate to write anything negative about books, because I know how much work they represent. I have no such qualms about this trifle.

I have to confess I have always loved Audrey Hepburn, but have never been quite sure what my favorite Audrey Hepburn movie should be. They all showcase that certain gamine ethereal quality which defined her during the great heyday of her career in the 1950s-the early 1960s. Sam Wasson's book, Fifth Avenue 5 A.M makes the case that everyone's favorite movie should be "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

When Stanley Kubrick made his film version of "Lolita," the ad campaign focused on how impossible it was under the prevailing motion picture code (illustrating what a dead letter that institution was that audiences would conspire to undermine it). The original work that the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was based upon posed just as many problems. It was the story of a prostitute (Holly Golightly) and her gay friend who talked and acted like Truman Capote. Capote even insisted that he was the only person capable of playing the male lead in any film version of his work. Holly Golightly could only be played by one person, Audrey Hepburn's polar opposite, Marilyn Monroe. One wonders what sort of movie would have been made had that bit of casting been attempted,. Marilyn discretely turning tricks while Capote dished the dirt with the upstairs neighbor, a Japanese photographer.

Movie making is collaborative venture and this book demonstrates that premise perfectly. Capote created the character of Holly Golightly based in part on his own wild playgirl of a mother. While she was not above depositing Truman with relatives in Alabama (where he met Harper Lee, but this is another story entirely) while she ran around Manhattan in the thrities, she probably was not the high class call girl that Holly was in the book. In fact any number of women including Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus (later to marry Walter Matthau) and Babe Paley contributed features to the development of Holly Golightly. Sometimes writing involves collaboration from a variety of sources.

Once the film rights were sold, several other individuals step into the story, each with their own agendas, but all seeking some sort of redemption. First there was Audrey Hepburn herself who had originally refused the part by saying, "I just can't play a hooker." There was the writer, George Axelrod, the writer, who sought to break away from doing movies with well endowed heroines (Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe) who seduce ordinary joes, a genre termed boobs and boobs films. Then there was the director, Blake Edwards, who despite a successful career as the director behind the successful Peter Gunn TV series wanted to movie into a higher tier of professional respect. Sam Wasson demonstrates how all of these three individuals achieved greater professional success than they might of expected from the outset.

Really the only thing that was left from the original novel was its title and the name of the heroine. Functioning more as a character study, there was little in the way of plot and dramatic tension. George Axelrod, turned the traditional formula for a late fifties sex comedy (which never involved sex unless both partners were married) on its head by making both his hero (no heterosexual) and heroine fully sexual beings who were presumably being kept by others and who needed to break free of the need for financial security to find love and commitment with each other. As for Holly herself, what she did for the $50.00 for the powder room was kept somewhat hush hush, Hepburn had recently been nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of a nun in the Belgian Congo for crying out loud. Holly had been changed from a call girl to a happy go lucky kook in the best traditions of Hollywood.

In most creative endeavors there is usually one person who annoys all others with his oversized ego. Oddly enough with so many talented people involved, that person for this movie was George Peppard. Of all of the participants that were interviewed for the book, absolutely no one had anything good to say about him. An inflated sense of one's own self worth though commonplace in Hollywood and even Washington is not an odd thing, but completely unsuspected if one has the scintilla of talent at the command of George Peppard. The tales of his antics make me long to read an account of one of my favorite trash classics, "The Carpetbaggers," which really is more his style anyway.

It is no surprise to realize that the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was a success. Audrey Hepburn achieved new successes and a greater sense of her abilities as an actress. George Axelrod went on to become one of the producers of "The Manchurian Candidate" (another great movie from this period, would love to read a book on the making of that movie) and Blake Edwards acquired the kind of fame and respect that led to the establishment of the wildly funny Pink Panther series of movies.

Truman Capote was predictably bitter. It was one thing to buy the film rights to his book and then trash most of the plot, but it was another thing to succeed wildly in doing so. Had "Breakfast at Tiffany's" failed (which it probably would have had it starred Marilyn Monroe and Truman in the leads), there would have been some consolation. This particular movie became the source of many extended rants from Capote in the later years who was appalled that his character, Holly Golightly, who was a high class call girl in his original novel had been turned into a lady by Hollywood.

Sam Wasson's work on the making of this classic of Hollywood alchemy is really an fun read as well as being a bit of a guilty pleasure. From the beginning of the story to the end, he weaves a tale of ego, genius and professional redemption in an entertaining and at times moving way. Well worth the read.

Seems to me that the author spent more time on trying to be cutesy and "kookie" himself instead of writing the book clearly. Also, it seemed that the point he tried to make about the impact of the movie on society was overkill. No one incident in the 1960's brought about the sexual revolution.

While the subject matter was quite interesting, I found the author's writing to be terribly convoluted. He constantly introduced topics that were unrelated and people that were unrelated to the story.

If you would like to read it----check it out from the library, it is NOT a keeper.

I was eager to read this book -- the differences between the the novel and the movie versions of Breakfast at Tiffany's have always suggested that a lot happened behind-the-scenes. But this skimpy book feels barely researched, rushed, lazy, content to be lazy -- and its curious presentation (in bits, some no longer than a paragraph) only underlines the problem.

Frequently, it begins to delve into some potentially fascinating facet of the production or its back-story only to give up abruptly. ("That's it?!" I kept saying to myself.)

For more satisfying, passionately in-depth investigations of specific films, see Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, or Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution. This book is just not in their league.

I love Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany's is one of my favorite movies, so I was excited to read this book. Unfortunately, it was terribly boring and I had to force myself to finish reading it.