Sam Wasson - Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffanys, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

Audrey Hepburn

as The Actress who wanted a home

Truman Capote

as The novelist who wanted a mother

Mel Ferrer

as The Husband who wanted a wife

Babe Paley

as The swan who wanted to fly

George Axelrod

as The screenwriter who wanted sex to be witty again

Edith Head

as The Costumer who wanted to work forever, stay old-fashioned, and never go out of style

Hubert de Givenchy

as The Designer who wanted a muse

Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd

as The producers who wanted to close the deal for the right money and get the right people to make the best picture possible

Blake Edwards

as The Director who wanted to make a sophisticated grown-up comedy for a change

Henry Mancini

as The Composer who wanted a chance to do it his way

and Johnny Mercer

as The lyricist who didnt want to be forgotten

COSTARRING

Colette

Doris Day

Marilyn Monroe

Swifty Lazar

Billy Wilder

Carol Marcus

Gloria Vanderbilt

Patricia Neal

George Peppard

Bennett Cerf

Mickey Rooney

Akira Kurosawa

as The offended

AND INTRODUCING

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

as The Girl who saw the dawn

Like one of those accidents thats not really an accident, the casting of good Audrey in the part of not-so-good call girl Holly Golightly rerouted the course of women in the movies, giving voice to what was then a still-unspoken shift in the 1950s gender plan. There was always sex in Hollywood, but before Breakfast at Tiffanys, only the bad girls were having it. With few exceptions, good girls in the movies had to get married before they earned their single fade to black, while the sultrier among them got to fade out all the time and with all different sorts of men in just about every position (of rank). Needless to say, they paid for their fun in the end. Either the bad girls would suffer/repent, love/marry, or suffer/repent/marry/die, but the general idea was always roughly the same: ladies, dont try this at home. But in Breakfast at Tiffanys, all of a suddenbecause it was Audrey who was doing itliving alone, going out, looking fabulous, and getting a little drunk didnt look so bad anymore. Being single actually seemed shame-free. It seemed fun.

Though they might have missed it, or not identified it as such right away, people who encountered Audreys Holly Golightly in 1961 experienced, for the very first time, a glamorous fantasy life of wild, kooky independence and sophisticated sexual freedom; best of all, it was a fantasy they could make real. Until Breakfast at Tiffanys, glamorous women of the movies occupied strata available only to the mind-blowingly chic, satin-wrapped, ermine-lined ladies of the boulevard, whom no one but a true movie star could ever become. But Holly was different. She wore simple things. They werent that expensive. And they looked stunning.

Somehow, despite her lack of funds and backwater pedigree, Holly Golightly still managed to be glamorous. If she were a society woman or fashion model, we might be less impressed with her choice of clothing, but because shes made it up from poverty on her ownand is a girl no lessbecause shes used style to overcome the restrictions of the class she was born into, Audreys Holly showed that glamour was available to anyone, no matter what their age, sex life, or social standing. Grace Kellys look was safe, Doris Days undesirable, and Elizabeth Taylorsunless you had that bodyunattainable, but in Breakfast at Tiffanys, Audreys was democratic.

And to think that it almost didnt come off. To think that Audrey Hepburn didnt want the part, that the censors were railing against the script, that the studio wanted to cut Moon River, that Blake Edwards didnt know how to end it (he actually shot two separate endings), and that Capotes novel was considered unadaptable seems almost funny today. But its true.

Well before Audrey signed on to the part, everyone at Paramount involved with Breakfast at Tiffanys was deeply worried about the movie. In fact, from the moment Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd, the films producers, got the rights to Capotes novel, getting Tiffanys off the ground looked downright impossible. Not only did they have a highly flammable protagonist on their hands, but Jurow and Shepherd hadnt the faintest idea how the hell they were going to take a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama, and an unhappy ending, and turn it into a Hollywood movie. (Even when it was just a book, Breakfast at Tiffanys was causing a stir. Despite Capotes enormous celebrity, Harpers Bazaar refused to publish the novel on account of certain distasteful four-letter words.)