Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (19 page)

ONE OF AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DINNER PARTIES

“When I was an agent at CMA [Creative Management Associates],” said Shepherd, “one of my clients was Akira Kurosawa. I went to Japan when he was directing his sequences for
Tora! Tora! Tora!
and when he realized that I had been involved with the decision to cast Mickey Rooney as a Japanese man, he almost couldn't talk to me. I felt awful. I was so embarrassed. Here was Akira Kurosawa, one of the masters, and he had invited me to his home for dinner, where I watched his wife serve me on her hands and knees, and then [trails off]…it was…painful.”

Blake Edwards has since apologized. As for Rooney, he pleads ignorance. When the actor was alerted that a public screening of the film in Sacramento had been canceled in the wake of a substantial protest against Yunioshi, the Mick told the
Sacramento Bee
that he was heartbroken. He added that he hadn't received a single complaint about the portrayal since the film's opening.

LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN GOES ALL THE WAY

“When
Breakfast at Tiffany's
came out, it blew me away,” Pogrebin said. “In those years, I really considered myself an
alter ego of Holly Golightly. First of all, it was because she was so unlike the usual Hollywood caricature of a woman. She was a woman you wanted to be. Of course, she didn't have a profession and I was career oriented, so that was a little troublesome, but the fact that she was living on her own at a time when women simply weren't, was very validating to me. It was very affirming. Here was this incredibly glamorous, quirky, slightly bizarre woman who wasn't convinced that she had to live with a man. She was a single girl living a life of her own, and she could have an active sex life that wasn't morally questionable. I had never seen that before.” Inspired to adopt some of Holly's kookiness for herself, Letty went out and bought a scooter, a dog, a rabbit, and a little duck.

“Back in 1961,” she says, “all we had to represent change was a young male president. But morally, nothing had changed. We were exactly in the same place. Then came Audrey Hepburn, this very good girl—so it can't be wrong, right?—as Holly Golightly and she was wearing these gorgeous Givenchy gowns. And they were black!” Like thousands of other American women, Letty bought one, or one like it, for herself. Before long, her closet was filled with black dresses and black hats. “That's when I was starting to begin to think seriously about black. They weren't pink or lime green like they were supposed to be. They didn't have lace around the collar or little doily patterns. There was only one secretary at Simon and Schuster who wore black all the time and I thought she was dynamite. That was really something. Phyllis was her name.”

I'D MARRY YOU FOR YOUR MONEY IN A MINUTE

Letty and Phyllis were not alone.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was well on its way to grossing $4 million domestically, and $6 million worldwide. That wasn't monster money, but it was enough to earn Jurow and Shepherd hearty handshakes around the studio. They had delivered a popular film on time and at budget. Their star was pleased, the sound track was selling, and if they wanted to impress the barons of art, they could show them the
New York Times
review. “See? It's good! It says so right
here
!”

That year,
Breakfast at Tiffany's
was nominated for five Academy Awards. There was one for Audrey (Best Actress), George Axelrod (Best Adapted Screenplay), the film's team of art directors, and there were two for Henry Mancini—Best Score, and Best Song, which, if he won, he would share with Johnny Mercer. Jurow and Shepherd weren't nominated, but they might as well have been; without them, those who were nominated never would have gotten their jobs. That right there was so much of producing. Putting the right people on the movie.

THE ENVELOPE PLEASE

Audrey flew to Los Angeles from Switzerland to attend the Oscar ceremony only to be confined to her hotel room with a sore throat. She watched it all in bed.

Though he wasn't nominated, Blake Edwards accompanied his team to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the honorable
Bob Hope presiding. That night, Blake didn't have the jitters of a nominee, but he was still tense.

George Axelrod, try though he did to laugh it off—the bullshit of the business and all that—wanted to win as much as anyone else. If he were a long shot that night, he might have been able to relax more, but the cruel fact of it was George had a chance—a good chance. Three weeks earlier, he'd picked up the Writers Guild Award for Best American Comedy, for which he had been nominated three times prior (
The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop,
and
Phffft
). Having never won until now, George finally had that gold-getting blend of momentum and freshness. It was just the combination to sway undecided Academy voters.

Mancini and Mercer arrived together. Their limo pulled slowly through the crush of screaming youngsters and stopped in front of the red carpet. A moment later, the door was held open, and out came Hank and Johnny, accompanied by their wives, Ginny and Ginger. But the screaming died when they showed their faces to the crowd. No, they weren't Elvis.

Inside the auditorium, the couples took their seats on the aisle, the Mercers in front of the Mancinis. To their utter shock, they were seated on folding chairs that weren't only hard on their backs, but creaked throughout the ceremony, which, incidentally, was the longest in the Academy's thirty-four years of Oscar. As is customary, the nominated songs were performed. Andy Williams sang “Moon River,” which had already become his theme.

As Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse took to the stage, Mancini braced himself. Listening to the names of his fellow nominees roll by, he was reminded that he was in the company
of (and up against) legends, each and every one of them. The names Rozsa, Stoloff, Tiomkin, and Elmer Bernstein were packed side by frightful side, and then there was his name—Mancini—blaring out like a bum note from a tuba. How could he even compete?

There was silence as the envelope was opened. And then Mancini heard his name again—“Henry Mancini”—this time followed by heavy waves of applause, which grew louder the longer Hank stayed frozen in his chair. Every face in the auditorium turned back toward him, Ginny kissed his cheeks, and Mancini bolted up. He was not thinking now, he was running.

Seconds later he was onstage. This was it, his first Oscar.

“I'm deeply grateful to the members of the Academy and my good friend Blake Edwards. Thank you.”

And after that, he was onstage again. But this time, Johnny Mercer was standing next to him.

“I've said my bit,” Mancini said, “go ahead.”

Mercer edged up to the microphone. “I'd like to say that I'm very proud that you liked our song. I'd like to thank you, Audrey; thank you, Andy; and martinis for everybody.”

“Thank you,” Mancini added.

That night, those two Oscars for Best Song and Best Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture were the only two wins for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. George lost to Abby Mann for
Judgment at Nuremberg
. So did
Tiffany's
art directors lose, but to
West Side Story
. And Audrey Hepburn, along with Piper Laurie, Natalie Wood, and Geraldine Page, lost to Sophia Loren for
Two Women
.

Audrey smiled it off. George was devastated. But when he was asked, he told everyone that it didn't matter. The bullshit of the business and all that.

AFTERGLOW

At the party to follow, Blake gave as many congratulations as he received. With his wife on his arm, he passed through the ballroom on the precipice of glory, offering phony and sincere strains of deference in switch combinations that surprised even himself. Handshakes, backslaps, and across-the-room waves were exchanged around like a hooker at an all-night orgy, and by the end of the evening, as he tried to remember how or when his bow tie got untied, Blake wouldn't be able to recall what he said to whom. His wife, Pat, dutifully reminded him that the evening's successes were rightfully his to share, and yet there was no getting around the fact that
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
no matter how good, wasn't really A Blake Edwards Movie. Yes, the cocktail party was his. The ending was his, too, but he wouldn't tell people that. Going around claiming credit for it would just make him look greedy, and gallantry was Blake's preferred mode of manipulation.

What Blake didn't know was that he was on his way—and in a big way. The new Blake Edwards—the one whom
Tiffany's
would inaugurate into the critical firmament—was not making movies until Andrew Sarris—who would soon
become
the critical firmament—formally christened
Breakfast at Tiffany's
the directorial surprise of 1961. If that wasn't sufficient indication of Blake's potential, then his Best Director nomination for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
from the Directors Guild of America surely was. Though he lost to the directors of
West Side Story,
there was no doubt that this recognition—Hollywood's first formal acknowledgment of his directing—meant he had upped
his ante and had been dealt a winning hand. Now, he was prepared: when the time came, Blake could wield the long leash he'd been storing up for years and make the kind of comedy he really wanted to. All he needed was the ace.

It came in the form of
Days of Wine and Roses,
and it handed Blake more prestige than ever, but he had no idea what he was going to do with it when he sat down with Maurice Richlin to write
The Pink Panther
.

THE END OF THE ROMANTIC COMEDY

As the days passed, Mel and Audrey spent more time in silence. Their marriage had become a Rubik's Cube they scrambled and unscrambled in the dark, he turning it one way, she turning it another.

In 1965, they bought an old farmhouse in the hills above Lake Geneva. “La Paisible” (The Peaceful) they called it. There was a white picket fence, orchards, and a marvelous view of the Alps. Best of all, there was no sign of the world of film production Audrey had come to resent.
My Fair Lady
had wrung her dry, and here at last she could soak up her life again. But seeing his wife at rest unsettled Mel. He wanted her to work, to have more ambition—his own.

Perhaps it was to ensure herself a long period of rest that Audrey, after finishing
How to Steal a Million
in Paris, became pregnant once again. The new baby, she felt, would be a friend to Sean, and moreover, a salve to their marriage—the turn of the Rubik's Cube they had been grappling for. But it did not work out that way. Audrey miscarried in January 1966.

Gamine parts, Mel sensed, were beginning to look strained
on his wife, now thirty-seven. Likewise, Hollywood's idea of the romantic comedy—the genre she had done so much to evolve—was growing tired, if not a little irrelevant to the politically charged sixties. Movies were now about struggles, not dreams. Their subject, reality, was taking asunder the naive glow of love, and the relevance of Audrey Hepburn, its patron saint, was falling down with it. One glance at her marriage and she would understand exactly why: romantic comedy, like any marriage, didn't end at “I do.”
The Philadelphia Story
was only half of the story.

It was the other half that worried Audrey. She didn't know if it was in her to play a real and ordinary woman. The last time she tried to revamp her image—
The Children's Hour
in 1961—nothing happened. Assuming the role of a maybe-lesbian did try the limitations of her persona, but it brought her some of the worst notices of her career. Audrey assured herself that light comedy was really where she belonged, and followed it with
Paris When It Sizzles
, a picture so problematic, Paramount shelved it for two years, only to release it in 1964 to more awful reviews.
Charade,
directed by her pal Stanley Donen, came next, but it was more of the same old-fashioned stuff. So were
My Fair Lady
and
How to Steal a Million
.

That's why Mel thought she should take
Two for the Road
. The story was not only experimental in its structure, which was temporally fractured like a film of the French New Wave, but it called for Joanna Wallace—the character Audrey would play—to use profanity, engage in adultery, and perform a seminude love scene (“If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess! If you want to make love, hats off!”) What's more, Stanley Donen, the director, told Audrey that if she were to do the
picture, she would be wardrobed not in couture but in ready-to-wear. Givenchy, he said, would be too formidable for Joanna. Of course, the character would have to have style, but it had to be relatable, or at least
au moment
. The gamine was out of the question.

Audrey read the treatment and turned it down. But Donen and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael, were not deterred. Script in hand, they flew to La Plaisible, where, mustering the kind of persistence Marty Jurow had himself mustered once upon a time, they convinced Audrey Hepburn to take the final leap in her career.

THE 1960S

THE BEGINNING OF THE ROMANTIC COMEDY

Stanley Donen said, “The Audrey I saw during the making of this film I didn't even know. She overwhelmed me. She was so free, so happy. I never saw her like that. So young! I don't think
I
was responsible. I guess it was Albie.” Albert Finney, her costar.

They began giggling the moment they were introduced, and they didn't stop until the end of the shoot. It took acting like children to make them feel like grown-ups, and sometimes it didn't feel like acting at all. They entered that blurry realm
after
acting called surprise, when actors let go of their own thoughts and feelings and, as if through intravenous transfusion, fade into each other.

In those few months of production on
Two for the Road
,
Audrey and Albie lived a brief lifetime of romance. Whatever happened to them in the hushed moments before a take, or privately, in seaside alcoves away from the set, can only be extrapolated from what they left on film: a dictionary's worth of silent shorthand, realized in split-second nuance. And then their romance ended quickly, as soon as it had begun.

Fearing the adultery suit Mel could bring against her, and the toll it would most likely take on her relationship with Sean, Audrey had no choice but to call it off. She and Albie parted on good terms, though the film's cast and crew (and indeed a slice of the world's reading population) knew better than to file the proceedings under “Just One of Those Things.”

“Audrey's the one who asked for the divorce,” Mel said many years later. But what's the point in assigning blame? He was her husband, she was his wife, and whatever passed between them had now passed. Once, it was true that they had loved each other.

“
Two for the Road
is that rare thing,” wrote Judith Crist in her review, “an adult comedy by and for grown-ups, bright, brittle, and sophisticated, underlined by cogency and honest emotion. And, far from coincidentally, it is a complex and beautifully made movie, eye-filling and engrossing with a ‘new' (mod and non-Givenchy) Audrey Hepburn, displaying her too-long-neglected depths and scope as an actress…”

Truly, for the first time, Audrey Hepburn played a woman—not a lovely one, but a real one—with all of her defects, desires, and unrefined human pains. “Director Stanley Donen,” wrote Richard Schickel, “and Writer Frederic Raphael (who also wrote
Darling
) have sensibly noted that girls don't become women just because they were sexually awakened (overnight,
as it were). The process takes considerably longer.” For Audrey Hepburn, that process, which began in
Roman Holiday
and climaxed in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
had finally reached its port of call.

From
Two for the Road
:

EXT. THE FRENCH-ITALIAN FRONTIER—DAY.

The Mercedes is snaking up the steep approach to the frontier station.

THE FIRST
MS
.

Several years later, in 1971, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, along with Gloria Steinem and several other women journalists, founded
Ms. Magazine.
“Holly was my formative prefeminist role model,” Letty said.

ADIEU EDITH

The last time Audrey saw Edith was in the Universal commissary a full decade after
Tiffany's
. Spotting Ms. Head dining alone, Audrey popped her head over her booth and said, “Why Edith, you haven't changed a bit!”

Edith—most likely working on her regular three scoops of tuna salad, cottage cheese, and sorbet—looked up to Audrey, who was not employed at the time, and shot back, “I haven't had time to. I've been too busy working.”

It was rare that Edith, renowned for her diplomacy, would let her proverbial glasses drop before such a powerful actress, but her retort shows how deep the wound really was. Of all the stars in her hundreds of films since 1925, it was Audrey Hepburn, the most timid of titans, who hurt her the most.

Edith would not have known it then, but she was on her way to obsolescence. First she would be out of fashion, then she would be out of date. Rita Riggs was there for the change. “When Gulf & Western bought Paramount in 1966,” she said, “they filled Ms. Head's fitting rooms with machines, and wiped her out in two weeks. They cleared out an inventory of fashion and accessories that she spent her entire career collecting. At one time, her work rooms of long tables—perfectly situated to catch the northern light—were big enough to fit twenty ladies doing rolled hems for the likes of Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford. Now they were no longer cost effective. Out they went, and Edith's studio became the accounting department.”

Edith Head, who played it safe, who hated trends, and who never wanted to be a designer, wore white gloves, tailored
suits, and her hair up in a tight chignon. She was nominated for the Oscar thirty-five times.

TRUMAN'S SWAN SONG

There are those who believe they are truly loved when they truly aren't, and others who suspect that despite sincere reassurance to the contrary, no one really loves them at all. At some point in their lives, most people suffer from one or the other, wrongly convinced that all is well or all is not, but Truman Capote, who was good at losing love, was terribly right about both. Simultaneously overadored and falsely adored, Capote rode a carousel of affections from his first day to his last, changing horses as it suited him, even turning them against each other on his way around to the prettiest next. Unbeknownst to him, he was preparing the herd for a stampede that would one day run him to the ground. Even as he fell, he'd claim he didn't see it coming, but no one else was surprised.

In 1975
Esquire
published “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the first shaving off Capote's much-talked-about, long-awaited maybe-masterpiece,
Answered Prayers.
It was narrated by Jonesy, a clear Capote surrogate, who listens as Lady Ina Coolbirth dishes society inside and out. Most of the dirt is directed at thinly veiled versions of Truman's swans, figures like Cleo, who Jonesy calls “the most beautiful woman alive,” and the affair her husband attempts with a governor's wife (it fails: she ends up menstruating all over the bed). All of Truman's friends and all of Truman's enemies—two categories that were beginning to merge—knew exactly whom the repugnant episode referred to, and when Babe read it, she recognized herself and Bill
immediately, and shut Capote away—forever. Truman wrote her two long letters; she ignored them. Jack Dunphy called her at Kiluna asking her forgiveness; she rejected him.

What Truman wanted to tell Babe, if only she would have listened, was that he never intended to betray her. He wanted only to give Bill his due. Destroy Paley, he thought, in a public literary lynching, and avenge Babe's suffering. But it didn't happen that way—at least, not immediately.

Ironically, long after Babe and Truman stopped speaking, friends of the Paleys' noted that the bad press Truman handed Bill had begun to pay off. Now that her husband was a known philanderer, Babe could turn away from him without worrying. More than simply justified, suddenly, leaving him was mandatory. And Bill began to feel it—he began to repent. As Babe fell to cancer, he spent literally millions fighting it off, catering to her every comfort. To the complete shock of his children, he even allowed himself to be seen in a state of desperation, sitting beside her on the bed as Babe, very slowly, put on her face for the last time. She died on July 6, 1978.

Truman died six years later. Among his last words were “Beautiful Babe” and “Mama, Mama.” Both had fled from him. But both were preserved in Holly Golightly. Of all his characters, he always said, she was his favorite.