Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (116 page)

Goyen disparaged Truman, defining his novel as “perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers. He dwells in a doily-story-world entirely of his own making.”

In a letter to the poet, John Malcolm Brinnin, Truman wrote: “How is that for a piece of sour grapes bitchy? What a psychopath!”

The attack on
Breakfast
that appeared in
The New York Times
was followed by a brief unsigned dismissal published in
The New Yorker
, for which Truman had once worked and contributed.
Breakfast
was denounced as “empty nostalgia.”

Truman wrote them a letter of protest, attacking their review as “condescending, with an unserious, unjust, and meaningless wisecrack.”

As anticipated, Gore Vidal stood by his stubborn position of maintaining that “Holly Golightly is a mere redrawing of Sally Bowles from Christopher Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories.”
Gore to some degree was accurate, but he failed to note that Holly’s character was far more complicated, with far more nuances, than that of Bowles’ in pre-war Berlin.

Unexpected praise for Truman came from Norman Mailer: “He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way, he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation. He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, which will become a small classic.”

Many actors, including several at the Actors Studio, wanted to play the male lead, a writer who hustles a rich woman for a living. When Marilyn heard that George Peppard was a leading contender, she went to the Actors Studio, with Truman, to watch him perform in a nude scene in bed with a woman.

“A lot of actors would have kept on their boxer shorts, but not George,” Truman said. “He was obviously proud of his equipment—and with good reason—and he flashed for his fellow actors in the studio, including Lee Strasberg. Marilyn and I were mesmerized by his beauty.”

Eventually, Peppard married actress Elizabeth Ashley, who became his second wife in 1966. Truman agreed with Ashley’s description of her new husband. “George Peppard looked like some kind of Nordic God—six feet tall, with beautiful blonde hair, blue eyes, and a body out of every high school cheerleader’s teenage lust fantasy.”

Ever the voyeur, Truman was privy to the secret friendship that Peppard had developed with a fellow hunk, Paul Newman. It had begun when they were cast together in the TV drama,
Bang the Drum Slowly
, which had first aired on
The United States Steel Hour
in 1956.

“I knew both Paul and George, and often saw them huddled together as if oblivious to the rest of the world,” Truman said. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a love affair. But I bet they had great sex together. They would often wander off together, including a secret weekend together in New England. I wished they’d invited me along as chaperone. At least they could have let me watch.”

“Looking at the two of them would give a queen an orgasm,” Truman said. “If some studio ever remakes
Gone With the Wind
, the director should cast George as Rhett Butler and Paul as Ashley Wilkes. I couldn’t quite pull off the role of Scarlett, but in blackface, I could do the Butterfly McQueen role perfectly. I already have her voice.”

Months later, when Peppard was cast in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
with Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn complained to Truman, “Audrey Hepburn got George, the man intended for me.”

Unlike Truman, Blake Edwards, the director of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, was unhappy about the casting of Peppard. He’d never viewed one of his movies until Edwards went to see
Home From the Hill
(1960), in which Peppard played the neglected son of land baron Robert Mitchum.

“After seeing George on the screen, I got down on my knees and begged Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd, the producers of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, not to make the film with Peppard. ‘He is a piss poor actor,’ I told them, an ex-Marine and all that shit. I wanted Robert Redford, but ended up with Peppard. Paul Newman could have done it, too.”

Truman’s greatest disappointment involved the casting of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. “I adore her, but she was wrong for the role. It was tailor made for Marilyn. She would have been absolutely marvelous. She wanted to play Holly, too, to the extent that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself and did them for me. She was terribly good, but Paramount double crossed me by hiring Audrey.”

In a surprising reaction, Audrey agreed with Truman, even though Holly, in time, would evolve into her most iconic film statement. “I feared I lacked the comic sense the part called for. Holly was an extrovert. I’m an introvert. I was pressured into doing the movie. But it made me a nervous wreck. I lost sleep. I lost weight.”

Truman was also displeased with the enormous liberties that Hollywood was taking with his plot. “In my book, Holly is really rather bitter, and Holly Go-lightly was
real—
a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. Holly had something touching about her, a portrait unfinished. Marilyn had that quality. Audrey did not. I also objected to turning my serio-comic tale of a lonely, wandering girl in Manhattan into a mawkish Valentine to New York City.”

In a nutshell, Truman had once described the role as “the story of a child bride from Tulip, Texas, who runs away from home to marry the richest man in the world, but ends up joining the ranks of the world’s oldest profession.”

Audrey brought in her friend, the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, to create her wardrobe, which included “the Little Black Dress” she wore at the beginning of the film. It became one of the most iconic items of clothing in the history of the 20
^th
Century. In 2011, it sold for nearly a million dollars.

Tiffany’s (the jeweler) wanted to hire Audrey to hawk its products in their print advertisements, but she rejected their lucrative offer. “I don’t want to become known as Miss Diamonds,” she said.

Despite Audrey’s objections and appraisals, millions of fans worldwide found her irresistible as Holly. At Oscar time, she received her fourth nomination as Best Actress, losing to Sophia Loren for her role in
Two Women
.

One horribly false note was sounded by casting Mickey Rooney as Holly’s grotesque Japanese neighbor, “Mr. Yunioshi.” Truman accused Rooney of “ludicrously overplaying the role.”

For her role in the movie as “The Other Woman,” Patricia Neal received her first movie offer in years. She jumped at the chance to play a society matron who supports the struggling young writer portrayed by Peppard. She worked well with Audrey, Blake Edwards, and “Gorgeous George,” as she called him.

“George’s character was written with a battered vulnerability that was totally appealing,” Neal remembered. “But it did not correspond to George’s image of himself as a leading man. He seemed to want to be an old time movie hunk. At one point, Blake wanted him to sit on my lap. George and Blake almost came to blows over that scene. In the end, George played the role as he wanted to, and I always felt that Blake should have stood his ground. The film would have been stronger—and so would George Peppard.”

When the final version of
Breakfast
was screened for the brass at Paramount, Martin Rankin, the head of production, objected to the song “Moon River,” demanding that it be cut from the film.

A defiant Audrey Hepburn rose to her feet, shaking her fist at him. “OVER MY DEAD BODY!” she screamed.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was a box office hit, although it drew a fair amount of criticism. One reviewer wrote that “Audrey Hepburn carries the picture, but her fragile grace doesn’t really fit the hillbilly-turned-Manhattan pub crawler Capote imagined. She is, however, a hundred times more engaging than the wooden Peppard.”

The New York Times
defined the movie as “completely unbelievable but wholly captivating.”

In 1966, Broadway producer David Merrick attempted to adapt
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
into a musical, starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain. Merrick opted to scrap the project’s original script, as conceived by the theatrical veteran Abe Burrows. Its replacement derived from an unlikely scriptwriting candidate—Edward Albee. “At least Edward adhered more closely to my original concept of Holly,” Truman said.

During its inaugural previews at Broadway’s Majestic Theater, beginning on December 12, 1966, the musical adaptation of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
ran for nearly four hours. Despite its heavy advance ticket sales, Merrick pulled the plug after only four previews. Then he placed an infamous infomercial in
The New York Times
, asserting that he shut down the show “rather than subject the drama critics and the public to an excruciatingly boring evening.”

“Moon River,” the song that almost didn’t make it into the film version’s final cut, went on to win an Oscar for Best Song, and became one of the proudest achievements of Henry Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer, especially when it was sung by Andy Williams.

Chapter Thirty-Five

During their early struggles
in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters roomed together to cut down on expenses. After they moved out and into better quarters, they remained friends and saw each other when no lover was on the immediate horizon.

One bored, rainy afternoon in Hollywood, Shelley visited Marilyn, finding her washing her hair and painting her toenails scarlet red.

The two men-chasers often shared revelations about their wide-ranging love affairs, present and past, sometimes plotting strategies for future conquests.

Marilyn claimed that early in 1955, she’d had an affair with James Dean, whom she’d met at the Actors Studio in New York.

“Who hasn’t?” Shelley asked.

“Jimmy and I used to play games in which we’d reveal our darkest secrets,” Marilyn said. “In one game, we both had to name very unlikely people we’d slept with. He named Barbara Hutton, Howard Hughes, Tallulah Bankhead, and J. Edgar Hoover.” “Not surprising,” Shelley said. “Jimmy would go down on a doorknob. And who did you name, my dear?”