Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (32 page)

The
plot of the movie differs considerably from the Truman Capote novella upon
which it is based, but the spirit of the work remains buoyantly the same.

Holly
Golightly, formerly Lulamae Barnes from the backwoods of Texas, lives in a Manhattan
brownstone on the Upper East Side. A party girl, she earns enough money to keep
herself in cottage cheese and little black dresses by accepting fifty-dollar
“donations” from her dates whenever she goes to the powder room.

She
also earns a “salary” of a hundred dollars a week by visiting
gangster Sally Tomato (Alan Reed) at Sing Sing.

George
Peppard portrayed Holly’s new neighbor and paramour Paul Varjak in the movie,
and Audrey was delighted to finally have a leading man close to her age.
“But his style of acting unnerved me,” she recalled. “He was
from `The Method‘ school, and I felt very inadequate just going on my instincts
while George would have thought-out reasons for what he was doing.”

As
usual, Audrey had other doubts about the project as well. In this instance,
they were justified. By nature, she was a quiet, introspective woman who
preferred to be surrounded by animals than by people. And Holly Golightly,
Capote’s most memorably kooky character, defined the word
“extrovert.” She was the epitome of “outgoing.” She lived
and breathed for and through other people. She fed off them. They gave her
effervescence, much like the champagne she so loved. “I was nothing like
her,” Audrey said, “but I felt I could `act‘ Holly. That was a
revolutionary thought for me. After so many movies, I no longer felt like an
amateur. I knew I would always be able to learn something, but I finally
realized I could give something as well. I knew the part would be a challenge,
but I wanted it anyway.”

Again,
the practical side of Audrey also showed through. She wanted to boost her
effort to change her image from young girl to worldly woman. Holly Golightly
would push her over the top. Here was a character from contemporary fiction
whom intellectuals analyzed and secretaries imitated. After portraying her,
Audrey hoped she could quiet the voices who spoke of her virginal innocence.
She knew those voices, however honest, would doom her career; she wouldn’t be
able to work again. There weren’t too many roles requiring a middle-aged woman
dripping with purity.

All
that made Holly Golighty, a character who says, “I’m used to being the top
banana in the shock department,” even more appealing.

After
much discussion, Paramount persuaded her to leave Sean in Switzerland with his
nanny. The studio felt the baby might distract Audrey, as well as hinder her
screen image as a swinging party girl.

She
and Ferrer flew to New York and while she worked on
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, he tried to drum up more screenplays that
would promote the newly minted image of his wife as a full-fledged woman. His
own career was flagging, and to prevent depression, he plunged into organizing
his wife’s life.

Meanwhile,
Audrey fought her own demons of insecurity. “Manhattan was a rude
awakening,” she recalled. “I hadn’t been back for any extended period
of time for so long, and it seemed more crowded than ever, just teeming with
people. They scared me.”

But
like her character, she hid her fear. “There’s this speech that George
Peppard delivers to me in the movie that I’m convinced was meant specifically
for me.”

In
the movie, Peppard, as suitor Paul Varjak, eventually tells her off.

“Do
you know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are?” he says, his anger
building. “You’re chicken. You got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out
your chin and say, `Okay, life’s a fact. People do fall in love. People do
belong to each other because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real
happiness.‘ You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified
somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in that
cage. You built it for yourself, and it’s not bound on the west by Tulip,
Texas, or on the east by Somaliland. It’s wherever you go because no matter
where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

If
Audrey was able to pull off her portrayal of Holly Golightly—and the critics
were mixed in their assessment—it is because she identified with her
character’s vulnerabilities.

Despite
the fact that she was at the height of her popularity, cinematographer Franz
Planer, who had worked on so many of Audrey’s movies, said that she was never
as insecure as she was during this movie.

“She
wanted to look stunning,” Planer recalled, “and she did, but she did
not look like Marilyn Monroe, whom she had heard Capote modeled Holly after.
She would confide in me, and I did everything in my power to persuade her that
she was just perfect, but she knew that wasn’t the case.”

The
day Audrey filmed the famous scene outside of Tiffany’s was particularly
difficult. Again she felt much like the words her character uttered.

“The
blues,” says Holly Golightly, “are because you are getting fat or
maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, chat’s all. The `mean reds’
are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t even know what you’re
afraid of. Did you ever get that feeling?…Well, when I get it, the only
thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me
down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad can
happen to you there.”

In
fact, Audrey thought she might be mobbed to death the morning she filmed the
famous scene. Forty security guards and hundreds of New York City cops
surrounded her that day as she gazed longingly into the front display window,
munching a Danish (which she detested) and drinking a cup of coffee in a humble
paper cup.