Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (11 page)

Through the late fifties and early sixties,
Peter Gunn
was the epitome of cool. Where most hard-boiled PIs were as burned out as the hoods they trailed, Gunn was an Ivy-league playboy closer to James Bond than Philip Marlowe and introduced network audiences to the next thing in soigné. With the aid of his cinematographers, Edwards developed a highly cinematic look for his show, complete with severe chiaroscuro (not the regular dull grays), eccentric angles, and disorienting camera moves. Adding to the hipness was Henry Mancini's chart-topping theme, which used modern jazz at a time when most TV was scored with a more formal orchestral sound. Jurow and Shepherd wanted that hip feeling for
Breakfast at Tiffany's
.

Blake was working on a picture called
High Time
when they called in May of 1960. No matter what they told him, he knew they were taking a chance.

BING CROSBY IN A DRESS

Blake Edwards, a pipe lodged in his mouth, settled down in his director's chair stationed squarely behind the camera and took a long, slow look around the set.

What a mess.
High Time,
a moronic “teenage” comedy with Bing Crosby, was undoubtedly the most useless picture he'd ever made. What the hell was the studio thinking? The scene they were setting up called for Bing to dance around in a pink taffeta hoopskirt, but that wasn't the problem (actually,
it was the funniest thing in the picture); the problem was the story, the dialogue, the acting, dealing with Bing himself, and the inexorable reality that no matter what he did or how smart he was about it, there was no way Blake could clean up the mess. What do you do with a movie about a fifty-year-old widower who decides to go back to college, hang with jive talkers, pledge a frat, rally for the big game, and romance a French professor on the school hayride? All the world's whip pans, flashy dissolves, and state-of-the-art postproduction effects—if Blake used them (and he did)—would only make him look like a plastic surgeon cutting up a corpse.

Okay, so he wasn't yet Billy Wilder, but why did he say yes to this shit? Right: he was making money. But that was about all he was making.

High Time
was proof positive that the industry was panicked about the new generation. Who were these kids? They had sex, they did drugs, and like everyone else, they went to the movies. But what did they want to see? In 1960, no one in Hollywood had a clue: the year's top films were
Swiss Family Robinson
and
Psycho
. Meanwhile, the success of foreign films by Bergman, Fellini, and—if you wore a beret—Antonioni were challenging the home court advantage. Should the studios get artier too? Ordinarily, getting young people to the movies was a cinch for Hollywood because kids wanted to see what their parents saw. Way back when, families used to go to the movies
together
. That's what Mickey Rooney was for. Shirley Temple, Depression-era antitoxin, was a box-office queen from 1934 to 1939. But this strange generation of youngsters—“teenagers” they were called—was impossible to pin down.

High Time
was one of Fox's attempts to bridge the widening generation gap. They cast rock 'n' roll sensation Fabian, circulated posters heralding Tuesday Weld “the new teenage crush,” and dropped Crosby in for the folks. With the right combination of antic revelry and a new Mancini tune for Bing (he sings, “love, like youth, is wasted on the young”),
High Time
would be a film families could enjoy together. But what teenager wants to go to the movies with his mom?

Blake didn't have an answer. He just went to work and thought about
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. He agreed with Axelrod that departing from Capote's novel was a wise choice, if for no other reason than he thought a faithful adaptation would frighten people. “It was too cynical,” he said of the book. “You touched on subjects that I believe people would be afraid to dramatize—the homosexual influence of the leading man, [and] the sexual relationships of Holly that were so amoral.”

Edwards was right, in a way. People would be afraid of a faithful adaptation. But one look around him and Blake could see that, with Hollywood in the middle of an identity crisis, filmmakers, if they were smart about it, could push all kinds of moral and artistic envelopes. Look at what Hitchcock did in
Psycho
. Killing off Janet Leigh in the first half hour? Making us empathize with Norman Bates, a perverted, matricidal, part-time taxidermist? Maybe Hollywood was saying bad guys weren't so bad anymore—maybe a lot of things weren't really so bad anymore. Like Natalie Wood in
Splendor in the Grass,
who wants to have sex with her boyfriend
before they're even married
—or engaged—and right there in the backseat of car. But rather than think her loose, we think maybe she's right to act “wrong”:

Blake Edwards was still a year away from seeing
Splendor in the Grass,
but he had seen
The Apartment,
that year's winner for Best Picture. Billy Wilder's story of the white-collar schlemiel who falls for a suicidal girl was everything midcentury-American cinema was not, and proved that it wasn't safe for the romantic comedy to be just cute any longer. Now it had to be truthful, too. “With that film we became grownups,” critic Judith Crist said. “This was not an age of innocence anymore. Suddenly we had the ability to come edging out in the open with sex. It was getting to be the sixties.” You could see it on the screen and you could hear it on the radio.

JAZZ

By this time, Henry Mancini was fluent in the unspoken language of Blake Edwards. They had been regular collaborators for several years, and now that Mancini had signed on to score
High Time,
he split his days between the recording stage and Blake's set.

“Hey, Hank,” said Blake one day during
High Time
. “It looks like
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is going to go ahead at Paramount. We've got a meeting with Jurow and Shepherd—they already know you're the one I want.”

Mancini read the script in preparation for the meeting. At just about every page turn, he saw opportunities for the sort of jazzy sound he was becoming known for. Blake was right to see that Hank Mancini and Holly had nonconformist cool in common: she with her hepcats, and he with his swingin' big band sound. By 1960, Mancini had already moved away from the more traditional symphonic approach of his predecessors. Of course, there had always been jazz in movies, but it was generally back-alley brass drenched in rotten sex. It was never pop like Mancini was pop. It was never fun.

One musical passage in Axelrod's script—which included lyrics Axelrod lifted directly from the book—caught Mancini's attention.

Mancini, should he get the job, would have to supply the music. But there was a problem. When Mancini met with Marty Rackin, Paramount's head of production, Mancini could see that the executive was clearly uninterested in hearing his ideas. He had a totally different kind of songwriter in mind for
Tiffany's,
one who wrote in the elegant Broadway style. This was to be a New York picture, he said, and Holly was very much a Manhattan girl, so she'd sing a cosmopolitan tune. What Alexrod had written in the script was just filler. Rackin wanted something hip that placed Holly squarely in the in-crowd. Mancini, he said, wasn't that songwriter. He'd just supply the score. Not the song.

The meeting was over.

CASTING

Blake Edwards did not want George Peppard in his movie. What about Tony Curtis? he asked the studio. What about Steve McQueen? Tony Curtis wanted the part, and having been cast in three of Blake's previous pictures, he thought his chances were good—but he didn't make it. Mel Ferrer, he was told, didn't want his wife playing opposite him (“Who knows why?” Shepherd said. “That was just the way Mel was.”). So Tony was out, as was Steve McQueen, who was still contracted to CBS's
Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Thus the name
George Peppard was thrown in once again. Trying to keep an open mind, Blake went with Jurow and Shepherd to see Peppard in
Home from the Hill,
and from the moment the actor first appeared on the screen, Blake knew he had been right all along. “After coming out of the film,” Edwards remembers, “I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk to the producers and begged them not to cast him.” But it was two against one. Peppard was in.

Virginia Mayo read for the part of 2E and performed satisfactorily, but she was turned down. By her own admission, she was not right to play a wealthy New York socialite. That's when Shepherd's wife, Judy, suggested they consider Patricia Neal instead. Blake loved the idea. Though she hadn't appeared in films since Kazan's
A Face in the Crowd
three years prior, Neal was, as far as Edwards was concerned, the intuitive choice. With her high-toned cheekbones, cabaret swagger, and that throaty purr, Neal was what you'd call born to play it. There was, however, one condition: Neal would have to dye her hair red so as to stand apart from the dark-haired Audrey. Fine, she said, great (though she couldn't wait to dye it back). Neal signed the contract in September. They didn't even test her for the part.

As for Jose da Silva Pereira, Holly's Brazilian suitor, it was unlikely Blake could do any better than the Marquis José Luis Cabeza de Vaca de Vilallonga. He had come recommended by Audrey and Mel who had spotted him two years earlier, inveigling Jeanne Moreau in
The Lovers,
but Vilallonga—as he would be listed in the opening titles—did not begin his career as an actor. He was a writer, and a scandalous one at that. In 1954, after an attempt at journalism and an aborted
stint of horse breeding, Vilallonga offended the Spanish military censor with the publication of his novel
The Ramblas End in the Sea
and was promptly exiled. (Paramount publicity ate it up. They wrote, “He received word from Spain that he was to be sentenced for 178 years in prison for his repeated attacks on the Franco dictatorship.”) Vilallonga spent his exile as a part-time foreign correspondent and occasional actor, dabbling in small parts in France and West Germany until he was spotted by Hollywood and offered a contract. He turned it down, but years later, at Audrey's request, he agreed to do
Tiffany's
. It would be his first Hollywood movie.

“Casting Buddy Ebsen as Doc Golightly was due to Blake,” said Patricia Snell. “We all thought the idea was off the wall, that he was too old, but Blake said, ‘No, he'll be perfect.' And he was.” Throughout his career, Edwards's eye for latent talent would produce many brilliant feats of casting, but few were as unforeseen, and indeed impactful as his feeling for Buddy Ebsen. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Ebsen had made a name for himself as a song and dance man, twinkling alongside the likes of Eleanor Powell and in
Broadway Melody of 1938,
a young Judy Garland. Then, in the 1940s, he practically disappeared: a contract dispute at MGM and World War II service in the U.S. Coast Guard all but removed him from the picture business. When he finally returned, Ebsen found himself in midlevel parts in B-westerns with titles like
Silver City Bonanza
and
Thunder in God's Country
. It wasn't John Ford; it was work. From there it was TV until the lightbulb went off over Blake Edwards's head in the summer of 1960. There was no question as to Buddy's strength as a performer, but could he act?
Really
act? Blake put his money on “Yes.” He called Ebsen out of the blue and told him that if he took the part, he would bet him a case of champagne he'd be nominated for an Oscar.

Less of a gamble was the casting of Holly's cat, or rather, cats. Since cats, unlike dogs, seldom perform more than one trick at a time, more than a dozen were required for the film. Said trainer Frank Inn, “I have a sitting cat, a going cat, a meowing cat, a throwing cat—and so on, each one a specialist, and all the same color, you'll notice.” All twelve cats were practically identical—“thug-faced,” as Truman described them in the novel, with “yellowish pirate-eyes”—but only one would get star billing. On October 8, the production held an open cat-call at New York's Hotel Commodore, at which twenty-five orange-furred hopefuls appeared freshly preened and plucked. After an arduous round of auditions and callbacks, the twelve-pound Orangey, belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Murphy of Hollis, Queens, was named the winner. “He's a real New York type cat,” Inn declared, “just what we want. In no time at all I'm going to make a Method, or Lee Strasberg type, cat out of him.”

YUNIOSHI