Neither, for that matter, would his beautiful Babe.”, Although on the surface Paley had everything she could have ever wanted and more, she and Bill had a relentlessly unhappy marriage. Before Breakfast at Tiffany’s was adapted into a timeless film classic, the story of party girl Holly and the man infatuated with her was the brainchild of literary icon Truman Capote. I could never find any of his friends who remembered her.” Clarke was also well aware of women who continued to claim they were the real Holly Golightly even decades later, all of them alleging they were friends with Capote at one time or another. To revisit this article, select My⁠ ⁠Account, then View saved stories. 27.). Gerald Clarke said that Capote told him a similar story. After much convincing and deliberations over script objections, Audrey Hepburn would eventually become the star to fill the shoes of Holly Golightly on the screen. Breakfast At Tiffany's is much grittier than the rather sanitized Audrey Hepburn-George Peppard film version. A young New York socialite becomes interested in a young man who has moved into her apartment building, but her past threatens to get in the way. Ye gods and little kittens, I haven’t thought of this movie in years! As Jamie Brickhouse from The Huffington Post wrote, “Sure, [Holly’s] the kind of woman straight men fall for. Several biographers note that his tendency to hold grudges and cut people out of his life after minor mishaps was all linked back to his mother issues and unstable childhood, as well as his quirk of exaggerating reality and making claims that he was friends with rich and famous people he had never even met, such as Greta Garbo. "Breakfast At Tiffany's", the 1961 Audrey Hepburn classic film based on the novel by Truman Capote, is scheduled for an outdoor screening at Brooklyn Bridge Park on August 11. In an interview years later, when asked what he thought was wrong with the film version, he replied, “Oh god, just everything.” He referred to it as the “most miscast film” he’d ever seen and that it made him want to throw up, particularly the one element that just about everyone can agree did not age well about the Breakfast at Tiffany’s film: Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. She sips coffee and nibbles on a Danish, peering at the display window of Tiffany’s. Capote also called Edwards a “lousy director” and badmouthed George Axelrod’s script, claiming that they had offered him the job of writing the script but he had turned it down. “Unlike Holly and her lovers, they share an intimacy that isn’t tethered to their erotic or financial needs. “It’s not that she was mean,” remembered Billy Wilder, director of The Seven Year Itch. I had avoided this film for sometime, but the timing was right and I'm happy to say, the hype is correct. The reason he was sent there was caused less by the divorce and more by the fact that his mother saw him as a burden. Inevitably, Nina’s latest beau would reject her for being the peasant girl she tried so hard not to be, and down the service elevator she would go, running all the way back to Truman with enormous tears ballooning from her eyes. Several myths surrounding the actress not getting cast have continued to circulate, with the general consensus being that Marilyn was already considered to be a high-maintenance diva and too much of a liability, so Paramount refused to even consider her. people reference it all the time, and it’s one of those things where you don’t have to explain what the reference is.”. Keep an eye on your inbox. But just a mere few months later in October 1958, Random House published the novella and Esquire magazine, in its November issue, would serialize it in full. While the real-life similarities between Holly and Marilyn practically write themselves (“I’ve never had a home,” Monroe once told Capote, “not a real one with all my own furniture”), Martin Jurow—producer of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s film—was merely unconvinced that Monroe was a strong enough actress for the role. “That appeal—a woman’s appeal—comes from the very basic idea of the gamine, and not just the gamine’s physical being, but the idea of her cleverness. “We can always see a classic movie here [in New York], but there are a lot of places across the country that can’t,” Vazquez says. “Truman would fashion Breakfast at Tiffany’s so Holly Golightly wouldn’t be.”, For all of his flamboyantly distinct eccentricities, Truman Capote was a precise, perfectionistic, and accomplished writer. “The page, he told those who asked, was no longer his playground; it was his operating room, and like a surgeon—like Flaubert, one of his heroes—he endeavored to keep surprises to an absolute minimum.”. Breakfast at Tiffany’s Book Summary and Review. After the first publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958, flocks of women all over New York City began to announce that they were the real-life inspiration for Holly Golightly, beginning what Capote referred to as “The Holly Golightly Sweepstakes.” In 1959, bookstore owner Bonnie Golightly sued the author for $800,000 of libel and invasion of privacy charges, claiming that she also lived in a Manhattan brownstone, loved cats, and was an avid folk singer in her spare time. Aside from the fact that Holly Golightly was very much ahead of her time in terms of liberating herself from patriarchal oppression, selling herself in order to gain independence, the original novella is laced with something that was deliberately left out of its film adaptation: queer subtext. Around her neck is a startling stack of pearls. He even gave me her name. “It’s just that she had no sense of time, nor conscience that that three hundred people had been waiting hours for her.”. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. In other words, they can love each other freely, the way no two married people can.” In this sense, Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a faint precursor to Will & Grace. But that was never entirely true. And while other schools of thought claim that Capote being a homosexual was also caused by his relationship with his mother, it’s more likely that his adult dependency on drugs and alcohol were indirectly caused by Nina as well. Later, Capote claimed that the inspiration for Holly Golightly came from a German refugee, a young girl of just 17 years who arrived in New York City at the beginning of World War II. This post contains affiliate links. So she’s a call girl, but we let her have it. “Challenging the sanctity of heterosexual dominion, Capote is suggesting that the gendered strictures of who makes the money (men) and who doesn’t (women) might not be as enriching as the romance between a gay man and straight woman,” wrote Wasson. And it's one of Truman Capote's most famous works, due in large part to the film adaptation of it. Breakfast at Tiffany's was a novella before it was a cinema classic before it was a mid '90s pop-rock jam. (Screenings were also held Nov. Let's please never mention that song again. “Very few people were aware of this, however, because she spoke English without any trace of an accent,” he said. Though the film’s reputation has only grown over the years, there is one startling aspect TCM always has to address before screenings: Mickey Rooney’s garish portrayal of Japanese character Mr. Yunioshi. Was it someone from Truman Capote’s sordid past? The story’s real inspiration is the tale of a flamboyant young man from the Southern United States, grappling with abandonment issues and a love of the written word. The title of the movie refers to a real store in New York, NY. The long black dress that Audrey Hepburn wore in the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's was auctioned off for charity on December 5, 2006 in London for over $900,000. Holly Golightly is actually a criminal and a call girl. Because she’s so imperious, and at the same time is slightly, shall we say, immoral?”. According to Capote’s testimony to Clarke, Babe had twice attempted suicide, once with pills and once by attempting to slit her wrists, and both times Capote claimed to have saved her. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century … [S]he was also the most chic woman I have ever known.”, Babe Paley’s chic influence was just too grand, opulent, and commanding to not be the central inspiration for Holly Golightly. Because it was fresh and daring for 1961. The final story in the collection, "A Christmas Memory" is potent without being sappy. “She took her dreams of society from Truman’s own mother, her existential anxieties from Capote himself, but her personality, which seemed so intimately hers, would come from the tight-knit coterie of Manhattan divas Truman so flagrantly adored,” he wrote. Thank you for signing up! While there are several “swans” who are believed to have contributed to the fictional creation of Holly, including Gloria Guinness, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, Carol Marcus, and Gloria Vanderbilt, there is one in particular that is thought to have gone above and beyond in terms of inspiration: Babe Paley, the wife of William S. “Bill” Paley, founder of the CBS television network. We let her have it subject matter and casting party girl meets a playboy and they friends! 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