Breakfast at Tiffany's

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Holly talks to the narrator about why she left O.J. behind in California, saying she doesn’t feel guilty even though she knows she should. Still, she says that she was only thinking of becoming an actress because she didn’t know what else to do. She then tells the narrator that fame would be too much for her at the moment—after all, she’s not yet attached to her own life. That’s why her apartment is so sparsely furnished and why her cat doesn’t have a name. Going on, Holly says she sometimes gets “the mean reds,” which is different than having the blues. The mean reds, she says, is a kind of “angst,” and the only way she knows how to deal with it is by taking a cab to Tiffany’s jewelry store and gazing at its beauty. This makes her feel calm, she says, because it feels like nothing bad could ever happen at Tiffany’s. Holly claims that if she could find a place in real life that made her feel like this, she would settle down immediately. Although on the surface Paley had everything she could have ever wanted and more, she and Bill had a relentlessly unhappy marriage. 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. “Babe was caught,” Wasson wrote. “Truman would fashion Breakfast at Tiffany’s so Holly Golightly wouldn’t be.” of Capote’s most popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a novella about Holly Golightly, a young fey café society girl; it was first published in Esquire magazine in 1958 and then as a book, with several other stories. Read More

Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote - review - The Guardian Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote - review - The Guardian

The movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” written by George Axelrod and directed by Blake Edwards came out in 1961. Starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard as the main characters, the movie was bound to be successful. And so it was. It soon became Hepburn’s most memorable role and one of the most beloved Hollywood films.

Risky Business. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was originally going to be published in Harper’s Bazaar, but the magazine’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation, felt uncomfortable printing some elements of the novella. Frustrated, Capote agreed to edit certain parts of the story, but Hearst ultimately decided not to run the piece, worrying that Tiffany & Co. would withdraw advertising support. One day, Holly tells the narrator that she gave his story to O.J., who liked it but thinks he’s wasting his time writing about things nobody cares about. Holly says she agrees, which creates a nasty falling out between her and the narrator. Over the next few days, the narrator keeps his distance, but he soon notices a strange man lingering outside Holly’s apartment. One day, the man follows him to a café, and when the narrator finally confronts him, he learns that the suspicious man is Doc Golightly—Holly’s much older husband. Sitting at a diner counter, Doc Golightly explains that Holly—whose real name is Lulamae—wandered onto his property in Texas when she was still a girl, having run away from nasty foster parents with her brother Fred. Doc caught both Holly and Fred stealing from his farm, so he took them in. When Holly turned 14, he married her, and she eventually ran away despite seeming happy. So we’re suddenly in a classic rom-com situation, and their final-scene kisses in the pouring rain becoming the blueprint for the genre, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to The Notebook. The novella meanwhile – despite the frothy, fizzing readability of Capote’s shimmering prose – leaves a more bitter taste, Holly scooting away in a cab never to be seen again. Golightly is a wild thing; there’s no containing her, no making her stay. She keeps on going lightly over the world, even if the need to keep reinventing herself starts to look more like a heavy burden. Two men came into the bar, and it seemed the moment to leave. Joe Bell followed me to the door. He caught my wrist again. “Do you believe it?” The woman in me really likes Audrey Hepburn because she is successful at what she’s doing, she’s sort of in charge of herself, and is a realist beyond being so cute and attractive,” said film critic Judith Crist in 2009. “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. Marilyn didn’t have that, but Audrey did. As a gamine, shrewdness was available to her. So she’s a call girl, but we let her have it. There’s even something very appealing about it. We won’t admit it, but don’t we, really, all secretly admire her for it? Because she gets away with it? Because she’s so imperious, and at the same time is slightly, shall we say, immoral?”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Study Guide | Literature Guide | LitCharts

After selling the screen rights for Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Paramount, it became somewhat common knowledge that Capote had one and only one actress in mind to play Holly Golightly: little girl lost herself, Marilyn Monroe. 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. But that was never entirely true. That evening, Holly is arrested because of her associations with Sally Tomato, who used her to run a drug ring from inside prison. O.J. who posts her bail. When the narrator goes to get Holly some clothes, he finds a man in Holly’s apartment. The man gives the narrator a letter from José, in which he explains that he can’t be with Holly because it would ruin his political career. The narrator delivers this letter to Holly, and she tells him she lost her baby while riding after him that day in the park. She then says she plans to go to Brazil when they let her out; not to chase José, but to avoid a prison sentence. The narrator hates this idea, but he brings her suitcase and cat to Joe Bell’s bar as instructed. There, Joe calls a limo to take Holly to the airport. On the way, Holly tells the driver to stop in Harlem, where she lets out the cat. After doing this, though, she screams at the driver to stop and frantically tries in vain to find the cat. The narrator promises to keep looking for the cat after she’s gone, so Holly leaves. 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. Holly and the narrator have a drink, and the narrator tells her that he’s a writer. Holly says she’ll help him become well-known and asks him to read a story aloud. When he does, she critiques it. This deeply hurts the narrator, but he still finds Holly appealing and she endears herself to him once more. As someone used to sharing personal information, Holly tells the narrator that she visits a mobster named Sally Tomato in prison every Thursday, explaining that Sally’s lawyer approached her and asked if she would keep Sally company. Holly agreed, she tells the narrator, so she goes to see Sally each week, delivering coded messages, though she mainly enjoys the man’s company and doesn’t think too much about whatever information she’s communicating. I strongly recommend this book to all those who like dramas and who love analyzing the main characters.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. “Holly had to be sharp and tough, and as anyone who saw Marilyn could sense, she was about as tough as a tulip,” Wasson wrote. “It was difficult to imagine a personality like that living like Holly, all on her own in the big city.” And, of course, there were very practical matters of film production to take into account. For all that we’ve come to love and appreciate about Marilyn now, she did have a reputation for chronic lateness and an almost pathological inability to remember dialogue, sometimes requiring upwards of 50 takes for a single line. “It’s not that she was mean,” remembered Billy Wilder, director of The Seven Year Itch. “It’s just that she had no sense of time, nor conscience that that three hundred people had been waiting hours for her.”