A Sunset Boulevard Christmas

To see what happened in the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s being plagiarism from prophetic, world-altering art and the transformation of this to the alive, effective dynamism of the movie that still ignites us with Audrey’s spirit, one has to see the movie in the light of what was known by the creators in that moment as they demonstrated it in the movie and the follow-up Paris When It Sizzles (1964), and why Truman Capote subsequently would say that Breakfast at Tiffany’s “made him want to throw up” (“'My mother was like a steel fist in a velvet glove': the real Audrey Hepburn” The Guardian 19 November 2020). We can look at the high humor of what was created making light of a dark, manipulative, self-centered situation where literature and its reality of how to alter ourselves and the structure of society and culture was being succumbed to just the lust for more fame—which is making the insights into breaking life open rather mundane, lifeless, and pointless just for one person’s fragile and damaged ego while the rest of humanity can go to pot as long as we have that one dark, empty story.

What good is a celebrity that just wants to dominate and kill everyone (and make a lot of people agree in that moment that killing is good—group think), given that with their success and billions they are still in their own minds the victim which paid off so well in manipulating everyone, including paying audiences? The statement, it seems, of their glory over the perpetrators is that old screwed-up vision of the justification of war as old as patriarchal history itself. High art and humor, however, delivers us. Not that anyone wants a joke when things are hard. Sometimes we want to stew in how bad things are, hold on to the pain and grief, seemingly often our only companions which we don’t want to let go. Comedy often isn’t exactly what anyone ordered, but the comedians, nonetheless, know their moment. Holding on to the hard is rather extravagant when so many others are suffering.

On that very note, Truman made sure he stayed in the spotlight, no matter what, above all else, above everyone, criminals to socialites, he used them all equally, taking their lives and their trust, anything that would put him in the public eye. It’s the lowest of the low to take someone’s opened vulnerability and make money off it—the better definition of whoredom. He did not value or respect others, exploitation that was not granted as a right even trying to make it more ‘valid’ by calling it “writing,” and which included the reach of a masterful female author’s entire oeuvre. Seeing Breakfast at Tiffany’s in a new light that opens Audrey’s courageous acts can act on us now in their revelation, her powerful dharma effect in her actions that never die because they were done with eternal spirit and no ego, just courage and power to set things right. She did it because that’s who she was. This assessment of Truman was done before he would exploit socialites and criminals, all the way to death (years before more personal damage)--in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1960 by screenwriter George Axelrod, one of the major shifts in the movie from “Truman’s Version”: the male writer is clearly made into the prostitute and not the female: “Holly is an eccentric New York City playgirl who becomes interested in her next-door neighbour, a writer who is ‘sponsored’ by a wealthy patron.” That shift goes further and in humor starts to show who that “patron”—the writer of the original sources—was: Willa Cather. For example, when she arrives by taxi she hands Paul the “urn” (she had passed in 1947) and says, “I’m late, I know.” She is holding the wallpaper or blueprints of an already admittedly "finished apartment" (i.e. already written), of which now Paul reluctantly calls her the “decorator”—but she’s the one writing the checks while he hasn't written anything in years. Truman himself set this off by exploiting Willa by making up having a “personal story” with her. George Axelrod had the guts to call him out and do it in the most gorgeous power and humor. And that is why Truman hated the movie and disliked Audrey Hepburn in it. And it didn’t stop there. George and Audrey continued the following year in showing his absurd exploitation and posing in their making of Paris When It Sizzles.

What Truman had done—and would get vehemently more bold with in the coming years—was clearly wrong and with Audrey’s relationships with female authors and actresses, such Anita Loos, Hollywood’s first female screenwriter, and Colette whose Gigi first brought her to Broadway, and having just worked with Lilian Gish who was the star of The Birth of a Nation, “the first non-serial American 12-reel film ever made,” a major female star from the silent era, this attack on a female writer’s work would not have “sat well” with her spirit. And having survived WWII and this state of importance of Truman’s fame would have made the efforts of the war look wrong and empty to her—all of that, for this? This is what America is for, for falsely generator major fame and continued obsessive need for the spotlight? Audrey took her spotlight and her life and said, “We’re going to look at something far more important” and shifted it, and these actions can be seen in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a most iconic and now far more beautiful statement of what “entertainment” is capable of—and how those actions resonate in beauty. Audrey was coming from a different place within herself and didn’t need that artificial spotlight as Truman did because she was inwardly and outwardly radiant from far deeper insight and keen intelligence, the real thing from her spirit. She could shift focus instead of just soak up more and more lights. She had to trust that that was enough to make a difference. As her son Sean said of her, it sometimes scared her, but she did it anyway. That courage is priceless when everyone is buying into whatever is being sold, especially in our visions of what “fame” is—self-importance or the possibilities now of eternal spirit breaking culture open into its potentialities by right action for every single Being.

While George Peppard was cast for the role of solicited “boyfriend,” William Holden, a major award-winning star was cast as the “writer” (who can’t actually write and the female is the actual writer) in Paris When It Sizzles. This casting of Holden brings in the dark humor of one of the most formidable movies of Old Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson with William Holden as the “screenwriter.” In it Swanson is the fame-obsessed Norma Desmond who is deranged enough to force a screenwriter to rewrite her content for her unsought-after come-back and force him into a physical relationship which is gruesomely paralleled with and foreshadowed by her deceased former pet monkey, and the “director/now servant” who keeps the illusions in place for her so that she can feel special and wanted. She lives for the cameras and only the cameras. In 1950, the film was already an exposure of the manipulations of fame.

And so the reason I am writing about Breakfast at Tiffany’s is because the shock of realization of what Audrey knew and what she was doing is our realization now of her true spirit and her “steel fist in a velvet glove.” She meant what she did, even as it was done in brilliant humor and naturalness, and that is still very much alive, still very much needed. The spirit of her actions live, and when let loose, can live more. She was using her fame and power to right a wrong. We didn’t actually know what she did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or why she did it. The shock of realization is a pivot point—a vastly important one. And that is “The Hermes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and there are many, many extraordinary creators on that same goal that they didn’t have to aim towards. Audrey didn’t have to do it. She could have been home with her husband and 3 month old son, Sean. And too, because of what a careful mother she was, her sons continue to change the world with no spotlights, but with true care, experience, and highly intelligent insight that most certainly will change the planet—men not screaming for more fame and self-indulgent war at ballot or ticket boxes, vying for rage and war. They are saying that there are enough resources on the planet to make a peaceful and safe life for every living being, especially the most vulnerable, children. As Audrey said, that should have never been in question. Children should have come before politics. Anything else is heinous. She gave her life to it.

And so what she did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is take ego and smash it to bits in beauty, wit, and humor bringing light to abuse, in this case the plagiarism of a ground-breaking female author and giving it back its path of opening worlds through both their indomitable spirits which now we can see. It positively glows in spirit that carries and there are reasons why. Truman would retaliate in many ways and slurs including with the highly invasive and abusive “Le Côte Basque” and Answered Prayers (a title incredibly similar to Willa's last unpublished work Hard Punishments), infiltrating people’s private lives with no empathy or respect for anyone and salaciously selling it so that he could once again be the bomb and the literati. It is not art and it is not justified as art. What I want to do is open it all up—what Audrey did, what Willa did, George Axelrod, the screenwriter did, what Truman did that was unethical, coercive, and hidden, and open it up into this moment to the gorgeousness of it all. Then others can be seen in a different light, perhaps everyone can be seen in a different light, a different value system.

Here it gets a bit technically complicated to write about the movie’s details that demonstrate this as there are a list of sources that have to be continually held up to each other to show what each was doing: the movie itself, Willa Cather’s original texts, Truman’s plagiarism of them, George Axelrod’s script for the movie which uses both Willa’s works and Truman’s, and the other creators, such as the lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and then demonstrating Audrey’s awareness of this within the movie, bringing her will and “star power” to it--and her gorgeous femininity.

To write this I wanted to know the person first, Audrey, and the courage it took to live as she did and for her to go to Los Angeles to complete this when she could have been home in Switzerland. It made a huge difference to me to come to Los Angeles and feel where the human was, her intentions and her efforts, and to feel the simple human beauty in her doing it. That was transformative in itself. I’ve also been on the path of following out what Willa did in those extraordinary works that Truman lifted and her actions and intentions in something beyond beauty as Audrey would come to do. It leads me to show what is possible in “entertainment” and the very true possibility of radiance in our actions that carry long after our forms are gone.

I think from this vantage point the best way is to look at the movie itself, so get your popcorn and Cracker Jacks and maybe even find a hopeful ring in it, and we’ll see it all in a new, powerful light. How could it possibly stay romantic after all of this? Because it opens something tremendous and far more beautiful when you see the brilliance of setting things right and how love then expands to everyone, broken past narcissism, across a globe.

The opening Fifth Avenue scene with the music of “Moon River” introduces Holly Golightly on a “raft” alone on an open river, which is also suggested later by Johnny Mercer’s lyrics “my Huckleberry friend.” This scene does not take place in Truman’s novella of standing outside the window of Tiffany’s, but parts of it are present in Willa’s stories. This begins to suggest that Axelrod was aware of the original sources and was therefore putting them back in. Willa Cather was friends with Mark Twain right in dirty and gritty Greenwich Village, with her concentrating carefully on how to break literature open to further, to show where we can go. Her “Tom Outland’s Story” and “The Enchanted Bluff” set up how she saw to take it further, and this through the feminine. Axelrod’s character of Holly Golightly thus becomes the female character on this lonesome adventure (and not Truman’s “stories” of having grown up on a river boat). Fifth Avenue itself is the very river up from where Willa listened to Mark Twain tell stories at his bedside where he lived in 2008—the river further up at its cultural origination point.

Willa’s stories hold where the details come from, this time showing up in Truman’s manuscript. Truman does have Holly say she wants to have “breakfast at Tiffany’s” and that she and the cat “took up by the river one day,” which would give credence to the Fifth Avenue scene and the lyrics of a Huckleberry Finn being original to Truman and then showing up in Axelrod’s screenplay, but the details are in Willa’s texts first: There are exact references in Willa’s “Coming, Aphrodite!” to “breakfast at the Brevoort”—which is also the place on Fifth Avenue where she first sold the story “The Bohemian Girl,” the beginning of her writing of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (including Holly’s black dress and spare furniture in exact detail, an idea which is also from Willa’s "The Novel Démeublé," wherein she suggests “taking out the furniture” of writing. In “Coming, Aphrodite!” the reference to “breakfast at the Brevoort” shows very Holly-like details, including first insinuations of her name:

Hedger made room for her on the seat. “No, at twelve o’clock I’m going out to Coney Island. One of my models is going up in a balloon this afternoon. I’ve often promised to go and see her, and now I’m going.”

Eden asked if models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, but Molly Welch added to her earnings in that way. “I believe,” he added, “she likes the excitement of it. She’s got a good deal of spirit. That’s why I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies.”

“And she hasn’t, eh? Is she the one who comes to see you? I can’t help hearing her, she talks so loud.”

“Yes, she has a rough voice, but she’s a fine girl. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going?”

“I don’t know,” Eden sat tracing patterns on the asphalt with the end of her parasol. “Is it any fun? I got up feeling I’d like to do something different today. It’s the first Sunday I’ve not had to sing in church. I had that engagement for breakfast at the Brevoort, but it wasn’t very exciting. That chap can’t talk about anything but himself.”

Hedger warmed a little. “If you’ve never been to Coney Island, you ought to go. It’s nice to see all the people; tailors and bar-tenders and prizefighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking a holiday.”

Willa’s other poetic details give us the movie’s opening scene:

Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing we knew: that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like someone standing before a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, deciding which she will order. She understands that they will not all be delivered immediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door. She already knew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance, that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with his sister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite another manner. He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everything obvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome.

(Which is also Holly’s assessment of the Brazilian boyfriend, that he is afraid in the movie version.)

And:

This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom [ . . . ] Eden got a summer all her own,—which really did a great deal toward making her an artist and whatever else she was afterward to become. She had time to look about, to watch without being watched; to select diamonds in one window and furs in another, to select shoulders and moustaches in the big hotels where she went to lunch. She had the easy freedom of obscurity and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both. She was in no hurry (“Coming, Aphrodite!” 1920).

If one opens the pages of McClure’s Magazine where Willa was a formidable female editor, often the front page is a full page ad for diamonds at Tiffany’s.

Truman’s story is a look back with a character named Joe Bell, of the same initials and correlating with the exact same story of looking back of Willa’s Jim Burden; both tell the story of the impression that Holly and Ántonia made on them, respectively.

WATCHING BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S IN A NEW LIGHT, AND ALL THAT IS TO BE OPENED, TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Reading Further

• 

  In Colder Blood: How Truman Capote Plagiarized his “Masterpiece” from Willa Cather

    When Truman Capote saw the NY Times headline in November 1959 of the murders of the Clutter family of Herb, Bonnie,...

• 

  FROM BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S TO IN COLD BLOOD: WILLA CATHER, EDITH LEWIS, AND TRUMAN CAPOTE’S PERSONALITY DISORDERS

  The Gift for Us of the Liberation of an Exquisite Career Upon Willa Cather’s passing her life companion Edith Lewi...

• 

  WHOSE RELATIONSHIP WAS IT ANYWAY?

    The distilled ardor, the astonished, silenced respect, hangs in the air as Willa Cather describes her “A Chance Mee...