‘[ . . . ] As We Dream by the Fire': Breakfast at Tiffany's in Los Angeles

 

What emerges from Breakfast at Tiffany’s is Audrey Hepburn.

What emerges is very real person in the here and now and what she did that stands out and apart from the movie and shows us what she’s made of. From that it is that we are engaging with her spirit, her inner character that speaks volumes—more than even the formidable endurance of the classic movie—of which entertainment and “fame” have been the limits, not exactly transition in understanding, but now we are breaking free into something more real beyond the screen that is alive and powerful and moving. I think it is the thing of this moment to know what that is.

Audrey actually had to work around it being a movie to accomplish a greater goal. The movie was a beautiful context, but not the final outcome in realization. Her emergence in this moment is even more than it was in 1961. It is alive. I felt her in Los Angeles where the truth is in the creation, in the milieu of movies, but stepping out of it, and where she courageously showed it. Divine tricksters and their divine actions don’t die. They have an extraordinary life beyond form, beyond entertainment. They carry until the next person recognizes what the actual magic was and how it worked. Until they feel it and see the genius depths of wisdom and insight and humor of it. She’s very much present and knowable in what she did outside of the expected in making the movie. It becomes an extraordinary feat that we can watch now differently on the screen.

 There’s the fairy taleness of Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue in New York City, its illusion of the spirit of NYC, which we will see is actually Audrey and her effect of character and spirit, her not being caught in it, even evidenced on the screen, and when the movie is brought to the reality of how the character, story, and movie go further than we imagined, we find a more terra firma truth in the actuality from Audrey arriving to the movie set on the morning of 3 October 1960, to set New York differently, and to the gritty realness of it in Willa Cather’s Greenwich Village where two artists first come to know each other in her “Coming, Aphrodite!” and by the end of the story the shocking realization in us of what they are to have recognized in each other that summer—not chasing the art or the most altering technique, but distinguishing the crystal clearness of what they each are. It becomes then a practice in the refinement of recognizing what they overlooked in themselves and each other, the inspiriting force, the incarnation, the essential and inner nature, what indwells there, and then to one’s own Beingness and how pressing forward in art gets us there, not vice versa, i.e. all of our efforts and just arriving to art. We seek to know the very real.

And when the movie is moved from that place and what the creators knew then to Los Angeles to Paramount Studios in early November 1960, now there is a removal from an imagined place into a study of a daily creation that is showing its awareness of its alive origins in Willa’s vision and Audrey’s actions from being aware of that, the intercept of plagiarism of Truman Capote wanting to be someone above others in New York City and also then to make that manipulation in the entertainment reaches of Hollywood, more “fame and power,” the force of that grab to restrict persons and the masterful art that laid the groundwork for its carrying forward, to Audrey’s genius “charade” of stealing the content back, to its realization of who Audrey Hepburn actually is, (and thus also who Truman Capote is not, as malignant narcissism, however fragile it may force itself to appear or whatever emotions it purposely evokes in others, is a mask of disturbance underneath that intends harm. Victimhood is its baited abode it wants you to come into and participate in). Audrey couldn’t call it what it was, not even to the German soldiers whose intentions were not lovely. However forceful, it did not make her not light-hearted. The point then, is not the plagiarism (and why I didn’t just write an academic paper and submit it to professional conferences), but that it was a cultural restriction (demanding enmeshment with its narcissistic emotional needs) that caused Audrey to step in to subvert that hold and break open the actual pure alive beauty that is possible to know and experience. That “detachment” from being forced into restriction, lesser than, by Truman Capote, is one of the first courageous acts that can be seen in her making the movie. She felt no obligation to be drawn into his fame and lie game that he was working so hard to maintain the illusion of. There’s that steeliness of her spirit that isn’t stopped by manipulations.

And so we continue watching the movie and seeing what is actually happening.

Upon arrival the “writer” Paul Varjak, who is actually a boyish, innocent-looking paid solicitor (*see the sensation caused by Truman’s solicitous photograph by Harold Halma on his Other Voices, Other Rooms novel in 1948 described as “caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. Truman claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity”) has to get into the building by ringing Holly’s apartment (the female character Truman has lifted which gets him into the story), and his arrival is marked by his having to repeat that he “couldn’t get the downstairs door open,” that “I guess they sent me the upstairs key.” The beginning of Truman’s novel lifts details from Willa’s Don Hedger’s painter’s apartment in it being dark and gloomy, among other very similar details, and in a moment shown to be right outside a ceiling fire escape, and having the details of his painting supplies as Truman describes of his new apartment and as now his writing materials.

And so Truman wrote, “Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment [ . . . ] to become the writer I wanted to be.” George Axelrod’s screenplay then at the opening has Paul not have the key to the right apartment building (it should be on Washington Square Park), or i.e. also he does not have “permission” to enter someone else’s intellectual property, but he does take the ‘key’ (“something that gives an explanation or identification or provides a solution”) to the upstairs apartment. (Holly usually doesn’t have a key either, but they know her there, as she lives there, it IS her place and she is given access, even though Mr. Yunioshi upstairs wishes she would just get the key remade—which is exactly what Audrey herself is working on: reestablishing the key to her character.)

It’s Axelrod’s first insinuation that Truman doesn’t have permission to this building, but we soon find out how he did get the apartment: through a literary figure like e.e. cummings (“2E”, and who also lived in Greenwich Village like Willa Cather) who is now known as simply the “decorator” instead of the actual author. Thus, it is a comment on the decorations in the apartment in Truman’s first paragraph not actually being his, and which Truman, in watching the movie for the first time would have immediately recognized with 2E showing up in the cab, an older woman, and handing Paul Varjak her urn while she holds the “blueprints” or covering for the walls for the already completed (written) apartment, and telling him beautifully, “I’m late, I know it.” Without knowing he was locked out she says, “Don’t tell me you were locked out? Didn’t you get the key?” Upfront and right at the beginning confronting his character with what Truman has done. How Holly now looks at her creator by pulling her sunglasses down in the surprise of seeing the person who has written you, and how 2E looks at her character in oddness at finding her here, but her attention is to how Paul has made himself “available” to her. Holly’s character has to keep on going. It would have been a brutal blow to Truman’s ego and made him seethe at Audrey’s actions at playing as Holly like she can’t hear him and isn’t quite paying attention to his trespasses, but lets it by. “It could happen to anyone, quite frequently does.”

At that point (before her arrival) Paul has to ask “one more favor”—to use the phone. To continue the story he’s got to “have a conversation” with “2E.” Because of the state of Holly’s apartment he comments that she must have just moved in too (which she does in “Coming, Aphrodite!), but she answers she already has lived there—but her furniture is obviously sparse, just as in Willa Cather’s “The Novel Démeublé” on her writing theory wherein she suggests “taking out the furniture” of writing: that “The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished.” In the essay Willa continued:

How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls.

And in her free-spirited “The Bohemian Girl” from 1912:

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the parlour. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take very long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short–lived. It went, indeed, little beyond a bathtub and her piano. They had disagreed about almost every other article of furniture, and Clara had said she would rather have her house empty than full of things she didn't want.

Of the upstairs Mr. Yunioshi whom director Blake Edwards later expressed regret for using because of the racist mocking of having an Anglo comic playing an Asian man as a bungling photographer, Blake did not have to take the blame but never said so, and he just did to keep it all intact. The joke was on Truman for it was he had taken an Anglo character and made him a “Jap.”

Truman wrote:

A little further in the conversation:

“He said, "Here's what the Jap says," and the story was this: On Christmas day Mr. Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul [ . . . ]

And so the racism, along with taking intellectual material (as well as biography) not his, is Truman’s and not Blake Edwards, but is the movie’s producers drawing attention to an Anglo man as an Asian, as Truman has done in the transition from original biographical material to his text, which is actually a reference to George N. Kates, “an American exponent of classical Chinese culture and decorative arts. His memoir of life in 1930s Beijing—The Years That Were Fat, Peking 1933-1940 is a widely read memoir of pre-revolution China. He also wrote one of the first texts on Chinese classical furniture—Chinese Household Furniture and put together a significant private collection of Ming style hardwood furniture.” He is also known for his writing on Willa Cather: “Kates published articles about Chinese history and decorative arts and contributed to two books about author Willa Cather. Several authors associate him with Old Beijing, the first half of the 20th century and the traditional way of life, also as an important collector of Chinese antiques, and for his contributions to the understanding of the Chinese decorative arts.” (Wikipedia). The entry continues:

Kates worked on two published essays in the early 1950s, connected with Willa Cather, the 1920s American writer. Kates’ contributions to Willa Cather in Europe; Her Own Story of the First Journey, with an introduction and incidental notes by George N. Kates, Knopf (1956), and Willa Cather, Five Stories, with an article by George N. Kates on Miss Cather’s last, unfinished, and unpublished Avignon story, Vintage Book (1956) were well done, if perhaps little read.

Kate’s important article on Willa’s unfinished novel also plays into Trumans notoriously “unfinished” novel Answered Prayers named just like Willa’s unfinished Hard Punishments which was set in a prime Catholic setting where the popes lived in the Holy Roman Empire in what is now France on the river Rhône, and Truman then attributing his title to Saint Teresa of Avila—far too close comparisons after what he did with Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Willa’s writing about people and places she knew. A stark difference however is the depth of insight, as Stephen Tennant put it, “The wealth of her human warmth of feeling has been one of the great factors in the popularity of her books. It pervades everything—as fire pervades the center of the earth” and “The very absoluteness of her concentration in another artist’s gifts liberates her own soul, her heart, with a most passionate clarity” (Introduction to On Writing). George N. Kate’s—the Anglo author on Chinese culture— article was published in 1956, Truman’s novel in Esquire in 1958, just two years apart.

Back in the creation of our movie, the cat jumps on Paul, whereas in Willa’s story it is Don’s dog that is so close to Don and who bothers Eden Bower. Later in the masks scenes in the five-and-dime, Audrey will pick up a dog mask (Huckleberry Hound), set it down, and switch it to a cat mask that she “steals” while the dog mask now goes on Paul, the writer taking the mask from the face that should belong to Don Hedger.

In one version of Axelrod’s script the ending is on the “paraphrasing” of the cat:

Paul obeys and as they walk out of the alley:

FADE OUT.

We will continue with the movie later with this deeper insight.