CALCULATED POWER PLAY

After Posing As Prodigy and “Nascent Innocent Available Sexuality” On the Cover of His Plagiarized First Novel Aiming For Solicited Spectacle Fame, How Truman Capote Made Up Having Had A Personal Relationship With Author Willa Cather* When It Was Actually Stephen Tennant Who Was Her Young, Gay, Learned Literary Friend, And Whose Details Truman Based His Lie On, The Deceit He Repeated The Rest Of His Life (*Willa wrote of a “chance encounter” in France in meeting Flaubert’s niece, collected in Willa Cather In Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey)

And The Intrepid Stand That Audrey Hepburn Took To Change the Fabrication Back to the Real Course

 

One of the first people Audrey Hepburn met after arriving on a boat on 3 October 1951 to New York City for the first time, what would be nine years to the exact day that she would be on Fifth Avenue filming the epochal opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was Richard Avedon. She is quoted as saying of the moment, “The first thing I saw when I came to America was the Statue of Liberty. The second—Richard Avedon.” She was immediately taken to his studio where he took the first pictures of her of arriving to appear in Gigi on Broadway. She was 22 years old. These two important moments across those years are connected. If her arrival to Avedon is condensed into a line of appearing on set as Holly Golightly and with it the audacious decision she had made in changing the course of popular culture back into its real path from what Truman Capote was doing, one of the connecting persons of that course is Richard Avedon with whom Audrey, in addition to being photographed over the years, would come to make Funny Face in 1957, a film inspired by his career as a photographer and his wife Doe. Audrey hadn’t planned on making Breakfast at Tiffany’s, especially at that moment in her life in 1960 when she had a newborn baby. But it wasn’t just screenwriter George Axelrod and producers Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd needing her to do it to pull off their making humorous of and altering the path of Truman’s spin and plagiarism back to its original inspired literary and artistic sources, the heart of life itself. Before Truman even published the novella in 1958, the path was already involving Audrey and Avedon. Truman’s anxious covetousness over Richard Avedon’s fame and influence in Funny Face in 1957 would set Truman in motion on his own version with himself at the center in 1958 with Breakfast. And with his relationship with Avedon came a relationship with Audrey Hepburn who couldn’t be flattered and manipulated by Truman, although she could always be kind. To him it certainly wasn’t supposed to be Audrey who then outshone him from his calculated maneuver. Truman stepping into wanting his own Funny Face, (in the time in-between writing the “script” for Avedon and Audrey’s Harper’s Bazaar spread “Paris Pursuit” with her husband Mel), Audrey doing Breakfast at Tiffany’s with a Willa Cather-instead-inspired script, would lead to Audrey to continue to thwart Truman’s public deceit throughout the 1960s.

Despite what Willa Cather’s life partner Edith Lewis and her young intellectual gay socialite friend Stephen Tennant along with publisher Alfred Knopf and scholar critical biographers E.K. Brown and Leon Edel had beautifully and wildly, intelligently done, Truman had for eight years “gotten away with it,” and been lauded and celebrated as he regularly solicited his “literary” fame. Edith had moved three works into publication upon Willa’s passing showing Willa’s brilliance above the plagiarism (with precise statements directed towards exposing it while showing the tremendous art), to show that Truman had taken his ‘first novel’ Other Voices, Other Rooms from Willa in 1948 upon her passing, and this following his previous transgression Willa may have been aware of, “Mariam,” his plagiarism in 1945 from her My Mortal Enemy (and then making up the biographical details such as his stories being about Sook). He even won the O. Henry Award for it in 1946, the year before Willa passed. There were tell-tale signs all along the way. At the time Truman was “writing” Other Voices he had asked New Yorker Editor Barbara Lawrence who had moved on to Harper’s Bazaar to read chapters of it, making sure he could pull it off and get attention, and she later recalled under the duress of her new job, “It was obvious he no longer needed my help. When I told him this, all he said was ‘Honey, I don’t want to make a fool of myself.’”

And so by the time Funny Face went into production in 1956 with Audrey and Avedon, Truman felt enough “in the clear” (if he had a conscience at all) to proceed with what he had been doing again. Funny Face would play the role in what would happen next with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In 1960 it would be documented between the producers of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that they knew of his plagiarism of Christopher Isherwood, who was in the same literary and magazine publishing circles in NYC, in its creation—with no extant documentation yet (except the screenplay and movie) of what they actually knew of its plagiarism of Willa Cather again, with it most certainly being known to George Axelrod who would write the script. If he read what Edith Lewis had arranged in the books, Axelrod certainly could have figured it out from there.

Importantly, in the 1940s and 50s, it would have been impossible to have the awareness and research that we have now of the predictable patterns of malignant narcissism which are detectable—red flags—such as can be seen as feeling that something is “off” or confusing when they happen, but are tell-tale signs of what is actually happening with the often infectious, gregarious and fast, close intimacy and crossing of personal (and professional) boundaries wrapped up in what appears to be attractive, decisive, and strong-willed but vulnerable personality cutting through the normal, slower conditions of coming to know friends and lovers. It happens quickly often through a revealed vulnerability to get others to open up their own intimacies. And, just as they expect, then they are “in.” The line has already been crossed. Cecil Beaton in his life-long journal even comments yet with no trepidation on this about meeting Truman, how unexpected and how quickly Truman became a close friend and came to his home in England. (There was an underlying reason with the novel Truman had just published). Cecil could not have suspected a personality disorder; he merely made note of things that happen in their friendship in a perceptive way, sometimes questioning Truman’s strange actions. Cecil would be another through-line of what Truman would be jealous of.

When Truman first met Avedon he had just had his story “Miriam,” published in the June 1945 issue of Mademoiselle and had submitted “A Tree of Night” to Harper’s Bazaar where Richard had just become a photographer in 1944. Through his style and photography Richard Avedon was already defining the 1940s-50s woman as his biographer Philip Gefter points out:

The idea of Holly Golightly is relevant to a definition of Dick's sensibility. Manhattan in the late 1940s was a petri dish in which the cultural matter of the second half of the twentieth century was germinating—in art, literature, music, dance, and theater. Dick was not only picking up on the spectacular newness of the ideas and attitudes in his midst, he was participating in the visualization of the cultural metamorphosis that was happening all around him. Breakfast at Tiffany's, like West Side Story, say, would not enter the collective unconscious for another decade, yet they both came out of this optimistic moment at the end of the 1940s in which Dick's creativity, too, was establishing new precedents that would prevail as resonant metaphors and abiding touchstones of mid-twentieth-century American exuberance and individuality.

As Truman’s friend author Harper Lee would point out nearly two decades later, Truman had a voracious streak of jealousy with anyone outdoing him, as with her 1961 Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird. He would get this Pulitzer Prize winner to be his “assistant” in writing “his” In Cold Blood. Before the project was even over she said that he was a habitual liar and their friendship ended. So as Richard Avedon grew in celebrity in defining the very attributes of the New York woman and photographing such beautiful and autonomous women such as Gloria Vanderbilt, very early on Truman told Gore Vidal he was writing a novel about a New York debutante, and of course, that he was making it about himself:

In the late 1940s, after their respective books were published, Truman Capote told Gore Vidal that he was working on his next novel, about a beautiful New York debutante. "What on earth do you know about debutantes?" Vidal said. "Everything," Capote countered. "After all, I am one."

Avedon’s biographer points out more common details between Holly Golightly and Avedon’s “creations”:

"Avedon's greatest creation has been a kind of woman," Irving Penn said in a workshop in the 1960s. "She's a definite kind of person. I know her. I'd recognize her if she walked in this room. She's sisterly, laughs a great deal, and has many other characteristics. To me, this is a very great achievement. It's a kind of woman I'm talking about projected through one very powerful intellect and creative genius." Penn emphasized this point with a description of this new style of woman: "She's a very real woman and not to be mixed up with any other age. The way she stands--the curious stance of her feet planted wide apart was something unique—a revolution of the nice woman and the world has changed because of this . . . As a photographer, I'm fascinated by Avedon's frozen instant of a laugh or an expression that comes about. As a moment in time, I'm very fascinated and touched and moved by these."

The women were the ones coming and going through Avedon’s New York studio:

In fact, the "idea" of Holly Golightly can be spotted throughout Avedon's work: Natálie Nickerson, who appeared in Dick's first cover for the Bazaar, stands as if a prototype of Holly Golightly in her orange short-shorts, legs akimbo and bare feet planted firmly on the studio floor. She arrived in New York from Phoenix and lived in virtual poverty in her first year in the city, until Eileen Ford took her on and made her a top fashion model almost overnight. She would eventually have her own personal stationery, first name only, "stylishly engraved without any capital letters: 'natálie, the barbizon, 140 east 63rd street, new york 21.’” Avedon would reinvent what a beautiful woman is, and the visualization of that idea, over and over and over again in his photographs, whether with Natálie Nickerson, Dorian Leigh, or, later, Dovima, no doubt influencing Capote in his own formulation of Holly Golightly in the decade to come.

This “influencing” of Truman and his starting his debutante idea in the late 1940s would take a steeper, more obvious turn when Richard Avedon’s fame brought him to the center of the movie Funny Face in 1956 with then Breakfast at Tiffany’s finally following just two years later in 1958. Avedon photographed Dovima, too, in the mid-1950s, and thus Truman’s description:

 

 

Dovima by Richard Avedon

 

It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.

 

Now all Truman had to do was go back to Willa Cather and her heroines for the title and text, and voilà!—more celebrity and borrowed right from his “friend” Richard Avedon’s fame that Truman couldn’t let him have.

Truman had even placed himself into the role and in essay form moved himself into New York City as a Holly Golightly (he had lived there since school age) in “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,”written as he was ‘finishing’ the manuscript and published after the movie in the February 1959 issue of the mid-century travel magazine, appropriately named, Holiday. In the photographs Truman had taken at the time, he put himself at the bottom of the staircase like Holly. Truman took the photographer who had had the same mentor as Richard Avedon around Brooklyn Heights, showing an environment similar in what he was writing to Willa’s Greenwich Village when she was writing the stories he would take for Breakfast.

It was then no mistake that Audrey was on the set of her How to Steal a Million when Truman took action on planning a masked ball based on Audrey’s shining moment in My Fair Lady (1964). She had furthered the ‘joke’ of the exposé in the details in Paris When It Sizzles carrying a “canary” in a bird cage marked with the name Richelieu (“the pen is mightier than the sword,” and with many more telling details again from screenwriter George Axelrod), and made the apropos Charade in her delightful humor. By 1966 Audrey went into production of the fun and campy How to Steal a Million—how to steal masters’ artworks by forging copies of them—at the same moment Truman finally pushed his In Cold Blood into publication in January 1966 (having needed to wait to get some people actually murdered by capital punishment so that he would have an ending—and pushing for it himself even though he had “befriended” the people he was getting murdered) and by June he was planning his revenge statement with his Cecil Beaton-inspired Black and White self-declared “Party of the Century” wherein he would mimic Audrey’s black and white scene for himself as the mastermind and star, even her black lace criminal mask from How to Steal a Million of her current movie that was in production, and make himself the center of socialite attention of all the world—putting himself socially even above the Bright Young Things and Stephen Tennant, even outdo their Holly Golightly and claim all those roles for himself. Again, his close friend Cecil Beaton had gotten the glorious publicity of a movie in My Fair Lady, like Avedon, and with Audrey starring, and so it was to be outdone. The spotlight had to be on Truman. Cecil noted in his journals how odd it was for Truman to need to throw the party. Truman made sure the “belle” of the ball was ostensibly the owner of the press, quite literally, publicity and showmanship and the “power” of that. And so Truman’s Black and White Ball in November 1966 and the massive publicity he could generate could outdo, by his estimation, if he used the most powerful, well-known, and influential as people at his beck-and-call, could outdo even the renown of Audrey Hepburn, using the artists own tactics, i.e. still copying them.