4

Holly Golightly’s Queer World Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Notwithstanding his screenwriting experiences, Capote criticized cinematic adaptations of fiction. He believed that transforming a written work into a visual one invariably degraded the source: “The transposition of one art form into another seems to me a corrupt, somewhat vulgar enterprise. Nature being what it is, these experimental inbreedings must logically make for Cretin offspring. Why can’t a novel be simply a novel, a poem a poem?”1 He also admitted that his previous involvement with screenwriting cautioned him against writing the adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “From these experiences I learned that it’s a fatal mistake to try to adapt my own work into another form. Once you have worked out the characterization and the whole significance of the story for yourself as a short novel, you can’t then take that experience and try to work it into a play. . . . You can’t alter your original vision to fit another medium. That’s the reason I didn’t want to do the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”2 With these words Capote echoes longstanding criticisms of cinematic adaptations of literature, notably that such films taint their sources: the original text is envisioned as a fountainhead of true art, which its cinematic offspring pollutes. Brian McFarlane observes that “much of the dissatisfaction which accompanies the writing about films adapted from novels tends to spring from perceptions of ‘tampering’ with the original narrative.” It is impossible, however, to translate literature to the screen without altering the source text, for adaptations, by their very nature, must alter their sources in shifting from one medium to another. McFarlane continues, “Such dissatisfactions resonate with a complex set of misapprehensions about the workings of narrative in the two media, about the irreducible differences between the two, and from a failure to distinguish what can from what cannot be transferred.”3 For viewers who concentrate primarily on how an adaptation alters its source text and thus on what is lost in the process, adaptations almost necessarily disappoint. When viewing adaptations as arising from yet not servile to their sources, their unique achievements come into sharper focus.

Certainly Blake Edwards’s 1961 film version of Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s succeeds on numerous levels, as it is generally lauded as a cinematic classic. Audrey Hepburn, in her iconic performance as Holly Golightly, enchants audiences with her cool sophistication and elegant costuming, particularly her slim black dress designed by Givenchy. The film features an impressive array of supporting actors, including George Peppard as her love interest Paul Varjak, Patricia Neal as Varjak’s lover Mrs. Falenson, and Buddy Ebsen as Holly’s abandoned husband Doc. Edwards undertook the project following his commercial smash Operation Petticoat (1959). George Axelrod, following his numerous successes in the 1950s with The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and preceding his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate (1962), wrote the screenplay. Axelrod was rewarded for his efforts with an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, as was Hepburn for her performance as Holly. Beyond the film’s strong foundations in its actors, director, and screenwriter, its success is indebted to its music and soundtrack, both for Henry Mancini’s film score and for Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s haunting music and lyrics for “Moon River,” which respectively won the Academy Awards for Best Music, Scoring, and Best Music, Original Song.

The filming and casting of Breakfast at Tiffany’s sparked numerous controversies—and Capote’s vocal displeasure. Capote expressed his distaste for Edwards venomously: “The day I signed the contract they turned around and did exactly the reverse. They got a lousy director like Blake Edwards, who I could spit on!”4 Also, Capote preferred Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly: “Marilyn would have been absolutely marvelous in it. She wanted to play it too, to the extent that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself and did them for me. She was terrifically good, but Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way and cast Audrey. Audrey is an old friend and one of my favorite people, but she was just wrong for that part.”5 On another occasion he opined of Monroe’s suitability for the role: “Holly had to have something touching about her . . . unfinished. Marilyn had that. But Paramount double-crossed me and gave the part to Audrey Hepburn. Audrey was not what I had in mind when I wrote that part, although she did a terrific job.”6 Capote contradicted himself in these statements, seeing Hepburn both as “wrong for that part” and as doing “a terrific job.” His preference for Monroe to play the role of Holly Golightly coincided with his description of her in Observations, in which he referred to her as an “expense-account darling,” perceptively capturing the mix of naiveté and artifice in Monroe that he saw as Holly’s defining features. Monroe, he wrote, seemed, “casually glanced, merely another specimen of the American geisha, the expense-account darling, those cabaret-cuties whose careers progress from tinted hair at twelve to a confiscated husband or three at twenty” (O 85).7

While Capote believed that studio executives betrayed him in casting Hepburn, producer Martin Jurow countered that he in fact recruited Monroe. According to his recollections, Paula Strasberg, Monroe’s dramatic advisor and wife of famed theatrical director Lee Strasberg, refused to consider the role for her client: “There is no way she will play that girl. Marilyn Monroe will not play a call girl, a lady of the evening.”8 Furthermore, Jurow thought that the film would benefit from the surprise of casting Hepburn in the part, in such contrast to her ingénue roles in Roman Holiday (1953) and Sabrina (1954). In regard to Monroe, he simply stated, “I felt that casting Marilyn as Holly would be too obvious.”9 Other candidates for the role of Holly included Shirley MacLaine, Jane Fonda, and Rosemary Clooney.10 As Jurow fended off Capote’s determination to get Monroe cast in the film, he also needed to convince Hepburn that she should take the role of Holly Golightly. Agreeing with Capote, Hepburn thought she was a poor match for the part: “I read the book and liked it very much. . . . But I was terribly afraid I was not right for the part. I thought I lacked the right sense of comedy. This part called for an extroverted character. I am an introvert. . . . Very often while I was doing the part, I was convinced I was not doing the best job.”11 According to Jurow, Hepburn also expressed reservations about Holly’s sexual ethos, and he employed reverse psychology to pique her interest in the part, accusing her of misinterpreting the role: “I cannot believe you don’t know the difference between a hooker and a dreamer of dreams, a lopsided romantic. If you think we want to make a movie about a veritable hooker, we don’t want you near the script.”12 But despite Jurow’s rhetoric, Holly Golightly is a “veritable hooker.” The sexuality of Holly Golightly’s character is whitewashed in Jurow’s sketch of her, yet Hepburn’s performance is central to the film’s success, in that her mixture of sophistication and innocence matches the film’s murky depiction of countercultural sexuality as slyly present yet knowingly camouflaged.

Casting decisions are subjective ones, but in this instance both Capote and Hepburn appear to have been rather spectacularly wrong. Certainly the voluptuous Monroe was physically unlike the novella’s description of Holly as a “skinny girl” with a “flat little bottom” (BT 9); the narrator later comments on her “chic thinness” (BT 12). In the novella Holly’s age is nineteen, whereas both Monroe (born 1926) and Hepburn (born 1929) were in their early thirties when the film was cast, which makes Capote’s statement that “Marilyn was what I wanted—at that age, she was exactly right for the part” objectively untrue.13 Hepburn’s performance as Holly Golightly is an iconic one, for the plaintive need emanating through the character’s façade of sexual sophistication, but also for her emblematic costuming. As Donald Spoto declares, “Thanks to the wardrobe designed by her friend Givenchy, the picture made her a fashion icon forevermore. . . . Audrey was henceforth considered a key arbiter, standard and model of elegance and vogue.”14 Givenchy praised Hepburn for her fashion sensibility, realizing that much of his success arose from her status as the ideal model of his fashions: “In film after film, Audrey wore clothes with such talent and flair that she created a style, which in turn had a major impact on fashion. Her chic, her youth, her bearing, and her silhouette grew ever more celebrated, enveloping me in a kind of aura or radiance that I could never have hoped for.”15 Moving from the 1950s to the 1960s, the feminine aesthetic of buxom stars such as Monroe, Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren, Mamie van Doren, and Elizabeth Taylor was supplanted by the svelte look represented by Hepburn (a trend culminating in the rise of fashion model Twiggy in 1966), such that Billy Wilder wryly commented of Hepburn: “This girl, singlehanded, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”16

Turning to the film’s other prominent roles, Jurow recounts an encounter with Capote in which the author declared: “You know, of course, that I want to play the male lead.” Because Capote based the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s on himself, his suggestion to star in the film is not as preposterous as it first sounds, but with the producers recasting Capote’s novella as a romantic comedy, it would be incongruous indeed for this short, high-pitched homosexual to play the role of heterosexual gigolo Paul Varjak. Jurow delicately rejected Capote’s casting proposition: “Truman, the role isn’t good enough for you. All eyes will be on Holly Golightly through every frame of the picture. The male lead is just a pair of shoulders for Holly to lean on. You deserve something more dynamic, more colorful.” As Jurow recollects this moment, to his relief Capote agreed: “You’re right. I deserve something more dynamic.”17 In casting the role of Paul Varjak, Edwards did not want to hire George Peppard: “I always thought he was a piss-poor actor,” he avowed.18 On another occasion, he pronounced a similar sentiment, albeit in milder terms: “He just didn’t have whatever it was that I wanted. He wasn’t my cup of tea.”19 The producers, however, saw him as an up-and-coming (and bankable) star, and a Paramount press release described him as “the hottest young actor in Hollywood, a comer with the impact of Jimmy Dean or a young Clark Gable.”20 Producer Richard Shepherd affirmed that Patricia Neal “was always our first choice” as Varjak’s lover and patron Mrs. Falenson, also known as 2e, and added, “We wanted somebody who was no-nonsense, someone who could play that kind of strong subterranean sexual role.”21 Of Buddy Ebsen for the role of Holly’s abandoned husband Doc, Shepherd stated that “no-one was more suitable to play a hillbilly.”22 As Ebsen recalls, Edwards telephoned to ask him to audition: “Blake Edwards told me he had a part. If I would test for it and get it, he wanted to bet me a case of champagne that I would get an Academy Award nomination.”23 Ebsen did not receive an Oscar nomination, yet his performance imbues the film with an affecting pathos that balances out Holly’s excesses.

Capote heaped particular opprobrium on the casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, the Japanese-American photographer: “It was the most miscast film I’ve ever seen. It made me want to throw up. Like Mickey Rooney playing this Japanese photographer. Well, indeed I had a Japanese photographer in the book, but he certainly wasn’t Mickey Rooney.”24 Capote’s Mr. Yunioshi, although a secondary character mostly incidental to the unfolding plot, is not a caricature. He speaks in unaccented English, with only slight inversions of standard word order indicating that English is not his native tongue, such as when he complains to Holly, “But always you are ringing my bell” (BT 12). Likewise, in Axelrod’s screenplay, no indication is given that the character’s speech should be inflected with such a strong, and supposedly comic, accent. Arthur Marx saw Rooney’s performance as evidence of his abilities as “a very fine character actor,” although “he was no longer exactly a leading man,” and A. H. Weiler, reviewing the film for the New York Times, praised Rooney’s “bucktoothed and myopic Japanese” as “broadly exotic.”25

Although Rooney’s timing for physical comedy was indeed impeccable, the racist caricature of the performance now distorts the film’s comic themes. Rooney’s biographer Alvin Marill allows that Rooney’s clowning results in a “rather funny but archly stereotypical portrayal of ‘Mr. Yunioshi,’” and the film’s coproducer, Richard Shepherd, condemned the casting altogether: “it was wrong to have Mickey Rooney playing this Japanese character; I felt it was ethnically improper.”26 Edwards, looking back at his film’s prized status in Hollywood history, likewise regretted the decision: “I would give anything to be able to recast it.”27 Rooney himself proclaimed, “I was downright ashamed of my role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”28

Along with the transitions inherent in bring Capote’s characters to the screen, the print and screen versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s illustrate the shifting narrative and thematic dynamics arising from adaptations. Primarily, Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s strips Capote’s novella of its homosexual subtext, replacing Capote’s gay and nameless narrator with Paul Varjak, a heterosexual gigolo who falls in love with Holly. Capote’s narrator reflects to some degree Capote himself, as this character declares that he moved to New York City “to become the writer I wanted to be” (BT 3). When Holly derides his fiction as focusing excessively on “Negroes and children: who cares?” (BT 62), Capote is ironically taunting himself for his own prior works, such as Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Grass Harp. The film’s recasting of Capote’s narrator as heterosexual enables its standard romantic comedy ending of love conquering all, one that starkly differs from Capote’s melancholy novella in which Holly, as she abandons her cat on the city streets, learns too late that she craves emotional connections only to cast them aside: “But what about me? . . . I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away” (BT 109). The novella concludes without any sense of romantic resolution, for romance has not been its concern, whereas the film relies on the time-tested cliché of the lovers’ embrace overcoming all past and future obstacles to their shared happiness.

The initial screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany’s was written by Sumner Locke Elliott, who penned numerous teleplays in the 1950s for The Goodyear Playhouse, Studio One in Hollywood, and Playhouse 90. Richard Shepherd registered his displeasure with Elliott’s draft, focusing on its botched efforts to rewrite Capote’s queer novella into a standard romantic comedy:

Elliott, to our way of thinking, has seriously failed to capture the warmth, the zest, the humor, the beauty and, more important, the basic heart and honesty that is Holly Golightly. The young man he has written is petty and unattractive in character, borders on the effeminate, which we all detest, and as is the case with Holly and the whole piece, is almost totally devoid of the humor and contemporary flavor that is absolutely vital for this picture.

All of us are convinced that we are correct in assuming that the boy and girl get together at the end of our story, that Holly’s problem, which is the principal one, is in some way resolved through the understanding, love and strength of the boy. This requires a completely different kind of male character than has been given to us by Elliott and a far more solid construction of the dramatic elements of the piece.29

The “young man” in Elliott’s script reflects Capote’s presentation of himself in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and so it is unsurprising that this character “borders on the effeminate.” In demanding a standard romantic comedy plotline, Shepherd excised the homosexual subtext of Capote’s novella in favor of an obviously heterosexual male lead, one who would convincingly pursue Holly’s affections.

Stripping Capote’s source text of its homosexual themes and restructuring it into a romantic comedy, Edwards concomitantly imbued it with queer undertones, as the film flirts with gender play, prostitution, and ostensible sexual deviance in numerous scenes. Radley Metzger, famed as an early distributor and director of erotic films, extolled Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s as “the most influential movie in the area of breaking down old taboos and letting the age of permissiveness come in.”30 Released in 1961, the film fore-shadowed the loosening sexual mores in American culture throughout the ensuing decade, painting a picture of sexually liberated romantics who find true love despite their vocations as quasi prostitutes. In this light, both Capote’s and Edwards’s versions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s are queer narratives that undermine conceptions of normative heterosexuality, although the former encodes themes of homosexuality to achieve this effect, whereas the latter concentrates on deviancies from heterosexuality.

Capote first heard the phrase “breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the queer kernel from which his novella grew, in an amusing story about a one-night stand. A cosmopolitan gay man enjoyed an evening with an attractive rube, as Gerald Clarke recounts:

Truman had once heard an anecdote and filed it away, waiting for the time he could use it. During World War II a man of middle age entertained a Marine one Saturday night. The man enjoyed himself so much in the Marine’s muscular embrace that he felt he should buy him something to show his gratitude; but since it was Sunday when they woke up, and the stores were closed, the best he could offer was breakfast.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Pick the fanciest, most expensive place in town.”

The Marine, who was not a native, had heard of only one fancy and expensive place in New York, and he said, “Let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”31

The audience of the anecdote knows, of course, that Tiffany’s is a jewelry store, not a restaurant, and is invited to laugh at the rube’s naiveté. In Capote’s novella, Holly expresses her desire for fame and riches—“I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (BT 39)—but the line is presented simply as a wistful dream, not as a mark of her ignorance, and the impossibility of the fantasy is then elided as she evokes the feeling of serenity that Tiffany’s grants her: “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there” (BT 40). Edwards metamorphoses Capote’s fantasy of desire into the film’s opening shots, as Holly peers through Tiffany’s windows while sipping coffee and eating a pastry. This chimerical vision, so central to the novella’s focus on the nexus between financial and amatory desire, is made real in the film, a simple side trip available to Holly whenever she fancies.

The predominant heterosexuality of Holly Golightly’s lifestyle in both the novella and the film eclipses Capote’s homosexual themes, but to overlook the queer aspects of Holly’s world obscures key moments of the text that provide a better understanding of its sexual dynamics and their reimagining in the film. Foremost, Capote codes Holly’s two closest friends—the narrator and the bartender Joe Bell—as homosexuals, although he does so with such deft touches of description that some readers fail to recognize that these characters are gay. For instance, both men repeatedly express their love for Holly but always in platonic terms. The narrator realizes his feelings for her—“For I was in love with her”—before qualifying this attachment as free from eroticism: “Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too” (BT 76). In a similar vein, Joe Bell protests, “Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I wanted to touch her,” thereby confirming his paternal affection for her rather than his erotic attraction to her (BT 9). Such proclamations of asexual affection for Holly reflect American literary mores of the 1940s and 1950s, in which gay writers coded characters as gay rather than forthrightly affirming their sexual identities. As Molly Haskell argues, “The repressiveness of the [1950s] both enabled and forced the homosexual writer to disguise himself,”32 a necessity that led Capote to downplay or otherwise camouflage the homosexual themes of many of his works.

Within Capote’s coded text, a primary clue to the narrator’s homosexuality lies in Holly’s formulation of how to determine whether a man is gay: “If a man doesn’t like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn’t like either of them, well, I’m in trouble anyway: he don’t like girls” (BT 38). These words resonate in the reader’s mind when the narrator reports the contents of Holly’s bookshelves—“of the books there, more than half were about horses, the rest baseball”—and then feigns interest in horses: “Pretending an interest in Horseflesh and How to Tell It gave me sufficiently private opportunity for sizing Holly’s friends” (BT 35). If this passage were insufficient to convince readers that the narrator holds no interest in horses and, therefore, no sexual interest in women, the episode when Holly takes him horseback riding to disastrous effect also figures him, according to her horses-or-baseball criteria, as a homosexual. Similarly, when Holly tells the narrator that she will not testify against Sally Tomato, the crime boss for whom she delivers coded messages from prison, she calls him a name laden with queer connotations: “Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not” (BT 102–3). In homosexual slang, “maude” signifies a male prostitute or a male homosexual, according to Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.33 Also, Capote’s narrator makes a veiled reference to his homosexuality when comparing his rain-soaked journey from Holly’s apartment to Joe Bell’s bar with another difficult trek he undertook years ago: “Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy’s Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to the journey to Joe Bell’s bar” (BT 105). Nancy’s Landing is Capote’s creation; it does not exist on any map of Mississippi. Eric Partridge defines the term “nancy” as referring either to the posterior or to “an effeminate man, especially a passive homosexual,”34 and so Nancy’s Landing serves as Capote’s code phrase for a gay resort, an imaginary Fire Island or Provincetown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The narrator’s coy “Never mind why” appears to be a subtle rhetorical move to distract attention from his sexual self-confession—which then draws further attention to it.

Although Holly’s friendships with the narrator and Joe Bell are asexual, they allow Capote to voice a liberal sexual agenda through her. Beyond these friendships, Holly espouses forward-thinking views on homosexuality and sexual identity. In words echoing Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), which posits human sexuality as a continuum, Holly avows her potential homosexual inclination: “Of course people couldn’t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone is: a bit” (BT 22). She also proclaims the novel’s theme about the necessity of honesty in one’s affections—“Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart” (BT 83)—and her words to the narrator about gay marriage remain topical today: “A person ought to be able to marry men or women . . . No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed” (BT 83). Holly’s queer world marks her as a participant in the sexual struggle against conformity and conservatism, rather than as merely a charming young woman who inspires protective and paternal love about her. At the novella’s end, Capote makes it clear that Holly leaves a queer legacy behind her when Quaintance Smith, who “entertained as many gentleman callers of a noisy nature as Holly ever had,” moves into her old apartment (BT 110). The name Quaintance alludes to George Quaintance, a painter of the 1940s and 1950s whose art bordered on soft-core gay pornography. In Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly’s queer world lives on after she flees the constraints of New York City to ensure her freedom.

Beyond her participation in a gay demimonde, Holly herself undermines normative constructions of 1950s heterosexuality. In this light Capote casts her as a queer, if not a homosexual, character, one who subverts traditional erotic paradigms. In the story’s frame narrative, Joe Bell updates the narrator about Holly’s travels after she departed New York. He reveals that she has broken the taboo of miscegenation when, during her African travels, she “shared the wood-carver’s mat,” a revelation that makes Joe Bell wince (BT 8). Capote also hints that Holly’s relationship with her suitor Rusty Trawler involves acting as a dominatrix, when she gently yet firmly disciplines him for his rudeness:

“I want you to behave, Rusty.” She spoke softly, but there was a governess threat of punishment in her tone that caused an odd flush of pleasure, of gratitude, to pink his face.

“You don’t love me,” he complained, as though they were alone.

“Nobody loves naughtiness.” (BT 41)

The traces of sadomasochism in this exchange, as Holly plays the role of the stern governess chastising Rusty for his petulant behavior, imbue their relationship with a queer edge in which, despite Rusty’s wealth, Holly rules over him socially and sexually. For Capote, Holly’s queerness emerges both in her progressive views on homosexuality and in her flaunting of heteronormativity, as she transgresses racial taboos and indulges in sophisticated sex play.

In Edwards’s filming of these queer story lines, Holly shifts from her role as an object of platonic homosexual affection to an object of heterosexual desire, while she simultaneously dismantles heterosexual normativity as understood in the 1950s and early 1960s. Certainly film censors of this period would not allow positive, or even neutral, depictions of homosexuality. In early drafts of the screenplay, Axelrod expanded the small role of Quaintance Smith, who moves into Paul’s apartment after Paul moves out. Axelrod’s script describes the newly refurbished setting as one of queer excess: “The apartment has been completely redone since Paul left. It is, if possible, even more elaborate.”35 When Varjak climbs through Smith’s window to reach Holly’s apartment, Smith exclaims preciously: “I have lived in a number of bizarre buildings in my time . . . but this . . . and you may quote me wildly on the subject . . . is far and away the bizarrest of all.”36 Censor Geoffrey Shurlock warned the producers not to depict homosexuality in any light, and of this short scene, he cautioned, “There should be no attempt to give Mr. Smith the mannerisms usually associated with a homosexual.”37 Given Shepherd’s determination to film the novella as a romantic comedy with a virile male lead, and given the censors’ refusal to permit any depiction of homosexuality, even through such a minor character as Quaintance Smith, Edwards was forced to strip the film of its homosexual story lines and themes. Yet, as Breakfast at Tiffany’s so tellingly demonstrates, heterosexuality can be queer, too, when one dismisses erotic taboos, as Holly and Paul do through their vocations as romanticized sex workers.

In both the novella and the film, Holly is a prostitute, but only nominally so, as Capote depicts her relative lack of sexual experience despite her reputation: “Not that I’ve warmed the multitudes some people say: I don’t blame the bastards for saying it, I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line. Really, though, I toted up the other night, and I’ve only had eleven lovers” (BT 82). Adhering to this aspect of her characterization, Edwards shields his audience from conclusively viewing Holly as a prostitute. Although refusing to see Holly as a call girl may necessitate reading naively against the grain, the film repeatedly depicts her circumventing sex with her suitors, a business model that would undermine any prostitute’s financial prospects. In the film’s opening sequence, Holly returns from her breakfast, consumed while gazing wistfully through Tiffany’s windows, only to encounter her admirer Sid Arbuck, who has followed her home and demands her attention, reminding her of his earlier generosity: “And when you asked for a little change for the powder room, what do I give you? A fifty-dollar bill. Now doesn’t that give me some rights?” In Capote’s novella, Holly rejects Arbuck because he has not been so generous, dismissing him for his stinginess in response to her request for powder-room funds: “Oh, Mr. Arbuck,” she calls. “The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change . . . take my advice, darling: don’t give her twenty cents!” (BT 14). In the film, however, Arbuck disburses the necessary funds, yet is rejected because Holly does not agree with him that fifty dollars grants him any rights to her body. He leaves in a hangdog huff when Mr. Yunioshi threatens Holly, “I going to call the vice squad on you.” This scene crystallizes the interpretive crux of Holly’s occupation: how can viewers see her as a prostitute, if the film circumvents this conclusion at the same time such scenes virtually demand this conclusion? Capote depicts her rejecting Arbuck because he has not paid to enjoy her company; Edwards depicts the same encounter, yet in this instance Arbuck’s money does not grant him entry into Holly’s chambers. In both scenarios, Holly’s evasion of sex enables one to believe in her essential innocence, no matter how tenuous such a vision might be.

Mr. Yunioshi’s threat to call the vice squad would appear to cement the view of Holly as a prostitute, but the scene merely continues to flirt with this possibility rather than to confirm it, as she quiets Mr. Yunioshi by wheedling, “Don’t be angry, you dear little man. I won’t do it again. If you promise not to be angry, I might let you take those pictures we mentioned,” then bids him goodnight with a blown kiss. Is one to assume that Mr. Yunioshi hopes to shoot erotic photographs of Holly? Her promise ends his tirade, but the film never depicts her following through on this enigmatic engagement. Axelrod did little more than transcribe Holly’s words to Mr. Yunioshi in this scene from Capote’s novella, but if viewers are to take their lead from the book, Mr. Yunioshi appears to be a legitimate magazine photographer, not a pornographer, as Capote writes that Mag Wildwood poses for a series of Mr. Yunioshi’s photographs that are to be published in Bazaar (BT 43). Moreover, if Mr. Yunioshi were a pornographer, he would be unlikely to call the vice squad on Holly, thereby also calling attention to himself. In the novella, Holly’s primary nemesis among her neighbors is not Mr. Yunioshi but the coloratura Madame Sapphia Spanella (whose name, with its echo of sapphism, further colors Capote’s novella with homosexual allusions). In Holly’s interactions with Mr. Yunioshi, the possibility of sex work, whether as a prostitute or as an erotic model, lurks in the background, but Edwards refuses to confirm these suspicions for his viewers, just as Capote refused to do so before him.

Likewise, when Holly outlines her business model for negotiating payment for visiting the convicted felon Sally Tomato in prison, she explains to Paul that she receives money for her companionship rather than for any sexual favors. Hepburn insouciantly delivers the lines “I told him, ‘Look, darling, you’ve got the wrong Holly Golightly. A girl can do as well as that on trips to the powder room. I mean, any gentleman with the slightest chic will give a girl a fifty-dollar bill for the powder room. And I always ask for cab fare, too. That’s another fifty dollars.’”38 Holly’s comparison of these business propositions obfuscates the possibility that she prostitutes herself in either scenario: because it is impossible for her to have sex with Sally Tomato during his incarceration, it appears from this financial agreement that Holly’s pecuniary success stems from her ability to get men to pay for her company while circumventing the necessity of sleeping with them. Peter Lehman and William Luhr argue of Holly’s occupational status, “Although we do see her rejecting the advances of two of these ‘rats’ in her apartment, the fact that she depends for most of her money upon them . . . would indicate that she is not able to put them all off and that the contract implied with the fifty-dollar ‘powder-room’ tips is at times fulfilled.”39 Lehman and Luhr are correct if one applies the rules of reality to this romantic comedy fantasy, but the obfuscation of Holly’s vocation as a prostitute is key to the film’s muddled sexual themes, in which countercultural sexual identities are camouflaged under a thin veneer of normalcy. Sam Wasson, with a particularly apt formulation, summarizes the tensions in Holly’s character: “With the help of screenwriter George Axelrod’s strategic adaptation, the character became a vision of studio innuendo—as if Mae West birthed her in the Hays Office.”40 That is to say, the film allows one to believe in Holly’s innocence even while knowing such innocence is not credible. Edwards similarly observed that many of his viewers simply overlooked the sexual nature of Holly’s profession: “I don’t think that the majority of the audience in those days really ever thought of Audrey Hepburn as a hooker, as a call girl. . . . when it was over with, they didn’t even know.”41 Given her star image as developed in the lighthearted fare of Roman Holiday and Sabrina, it was difficult for many viewers to see Hepburn in such a sexual role, as Peter Krämer posits: “Audrey Hepburn’s celebrated style, respectability, and even nobility finally neutralized Holly’s sexual transgressiveness; on or off screen Hepburn was hardly perceived as a sexual being at all.”42

Whereas Holly’s vocation as a prostitute is obscured, the film clearly depicts her eventual romantic interest, Paul Varjak, as a gigolo. Numerous parallels link Holly to Paul: as Holly repeatedly awakens Mr. Yunioshi to let her into their apartment building when she loses her keys, so too does Paul wake her when first finding his new residence. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t get the downstairs door opened,” he apologizes. Holly’s cat symbolizes her quest for companionship and a home, and the film links Paul to feline imagery as well, with the title of his book, Nine Lives, referring to the folkloric belief in cats’ agility and longevity. But the film’s refusal to depict Holly in a compromised position, in contrast to its frank depiction of Paul’s sexual relationship with his patron Mrs. Falenson, draws a key distinction between Holly and Paul. The scene in which Holly realizes that Paul is a gigolo begins with her being pursued by one of her many suitors, or “rats.” She flees to the safety of her bathroom, with the “rat” pounding on the door and calling, “Hey, baby. Where you going? Come on, baby. Open the door. Be a pal. You’re breaking up a beautiful party.” Holly climbs the fire escape and peers into Paul’s bedroom, where she sees that Paul has slept with Mrs. Falenson: he lies in bed, shirtless and presumably naked under the sheets, as Mrs. Falenson emerges fully dressed from his bathroom. Mrs. Falenson leaves some cash on his desk, kisses him goodbye as he sleeps, and departs. Holly then enters Paul’s bedroom and implies that she understands the nature of his relationship with his patron: “I must say, she works late hours for a decorator,” she wryly comments, later remarking, “Three hundred dollars? She’s very generous. Is it by the week, the hour, or what?” Although Paul takes offense, she soothes his feelings by declaring, “I was just trying to let you know I understand.” As filmed, the scene is milder than in Axelrod’s screenplay, which depicts Holly entering Paul’s bedroom in a bathrobe and declaring, “Look at that . . . tooth marks. Genuine tooth marks,”43 suggesting that her “rat” literally took a bite out of her. Further, she provocatively expands her soothing words to indicate their shared vocation: “Please don’t be angry. I was just trying to let you know I understand. Not only that. I approve. In a way we’re really in the same line of business.”44 The censor, however, rejected such frank discussion of the sex trade: “Also, please eliminate Holly’s line, ‘I was just trying to let you know I understand. Not only that, I approve.’”45

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FIG. 9 Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) and Paul Varjak (George Peppard) discuss their love lives in bed. Paul has been undressed to undertake his duties with Mrs. Falenson; Holly, in contrast, undresses herself while escaping her “rat.”

Although Holly expresses sympathy to Paul for the degradations of sex work (and solidarity with him in the expunged lines), Edwards’s shooting of the scene stresses her sexual escape in contrast to Paul’s sexual complaisance. While evading the “rat” in her apartment, she wears her signature black dress by Givenchy, but before slipping through the bathroom window onto the fire escape, she changes into a bathrobe. This costume change is critical to viewers’ sympathy for Holly: the fact that she still wears her dress while fleeing the “rat” proves that his sexual advances were successfully spurned, in contrast to Paul, lying spent and naked in bed following his duties with Mrs. Falenson. Holly comments, “You must be absolutely exhausted. I mean, it is very late, and you were sound asleep and everything.” Her words focus on his sleep rather than on the erotic activities preceding it, yet viewers have seen Mrs. Falenson exiting Paul’s bathroom and understand the reasons for his fatigue. The scene concludes with Holly asking Paul, “Do you mind if I just get in with you for a minute? It’s all right. Really, it is. We’re friends, that’s all,” as she cuddles up against his naked body. The scene’s juxtaposition of innocence and deviance—the female quasi prostitute eluding the clutches of her john, to snuggle against a naked gigolo who has only recently serviced his patron—rewrites the meaning of midcentury American sexual propriety, for viewers are intended to cheer the incipient affection between heroine and hero despite their mercenary circumstances. The necessity of Holly’s costume change also becomes apparent, for she must not be dressed in evening wear if she is to join Paul in bed. Her change prior to entering the apartment quells the sexual dynamics between the two sex workers cuddling together, one of them naked.

Another key distinction between Holly and Paul is that Holly desires, or so she proclaims, to be a kept woman, whereas Paul succeeds in his ambition to be a kept man, only to then reject the security of this position. Although Paul appears to have been involved with Mrs. Falenson only sexually, not emotionally, Holly falls in love with her wealthy suitor José, as she confesses to Paul: “Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you. I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line. Really, except for Doc and yourself, José’s my first non-rat romance.”46 When José breaks up with her over her complicity in the Sally Tomato scandal, Holly is devastated; in contrast, when Paul ends his liaison with his patron, he is asserting a newly developed sense of agency. Mrs. Falenson accepts the possibility that he has taken a new lover and cavalierly offers him a thousand dollars while joking about the necessity of a male prostitutes’ union. She then teases him about his new romance while reminding him of his financial duress: “I do believe love has found Andy Hardy. Let’s see . . . a waitress? A salesgirl? No. She’d have to be someone rich, wouldn’t she, Paul?” Mrs. Falenson’s reference to the Andy Hardy films of the 1930s through the 1950s casts Paul’s love for Holly as innocent, naive, and sincere (and ironically reminds viewers that the star of these films, Mickey Rooney, plays a Japanese man in the current picture). Paul defends himself by casting himself as Holly’s protector: “Thing is, I can help her, and it’s a nice feeling for a change.” Insulted by Mrs. Falenson’s jokes, Paul draws pride from his love for Holly and rejects his patron: “When you get yourself a new writer to help, try and find one my size. That way you won’t have to even shorten the sleeves,” as he exits his walk-in closet, with its many articles of clothing documenting Mrs. Falenson’s generosity to him. The deployment of the closet in a film with queer themes, in which Paul dramatically exits from his cosseted life as a gigolo to seek Holly’s love, imbues the film’s treatment of heterosexuality with an overarching irony: in this instance, the exit from the closet allows the character to be the straight man he has always been and simultaneously to free himself from his queer position as a hired companion to a strong and sexually dominant woman.

To heighten the gendered dynamics of Paul and Mrs. Falenson’s relationship, Edwards underscores that his financial dependence on her effeminizes him, which further overturns gendered norms. When she telephones Paul to cancel a rendezvous after her husband’s unexpected return, she dubs him “Lucille” to dupe her spouse: “Lucille, darling? . . . I’ve been trying desperately to reach you. Bill just got back. [a shot of Bill’s hand making a drink] A day early, the beast. So I’m afraid I’ll have to beg off. You’ll explain to the rest of the girls?” In their scenes together, Patricia Neal portrays Mrs. Falenson in a manner to accentuate her power over Paul, emphasizing her character’s sexual dominance through her cool patrician mien. Her decisions in this regard infuriated Peppard, as Edwards affirmed: “I do remember a certain tension between [Neal and Peppard], which wasn’t bad for their characters—her being a strong woman, and him a kept man. Patricia had suggested in one scene that George sit on her lap. He was horrified. He said he would never do anything like that. To which she replied, ‘Maybe you wouldn’t, but would Paul?’ She really cut him down to size.”47 Reminiscing about the film, Neal summarized her conflicts with Peppard—“And I dominated him a lot more in the script. And he didn’t want to be seen in that condition”—suggesting as well that Peppard “seemed to want to be an old-time movie hunk. . . . In the end George played the role as he wanted, and I always felt that had Blake stood his ground, the film would have been stronger. And so would George Peppard.”48 Such disagreements expose the ways in which the queer themes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—in this instance, the dismantling of the starring male’s position as sexually dominant—troubled Peppard, who resisted filming scenes that would accentuate his character’s weakness. For example, in scenes not included in the film’s release, Axelrod highlights Mrs. Falenson’s sexual agency in contrast to Varjak’s financial dependence. She speaks of him as if he were an investment, and then, with her intentions clearly expressed, demands immediate dividends. The screenplay sets the scene as Mrs. Falenson “draws him to her and kisses him. When they break she very gently pushes him away from her and toward the bed.” She then wheedles, “It’s not so bad, is it? Really?” to which Paul gamely replies, “I suppose there are tougher ways of earning a living.” One can readily imagine Patricia Neal delivering the following lines with patrician aplomb and sexual anticipation: “You bet there are, darling. You just bet there are.”49 The deletion of these scenes builds Varjak’s masculinity, lessening his effeminacy and his dependence on Mrs. Falenson, yet the image of the closet remains the defining metaphor for this midcentury American gigolo who must liberate himself from the shackles of heterosexual intercourse when it is coupled to his financial distress.

In Holly’s cinematic transition from mercenary to romantic, she must learn from Paul about the meaning of love, and one could well argue that this plotline reinstates traditional gender roles, with Paul freeing himself from Mrs. Falenson’s control and then helping Holly to escape from her “rats” as well. When Holly announces her plan to marry Rusty Trawler, the ninth richest man in America under fifty, she does so with financial comfort as her goal: “I need money, and I’ll do whatever I have to do to get it. So, this time next month, I’ll be the new Mrs. Rusty Trawler.” Paul admonishes her, “If I were you, I’d be more careful with my money. Rusty Trawler is too hard a way of earning it.” When they reconcile after this fight, they proclaim their mutual desire to marry each other if they were rich, and Holly kisses Paul on the lips. Paul’s growing disapproval of Holly’s sexual lifestyle reaches its climax when he gives her fifty dollars to go to the powder room at the library, enacting her quasi-prostitutional ritual in a setting that privileges his identity as a writer and that thereby accentuates his newfound freedom from prostitution. This encounter validates Paul’s reconceived sense of heterosexual desire as inspired by love rather than penury, and Holly’s ultimate acquiescence to his viewpoint superficially cleanses the film of its mercenary treatment of desire.

Beyond the queer dynamics of Holly’s and Paul’s sexual lifestyles, Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s paints the early 1960s as a time of recreational excess, particularly in its famed party scene. In Capote’s novella, the party is a stag affair for Holly’s admirers—“Within the next quarter-hour, a stag party had taken over the apartment” (BT 35)—during which Mag Wildwood intrudes to provide another female body among a sea of men. This party’s predominant homosociality is recast in the film as a heterosocial affair of rampant excess and sexual suggestiveness, and Axelrod’s script establishes a raucous tone such that the “general effect is rather like the famous Marx Brothers ‘state-room scene’” in A Night at the Opera (1935).50 Edwards shot the scene with numerous reversals: a laughing woman stares at herself in a mirror, but a subsequent shot shows her crying as mascara runs down her cheeks; a man consults a watch worn on a woman’s ankle; a drunken woman talks with another woman, but when the drunken woman looks away, a man stands up beneath her companion, lifting this woman up so that he is now on face level with the drunken woman; a man wearing an eye patch argues with a woman over whether he was supposed to pick her up, and then lifts up the eye patch to reveal his healthy eye; a man sits on Paul, and so he gives him a hotfoot. Also, as Paul escorts José to the fire escape via the bathroom, he plucks a woman away from her male companion and deposits her onto a couple, whose amorous flirtations she appears to join. As Paul and José enter the bathroom, they find O. J. Berman embracing a woman he earlier dubbed Irving, an echo of the novella’s interest in homoerotic attractions. The party scene continually flirts with attractions polymorphous and ostensibly perverse, none of which is developed into a coherent story line but all of which contribute to the film’s subversion of sexual conformity.

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FIG. 10 Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A scene of suggestive sexual excess in which Paul Varjak (George Peppard) builds a ménage à trois out of miscellaneous party guests.

Such depictions of prostitution and sexual excess throughout Breakfast at Tiffany’s undercut images of Holly as a sexual naïf, despite Hepburn’s obdurate good-girl persona, and the film’s sexual dynamics further subvert any vision of heteronormativity through the specter of pedophilia haunting both it and Capote’s novella. When Holly’s abandoned husband Doc finds her in New York, he explains to Paul the circumstances of their marriage: “Now, you might think the average person going on fourteen wouldn’t know his own mind. But you take Lula Mae—she was an exceptional person. I’ll tell you, son, she just plumb broke our hearts when she run off like she done.”51 In both versions of the narrative, it is clear that Holly had sex with Doc as a young teenager, as she does again in the narrative present. In the novella, she confesses to the narrator that she got no sleep the night of Doc’s visit, and then blushes. “Well, I had to. Doc really loves me, you know” (BT 73). In the film, Doc carries Holly into her apartment, enacting the traditional iconography of a groom carrying his bride over the threshold. Both versions of the narrative agree that the marriage was illegal, but in Capote’s novella Holly simply assumes that the marriage could not be valid—“Divorce him? Of course I never divorced him. I was only fourteen, for God’s sake. It couldn’t have been legal” (BT 72)—whereas in the film she announces, “It was annulled ages ago, but he just won’t accept it,” so as to provide viewers with a conclusive resolution to a pedophilic marriage. Indeed, this change in dialogue reflects censors’ concerns, as Geoffrey Shurlock insisted that Holly’s marriage to Doc be terminated with legal clarity in the film: “You will recall it was agreed that Holly would explain that her marriage to Doc had ‘never been a real marriage at all, and that when she left him, the marriage had been annulled.”52 Doc then returns home to Texas, but the specter of his desire for Holly as his child bride permeates the film with a sentimental yet disturbing vision of heterosexuality’s pedophilic underbelly.

In alluding to Doc’s sexual desire for Holly as a young girl, Edwards develops Capote’s narrative interest in the sex lives of children, a theme running throughout much of his fiction and films, particularly Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Innocents. In this regard, Paul’s conversation with Doc takes place as Doc eats a box of Cracker Jack and shares it with Paul. Paul finds the toy prize inside the box—the ring that he and Holly later have engraved at Tiffany’s—and offers it to its owner: “It’s the prize from the Cracker Jacks. You want it?” Doc replies that he does not. As the ring symbolizes Holly, she passes first through Doc’s hands and then to Paul’s, culminating in the climactic scene when he tosses the ring to her—“Here, I’ve been carrying this thing around for months”—as he exits the taxi transporting her to the airport. The ring, thus transformed from a children’s toy into a token of lifelong love, also encodes Holly as a woman whose self and sexuality are traded by men, whether driven by the pedophilic desire of her abandoned husband or the amatory devotion of her suitor. The film concludes with Holly and Paul reuniting, as she also reunites with her discarded cat, and a tidy romance ending writes over, but cannot erase, the queer themes released throughout the film. Love conquers all for these mercenary prostitutes, who really weren’t so mercenary after all, and this ending strips viewers’ perceptions of their occupations in favor of a romanticized view of heterosexuality, in which love redeems two lost souls through their eternal union. Queerly encoded under a patina of impossible innocence, the love that Holly and Paul share reveals that normative heterosexuality is a chimerical vision, one dependent upon a recalcitrant insistence on presuming the innocence of heterosexuality rather than acknowledging its underbelly of erotic transgressions.

“Too bad about the Tiffany film. I doubt that I will ever go to see it,”53 Capote wrote in a personal letter to Cecil Beaton in 1961. In a 1963 interview he publicly reiterated, “I thought it was awful. I will never allow another movie version of a novel I’ve written.”54 He later summarized his dislike for Edwards’s film: “The film became a mawkish valentine to New York City and Holly and, as a result, was thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly.”55 But as Peter Lehman and William Luhr argue, Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not simply a “mawkish Valentine to New York City” but a complex and contradictory work in itself and in its depiction of the city: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s, then, expresses an ambiguous, contradictory attitude toward New York City. . . . It is a chic center of cosmopolitan style, energy, exuberance, and attractive nonconformist behavior. . . . On the other hand, this freewheeling lifestyle is superficial and the main characters have to escape it in order to mature and develop a growing relationship that leads them toward true love.”56 In this light, to see Edwards’s film as “thin and pretty,” as Capote does, is to overlook its sly depiction of the queerness of heterosexuality, in which two quasi prostitutes find love among the vagaries of their occupations and the shifting sexual mores of American culture. Ironically, Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s may have inspired some of Capote’s subsequent fiction, for the scenes in Answered Prayers in which a wealthy and respected female author adopts the narrator/gigolo P. B. Jones as her protégé mirrors Mrs. Falenson’s relationship with Paul Varjak. Capote’s passionate dislike for Breakfast at Tiffany’s reflects his disappointment with its lack of fidelity to his vision of the narrative as rich and ugly, yet in their joint queerness, the novella and the film promote a progressive sexual agenda just below the surface of Holly Golightly’s “innocent” lifestyle and its intersections with love, romance, and commerce.