A Reel Phony: Class, Race, Sex, and Audrey Hepburn in a Bastardized Adaptation

I've never understood, or rather related to, the appeal of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a much beloved rom-com classic, chic chick flick, National Film Registry selection, 5 Oscar nominations, Audrey Hepburn, the little black dress. For this viewing, I even read Truman Capote's novella, although that surely didn't help me to appreciate the film given this is a notoriously unfaithful film adaptation. There's an entire "Seinfeld" episode revolving around that fact. Capote was certainly displeased.

"Audrey was not what I had in mind when I wrote that part, although she did a terrific job. But Marilyn [Monroe] was what I wanted."

The book was really bitter, and Holly Golightly was real -- a tough character, not an Audrey Hepburn type at all. 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."

- Truman Capote, from interviews in "Playgirl" and "Playboy" magazines, and probably the nicest things I've read the author say about the film or its casting, otherwise being even more negative regarding Hepburn's role, stating a desire to spit at the "lousy" director, and throwing up over Mickey Rooney.

Rewatching Monroe films recently surely did the film no favors, either, placing in my imagination what the picture might've looked like had she got the part. I sought out Sam Wasson's making-of book "Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M." and more fawning praise of the picture to try to offset such prejudices. No avail, I still detest it, ever more so. Rooney's racist caricature and the homophobic straightening of the gay narrator-writer protagonist, a thinly-veiled version of Capote himself, and the novella's general queer quality also distract from what's otherwise just a timelessly bad movie that, moreover, contradicts the feminist strengths of the literary source and its throughline subtext, perhaps unremarked upon except in Melissa Phruksachart's excellent essay, that the book subversively confronts America's miscegenation paranoia. Hardly a New York valentine.

It's as though playwright-turned-screenwriter George Axelrod wanted to bastardize someone else's work after what Hollywood did to his own plays, namely the Monroe vehicle "The Seven Year Itch" (1955) and, a play rooted in Hollywood adulterating the former and with a Monroe knockoff played by Jayne Mansfield, "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1957). So, why not this anti-Monroe princess-as-prostitute debacle of, a better writer, doubtless, Capote's caustic wit turned rom-com tropes that set feminism and the Sexual Revolution back to "Sex and the Single Girl" and "Sex and the City," including now, ironically, the gay best friend cliché and a pandering "Woke" reboot. The surprising nuances of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" to a shameless Tiffany & Co. commercial made out of an eponymous offhand whimsical remark or two from the book. No diamonds before 40 asterisked by but tiaras and pearls are OK. Gold digging without the love.

"Of course I haven't anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can't bang the guy and cash his checks and at least not try to believe you love him. I never have."

- Holly Golightly, sounding a lot like a vulgar Monroe to me, in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the book.

Almost everything about the film is wrong, except for the cat and the song "Moon River." The notion of the protagonist as the writer of the story is taken from the book and is bungled in adaptation with the inane romance, so no points for that. Even Wasson's unaccountable gushing over the film would seem tempered by the admission that, "Anything of the know-how and resilience Capote instilled in his heroine was now out of step with the new Holly, who Axelrod was turning, quite deliberately, into a cockeyed dreamer à la Princess Ann in Roman Holiday and Sabrina in Sabrina." The character study the narrator of the page followed into a library replaced by a moron who must be taught by a man how a library works, and the rubes still make a ruckus and deface a library book. (Read the "Reel Librarian" write-up linked in Works Cited for more on the film's library scenes.) That's not a concept of charming, quirky, or kooky I can get behind, nor is his insistence that he owns her because he loves her, albeit as later tempered by the suggestion they own each other. This is based on a book concerned with Mary Wollstonecraft's proverbial gilt cage motif of patriarchal marriage that instead turns Holly's free-spiritedness into the supposed cage, mere more feminine mystique, a commodity like a Cracker Jack prize engraved at Tiffany's. Romantic, huh.

Framing his essay around the disillusioning confection surprise, "a feeling of solidarity," "continuity with the past," as the Tiffany's clerk says, Zachary Wunrow retorts, "For most of the film, the irresistible, irrepressible icon that is Hepburn's Holly Golightly signifies glamour, alluring idiosyncrasy, and nonconformity; yet by the end, much of her subversive potential has been undone." All the more troubling because while the film rewrites the book's ending, it emphasizes the child-bride subplot. "The notion that Holly might sustain an identity of her own -- without a male counterpart -- proves illusory: the ring was in the Cracker Jack box the entire time, to be passed from her ex-husband Doc Golightly (Buddy Ebsen) to a second patriarchal protector Paul Varjak (George Peppard)."

Even the expansion of the more frivolous mask stealing bit annoys me, of them constantly glancing at the five and dime staff to see if they're watching them. Note to thieves, don't wander a store excessively and repeatedly eyeball staff if you want to be inconspicuous. No way that cashier and security guard cared all that much about their jobs, because they had to know those two were there to steal. I mean, if you want to depict shoplifting as romantic, whatever, but then this just becomes like watching an extremely inept sex scene. I thought they were supposed to be professionals. I'm not one to write much on the trendy topic of "white privilege," either, but this nonsense is asking for it. Also, what dead brother; that's just an excuse for some kooky misnaming--and quasi-incestuousness now that they're a romantic couple. So cutesy I could vomit, too. The unimportant details loyally transmuted from page to screen with little of the structure that actually mattered.

I roll my eyes when Wasson or whomever mention the film and Hepburn's supposed role in the Sexual Revolution or 1960s counter culture. I don't think playing up the prostitution of the book so as to distance the film from its source's queerness qualifies as anything more than reactionary. Besides the narrator, another gay-coded character is entirely erased, as are any bisexual inclinations expressed by Holly. That in addition to turning a character of a few, non-offensive lines early on from Capote, a character who might be put in an internment camp for how non-existent he is for the rest of the narrative, into a broken English-speaking, bucktoothed, hachimaki and kimono-wearing, and all else Orientalism, Japanese comic-relief stereotype as played by the white Rooney in yellowface, who, Phruksachart puts it, becomes "a Japanese traitor and misinformed spy" when he "rats" out Holly. An extra of Asian descent is cast for the party scene as if only to highlight how less interested the picture is in such a portrayal. There's also a line spoken by Hepburn's Holly that truncates a speech from Capote into something newly racist, suggesting her hypothetical mixed-race offspring will be dark, "but" will have beautiful green eyes.

The story of Capote's Holly is one of her crossing the color line, from a WWII-era scarcity of eligible heterosexual white bachelors under 50 in New York and the U.S., her first option being the "Nazi" Rusty Trawler, subsequently the multiracial Brazil and the abandoned unborn child, and finally her traveling the world and sleeping with a black man in Africa, and only after a narrative of confronting racialized fears, including a group of black children who spark a horse-riding miscarriage. In place of that, Hollywood gives us reinforced white-supremacist patriarchy. Rooney's impotent Mr. Yunioshi, as Phruksachart says, "his inability to embody a performance of whiteness and/or authority" is integral to the picture's phoniness, Hepburn's Holly's "pure" whiteness against his grotesqueness, from Hillbilly to urbane white, a "fetish of the emotionally real" that is to say white and straight with "class," not "phony." "Free, white, and twenty-one," as the American idiom goes.

Enjoy your rom-com. Again, no points from me for the adaptation here, especially given the weakness of the Production Code and social changes by the early 60s, as well as members of the production and film critics noting at least the particular offensiveness of Rooney's role at the time. From Monroe overseeing a couple of gender-playing transvestites and a climactic acceptance of a queer romance in "Some Like It Hot" (1959) to this classist, homophobic, misogynistic, and racist trash? That's not progress, not subversive, and it's certainly not some kind of "heterosexual queerness" as Tison Pugh goes so far as to ridiculously argue.

Most seem to concede that Peppard is unimpressive and is rumored to have been difficult to work with. One of Wasson's colorful anecdotes attributes the director, Edwards, with calling him a witless ham, a "piss-poor actor." To cut to the chase, though, central to my bafflement with the excessive admiration for this film is that Hepburn is overrated. No. 3 on the AFI's top 50 list of classic film actresses; that's got to be a joke. The only two performances here that consistently affect, those of Ebsen and, in a part invented for the film (and for which I'm guessing the "interior decorator" joke is a homophobic jab at the book), Patricia Neal, are far too slight of roles to be of much consequence. Moreover, for all the talk of Monroe supposedly playing herself again and again, that wasn't the case; her star persona was a construct, one repeatedly complicated and deconstructed, and she was later trained in the same Method as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Hepburn, meanwhile, was a European aristocrat who went on to play movie princesses and insultingly and unconvincingly, as here, commoners transformed for high society. I'm sure she was a lovely woman and that her humanitarian work makes up for her family's past fascism, but she wasn't much of an actress, if anything a glamour girl model and personality that's become a cultural icon for clothes horses, classist adoration confusing grace and style, the haute obsession with what, and to cite more anecdotes from Wasson's book, Edith Head claimed as the thinnest waist line since the Civil War, or, as Billy Wilder quipped, "This girl singlehanded may make bosoms a thing of the past."

Doubly no help that her two most famous roles were infamously considered for more talented performers who would've also made for more appropriate casting, Monroe for this and Julie Andrews with "My Fair Lady" (1964). No mere resentment for resistance to financing a remake, Emma Thompson may be right:

"I find Audrey Hepburn fantastically twee. Twee is whimsy without wit. It's mimsy-mumsy sweetness without any kind of bite. And that's not for me. She can't sing, and she can't really act, I'm afraid."

- Emma Thompson, for a "Hollywood Reporter" interview.

That's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in a nutshell, too, as even a New York call girl is turned into another opportunity for Audrey Hepburn to play herself in a rom-com that's neither touching nor funny and a whole lot worse. Y'know, they've been doing the dramatic reunion and kissing in the rain bit since at least Mary Pickford's "My Best Girl" (1927). It worked then, but it's been mostly hacky since, mouser or no in the middle. Hepburn also negotiated choice of director, getting the then-unproven John Frankenheimer removed from the production. I don't know how Frankenheimer would've worked out, but I do know that the mediocrity of, if not "lousy," Edwards that they eventually had to settle on after being unable to enlist an A-list director is what's credited with getting Edwards's friend Rooney cast. His other big innovation of the party scene is harmless-enough broad and bland slapstick, I suppose, but hardly the hilarity some suggest, let alone enough to make up for Rooney, if not also the rest. It's a super-rat of a reel phony that gives one the mean reds.

Works Cited
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. Modern Library Edition, 1994.

Hueso, Noela. "Walk of Fame: Emma Thompson." The Hollywood Reporter. Website. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/walk-fame-emma-thompson-26350/.

Norden, Eric. "Playboy Interview: Truman Capote." Playboy (March 1968).

Phruksachart, Melissa. "The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi: Yellowface and the Queer Buzz of Breakfast at Tiffany's." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 3, no. 32 (2017): 92-119.

Pugh, Tison. Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies. The University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Snoek-Brown, Jennifer. "A reel librarian gets shushed in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961)." Reel Librarians (11 May 2022). Website. reel-librarians.com/2022/05/11/reader-poll-write-up-spring-2022-a-reel-librarian-gets-shushed-in-breakfast-at-tiffanys-1961/.

Wasson, Sam. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. HarperCollins, 2010.

Wunrow, Zachary B. "Holly Golightly and the Endless Pursuit of Self-Actualization in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's.'" Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 6, no. 9 (2014): 1-3. www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/915/holly-golightly-and-the-endless-pursuit-of-self-actualization-in-breakfast-at-tiffanys.

Zeerink, Richard. "Truman Capote Talks About His Crowd." Playgirl (September 1975).