The Hindsight of Breakfast at Tiffany’s
In my misspent youth during the early days of the internet, I created and helmed what was ultimately a ridiculous number of celebrity fan sites. The first and one of the biggest of those was The Altar to Audrey, a top-heavy, unfortunately named behemoth of a site dedicated to Audrey Hepburn. I’ve been an Audrey Hepburn fan since I was a teenager in the early Nineties. She was to me the epitome of a specific and enviable brand of feminine grace, and I longed to be more like her.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I’ve seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s innumerable times: It was one of the first Hepburn films I ever saw, and it seems as though I’ve kept it readily on hand in one form or another ever since. Barring the inherent discomfort of the racial issues (Which I’ll expand on later), I adore the film.
Color me surprised, then, that after finally getting around to reading Capote’s original novella, I find myself wishing more than ever that the film version had been handled differently. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want to attack Blake Edwards or tear down the legacy of the film. For its faults, it remains a solid piece of filmmaking, worthy of being beloved. But the crux of the whole story — The tone, the motivation — were lost in the transition to the big screen.
Even after some fifteen years and countless viewings familiarizing me with the idea of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, as I read the story I couldn’t picture her at all (And believe me, I tried- Out of a sense of loyalty if nothing else). Truman Capote famously wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role, but I imagined a cheeky Grace Kelly: Regal, inherently sexual, fiercely complicated, and absolutely blonde. I finally understand why Capote railed against the studio for casting Audrey without his consent, because while Audrey’s version is enduring and intriguing in her own right, not even lifting the bulk of the dialogue directly from the novel can change how fundamentally different she is from the original. Audrey brings a certain fragility to the role that, when combined with the changes to the story itself, create a completely different beast altogether.
I have to wonder what screenwriter George Axelrod was thinking. Beyond the shift in the central character, there are omissions and additions that perplex me — The narrator as a kept man, for example, or the clear implication that the narrator and Holly have sex, neither of which are included in the novel. Most confounding is the careful removal of all offhand remarks of a racist nature (Not entirely unexpected for a story set in the 1940s), but addition of Mickey Rooney’s now-infamous and utterly pointless Yellowface portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi. To be fair, Blake Edwards has expressed regret at allowing the character to be so depicted (There is nothing in the novel to suggest Yunioshi has even so much as an accent, much less spends his days running around as a horrible Asian stereotype), and still I have to boggle at what the hell they were thinking, but I’m going to leave that issue to people more eloquent and educated on the subject than me.
The point of all this isn’t simply to wax philosophic over book vs. screen, though, but rather to assert how much I wish someone would take on not a remake, but an entirely new film more open to modern sensibilities and keeping more with Capote’s compelling, original vision. I don’t want to go so far as to say the story was squandered on the film, but I do believe the fundamental essence of it was lost, and that is such a shame. Anna Friel is reportedly due to star in a stage adaptation of the film this September; Will she go one way or the other with her Holly, or develop a whole new interpretation?
As for you, I encourage you to dig out your library card, hustle to the C section of the fiction shelves, and take an afternoon to discover exactly why Breakfast at Tiffany’s compelled Norman Mailer to claim Truman Capote was “the most perfect writer of [his] generation.”
