(HarperStudio, 231 pages, $19.99)
Doubts were swirling in Audrey Hepburn’s head as she sat in a Manhattan cab watching dawn break over Fifth Avenue, said Mary Kaye Schilling in New York. It was Oct. 2, 1960, and the slim star, the mother of a 10-week-old, was waiting for cameras to roll on the first day of shooting for a film that she wasn’t sure she was quite suited for. Finally, “Action!” The taxi rolled up to a curb and Hepburn stepped out, wearing sunglasses and a black Givenchy gown, pausing to gaze up at the Tiffany & Co. jewelry emporium. “In that moment, the actress, in the guise of Holly Golightly, created an indelible cinematic image—and a new future for women.” Then she peered into a window and bit into a Danish.
Sam Wasson’s “alluring little book” about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s captures the film’s lasting reverberations, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Hepburn’s slim black dress was a fashion revelation. Staying out past dawn became a goal young single women began to aspire to. But many of the best moments in Wasson’s account describe the difficult task of transferring the Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s 1958 novel onto the screen. Capote had been clear that Holly was taking older gentlemen’s money to sleep with them, but Paramount Pictures worked to pass off Holly’s busy nights as resulting from the natural proclivities of “a kook.” The tension in the material forced the filmmakers to create “a new kind of romantic comedy,” one in which the leads were sexually experienced but “yearned for a new kind of fulfillment.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Wasson celebrates the fairy-tale ending of the filmmakers’ struggle, but I wonder if the movie’s legacy “isn’t more problematic,” said Sadie Stein in Jezebel.com. Capote himself wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly, and you can see why: The novel was about “a vulnerable call girl trapped in an image of her own making,” and her crucial relationship was with a gay neighbor. The Hepburn film turned that story into a modern romance, spawning a genre that has inspired generations of young women to flock to cities seeking romances of their own. It’s a pity so many of us have forgotten that Capote’s template was actually a cautionary tale about “the brutal nature of the city and the dangers of reinvention.”
-
Music reviews: Chance the Rapper, Cass McCombs, and Molly TuttleFeature "Star Line," "Interior Live Oak," and "So Long Little Miss Sunshine"
-
Film reviews: Eden and Honey Don't!Feature Seekers of a new utopia spiral into savagery and a queer private eye prowls a high-desert town
-
Critics' choice: Three chefs fulfilling their ambitionsFeature Kwame Onwuachi's grand second act, Travis Lett makes a comeback, and Jeff Watson's new Korean restaurant
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”