My Journey To Breakfast At Tiffany’s

My first encounter with Breakfast At Tiffany’s was Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy and rhinestones. Like a lot of little girls, I had the calendar and the costume jewellery and a battery-powered vintage-looking alarm clock that had the Robert McGinnis poster emblazoned on it in technicolour – one that I kept long after it stopped functioning as an alarm clock. I wore black dresses to parties and, when in Rome, made my bemused friends take my picture on the Spanish Steps as a tribute to Audrey. All my friends knew that my interest was serious, and one gave me a wonderful Christmas present of a framed collage of Audrey on pink paper. My parents, seeing this fairly typical teenage interest, got me the DVD. Actually, one whole birthday was Audrey-themed for me: my presents were a boxed set of five Audrey Hepburn at Paramount DVDs, some elbow-length gloves, and a set of faux pearls. I spent the day in the dress I wore to my uncle’s wedding (black satin) and a tiara (from Claire’s). It was the gateway into classic movies – first Breakfast At Tiffany’s, then Sabrina, then so many more that I sought out. In New York, I had actual breakfast at actual Tiffany’s, getting coffee and pastries and orange juice at Grand Central Station and dragging my parents to stand outside the store at 8 in the morning so I could do it how Audrey does in the film.

When I was about 17, I read the book, and overnight the film was dead to me.

I have always loved Truman Capote, ever since I first picked up the slim little copy of Breakfast At Tiffany’s from the library. Audrey’s image was on the cover, of course – it was her in sunglasses; the book itself was a silver-spined Penguin Modern Classic. It felt glamorous because it felt adult – the minimalist modernism of the cover and the imprint felt like real pearls in my fingers instead of the pearlescent plastic ropes of Audrey’s picture, stamped on everything. I had requested it, knew that I wanted it and a librarian had gone to fetch it for me. It was more like the Orwell I was reading than the frothy pink chick lit I picked up second hand and read ‘ironically’, and it turned my understanding of the story on its head. Not just because of its explicit portrayal of sex work and the egregious, blatant racism and homophobia that Capote writes about – some but not all of which I ‘got’ at that age – but because of the total and utter lack of resemblance to the version I had seen: the characters all play different roles, it’s set in a different time with a much different context added by the Second World War, and the gaze through which Capote realises the character of Holly is totally different. It’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the romance in the novel is completely one-sided, and the book is a vignette in a life rather than a romance. Holly’s autonomy is ultimately the focal point of the novel, and we only witness it from the point of view of the narrator. In the movies, the plays, and the images, Holly is the main character, but she no longer has autonomy (‘I love you, you belong to me’ says Paul Varjack), though the loss of it is played through a passionate kiss in the rain and the searing strings of Moon River. At that age, I felt I had to disown that which I had encountered first in order to accept the supremacy of that which had come first.

It was in this period I got angry at the movie because it began the erasure of the book I had fallen in love with. I threw a copy of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City at the wall for her misquoting Capote’s original, which she had clearly never even begun to read. I couldn’t fathom that McGinnes had pioneered a career in accessible artistry and graphic design, thinking instead that he must have had to design movie posters and book covers, that his clear talent was wasted on interpreting others’ stories. This was the era in which I attended multiple stage plays of the Breakfast At Tiffany’s story, starring Anna Friel or Pixie Lott, attempting to find an adaptation that would bypass the iconic movie and create a totally new image of Holly that even vaguely resembled the one inside my mind – one which attempted to actually transpose the book into a visual medium, even if they went full pearls-and-cigarette-holder on the poster. Breakfast At Tiffany’s was pivotal to me becoming a literature student, because it made me want to rush to the defence of books and ally myself with the printed word over a gauche mass-media that had drawn me to these books in the first place. I read Capote, Ian Fleming, Christopher Isherwood, and a lot of Orwell, attempting to reclaim my mind and equip myself with a journalistic sensibility divorced from the dumbed-down movie versions that had put me in a mindframe to be receptive to this kind of text. It was important to me to look beyond the easily encountered, and I began to develop an interest in silent films and medieval epic poems as the inspirations to the more obvious greats.

In this way, it’s through Breakfast At Tiffany’s that you can trace my journey as a cultural theorist. First comes an attraction to something, and if I could I’d assure my young self that in itself is valid. Attraction is interest, the things we are attracted to direct us to aspects of culture that we find interesting. There is a certain undefinable thing which draws us in and shows us what we’re interested in exploring – the attraction is important, and you could never explain to anybody else why it’s that particular thing you’re attracted to. After attraction to an image comes an engagement with mainstream culture, the accessible form of what you were attracted to. This allows us to more deeply connect with that ‘thing’, to more fully understand the subtext behind the image and, even subconsciously, understand what it represents, and begin to understand what it means to us. Beyond the mainstream culture is ‘highbrow’ culture – reading the book it’s based on, seeing the silent movie the cinematographer was inspired by, recognising the artistic tradition that went into the creation of mass media. When you first encounter this, you feel like the culture you engaged with first was a lie, and that the art you loved lied to you by omitting something or changing the text or the subtext. You feel like you have to ‘pick a side’ in the fight between new and old, the thing you loved first and the thing it came from. Nothing, though, is new: all artists borrow or react, and when you first discover where something you love came from it changes the way you feel about it. The final phase is to recognise and accepting that different mediums tell stories in different ways. The power of a character in a book is not lessened by the power of the image she inspired, whichever one has more ‘depth’ or is more ‘iconic’. Blake Edwards’ version of Holly Golightly was aiming for different things to Capote’s – he wanted the Audrey image to be something other women could recognise themselves in; Truman Capote didn’t want Audrey at all. The wistfulness in the movie isn’t Holly’s, it’s Paul’s, and over the years I have slowly realised that the movie adaptation didn’t miss the point – rather to say, it was aiming at a whole different point. 

It took many years in my cultural development, but I am finally able to enjoy all aspects of the Breakfast At Tiffany’s mythos on their own terms. I can take the visuals and the fashion and the aesthetic sensibility and divorce it entirely from the movie it came from. I can watch the movie without feeling like my favourite book was betrayed. I was 17 years old when I first read it – I wasn’t Raymond Williams, Pierre Bordieu, or Augusto Boal, but through Breakfast At Tiffany’s I began to recognise ideas put forward by each of these great thinkers, meaning that my first encounters with each of these theorists was not from the ivory tower of academia but as a fan, an ordinary person struggling with the interpretation of the media I love, forever trying to understand the power held in each of its incarnations. 

It remains my dream to see a decent adaptation of the book. It should be on the BBC, at Christmas-time, not be more than an hour long, and look more like an early Ginger Rodgers movie (I’m imagining ‘Kitty Foyle’) than anything Blake Edwards ever did. What I took from a complex, ever-changing relationship with this one story, though – what Breakfast At Tiffany’s has taught me – is that ‘classic’ is context-bound, that an education can come from anything, that culture is anything, and that I can enjoy things on their own terms without it affecting my enjoyment of seemingly contradictory things. These are valuable lessons, ones which I often remind myself to remember.

To-Do:

• Read emails
• Birkbeck PGRS conference – organising and write a GD paper
• Talk to friends

Today’s Culture:

• Kitty Foyle – the Ginger Rodgers vehicle I want my ‘dream’ adaptation to look like.
• Alligator, or mock-croc, shoes. My love for alligator leather never left me after that first viewing.
• Truman Capote reading from his book.