Marilyn with her friend, the novelist Truman Capote, circa 1956
‘Another influence on Capote’s sense of this bright new character in American fiction was Marilyn Monroe. He loved the wit and the strange sadness Marilyn expressed in her friendship with him; the sense of aloneness and of running away from the past, which turns out to be the exact feeling behind the ”mean reds’’, the depressions that lead Holly Golightly to take a cab to 5th Avenue and eat breakfast in front of Tiffany’s window.
Capote wanted Marilyn for the film and he was never happy with the casting of Audrey Hepburn. The author had wanted a kind of literary magic to light up the screen, the book’s black lining to show through the tinsel and peroxide, but the film starring Hepburn would prove to be as light as soufflé and Givenchy-cool.
(Martin Jurow, the film’s co-producer, recalls a meeting at which Capote insisted he himself play the male lead. ”Truman, this role just isn’t good enough for you,’’ said Jurow, thus saving the author’s face and probably saving the film, too.) But Capote was always more bitter about the casting of Holly. ”Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way,’’ he said. ”Holly had to have something touching about her – unfinished. Marilyn had that. Audrey is an old friend and one of my favourite people but she was just wrong for that part.’’
Sadly for Marilyn, the people around her (including herself: by this point she was failing, and more around herself than in her own skin) thought it too obvious that she play a hooker. When they first offered the part to Hepburn, she didn’t want to be a hooker either. The producer insisted Holly wasn’t a hooker, but ”a dreamer of dreams, a lopsided romantic’’. The character was to become a midcentury classic: on screen, she was less vulnerable, less dark and less raw, but Hepburn gave her a classy easefulness that was more in touch with the Sixties.’
Extract from ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s: 50 Years of Sunshine and Heartbreak’, an article by Andrew O’Hagan (author of the 2010 comic novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe), published in today’s Telegraph.
