Hello lovely people,
Today we’re going to be pulling apart Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the book and then the film…
Whilst also wearing an incredibly red dress because
it’s almost valentine’s day and it seems fitting.
We know the film or at least think we do. We’ve all seen the poster for sale on every poster
website going and the various items of merch that have Audrey Hepburn’s face has been plastered on.
Not to mention the number of people who base their entire wardrobe on her…
But do we REALLY know the film?
Do we know the book behind it?
Do we know how QUEER it is?
Yes, it’s LGBTQ+ History Month here in the UK so let’s get rolling with some Queer History 101.
If you’re new to the channel then hi, I’m Jessica. I make videos about Disability,
Chronic Illness and LGBTQ+ issues- sometimes vintage fashion too because
I just… happen to look like this all the time.
Sometimes they’re sit downs, sometimes they’re more vloggy,
sometimes they have my wife, sometimes they even have my baby-
His name is Rupert, he’s 8 months old, I’m very much in love with him.
Generally there will also be a dog in the background making a
noise or in today's case sleeping silently.
We are very pleased with this change of events!
Today’s video is also sponsored by BetterHelp because on this channel we
believe that mental health is just as important as physical health.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote published in 1958.
In it, a writer recalls his past, early days living in New York City,
when he made the acquaintance of his remarkable neighbour, Holly Golightly.
The unnamed narrator befriends Holly Golightly in autumn 1943. The
two are tenants in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Holly,
who is around the age of 19, is a country girl turned New York cafe society girl. As such,
she has no job and lives by socializing with wealthy men, who take her to clubs and
restaurants, and give her money and expensive presents; she also hopes to marry one of them.
Capote asserted that Holly was not a prostitute but an “American geisha”.
If you’ve read the book or seen the film you’ll know that Holly isn’t…
quite a prostitute, she’s just… an escort of sorts.
‘The kind of girl who asks for $50 for the powder room’ she’s described as-
ie. much more than she needs for a tip so she gets to keep the change and can make money that way.
Capote meant for her to express the sentiment of all the big-dreaming
small-town girls who ran away to make it in New York City.
But then found as mid century girls did that oops they were girls
and there weren't many employment opportunities open to them.
And although, as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke wrote "half the women he knew ... claimed
to be the model for his wacky heroine," there are actually similarities between the lives of Holly
and Capote's mother, Nina Capote; both women were born in the rural south with similar
"hick" birth names that they changed (Holly Golightly was born Lulamae Barnes in Texas,
Nina Capote was born Lillie Mae Faulk in Alabama), both left the husbands they married as teenagers
and abandoned relatives they loved and were responsible for, instead going to New York,
and both achieved "café society" status through relationships with wealthier men,
though Capote's mother was born two decades earlier than the fictional Holly Golightly.
Whilst Clarke also wrote of the similarities between the author himself and the character of
Holly, the narrator- who was given the name ‘Paul’ in the film so I’m just going to call him ‘Paul’,
ok? It’s really annoying saying ‘the narrator’- is very much a reflection of Capote himself.
He’s this young writer in New York, right at this period of sexual liberation,
he’s going to make a name for himself, he’s surrounded by dazzling, stylish
women and he’s utterly enamoured with this captivating girl-
But in a completely platonic way!
Because much like Truman Capote, the book tells you it’s gay once every eight pages.
Although if you don’t know the lingo of the
1950s homosexual circles it’s maybe understandable if you missed it.
Maybe.
It’s pretty gay.
Our first idea that the narrator is gay comes from Holly’s definition
of a gay man from page 38: “If a man doesn’t like baseball, then he must like horses,
and if he doesn’t like either of them, well, I’m in trouble anyway: he don’t like girls”
Hands up if you too are apparently a gay man now(!)
Well, Holly throws a party and the narrator recounts that he was
“left abandoned by the bookshelves: of the books there, more than half were about horses,
the rest baseball. Pretending an interest in Horseflesh and
How to Tell It gave me sufficiently private opportunity for seizing Holly’s friends”.
Not only does he not know anything about either of these topics… he doesn’t LIKE them either.
He even goes horseback riding with Holly and
almost gets himself killed because he doesn’t know what he’s doing-
that’s just how gay he is(!)
Throughout the book his disregard for “typically heterosexual” interests
therefore essentially signifies his homosexuality.
I know, I know- it’s very stereotypical cis gay stuff but this was written in the 1950s,
a time when lighting another man’s cigarette was basically equivalent to coming out in a film.
In an ‘if you know, you know’ way.
Other not-so-subtle hints come when Holly, asserting that she will not
under any circumstances testify against Sally Tomato (yes, that’s the name of a
male mafia gangster in the book. Slightly on the nose), says on page 93:
“Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not.”
‘Maude’ was slang for either a male prostitute or a male homosexual.
There is also a great bit about a metaphorical journey when when the narrator comes,
by the end of the book, from Holly’s apartment to Joe Bell’s, he makes the following remark:
“Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy’s Landing, Mississippi, just
under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to the journey to Joe Bell’s bar”.
Nancy’s Landing doesn’t exist as a real place, it’s merely an allegory
to express the narrator’s coming out since ‘Nancy’ was used to refer to ‘an effeminate,
homosexual man.’ and the milage expresses the difficulty in coming out.
Speaking of coming out…
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But what of Holly herself?
Well, we’re probably used to thinking of her as Audrey Hepburn: icon.
Hetero icon at that.
In the novella - potentially trigger warning for language here as some consider it a slur
and some feel proud of it, I personally don’t love it being used against me. Anyway…
In the novella, Holly says explicitly that she doesn’t identify as a “dyke”:
“Of course I like dykes themselves. They don’t scare me a bit. But stories about
dykes bore the bejesus out of me. I can’t put myself in their shoes.”
Yet, only a little bit later Holly describes a situation with an old roommate in Hollywood. “Of
course people couldn’t help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course I am. Everyone
is: a bit. So what? That never discouraged a man yet, in fact it seems to goad them on.”
I don’t love that at all.
I don't love that I have to say that either.
When talking about remarrying, Holly says, “I’d settle for [Greta] Garbo
any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or—”
and then she moves on with the conversation, the comment dropped lightly.
At least on the page, Holly’s sexuality is free-form, something more fluid and
more difficult to categorize than most other art forms allowed for at the time.
In a 1968 interview with Playboy, the interviewer asked Capote, “Was Holly a Lesbian?”
Because god works hard but bisexual erasure works harder.
Capote replied: “Of course, there’s a Lesbian component in every woman,
but what intrigues me is the heterosexual male’s fascination with Lesbians.”
In other words, you asking me this question means you’re part of the problem.
Holly’s sexuality doesn’t matter quite as much as how the world perceives and polices it. For Holly,
sexuality is just part of the persona she has woven around herself and it’s
how she stays alive. She is an icon for a new era, one where women can
only be themselves when they run away from men and society’s expectations.
Paul and Holly are bound to each other precisely because their intimacy is platonic, and therefore
not transactional. Their togetherness is not filling a need for money or sex,
it is a choice they are both willingly making, for the pure pleasure of each other’s company.
But, of course, that’s not how movies work- that’s not big screen enough!
Paramount Pictures, who acquired the rights to the story, were initially reluctant to
even make the film. It didn’t have any of the key features they were looking for: no
love story, no central conflict, no happy ending and
what on earth were they meant to do with a gay protagonist and a… not-not-a-call-girl.
The film was rewritten for the screen by George Alexrod but even his ending wasn’t good enough-
too close to Capote’s novel, which ends on a question mark: what happens to Holly? Where
does she disappear to after this? What’s going to happen to these two people now?
So an ending was tacked on by director Blake Edwards:
the classic Hollywood romantic consummation with the big kiss!
Yeah eh we know it.
It’s been done.
The kiss itself was an apology, to the audience and to the censor board- these
two people are definitely going to get married now and they’re definitely going to reform,
we promise!
And speaking of the censor board…
Looking back at Breakfast at Tiffany’s the film in 2022 it isn’t exactly high up there with
‘shocking’ films-
that iconic look of Audrey Hepburn in her little black dress and pearls, eating a pastry outside
Tiffany’s or singing Moon River on the fire escape seems pretty sanitised. It’s kinda vanilla.
but… not only did the film usher in a new fashion era for women,
it also signaled a change in the average person’s attitude toward sexuality.
As the 50s became the 60s, sexual mores strayed from the rigid monogamy
of the past into the culture that produced the Free Love movement.
Obviously I'm not saying everyone was in that movement at all. But still.
However, as always, Hollywood lagged behind.
The Motion Picture Production Code, which banned things like ‘excessive kissing’ (the horror)
or two adults being seen in the same bed (hence why all married couples sleep in
twin beds or separate rooms in old movies) came into effect in 1934.
I have a whole video about it, which you can watch by clicking
the link in the description or the card in this top corner.
[Oh. I used the wrong hands at the wrong time. You get it!]
Since then, homosexuality had been nodded to in film, but in coded language
(like a pansy worn on the lapel or the aforementioned lighting of another man’s
cigarette) or in stereotypical and mocking portrayals, almost always of effeminate men.
Oh you are allowed to do gay people if bad thjings happen. They just have to get their upcomopings.
Lesbians were generally evil, manly and predatory and had to be killed
to protect the general population and sweet women from their murderous ways.
Why are lesbians always murderous?
Oh wait, the answer is: that’s supposed to be a man thing.
By the time screenwriter George Axelrod was adapting Tiffany’s for the screen in 1960,
the production code’s grip on American filmmaking was already beginning to loosen, largely thanks to
British and other foreign films being much racier and the advent of television, which from the start
catered to it’s audience’s actual desires rather than what it THOUGHT they should be watching.
TV: it was always kind of trash and we loved it.
That’s only part true and a massive simplification,
but I’m just making a fun YouTube video about how gay Breakfast at Tiffany’s is,
please don’t come for me, ghosts of my past university essays!
I studied the history of the screen. Can you tell?
Anyway, Axelrod found himself with the challenge of satisfying audiences who
wanted movies that reflected their changing attitudes, while still making a movie
the tight rules of the Production Code would deem decent enough to release.
So he just threw in some other stuff he KNEW the board would cut out!
He knew that the book was too gay and Holly was too sexual so
he made Paul into a heterosexual kept man- creating a conflict that the film needed:
(Deep down, Holly and Paul want to be together, but their need for money and
stability keeps driving them back to their respective benefactors)
AND lots of sexually charged hetero stuff that the board could easily cut out
and hopefully would miss the rest.
There was a scene detailing Paul’s paid sexual relationship with his benefactor 2E. Cut!
There was a scene with Holly on screen in only a bra and half slip. Cut!
There was even a little -gasp- LANGUAGE. Cut!
So by focusing on those, the board simply overlooked the film’s other gay undertones and
Holly’s own status as an escort because you know… it wasn’t as bold as it happened in the book.
A large part of that also has to do with the mystique and pull of Audrey Hepburn.
Capote had originally hoped for Marilyn Monroe to play Holly,
she was the type of girl he had pictured whilst writing but she and her advisors
worried that playing a “woman of the night” would tarnish her image. Which is
interesting in light of how we think of Holly, we don't think of her as that risqué.
When Audrey Hepburn was cast instead, Capote was less than thrilled. “Paramount
double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey,” he later claimed.
But the Audrey persona is so strong we don’t believe that Holly could be anything
outside of the bounds of it. The film coded in that she’s a bisexual call girl
but she’s also Audrey Hepburn so we just read it as…
Audrey Hepburn being fabulous.
We see Holly in a little black dress in a time of florals and chintz and big,
bold colors. Well, that’s actually a hint at what she’s doing at night. She’s living outside of the
norm. If you’re a girl with a busy life, you don’t have time for the sweet, girlie uniform.
But instead it’s been turned into an iconic symbol of sophistication
because everything Audrey does is… iconic.
Of course in changing many things from the book we do lose the beauty of the original,
platonic and uncomplicated relationship between Holly and the narrator. Capote
is suggesting that the gendered strictures of who makes the money (men) and who doesn’t
(women) might not be as enriching as the romance between a gay man and bisexual woman.
However, though it seems that Breakfast at Tiffany’s homosexual thematic elements
had been entirely erased in the film, and the sharp edges of the book are gone… writer George
Axelrod director Blake Edwards did manage to sneak in one little bit of same-sex desire from Holly.
In the scene where she and Paul go to what appears to be a strip club, a woman dances on stage while
removing her dress. As she watches, Holly lowers her sunglasses and looks up at the woman.
Though she says nothing, her face very clearly says,
“Yes, please!”
And there you go, that is: Breakfast At Tiffany’s is Queerer than
you think!
Did you know any of this before? Let me know in the comments down below.
I hope you enjoyed
today’s video. Please subscribe if you haven’t already and I hope to see you in my next one.
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