Breakfast (and a Movie) at Tiffany’s

On May 4, I thought about Audrey Hepburn, who was born on that date in 1929. If she had lived, she would have just turned 85. That’s hard to imagine, given what a charming gamine she made in films like Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), and Funny Face (1957). Of course she got older, and skillfully took on mature roles in Two for the Road (1967) and Robin and Marian (1976). But Hepburn had no opportunity to truly become elderly on screen. She left us in 1993, at the age of 63.

One of Audrey Hepburn’s classic performances came in the 1961 Blake Edwards film version of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As party-girl Holly Golightly, who stays afloat in New York City with a little help from her (male) friends, Hepburn is both hilarious and heart-breaking. Capote, though, was not pleased. The story as he envisioned it called for a Holly who was less elegant and more earthy. To Capote, Marilyn Monroe would have been perfect casting. (And he also envisioned himself playing Holly’s confidante, the male lead.)  

Much of what I know about Breakfast at Tiffany’s comes from a fascinating little volume that appeared in 2010. Sam Wasson (who has since gone on to write a major biography of Bob Fosse) is the author of Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. Wasson’s book chronicles the making of the film, and also reveals how vital it was in changing the public perception of women’s behavior, at a time when sexual mores were starting to change. As he writes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s “rerouted the course of women in the movies, giving voice to what was then a still-unspoken shift in the 1950s gender plan. There was always sex in Hollywood, but before Breakfast at Tiffany’s, only the bad girls were having it.“

The challenges for Paramount Pictures when approaching the original material were manifold:  Capote had given the world “a novel with no second act, a nameless gay [male] protagonist, a motiveless drama, and an unhappy ending.” After much angst, the screen version evolved into a romantic comedy that faded out on a happily-ever-after kiss in the rain, with “Moon River” swelling in the background. Paramount execs solved the problem of the book’s gay protagonist by turning George Peppard’s writer-character into a red-blooded American male. Holly Golightly, as repurposed for the film, was less a high-class hooker than an adorable kook. It helped immensely, of course, that Audrey Hepburn hardly connoted sexuality in a way that Marilyn Monroe assuredly did. Reading between the lines, we knew that Holly slept around—and earned her daily bread by so doing. But mostly Hepburn’s Holly was childlike and fun, with a child’s wistful innocence underneath.  And Peppard’s Paul Varjak was made a gigolo of sorts, as a clever way of distracting us from Holly’s own sexual side.

Wasson has much more to say about Breakfast at Tiffany’s. About, for instance, the inspired teaming of veteran lyricist Johnny Mercer with newcomer Henry Mancini (“Together they were kindness incarnate, and they melted as easily as butter on mashed potatoes”). About the impact of Givenchy’s little black dress, which—as worn by Hepburn—gave women on a budget the freedom to look bold and sophisticated without seeming flashy. The movie feels modern, except in one department: Mickey Rooney’s obnoxious caricature of a buck-toothed Japanese neighbor, played strictly for guffaws. Director Blake Edwards eventually apologized for this lapse in taste, which rubbed many Asians the wrong way.  Like Truman Capote, the great Akira Kurosawa was most displeased. 

He Had a Little List: How Carl Laemmle Became Hollywood’s Oskar Schindler

The Rialto school district, in California’s Inland Empire, is now under fire for an English class assignment required of all eighth-graders. The assignment? To write research papers debating whether the Holocaust actually happened. The “evidence” placed at students’ disposal included links to sites of Holocaust deniers who dismiss the murder of six million Jews as pure fable, a worldwide hoax designed to advance Jewish interests. 

Today’s Hollywood has no room for Holocaust deniers. Countless feature films have been made on the subject, dating back to Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), which incorporated actual concentration camp footage into its plot. Schindler’s List was of course a global blockbuster in 1993, and documentaries that touch on the Holocaust period are perennial Oscar winners. But back in the 1930s, when the Nazis were tightening their grip on Europe, Hollywood studio bosses were reluctant to jeopardize their profits by speaking out against the new German regime. Though the heads of most major studios were themselves Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, they preferred to overlook the anti-Semitic rhetoric coming out of Deutschland. Psychologically, says film historian Neal Gabler, this was their way of advertising themselves as true-blue Americans, part of the cultural mainstream that had little interest in protecting an ethnic minority in a foreign land.

Gabler should know. As the author of the classic An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, he’s well aware of how a Hollywood Jew like MGM’s Irving Thalberg could visit Germany in 1934 and shrug off the rising tide with a quip: “Hitler and Hitlerism would pass; the Jews will still be there.” Even though Thalberg and others suspected a bloodbath was coming, they went on with the business of show business. (Recent books by Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand accuse the moguls of actually collaborating with Nazi higher-ups in order to safeguard Hollywood interests.) 

Carl Laemmle, though, was a different story.  Gabler says as much in a recent NewYork Times piece, written at the behest of a man whose father owed his life to Laemmle’s intervention. The jovial Laemmle, known throughout Hollywood as Uncle Carl, ran Universal Studios for the first twenty years of its existence. A native of Laupheim, Germany, he quickly spotted the dangers ahead when the German première of Universal’s anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front was disrupted by Nazi hooligans, after which Universal’s German rep (a Laemmle relative) was dragged out of his bed for questioning. Determined to save his large extended family from the Nazis, Carl compiled a list, then began pulling strings to guarantee their safe passage to America. Very soon other German Jews were appealing to him for help, and the list grew longer.

By signing affidavits for hundreds of Jews, Laemmle was guaranteeing them financial as well as moral support once they landed on American shores. Gabler details the lengths to which he went in securing the future of those he saved. This was an expensive proposition. And it was not made easier by the fact that two successive American consuls in Stuttgart made bureaucratic demands seemingly designed to thwart Laemmle’s efforts. Perhaps that’s why, as war approached, Laemmle’s health deteriorated. On September 24, 1939, just after Hitler invaded Poland, he was dead at age seventy-two.     

One L.A. branch of the Laemmle clan has run a chain of art-houses for decades. When I last visited the Royal on Santa Monica Boulevard,  I discovered a kind of memorial wall dedicated to family history. There I saw evidence of Carl Laemmle’s good deeds, including a heartfelt letter from one of his beneficiaries. Thanks, Uncle Carl. 

Pat Nixon and Winnie Davis: Icons of Womanhood

It’s common wisdom that Richard Nixon lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy in 1960 because he didn’t know how to handle television. During their first televised debate, Kennedy appeared tan and relaxed, while Nixon’s sweaty forehead and five o’clock shadow made him look disreputable. But as author Will Swift points out in Pat and Dick, there were times when Nixon himself turned the new medium of television into brilliant political theatre. Swift kicks off his portrait of the Nixon marriage by describing the night of September 23, 1952. Nixon, campaigning to become Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, had been accused of taking inappropriate monetary gifts from campaign donors. With his candidacy called into question, he decided to book a live broadcast to the nation. The stage at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theater was dressed to look like the den of a middle-class family home. Dick Nixon, seated at a desk, proclaimed himself innocent of having received anything but Checkers, the beloved family cocker spaniel.

During a speech that made Checkers a household name and helped Nixon surge in popularity, Pat sat silently, loyally, at her husband’s side. For her pains, she won the respect of an American public that believed it was a wife’s duty to stand (or at least sit) by her man. Patricia Ryan Nixon—who before marriage had been a school teacher and a sometime movie actress—knew she had to live up to the Fifties ideal of womanhood. It was her responsibility to raise the children and keep the home fires burning while her mate went off to joust with the outside world. In 1960, says Swift, Americans had not yet fallen in love with the patrician Jackie Kennedy. “But Pat Nixon was as familiar to them as television actress Donna Reed, and as much admired.” Reed, of course, was the star of a long-running TV sitcom (1958-1966) portraying an idealized American family guided through life by Mom’s wit and wisdom.

Swift suggests that being Dick Nixon’s helpmeet was not the easiest of jobs. She was a private woman and a proud one. As much as Pat believed in her husband's brilliance and his destiny, being cast as a symbol (and publicly ridiculed as “Plastic Pat” by her husband’s detractors) could not have been pleasant for her.

Oddly, I started thinking about Pat Nixon after reading the biography of a woman who never became a wife and mother. Heath Hardage Lee is the author of Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause. It’s a scholarly book that has attracted some Hollywood interest, and I can see why. Winnie was the youngest child of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Born in the darkest days of the Civil War, she grew up to find she was expected to serve as a symbol of the Old South. Solemn and virginal, dressed all in white, she appeared before Southern veterans’ groups like a sweet apparition, lending her angelic touch to the nostalgia they felt for the Dixie of ante-bellum days. As an image of Southern womanhood, Winnie was far less Scarlett O’Hara than sweet, sad Melanie, and the old soldiers loved her for it.

But Winnie was also a flesh-and-blood young lady, one who fell for exactly the wrong kind of man. So loud was the clamor from her Southern admirers that the engagement got called off. She found some happiness in, of all places, New York City, where she worked as a writer and lived an independent life. But, ironically, her obligations to the Lost Cause did her in: by age 34 she was dead. As Pat Nixon also knew, being a symbol is hard work. 

Will Swift will appear on my panel, “Getting the Family on Board,” at this year’s conference of the Biographers International Organization (BIO), to be held in Boston on May 17. The public is cordially invited.   

Lethal Outcome: Aileen Wuornos and Executions, Hollywood-Style

That grizzly botched execution in Oklahoma has reminded me of all the movies in which central characters are put to death by the state. Usually the actors involved win Oscar nominations for their troubles. Susan Hayward, who was marched to the gas chamber in 1958’s I Want to Live, took home a Best Actress statuette for her emotional performance. Michael Clarke Duncan, playing a gentle giant who goes willingly to the electric chair in 1999’s The Green Mile, was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. Four years earlier, Sean Penn’s rapist-character died by lethal injection in Dead Man Walking, after cleansing his soul by confessing his crimes. Penn was Oscar nominated, though it was Susan Sarandon who won the big prize for this artfully crafted drama. Playing a real-life death-penalty opponent, Sister Helen Prejean, she put forth arguments against state-sanctioned killing that still linger in my brain. 

Then there was Aileen Wuornos. Charlize Theron nabbed the 2003 Oscar for transforming herself from a glamour-girl to a scruffy, raw-boned hooker who killed seven men before dying in Florida’s death chamber. The film version, called Monster, does not shy away from the brutality of Wuornos’s crimes. But it also creates sympathy for this self-appointed “first female serial killer” by playing up her victimization, both by the men who were her “johns” and by the female lover she was trying to impress.

My source for the real story of Aileen Wuornos is Lethal Intent, a recently re-released true-crime account by journalist Sue Russell. Russell, who has been investigating Wuornos’ life since her arrest in 1991, does not overlook the harsh events that shaped Wuornos’s world from childhood onward. But she is also well aware that Aileen was a pathological liar who would say anything to get attention. Early on, she bragged to a friend that “there’ll be a book written about me one day,” and she once tried to commission a ghost-written autobiography. Her real goal (emphasized in the movie’s opening voiceover) was to turn herself into a celebrity, maybe even a movie star. In prison, following her sensational arrest, she demanded recognition from her fellow inmates: “Do you know who I am? I’m Aileen Wuornos of television.”

There’s nothing wrong with dreams of glory, but Aileen seemed determined to turn herself into an avenging heroine. According to Monster, which takes Aileen’s court testimony at face value, she first killed in response to a brutal rape. The evidence, though, strongly suggests that her motive was robbery: she took possession of her victim’s cash and car, then concocted a dandy story to cover her misdeeds. 

In one other key respect, the movie twists facts to ratchet up sympathy for its protagonist. In real life, Aileen’s lover was a cheerful, pragmatic lesbian named Tyria (or Ty). It was she who was to become the #1 witness for the prosecution, possibly in a frank bid to save her own skin. Monster transforms Ty from a hefty, feisty dame into the waiflike Shelby. As played by the petite and saucer-eyed Christina Ricci, Shelby is something of a sponge, petulantly demanding that Aileen provide her with good times and a house by the beach. In this version, Aileen kills repeatedly because she loves not wisely but too well.

 For me, the most truthful moment in Monster is Aileen’s slaying of a Good Samaritan who thinks he’s stopped his car to help a lady in distress. Ironically, he’s played by Scott Wilson, one of the killers from 1967’s In Cold Blood.  Yes, he was hanged at the end of that film.  No Oscar nom, though. Sometimes you just can’t win.   

Here’s Sue Russell’s frank response to Monster,  first published in the Washington Post and now featured on her website, http://www.suerussellwrites.com  

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

The number of dancing Pontipee brothers is rapidly dwindling. Those who know and love the exhilarating MGM musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), will understand what I’m talking about. This is one musical (West Side Story of course is another) that glories in the ability of young males to look macho while moving to music. Eldest brother Adam, played by the ultra-virile Howard Keel, didn’t dance, but he used his resonant baritone to great effect in this film about love and courtship in Oregon territory, circa 1850. Keel passed on in 2004. Second brother Benjamin (Jeff Richards) is also no longer with us. It’s taken me years to realize that “Benjamin”— in real life a former baseball player—doesn’t truly take part in Michael Kidd’s breathtaking ensemble choreographies. You generally find him hanging around in the background, sometimes in the company of Julie Newmar, who was still billed as Julie Newmeyer back then.

Thank goodness the three youngest of the alphabetically-named Pontipees are still alive and kicking. Jacques d’Amboise, now 79, took a leave from the New York City Ballet to play brother Ephraim. He later became a respected dance teacher, was the focus of  the Oscar-winning He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, and is currently on view in a new documentary, Afternoon of a Faun, about the tragic Balanchine ballerina, Tanaquil LeClercq. Tommy Rall, who played  hyper-intense Frank, last appeared as a werewolf in a goofy Roger Corman comedy on which I worked, Saturday the 14^th Strikes Back. Russ Tamblyn, who showed off his gymnastic talents as youngest brother Gideon, is best remembered as Riff, the leader of the Jets, in West Side Story. He’s still performing, and has also contributed daughter Amber to show biz.    

But we lost Matt Mattox (Caleb) in 2013: he was the one who retained a beard and mustache even after the brothers cleaned up at the film’s midpoint, and  he did a memorable solo dance in a number called “Lonesome Polecat,” in which the men lament the lack of women in their winter hideaway. (As Johnny Mercer’s lyrics remind us, “A man can’t sleep/When he sleeps with sheep.”)  The film’s Daniel, Marc Platt -- not to be confused with a major Hollywood producer who bears the same name – passed on just recently, at the end of March, 2014.   

The best way to see the dancing Pontipees in action is to take a gander at the film’s famous barn-raising sequence. Anyone who enjoys the competitive aspects of Dancing with the Stars will relish what happens when the brothers try to outdance some town dandies to win the affections of the local womenfolk. Dancing as somehow unmanly? Not here.

But in one respect the “manly” men of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers give me pause. The film’s plot derives from a short story, “The Sobbin’ Women,” by Stephen Vincent Benét. It’s a folksy bit of backwoods Americana, but it’s based on a rather odious legend about how the men of ancient Rome, in desperate need of wives, helped themselves to the women of the neighboring Sabine tribe. What’s generally referred to as the Rape of the Sabine Women has often been portrayed in classical paintings. If you happen to be female, it doesn’t look like much fun.  Of course in the MGM version, the “brides” who are abducted by seven wrong-headed males—following a period of outrage and some serious scolding by Adam’s wife (the adorable Jane Powell)—are all too ready to fall for their captors. Which makes for a happily-ever-after fadeout. But is this love, or Stockholm Syndrome?   

"The Rape of the Sabine Women" (1636) by Nicholas Poussin