My favourite short novel, the one that moves me most whenever I read it, is Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The story is wonderful, and, partly, the joy of reading it is the contrast with the movie, which is a lot lighter in tone and, unlike the book, has a happy ending.
I’ve always thought that Holly was based on a real person, or was based on a sketch of a real person that the author might have known. Holly was drawn with love and tenderness and the sort of accuracy that only comes from real life. Then again, I think, maybe all fictional characters are drawn from real people, or are constructed from parts of people that the author knew.
At the end of the movie, Holly and Paul, the narrator, find Holly’s cat, named Cat, in the rainy streets of New York and everything ends happily. In the novel, however, Holly leaves forever and the (unnamed) narrator never finds Cat, though he thinks he might have seen it in a window of some brownstone apartment.
Truman Capote was homosexual and I always thought that the character of Holly was probably based on a boy or a young man he might have known, certainly, the way he physically describes her, she could have easily been a young man. It doesn’t make the story better or worse for thinking that, but it does leave me with a real feeling of a shadow story going on in the background.
Whatever. Both versions of the story make me cry.
Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Which makes Dylan Mulvaney's transformation into Audrey 'Hepburn' all the more ironic. It's meta-closeting.
I had forgotten all about that movie. I must try and find it again as I remember enjoying it a lot. It's amazing how to this day, Audrey Hepburn in that film is still seen (at least by older people) as the epitome of cool for women. Such screen presence. It's uncanny how the camera "loves" some people for some reason, which seems to transcend physical attractiveness alone.