Truman Capote's heroine Holly Golightly by another name | The Independent Truman Capote's heroine Holly Golightly by another name Author originally christened his famous character Connie Gustafson Tuesday 2 April 2013 18:13 BST Click to follow Truman Capote's heroine Holly Golightly by another name 1/3 Audrey Hepburn famously played Capote's heroine Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's Rex Features The typed manuscript of the novella with hand annotations by Truman Capote AP Getty Images Audrey Hepburn famously played Capote's heroine Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's When Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s was first published in 1958, the author’s contemporary Norman Mailer called Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation” and suggested that he “would not have changed two words” in the book. It is now clear, however, that Capote himself was inspired to change two rather crucial words in his own text at the last minute: the name of his now-iconic protagonist.

Capote’s type-written, hand-edited manuscript of his celebrated novella is being offered at auction this month in New Hampshire, where it is expected to fetch more than $250,000 (£165,300). The author’s annotations are on every page, though none is as striking as the alteration he made to his heroine’s name: Holly Golightly, later famously played by Audrey Hepburn, was originally christened “Connie Gustafson”. The 84-page final working draft for the novella’s publication by Random House features at least 150 instances in which Capote crossed out the original name and inserted its replacement. It is the star attraction of RR Auction’s online sale of hundreds of items of Hollywood memorabilia, from 18 to 25 April. The sale also includes a film of Marilyn Monroe visiting troops in South Korea in 1954, shot by an infantry lieutenant, as well as items autographed by James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Judy Garland. RR Auction’s vice president Bobby Livingston told the Associated Press that the Capote manuscript is “obviously quite a treasure, quite a find for us”.

The seller wished to remain anonymous, he said, but is linked to the estate of a “very famous” New York autograph collector. Capote, who died aged 59 in 1984, was also the author of the non-fiction classic In Cold Blood (1966). He supposedly conceived the idea for Breakfast at Tiffany’s while travelling in Europe in 1949, but it took him nine years to bring the idea to fruition. The novella begins in autumn 1943, when its unnamed narrator first encounters Holly Golightly, a fellow tenant in his Manhattan apartment block. Holly – who has changed her own name from Lula Mae Barnes better to appeal to New York society – subsists on dates with wealthy lovers, in the hope that one of them will marry her. Capote described his most famous character as an “American geisha”. The book’s content was considered so racy for its time that Harper’s Bazaar, which had purchased serialisation rights for $2,000, decided not to print it. An incensed Capote vowed never to offer the magazine any of his work again.

Instead, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was first serialised in Esquire’s November 1958 issue, and published by Random House shortly thereafter. The 1961 movie version, starring Hepburn and George Peppard, shifted the action to 1960 and added a romance between its two central characters. Capote was almost ready to submit his final draft when he came up with the new name for his femme fatale at the eleventh hour, said Livingston. The character was reportedly inspired by Capote’s close friendships with a series of New York society figures, including the heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt; Oona O’Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill; actress Carol Grace; writer Maeve Brennan; and model Dorian Leigh, whom he nicknamed “Happy Go Lucky”. According to Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke, “half the women he knew … claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine.” More about: The making of Holly Golightly - Telegraph Books The making of Holly Golightly The spirited heroine of Truman Capote’s most famous book is a bewitching blend of many different characters, including the author’s own, writes Jay McInerney.

Image 1 of 2 Photo: © Karen Klassen, 2013 from The Folio Society edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golighty in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' Photo: REX/MOVIESTORE COLLECTION By Jay McInerney Comments Holly Golightly is one of the great heroines of modern literature. Part Becky Sharp, part Elizabeth Bennet, she also bears a passing resemblance to Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, and yet she’s a great original. Of all his characters, Capote said, Holly was his favourite, and she has become an icon of American womanhood in the years since he created her. There were any number of New York party girls and society fixtures who claimed to be the real-life model for Holly, but, as Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke remarked, “the one Holly most resembles, in spirit if not in body, is her creator”. Like Holly Golightly, Truman Capote invented himself pretty much from scratch, and became the toast of a town that celebrates the moment, and doesn’t give much of a damn about the past – about origins or ancestry or even the events of last week.

In her disregard for the conventions of polite society and her sexual adventurousness, Holly is something of an avatar of the liberated woman of the Sixties and Seventies, although she probably wouldn’t have approved of hippie sartorial practices, nor would she have likely appreciated the more strident male-bashing aspects of the radical wing of the feminist movement . Holly likes men and she believes appearances matter. In these regards at least she is very much a woman of her time, although Holly sometimes seems a little more like a woman of the Fifties than a woman of the Forties. Related Articles How I captured Capote 17 Feb 2006 The story is set in 1943, but was conceived in the mid-Fifties and published in 1958. Capote seemed to occasionally forget he’d set his story during the war years, as when he has Holly buying furniture from the William Randolph Hearst estate: Hearst died in 1951.

Capote drew on some of his contemporaries in his creation of Holly, beautiful party girls of his acquaintance like Carol Marcus and Oona Chaplin, but it seems significant that before Holly reinvented herself in Hollywood and New York she was Lulamae Barnes, from rural Texas; Capote’s mother was Lillie Mae Faulk, a rural beauty from Monroeville, Alabama. Like Holly she longed to escape home, eventually moving with her feckless new husband to New Orleans, where she gave birth to her only son, whom she soon sent off to live with her cousins in Monroeville. Like Holly, Lillie Mae was promiscuous, avidly pursuing extramarital affairs in New Orleans and eventually moving to New York, which had always been the focus of her yearning. There she fell in love with Joe Capote, a stylish, successful textile broker of Cuban heritage, and eventually, after marrying Capote and moving to an apartment on Park Avenue, retrieved her son from Monroeville.

Lillie Mae’s role as a Park Avenue matron didn’t last long – the family had to move after Joe was charged with embezzlement – but in later years Truman would dote on the real Park Avenue society women, his so-called swans, the rich and sophisticated social princesses of haute Manhattan. Capote’s relationship with his mother was deeply ambivalent and problematic throughout his life, but she definitely seems to have contributed some of her DNA to his most important female protagonist. While still in high school Capote got a job at The New Yorker, the de facto headquarters of New York’s literary establishment; he garnered early recognition with the publication of several precocious short stories, and became famous, or notorious, at the age of 23 with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms, a hothouse coming-of-age novel jokingly described by a friend as “the fairy Huckleberry Finn”. The novel received generally positive and even glowing reviews, and became an instant bestseller, its sales boosted in part by the controversy generated by its homoerotic content as well as the Harold Halma jacket photograph of the young author sprawled on a divan with a “come hither” look on his face.

Capote subsequently published a well-received second novel, The Grass Harp, a collection of stories, and a book of non-fiction, The Muses are Heard. He wrote two plays and the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil, although it would be safe to say that until Breakfast at Tiffany’s the author himself was more famous than any of his works. Breakfast became an immediate bestseller, despite reviews that were mixed, and occasionally condescending. The New Yorker dismissed it as “empty nostalgia”, an assessment that particularly upset Capote, who wrote for the magazine. William Goyen in The New York Times called Capote “perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers”. While he praised Capote’s writing he complained about the artificiality of the plot. “When her piney-woods husband comes to New York and explains the psychological and spiritual basis for her behaviour, Holly seems to the reader less feasible.” Goyen has a valid point, although it could be argued that the hardscrabble biography Capote concocted for her makes her more sympathetic to readers.

One of the strongest endorsements of the novella came from Norman Mailer, normally the most competitive and certainly the most macho of all of Capote’s contemporaries, who wrote: “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. “He is as tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic.” (Indeed, perfectionist that he was, Capote might well have placed a semicolon after the word “generation”. Capote was a master of that particular punctuation mark.) In an interview with The Paris Review published around the time he was working on the novel, Capote talked about his obsession with style. “Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

“Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance… For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist’s sensibility – more so than the content of his work.” Capote was indeed a great prose stylist, although in some of his earlier work his style can seem overwrought and baroque; in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the style seems to have matured to the point that his prose almost inevitably works in service of his story. His descriptions of his characters, even the minor ones, are masterfully etched, vividly evoked: “A creature answered the door. He smelled of cigars and Knize cologne. His shoes sported elevated heels; without these added inches, one might have taken him for a Little Person. His bald freckled head was dwarfbig: attached to it were a pair of pointed, truly elfin ears. He had Pekingese eyes, unpitying and slightly bulged.

Tufts of hair sprouted from his ears, from his nose; his jowls were gray with afternoon beard, and his handshake almost furry.” This is OJ Berman, the Hollywood agent who presided over Holly’s makeover not long after she left Texas, before she ran away to New York. And we are not likely to need to struggle to remember who he is when he reappears later in the story. The sharp-eyed narrator is the only figure who isn’t vividly described. A young, struggling writer who in many ways resembles the author, he has rented a small studio apartment in an Upper East Side brownstone. He gets his first glimpse of Holly late one night as she is returning from her nocturnal rounds at some of Manhattan’s glamour spots, in the company of one of the men on whose generosity she relies to support herself: “She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker.

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.” It is a vivid, and irresistible description of the heroine, a sneak peak from the point of view of the neighbour who will become fascinated with her, and tell her story. The nature of his infatuation with Holly is never clearly articulated; the fact of Capote’s own homosexuality inevitably leads to speculation that the narrator, too, is gay, like the narrator of Christopher Isherwood ’s 1937 novella Sally Bowles, also a story of an aspiring writer infatuated with a charismatic party girl, which eventually would serve as the inspiration for the play and the movie Cabaret.

In fact, in the novella Capote doesn’t really provide enough evidence for any conclusions to be made about the narrator’s sexuality, or much else about his life for that matter, although at one point he does say that he’s in love with Holly. Hollywood, of course, couldn’t condone this ambiguity, much less the possibility that the narrator, whom we know only by the nickname Holly bestows on him, Fred, was gay. (A character who’s possibly a gigolo was apparently more acceptable than a homosexual.) In the book, Fred’s relationship to Holly suggests another literary antecedent: Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , who is also fascinated with a mysterious, glamorous neighbour, with whom he becomes intimate and, for a short, intense period, deeply involved. Like Holly, Gatsby is a self-invented figure, on the run from his unglamorous, rural past.

Capote was in fact hired by Paramount to adapt Gatsby for the screen, and while his screenplay was ultimately rejected, he was clearly an admirer of the novel, declaring, “I love The Great Gatsby and its sad, gay nostalgia.” Breakfast at Tiffany’s possesses that sad gay nostalgia along with a flashback structure and an observant, passive narrator in the thrall of a colourful protagonist. Like Gatsby, Holly Golightly has rechristened herself, rather brilliantly, it has to be said; the calling card that she has printed at Tiffany’s, which first alerts the narrator to her existence when he sees it in the name slot of the mailbox in their building, is engraved with the name Holiday Golightly. It’s a perfect name for a blithe spirit, a sprite determined not to take life too seriously, or to be pinned down. It’s hard to imagine Holly becoming immortal with the first name that Capote devised for her, Connie Gustafson.

(In fact, Capote uses names to great effect in the book – baby-faced heir Rusty Trawler, model Mag Wildwood, the imprisoned mob boss Salvatore “Sally” Tomato.) Holly came to represent the epitome of midcentury New York sophistication, a free spirit with chic style, endearing eccentricity, and easy virtue. She spends her days sleeping and her nights at glamorous nightspots in the company of men, some of whom give her money. “Any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girls’ john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that’s another fifty.” Holly’s mercenary attitude towards the opposite sex is no small part of her mystique, titillating some readers and shocking others. Was Holly a hooker? In a 1968 Playboy interview, Capote responded to this question. “Holly was not precisely a call girl. She had no job, but accompanied expense-account men to the best restaurants and night clubs, with the understanding that her escort was obligated to give her some sort of gift, perhaps jewellery or a check… if she felt like it, she might take her escort home for the night.

So these girls are the authentic American geishas and they are much more prevalent now than in 1943 or 1944, which was Holly’s era.” Marilyn Monroe ultimately decided against pursuing the part of Holly, swayed by acting coach Lee Strasberg, who told her that playing a prostitute would be bad for her image. (In fact Monroe had played something very similar in Sweet Smell of Success and wasn’t exactly known as a choir girl.) Capote wanted Monroe to play the part, insisting that Holly was blonde, despite the book’s suggestion that the blonde tones in her variegated hair were the product of a home dye job. It’s hard to imagine two actresses who would have made such different Hollys and hard, now, to imagine Monroe in the part. For better or for worse, Audrey Hepburn made it her own. Indeed, even for those who hold the book in great esteem, it’s well nigh impossible not to picture Audrey Hepburn when we hear the name Holly Golightly.

Hepburn seems to very much resemble the Holly described in the book, with her “chic thinness”, and while the Holly of the movie doesn’t behave all that differently, still accepting powder-room tips, Hepburn’s good-girl persona was such that she seemed to sanitise the character just enough to make it acceptable for the standards of the day. Having her fall into the arms of the unequivocally heterosexual George Peppard at the end sealed the deal. These changes in key aspects of plot give the movie a sunnier and more conventional cast than the book. Truman Capote’s unfinished, and indeed mostly unwritten, masterpiece was to be called Answered Prayers, from a quote by Saint Theresa of Avila: “Answered prayers cause more tears than those that are unanswered.” While the $65,000 Capote received for the movie rights to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a then princely sum, had helped support him during the long gestation of In Cold Blood , he disliked the movie, which diverged in several important respects from the novella and eventually threatened to eclipse the book he’d written. And yet the book itself remains, and endures, and continues to exert its spell.

Those who want to encounter the untamed Holly, “the wild thing” who can never be caged or pinned down or domesticated, and whose ultimate fate remains a mystery, will find her here in Capote’s luminous pages. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with an introduction by Jay McInerney and illustrations by Karen Klassen, is published by The Folio Society (£24.95) Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories - Truman Capote - Google Books Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories 34 Reviews Starring its heroine, Holly Golightly, from the popular ">Breakfast at Tiffany's", this volume also contains three of Truman Capote's best-known short stories: "House of Flowers", "A Diamond Guitar", and "A Christmas Memory". From inside the book What people are saying - Write a review User ratings I reread this little gem every couple of years and still find it fun... yes, it has begun to date itself but it's still a fine portrait of a woman beyond measure.

Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's User Review - Commodore Russo - Goodreads I enjoyed Breakfast at Tiffany 's, especially once I started reading it as a prototype of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope done very right. The middle story was alright, and I loved A Christmas Memory. Read full review View all » Common terms and phrases Limited preview - 2008 About the author (1958) The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

A Holly good read before breakfast - Books - Entertainment - smh.com.au A Holly good read before breakfast Large font October 26, 2005 The discovery of a Truman Capote manuscript raises the question of why the literary giant abandoned the novel, writes Peter Huck. American master ... Truman Capote and the long-lost novel. To her fans, Holly Golightly, the pleasure-loving heroine of Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, is one of a kind, an irresistible figure whom most people remember from Audrey Hepburn's performance in the movie of the same name. But was Holly foreshadowed by another Capote creation? On Tuesday, Random House in New York published Capote's "lost" novel, Summer Crossing. Started in 1943 when the precocious author was 19, the novel predates Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote's official debut in 1948. The world first heard of Summer Crossing when the manuscript was auctioned at Sotheby's in December. It failed to sell, and was acquired early this year by the New York Public Library for an undisclosed sum.

Touted by Random House as a "major discovery of 20th-century American literature", Summer Crossing was brought to Sotheby's by a relative of the man who once house-sat for Capote. Like Breakfast at Tiffany's, it features an irrepressible socialite, Grady McNeil. Left alone in a Manhattan penthouse while her parents take a European trip, she falls in love with a Jewish war veteran who works as a car park attendant. Neither the publisher nor The New Yorker magazine, which ran an extract this week, would elaborate, although both praised the novel. "Dashing, defiant and irrepressibly carefree, the novel's heroine will remind readers of one of Truman Capote's most lasting creations, Holly Golightly," Random House gushed. Nonetheless, the publication of a posthumous Capote novel is a literary event. The author died in 1984 but his reputation as a leading man of American letters endures, not least because of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant portrayal of the novelist in the film Capote, which attracted rapturous reviews in the United States.

(It is due for release in Australia in May.) Directed by Bennett Miller, it examines how Capote wrote his celebrated "non-fiction" novel, In Cold Blood. An account of the murder of a Kansas family in 1959 and its aftermath, the book catapulted Capote to literary stardom. Yet success exacted a huge personal toll. Hoffman depicts Capote as a manipulative, Faustian figure, enormously talented yet prepared to betray trust and do whatever it takes to get his story; a wry comment on journalistic ethics. Capote never completed another novel. He started Summer Crossing while working at The New Yorker. When he was fired, he returned to Alabama, his childhood home, to finish the novel. But, according to Gerald Clarke's 1988 biography, Capote, it was put aside in 1944. "I said goodnight, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of Summer Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed and with pathetic optimism wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms - a novel by Truman Capote," it quotes its subject. Which sounds like one for posterity.

Yet, by 1949, Capote had resurrected Summer Crossing. He had "fine hopes" and told Robert Linscott, his editor at Random House, he hoped to have it "polished" by the new year. By August, he was two-thirds finished. Yet the manuscript was never delivered. "As for Summer Crossing," he wrote in 1953, "I tore it up long ago; anyway, it was never finished." What happened next is obscure. "I don't think it's known when he gave it up," says David Ebershoff, who edited the manuscript. "People thought it was destroyed in the '50s because that's the last time they heard of it. But we don't really know when Capote last looked at it." According to Sotheby's, the unnamed house-sitter found the novel - about 200 pages in four handwritten notebooks, along with 89 pages of extra material and corrections - on the footpath outside the author's flat in Brooklyn. Capote had vacated it for fancier digs in 1966 after the enormous success of In Cold Blood. This amazing story has an apocryphal air.

But scholars are more likely to ask what the book reveals about Capote's talent. Did he start his career by pursuing one stylistic direction, segue to another for Other Voices, Other Rooms, then veer back towards where he started with Breakfast at Tiffany's? Breakfast at Tiffanys, Truman Capote. (Paperback 0679745653) Breakfast at Tiffany's This volume includes three of Capote's best-known stories, "House of Flowers, " "A Diamond Guitar, " and "A Christmas Memory, " in addition to his bestselling novel, Breakfast at Tiffany, the popular story of Holly Golightly--"a cross between Lolita and Auntie Mame" (Time). Post This Book Janis K. ( scrapbooklady ) reviewed Breakfast at Tiffany's on 8/28/2007 + 472 more book reviews Helpful Score: 3 "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is probably the best introduction to Capote's work. Holly Golightly represents a figure that so many millions of people have come to Manhattan to try to become.

Capote's ability to sustain this dream in prose, even though Holly is not much more than a stylish whore, is what has kept this short, breezy-yet-tragic postwar novel in print for over 50 years. A real classic. Marie L. reviewed Breakfast at Tiffany's on 1/31/2007 + 33 more book reviews Helpful Score: 1 In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's;her poignancy, wit and naivete continue to charm. Hanna M. ( HannaM ) reviewed Breakfast at Tiffany's on 3/23/2010 + 64 more book reviews Helpful Score: 1 breakfast at tiffany's is a classic that is so enjoyable that you forget that it is a classic. i love how holly golightly is always viewed from an outsiders perspective, she seems so tragic and yet so oddly contented and real.

Capote wrote someone who was too much to be real but you viewed her as real anyway just because you wanted to. The other short stories were also fun quick well written reads but as the title suggests the best piece in the collection was by far Breakfast at Tiffany's. Please Log in to Rate these Book Reviews Sophia C. reviewed Breakfast at Tiffany's on 12/21/2014 + 289 more book reviews Breakfast at Tiffany's is a classic that was easy to read on a plane ride back to New York. Holly Golightly lives in New York of a different era, but Truman Capote makes the young heroine come alive as a self-made, other-worldly existence as her neighbor reminisces long after she's gone. I also especially enjoyed the last short story in this volume, "A Christmas Memory," which celebrates the important things during the holiday season. I was moved by the friendship between a boy and his elderly relative as they made fruitcakes together and Christmas presents for each other. A short, enjoyable read from the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ Play Rekindles the Mystery of Holly - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |Forever a Gamine at Tiffany’s Search Continue reading the main story Photo Kaitlin Flynn, left, and Victoria Mason, students at Wake Forest, watching “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” are part of a new generation of fans of Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s heroine. Credit Chris Keane for The New York Times FIFTY-FIVE years after stepping off the pages of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Holly Golightly is starring in a Broadway play. So does that make her an ingénue or a trouper? Neither, really. Miss Golightly is a traveler in the lands of fiction, film and theater, and she will always be, as Truman Capote , her creator, described her, “beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.” City wise and ultrachic, but still a girl. Putting aside for a moment what kind of girl she might be, there’s no question that generations of women have responded to her. To this day they have themselves photographed staring into Tiffany’s window in the classic pose from the 1961 film .

They don’t label Holly — was she really a prostitute? — they just want to be her. Ask around. Say “Holly Golightly” to a young female relative or co-worker, or perhaps a friend’s niece, and you might soon receive Facebook photos of her in front of that sacred spot or even wind up in an enthusiastic discussion of the movie and Audrey Hepburn style. Emily May, 22, a trainee journalist at The Bournemouth Echo in England, says the film made her want to travel to New York. She doesn’t quite see the character as a role model, “but I still love Holly,” she wrote in an e-mail. Continue reading the main story “The idea of running away and starting an entirely new and glamorous life sometimes definitely appeals,” she said. “When I finally went there to celebrate my 21st and my sister’s 40th, we posed outside Tiffany’s, looking into the window with a coffee and croissant. It sounds corny, but it meant a lot to us to relive that iconic scene.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Women like Ms. May drawn to Holly’s New York can find it easily.

Tiffany & Company, of course, hasn’t moved from Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, so it’s available for those photographs — BYO breakfast — but note that the scene was shot at an uncrowded 5 a.m. A Holly walk could begin at the New York Public Library, zigzag to the fountain on Park Avenue, then head up Lexington Avenue to study the town house at 169 East 71st Street , where even the fire escape and the mailbox delivered clues about Holly. Rest on a bench near Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. Maybe dinner at the “21” Club? But back to the question of who this admired girl-woman was: In Capote’s novella the year is 1943, and Miss Golightly is two months shy of her 19th birthday. Like Capote’s mother, Nina, Holly was born in the rural South and migrated to New York City, where she soon changed her name, style, status and men. Nina was born Lillie Mae Faulk in Monroeville, Ala.; Holly came from Tulip, Tex., where she was Lulamae Barnes, a purloiner of turkey eggs.

Capote unveiled his Holly Golightly in 1958 in a Random House book and in Esquire (Harper’s Bazaar turned it down as too risqué). He advances the plot by revealing intimate details of her character to the narrator, who becomes involved, along with the reader, in trying to solve the mystery of Holly. When not being charmed by her, we sometimes pause to wonder how she affords her fashionable wardrobe and apartment. Photo Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. Credit Paramount Pictures, via Associated Press The poster image of Hepburn as Holly — balancing her precarious hairdo, no-name cat and elongated cigarette holder — even today adorns dorm rooms like that of Kaitlin Flynn, a freshman at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Unlike Ms. May she sees Holly as a role model. “As silly as she can be, I’ve always found something almost cerebral about Holly,” Ms. Flynn, who is from Tolland, Conn., said in an e-mail.

“She is a strong, free woman, and the difference between her and a call girl or prostitute lies in the control she has over her relationships.” She added, “I think that the quirky elegance Holly embodies is something every girl can have.” The play, which opens Wednesday on Broadway, starring the British actress Emilia Clarke from HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” can’t help smacking up against memories of the movie. Though it didn’t make the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list, Hepburn is ranked No. 3 on its roster of female stars. Her Holly sparkles across the decades. Even her bare back is recognizable, sheltered by rows of pearls and the simple black Givenchy dress . “I should be a stylish Holly Golightly,” she said in 1960, “even if that’s all I can contribute.” Capote’s explicit, sometimes bitter prose had to go through the usual wash to meet the Hollywood production code. Whether he liked it or not, a new Holly emerged for a new decade, a freethinking New York woman.

And for the opening scene, the director Blake Edwards turned the book’s title and the words “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s” into a wordless visual. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Though Edwards’s Holly is still a cafe-society girl who knows which side her bread is buttered on, the Capote world where men “forked over $50 for the powder room” was slipped in as a wink and a nudge. Edwards, in an interview on the DVD of the film, says: “She was not a call girl. I’m sure that the majority of the people who watched the movie didn’t even think of her that way. Maybe ‘an escort girl.’ ” The producer Martin Jurow, who wrote in 1993 that Hepburn was the actress he wanted (Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe), said that the role was that of “a lopsided romantic, a dreamer of dreams.” If the hooker question still gave the Paramount studio a bad case of publicity agita, movie fans weren’t worried.

“It had little effect,” observed Rachel Moseley, an associate professor in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, England, in “Growing Up With Audrey Hepburn” (2002). Young female Hepburn fans “filtered it out,” she writes, and “the meanings made of her image by these women in relation to femininities in the 1950s are located in her body and her look.” In the 1950s and ’60s young women loved Holly-Audrey’s aura of liberation (from men, mothers, marriage and middle-class morality); Gloria Steinem, in her 20s when the film came out, admitted that Holly was the inspiration for her trademark blond streaks. Today young women embrace the character for the same reasons. Ms. Flynn was 12 or 13 when she first saw “Breakfast.” “I have never seen her as immoral in the least,” she said about Holly in an e-mail. “I never noticed the comment about the powder room — maybe I’m naïve in asking this, but what does Holly mean by it? I really couldn’t guess.” Photo Credit The New York Times Ms.

May first watched the film at 16. “Maybe she was a call girl, an escort, a gold digger,” she wrote, “but I don’t think she would do anything she felt uncomfortable with.” Holly Golightly, she added, “didn’t belong to anyone.” Ms. Flynn, who like Ms. May has also read the novella, said, “Maybe I’m blinded by my love for the character, but I see her behavior as simply taking control and living her life to the fullest.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Capote, in a 1968 interview, said Holly “accompanied expense-account men to the best restaurants and night clubs, with the understanding that her escort was obligated to give her some sort of gift, perhaps jewelry or a check,” and “if she felt like it, she might take her escort home for the night.” Hepburn said, “Too many people think of Holly as a tramp, when actually she’s just putting on an act for shock effect, because she’s very young.” In Capote’s text Miss Golightly says that her ideal partner would be Nehru, Wendell Willkie or Garbo.

(“A person ought to be able to marry men or women.”) On screen she named Nero, Albert Schweitzer and Leonard Bernstein. On the page she also pointed out that she’d “only had 11 lovers,” adding, “Does that make me a whore?” Capote called women like Holly “the authentic American geishas.” Gerald Clarke, his biographer, wrote in 1988 that “half the women” Capote knew, “and a few he did not, claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine.” They included Gloria Vanderbilt , Oona Chaplin , Carol Matthau, Gloria Guinness, the writer Doris Lilly and the model Suzy Parker . “The main reason I wrote about Holly,” Capote said, “outside of the fact that I like her so much, was that she was such a symbol of all these girls who come to New York and spin in the sun for a moment like May flies and then disappear. I wanted to rescue one girl from that anonymity and preserve her for posterity.” Labels aside, it’s tempting to imagine what this girl about town might have become. Perhaps she would perpetually be “Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling,” as her card reads in the book.

But she would certainly return to New York and to Tiffany’s. After 40, you see, it’s no longer tacky to wear diamonds. “Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds,” she says. “I can’t wait.” Correction: March 19, 2013 An article on Friday about the character Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote, the basis of a Broadway show that is now in previews and scheduled to open Wednesday night, misspelled the surname of one of the people who, Holly says in the book, would be her ideal partner. He was Wendell Willkie, not Wilkie. A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2013, on Page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: Forever A Gamine At Tiffany’s. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ Heroine Originally Named... Gustafson? | LitReactor ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ Heroine Originally Named... Gustafson? News by Dean Fetzer April 3, 2013 1 comment In: Truman Capote What’s in a name?

As Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But authors often struggle to find the right name for a character — get it wrong and face ridicule or worse, ignominy. (The one that still makes me giggle is Jo Nesbø's detective ‘Harry Hole’ which everyone seems to ignore.) Even great writers have this problem. A rather critical name change has come to light with the impending auction of Truman Capote’s original hand-edited 84-page manuscript of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That of his main character . The author’s annotations are on every page, though none is as striking as the alteration he made to his heroine’s name: Holly Golightly, later famously played by Audrey Hepburn, was originally christened “Connie Gustafson”. Apparently Capote crossed out “at least 150 instances” of Gustafson and inserted its replacement. What?!? Seems like a very prudent change in retrospect — I can’t see Connie Gustafson having the same draw as the now iconic Golightly. But is that just an opinion tainted by familiarity with the character, both through the book and the Audrey Hepburn movie?

Possibly, but Gustafson just doesn’t roll off the tongue like Holly Golightly. The New York Times: Book Review Search Article CAPOTE A Biography. By Gerald Clarke. Illustrated. 632 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $22.95. ''HOLLY GOLIGHTLY, c'est moi,'' Truman Capote might well have said, echoing the words of Flaubert. A number of dashing women about town claimed to be the model for the heroine of ''Breakfast at Tiffany's,'' but to a marked degree she took her shape and essence and angst and hummingbird existence from the author himself. Flaubert, Capote's literary idol, only entered the mind of Emma Bovary, whereas Capote was his provincial waif. In this 1958 novel, the future avatar of ''new journalism'' was already recording the arc of his life. He had come to the big city from Monroeville, Ala.; he charmed and wrote his way into the literary limelight; he seduced the rich and famous.

He would waver at the top where drugs, alcohol and the ''mean reds'' - the free-floating anxiety that ambushed the deeply insecure - would get the best of him, and he would spiral down in a sordid exit that lacked the grace and brevity of Holly's. Moreover, when it came time to do the movie of ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' he saw Holly not as Audrey Hepburn but as Marilyn Monroe. In a tantalizing aside in Gerald Clarke's enthralling, novel-like biography, ''Capote,'' we learn that he actually argued Monroe's case (in vain, fortunately) with the producers. In her blithe elegance, Audrey Hepburn was a perfect emblem for the ''swans'' - Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, Slim Keith - to whom Capote would be attracted as courtier and confidante, but the more vulnerable Monroe was his mirror image, another yellow-haired, love-starved country bumpkin with a little girl's voice who never quite filled the void in her heart, and who finally overdosed on love's substitutes, drugs and celebrity.

We tend to look at such careers as tragic foreshortenings - Monroe's sudden suicide, Capote's slow-motion crash landing (except for occasional stories and some brilliant fragments of ''Answered Prayers,'' he wrote himself out with ''In Cold Blood,'' almost 20 years before his death in 1984). But looked at from another angle, Capote's death was a triumph over the sort of background that turns people into ax murderers. The killers that Capote encountered when he went to Holcomb, Kan., to write about the murder of the Clutter family and met Perry Smith and Dick Hickok. The killer that Capote himself became - far more efficiently than Perry and Dick - when, in poisonous prose and on talk shows, he laid waste his friends and skewered his competitors with malice as pure as the air in an oxygen tent. How Capote went from an enchanter, the startlingly fresh voice of his first novel, ''Other Voices, Other Rooms,'' to someone you wanted to hold away from you with a pair of tongs is an amazing story, as disturbing as anything Capote ever wrote. In this work of prodigious research gracefully presented, Mr.

Clarke, who had his subject's confidence during the last years, gives Capote what the writer himself, in a last grand, gutsy gesture, declared he wanted: a book in which nothing, nothing at all, was left out. Mr. Clarke, a former senior writer at Time magazine, makes us take a longer look at Capote than I, for one, ever thought I wanted to take, and the result is mesmerizing, a fine-tuned balance - unusual for an author so immersed in his subject - of empathy and dispassion. The book reads as if it had been written alongside the life, rather than after it, like a car following a train, the driver picking up passengers as they alight, always catching the right people at the right time. He pulls together the pieces of the puzzle and makes us see a terrible inevitability in the journey from the fetching little fellow with an uncanny talent (''a specific gift for writing,'' said one early observer, ''like a musician's for music'') to the blocked and bloated self-parody whose most severe lacerations were self-inflicted.

Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in a New Orleans hotel in 1924, of parents who were alike only in their frightening inadequacy as parents. Lillie Mae Faulk realized she had made a mistake hours after marrying Arch Persons, and they more or less went their separate ways thereafter, leaving Truman to be raised by an eccentric family of maiden aunts and a bachelor uncle. Lillie Mae was that most treacherous of mothers, a discontented small-town beauty who would appear in his life for a day or two, wafting the perfume of motherhood over him, then disappear. Arch was a charming, no-account con man, but it was Arch who, in preventing Lillie Mae from having the abortion she had desperately wanted, saved Truman's life. And it was Arch whom Truman had to thank for his literary talent: the Persons family were great letter writers, and the samples of Arch's wheedling, money-grubbing epistles included here are comic masterpieces, marvels of double talk and self-deception. With his father's instinct for getting inside people and articulating their wants before they quite knew them, Truman was a born seducer and spellbinder.

A ''pocket Merlin,'' Harper Lee called him, in the fictional portrait of her childhood companion that appears in ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' - a curiosity whose ''hair was snow white and stuck to his head like dandruff . . . [ and ] whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.'' Odd little elf that he soon recognized himself to be, he saw the advantage of using his oddness to get the attention he craved. He felt his effeminacy early on and came to terms with it. Until he was about 9, Mr. Clarke tells us, ''he found being a boy so demanding and burdensome that he actually wanted to be a girl.'' The mannerisms of his homosexuality -the whiny lisp, the feyness, the mischievous needling, all exaggerated for effect - were the budding performer's way of flaunting his difference and upstaging the competition. Meanwhile, Lillie Mae had moved to New York, successfully remarried (Joe Capote, a Cuban businessman) and gained custody of Truman, and she was wild with alarm over her son's sissy mannerisms.

Ever sensitive to public opinion - she changed her name from the yokelish Lillie Mae to Nina in preparation for her ascendancy to the suburban haute bourgeoisie -she began hauling him to shrinks, sending him to military schools and moaning to friends and neighbors that she would have preferred a dumb, football-playing, insurance-salesman son to the one she had. And from that time on, through the decline of Joe Capote's fortunes and her growing misery and drunkenness, she was unrelenting in her refusal to forgive his homosexuality, or to accept compensation in the form of his growing literary achievement. She had her bouts of affection, too, as such mothers do, and mother and son - the son waiting (as children do) for the sudden sunbursts - were locked into a lifelong love-hate relationship, sharing apartments and bottles, evenings and battles, until she died, a suicide, in 1954. LIKE Narcissus, Capote was enraptured by his own reflection.

He was a genius at self-promotion, and those indelible photographs became inseparable from the prose itself: the flirtatious changeling in the humid, sultry picture on the jacket of ''Other Voices, Other Rooms'' wafts up from every page of the book, and the image of Harold Halma's portrait of the supine seducer clung to him for years. Yet paradoxically, Capote's freakishness was a kind of camouflage that allowed him to disappear, become a fly on the wall. His size and mascotlike appearance put people off guard. The number of animal references that crop up in Clarke's book is almost comical: ''lion cub,'' ''pony,'' ''chipmunk,'' ''koala bear,'' ''alley cat,'' ''bunny,'' ''banty rooster,'' ''ant of genius,'' ''frog'' and Jacqueline Susann's famous retaliatory ''capon'' (after he said she looked ''like a truck driver in drag'') are a few of the zoological images, some more benign than others, that spring to the minds of witnesses.

Coupled with his disarming appearance was his shrewd conversational tactic of offering people choice tidbits of his own past, whereupon they, according to the tacit trade-off on which gossip and fellowship are based, would disgorge volumes of their own. In a long, drunken dinner in a Hong Kong hotel room, the fiercely reticent Marlon Brando found himself pouring out the story of his own mother's alcoholism that would turn up in Capote's famous New Yorker profile, ''A Duke in His Domain.'' The cast of characters with whom he fell in and out of love and collaborated, yachted and partied, is enormous, swelling through four decades, shrinking in one, an eclectic collection of highbrow and lowlife, a geographical stretch from Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo to the fleshpots of 42d Street. They were also a voluble and bitchy lot, and much of the brightness of the book comes from the aptness of the observations Mr. Clarke has tracked down or got firsthand.

A very funny description of Capote's brief tenure as a copy boy at The New Yorker, where his behavior and appearance caused havoc among the normally phlegmatic staff (''Two of the elevator men were so confused that they bet a dollar on his gender,'' reports Mr. Clarke, and ''one of the women was so vividly impressed by him that she dreamed that his veins were filled with milk - whole or skimmed, she did not say''), is interspersed with the curmudgeonly voices of E. B. White and Harold Ross (''For God's sake!'' Ross cried when he saw the tiny employee. ''What's that?''). Neither the uproar he caused nor the alliances he formed - most notably with Daise Terry, the notoriously difficult office manager -nor the stories he submitted induced anyone to lift The New Yorker's traditional barrier against copy boys becoming writers, which was, Mr. Clarke ventures, a stroke of good fortune.

Trying to write the genteel, made-to-order story then in vogue would have stifled the quirkily original gifts Capote was able to develop in the more adventurous pages of Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle under the literary tutelage of editors like George Davis and Mary Louise Aswell. His love affairs, mostly with older men of a conservative stamp, are amply documented. Among the most fascinating was his long, weekends-only relationship with Newton Arvin, the conservative Smith professor and Melville scholar, whom he met at Yaddo, and with whom he served a sort of literary apprenticeship. Capote had never gone to college, and he had the autodidact's fanatical favorites and unaccountable gaps. He went to the movie of ''Great Expectations'' and became more and more agitated: ''They've stolen my plot!'' he screamed furiously. His stories arose out of nowhere, self-made, innocent and all-knowing; the prose is exquisite, limpid with bright, sharp images in a shallow field. Yet it's the shallowness that gives his characters their eerie and essentially two-dimensional sense of isolation.

The tableaulike vignettes he creates in ''In Cold Blood'' are as stark as an Edward Hopper painting: those representatives of the two Americas, the well-rounded, God-fearing Clutters on the one hand and the scum-of-the-earth Hickok and Smith on the other, are equally solitary figures in an American landscape that is chilling even in 100-degree heat. THE absence of other writing voices in his literary bloodstream, enriching and harmonizing with his own, may have had a diminishing effect, but it also enabled him to preserve what was unique in his own sensibility: that thin air of receptivity, a listening void, a recording apparatus for human voices he encountered and registered so acutely. He was a strange sort of ventriloquist, taking into his confidence Kansas housewives and F.B.I. agents and filling-station owners and murderers and monomaniacal sheriffs, getting inside them and speaking with their voices. His best sustained acts of metempsychosis were with society's subsidiary characters - small, unofficial character players nobody else listened to: older women, gigolos, fashion plates, waifs, arrivistes, outsiders, all those whose satellite status gave them special poignancy.

He was especially good with women. Jennifer Jones was never more relaxed than as the playful aggressor to Humphrey Bogart's cynic in ''Beat the Devil,'' the John Huston melodrama in which Capote's mischievous screenplay offered a sly counterpart to Huston's sourly masculine world view. But most of all, he was a child who enticed us into becoming children again, and who, with his bathroom and boudoir privileges, turned us all into diminutive voyeurs. Even Capote's grandiosity - his invocations of Proust, the formal innovations claimed for ''In Cold Blood'' and his fury at being passed over by the literary establishment for the awards and credit he thought were his due -had something of the child's pique. Although ''In Cold Blood'' had every right to be considered a pioneering work in the sort of idiosyncratic, personal, fictionlike journalism that would enliven the 60's and 70's, Capote's insistence on giving it the pretentiously exalted - and meaningless - title of ''non-fiction novel'' did him more harm than good.

This literary coup was followed by that no less grandiose social coup, the mammoth black-and-white ball he threw at the Plaza Hotel for Katharine Graham and 500 close friends - a child's fantasy that was intended to overwhelm as much as entertain and that was as important for who was left out as for who was included. IT was in 1966, the year of these two triumphs - when black and white, positive and negative, were precariously balanced - that things began to unravel. With the spectacular success of ''In Cold Blood,'' his favorite quotation, St. Theresa of Avila's ''More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,'' was on its way to becoming his epitaph. He had spent over five years on the book, living it, conducting hundreds of interviews, writing it, involved in a story that was winding at an inexorable snail's pace toward the hanging of two people with whom he had become intimate. Gradually, and just as inexorably, something happened to him: the voices of the past, the grudges, the unaccepted and unmourned losses and unsettled claims rose up to haunt him. And in Perry Smith, Mr.

Clarke suggests, he seemed to come face to face with the demons of failure, the dark side of his own unloved self he had been fleeing all his life. Perry, the half-Cherokee psychopath with the dreamy eyes and the literary ambitions, the stocky little guy whose feet didn't touch the floor when he sat in a chair, the lost soul who'd been betrayed by an alcoholic mother and spurned by a loved and hated father, the pretentiously self-educated ''writer'' who'd never got beyond the third grade but nurtured a murderous grudge against anybody who had - it all came too close for comfort. Capote's dark doppelganger, facing him from behind bars, waiting to be executed, howling with self-pity and infuriating Capote with that trait from which he himself was remarkably free but which he had recognized and hated in his own father. How could he not have felt shadowed by Perry's feelings, Perry's fate?

A writer who had a notoriously difficult time with endings, those soundings of the depths that are advance notices of mortality, he simply sidestepped this one altogether: he reported Dick Hickock's last words and actions, but it seems to me he left a hole where Perry should have been. As Capote's sense of himself began slipping, so did his female alter egos, his Galateas. In the 50's, the stylishly rich women who obsessed him did so as much for their stories as for their beauty. Gloria Guinness, Slim Hayward (later Lady Keith), Pamela Churchill, Marella Agnelli - many of them, says Mr. Clarke, ''had struggled, schemed and fought to be where they were. They had created themselves, as he himself had done. Each was an artist, he said, 'whose sole creation was her perishable self.' '' What Mr.

Clarke calls Capote's ''Pygmalion complex'' was limited to a kind of creative empathy with women who were already highly evolved: he drew them out, filled in the gaps (for example, instructing Babe Paley in literature while she polished and tutored his taste in decor, the fine arts and other refinements of the good life). However, his later, more ambitious projects - to make Lee Radziwill an actress, Joanne Carson a toast of Los Angeles society - were dismal failures. The drugs and alcohol he'd successfully avoided for so much of his life he now turned to with a vengeance, and the writing became more difficult as he grew disenchanted with and even repelled by the jet-set nobs he'd panted after. The task he had assigned himself - a Proustian masterwork chronicling the excesses, the charms, the conversations of the ''beau monde' he knew so well - was turning into a work of unrelieved if brilliant venom and was finally sabotaged with the publication of the ''Cote Basque'' episode in Esquire. His friends dropped him; he was stunned, or pretended to be.

Capote hadn't played by the rules, hadn't understood that his status among the rich was that of a petted and tolerated outsider. He was meant to celebrate them, not expose them. Isolated, he lashed back, and his social and sexual habits grew ever more labyrinthine and degenerate. In an attempt to complete the broken triangle of his childhood, he had made a specialty of attaching himself to couples. But as with the Paleys, with whom he formed the major, glorious triangle of his life, he was then compelled to drive a wedge between the partners and try to destroy them by seducing first one (if only emotionally), then the other. His love affairs took a pathological turn as well. Between reunions with Jack Dunphy, the writer with whom he had lived for many years, he took up with heterosexual nonentities - bartenders, air-conditioner salesmen - whose only appeal was their utter averageness. They were, as Mr. Clarke points out, pale reincarnations of the all-American type preferred by his mother, and of the military school boys who had once mocked him.

He prided himself on having seduced these rather weak specimens of heterosexuality away from women, although one notable art critic suggested he had simply grown too fat and ugly and undesirable to attract a homosexual. But as social embarrassments, these preposterous lovers may have had another, more deviously self-destructive purpose: that of dissolving Capote's few remaining friendships.

Capote's take on the world, the sexual picaresque of ''Answered Prayers'' with its writer-gigolo hero, is a throwback to Tobias Smollett, that cheerfully conscienceless and sexually frank Scotsman who chronicled the vice and disorder of 18th-century England and of whom George Orwell said, ''Many of his best passages would be ruined by any intrusion of the moral sense.'' What makes Smollett worth reading, wrote Orwell, is that he is funny, and that he ''often attains a truthfulness that more serious novelists have missed [ because ] he is willing to mention things which do happen in real life but are almost invariably kept out of fiction.'' There is nothing funnier or more outlandish than the description, in ''Answered Prayers,'' of Miss Victoria Self, proprietor of the Self Service - a ''Teutonized Marianne Moore'' who plies her sex trade as if it were an employment office for Vassar graduates; or the story of a Tennessee Williams-like client at the Plaza Hotel with a monstrously messy English bulldog; or the party at which Dorothy Parker, Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift outdo each other in wild, drunken incoherence

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To writers, to all of us, Capote became a morbidly fascinating spectacle. In his ad hominem writing and his mincing, swaggering knockout punches on talk shows, he revealed more about the literary and jet-set worlds, and their insidious interminglings, than we wanted to know. Sometimes his nastiness was refreshing, an antidote to the ego preening and liberal attitudinizing of most media darlings. But in exposing the secrets of real people in private situations, in his willingness to betray all confidences, all conversations, Capote transgressed limits that even the most cavalierly confessional writers have accepted, if only in the interest of self-preservation. Cruelty has a way of boomeranging. If the people Capote had once loved were now loathsome and worthless, how did he escape the taint of that worthlessness? And if they were larger than he was? He wrote exquisitely mean things about Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, but they're still standing tall and he isn't. P. D.

Jones, his alter ego in ''Answered Prayers,'' argues the superiority of truth over fiction, claiming ''Remembrance of Things Past'' would have been ''better'' (though less convincing) if it had been more factual, less disguised. This strikes me as a desperate alibi for Capote himself, whose last stories were more shapelessly journalistic than his earlier ones, lacking the transfiguring quality of art and the richer promptings of the unconscious. If Proust's characters diminished before his disenchanted eyes, there was still something behind and beyond them that wasn't small: God, and if not God then love, and if not love then culture itself. Capote wasn't in search of time past, but of an escape into an eternal present. There was no madeleine for Capote, no magic lantern. Only emptiness. FINALLY the toxicity of the venom, fueled by self-hatred, became all-corroding. And the beauty, what beauty there was, was hollow and unreal. Though I find myself generally concurring with Mr.

Clarke's astute appraisals of Capote's work, when he speculates that Kate McCloud, the central figure of ''Answered Prayers,'' ''might have become the most remarkable of his heroines,'' I can't agree. The red-haired, green-eyed heiress is as idealized as a fairy princess. She's not Capote at all, not ''tres fou'' as Holly might have said. Although P. D. Jones is rapt in his admiration, we never quite fall for this paragon or believe in her fervently maternal mission: she is out to recapture her child from her tycoon husband, who has threatened to kill her if she tries. Perhaps Capote could never believe in such a woman, a mother who would risk her money and her life to keep her son. In any case, he was now too far gone in darkness to find redemption in Kate McCloud. What the mirror on the wall reflected back was the mother who hadn't wanted her child in the first place and the child whose nature, so much like her own, she had never accepted.

HE WOULD SAY ANYTHING - OR SO IT SEEMED When Gerald Clarke first decided to write a biography of Truman Capote, he figured it would take two years. ''I thought it would be easy and fun, because Truman would tell you anything -or so it seemed,'' Mr. Clarke said in a telephone interview from Bridgehampton, L.I. ''What I did not know was that I was walking into a maelstrom. His long decline was beginning.'' Mr. Clarke's chronicle ended up taking 12 years to write. During that period, Capote slipped further and further into a downward spiral in which the ravages of alcoholism and drug abuse were compounded by his increasingly apparent inability to write ''Answered Prayers,'' which he had hoped would be his masterwork - as well as by a series of disastrous love affairs with younger men attracted by Capote's money and fame. For Mr. Clarke, now 50 years old and until last year a Time magazine staff writer, working on ''Capote'' began to seem as endless as his subject's struggle with ''Answered Prayers.'' ''The story was going on,'' Mr. Clarke explained.

''It was a great drama, but there was no ending. It didn't have to end with Truman's death; it could have ended with the publication of 'Answered Prayers' or with his finally drying out. But he was a very, very unhappy man, and especially toward the end he had an insatiable need for attention, love and recognition that just couldn't be filled by anybody. It was clear that he wanted to die for a long time.'' At the age of 59, Capote did die, possibly of a drug overdose. Mr. Clarke, a neighbor in the Hamptons and a confidant for nearly a decade, was ''devastated,'' but his subject's death in 1984 released him to complete his own opus. The compulsively talkative Capote had been far less accessible than he seemed; he had embellished upon, if not fabricated completely, many key events in his life, and concealed others. The darkest secret of all was his failure to write ''Answered Prayers,'' but Mr. Clarke hopes that his own book will help to compensate for that failure. ''The story of his own life was as extraordinary as anything he wrote.

His life was 'Answered Prayers,' and he knew it.'' - LESLIE BENNETTS <123> July 24, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition <127> Because of a transcription error, a quotation in a review of Gerald Clarke's biography ''Capote'' June 12 was incorrect. The passage, from Harper Lee's novel ''To Kill a Mockingbird,'' describes a character whose ''hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck fluff.'' "Breakfast at Tiffany's" turns 50 - Photo 1 - Pictures - CBS News "Breakfast at Tiffany's" turns 50 Next Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly from the 1961 movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The classic Blake Edwards comedy, based on the novel by Truman Capote,. was not a huge success when it was first released 50 years ago, but has since attained iconic status - from the fashions Hepburn wore to the lilting music of Henry Mancini. But it was Hepburn who solidified her status as a Hollywood icon with her performance as a young woman torn by love in the concrete canyons of New York City.

Credit: AP Photo Actress Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." "I think it's gained in popularity the last 50 years," Alison Bailes, film critic for More Magazine, told CBS' "The Early Show." New York Times film critic A.O. Scott said, "I think it's true partly 'cause of the wonderfully charming and romantic and sophisticated view it gives of bohemian life in New York." Credit: AP Photo/Christie's, Ronald Grant Archive George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961). In Truman Capote's novel, published in 1958, Holly Golightly is a young (18 or 19) girl from the country who comes to New York City to snare a wealthy husband Credit: Paramount Pictures Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961).

Scott said the filmmakers kind of "air brushed" the sexual connotations of the story, "makes it look pretty and fun, like 'Pretty Woman' did." "I think what is ground-breaking about it [was] the way that Audrey Hepburn became associated with the little black dress and hat and cigarette holder," Bailes told "The Early Show." "It was iconic, rather than groundbreaking. She is playing a society girl. She's very inventive. It's about self-invention. It's about the American dream. Ground-breaking for women? Not so sure." Credit: Paramount Pictures Audrey Hepburn sings "Moon River" in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961). Credit: Paramount Pictures George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn kiss in the rain in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." A poster for "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961). Credit: Paramount Pictures This photo released by Christie's auction house shows a back view of the black Givenchy dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." The dress was offered at auction in Dec. 2006 at Christie's in London and sold for $923,187.

The money raised was used to help build a school in Calcutta. Credit: AP Photo/Christie's A set of Audrey Hepburn stamps, at auction in Berlin on Oct. 16, 2010. The money raised was donated to the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund. Credit: AP Photo/Kai-Uwe Knoth Program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center Richard Pena and Julie Andrews speak on stage at Q&A commemorating the 50th Anniversary of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, September 15, 2011 in New York City. Andrews' late husband, Blake Edwards, directed the film, which debuts on Blu-ray September 20, 2011.

When asked about Holly Golightly's status as a man-chaser, Andrews said, "When you've got Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy, I don't think anyone for a second believed that this was a heavy hooker, for God's sake!" Credit: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Paramount Julie Andrews attends the blue carpet at the 50th Anniversary of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, September 15, 2011 in New York City. Credit: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Paramount During her career Audrey Hepburn trained at the ballet dancer, made her London debut in 1948, and was given the lead in the Broadway production of "Gigi" (1951). She went on to win international acclaim for such films as "Roman Holiday" (1953), "Sabrina" (1954), "The Nun's Story" (1959) and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961).

Actors Eddie Albert, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn all sit on a Vespa scooter during the shooting of "Roman Holiday" in Rome in 1953. Credit: AP Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 film "Roman Holiday." She won an Oscar for Best Actress portraying royalty who lets loose with an American journalist played by Gregory Peck in Italy. Hepburn and Gregory Peck in "Roman Holiday" (1953). Credit: MPTV.net Audrey Hepburn in a publicity photo for "Roman Holiday." Credit: Paramount Pictures In "Sabrina" (1954), Audrey Hepburn played the daughter of a chauffeur caught in the live sof two very wealthy men, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. Credit: Paramount Pictures Audrey Hepburn holds a poodle as William Holden looking on in this scene from "Sabrina." Credit: AP Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer arriving in Rome on Sept. 29, 1954, after they were married. Credit: AP Photo/Walter Attenni Fashion photographer Richard Avedon talks to actress Audrey Hepburn, during a photo session in Los Angeles, on April 24, 1956.

Credit: AP Cary Grant was always good in a clinch, especially with Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donan's comedy-thriller "Charade" (1962). Credit: Universal Pictures Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in 1963's "My Fair Lady." For the movie version of the Lehner & Loewe musical Hepburn got the role that Julie Andrews made famous on the stage. But Andrews copped the Oscar for Best Actress for "Mary Poppins." Credit: AP Photo In this 1967 file photo, Audrey Hepbrun is seen on the Los Angeles set of "Wait Until Dark" with her husband, actor Mel Ferrer. Credit: AP Photo The Belgian-born actress traveled extensively as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Here she is surrounded by reporters in this September 1992 file photo during a press conference after her return from Somalia. Credit: THIERRY SALIOU/Getty Images Truman Capote Reads From Breakfast At Tiffany's April 7, 1963. - YouTube Truman Capote Reads From Breakfast At Tiffany's April 7, 1963. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist.

Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Apr 15, 2010 92Y Readings: If theres one thing I loathe, its men who bite! So exclaims Holly Golightly in the opening pages of Breakfast at Tiffanys, having entered the narrators apartment via the fire escape, and such is how Truman Capote introduced his heroine when he read from the novel here at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center on April 7, 1963. Todays featured recording is a selection from that evening. Read more and download the MP3 at the 92Y Blog: 92Y Readings: Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation. Follow 92Y on Twitter: Read more on the 92Y Blog: Category

Question: Holly Golightly is the heroine of which novel by Truman Capote?
Answer: Breakfast at Tiffany’s