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23 “I Love New York!” BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S peter lehman and william luhr Since its debut in , Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s has been considered one of the preeminent films celebrating New York City. Its first image of Audrey Hepburn as the elegantly dressed Holly Golightly standing at dawn before Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue defines carefree New York sophistication for many. In acknowledgment of this, one Manhattan cinema, The Screening Room, showed the film every Sunday for the run of its existence from July  through October . On one level, it is odd that this, among the thousands of films that have been set there, has achieved the “New York City film” status it holds. It does not focus on the internationally recognized, iconic sights most associated with the city in , like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the United Nations, Lower East Side tenements, the George Washington or the Brooklyn Bridge, or the arch in Washington Square Park. Neither Edwards nor the film’s stars, Hepburn and George Peppard, are figures whose careers are particularly associated with New York City. Until the film appeared, Tiffany’s jewelry store never had the tourist attraction status it has held since. The film’s hugely popular, Academy Award–winning song, Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” has nothing whatsoever to do with New York City and, indeed, invokes a rural rather than an urban landscape. One aspect of the film that helps to account for its New York identity involves its celebration of the city as a place to which people who are unhappy with their lives come to reinvent themselves, a place where dreams come true. This element of fantasy is evident in both the film’s title and its opening sequence. As the film opens, Holly arrives at Tiffany’s alone at dawn with a bag of take-out coffee and a cruller and quietly, reverently, peers into its windows. Tiffany’s is an expensive jewelry store. One cannot have breakfast there (although reportedly even now, nearly half a century after the film appeared, the store still gets requests for breakfast reservations). For Holly, this impromptu breakfast is the perfect way to end, or begin, a day. As she looks at the jewelry she would love to be able to afford, she herself looks like the wealthy, elegant socialite that she dreams of Chap-01.qxd 1/12/07 12:13 PM Page 23 becoming. It is all fantasy, of course, but during the times when the central characters feel they are on the verge of fulfilling their fantasies, the film represents their joy by having them take exuberant pleasure in the city itself. At one such point, Paul Varjak (Peppard) receives a fifty-dollar check from a literary magazine, verifying that it will publish one of his short stories. Although he had published a respected short story collection some years earlier and maintains literary aspirations, he has written nothing since then and has been living as the “kept man” of a wealthy society matron (Patricia Neal). This check signifies a new, respectable life for him and he asks his neighbor Holly to celebrate with him. She suggests that they spend the day doing things they have never done before. In keeping with the film’s vision of New York City, this instantly translates into spending the day enjoying Fifth Avenue. They wander into the New York Public Library, a five-and-ten-cent store, and Tiffany’s itself, having a carefree, almost childlike time. Later in the film when, due to her involvement with a rich suitor, Holly is about to leave New York for Brazil, she and Paul again go out to celebrate. As they sit near a small fountain, she talks of her plans to return in years to come, exuberantly bursting out, “Oh, I love New York!” Holly has also come to New York to reinvent herself. At thirteen, as Lulamae Barnes, she married Doc Golightly, a much older horse doctor in rural Tulip, Texas, in order to provide for herself and her mentally disadvantaged brother. After the brother joined the army and no longer needed her support, she fled her backwoods life, and eventually earned her living in Manhattan as a social escort for wealthy men (which the film can only imply, in accordance with the production code of the times, involves prostitution) and as a naive courier for a gangster. Her unapologetic goal is to become an...

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