Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories by Truman Capote

From Capote’s high school chum, Phoebe Pierce Vreeland, to less conceivably, Irish writer, Maeve Brennan. In fact, the list of possible Holly's runs a confounding length. Brantley, who says that Marguerite, “spoke in good lines,” recalls she once drawled she’d “cornered a market that never should have existed.”īut, Clarke tells T&C, “It’s a nice allusion but it isn’t true. Once there, she found herself under contract to Columbia, but unable to shake her Louisiana lilt, she wound up as a dialect coach to the stars, instructing the likes of Elizabeth Taylor on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Littman, Marguerite Lamkin was born in Louisiana and eventually she made her way out to Hollywood in the 1950s.

“She was butterfly light,” says critic Ben Brantley, who came to know her along with at least three others who were supposedly Capote's muses. On first glance, Littman ticks off a few boxes as a gamine brunette with a sugar-rimmed sidecar of a voice. Explaining, “It’s useful being top banana in the shock department.” Capote’s Golightly darts her way through his pages taking the best the men of 1940s New York had to offer, while running away as fast as she could from the barefoot ‘Lula Mae,’ she’d once been in Tulip, Texas.Īudrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards’s adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. A sly personification of a charm bracelet, she winks with tossed away bon mots, “darling’s” and the occasional four letter word. “I'd rob a grave, I'd steal two-bits off a dead man's eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day's enjoyment-but unto thyself honest,” she philosophizes. Indelibly linked to the iconic albeit sanitized image of Audrey Hepburn, the novel’s Holly was written as a slim girl, just shy of 19, piquant, breezy, and mercenary in her pursuit of a good time. Starting as early as the novella’s 1958 publication, “half the women he knew and a few he did not claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine,” biographer Gerald Clarke wrote in his definitive biography of the author. Littman may be the last of the would-be Holly’s, but, in fact, she has a few sisters who can also lay claim to the Golightly name. However, most tributes farewelled her with the curious send-off that she had been the inspiration for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. When the London residing hostess, Marguerite Littman, died late this year, she left behind a storied life filled with acquaintances both notable and quotable.

Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories by Truman Capote