The 1961 Song "Moon River" -- Part 1

Although the song "Moon River" is not mentioned in the finished movie, it is mentioned in the July 1986 script.


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The song "Moon River" was introduced to the public in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. The song is sung by the character Holly Golightly, played by the actress Audrey Hepburn. Holly lives in an apartment below the apartment of a writer, the character Paul Varjak, played by the actor George Peppard.

In one scene, Paul is writing a story titled My Friend, which begins with the two sentences:

There was once a very lonely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.

Paul hears Holly singing outside, on the fire escape along the apartment building's outside wall. Paul opens his window and listens to Holly sing the song "Moon River", the lyrics of which mention Holly's "huckleberry friend".

The song's lyrics:

Moon River,
Wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style
Some day.

Oh, dream-maker,
You heart-breaker,
Wherever you're going,
I'm going your way.

Two drifters,
Off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world
To see.

We're after the same rainbow's end,
Waiting round the bend --
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River, and me

The song "Moon River" became a huge hit. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

The song became closely associated with the singer Andy Williams, because the song began every episode of his weekly television show, which was broadcast from 1962 to 1971.

This kind of song and music was hugely popular in the year 1963, when the movie Dirty Dancing takes place. Whenever the song was played in the Kellerman's ballroom, most of the hotel guests would get up and dance to it. When Jake and Marge Houseman were standing in the gazebo and waiting for a slow waltz, they were waiting for "Moon River" or for a similar song.

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The 1961 movie was based on the 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, written by Truman Capote.

The cover of an early edition
of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's

The entire novella can be read on-line.

The novella -- in which the story takes place in the year 1943 -- describes (page 4) Holly sitting on the fire escape and singing.

Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried.

Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice. She knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked the songs from Oklahoma!, which were new that summer [1943] and everywhere.

But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went:

Don't wanna sleep,
Don't wanna die --
Just wanna go a-travelin'
Through the pastures of the sky.

and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

The movie's producers commissioned lyricist Johnny Mercer and musician Henry Mancini to compose a song for Holly to sing in the corresponding scene in the movie. Although Mercer did not use the novella's lyrics, he did write lyrics that portrayed -- like the novella's lyrics -- an endless, soul-satisfying journey. Instead of a sky journey, however, Mercer's lyrics portrayed a river journey.

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Mercer surely read the novel for ideas about the song he was commissioned to write. Later in the novella, Mercer then read the below passage (page 9). The scene is that Holly and Paul are talking with each other during a party in her apartment. She is holding her cat and telling him that a movie agent, O.J. Berman, had arranged for her to audition for a movie role in Hollywood but that, without telling Berman, she had flown away to New York City in order to avoid the audition. Now Berman is at her party in New York, and he has just told Paul that Holly had flown away from the movie audition he had arranged for her in Hollywood.

(I have bolded a few parts of this passage and will discuss those parts afterwards.)

"He [Berman] is still harping?" she said, and cast across the room an affectionate look at Berman.

"But he's got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have been good: they wouldn't and I wouldn't. If I do feel guilty, I guess it's because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn't dreaming a bit.

"I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all.

"I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's." ....

She was still hugging the cat. "Poor slob," she said, tickling his head, "poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody.

"We [Holly and the cat] just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like."

She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. "It's like Tiffany's," she said. "Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskay. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait. But that's not why I'm mad about Tiffany's. Listen. You know those days when you've got the mean reds?"

"Same as the blues?"

"No," she said slowly. "No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is. You've had that feeling?"

"Quite often. Some people call it angst."

"All right. Angst. But what do you do about it?"

"Well, a drink helps."

"I've tried that. I've tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle.

What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name."

Mercer surely recognized that this is a key passage in the novella. The passage explains why the novella is titled Breakfast at Tiffany's and explains Holly's personality in her own words.

The passage also features Holly's cat, which appears frequently in the novella and also in the movie. Although the novella and movie end differently, in both cases Holly shoves the cat out of a taxi in another neighborhood but then regrets her action and runs back to try to find the cat, unsuccessfully.

Here is how the movie ends:

While thinking about the lyrics he would write for the movie's singing scene, Mercer pondered the above two passages of the novella. In the novella, Holly sang her self-written song:

Don't wanna sleep,
Don't wanna die --
Just wanna go a-travelin'
Through the pastures of the sky.

Holly considers herself to be a traveler, a nomad. Very early in the novella (pages 2-3), Paul had told the readers how he had learned his downstairs neighbor's name.

I'd been living in the house about a week when I noticed that the mailbox belonging to Apt. 2 had a name-slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner, Traveling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling.

Mercer decided that he would write his movie-song lyrics about Holly traveling. Holly would sing that she was "off to see the world" because "there's such a lot of world to see.

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Holly traveled nomadically because she suffered chronically from anxiety. Paul suggested that she use the German word Angst. Holly herself called her anxiety the mean reds.

Because of her anxiety, Holly suffered from a sleep disorder. She declared in her song that she did not want to sleep. While talking with Paul at the party, she indicated that she did not dream a bit. The novella and the movie show her staying awake far into the night -- even until dawn.

Because of her anxiety, Holly also suffered from an inferiority complex. She feels that she has no ego and that she does not even want to have an ego. She wants to own and wants to belong, but she is not ready for either.

Holly usually wears big sunglasses in order to hide her face. She shoplifts and wears a mask. In the movie the stolen mask is a cat mask.

Holly wearing a cat mask and Paul wearing a dog mask
in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's

Holly Golightly's cat mask
in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's

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The cat symbolizes the lack of belonging in her life. Although the cat lives with her, the cat does not belong to her. Because the cat does not belong to her, she does not give the cat a name.

The Shmoop study guide of the novella interprets the cat symbolism as follows:

Holly's cat is a constant reminder of the lack of connection she feels to those around her. For much of the story, he represents her unwillingness (or maybe her inability) to feel tied down to anyone or anything, and the fact that she won't name him further emphasizes this: "We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I". Holly won't claim the cat as her own because that would signify that she's putting down roots, and this is something she's clearly adverse to doing.

Near the end of the story, the cat comes to represent something slightly different. Holly sets him free on her way to the airport, but she does so by leaving him in an unfamiliar and unfriendly-looking neighborhood. When she realizes the horrible mistake she has made and tries desperately to find him, the cat symbolizes Holly's realization that she's scared about never belonging anywhere or to anyone. All of her fears come to rest in the symbol of the cat, and the fact that she doesn't find him might tell us something about her eventual fate.

Because Holly herself does not belong to anyone, she never tells anyone her real name, which is not Holly (Holiday), but rather Lula Mae.

In the novella, Holly never calls her writer neighbor by his real name. (The novella's readers never learn his real name.) Rather, she calls him "Fred". In the movie, the writer neighbor's real name is Paul Varjak, but Holly calls him only "Fred".

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I speculate that as Mercer read the novella, he too recognized the cat's symbolism in relation to Holly. She explained her relationship to the cat in these words:

We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

This passage in the novella prompted Mercer to begin writing his lyrics about "two drifters, off to see the world". The two drifters were Holly herself and her "huckleberry friend" -- the nameless cat. They had taken up with each other by the river one day, and they would travel along the river, endlessly looking for a rainbow around the river's next bend.

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I will continue this series in Part 2.