The 1961 Song "Moon River" -- Part 11

This series began in Part 1.
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The movie Breakfast at Tiffany's was released on October 1, 1961 -- a little less than two years before the Houseman family's vacation at Kellerman's Mountain House. When the movie was released, Baby Houseman was about 15 years old and Lisa was about 17 years old.

When Lisa was 17 and saw the movie preview, she decided immediately that she absolutely had to watch the new movie.

The preview promised a movie that was full of beautiful clothes, romantic relationships, fun parties and Audrey Hepburn. Lisa Houseman wanted to be just like Audrey Hepburn and wanted a boyfriend just like George Peppard.

When Lisa had been 15 in the year 1957, she had seen Audrey Hepburn's movie, Funny Face. In that movie, Audrey had played the intellectual character Jo Stockton. Jo studied philosophy and worked in a bookstore. After the bookstore was bought by a fashion designer, however, plain but brainy Jo found herself working as a fashion model for the bookstore's new owner. Jo was selected for this modeling job because the fashion designer was developing a new clothing line with a "beautiful and intelligent" look.

When Jo learns that she will pose for such fashions in Paris, she looks forward to the opportunity to meet the famous French philosopher Emile Flostre, the founder of the Empathicalism school of philosophy. The Paris trip turns out to be full of glamorous fashion and romantic adventure for sweet and smart Jo.

Lisa was sure that Funny Face was the best movie in the history of the world. Therefore Lisa did her hair fancy, put on makeup, dressed up in a cute outfit and went to the movie theater when the movie opened there.

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Although Breakfast At Tiffany's was not half as good as Funny Face, Lisa liked it because of Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, their beautiful clothes and the cute cat.

Athough Jo in Funny Face was bright, Holly in Breakfast at Tiffany's was dopey. Despite being a ditz, though, Holly won the love of a professional writer who had lots of money, always wore a suit and tie and lived in a large apartment in Manhattan.

Lisa did not understand or even think about how Holly earned her living. Holly seemed to get some money from rich older men, who apparently adored her.

Anyway, Lisa thought that if she herself ever moved to Manhattan as a young adult, then she might be able to get a good job and have a lot of fun.

Lisa felt sure that her chances of getting a good job would be better if she assembled a good wardrobe If she dressed well for job interviews, then she would appear to be sensible, capable and professional. Then after she got a job, continuing to dress well would help her to advance in her career.

 Whenever Lisa's mother suggested a shopping trip, Lisa jumped up to accompany her. These mother-daughter shopping trips always turned out to include some purchases for Lisa. When considering a clothing or beauty item, Lisa always asked her mother's opinions. Were the colors coordinated well? Would the fabric be troublesome? How might this outfit be accessorized?

Lisa's mother enjoyed these mother-daughter experiences with Lisa and generously paid for items that pleased both of them.

In contrast to Lisa, Baby was not eager to spend time with her mother window-shopping and wandering around inside stores  It was a chore for Baby even to buy new school clothes before a new school year began. As a consequence, Baby accumulated much less clothing than Lisa did. Baby did not even buy and wear makeup.

(While Baby was leaning to dance at Kellerman's, she borrowed most of her dancewear from Penny Johnson.)

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Essayist Jamie Brickhouse has written an interesting article titled Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s - the Novel That Saved My Life. Although his article is written from the perspective of a gay young man, his article perhaps includes much of Lisa Houseman's perspective on the movie. Brickhouse's article includes the following passage:

.... is Breakfast at Tiffany’s a gay book?

It doesn’t have a gay love relationship, gay sex or even an overt gay character. It does have an overt gay author, Truman Capote. I’d never read a Capote book but I knew he was gay. Even folks in Tulip, Texas knew he was gay.

I came to the book through the movie. I wanted to be Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly who falls in love with the edible George Peppard. Truth be told, I wanted to be Patricia Neal aka “2-E,” George Peppard’s sugar mama who was costumed like the Evil Queen from Snow White. That’s how gay I already was.

Then I read the book. I didn’t dive into it thinking it was a gay book, just that it was the basis for my new favorite movie. There isn’t a whiff of romance between Holly and Capote’s alter ego, the struggling writer and narrator of the book. I’ll call him Tru since he is never named, as Holly’s cat is never named. Long before Will and Grace, there was Holly and Tru.

Capote doesn’t claim his alter ego’s sexual identity, but it’s clear that Tru is gay from his infatuation with Holly. She is a girl who welcomes a cavalcade of men into her bed, dresses chicly on powder room change and says things like:

Would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.

It’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky.

Dykes are wonderful home-makers, they love to do all the work, you never have to bother about brooms and defrosting and sending out the laundry.

She’s also the kind of girl who reinvents herself into Holly Golightly of New York City from Lulamae Barnes of Tulip, Texas. Sure, she’s the kind of woman straight men fall for. But she’s the kind of girl gay men adore.

Holly wants Tru to find himself as a writer, and Tru wants Holly to find herself. Period. I found that sexy.

The book opened a window on life beyond the Tulip, Texas I was living in. It made the New York City I’d seen depicted in movies and TV shows suddenly possible. I saw an adult life that wasn’t about marriage and children. In one scene Holly is throwing a raucous madcap party in her brownstone walk up apartment. In another she and Tru are stealing Halloween masks from a Woolworth’s. Later in the book they’re walking across the Brooklyn Bridge after a chow-mein supper and watching the ships pass.

The book is loaded with deliciously quotable lines, but the one that stuck with me and penetrated a gay nerve the first time I read it is never quoted as far as I know. It’s on the last page of the book when Tru is telling the reader what happened after Holly disappeared.

The owner of the brownstone sold her abandoned possessions... a new tenant acquired the apartment, his name was Quaintance Smith, and he entertained as many gentlemen callers of a noisy nature as Holly ever had — though in this instance Madame Spanella did not object, indeed she doted on the young man and supplied filet mignon whenever he had a black eye.

I tingled with excitement when I read that line. I pictured Quaintance — whose real name was probably Joe Bob and he no doubt hailed from a town like Tulip — holding Madame Spanella’s raw filet mignon to his blackening left eye and cradling the phone under his right ear as he gesticulated wildly with a lit cigarette:

Darling, I have the most gruesome hangover. Penn Station at rush hour, in August, on Friday doesn’t begin to describe it.

I saw two gay men — Tru and Quaintance — living the kind of live I wanted to live.

After college I moved to New York. I didn’t become Holly Golightly, Tru or even Quaintance, but I dabbled in all three. I moved into a cute apartment on the top floor of a brownstone walk up with a man I met in Central Park. We threw raucous parties and entertained a cavalcade of men. We could have posted a sign over the door like McDonald’s: “Billions Over-Served.” When I recovered from two decades worth of gruesome hangovers I started to become a writer.

Maybe Breakfast at Tiffany’s did save my life; not in the obvious dramatic way that Holly saves Tru’s life during a runaway horse incident near the end of the book. It saved my life by planting a fertile seed. It showed me an adult life that was about parties and friends and sex and sparkling wit and messiness and creativity and longing for something outside of convention. It gave me the insatiable appetite to reach beyond my circumstances. It gave me a vista of what kind of life was possible for a homosexual like me.

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This article concludes this series about the song "Moon River".