The 1961 Song "Moon River" -- Part 5

This series began in Part 1.
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The character Holiday (Holly) Golightly in the Breakfast at Tiffany's novella has several similarities to the character Penny Johnson in the Dirty Dancing movie. If a prequel Dirty Dancing movie were made, then the novella could serve as a partial inspiration for the story of Penny. Like Holly, Penny ran away from her home in Texas to New York when she was a teenager.

Holly ran away from Texas when she was about 15 years old -- first to California and then to New York, where she arrived at about the age of 17.

An important difference between Holly and Penny, however, is that Holly was a lazy courtesan whereas Penny was an energetic dancer.

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The novella is about a couple of teenagers -- Holly and her writer-neighbor (his name is not mentioned in the novella) -- who are estranged from their families and are struggling to live by their wits in Manhattan during World War Two.

In the 1961 movie, the two main characters are played by Audrey Hepburn (born in 1929), who was about 32 years old, and by George Peppard (born in 1928), who was about 33 years old. Each character lives alone in a rather large apartment.

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Truman Capote, the novella's author, was born in New Orleans in 1924. When he was four years old, his father left the family, and then his mother turned Truman over to be raised by four elderly, spinster female relatives in a small, Alabama town, Monroeville.

In 1931 Truman’s mother – it will be relevant to mention that her birth name was Lillie Mae – moved to New York City, changed her name to Nina. She married a wealthy Cuban immigrant Joe Capote, who eventually adopted Truman, who joined his mother and new step-father in New York City in 1933, when he was nine years old.

In the following years, Truman maintained contact with and often visited his relatives in Monroeville. One of his childhood friends there was Harper Lee, who later became famous as the author of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird (some people believe that Capote helped Lee write it).

In 1941, at the age of 17, Truman dropped out of high school began working in the art department of The New Yorker magazine. In his free time, he began to write short stories, hoping to become a professional writer. At about the time of his 19th birthday, at about the beginning of October 1943, he moved out of his parent’s luxurious home and moved into a small, third-story apartment in the area of the East 70s in Manhattan.

These were the circumstances of Truman Capote’s life that were depicted in his novella. The story's main events take place from October 1943 to October 1944 – essentially the year between his 19th and 20th birthdays.

Toward the end of that year, Capote was fired from his job at The New Yorker because he insulted the famous poet Robert Frost by walking out of the room during the middle of one of his poetry readings. The novella mentions this firing but does not provide any details.

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Capote seems to have based his novella's character Holly Golightly primarily on his own mother -- and on himself. The Wikipedia article about the novella includes the following passage.

Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke wrote "half the women he knew ... claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine." Clarke also wrote of the similarities between the author himself and the character.

There are also similarities between the lives of Holly and Capote's mother, Nina Capote; among other shared attributes:

* both women were born in the rural south with similar "hick" birth names that they changed (Holly Golightly was born Lula Mae Barnes in Texas, Nina Capote was born Lillie Mae Faulk in Alabama),

* both left the husbands they married as teenagers and abandoned relatives they loved and were responsible for, instead going to New York,

* and both achieved "café society" status through relationships with wealthier men.

In his novella, Capote imagined himself as a teenager living as a neighbor of his own teenager mother. His mother's personality was similar to Holly's personality.

Capte was a flamboyant homosexual, and his own personality was likewise similar to Holly's personality.

To some extent, Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's was a self-examination of his relationship with his mother, who had left him when he was four but then taken him back when he was nine. His continuing problems with his mother caused him to move out of her luxurious home when he was 19.

To some extent, he did not consider his mother to be his real mother. He had been raised by his Monroeville female relatives until he was nine -- the age when he consciously came into his mother's life.

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Penny Johnson too had a troubled relationship with her own mother. This was part of Penny's reason for leaving Texas at the age of 17 and moving to New York.

Penny does not mention her father during Dirty Dancing.

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Holly Golightly suffered chronically from anxiety, which she masked from other people by means of an apparently merry personality. Because of her anxiety, she characterized herself as Traveling and she moved from place to place -- and from relationship to relationship -- erratically.

In the novella, Holly sang about her traveling characteristic in her song:

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

In the movie, this song was adapted into the song "Moon River".

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My interpretation of the story is that Holly suffered from anxiety because her life had been sexualized by older men when she was too young. After both her parents had died from tuberculosis, she was taken in by a widower, Dr. Golightly, who soon married her when she was 14 years old. In this young marriage, she had to take care of the Dr. Golightly's children from his previous marriage.

Soon Holly ran away to California. There a movie producer arranged for her to audition for a movie role, but she flew away to New York in order to avoid the audition. I suppose that Holly flew away because she perceived that she was being groomed to serve as a sexual toy for older men in the Hollywood movie industry.

Although her birth name was Lula Mae, she adopted the name Holiday (Holly) while she was involved in Hollywood. Her new first name perhaps originated from her experiences as a young sexual toy in Hollywood.

Holly was about 17 years old when she arrived in Manhattan and was approaching her 18th birthday when the Breakfast at Tiffany's story began.

In New York, Holly made her living mostly as a sexual dominatrix for an extremely rich man, named Rusty Trawler. He was a sexual pervert. He liked to dress up as a little girl. Then Holly would discipline and spank him. He liked that he denied sexual pleasure to him but appeared to have sexual relations with other men.

In fact, though, Holly did not really have sexual relations promiscuously with other men. She was not an ordinary prostitute. Rather, she was a young dominatrix, beginning a career of catering thus to much older, very rich men. When she flirted with older, rich men, she was to some extent putting on a show for Rusty's cuckold fantasies and she was to some extent trolling for new clients like Rusty.

Holly's sexual business is not spelled out in the novella, but it was understood in 1958 by sophisticated readers who knew how to read between the lines. The novella's scattered hints of sexual perversion were a major reason for its commercial success.

The novella does not hint about the sexuality of Holly's writer-neighbor. Although he is Capote himself -- who was a flamboyant homosexual -- he in the novella is merely a neighbor and friend. In much of the novella's second half he is not even a friend, because he is unfriended by Holly. The writer-neighbor is too busy writing to spend any time on romantic or sexual activities.

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Capote himself -- when he was in his late teens -- used his homosexuality to help advance his literary career. He sexually served older successful writers who might serve as his mentors and promoters in the writing business. In that regard, young Capote himself was similar to young dominatrix Holly Golightly.

The novella takes place during 1943-1944, when the USA was fighting in World War Two. Although Capote was 19-20 years old, he did not serve in the military. He perhaps was deferred from conscription because of his flamboyant homosexuality or perhaps avoided conscription because he himself recognized that his flamboyant homosexuality would make him unfit for military service.

The novella does refer occasionally to the war.

* When the writer-neighbor is fired from his job, he is doubly upset by having to look for another job because he fears that he might be conscripted into the military anyway.

* Holly and her temporary roommate both have boyfriends who are characterized as German sympathizers.

* Holly’s brother is serving in the military, and she wants to mail him some peanut butter. Because sales of peanut butter are limited by wartime rationing, she and her writer-neighbor spend a day going from store to store to buy a lot of small portions of peanut butter.

* After Holly’s brother is killed in combat in Europe, she suffers a nervous breakdown. (In the movie, her brother is killed in a car accident in peacetime Kansas.)

I suppose that Capote felt ashamed about not serving in the military during the war. He was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a slacker.

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If you want to try to read between the lines about Holly's relationship with Rusty, then study the following passage (pages 8-10) from the novella. Holly's writer-neighbor is at a party in Holly's apartment. I have bolded some of the words to help you read between the lines.

Presently one of these [friends of Holly] became prominent. He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom.

There wasn't a suspicion of bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he'd been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.

But it was not appearance that singled him out; preserved infants aren't all that rare. It was, rather, his conduct; for he was behaving as though the party were his: like an energetic octopus, he was shaking martinis, making introductions, manipulating the phonograph.

In fairness, most of his activities were dictated by the hostess herself: Rusty, would you mind; Rusty, would you please. If he was in love with her, then clearly he had his jealousy in check. A jealous man might have lost control, watching her as she skimmed around the room, carrying her cat in one hand but leaving the other free to straighten a tie or remove lapel lint; the Air Force colonel wore a medal that came in for quite a polish.

The man's name was Rutherfurd ("Rusty") Trawler. In 1908 he'd lost both his parents, his father the victim of an anarchist and his mother of shock, which double misfortune had made Rusty an orphan, a millionaire, and a celebrity, all at the age of five. He'd been a stand-by of the Sunday supplements ever since, a consequence that had gathered hurricane momentum when, still a schoolboy, he had caused his godfather-custodian to be arrested on charges of sodomy.

After that, marriage and divorce sustained his place in the tabloid-sun. His first wife had taken herself, and her alimony, to a rival of Father Divine's. The second wife seems unaccounted for, but the third had sued him in New York State with a full satchel of the kind of testimony that entails. He himself divorced the last Mrs. Trawler, his principal complaint stating that she'd started a mutiny aboard his yacht, said mutiny resulting in his being deposited on the Dry Tortugas.

Though he'd been a bachelor since, apparently before the war he'd proposed to Unity Mitford [a British woman who sympathized with Nazi Germany], at least he was supposed to have sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn't. This was said to be the reason [newspaper columnist] Winchell always referred to him as a Nazi; that, and the fact that he attended rallies in Yorkville.

I was not told these things. I read them in The Baseball Guide, another selection off Holly's shelf which she seemed to use for a scrapbook. Tucked between the pages were Sunday features, together with scissored snippings from gossip columns. Rusty Trawler and Holly Golightly two-on-the-aisle at "One Touch of Venus" preem. Holly came up from behind, and caught me reading: Miss Holiday Golightly, of the Boston Golightlys, making every day a holiday for the 24-karat Rusty Trawler ....

Rusty Trawler came carrying a martini; he handed it over without looking at me. "I'm hungry," he announced, and his voice, retarded as the rest of him, produced an unnerving brat-whine that seemed to blame Holly. "It's seven-thirty, and I'm hungry.

You know what the doctor said."

"Yes, Rusty. I know what the doctor said."

"Well, then break it up. Let's go."

"I want you to behave, Rusty." She spoke softly, but there was a governess threat of punishment in her tone that caused an odd flush of pleasure, of gratitude, to pink his face.

"You don't love me," he complained, as though they were alone.

"Nobody loves naughtiness."

Obviously she'd said what he wanted to hear; it appeared to both excite and relax him. Still he continued, as though it were a ritual: "Do you love me?"

She patted him. "Tend to your chores, Rusty. And when I'm ready, we'll go eat wherever you want."

"Chinatown?"

"But that doesn't mean sweet and sour spareribs. You know what the doctor said."

As he returned to his duties with a satisfied waddle, I couldn't resist reminding her that she hadn't answered his question. "Do you love him?"

"I told you: you can make yourself love anybody. Besides, he had a stinking childhood."

"If it was so stinking, why does he cling to it?"

"Use your head. Can't you see it's just that Rusty feels safer in diapers than he would in a skirt? Which is really the choice, only he's awfully touchy about it. He tried to stab me with a butter knife because I told him to grow up and face the issue, settle down and play house with a nice fatherly truck driver. Meantime, I've got him on my hands; which is okay, he's harmless, he thinks girls are dolls, literally."

"Thank God."

"Well, if it were true of most men, I'd hardly be thanking God."

"I meant thank God you're not going to marry Mr. Trawler."

She lifted an eyebrow. "By the way, I'm not pretending I don't know he's rich. Even land in Mexico costs something. ...

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I will continue this series in Part 6.