Manuscript shows how Truman Capote renamed his heroine Holly Golightly
The final typescript for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on which Truman Capote scratched out his original choice for the name of his heroine, Connie Gustafson, and replaced it with Holly Golightly, is set to go up for auction.
The manuscript, which is covered with Capote’s handwritten edits, also shows how the author tempered the sexual content of the story before publication, removing lines such as Holly’s admission that: “Boy, I have hit the hay with some real ghastlies just because I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to have somebody hold me”. Later, Capote cuts an exchange between Holly and her flatmate Mag Wildwood, in which Mag reveals that during sex she pictures a statue of her forefather “Papadaddy Wildwood” in his military uniform.
But the biggest change was Capote’s renaming of his socialite heroine, said Sotheby’s, which is due to auction the typescript next week for an estimated price of £120,000 to £180,000.
Until Capote, who wrote mostly from his bed, took up his pencil for the final time, his heroine was known as Connie Gustafson – a name Sotheby’s said may have been more plausible for “a child bride from Tulip, Texas”, but would have reduced the enduring impact the character has had on the world.
“Holly Golightly is such a magnificent name – it is instantly memorable. It is also a great comic name in itself, and, as with all comic characters, the name is an extremely important element,” said Sotheby’s books specialist Gabriel Heaton. “The original name does not have the same ring to it – it does not trill off the tongue in the same way or capture the character. We all remember the name Holly Golightly, it sticks long after turning the final page of the book or switching off the film as the credits roll.”
The manuscript, which had been in private hands, also shows Capote’s minute attention to detail as he changed or deleted words – “mad” to “vexed”, “touch” to “stroke”. When Holly remembers her slow-witted, peanut-butter-loving brother Fred, Capote originally wrote: “Poor Fred, I’m surprised they took him in the army. Have you got anything to eat? I’m starving.” He changes this by hand to: “Poor Fred. I wonder if the army’s generous with their peanut butter. Which reminds me, I’m starving.”
Heaton said that Capote may have removed the more explicit lines from his manuscript because he feared it might not sell: “It is known that he was concerned that the publishers for the periodical were getting cold feet about the story, worried about its sexually explicit content.” But the excision could also have been a stylistic decision, with Capote feeling “that some of the passages he removed were too much, not having the same lightness that is so integral to the story and makes it work so well”.
In an interview with the Paris Review in 1957, Capote said he thought of himself “as a stylist and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semi-colon”. He added: “Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.”
Capote submitted the typescript to Random House in May 1958. It had been sold to Harper’s Bazaar for the July 1958 issue, but the magazine cancelled the publication at the last minute because of concerns over its sexual content. This enraged Capote, who would say: “Publish with them again? Why I wouldn’t spit on their street.”
The novella was sold to Esquire and appeared in its November issue, by which time it had already been published in book form by Random House. The film starring Audrey Hepburn that followed in 1961 removed much of Capote’s story, including his references to homosexuality.
“For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes,” runs Capote’s description of Holly. “It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between 16 and 30; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her 19th birthday.”
Sotheby’s described the typescript as a major literary manuscript. “The name change from Connie Gustafson to Holly Golightly is a matter of public record, but the sheer volume and detail of revisions here is not known to the wider public,” said Heaton. “The revisions, of which there are many, are often stylistic changes. Capote is, perhaps above all else, a great stylist, so these final revisions – changing single words, cutting redundant phrases – offer us a wonderful opportunity to observe a master of his craft at work.”
