Anyone who's followed the career of any given starlet for longer than twenty minutes has heard the line, "Audrey Hepburn is my fashion icon." As this declaration often tends to issue from the lips of young women in plunging necklines, thigh-high skirts, and buckets of makeup, one is sometimes tempted to ask, "Which Audrey Hepburn are you talking about?"

The ironic fact is, the more unique and distinctive an icon is, the more people see in him or her exactly what they want to see. Something of this sort is going on in Sam Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.

As his subtitle makes clear, Wasson is aspiring to something much more than your run-of-the-mill chronicle of the making of a famous film. Where many of us see in Breakfast at Tiffany's simply a cool, quirky film that caused a fashion sensation, Wasson sees nothing less than a watershed moment for American womanhood.

He sets up this thesis by exploring the backgrounds and mindsets of several of the key players, including Hepburn, screenwriter George Axelrod, and Truman Capote, author of the novella on which the film was based. Having sketched a bleak portrait of the mother-hungry Capote surrounded by rich, married, bored lady friends, Wasson explains how the character of Holly Golightly emerged from Capote's imagination: "As he wrote Holly, Truman was discovering that, though she shared many qualities with the women he knew, she was unlike any woman Truman had ever met. She said what she wanted, did what she wanted to, and … outright refused to get married and settle down."

From here Wasson goes on to make a broader point: "Challenging the sanctity of heterosexual dominion, Capote is suggesting that the gendered strictures of who makes the money (men) and who doesn't (women) might not be as enriching as the romance between a gay man and straight woman"—the kind of "romance" that took up so much of Capote's own life.

In Capote's high-society world, Wasson tells us, marriage meant the loss of a woman's freedom—a freedom that Holly Golightly refuses to give up, even though it means she has to sell herself to survive.

Bringing Holly's story to the screen in 1961, of course, meant softening this storyline, turning the story's sexually ambiguous hero into a genuine love interest for Holly, and steering toward a conventional happy ending. Wasson doesn't seem any too pleased about this. In fact, he tries valiantly to carry on with his tale as if the film had held fast to Capote's conception of the hard-boiled independent hooker.

Thus, he peppers his book with quotes like this one, from fellow film critic Judith Crist: "The woman in me really likes Audrey Hepburn [in this film] because she is successful at what she's doing, she's sort of in charge of herself, and is a realist beyond being so cute and attractive." Or this from Ms. Magazine co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin:

[Holly Golightly] was a woman you wanted to be. Of course, she didn't have a profession and I was career oriented, so that was a little troublesome, but the fact that she was living on her own at a time when women simply weren't, was very validating to me. It was very affirming. Here was this incredibly glamorous, quirky, slightly bizarre woman who wasn't convinced that she had to live with a man. She was a single girl living a life of her own, and she could have an active sex life that wasn't morally questionable. I had never seen that before.

One can only suspect that Pogrebin got so swept up in the glamour that she saw the whole movie through a rosy haze. For the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's actually tends to emphasize Holly's vulnerability—a vulnerability portrayed brilliantly by Hepburn. She's a self-described "wild thing," but not a wild thing that will forever refuse to be caught, as in Capote's story. Instead, her glamorous independence masks a deep need to belong to someone.

Again and again this need shows itself, usually against Holly's will—in a sudden teary-eyed glance or harsh ring in her voice; in a moment of drunken fury at Paul, the man she simultaneously appeals to and pushes away; in her determination to provide for her needy brother and her hysteria when she loses him. As for that exciting sex life, it consists mostly of conning various men out of fifty dollars apiece and then escaping out the nearest window.

Yet Wasson remains deeply invested in his thesis that Breakfast at Tiffany's gave a makeover to American womanhood—a makeover that he believes it desperately needed, given his patronizing remarks about the housewives of the 1950s and early '60s who were the film's target audience. (As so often happens, the author's attempt to sympathize with what he perceives as a victimized class comes off as insufferable. We get a charming composite portrait of a boozy homemaker turning the channel to Ozzie and Harriet because she lacks the self-confidence to try to understand a news report about Joseph McCarthy.) So delighted is he by the paradoxical idea of "wholesome, wholesome Audrey" unwittingly helping to launch the sexual revolution that he has to twist his facts to support it.

Note, for instance, the scenes that Wasson talks about in detail and the scenes he ignores. Covering as much material as he does here, obviously he had to do some picking and choosing. But it seems significant that he devotes eight pages to the shooting of the wild party at Holly's place, but barely touches on the scene in which she takes refuge in Paul's apartment when one of her "rats," as she calls her admirers, becomes drunk and violent.

Wasson does acknowledge that Holly and Paul long to leave "a steady life of fiscal security for one of love"—that this, in fact, is the central conflict that drives the film and is a major source of struggle for both of them.And yet he still argues, presumably with a straight face, that Holly has "had a really, really good time throughout" the movie. His encyclopedic knowledge of the film rules out the possibility that he's seen only a heavily edited version of it. The truth is that his ideological blinders are so firmly affixed that he sees only what he wants to see—and sadly, this mars what might have been a book as absorbing and winsome as the film it purports to honor.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog.

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