I was madly in love with her,” Capote told Gerald Clarke, author of the 1988 biography Capote. “I just thought she was absolutely fantastic! She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life. She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about. I consider her one of the three greatest beauties in the world, the other two being Gloria Guinness and Garbo. But Babe, I think, was the most beautiful. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century … [S]he was also the most chic woman I have ever known.” I strongly recommend this book to all those who like dramas and who love analyzing the main characters. Holly and the narrator have a drink, and the narrator tells her that he’s a writer. Holly says she’ll help him become well-known and asks him to read a story aloud. When he does, she critiques it. This deeply hurts the narrator, but he still finds Holly appealing and she endears herself to him once more. As someone used to sharing personal information, Holly tells the narrator that she visits a mobster named Sally Tomato in prison every Thursday, explaining that Sally’s lawyer approached her and asked if she would keep Sally company. Holly agreed, she tells the narrator, so she goes to see Sally each week, delivering coded messages, though she mainly enjoys the man’s company and doesn’t think too much about whatever information she’s communicating. The moment when you finally understand why the book is called "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is the one when you find out Holly's biggest dream and the main purpose in life. The main idea of the book is expressed in Holly's words "Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,[…] If you let yourself love a wild thing, you'll end up looking at the sky." In this book, "the wild thing" is a metaphor for Holly, a person who listens only to her heart, breaks the rules and doesn't really care about the future. She is that kind of woman which can't be tamed and who is in a continual search for the place which she calls "home". of Capote’s most popular works, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a novella about Holly Golightly, a young fey café society girl; it was first published in Esquire magazine in 1958 and then as a book, with several other stories. Read More

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote Plot Summary | LitCharts

Although on the surface Paley had everything she could have ever wanted and more, she and Bill had a relentlessly unhappy marriage. According to Capote’s testimony to Clarke, Babe had twice attempted suicide, once with pills and once by attempting to slit her wrists, and both times Capote claimed to have saved her. “Babe was caught,” Wasson wrote. “Truman would fashion Breakfast at Tiffany’s so Holly Golightly wouldn’t be.”

While the real-life similarities between Holly and Marilyn practically write themselves (“I’ve never had a home,” Monroe once told Capote, “not a real one with all my own furniture”), Martin Jurow—producer of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s film—was merely unconvinced that Monroe was a strong enough actress for the role. “Holly had to be sharp and tough, and as anyone who saw Marilyn could sense, she was about as tough as a tulip,” Wasson wrote. “It was difficult to imagine a personality like that living like Holly, all on her own in the big city.” And, of course, there were very practical matters of film production to take into account. For all that we’ve come to love and appreciate about Marilyn now, she did have a reputation for chronic lateness and an almost pathological inability to remember dialogue, sometimes requiring upwards of 50 takes for a single line. “It’s not that she was mean,” remembered Billy Wilder, director of The Seven Year Itch. “It’s just that she had no sense of time, nor conscience that that three hundred people had been waiting hours for her.” That evening, Holly is arrested because of her associations with Sally Tomato, who used her to run a drug ring from inside prison. O.J. who posts her bail. When the narrator goes to get Holly some clothes, he finds a man in Holly’s apartment. The man gives the narrator a letter from José, in which he explains that he can’t be with Holly because it would ruin his political career. The narrator delivers this letter to Holly, and she tells him she lost her baby while riding after him that day in the park. She then says she plans to go to Brazil when they let her out; not to chase José, but to avoid a prison sentence. The narrator hates this idea, but he brings her suitcase and cat to Joe Bell’s bar as instructed. There, Joe calls a limo to take Holly to the airport. On the way, Holly tells the driver to stop in Harlem, where she lets out the cat. After doing this, though, she screams at the driver to stop and frantically tries in vain to find the cat. The narrator promises to keep looking for the cat after she’s gone, so Holly leaves. In the end Holly's destiny remains unclear and this leaves us many questions. Has she forgotten about her friend and that's the reason why she never writes to him? Where did her affairs bring her? Did she find that perfect place where she felt like at Tiffany's? One day, Holly tells the narrator that she gave his story to O.J., who liked it but thinks he’s wasting his time writing about things nobody cares about. Holly says she agrees, which creates a nasty falling out between her and the narrator. Over the next few days, the narrator keeps his distance, but he soon notices a strange man lingering outside Holly’s apartment. One day, the man follows him to a café, and when the narrator finally confronts him, he learns that the suspicious man is Doc Golightly—Holly’s much older husband. Sitting at a diner counter, Doc Golightly explains that Holly—whose real name is Lulamae—wandered onto his property in Texas when she was still a girl, having run away from nasty foster parents with her brother Fred. Doc caught both Holly and Fred stealing from his farm, so he took them in. When Holly turned 14, he married her, and she eventually ran away despite seeming happy. While there are several “swans” who are believed to have contributed to the fictional creation of Holly, including Gloria Guinness, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, Carol Marcus, and Gloria Vanderbilt, there is one in particular that is thought to have gone above and beyond in terms of inspiration: Babe Paley, the wife of William S. “Bill” Paley, founder of the CBS television network.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary Breakfast at Tiffany’s Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.” And I swear, it never crossed my mind about Holly. You can love somebody with­out it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

So we’re suddenly in a classic rom-com situation, and their final-scene kisses in the pouring rain becoming the blueprint for the genre, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to The Notebook. The novella meanwhile – despite the frothy, fizzing readability of Capote’s shimmering prose – leaves a more bitter taste, Holly scooting away in a cab never to be seen again. Golightly is a wild thing; there’s no containing her, no making her stay. She keeps on going lightly over the world, even if the need to keep reinventing herself starts to look more like a heavy burden. Risky Business. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was originally going to be published in Harper’s Bazaar, but the magazine’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation, felt uncomfortable printing some elements of the novella. Frustrated, Capote agreed to edit certain parts of the story, but Hearst ultimately decided not to run the piece, worrying that Tiffany & Co. would withdraw advertising support.