The Female Hermes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s examines author Willa Cather’s stories written and set in Greenwich Village (and later written in nearby West Village) as forerunners to Breakfast at Tiffany’s—beginning further down 5th Avenue in 1912 when Willa sold her story “The Bohemian Girl” to McClure’s Magazine for their August issue at the Brevoort Hotel, just a block up from Washington Square Arch where her 1920 story “Coming, Aphrodite!” (and ‘breakfast at the Brevoort’) take place. Audrey Hepburn’s role in the movie in 1961, 49 years later, came to fulfill Willa’s first literary visions in a much different path for the feminine in culture.

Willa was showing how this different feminine endowed culture with that spirit and ultimately the roots she was examining gave it a different sense of place, America’s possibilities, with a real groundedness in this core of the feminine. It was structural in culture for Willa and would make all the difference.

Audrey Hepburn was a different kind of Being. Audrey was not seeking the spotlight, wealth, or fame. She never chased it; she never had to. It came to her. Audrey lit up the stage and screen naturally. She endures naturally. Literary agent Irving Lazar said that she never needed a press agent or publicist to push her to the public. One of the first invasions of WWII and one of the last places the invaders left was Audrey’s own neighborhood. It was if the atrocities of WWII had arrived for Audrey to witness firsthand. During this she gave herself diligently to daily study of ballet, when possible, with a vision of solo expression, a vibrant contrast of her beauty next to the brutal war surrounding her in The Netherlands. 

Careful evidence shows that Truman Capote took Willa’s characters and turned them into a woman available for money, completely losing Willa’s intrepid vision of what she knew to be the elements for a completely different kind of embodiment. Audrey was this vision, and there’s a great deal of evidence that Audrey knew she was reclaiming Willa’s writing. In WWII Audrey watched as the newspapers were taken over by propaganda, the radios at first dictated, then forcibly removed from people’s homes so that they weren’t allowed to hear anything that wasn’t commissioned for the forcefulness for brain-washing, power, punishment, and control. Audrey witnessed as a child this pure evil destroying their families and homes without any sense of decency towards humanity. The invaders took the best for themselves while demanding to be seen as special. The resistance to that was deeply a part of Audrey’s spirit and deeply a part of the Dutch Resistance. As a young girl Audrey had secretly carried notes for the Dutch Resistance, and here she is in her gorgeous spirit surreptitiously in Breakfast at Tiffany’s doing it again.

One example of Audrey’s audaciousness shows she knew what she was doing when one can’t speak out against the climate of culture or mass belief as the Nazi regime was—most especially when it is as control of propaganda, even the entertainment industry’s. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly and Paul are spending the day ‘doing things they’ve never done before,’ and in the five-and-dime Holly first puts on a dog mask, takes it off, and replaces it with a cat mask, looks over to Paul and he nods “yes,”and that is thing she’s going to “steal” (back) “to keep her hand in.” Those references come straight out of Willa’s “Coming, Aphrodite!”—and Audrey herself ‘keeping her hand in it.’ Willa’s Eden Bower decides to take a hot air balloon ride dangling off the bottom in place of the female model, something she’s never done before. In Willa’s story the cat is a dog living there on the Square in Greenwich Village. Audrey knew the terrorizing of a neighborhood and the suppression of life, and in her beauty Audrey in this scene is wearing an orange coat, the color of the Dutch Resistance, now boldly on a worldwide stage.