Holly Golightly and Women in the early 1960s

by Susan Douglas

We were a tricky market to pitch things to, however, because we wanted to rebel against grown-ups and the establishment while feeling grown-up ourselves. We also wanted desperately to conform with one another, or at least with those of us who were cool. A successful ad campaign or TV show or musical group spoke simultaneously to these conflicting desires and made us feel like distinctive individuals with traits all our own who defied mindless, knee-jerk conformism yet still fit in. What this led to by the mid-1960s was a plethora of images of teenage girls and young women, some of them cynically manufactured, some of them much more genuine, who personified the blending, or management, of both defiance and conformity.

As something resembling my teen identity began to coagulate, there was a cavalcade of female archetypes to consider, and each, in her own way, embodied a reaction against the identity with which our mothers had been saddled. They also represented a compromise between obeying gender norms and subverting them. Even so, the absolute importance of having flawless skin, thick, shiny hair, a slender figure, and great clothes remained indisputable. This hadn't changed, and maybe even had intensified as more products, from Stri-Dex to Summer Blonde to poor boy sweaters and miniskirts, were marketed exclusively to us. We were still terrified of being ugly, unpopular, smelly, fat, and dorky, and as lemming-like in our desire to imitate what we saw in Seventeen and Glamour. (Models like Twiggy would shortly raise the stakes considerably on how much weight we all had to lose and how much eyeliner we had to apply, to be truly fashionable) Yet these new female icons, as strikingly different as they all were--the bohemian, the career girl, the folk singer, the Beatles fan, the perky TV teen--were about repudiating certain prescribed female traits, like being docile, obedient, apolitical, and sexually passive. Even Glamour, by the early 1960s, assumed its readers would either work or go to college after high school, and there were many more articles like "From Campus to Career" and quizzes asking, "Are You in the Right job?" than there were pieces about marriage, let alone babies, which were rarely mentioned. The 1963 "Happiness Index" asserted that "happiness is ... an eight dollar raise; the boss's compliment; not having to shave your legs." Yes, this was chatty and cute; it was also pre-feminist.

Through these new archetypes, we could imagine and emulate a new kind of agency for ourselves and for our generation of girls. And the celebrity girls and boys we identified with were blurring one of the most important boundaries of all, the one demarcating what it meant to be a boy and what it meant to be a girl As longer hair and dandified clothes for boys became cool, many of us began doing what boys did, acting like them, and even looking like them. Mia Farrow and Twiggy had shorter hair than John Lennon. We 'wore pants, instead of skirts, whenever we could, man-sized watchbands, and, if we were preppy, the same Bass shoes the boys wore. We stopped wearing Heaven Sent and bought Canoe from the men's counter. Sure, these were just cosmetic gestures of style, but they mattered. No one called it gender bending at the time, but that's what was happening. And it gave us just that little bit of latitude we craved as we collectively cast ourselves against Mom. Referring to the unisex fad, Glamour cautioned, "Try On His Shoe in '66, But Don't Try to Fill It."' But once you tried it on and felt how comfortable it was, well, as men found out, they didn't always get those shoes back.

The first irresistible, androgynous, and non-conformist female character many of us remember is Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). She partied all night and slept all day, usually in the nude, watered the plants with scotch, kept her slippers in the refrigerator and her phone in a suitcase, refused to decorate her apartment, used a two-foot-long cigarette holder, and earned her living as a quasi-call girl, quasi-escort. She lived a glamorous life in New York City, hosting wild cocktail parties, dining at the "21" Club, and getting drunk whenever she felt like it. She could whistle for a cab as loudly and effectively as any burly doorman. She was definitely not a virgin, and she was completely charming. She was totally cynical about marriage, setting her sights only on millionaires. She shop-lifted for fun, played the guitar on her fire escape, and called everyone darling.

Here was a young woman on her own, flouting all sorts of old biddy conventions about how single women should conduct themselves, having a ball. But it was the fact that Audrey Hepburn played this character that made so many of us fantasize about becoming Hollys ourselves when we grew up. It wasn't just that Audrey Hepburn was stunningly gorgeous, or that she was slimmer than most models, or that whatever she wore automatically looked so incredibly stylish. Wide-eyed and small-breasted, Hepburn was still girlish, and while it was quite clear that Holly Golightly was sexually active, Hepburn seemed, well, not quite pre-sexual or asexual but like a fairy or a storybook princess, above it all. She made sexual maturity for girls less scary, as if on the other side of puberty you could be child-like and androgynous and still be attractive to men. Beautiful women with boyish bodies and upper-crust accents, women like Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy, were critical icons during this period, for they made being boyish "classy" and very "in." After the mammary mania of the 1950s, flat-chestedness was fashionable and soon came to signify intelligence and breeding, as if flat-chested women were ipso facto the special exceptions to all those negative stereotypes about female irrationality, incompetence, and stupidity. Audrey Hepburn made me feel a lot better about not looking remotely like the "after" picture in ads for Mark Eden Bust Developers, and this explains, in part, why she was one of the most popular actresses in America among young women.

The narrative of Breakfast at Tiffany's was so compelling because it is about a young woman's struggle with her own identity and her passage to womanhood, a passage she and many of us in the audience regarded with dread. After meeting this sophisticated New York City glamour girl, we learn that in a previous life she was Lulamae Barnes, a tomboy, child-bride hillbilly from the sticks, Holly's complete opposite. When her former husband comes looking for her, she refuses to go back with him, explaining simply, "I'm not Lulamae anymore." Later in the film, when Paul Varjack (George Peppard) pressures her for a commitment, she announces that she is neither Lulamae nor Holly, she isn't sure who she is.

This never-ending invention of selves, of masks, of poses was too familiar to us, and when Paul asks her to give up certain aspects of being Holly to be his wife instead, we were as torn as Holly. Paul insists, "I love you you belong to me," but Holly snaps back,
"No--people don't belong to people. I'm not going to let anyone put me in a cage." Loving someone, she asserts, is tantamount to imprisoning her. (Even as a preteen viewer, I saw the way marriage had entrapped a lot of adults I knew, so I tended to agree with how Holly validated my own emerging antagonism to the institution of marriage. Nevertheless, there was George Peppard, handsome, caring, and smart, who loved her despite all her previous dalliances ; who seemed to be offering something different. I wanted Holly to able to stay Holly and keep Peppard. The final scene, in which Holly finds her cat (named Cat, of course) and kisses Paul in a teem downpour, is ambiguous. Do I cry every time because she's found Cat and Paul, or because she's lost Holly? And it's not clear how important the film's resolution was anyway, since what we all remembered and found thrilling wasn't that Holly got George Peppard the end but that she got away with all sorts of non-conformity without paying any price; on the contrary, she got one reward after next. She made female eccentricity and deliberately not fitting glamorous.

It's not embarrassing, after all these years, to admit that Holly Golighdy/Audrey Hepburn had a strong impact on you when you were young, making you long for bigger and better things.