Breakfast at Tiffany's — Writing on the Arts

“And another thing…” Audrey Hepburn tells Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, “never a briefcase in Paris and never an umbrella. It’s the law.”

I recently lost my favorite black, bamboo-handle umbrella, purchased several years ago on a rainy afternoon from the flagship Brooks Brothers store on Madison and 44th Street. And I no longer have the beautiful raincoat my mother, who had clearly not listened to Audrey Hepburn, bought me at Brooks Brothers for my first trip to Paris.

This seems fitting as the loss of the 44th Street store has become a reality. Somehow, I can’t seem to bring myself to walk over and see the demise. So many memories…

The following is a blog post I wrote in 2012:

Breakfast with Audrey

When my mother took me to Bloomingdale’s I wanted to move in. There is no logic to this. Except that the world inside, with its living– and bedrooms set up seemed perfect.

I never knew anyone else had this feeling. Then I read Capote:

“Just get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.”

The thing is -- you want to go to Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn. After you’ve seen the film, you are sunk. There is no Holly without Audrey. The real Holly is far from perfect and Hepburn was so stunning on so many levels that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not prevent her inner goodness from seeping through.

Another store with a proud look was Brooks Brothers; my one-year career at prep school gave me an excuse to shop there for boy’s oxford-cloth shirts and tweed blazers. I was fascinated by the mostly-male sales help. What was their back story? I came up with an idea, The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, that imagined a young man and his mother, a former model, coming to terms with their lives as they come and go from their apartment in Greenwich Village.

Letitia Baldridge once wrote an Op-Ed piece about shopping yesterday called I Shopped Them All: “It was such a safe, predictable world. It was also intensely personal — everything directed at you and no one else.”

“That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird…in the park…we giggled, ran, sang along the paths toward the old, wooden boathouse…leaves floated on the lake; on the shore, a park-man was fanning a bonfire of them…Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring…”

So said Truman Capote, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

There is always a day in October -- when pumpkins appear on the stands, the sky is cloudless and cerulean, and, most of all, the late summer’s heat has finally been fanned away -- that seems like a new beginning.

These are the days when hot tea is finally an option and sweaters are found. They are also the days that I think of Central Park and how lucky I was to have this extraordinary landscape as my childhood playground.

We jumped rope and played Red Rover; in the winter we sledded down Cedar Hill. We were blissfully unconnected, unlike the way children, from babyhood, are now. To see the photographs in the stunning Central Park Country: A Tune Within Us (SierraClub/Ballantine, 1970) is to glimpse another time.

The images can be misty and ethereal, taking us out of the city where they are located, or grounded and humorous, such as when a tired child leans against a green balloon.

This book caught my breath when I discovered it with my friend, Kate, who had brought me to the divine Book Cellar in the basement of the New York Public Library, Webster branch. My father, a retired librarian in the Queens system, brought me a copy of this book from the library when I was a little girl. I have not seen it since.

With a foreword by then-Sierra-Club president David Brower, and a beautiful introduction by the poet Marianne Moore, Central Park Country, reminds me of the power of nature in the city and new beginnings in October.