Текст книги "Being Audrey Hepburn"

Автор книги: Mitchell Kriegman

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DEDICATED TO VERONICA GENG

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

 

 

I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.

–HOLLY GOLIGHTLY

1

It all started with that little black dress.

Yeah, I mean the little black dress—the wickedly fabulous, classic, fashion perfection Givenchy that Audrey Hepburn wore to brilliance in the opening scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Right in front of me was the dress dreams were made of.

“Let me try it on, please, please, please,” I begged Jess.

“No way,” she said. “I’ll get fired.”

Jess was already the special projects assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, otherwise known as the Met. It was kind of a glorified grunt and gofer position but a real foot in the door at the museum, and like me she was only nineteen. That was just one of her jobs. Jess attended fashion-design school all day, worked the Met at night, and waited tables with me at “the Hole” on weekends.

Determined to design her own line of clothing before she turned twenty-five, she’d always known what she wanted to do—like the way she “came out” in tenth grade and never looked back. Considering she was an absolute genius with fabric, scissors, and a sewing machine and the most responsible, goal-oriented person on the planet, let alone anywhere near where we lived in South End Montclair, New Jersey, I had no doubt she’d pull it off.

“You won’t get fired,” I pleaded and gave her my saddest, most pathetic, BFF, puh-leese let me try on the most spectacular dress in existence face.

“Nobody’s here but you and me. It’s the least you can do for dragging me out on a sweaty Friday night in July to sort a bunch of broken pottery fragments from the ancient Nile while all the Park Avenue princesses and baby moguls whoop it up downstairs.” We could hear the party from the main galleries below: popping corks and clinking champagne glasses, the opulent uppity classes murmuring obscene nothings to one another in their preppy Manhattan tones at another over-the-top celebutante gala.

Jess was the only person in the world besides my Nan who had any idea what a big deal that dress was to me. Breakfast at Tiffany’s wasn’t just my favorite movie ever, it was my jam, my mantra, my addiction, the one thing that got me through all the crap at home.

Unless you live in a cave, I know you’ve seen it. I don’t know if anything more perfect has ever existed on film. The pearls! The tiara! That dress! Really, what would you give to live for one day in a world where it would be perfectly normal to wear a little tiny tiara without looking like a runner-up in the Miss Hackensack pageant?

To think that this scrawny girl who came from nothing could become a fabulous socialite with mobsters and writers and photographers and millionaires falling all over themselves for her. New York City in 1961 was cooler and more wonderful than it is today, so full of possibilities. All the men Holly knew turned out to be rats, of course. Or super-rats. Holly was so right. There are so many super-rats out there.

“Please,” I whined. “You know how much I love that movie.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Jess. “That’s why I’m letting you see the dress.”

I gently lifted the dress out of its archival wrapping and held it up. I knew for a fact that Audrey Hepburn and I were almost exactly the same size, 34-20-35, although she always appeared elegant and gamine, where I tended to be more, well … scrawny and boyish. My boobs were smaller—I could maybe hit 32-20-33 if I held my breath and thought Katy Perry.

The black satin was rougher than I expected. It had a hip-length slit on the left side and was accompanied by a pair of elbow-length gloves in a tinted plastic bag pinned to the satin padded hanger inside the box.

Unbelievable.

This was the mystery dress that everybody swore existed, but almost nobody had ever seen or touched, Givenchy’s hand-stitched original design. I wondered if the delicate smell of the fabric was something from the preservation, though I secretly hoped it was a tiny bit of leftover Audrey Hepburn perfume.

“You’re such a stalker,” Jess whispered. “Be supercareful. That’s like a million-dollar dress.”

“Actually, 923,187 dollars. The highest auction price ever received for a dress made for a film at the time. And this one might be worth even more.” I sighed and held the dream dress up to my body.

She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye.

“Okay,” she said. “Try it on. But just for a minute.”

2

If you’d told me that, while I caressed the rough satin of Audrey’s famous black dress, my life was about to change in a million unimaginable ways, I wouldn’t have believed it. Not because I didn’t believe that Audrey’s dress was magical. Or that I didn’t believe in magic. I did, desperately.

In fact, I saw magic around me all the time—in the lives of the famous people I ogled in movies and magazines and online. But magic was for those people, not me. I just couldn’t imagine how magic could even find me sitting in the gray Jersey suburbs where I’d lived my whole life.

Five hours before caressing Audrey’s precious Givenchy, I stood at ground zero of my totally unmagical life: the greasy South End diner where I waitressed, the Finer Diner, appropriately nicknamed the Hole. I was wearing “eau de short-order grill,” the smelly, sweaty perfume of a diner waitress, along with a greasy pink apron. I had just dropped two mugs of coffee and a plate of fried pickles. The zombie shift at the diner was enough to kill you, and I had just finished a double. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.

Making my way home on 21S, one of New Jersey’s finest state highways, I thought I might fall into a coma. I turned off at the 4th Avenue exit, struggling to keep my eyes opened, and drove down Bloomfield Avenue to my house, thankful there were no cars outside.

“Hey, sis, you look like shit,” Ryan said, startling me as I stumbled through the front door. For a thirteen-year-old, he already had a sewer mouth. But considering the way Mom talked, what could you expect? He gave me a crooked grin and twirled that nasty braided mullet of his. As usual, Ryan was playing World of Warcrack, as Mom called it. The most addictive computer game ever created, where kids with no lives have names like Worgen and are always leveling up.

“Thanks a lot, Ry. Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“She went with Courtney to pick up her car. It got towed.”

“Again? How long ago?” I contemplated whether to flee and crash at Jess’s house.

Car doors slamming and the rusty screech of the screen door gave me the answer—it was too late.

“You don’t know crap!” Mom yelled as she barreled through the door. “You can’t go through life without a plan.” She lit up a cig and headed for the kitchen. She wore her usual pale blue scrubs from the hospital.

“I have a plan! It’s just not your plan!” screamed Courtney, stomping just a few steps behind, tramping around in her furry boots wearing shredded Daisy Dukes. Her deep-scoop tank was so tight that her breasts looked like they’d pop out any second.

Ryan gazed up at me with that glazed look and went back to slaying warlocks and werewolves. A death stare from Courtney made it clear that, unless I wanted to become the equivalent of roadkill, I had better get out of there. Getting in the middle of a blowout was the last thing I wanted to do anyway. In this situation, either Mom or Courtney could train their sights on me, so I made a beeline for my bedroom.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Mom shouted. I froze. Between alcohol and cigs, her voice sounded like she had swallowed a shot glass.

“I just got off work and I smell like bacon,” I said as softly as possible. “I have to take a shower.” She turned to the cabinet, grabbed her coffee mug, and went to the fridge for some ice cubes. I slinked away.

The walls in our house were so flimsy that even in my bedroom I could hear Courtney clomping across the linoleum floor and Mom rattling the ice cubes in her cup of Gordon’s.

It didn’t take much to get Mom going at Court. Toenail clippings left on the bathroom floor? A 2:30 A.M. hookup in the driveway? The fact that my older sister was flunking out of junior college because she hadn’t attended a class? Or just another bad day of work at the hospital for Mom—all of the above could trigger Argumageddon. I did, however, know how it would end. The same way it always ended.

You would have thought Mom would have been happy she wasn’t drunk driving. I guess it didn’t help that Courtney had left her car by the side of the road in a stupor for the second time this month. The three-hundred-dollar towing fee had to hurt.

“A plan is something with a future. Responsibility. Not getting shitfaced, smoking weed with your idiot friends, and leaving your car by the side of the road,” Mom spit out downstairs. “I can’t keep saving your ass all your fucking life.”

“Nobody wants you to!” Courtney screamed.

Mom was wrong about Courtney. She did have a plan. Her goal was to relieve the world of all its alcohol, one Jell-O shot at a time, in Jersey City’s vast array of lowlife nightclubs, while fantasizing she would get picked next season as a finalist on American Idol or The Voice. Courtney believed she should get her own reality show—hey, everybody has that same dream, right? Once, she made up a whole new family and seriously tried to get a slot on Mob Wives. There just aren’t enough of those reality shows around for all of us real people to become famous.

Sometimes, it seemed like Courtney was trying to outdo Mom. See, I knew from Nan, my grandmother, that back in her day, Mom was the same as Courtney, only more so. Before MTV discovered New Jersey, Mom was drinking and cruising the seventy-five exits of the Garden State Parkway from Whippany to Seaside Heights. She practically invented shooting beers. She was like the original JWoww, before rehab became a college alternative.

The door slammed, and the vibrations echoed throughout our tiny house. The walls might as well be hospital partitions. That slam was definitely the kitchen door. I listened for the sound of Courtney’s junker starting.

Nothing. Shit. That meant get ready for round 2.

Really, in this situation, the best thing to do was to lock myself in the closet. I just needed to stay out of the line of fire; otherwise, I’d be collateral damage.

I was the middle child. Staying out of the way was my specialty. In fact, I was so out of the way, I was nowhere, but that was better than being somewhere in the middle of what was going on at home.

“You’re just mad because you’re old and you’re always going to be alone and nobody cares about you!” Courtney yelled. I guessed Court had come back inside.

There was a pause for crying until Mom finally said something that was hard to hear because it was buried in tissues. “You have no right to talk to me that way…” And another pause. “This is my house.”

“Nobody cares!” screamed Courtney. The door slammed again, and I waited.

Inside my closet, the sounds coming from downstairs were considerably more muffled. You probably thought I was kidding about the closet.

My closet was my haven, my panic room, my refuge. Mom usually came home from work at 4 P.M. and got her drink on until she passed out on the couch. Once in a while, she’d get super tipsy and silly—singing old Springsteen songs. That was fun. We’d play along until she fell asleep at the kitchen table. But most of the time, she’d get all weepy, and then start hurling ashtrays. She was always angry.

See, Mom never had a “plan” either. After her party years, she never moved away like she told Nan she would. She expected Dad would make money someday, but instead he ditched us and left Mom with a ton of debt.

Eventually she had to make ends meet, so she went back to her maiden name to avoid all the creditors and spent a year in vocational school to become a nurse. We ended up in South End, which isn’t exactly Upper Montclair or even Lower Montclair. Lower Montclair, which we’re close to, was where all the hip professionals lived. They had three ice cream shops and lots of espresso bars and clothing stores like Anthropologie and American Apparel. In South End, we had the K&G Fashion Superstore and Advanced Auto Parts.

Mom worried 24-7. She worried about the dishes in the sink, about the heating bills, about Courtney stealing her last two cigarettes. Then there was my brother, Ryan. At thirteen, he had racked up so many misdemeanors that the security guards at the courthouse knew him on sight.

And my “plan”? Good question.

My life was mapped out. I’d always been the good girl. As much as I’d missed out on a lot of the kind of wild stuff Courtney did (binge drinking, wet T-shirt contests, and generally waking up someplace and having no idea how you got there), I was fine with following the rules. Honestly, I didn’t want to put myself out there that much. Too many friends and friends of my sister’s ended up pregnant early, drunk, addicted, or dead without ever even getting old. Maybe it was that middle-kid thing (if you consider my younger brother, Ryan, in the category of “kid,” rather than, say, devil spawn or homeland terrorist threat). I never had a rebellious phase.

But just because I was quiet didn’t mean I had no opinions. In my head I always had a witty retort. I just never had the guts to say anything out loud. I’d mumble to myself or write it down in my journal. No one really knew I had a clue, except Jess. After all, I wasn’t sitting home like a shut-in licking orange dust from the last bag of Cheez Doodles or anything. I’d go out weekends just to get out of the house. I drank a little, but I never got in trouble or drew attention to myself.

Mom’s plan for me was two years at Essex County Community College to get all my requirements out of the way and then Montclair State University for a MSN or DNP degree. Mom wouldn’t have to pay my room and board because they were both close to home. The goal was to become a nurse-practitioner, which was one step below a doctor but a step above being a nurse like Mom. Mom told everybody about her plan for me whenever she introduced me to anyone.

The truth was, I’d agreed and got decent grades just to keep everyone off my back. Courtney even helped me cram for finals because she wanted me to go, too. It took the pressure off of her.

Downstairs, Courtney must have come back inside. She was still screaming, but the words were hard to hear with my closet door closed. They were probably in the living room. But it didn’t matter where in the house they were. I knew the words by heart. In fact, I was the only one who knew why they fought—even though they didn’t.

Underneath it all, Mom and Courtney always argued about the same thing. My sister and my mom were like the same person at different points in time. Like Back to the Future, where you traveled forward in time but had to be careful not to run into your future self at the Piggly Wiggly because the space-time continuum would collapse. That space-time collision pretty much happened at my house every day.

Though Courtney was a total bitch to me, I felt for her, because Mom knew everything Courtney was going to do wrong before she even thought of doing it, like she was crawling inside her skin. I think that’s why Courtney pushed it to the limit.

Then there was my surprise baby brother, Ryan, who seemed destined to become a complete undermining tool. Dad left a few months before Ryan was born. Funny about that.

When Ryan was little, he burned through babysitters like toilet paper. It didn’t matter if they were nice old ladies, perky teenagers, a Navy SEAL or the Cat in the Hat. None of them made a difference, and none of them lasted. Mom used to joke that she felt like the devil recruiting new souls for a three-to-midnight shift in hell. Once Ryan turned twelve, Mom just gave up.

It sounds weird, but I’d been hanging in my closet since I was five. First time was when Dad put his fist through the kitchen wall, which was followed by a barrage of dining room plates Mom hurled at him. Years later, Courtney and Mom’s screaming matches sent me into hiding again

I pulled the door tight. It was pretty comfy when I was little, almost like a walk-in, so it’s not like I was a total coffin freak. Although these days, I had to squeeze. Even though we didn’t have AC, the temp in my closet was pretty cool. Mashing the pillows around me like a nest, I pushed the big turquoise body pillow to the door, blocking the light and their voices.

I grabbed a Coke out of the minifridge. Yes, I had a minifridge in my closet. I won it by selling more wrapping paper and chocolate than anyone in the history of my tenth-grade class. My secret weapon was to hit up old lady Conner down the street for a bundle. She smoked a lot of weed and bought my chocolates so I wouldn’t tell anyone. As if I would.

I opened my laptop and thanked God for the Internet. There was always a new Web site to check out. I think the Internet was designed for people like me, who need somewhere to go to forget where they really are.

Within a dozen clicks, I could get lost in the urgent need to know the most important details about all the stuff I couldn’t have, didn’t need, but couldn’t live without. There was an update on the hot young royals at Jezebel, Kate Bosworth’s ultrachic cocktail sheath, and red python-print heels at FabSugar, a rundown of who’s prematurely aging at TMZ for their “Celebs Without Makeup” feature, a sneak peek at Jason Wu’s unbelievable new designs for Fashion Week, and a fleeting look at Page Six, the old standby, where I saw the latest on Taylor Swift. Ugh. Did they pass a law requiring that every celebrity Web site had to have a feature on Taylor Swift’s crimped dos and her latest glitter-like-a-princess dress?

Once that was out of my system, I clicked on the DVD in my computer—Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

As the mournful first chords played over the Paramount logo, I fell into a trance. I was there on the street as the lone cab crept up Fifth Avenue, the melancholy notes of “Moon River” weaving their way through my headphones, deep into my cerebral cortex and through my entire body, like the gas they give you at a dentist’s office when your wisdom teeth are removed.

Sinking into the pillows, I melted away to be with Audrey as she stepped out of that yellow 1960 Ford Galaxie taxi wearing the exquisite Givenchy with those extravagant gloves and the four giant strands of pearls. We looked up at the chiseled Tiffany & Co. name above its Fifth Avenue entrance and gazed through the jewelry store window at those miniature chandeliers and floating bracelets, all the while sitting in my closet.

Although I was completely addicted to all of Audrey Hepburn’s movies, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was my total fix.

It was my IV drip bag.

3

Here’s the big secret—Audrey Hepburn is the cure for everything.

Dumped by your lifelong crush? Sabrina. Want to escape your life and go incognito? Roman Holiday. Tired of being a bookworm? Funny Face. Crisis of conscience? The Nun’s Story. Family secrets to cover up? How to Steal a Million. Ready for a vacation escapade with a little intrigue in Paris? Charade.

A movie cure for every need.

Above them all is Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I loved the flat-out glamour of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the false eyelashes, the roaring parties, the tiaras and pearls, and the “darlings.” I loved that Holly Golightly slept with a satin mask and turquoise earplugs with little tassels. I wished I could pull off a look like that.

Edda van Heemstra, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, Audrey Hepburn-Ruston were some of her names, and each one was an evolution toward the Audrey we grew to love. From hours of obsessive online research in the confines of my closet, I knew she grew up during the Holocaust and World War II and was at one point forced to eat tulip bulbs and bake bread out of grass. If Audrey could do all that during a world war, you’d think that I, Lisbeth Anne Wachowicz, growing up in South End Montclair, New Jersey, could make something out of my life. Although the bread-out-of-grass thing seemed totally out of the question.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the one-hour-and-fifty-five-minute version of my hopes and dreams and all the lurking dangers in-between. I’ll never forget the first time I ever heard Holly Golightly talk about the mean reds. I immediately realized that there were mean reds around me all the time.

Everybody knew that you got the blues because you were stuck or you were depressed or you were being treated unfairly. But the mean reds were more unsettling, because when you have them, you don’t know what you’re afraid of, except that something bad was going to happen, and you didn’t know who to tell or what to do.

There wasn’t a time I can remember when I didn’t feel that way. Something bad was always about to happen. Mom and Dad were building to a fight. Dad was itching to leave. Mom was getting plastered, and Courtney was nowhere around. Ryan … well, who knew what lurked inside that poor boy’s soul? And me, what could I do about it all?

When the mean red panic light inside me flashed, I found myself further and further away from who I was or could hope to be. It all just made me want to put everything on hold, keep to myself, and be quiet as a mouse.

I loved Holly Golightly’s Tiffany cure. It wasn’t about the merchandise. Even Holly said that—she didn’t give a hoot about jewelry. “Diamonds are for old elegant white-haired ladies,” she said famously.

Have you been to Tiffany’s? I don’t mean the mall stores like the ones in Short Hills or Hackensack. Fifth Avenue is the only one that will do. Just walk in sometime and experience its tranquility, harmony, and splendor. You don’t have to buy anything. Diamonds aren’t just a girl’s best friend, they’re a sparkling tonic for the soul, like summer rain, gazing at the Milky Way, or snowflakes that land on your tongue.

Tiffany’s was a state of mind, exquisitely removed from fear and panic. That’s what made it medicinal. When Holly Golightly took me on my first Tiffany’s tour, I realized that I’d finally found someone who felt what I felt.

Pretty much since my ninth birthday, I’d been watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s continuously. That’s when Nan gave me my first VHS tape of the movie.

I watched that one nonstop until the tape became hopelessly entangled in our secondhand VCR. The replacement copy lasted longer, but I was limited by family viewing time, which meant I couldn’t watch when Ryan was mainlining SpongeBob and Fairly Odd Parents. Thank God for laptops with DVD drives. My closet became my own personal multiplex, my ticket to a world that I lived in more than this one. And it was really all because of Nan.

Nan was my grandmother, my mom’s mom. She was so different from Mom; it was hard to believe they could possibly share the same DNA.

Nan laughed all the time and had a totally wicked-smart sense of humor. Tiny and elegant, everything she wore was from the 1960s. She never left her house without a touch of rouge, lipstick, and her classic double strand of pearls—a look she’d been wearing since her debutante days—though she worried about the punks on the street trying to snatch them.

Oh crap! Nan!

I grabbed my phone and checked the time—5:04. Crap, crap, crap. I was supposed to have been at Nan’s at five. Yanking off my headphones, I scrambled out of the closet on my knees and dug through the piles of laundry in my room for my favorite pair of jeans, a blouse, and shoes. I slid my laptop into my bag, tossed the bag over my shoulder, and bounded down the stairs toward the kitchen. How was I going to make an exit without getting stuck?

As I tiptoed into the kitchen, I saw Mom at the table in the breakfast nook, her face puffy and red from crying. No sign of Courtney. I couldn’t just ignore her, could I?

“Mom, uh, are you okay?” I asked.

Big mistake. She turned full bore on me.

“You better not turn out like your sister.” I nodded my head no.

“Good. There’s leftover lasagna. Make us something to eat,” she said and walked over to the paper towels, wiping her nose. “I’m too upset.”

Shit.

I forced myself to say something.

“I have to go.”

“What?” She was inspecting me, in that way of hers, like I was under a microscope. Mom has this way of picking on people’s sensitive points. Like in second grade, when I used to invite Sarah Policki, our next-door neighbor, over to play, and we’d ask for a snack, Mom would laugh and say that Sarah looked like she’d had too many snacks already. Just like she made fun of my bony knees. Eventually Sarah stopped coming over. Mom wasn’t exactly great for your self-esteem, especially when she was drinking.

I saw the wheels turning in her head. There was still too much fight in her.

“Mom, I’m already late for Nan’s.” I hated that I sounded like I was begging. She paused for a second, probably debating whether she should strike and go for the kill.

“Nan’s waiting, Mom. I’ve gotta go,” I said. Seizing the moment, I pushed open the kitchen door.

“We need to have that talk,” Mom yelled after me.

I didn’t know and didn’t want to know what “that talk” was.

But what I did know was that she hadn’t found out yet.

You know my “plan”? The whole thing I told you about, the one thing Mom was counting on and Courtney almost as much? The Mama’s “good girl going to school at Essex and becoming a nurse-practitioner” plan?

I wasn’t going.

I hadn’t told Mom or Courtney yet. Mostly because I was chicken. But also because I had no idea what I was going to do instead.

I just knew I wanted out. Out of that house, out of that life, out of New Jersey.

As much as I loved my closet, I couldn’t do another four years in there.

“I know, Mom. We’ll talk later for sure,” I shouted back, already out the door.

“I mean it, Lisbeth,” she said. “You can’t avoid this forever!”

Maybe not.

But I could try.

I ran out the door and headed toward my car as fast as I could.