My Huckleberry Friend

Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River.” For the sake of convenience I reproduce the lyrics in question here:

Two drifters off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

We’re after the same rainbow’s end

Waiting round the bend

My huckleberry friend

Moon river and me

As sung by Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song reveals her rootlessness, her yearning to take flight, to get away—unusual characteristics for the heroine of what is essentially a romantic comedy with a few screwball elements. Childlike and often childish (as the heroines of this genre frequently are), “free-spirited,” she has escaped an unfulfilling life in rural Texas, abandoned her husband and step-children, and moved to New York City. Her reinvention takes the form of a revolt against conventionality—defying social convention is a characteristic trait of the screwball heroine. Subject to whims and tantrums, impulsive, a “kook” (derived from “cuckoo,” late 50s-early 60s lingo for someone who flaunts convention, individuality expressed through eccentricity), she seeks to avoid the confines of responsibility and in order to maintain her independence she avoids commitment, seeking to prolong her adolescence as far into adulthood as she possibly can. 

Perhaps this is why Breakfast at Tiffany’s has that wistful, melancholic mood that I identified in my last post. After thinking about this movie for several years, it seems to me that the ending, in which Holly and Paul famously kiss in the rain as the music swells, cannot conceal what seems to me to be a hint of sadness. Why? Because inevitably, like Huckleberry Finn, Holly is going “to light out for the Territory.” Critic Judith Crist expressed a similar idea (without invoking Huck Finn) during an interview in 2009:

But what’s clever about the way they ended Breakfast at Tiffany’s—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ (Quoted in Sam Wasson’s book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fifth Avenue, 5:00 a.m., p. 168)

Like Judith Crist, I can’t shake the feeling that the couple’s relationship will not last, either. Perhaps Crist felt that Paul Varjak (George Peppard) wanted to control Holly, to suppress her, that he isn’t the “right” match, rather like having the wrong couple end up married at the end of a screwball comedy—imagine Johnny Case (Cary Grant) married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) at the end of George Cukor’s Holiday (1938). Yet the sadness I’m trying to identify isn’t simply an issue of compatibility, or certain hesitations about George Peppard’s performance (it is no secret that director Blake Edwards was strongly against casting him in the role), but something deeper than that, having to do with the underlying motivations of Holly’s character. Leslie A. Fiedler wrote about Huck Finn in a way that is applicable to Holly Golightly:

[H]e does not know to what he is escaping, except into nothing: a mere anti-society, in which he is a cipher, a ghost without a real name. “All I wanted was to go somewheres,” he tells Miss Watson, “all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Huck is heading for no utopia, since he has heard of none; and so he ends up making flight itself his goal. He flees from the impermanence of boyhood to that of continual change; and, of course, it is a vain evasion except as it leads him to understand that no society can fulfill his destiny. (Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 464-65)

Perhaps Fiedler’s observation is more applicable to the Holly Golightly as portrayed in Truman Capote’s novel rather than the Hollywood adaptation. Nonetheless, the diegetic use of “Moon River” requires an explanation, and there is nothing in the movie that interests me more.

Moon River and Me

According to legend, after a successful preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, Martin Rackin, although happy with the test audience’s positive assessment of the film, insisted that the scene of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” be cut from the picture. Some accounts aver that Rackin had been an opponent of the song all along. Others say that he preferred a different composer than Henry Mancini. Is there any truth to these rumors? Composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, “Moon River” went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and additionally received the 1962 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Given the song’s huge success and popularity, could the production head at Paramount really have been so obtuse? How could he have failed to recognize the song’s greatness?

Pure speculation, but perhaps the reason why he wanted the song cut was because he felt the scene was narratively unnecessary. For the sake of argument, I might even say that I agree with him: the scene doesn’t advance the plot. However, plot is only one dimension of a movie. The “Moon River” scene is essential to the film—imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s with the scene omitted. What is lost? Holly singing “Moon River” contributes nothing to the plot, but has everything to do with mood or atmosphere. The song’s subject—wanderlust, the lure of the river—deepens our understanding of Holly’s character and also invokes a wistful, melancholic mood that haunts the rest of the movie. The scene is an instance of diegetic music, music that is actually played within the fictional space of the film’s story.

Of course, the movies are loaded with such moments, and the best of these moments remain indelibly etched in our memories. For author and critic Umberto Eco (1985’s “’Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”), the greatest movies are “great” precisely because they contain such moments. The challenge presented to us is how to write about such moments in a way to do them justice. As Christian Metz stated in his now famous epigraph (cited by James Monaco in How to Read a Film), “[M]ovies are difficult to explain because they are easy to understand.”

Nancy & Lee, Part V: Pop vs. Rock

The summer of 1967 became known as the “Summer of Love,” in effect an opportunity to market new fashions, rock music, and alternatives to Western (or European) thought and religion to the young people of America. As a moment in history, the designation was supposed to signal a profound shift in consciousness. A pop song was written to announce this shift, John Phillips’ “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” sung by Scott McKenzie. Thousands of young people, celebrating the American values of freedom and the open road enabled by the automobile, flocked to San Francisco, later to Monterey (for the Pop Festival), where that summer “bohemian chic” was all the rage. Fashion designer Thea Porter was responsible for most of the bohemian chic fashions of the 60s and 70s—caftans, diaphanous patterned shifts, and Middle Eastern (or Oriental) influenced dresses and blouses.

“The hippie look started out as more of a political statement, a type of anti-fashion, but it soon became the fashion itself,” states Laura McLaws Helms in her book, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic, co-written with Venetia Porter, the designer’s daughter. Changes in fashion allowed for new, exotic, and, occasionally, bizarre expressions of individuality. The Fall of the Summer of Love began on October 17, 1967, when the musical Hair had its off-Broadway debut at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, later opening on Broadway in April 1968. The Monterey Pop Festival was to rock (a noun that once had been a verb) what Hair’s “tribe” was to Bohemian chic. The entertainment industry realized that it was time to market products specifically for the counterculture.

Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967, featured the band members in jackets designed by Thea Porter on the album cover.

The vaguely Oriental jackets, coupled with the band being photographed using a prism lens, all suggested an hallucinatory “trip.” As purveyors of Bohemian chic, the band announced itself through the album cover as playing a new kind of music signaling a new form of consciousness. Any number of terms were applied, correctly or incorrectly, at the time to the band’s music—psychedelic, hallucinatory, “mind-expanding,” “trippy.”

NANCY SINATRA: My music was left behind in a way…since I was never embraced by my peers. I was stranded, on my own, to fend for myself . . . . I remember, years later, meeting Stevie Nicks and Sheryl Crow at the Clinton White House. They virtually snubbed me. I was hurt.

An interesting comment, to be sure. However, I’m not sure that it was Nancy Sinatra’s music that was left behind. She represents a pop music aesthetic that signifies values that certain individuals, such as those named above, hold in disdain. She is a representative of a fashion style that was considered conservative—miniskirts, go-go boots, simple A-line dresses—that was rejected by rock culture’s adoption of the values represented by Bohemian chic—non-Western, Oriental, and superficially radical. Anti-fashion became fashion, earnestness became pessimism, and the supposed shift in consciousness became an obsession with sex and hallucinatory drugs. Pop music was for so-called “empty people,” superficial in thought and feeling. In contrast, rock was for those who felt deeply, those who adhered to the fundamental modernist values: individuality, spontaneity, inspiration. By associating itself with modernist values (previously adopted by jazz culture), rock leveraged itself into the position of being the superior pop musical form.

Nancy & Lee, Part IV: Movin’ Beyond

An old adage warns never judge a book by its cover. What about an album cover? Music critic Michael Jarrett observes, “[album] covers not only represent—encode in visual form—the myths associated with music, they contribute to the construction of those myths. They are part of the process that imbues music with meaning, giving it both a face and a voice.” (Sound Tracks) Record covers mirror back our perceptions of particular types of music, perceptions that are to a great extent visually and not musically determined, perceptions that are shaped by our past experiences with other texts representing aural “events.” Album covers are essential to our consumption of pop music; they shape our reception of the music the album contains.

Nancy & Lee’s cover photo was taken by Ron Joy (1931-2013), a prolific photographer whose celebrity photos appeared on the covers of magazines, books, and album covers from the 1960s through the 1990s. Joy had previously taken the cover photos for Nancy Sinatra’s albums Sugar (1966), Nancy in London (1966), Country, My Way (1967), and the Movin’ With Nancy soundtrack LP (1967). In contrast to the cover photographs of other records released during the same time period featuring couples, the minimalist, burnt orange background of Nancy & Lee is an interesting innovation. The cover of Sonny and Cher’s In Case You’re in Love (1967), for instance, features the laughing couple sitting back to back on a large boulder that sits above an expanse of water, likely a lake. Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter (released later in 1967) features the smiling couple sitting together within a forest clearing, leaning against each other at the shoulder. Question: is the use of natural landscapes on these album covers intended to be an idealized visualization of an idyllic, untroubled, and pastoral life dating back to the Edenic world of Adam and Eve?

The Ron Joy photograph of Nancy and Lee eschews a natural setting in favor of the controlled lighting of a photography studio. The color of Nancy’s jacket and Lee’s shirt, as well as their sun-tanned faces, is enhanced by the minimalist burnt orange background. They are bent very slightly forward, Nancy leaning into him as if they are sitting atop a horse that’s not visible within the frame. The minimalist background accentuates their eyes as they both stare directly at the viewer, breaking the theatrical “fourth wall.” The tops of their heads are at the same level, as are their eyes. They imitate each other’s pose as well. Are they to be perceived as boy/girl fraternal twins (dizygotic), one light, one dark? We return their gaze, our eyes moving from to left to right and back again, caught by the surprising ambiguity of their facial expressions: is this photograph an artfully created spectacle, or a documentary-like portrait? Is the photograph pop music’s citation of the doubling scene of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), released in the U.S. in 1967? Persona is a film that Susan Sontag said is about doubling: “...it is...pertinent to treat Persona as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self....” She goes on to say, “A sub-theme of doubling is the contrast between hiding and showing forth. The Latin word persona, from which the English ‘person’ derives, means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask.” (Styles of Radical Will).

Sontag’s reference to the actor reinforces the observation I made in my previous post, that songs—especially duets—are more like plays than poems. The singers are like characters in a play. As I also suggested last time, the male-female duet is like a conversation overheard by a listener who is put in the position of being a voyeur. And yet, while Nancy and Lee’s duets are charged with an erotic undercurrent, they are not love songs. “Sand,” “Summer Wine,” “Some Velvet Morning “Lady Bird” and “Sundown,” invoke atmosphere and mood like good film music, but the meaning of their lyrics remains open to interpretation, to the performers (see the liner notes) and listeners alike. The ambiguous cover photograph on Nancy & Lee—is it a documentary-like portrait of the couple, or is it an image of doubling, an image that both reveals and masks simultaneously?—contributed to the construction of the powerful myth of Nancy and Lee that endures to this day.