There’s a joke floating around the cobwebs of the internet in varying forms that goes something like this: if you developed an interest in old movies as a tween, you were either an Audrey Girl or a Marilyn Girl. There are plenty of other actresses in the Old Hollywood canon, ones you probably liked, too, or would discover or appreciate more when you were older. But for a subset of young girls, your ride-or-die was either Audrey Hepburn, the gamine girl next door, or Marilyn Monroe, the sexy, sultry starlet. Decades after the ends of their brief careers, the two actresses had been reduced to images that existed in opposition to each other.
I was an Audrey Girl, I must admit, from the moment I watched her make her grand, fully Pygmalion-ed entrance in My Fair Lady (1964). It’s one of my earliest memories: I’m five, maybe six, lying on the carpeted floor in front of the TV at my babysitter’s house, and I pull myself closer to the screen, enthralled. “That,” I think, as the newly regal woman on screen descends the staircase, “is who I want to be when I grow up.” By the time I reached high school, my childhood bedroom was filled with memorabilia and movie posters; I had seen every Hepburn film more times than I could count and written more than one obsessively researched school paper on the star.1
But then came college, where the Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster was ubiquitous in dorm rooms across campus. It was then I learned that though the Audrey Girls were numerous, a majority were much less invested in the actual films of the screen idol than they were in her iconography.
In the passing years, I’ve revisited Hepburn’s canon often. I’m always waiting for a repeat viewing to somehow prove my admiration wrong, to tell me that I was an impressionable and naive child who conflated glamour with talent, that liking Audrey Hepburn was simple, unsophisticated, and unintelligent. (Basic, I guess.) But instead, the opposite happens. The older I get, the more I find myself impressed by Hepburn as an actor who was great in spite of her packaging; by the evolution of her raw and untrained talent over the span of her relatively short career; and most of all, by the undeniably prickly undercurrent of her most iconic films. I can’t help but wonder: how, in a culture increasingly invested in reexamining women from the past, has Hepburn only continued to shrink into oversimplification? When did we start seeing her films as purely aspirational, comfort food fluff, rather than the complicated tombs they are?
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It’s never been more popular to be a girl. At least, on the internet. Turn your head away from the ugly crises facing girls and women today—the ever-increasing assaults on their bodies and brains—and instead toward social media, where nostalgia for girlhood reigns supreme. Online, anyone can be a girl, and girlhood can be anything you want it to be. Whether you’re having a hot girl summer or more of a rat girl one, you can eat your girl dinner while doing your that girl makeup and go to your girlboss job (the one you resent having the right to have when your ancestors got to be girlies who stayed home all day to vacuum and do quaaludes).
Girlification, it’s worth pointing out, is most often performed by grown women, an act that is either applauded or derided depending on whose reaction you seek. There’s the fury that adult women would willingly infantilize themselves when society already does that enough for them.2 But others see it as an act of power. “Womanhood” belongs to those who transition, as Robin Wasserman writes, “from being someone to being someone’s wife, someone’s mother.” With the traditional rights of passage being delayed more and more, of course many adult women often feel more like girls. But it’s more than that: to be a girl3 is to be a fully-actualized person with boundless potential.
Girlification is not a new trend by any means; it just presents itself differently over the years. What if this newest wave is not about being marketable or powerful? What if it’s a desperate reach for nostalgia, a form of escapism into a fantasy version of the past, a desire to recapture the fleeting, simple times of youth before everything got so serious and hard? Perhaps attempting to extend girlhood is an easier alternative than the burnout, anxiety, and general existential despair that surrounds being a woman in today’s world?
I noticed girlification slowly dripping into my own thoughts this summer, a much-needed IV of self-delusion. I couldn’t stop watching classic romantic comedies, many of them old favorites from childhood, longing not for my own girlhood but for a girlhood of another time. “It’s genuinely so embarrassing,” I texted a friend after one viewing, tentatively prefacing what I knew was an objectively stupid thought, “how frequently—more so lately!—I honestly think ‘I should have been a girly in the ‘50s.’”
Realistically, I know that to be a girly in the mid-20th century would be to live in an era of stifling sexism, scant rights, and overall bad vibes.4 My rose-colored assessment is based solely on the past’s representation in fiction. Of course the world looked better in old movies. What’s a quick cure for an inescapable feeling of impending doom, for feeling like there isn’t much time left in the universe, or that existing today—as a girl, woman, or otherwise—is just too fraught? Maybe it’s wishing to wish to exist in an era of optimism. An era, in movies at least, of girlies.
In searching for a reason why Hepburn’s films seem to endure so strongly with young women today, I keep looking towards the fantasy of girlhood. Audrey Hepburn is never a woman in her movies, only a girl. And to be a modern girl in an Audrey Hepburn movie—an Audrey Girl, if you will—is to dress exclusively in well-tailored Givenchy, to never worry about billionaires or climate change or the housing market (inflation doesn’t exist for girls in Audrey Hepburn movies). Girls in Audrey Hepburn movies are courted by older men, but it’s never problematic or predatory; they never have to worry about access to birth control or abortion, or maternal mortality rates, and they definitely don’t have ethical dilemmas over bringing a child into a dying world. A girl in an Audrey Hepburn film doesn’t have a real job; she’s a girl of means, or a girl about to acquire them by the sheer virtue of her glowing personality and charm. She is always a virgin, quirky but not troubled, and easy to fall in love with.
This, of course, is the slant of star-making machinery in and of itself. Those characteristics apply only to Hepburn’s most well-known and well-remembered films, the ones that cemented her celebrity in the first place. No Audrey Girl’s favorite movie is Wait Until Dark; Target doesn’t sell posters for Two for the Road; and you could not possibly make a Halloween costume out of They All Laughed. In Hepburn’s more dramatic, serious roles—the ones where she played, unmistakably, a woman—she demonstrated that she was a great actor. In the more lighthearted or frivolous fare, she proved she was a star. And when we watch those movies, we can pretend that we could be that girl, too. We can feel that maybe things were better in the past, because she makes it seem that way.5 But even that framework ignores the thorniness present in the best of the feel-good fare, in favor of projecting an ideal onto them that we wish to project. A closer look, a tilt of the head is all it takes to see: the past wasn’t as great as we thought it was, not even in the movie version.
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“Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing, Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich.”
Sabrina Fairchild’s father, the Larrabee family chauffeur, imparts this wisdom to his daughter as he drives her to the ship that will take her far away from him, far away from their Long Island home, and far away from her doomed infatuation with another Larrabee boy. Sabrina’s return home from Paris, following two transformative years at cooking school, was not the triumph she had hoped it would be; her grown-up, sophisticated looks, unimpeachable grace, and confident self-possession hadn’t won the love of her longtime crush, the youngest Larrabee boy, David (William Holden). Just like our teenage Sabrina was in love with the idea of David, David was in love with the idea of grown-up Sabrina. Without her made-over new look, he never would have noticed her in the first place; with it, he feels no need to get to know who she is underneath. Worse, she’s found out that her courtship by David’s uptight older brother, Linus (Humphrey Bogart)—which was beginning to edge its way distressingly closer to a genuine romance—was just a ruse. Sabrina is a nice girl, everyone agrees, but she’s not one of them; her affair with David could be devastating for the family business. Linus has promised to handle things. Better to hurt her than hurt a million dollar deal.
It’s easy to lean into all that is romantic about Sabrina (1954). It’s a fable, a modern Cinderella story. Hepburn gets to play the awkward little duckling who returns a swan, and in turn makes us all believe we’re capable of blossoming, too. Who doesn’t have the biggest smile possible plastered across their face when Sabrina, confident for the first time, declares, “No, the moon is reaching for me”? We fall for the trappings of a world most of us will only ever be granted access to via fiction: the black tie dinner parties, the private champagne toast with our teenage crush, moonlit dances on tennis courts, dinner and drinks and dancing on the town, sailing on the Sound. It’s a world we can aspire to place ourselves within; the platonic ideal of a romanticized past that we’re certain must have been better than whatever humdrum life we’re living now. In Hepburn’s Sabrina, we see ourselves reaching for the moon, and can believe there was a time in the not-so-distant past when we really were capable of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and overcoming our humble origins to get the guy, win the prize, and live the kind of lives we envisioned for ourselves. To be fair, Sabrina is an unimpeachably romantic movie—but to only see that side of it is an idealistic misreading.
The more I watch Sabrina, and the older I get, the more clearly I see Billy Wilder’s contempt for American class politics. The wealthy are casually cruel; they worship workaholism and stoicism; they’re suspicious of outsiders. People, in the Larrabee’s world, are expendable. Money is not, no matter how much of it they have. (Even David, the aloof son of privilege, is not immune to the fixed and immutable trajectory of a life chosen for him at birth—his latest relationship has been orchestrated with the boardroom in mind, not the bedroom.) The one percent are not a new phenomenon; they have always existed, and they have always sought to keep others out.
The American Dream, shaped in Wilder’s vision, becomes mythology at best, a lie at worst, and the concept of upward mobility a paradox: Sabrina wants to participate in a world she is supposed to want to participate in, and does all the right things she’s supposed to do in order to gain access. But she is not, and will likely never be, welcome there. Some doors will always remain shut to those not born with the key. Where’s that asterisk on the American Dream brochure, the one saying that you are supposed to want more for your life, but not too much more? Sabrina isn’t meant to live in a mansion, but she’s not meant for the garage, either. In nearly twenty years of watching Sabrina, I had never registered Mr. Fairchild’s line about democracy, much less felt its blow. I never realized Sabrina’s crushing realization that there is a limit to how much she can have. Sure, she gets her happy ending—Linus realizes it’s awfully lonely being a loveless stuffed shirt and goes after her—but it isn’t really happy so much as bittersweet. The two lovers sail into exile together.
Maybe that crushingly stark take—that the wealth inequality and human cruelty we see today are far from new—is why we choose instead to view the film through Sabrina’s naive eyes, choosing to believe that she believes it when she sings “La Vie en Rose.” It’s easier to see the world—past or present—with rose-colored glasses, in blissful ignorance of the truth.
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“An original, an independent, not a good girl, not a bad girl, but a girl, and a free girl to boot, whose disruptive update of modern womanhood (cheery premarital sex!), palatably offset by the grace and wholesomeness of Audrey Hepburn’s own brand of eternal young-girlhood, [Holly Golightly] resolves the paradoxes of one of American womanhood’s rites of passage.”
—Sam Wasson, introduction to the 2021 edition of Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.
I knew I loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) the moment Audrey Hepburn, wearing a man’s tuxedo shirt and embroidered turquoise eye mask, pulled a pair of pink ballet flats out of her refrigerator while looking for milk to pour in her coupe glass. The famous opening scene, with that famous Henry Mancini score, hooked me, obviously—it’s impossible not to get hooked by it—but it was Holly’s sleepy, late-morning introduction to Paul Varjak (George Peppard) that sold me. I knew, even at 13, that there was an inherent sadness coloring the entire picture—not just the more dramatic back half—that, despite its significant watering down of Truman Capote’s novella, it was not the one-note romp I had assumed it would be. But the romp is what I latched onto, what every girl latches onto, I suppose. And what part of the romp isn’t there to love? Audrey Hepburn as a glamorous woman—no, a glamorous girl—about town was a picture of a wild, carefree, and proudly independent adulthood I aspired to, one so unlike that of my parents or any adults in my suburban town, one where everything was fun and nothing was serious, or had a price, or had to be my responsibility if I didn’t want it to be.
It’s this version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that is most firmly cemented in popular culture: Audrey Hepburn as a proto-manic pixie dream girl, walking through New York at dawn in an evening gown with coffee and a Danish, chronically losing the keys to her sparsely decorated apartment. There she is, smoking from the longest cigarette holder you’ve ever seen while keeping her telephone in the suitcase to ensure she’s unreachable, a party girl who doesn’t have a real job and doesn’t seem to want one as long as taking money from men “for the powder room” will do. (Even being a call girl is made glamorous in its vague, early-1960s studio censor-passing depiction.) It is this carefree ideal of Breakfast at Tiffany’s we choose to remember—and emblazon on posters and tee shirts and mugs—rather than the film’s egregious racism, or its co-lead’s anemic sense of chemistry, or its decidedly dark turn after Hepburn sings “Moon River” on her fire escape. It is this version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that I realized, at some point, was, well, basic to like. Continuing to call it my favorite movie would have implied that I was dumb, or simple, or uncultured; in order to prove I was “not like other girls,” rather than explain the nuanced reasons for which I loved it, I instead quietly put my love for it in a drawer. After a while, it became easy to tell myself that basic and simple was all it was, pure iconography with no substance.
Or, at least, that’s what I was expecting to see on a recent Valentine’s Day evening, when I sat in an old theater in the East Village to watch the film for the first time as a real adult. I have to assume that’s what most others there—college-aged couples and groups of young girlfriends clambering in twenty minutes after the start time, drunk on champagne and main character syndrome—expected, too. Every reaction felt so big; shrieks of laughter and oohs and ahs echoed at every expected moment, and several completely inappropriate ones, too.
It didn’t feel like we were watching the same movie; I was acutely aware of how much sadder it was than I had remembered. Holly wasn’t the platonic ideal of an independent woman; she still felt like she was the 14-year-old ragamuffin she used to be, despite all her protests to the contrary. (Had I even noticed that admission when I was 14, I couldn’t have possibly understood it the way I do in my 30s.) This wasn’t a film that was basic, or frivolous, or slight at all—and it certainly wasn’t a romantic version of the past I wanted to live inside. It was another movie about class, about who is born into wealth and leisure and who has to scam their way towards whatever semblance of it they can acquire. Holly and Paul aren’t an ideal romantic couple by any means; she’s a runaway child bride, he’s a failed writer, and neither of these deeply emotionally damaged people knows how to love, just manipulate. They don’t have any options in life other than to rely upon their charm and the kindness of others6 to keep themselves afloat, to invent personas to mask the people they really are. Holly’s greatest desire is to marry rich; it goes unspoken that her existence has an expiration date. She won’t remain young and beautiful and charming forever—what happens then? The whole thing made my stomach hurt. I didn’t want to be Holly, not unless I wanted to entertain the fantasy of self-destruction, and I couldn’t understand everyone around me who seemingly did.
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The thing about Audrey Hepburn is that she’s been a posthumous product almost as long as she was an actor. (Search her name on Amazon and the first page will pull up more Halloween costumes and makeup bags printed with misattributed quotes in the live, laugh, love vein than it does movies.) The Hollywood studio system that created the types for its stars to play to ensure ticket sales is long dead, but the cash cow that is the management of these stars’ estates ensures it endures.
Hepburn has been dead for thirty years, yet, looking around, it’s almost as if she never left. There are countless documentaries and biopics, books and magazine features and museum exhibits. At least one major fashion publication does an Audrey Hepburn-inspired spread each year; any celebrity wearing a little black dress draws instant comparisons, no matter how much of a stretch they may be. Long before we entered our current AI hellscape, there she was, retrofitted into Gap ads (a semi-passable usage of archive material) and Dove chocolate commercials (an extraordinarily discomforting deep fake). That the name and likeness of Audrey Hepburn—managed by two sons who seem at ease cashing in time and time and time again on the name of their famous parent7—signifies strong enough G-rated qualities that it can be used to sell us things suggests that her legacy has not only not been forgotten, but manipulated to be remembered in a specific light. The “Audrey Hepburn” most people know—spunky yet docile, innocent yet worldly, elegant yet grounded—is not so much a person as it is an idea.
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The best of Hepburn’s films contained the perfect cocktail ratio of bitter and sweet—so, too, did Hepburn—but the sweet is what we wish to taste. Or, maybe, it’s the sweet that we’ve been told we are supposed to taste. Or maybe, still, it’s just that the sweet is easiest to taste. It is, after all, the genuine foundation upon which Hepburn’s star persona was built; it’s hard to get past that gentle, graceful lilting voice and elegant figure to perceive her, or her work, as anything other than wholesome, pure, and good. It’s why we see Sabrina Fairchild all grown up and sophisticated from her time abroad, but still a virgin, why the nature of Holly Golightly’s call girl occupation seems to be a forgettable aside.
It’s difficult to see Audrey Hepburn as anything less than a deified ideal of a person, instead of as any other person just as capable of having a bad day, of being rude or in a bad mood occasionally, of letting a curse word leave her lips.8 Who can blame us for wanting to forever see her as a girl when she remains, shamefully, embalmed in an eternal celluloid youth, partly of her own making—she only made four lesser-known films following her semi-retirement at age 38—and partly the craft of ™-ification following her passing. It would be nice to remember Hepburn as aging and complicated, playing a woman having an affair with Ben Gazzara in They All Laughed (two years after they had an affair IRL) or talking about something as boring and old lady-core (complimentary) as gardens, or appearing grief-stricken but brave in photographs of her humanitarian work with UNICEF. But I get it. Those aren’t the kind of images that soothe or provide aspiration as easily as streaming a romantic comedy.
What if watching the movies of Audrey Hepburn is to so many girls what going to Tiffany’s was to Holly Golightly: a cure for the mean reds. It isn’t real, Tiffany’s. I mean, yes, of course, Tiffany’s is real, but Tiffany’s is a figment of our imaginations, a fantasy of an entity we flatten in order to idealize. Tiffany’s—the real one—isn’t any more a holy ground than Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Sabrina are safe and perfect worlds in which to live. Bad things can happen to you at Tiffany’s. I’m sure bad things happen there all the time, just like bad things happened in the past.. But still, we watch, and we think: “If only I could find a real life place that made me feel like that.”
- It’s so crazy that the signs I would one day become a biographer were already there.
- Nevermind the fact that society also worships youth and equates it to relevance, particularly when it comes to women, so you really can’t win.
- It’s important to note that it still often comes down to context: there is a distinct difference between an adult man calling an adult female a girl and that same adult female referring to herself as one.
- And this is just talking about being a cis-het girly!!!
- Or, we can at least concede that it was likely just as awful, but with a lot more glamour and fun.
- And, very often, put up with the unkindness. It seems to go unacknowledged that their first romantic exchange—Holly climbing into bed with Paul after observing him from the fire escape—is the result of Holly escaping a potential assault by an aggressive drunk by climbing out her bathroom window.
- Several opportunities proclaim to benefit charity, though how much is up for debate. The 2017 back-and-forth lawsuits between Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Luca Dotti, and the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund—which Hepburn Ferrer eventually won in 2019—over which party was exploiting the Audrey Hepburn IP for personal, and not charitable, financial gain was, to put it plainly, a mess.
- Maybe this is one of the reasons why I love an outtake of Hepburn yelling “it’s bird shit, boys!” during an interview with Barbara Walters so much.