Fifty Avenue, Sunday, October 2, 1960, Dawn.

Audrey was worried. They all said she could do it, that playing Holly would be a challenge, but that like everything else, it would come naturally to her. Naturally, they said naturally. In Roman Holiday, they said she was so lovely and natural, and then gave her the Academy Award. But that wasn’t acting, not like the Patricia Neal kind that made you really think and really feel. Now there, she believed, was a real actress. Pat could play anything, but Audrey, sitting in a yellow cab, waiting for Blake Edwards to call action, just had intuition. Intuition and luck. Audrey missed her ten-week-old baby, Sean, whom she left with the nanny back in Switzerland, and she began to wonder if she was wrong about leaving him in the first place. This was the longest she had ever been away from him. He would be fine, she assured herself, though it was difficult to forget the recent string of high-profile kidnappings back home (she and Mel had taken severe precautions not to publicize the name of their nanny on her whereabouts). No amount of cigarettes could ease her tention, but she was desperate and smoked on anyway, sometimes shakily, like a gambler with a bad hand.

The street was empty, like one of those tumbleweed roads in a western movie. A crowd would be gathering soon. It was all so nonsensically difficult, down to the Danish pastry in the bag beside her. Ho would she eat that thing? Audrey didn’t want to be troublesome, but she despised Danishes, and asked Blake if he wouldn’t mind if she were to walk up to Tiffany’s with an ice-cream cone instead. But he said no. Of course, he was completely justified. This was breakfast after all, and who would believe that?

(…) A man approached the cab and asked Audrey if she was ready. Yes, she told him, she was, and braced herself. She waited. Outside, the sun was not yet up. (…) “They’re rolling…” Audrey heard, and a second later, the second A.D cued the cabbie, and they were off. The scene had begun. (…) They wouldn’t have many takes (the sun would be too bright soon), and even though it was a chilly Sunday morning, the people of New York would begin to pour out quickly. (…) Audrey couldn’t rush it, though. If Tiffany’s was, as she says in the script, the place where Holly and things went together, she would be wise to linger at the window and take it very slow, savoring it the way one would a moment of total satisfaction. (…) One by one the city blocks fell away, and as the cab approached 727 Fifth Avenue, it slowed beside the curb and came to a stop. Audrey stepped out of the car and shut the door behind her. Rather than approach right away, she paused on the very edge of the sidewalk and looked up at Tiffany’s.  

spiritualevolution1111:

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”

~ Joseph Campbell

Audrey Hepburn at a party in New York.