Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) Read Online Free Page B

out of Capote’s original story, blah, blah, are betrayed by a wetness in the eyes, a heaving chest and an occasional shudder of bliss/pain. Obviously, some part of the nervous system wants to acknowledge the film’s impact.
    Edwards’s special interest in marginality in an expensive setting made him a good choice for this urban romance, but it was his huckleberry friend Hank who really came through. We may have OD’d on “Moon River” long ago, but, as played on the harmonica during that opening scene, it still does the job. The harmonica, an instrument associated with children, stands in for Holly’s rural origins (innocence) and contrasts with the rich orchestration and what you’re seeing on the screen (Tiffany’s, Givenchy shades, sophistication). It’s a great effect, muchimitated since. Later on, Hepburn sits on the fire escape and sings “Moon River” while accompanying herself on the guitar. She’s wearing pedal pushers and a sweatshirt. In Capote’s novel, she sings, more appropriately, a mournful country ballad, but why quibble with perfection?
    As in
Peter Gunn
, the city is presented as a grid of luxe through which the outsider characters, Holly and Paul, drift. To score the scenes in which they goof around town, Mancini used a mixed chorus singing in a skidoo-be-doo scat style similar to that of the Modernaires or the Mel-Tones. This was a little twee for my taste. By 1961 I was starting to wise up about jazz, and I felt that Hank, by exploiting this blanched-out idiom from the previous decade, had exposed himself as a bit of a moldy fig. Nevertheless, it enhanced the concept of a carefree, womblike Manhattan in which the bohemian ruled with a magical, childlike omnipotence. In high school I would have given anything to preserve that sanctified state, to rescue Holly from herself (from growing up, being corrupted), to goof around an enchanted Manhattan with some wild thing forever, scat singers always on call to back us up.
    Eventually, my quest for relevance and authenticity (plus a not unsound instinct as to where the most desirable girls were gathering) propelled me into a phase where even the greatest jazz—Ellington, Miles, Mingus, Monk—seemed slick and sexually coy, and I turned to blues and soul music and Bob Dylan. I started reading about pop art and Timothy Leary’s experiments at Harvard. I went to a lot of Brit movies of the kitchen-sink school. The language of hip was changing.
    In his own way Blake Edwards was sensitive to this shift inconsciousness. Super-suave Peter Gunn had evolved into Inspector Clouseau, who tries to stay cool but finds the world just too opposed to the notion. The luxe is still there but the alienation is played for laughs. The expensive objects (custom pool cues, cigarette lighters, etc.) literally attack Clouseau. When Edwards began to sabotage his own hero, it should have been a tip-off as to what was coming. Egos were cracking. Self-image and sexual identity got hazy around the edges. When Clouseau runs across a cool jazz combo in
A Shot in the Dark
, they’re gigging in a nudist colony and they’re in their birthday suits. The old, heavily defended hipster has literally been stripped naked. As for the music in the Pink Panther films, it has become an extravagant parody of coolness—it’s funny because it’s too spooky, too cool to be believed.
    By the time I left suburbia to go off to college in 1965, Mancini seemed a quaint enthusiasm. If I thought about him at all, he would have seemed, at best, a popularizer of jazz, a dependable Hollywood professional. I’m sure some guys in my dorm would have seen him as an insidious agent of the “culture industry” that was devouring America’s native art form and packaging it for mass consumption. Although I didn’t think in those terms, by the late sixties Hank had metamorphosed, certainly in my mind, into an incredible