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In the preface to the 1954 edition of his Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood relates a recent encounter with the actress Julie Harris. Harris played the female lead in I Am A Camera, John van Druten's stage adaptation of Isherwood's story 'Sally Bowles', which - like the other Berlin Stories - is a strongly autobiographical account of his experiences in Berlin in the early 1930s. Isherwood writes:
Now, out of the dressing-room, came a slim sparkling-eyed girl in an absurdly tart-like black satin dress, with a little cap stuck jauntily on her pale flame-colored hair, and a silly naughty giggle. This was Sally Bowles in person. Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character . . . . I was dumbfounded, infatuated. Who was she? What was she? How much was there in her of Miss Harris, how much of van Druten, how much of the girl I used to know in Berlin, how much of myself? It was no longer possible to say.1
Isherwood freely, and joyfully, admits that the hold he has over his own creation is tenuous at best; that Sally Bowles has a life of her own, which is beyond the author's reach. The real-life person he modelled this character on had merely been a pale shadow of the essential Sally Bowles as Isherwood envisioned her; and his own story had only partially succeeded in capturing this essence. Now, through an actress' interpretation was he finally able to see this character fully realized, twenty years after he had met the young woman who inspired her creation.2
In this essay, I want to apply some of the questions Isherwood asked himself when confronted with Julie Harris, to a close literary relative of Sally Bowles - another extrovert, moody, playful and oddly stylish nineteen-year old party girl, who thoroughly enjoys her sexuality while also exploiting it for material gain. Holly Golightly made her first public appearance in Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1958. Prompted by a conversation with the owner of a bar in his old neighbourhood, the narrator tells the story of his acquaintance with a...