Figure 1. Mickey Rooney as Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, US, 1961). Paramount Pictures/Photofest Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi: Yellowface and the Queer Buzz of Breakfast at Tiffany’s Melissa Phruksachart Much like its female protagonist Holly Golightly, Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s has led a chameleonic life. The narrative about the glamorous call girl has shape- shifted from its written form into a feature ilm starring Audrey Hepburn (1961), a failed Broadway production with Mary Tyler Moore (1966), an ABC sitcom pilot with Stefanie Powers (1969), a West End London stage musical featuring Anna Friel (2009), and a Broadway play starring Emilia Clarke (2013). Notably, Hepburn’s portrayal of the character lives on as an icon of lipstick feminism. Holly Golightly’s preferred accoutrements of privileged white femininity — champagne, diamonds, the chic cigarette, and the little black dress—have their drugstore stand-ins through calendars, posters, and many a college girl’s Halloween costume. However, the contemporary success of Breakfast at Tiffany’s — especially in its widely distributed ilm version (dir. Blake Edwards, US, 1961)—has been marred by a general unease with Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Holly’s neighbor Mr. Yunioshi. Camera Obscura 96, Volume 32, Number 3 doi 10.1215/02705346-4205088 © 2017 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press 93 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 94 • Camera Obscura In the summer of 2008, the Council of Asian Paciic Islanders Together for Advocacy and Leadership (CAPITAL) protested the city of Sacramento’s free community screening of the ilm. The city relented, agreeing to show the Pixar animated ilm Ratatouille (dir. Brad Bird, US, 2007) instead. A similar protest took place in New York in 2011 around a free screening of the ilm presented in a public park. Instead of switching out the ilm, the programmers preceded it with a short documentary on the history of yellowface produced by the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA).1 On the production side, both Mickey Rooney and director Blake Edwards have publicly apologized and expressed regret for fashioning the character.2 This genulection at the altar of antiracism has become the de facto response for recuperating the ilm, its lauded cast and crew, and its eager viewers. This discourse of aberration suggests that the problem of racism could be solved if the ilm, or merely Rooney’s Yunioshi, simply disappeared, but neither the outright banning of the ilm nor the offhand acknowledgment of its racism has truly mitigated the discomfort of its existence. At the ilm’s iftieth anniversary screening in 2011 sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one attendee lamented, “The only jarring note was Mickey Rooney’s performance as the obnoxious Japanese neighbor. It was an ugly caricature and jarring to today’s sensibilities.”3 In keeping with the ilm’s discourse of easy glamour, the attendee’s disavowal of Yunioshi is mediated not in terms of ethics or justice but through the realm of sensibility and aesthetics as experienced by the implicitly white viewer. Yet the notion that Rooney’s yellowface performance taints the ilm is the very thing that constitutes the innocence of its viewing public. This is because the audience’s point of identiication, the heroine Holly Golightly, is similarly structured as “pure” against Yunioshi’s grotesqueness. Thus, rather than turning away from Yunioshi, I propose that we turn toward him in order to interrogate the ways his presence cannot be excised from the ilm and is actually critical to leveraging the particularly daring conglomeration of gender, sexuality, class, and race that rendered Breakfast at Tiffany’s a desirable model of white femininity. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 95 Asian Americanist scholars and critics such as Karla Rae Fuller, Helen Zia, Jeff Yang, and Kent Ono and Vincent Pham have addressed the implications of Mr. Yunioshi as a racist caricature.4 This essay contributes to those conversations by unpacking Yunioshi as a historical igure with an archival presence rather than a mythic character to be read textually. Exploring Breakfast at Tiffany’s through Paramount’s production iles and press releases, available at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, helps us apprehend how the performance of Yunioshi was not merely a product of an American cultural climate Christina Klein has termed “Cold War Orientalism,” but was also part of a broader Hollywood repertoire of cinematic practices.5 Through Mr. Yunioshi, we can open a window into the massive amounts of labor that studios like Paramount Pictures (the distributor of Breakfast at Tiffany’s) spent on creating and sustaining the racial ictions that brought in millions of dollars to the box ofice. Framing Mr. Yunioshi not as a singular event or performance by one body or actor but rather as a social process involving multiple people and ofices contributes to our understanding of how minoritized others become racialized within popular media industries. This pivots the conversation away from one of Asian American racial injury, which often elicits responses of defensive negation and/or hollow apology from Hollywood, toward a material history of industrial practice that concretizes how racial meanings are produced through and by mass media like ilm. Yunioshi’s importance lies not only in his role within the ilm’s narrative but also in his presence in the production history of the ilm, particularly in the context of its adaptation from Capote’s novella. The character served not merely as a stereotype but as an apparatus—a technology of race, sexuality, and gender—that helped mediate the problems that the producers encountered in adapting the novella. Capote, for one, vehemently disapproved of the Hollywood revision. “It was the most miscast ilm I’ve ever seen,” he said in an interview. “It made me want to throw up. Like Mickey Rooney playing this Japanese photographer. Well, indeed I had a Japanese photographer in the book, but he certainly wasn’t Mickey Rooney.”6 For Capote, Rooney-as-Yunioshi epitomized the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 96 • Camera Obscura multitude of broad alterations made to the novella that radically changed its scope. The novella was retooled in order to become legible to contemporary Hollywood logics of embodiment, and Yunioshi served as a repository for a number of negative affects and aesthetics around nonnormative sexualities that the ilm’s creators saw in Capote’s novella. As I will show, the character of Mr. Yunioshi is not an exceptional aberration; rather, he its quite nicely into a ilm preoccupied with masquerade, phoniness, and fakery. Emphasizing the ilm’s investment in such themes (and the ways in which the ilm uses Yunioshi to communicate them) allows us to make sense of the ilm in relation to several entangled biopolitical concerns of the early 1960s: the management of post–World War II Asian American populations, remnants of the lavender scare, the burgeoning feminist movement, and the changing status of whiteness in postwar America. To explore these themes, I introduce the analytic of the “buzz” as a way of reading in and out of the ilm. The motif of buzzing connects Holly Golightly and Mr. Yunioshi: the absentminded Holly continually forgets the keys to her apartment and relies on Mr. Yunioshi, her upstairs neighbor, to buzz her in. Mr. Yunioshi, meanwhile, reacts to these disturbances through a frenetic buzz of his own. In a metaphorical sense, a buzz is a repetitive noise that occurs at a lower frequency, diffuse yet palpable. I show how racial and sexual difference resounds atmospherically in the ilm and its source text as a buzz, and I argue that this is elided by standard readings of Mr. Yunioshi that understand him merely as a stereotype. Last, I investigate Paramount’s publicity tactics, which created a salacious buzz around the ilm, speciically around Rooney’s yellowface performance of Yunioshi and Hepburn’s against-type casting as Holly Golightly. The Persistence of Yellowface The white Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of the Japanese Mr. Yunioshi is part of a long tradition of yellowface in American culture which should be understood within an economy of racial desire that centers on the titillating effects of white (and sometimes black) Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 97 performances of Asianness. Drawing on its blackface sibling, the practice of yellowface usually features white performers who use “dialect, makeup, posture, and costuming” to igure the “Oriental” as temporally backward, strange, and diabolical for the purposes of entertainment.7 Prior to the advent of cinema, imagery of Asians circulated in political cartoons, popular song, and vaudeville acts across the US.8 Notable early examples of cinematic yellowface include Madame Butterly (dir. Sidney Olcott, US, 1915), featuring Mary Pickford as Cho- Cho- San; Broken Blossoms (dir. D. W. Griffith, US, 1919), with Richard Barthelmess as Lillian Gish’s forlorn Chinese lover; and popular series such as Mr. Moto (1937–39), Fu Manchu (1923–80), and Charlie Chan (1926–81), all of which starred white men in yellowface as the title characters. Many of these ilms included “real” Asians in their casts as supporting characters, as does Breakfast at Tiffany’s (a point to which I will return later), highlighting the desire for the particular effects of a yellowface performance over a “real” Asian performance. The style of yellowface used in Tiffany’s relects postwar America’s relationship with Japan as well as its Cold War concerns regarding the growing geopolitical power of Asia. Asian representation underwent especial pressures in the US imaginary during World War II as the enemy Japanese needed to be understood differently from the US-allied Chinese. The incarceration of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans, most of whom were US citizens, in camps from 1942 to 1946 was one such racially based response to the war. The internment was legitimized in popular culture through numerous forms, from propaganda newsreels showing the internees to be “happy campers” to ilms and cartoons that depicted the Japanese as bumbling, bespectacled, clumsy, and bucktoothed middle-aged men who wished to destroy the US. Theodor Geisel’s (Dr. Seuss’s) anti-Japanese political cartoons, such as the 1942 drawing “Waiting for the Signal from Home,” and animations such as Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (dir. Friz Freleng, US, 1944) are two notable examples of works that gave formal shape to this newly urgent racialization of the Japanese. The American dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 sobered the popularity of “Jap” imagery. Dominant images Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 98 • Camera Obscura of the Japanese shifted from the cartoonish enemy to stark blackand-white photography of disigured, scarred, and suffering men, women, and children.9 The 1961 ilm version of Yunioshi drew directly on cartoonish World War II stereotypes: Rooney plays the character for laughs with slanted eyes, round glasses, buck teeth, a kimono, and an exaggerated Japanese accent. Rooney’s caricature of Yunioshi was a pointed reminder of these past violences, and upon the ilm’s release, several critics, including those from the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, noted its offensiveness.10 After World War II, an ambivalent vogue for racial authenticity ran through Hollywood. The mid-1950s to the early 1960s saw the rise of the Asian American star through actors like Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta. Both garnered leading roles in this period, including romantic leads, and costarred in the irst all–Asian American musical, Flower Drum Song (dir. Henry Koster, US, 1961). Indeed, strains of postwar US culture attempted to embrace rather than negate racial difference as a response to critiques of the civil rights movement and as an attempt to prove US capitalist democracy superior to Soviet and Chinese communism.11 Through heteronormative stars like Kwan and Shigeta, Asianness and Asian heritage became newly celebrated as Asian Americans were marshaled as proof of the US’s success in assimilating immigrants.12 Despite this movement, yellowface persisted in ilms such as The King and I (dir. Walter Lang, US, 1956), The Teahouse of the August Moon (dir. Daniel Mann, US, 1956), and Sayonara (dir. Joshua Logan, US, 1957). One key difference is that this cycle of ilms were all set, and often ilmed, in Asia. These “runaway productions” were desirable from a business point of view, as Hollywood aimed (and often failed) to capture the large Japanese market of postwar ilmgoers.13 They were often “about” Asia in the broadest sense: whatever the ilms’ plots, postwar Asia played a starring role as an object of fascination and reverence. Americans no longer approached Japan as a credible foe, as they did in World War II, but rather as an aesthetically complex and tradition-bound ancient society. Hollywood imagery of postatomic, US- occupied Japan no longer imagined its citizens as evil minions of the emperor Hirohito, but rather as pliant geishas from another century. Postwar Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 99 modernity was rendered implicitly American as it was buttressed by the supposedly anachronistic Orient. Following this trend, Paramount released a number of ilms in the late 1950s and early 1960s that exploited the US fascination with Asia, including The Geisha Boy (dir. Frank Tashlin, US, 1958), a comedy starring Jerry Lewis as a magician who befriends a Japanese war orphan; The World of Suzie Wong (dir. Richard Quine, US/UK, 1960), a romance about a white American man who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute in Hong Kong; and My Geisha (dir. Jack Cardiff, US, 1962), a truly bizarre ilm starring Shirley MacLaine as a famous actress who disguises herself as a geisha in order to play Madame Butterly in a remake directed by her unsuspecting husband. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is adjacent to, though not necessarily part of, this cycle. The ilm shares important similarities with the others in how it uses a backward Orient to shore up Americanstyle modernity—in this case, as embodied by Holly Golightly in an emerging form of white female sexual independence. The Buzz across the Color Line In Capote’s original Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly’s emerging form of white female sexual independence is constituted against a backdrop of racialized menace, speciically though fears of black-white miscegenation. From Holly’s sexual excesses with racial others to the narrator’s queerness, the sexual transgressions in the novella operate on the frequency of a buzz: they are strongly implied but not exactly explicit. The novella revolves around the friendship between an unnamed narrator—an ambiguously gay young white man—and his friend Holly Golightly, a young white woman who moonlights as a high- class call girl. Although the novella was published in 1958, it opens in 1956, and the bulk of the narrative is a lashback set in 1943. As a result, while it may be read as a Cold War text concerned with the negotiation of authenticity and “phoniness,” the preoccupations driving the plot are in fact the homefront anxieties around miscegenation produced by the number of newly independent women and scarcity of eligible white men induced by the World War II draft. While literary critic Abigail Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 100 • Camera Obscura Cheever reads the enigmatic exchange between the narrator and Holly’s agent, O. J. Berman (“Is she or ain’t she?” “What?” “A phony.”) as about a Cold War crisis of authenticity à la Holden Caulield, I suggest we consider what it would mean if this central question propelling the narrative is whether Holly is, or ain’t, ready to cross the boundary of sleeping with a black man.14 At the start of the novella in 1956, the narrator hears from his bartender, Joe Bell, that news has been received about Holly Golightly, whom no one had seen for some time. Their mutual friend Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi, shooting photographs in Africa for a magazine, sent word that he had come across a tribal man with a carving of a igure that looked eerily like Holly. The narrator muses, “On a glance it resembled most primitive carving; and then it didn’t, for here was the spit-image of Holly Golightly, at least as much of a likeness as a dark still thing could be.”15 The spritely, white Holly has been captured as, but not reduced to, her black, heavy opposite. Joe and the narrator argue as to whether the rumors that Holly had “shared the wood- carver’s mat” could be true. Joe comments, “I know she had her ways, but I don’t think she’d be up to anything as much as that” (8). This exchange, which opens the novella, presages the “Is she or ain’t she?” question that will later be posed by Holly’s agent: did she or did she not sleep with a black man? Has she, or has she not, been captured by blackness? This aporia around miscegenation, which begins the narrator’s meditation on his unknowable friend, constitutes the remainder of the novella. The story then lashes back to New York City in 1943, when the narrator and Holly developed a friendship. Holly’s “purity” is not measured through her sexual activity—she freely admits to being “a bit of a dyke myself” (21)—but rather the skin color of the people with whom she sleeps. In the beginning of the novella, Holly is not especially keen to settle down with a person of color. It is quite the opposite: one of her love interests is Rusty Trawler, whom “Winchell always referred to . . . as a Nazi” because “he attended rallies in Yorkville” (37), a predominantly German neighborhood in Manhattan. Throughout, however, she toys with the idea of miscegenation, which both tantalizes and disgusts her: “We Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 101 had an irresistible guide [in Havana], most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don’t go for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting: so I let him play kneesie under the table, because frankly I didn’t ind him at all banal, but then one night he took us to a blue movie, and what do you suppose? There he was on the screen” (57). Curiously, it is not the idea of black-white miscegenation that activates Holly’s interest, but blackyellow, a nod to the complex racial frameworks of the Caribbean. In Holly’s story, the objectiication of the tour guide as a sexualized racial curiosity allows her the sanitary space in which to interact with him; only when he reveals his own sexual agency as a screen actor is she scared off. Later on, as her choices become more limited, she must compromise the protection of her whiteness. Holly’s downfall, which is kick-started by the death of her beloved brother Fred, is communicated through color. Her glamorous world, formerly marked by sparkling diamonds and lutes of champagne, turns an unappealing black. The narrator observes that her hair turns shades darker, and even her food becomes discolored. He laments, “Wartime sugar and cream rationing restricted her imagination when it came to sweets—nevertheless, she once managed something called Tobacco Tapioca: best not to describe it” (77). Instead of spending her time with the Nazi-adjacent Rusty Trawler, she takes on a dark lover, the Brazilian aristocrat José Ybarra-Jaeger, like molasses substituting for cream and sugar. Faced with hard times, Holly succumbs to the last taboo of miscegenation. After she believes she has become pregnant with José’s child, she declares to the narrator that she wants to have at least nine children: “I’m sure some of them will be rather dark—José has a touch of le nègre, I suppose you guessed that?” (77). Black children haunt Holly throughout the novella. A premonition about her future on the dark continent occurs in a lashback scene when she and the narrator go horseback riding in Central Park: “For all at once, like savage members of a jungle ambush, a band of Negro boys leapt out of the shrubbery along the path. Hooting, cursing, they launched rocks and thrashed at the horse’s rumps with switches” (83). This surprise encounter with the primitive embodied by the black children sets off a chain of events that Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 102 • Camera Obscura lead Holly to leave for South America and eventually, the postcard from Yunioshi suggests, Africa. When José abandons Holly on the eve of their elopement to Rio, she decides to go on without him. She orders the narrator, “[Get] a list of the ifty richest men in Brazil. I’m not kidding. The ifty richest: regardless of race or color” (98). The ambiguous racialization of Cuba and Brazil offers a space in between America’s primary schema of a black-white binary: as Holly has noted, Cubans and Brazilians are a mix of black, Asian, indigenous, and European roots. The narrator sees that crossing the color line ultimately frees Holly, allowing her to leave New York and travel the world indeinitely. As the novella comes to a close, the narrator celebrates, wistfully, the lost world he knew during the war with Holly at its center. It concludes with his hope that Holly has found somewhere she belonged, “African hut or whatever” (105). The adaptation of the novel into the ilm straightened, in multiple senses, the queer buzz of Capote’s work. When producers Marty Jurow and Richard Shepherd bought the novella’s ilm rights from Capote in 1958, there was little to no comment on the novella’s preoccupation with miscegenation, but the queer indeterminacy of Capote’s ending was read by Hollywood executives as fundamentally lacking plot. Its queerness was a structural law. Edwards’s ilm version rewrote Holly’s lightiness as ultimately just a fear of commitment. Installing the traditional Hollywood romance narrative, concluding in compulsory heterosexuality for Holly and the narrator, was meant to dismantle the asexual but affectionate pas de deux Capote had rendered between them in the novella. Through these and a number of other revisions, Paramount considered the queerness of the text suficiently elided, and the project was allowed to proceed.16 The Buzzer and the Buzzed If the phantom black primitive haunted the novella, the cartoonish “Jap” replaced him in the ilm. Breakfast at Tiffany’s became another in the cycle of postwar films in which an implicitly American modernity is deined over and against an Orientalized, Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 103 tradition-bound Asia, as the racialized queerness of the Yunioshi character functions to shore up the heteronormativity of the revised plot. In the film, the management of (hetero)sexuality is understood through the framework of domesticity: falling in (proper) love is inding a happy home. The eventual pairing of Holly and Paul (George Peppard) is normalized through its juxtaposition with the various forms of queer domesticity that Holly and Paul’s neighbors inhabit. The ilm version adapted Yunioshi from a Japanese American photographer from California (as he was in the novella) into an Orientalist caricature. Several scholars have speculated that Capote based Yunioshi on the Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953); the two most likely knew of each other in the New York arts and literary scene.17 In the hands of screenwriter George Axelrod and director Blake Edwards, Yunioshi’s role was enlarged—he became Holly’s upstairs neighbor and the resident killjoy.18 Mr. Yunioshi’s strangeness emerges from his impotence, his inability to restore order to his household. He complains that Holly rings his buzzer in the middle of the night because she has forgotten her key, but the eficacy of his charge is offset by Rooney’s fake Japanese accent, eyeglasses, buck teeth, kimono, and the like—all markers of his inability to embody a performance of whiteness and/or authority. This inability is expressed by Rooney as hysteria, a quality that, David Eng argues, has long been associated with the female body as well as the feminized Asian male body, marked by “mysterious symptoms all relating to sexual impotence and resulting in complicated withdrawals from the social realm.”19 Yunioshi’s hysteria buzzes with guttural mutterings, physical bumbling, and general clumsiness. In this way, the buzzer and the buzzing serve as a powerful metaphor of Holly and Yunioshi’s relationship (and hence the connective threads between racial and sexual difference in the ilm). Holly needs Yunioshi, a racial other, to constantly “buzz” her in, to let her into an imagined, fragile illusion of middle- class domestic order that is their shared apartment building. Despite a lack of bodily control over himself as well as Holly, Yunioshi is shown to be a master of the aesthetic realm, particu- Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 104 • Camera Obscura larly in interior design. In comparison to Holly’s bare-bones apartment, which features a cut- out bathtub as a sofa and no books on the shelves, Yunioshi’s home is shown decorated in high Japanese tradition. His performances of what we are meant to imagine as Japanese domesticity—taking hot soaking baths, performing ritual tea ceremonies, and so forth—are interrupted by Holly’s loud requests to be let into the building. Likewise, Paul’s lover and patron—the rich, married older woman Mrs. Failenson (Patricia Neal)—is introduced to us as his interior decorator. Though not a professional, she proves to be a highly competent designer: Paul’s apartment, which she inances, is adorned with gilded furnishings, dramatically patterned wallpaper, and rococo statues. When the ilm peeks into the home she shares with her husband, we see that they live in a big-windowed high-rise decorated in the height of midcentury modern luxury. As with Yunioshi, a mastery over home furnishings masks a lack of sexual control. Patricia Neal plays Mrs. Failenson as a cunning, snake-tongued Park Avenue matron. Her desire for sexual power, which goes so far as to pay for Paul’s living as a kept man, invites us to read her as a queer igure.20 The ilm suggests that the queer domesticity of igures like Mr. Yunioshi and Mrs. Failenson is bourgeois, pathological, and soulless, while modern domesticity like Holly’s is scatterbrained but full of spunk and life. As Michael Trask has argued, the spirit of the 1960s New Left valued authenticity and thus saw “gay culture’s uncommitted and artiicial persons [as] beyond redemption.”21 While the Tiffany’s ilm and its makers were not of the New Left, they appropriated its fetish of the emotionally real as a signal of a virile modernity, casting concern for the exterior and the ornamental as effeminate, perverse, and phony. This comes to a head when, toward the end of the ilm, Yunioshi calls the police on Holly and has her arrested on suspicion of drug traficking, revealing himself to be a Japanese traitor and misinformed spy. Through this mishap, Holly and Paul become a couple and, we imagine, move out of the building they share with Yunioshi and Mrs. Failenson and into heteronormative domesticity. In straightening the narrative into a romance, the ilmmakers perceived that it needed “that certain Capote something,” Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 105 the original text’s je ne sais quoi buzz.22 According to Axelrod, Rooney’s part was expanded at Edwards’s insistence for comedic purposes. He recounted in an interview, “Each time [Yunioshi] appeared I said, ‘Jesus, Blake, can’t you see that it fucks the movie up?’ He said, ‘We need comedy in this, and Mickey’s character’s funny.’”23 Axelrod even convinced Hepburn to reshoot some scenes for free in the hope that Yunioshi could be edited out of the ilm, but Edwards was adamant. Axelrod contended, “I hated that Jap routine he does in the ilm. . . . Blake violently disagreed, so Mickey Rooney’s still in the picture, to its great detriment. Blake said, ‘I love it. It gives a big lift to the picture.’”24 Ironically, the white actor in yellowface both dramatizes and reverses how Holly’s own racial masquerade—revealed as her passing from rural “hillbilly” whiteness into urbane, sophisticated whiteness—is made over and against racialized sexualities. The Whiteness of “Audrey Hepburn” At stake in the ilm is not merely the legitimacy of white heteronormative romance; few people relish Tiffany’s for Paul’s love for Holly. Rather, what defines the film is the exaltation of an emergent modern white femininity in Hepburn’s portrayal of Holly Golightly. This new prototype combined the chic and the “kookie” (i.e., crazy, wacky) to produce a modern, feminine, offbeat minimalism that was puriied of excessive sexual ornamentation. Through Edwards’s ilm, Holly’s “kookiness” deined itself in opposition to the racialized sexualities that inhered in “redneck” whiteness, the lush sensuality of the glamour girl, and Asianness. Although it is suggested that Holly is a call girl because she is a paid companion to rich men, the ilm never conirms that Holly has sex with these men. (She gets paid by euphemistically asking for a few coins “for the powder room.”) Scenes in which she pushes men like Sid Arbuck out of her doorway at the end of the night suggest that the men expect sex out of the exchange, something she coquettishly ignores. Hepburn plays Holly as a charmer — a woman who gains inancial independence without sullying herself through sexuality. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 106 • Camera Obscura Unlike the everyday girl who turns out to be a princess in Roman Holiday (dir. William Wyler, US, 1953; Hepburn’s breakout role), in Tiffany’s Hepburn plays the opposite: a glamorous New York woman running from her past as a hillbilly child bride. At the start of the ilm, the buzz about Holly Golightly is that she is of mysterious origins that no one has been able to trace. As her agent, O. J. Berman, remarks, “Even when she opens her mouth . . . you don’t know if she’s a hillbilly or an Okie or what. My guess, nobody’ll ever know where she came from.”25 When Holly’s former husband comes looking for her, we discover that her real name is Lula Mae Barnes and that she is originally from the backwoods of Tulip, Texas. Edwards’s choice of the folksy Buddy Ebsen for the part of Holly’s horse- doctor husband, Doc Golightly, produced a caricature of a comically backward, sexually deviant South; Lula Mae was said to be fourteen when she married the middle-aged Doc.26 In this sense, Holly’s story parallels a passing narrative. Her “white trash” identity must be shielded from the public, and from her own psyche, at all costs. She must move past her muddy biological ties in order to move into her future life of whiteness. This is not to suggest that Holly’s rural white background is a mere stand-in for blackness; indeed, it relects its own kind of racial shame. Such narratives index the entanglement of class, race, gender, and social location that transformed postwar American whiteness during a time marked by technological, ideological, and structural shifts toward centralization and standardization, and by radical challenges to the social order through the burgeoning civil rights and feminist movements. As emerging mass media like network television attempted to homogenize American regions into a more coherent, uniied culture, certain forms of whiteness became identiied and devalued as uneducated and backward: media centers New York and Los Angeles produced television series like The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71; starring Ebsen), Petticoat Junction (CBS, 1963–70), and Green Acres (CBS, 1965–71), programs whose comedy was generated by highlighting the increasing differences between rural and (sub)urban America. Among these differences were the ways in which whiteness was lived and experienced: as rational, capitalistic, and urbane, as the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 107 “city folk” are portrayed, versus the irrational, unsophisticated, technologically inept farm people.27 Historian Lizabeth Cohen traces the way in which ethnic European Americans became understood as normatively white through their consumerist participation in postwar suburban lifestyles.28 For example, John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy tempered fears about John’s Irish Catholic heritage by captivating the public with their American take on Camelot. Holly’s Camelot, however, is the jewelry store Tiffany’s, a protective pleasure dome famous for its diamonds. These aspirations pointed not only to the deracination of whiteness but also to the seeming democratization of wealth and glamour from a WASP elite to an expanding middle class. Contemporaneous musicals like My Fair Lady (1956 Broadway debut) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960 Broadway debut), along with ilms like Cinderella (dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson, US, 1950) and Sabrina (dir. Billy Wilder, US, 1954), dramatized (and feminized) arriviste desire in narratives about working- class girls, dirtied by Cockney accents or Irish birth, who undergo ethnoracial transformations into upper- class denizens. Hepburn’s ability to balance the reined and the democratic made her the leading face of numerous such narratives; her European aristocratic appeal legitimated rather than mocked her characters’ desire for upward mobility. Thus in producing a ilm about a sex worker, producers Jurow and Shepherd wanted to tone down the sexual tenor of the ilm by casting against type.29 While Hepburn was their irst choice for the role, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly and himself to play the narrator.30 This would have made for a far more corporeally sexualized Holly, and Capote has repeatedly stated that this was his vision of her. As he saw it, the ilm ended up “thin and pretty, whereas it should have been rich and ugly.”31 Yet Hepburn’s thinness, combined with Yunioshi’s effeminate, racialized hysteria, was key to portraying Holly as white, demure, and nonexcessive. Critic Elizabeth Wilson wryly notes, “Hepburn is too innocent to bring out the squalor and humiliation of Holly’s life. Hepburn is incapable of being damaged or shop- soiled.”32 Whereas busty blonde types like Monroe reigned as sex Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 108 • Camera Obscura symbols, the petite Hepburn was seen as a biological and cultural alternative to what Rachel Moseley terms the “mammary women” of the 1950s.33 Hepburn’s star persona depended on maintaining a sense of difference while celebrating upper- class white female innocence. In promotional material, Paramount highlighted Hepburn’s performance of Golightly as “chic” and “kookie.” The July 1961 issue of Photoplay read: “Miss Hepburn, an elegant thoroughbred, just doesn’t look like the type of girl who would live strictly for kicks. Yet here she is, turning out the performance of her life . . . ‘a real kookie dame!’”34 The language of Hepburn as a “thoroughbred” refers to her aristocratic European lineage: her mother was a Dutch baroness.35 As an expertly engineered creature of the civilized upper classes, Hepburn avoided connotations of darkness or proletarianism, which ironically facilitated her success in such roles. In addition, the persona of the “kookie dame” allowed her to play sexually adventurous characters like Holly Golightly or Karen Wright in The Children’s Hour (dir. William Wyler, US, 1961).36 To a lesser extent, it also facilitated cross-racial roles. In Capote’s essay “The Duke in His Domain,” he divulges that Hepburn had been offered a cross-racial role in Sayonara playing the Japanese love interest to Marlon Brando’s white leading man. Hepburn declined the role, fearing that audiences would laugh at her.37 A few years later, she was cast as a young Native American woman in John Huston’s The Unforgiven (US, 1960). According to Lizzie Francke, “[Her] gamine appeal could be translated into exotic otherness.”38 Curiously, a gender luidity abets a racial one: the masculine (or rather, boyish) elements of Hepburn’ femininity produce racial pliability. While this new model of sexuality may have been liberating for young white women, it privileged the pure, pared- down, or chic at the expense of the excessive, unruly, and varicolored. The articulation of the modern girl, in other words, became expressed through the ability of a puriied body to cast on or off an identity at will—the central task of Hepburn’s character. The privilege to be unmarked, and thus able to slip on and off the lags of racialization, did not extend the opposite way. Actress Nancy Kwan, the star of Suzie Wong, was also touted in the language of fresh, natural Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 109 beauty; like Hepburn, her ballet training was emphasized. Yet in the press, the petite Kwan was photographed more like a Marilynesque sylph than like the similarly built Hepburn. Kwan’s true racial “Asianness” continually foreclosed her full incorporation into white female privilege. However, Kwan was never considered wholly Asian, either. Both she and France Nuyen (the actress originally cast to play Suzie Wong) had European mothers and Asian fathers, yet both required makeup around the eyes to make them look “more” Asian: the Eurasians were not quite Asian enough. Paradoxically, while the whiteness of Hepburn allowed her to access Asian femininity, the hapa actresses Kwan and Nuyen could never be cast in white roles and were instead tied down by a racialized sexuality that was inherent in their bodies, despite, or because of, their mixed-race status. The solidity of Asian female racialization at this moment is evidenced in the infamous party scene at Holly’s apartment, which includes two Asian women dressed in Shanghai-style qipao among a sea of white people in contemporary dress. The women do not have speaking roles but are placed prominently in the frame as sexual playthings of the men in attendance. Ironically, the men at this party are presumably all the men Holly has been dating. Yet the party scene preserves her as a coy, desirable but not desirous hostess, while the actual “work” of sexualizing the party atmosphere is done by the mere presence of the Asian women. Likewise, the placement of Mr. Yunioshi at strategic moments in the ilm helped to hide the fact that Holly worked as a high- end call girl. This was a necessary obfuscation not only for censorship purposes but as part and parcel of a fantasy of female independence unencumbered by sexuality. In a number of scenes, Holly attempts to enter her apartment at the end of the night but is badgered by the wealthy men who have wined and dined her and expect sex out of the deal. One man asserts, “When you asked for change for the powder room, I give you a ifty dollar bill. That gives me some rights.” Yunioshi bursts into the hallway to complain about the noise that the scene of near-rape engenders. As an Asian man, he is presumed blind to sexual subtexts and thus does not realize what is going on. Rooney as Yunioshi distracts Holly’s Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 110 • Camera Obscura suitors through his own protestations, diegetically, and the audience through his yellowface, extradiegetically, from Holly’s situation. After placating Mr. Yunioshi and regaining control of the situation, Holly is able to slip into her apartment. He is the queer phantom—a cockblock—enabling Holly to reap the rewards of her game. Appearing only six times and with a few lines at each appearance, Yunioshi has an ambivalent but instrumental role in the ilm. He demands middle- class order in the building but carries on an isolated bachelor life in his apartment surrounded by his tatami mats, paper lanterns, and other assorted japonaiserie. His strangeness is mitigated by his quasi-paternal presence in Holly’s life. His location, the apartment above Holly’s, suggests a bird’seye glimpse into her life. He watches her, and watches over her, both witness to and protector of her life. Holly continually appeases him by promising to model for him. This opportunity to subjugate Holly into an object of Yunioshi’s gaze, though, is merely a tease: his desire to be seen and heard by Holly is limited by his own effeminate to-be-looked-at-ness. He is continually shot climbing up the stairs and into his living quarters, a climbing which suggests a climb that remains only and always a climb with no end. Whatever moral criticism the audience might tender toward Holly’s own social climbing is displaced as laughter for a character that is far less capable of it. In this twofold way, Asianness is deployed to manage emergent white femininities embodied by the “kookie dame.” Racial Masquerade as Industrial Practice Racial masquerade becomes in Breakfast at Tiffany’s an eficient way to explore questions of gender and sexual expression. Techniques like yellowface avail themselves of cinema’s visual and sonic qualities as well as Hollywood ilms’ self- conscious performativity and investment in fantasy as a route to reality. Yunioshi is proof, not of bad taste, but of a culture of performance that utilized racist tropes as part of the lexicon and grammar of comedy. He is not the creation of singular individuals (like the director, screenwriter, or performer) but rather a concerted production Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 111 assisted by a phalanx of studio employees. He was produced by no one and everyone; apologies from Axelrod, Edwards, or Rooney merely attempt to strike Yunioshi’s existence from the record. This strategy conveniently allows responsibility to be shouldered by a few key players, sacriicing a consideration of race as a reproducible technology while it safely secures difference by containing it within the ideology of the same — whiteness. In closing, I want to consider how yellowface buzzed around Breakfast at Tiffany’s outside the diegesis of the ilm, allowing Yunioshi to endure far beyond the conines of its two-hour running time. Masquerade was a preoccupation in director Blake Edwards’s career, something that buzzed around him (in rumors about his closeted homosexuality) and his ilms. Indeed, many of his most well-known ilms rely on racial and/or gender drag to produce comedic tension: in The Party (1968), Peter Sellers plays an Indian man, Hrundi V. Bakshi, who has adventures in Hollywood; Edwards’s ilms in The Pink Panther series (1963–93) feature the British Sellers once again trading on ethnic stereotypes by playing a French detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau; in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Clouseau’s Chinese sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk) masquerades as a Japanese waitress, while in The Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), Clouseau and Simone Legree (Dyan Cannon) don Oriental disguises while Cato wears the Western suit; Darling Lili (1970) stars Julie Andrews as a German spy posing as a British entertainer; and most famously, in 1982’s Victor/ Victoria, Edwards directs Andrews as a woman playing a man (a Polish man, Count Victor Grazinski) playing a woman.39 These ilms explore the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality intersect in the production of comedy. While the ethnic and racial secrets of the female characters (Lili and Victoria) are kept hidden and then eventually revealed, the male characters (Bakshi and Clouseau) derive their comedy not from the issue of performativity (i.e., can they pull it off or will they be found out?), but from the cross-racial performance itself. The racial comedy in Tiffany’s, The Party, or The Pink Panther arises from how closely the white actor can mimic the nonnormative man. Edwards had been a frequent collaborator with Mickey Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 112 • Camera Obscura Rooney since the early ifties, along with Richard Quine (director of Suzie Wong). Rooney, too, had a history of racial masquerade, performing in blackface with Judy Garland in Busby Berkeley ilms decades earlier. His creation of the character of Yunioshi was no mere mistake but part of his repertoire, given his performance background. The abjection of Mr. Yunioshi is compounded by his creation at one of the lowest points in Rooney’s career. Having run into problems with alcohol use, the actor was losing friends and work in Hollywood—Jack Paar kicked a drunk Rooney off the Tonight Show in front of an applauding audience in 1959.40 The year after Tiffany’s was released, Rooney would declare bankruptcy. Expanding Yunioshi’s role in the script, and then casting Rooney to perform it, were not the only (mis)steps Paramount took in regard to the character. Between October and December 1960, Paramount released a series of twelve press releases announcing its casting of a Japanese actor named Ohayo Arigatou to play Mr. Yunioshi, a gag that was meant to hide that the character would be played by Rooney.41 The nonsense name Ohayo Arigatou (“Hello Thank You”) was a trace of the pidgin Japanese that American troops would have picked up during the war; indeed, part of Arigatou’s biography was that he earned his initial fame by entertaining troops. Paramount developed a narrative through the press releases about Arigatou’s ascent from a Japanese comic into a Hollywood wannabe. It followed Arigatou’s relocation to the US, where he attended the World Series, demanded the ilm be put on hold while he studied at the Actors’ Studio, and asked to have top billing. Paramount recounted many of these stories phonetically in Arigatou’s broken English. These press releases laid the groundwork for the sense of ridiculousness that Rooney’s performance of Yunioshi was supposed to convey: the humor in a “Jap” growing an ego the size of a Hollywood diva. In his performance of Ohayo Arigatou and Mr. Yunioshi, Rooney did not try to pass as Japanese (as Brando attempted in The Teahouse of the August Moon) but pointedly exaggerated the incommensurability between the Asian and the Caucasian. In re-presenting the Japanese man’s alleged impotence, Rooney and Edwards effectively reinscribed this impotence as both real and unreal (i.e., recognizable as parody). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 113 This ruse was perpetuated not only on the public but on the movie industry as well; Arigatou was listed as a cast member in the daily and weekly trade production charts. Two press releases even used the opportunity to cross-promote Paramount’s Shirley MacLaine vehicle My Geisha, stating that Arigatou was lending his geisha house in Tokyo as a ilming location. Once production on Tiffany’s started, the secret was uncovered. Paramount worked with Hollywood columnist Jimmy Starr to release a story suggesting the press was in on the gag—that a UPI photographer on set had recognized Rooney underneath the Arigatou disguise. Indeed, the entire reveal was done in a merry, back- slapping fashion in which the studio, the press, and the actor all colluded. No apologies were given; the uncloaking was used instead to create even more mischief. Rooney gave a statement explaining the situation, although he did so, according to the press release, in “full makeup, eyes slanting, hair jet black, teeth as prominent as a picket fence in the moonlight.” He used the opportunity to tell the press that although he has an Irish name, he was actually Scottish, further insisting on the racial pliability of whiteness to deceive. Paramount also released a straight-faced statement that the production had hired Mrs. Katsuma Mukaeda, the wife of a Los Angeles Japanese Chamber of Commerce oficial, to act as a “technical advisor” to Rooney.42 Once the ilm was ready for distribution, Rooney’s performance of Yunioshi was one of Paramount’s distinct advertising features for creating buzz around the ilm, along with the excitement over Hepburn’s salacious new role as a call girl. One press release, titled “Mickey Rooney turns Oriental for Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” reads, “If the Japanese photographer Mr. Yunioshi in Jurow- Shepherd’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s looks slightly familiar, small wonder! Underneath all that make-up is Mickey Rooney, who again proves his great versatility by playing Audrey Hepburn’s constantly complaining neighbor in this Technicolor comedy.”43 “Small wonder” is perhaps a reference to Rooney’s famously short stature; nearly every clause in that short sentence references Rooney’s fame (“looks familiar”; “again proves his great versatility”). Rooney is prominently featured in the ilm’s trailer, hamming it up in the bathtub (meant to evoke a Japanese onsen), and his name appears in the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 114 • Camera Obscura “last but not least” position of the title credits, where both actor and character are listed: “And also starring MICKEY ROONEY as ‘Mr. Yunioshi.’” The character of Yunioshi was even important to the ilm’s musical tie-ins. Composer Henry Mancini included a chopsticky instrumental titled “Mr. Yunioshi” on the ilm’s soundtrack, made famous by the original song “Moon River.” Alongside Mancini’s easy listening soundtrack, jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris put out a hard bop version of the ilm’s score. The seven-inch single “Moon River” was backed with “Mr. Yunioshi,” suggesting its interest to potential audiences. In Japan, Paramount took a different tack. The studio knew it was tiptoeing a line between postwar America’s renewed fascination with Japan and the studio’s potential to offend Japanese moviegoing audiences through fabrication of such fantasy.44 US- occupied Japan was an important market for the ilm; it was released there (and in Brazil) one month after the US world premiere and a full month ahead of its European showing. What Paramount offered Japanese audiences through the ilm was a chance to identify with the French-inlected, aspirational glamour and style of Holly Golightly. The studio arranged for the Japanese label King Records to produce a cover of “Moon River” by Misao Nakahara, an actress and chanteuse who sang in Japanese and French, in conjunction with the ilm’s Japanese release.45 The possibility of translating modern Japanese femininity into the framework of Hepburn’s stardom overrode popular audiences’ dislike of Yunioshi. Despite the ilm’s use of yellowface, it was so successful in Japan that it was rereleased in 1969. Not all Japanese viewers concurred; one of the ilm’s producers, Richard Shepherd, found himself snubbed by Akira Kurosawa some years later when it was revealed that Shepherd was involved with Tiffany’s.46 Ultimately, the legacy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s registers modern liberal audiences’ simultaneous love of Hepburn and discomfort with Rooney’s character. The “buzz” around the ilm and its continuing relevance operates, then, along these two parallel yet intimately entangled stories: a fantasy of upward social mobility embodied by Hepburn’s aspirational whiteness and the racist remainder of Rooney’s stereotypical yellowface character. By grapDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 115 pling with Mr. Yunioshi outside of a limited binary of negative and positive racial representation, we can understand him as a constitutive foil for the brand of modern white womanhood commodiied by Edwards in his version of the ilm. As this essay has shown, viewers are invited to read the various sexual excesses and racial anxieties as funneled through the singular comedic igure of Rooney’s racial masquerade in order to construct Holly as innocent. If, more than ifty years after the ilm’s debut, Breakfast at Tiffany’s lingers as the example par excellence of what was for decades a regular cinematic practice, it is not because of our attachment to racist yellowface in Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, but because of our attachment to the forms of white womanhood that elicit it, embodied in Audrey Hepburn and Holly Golightly. In short, Mr. Yunioshi lingers not because we love him, but because we love Holly. Yet the work of feminist antiracism requires not a negation of its bad objects, but a disinvestment in its precipitating conditions. Notes I would like to thank David Gerstner and Kristina Huang for their enthusiasm for earlier versions of this essay, as well as Bliss Cua Lim, Patricia White, and Christopher Eng for their generous and perceptive feedback. 1. “MANAA Adds Disclaimers to Breakfast At Tiffany’s Screenings in New York and Beverly Hills,” Eyes & Ears: The Newsletter of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, 4 April 2013, newsletter .manaa.org/2013/04/manaa-adds- disclaimers-to-breakfast-at -tiffanys-screenings-in-new-york-and-beverly-hills/. 2. Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 189. 3. Jay Weston, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s Celebrates 50th Anniversary at Academy,” Hufington Post, 1 August 2011, www.hufingtonpost .com/jay-weston/breakfast-at-tiffanys- cel_b_914066.html. 4. Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009); Jeff Yang, “The Mickey Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 116 • Camera Obscura Rooney Role Nobody Wants to Talk Much About,” Wall Street Journal, 8 April 2014, blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/04/08/the -mickey-rooney-role-nobody-wants-to-talk-about/; Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 5. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 6. Lawrence Grobel, Conversations with Capote (New York: New American Library, 1985), 157. 7. Krystyn R. Moon, “Lee Tung Foo and the Making of a Chinese American Vaudevillian, 1900s–1920s,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 25. 8. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); and Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 9. See Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Thy Phu, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); and Patrick B. Sharp, Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 10. Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 191–92. 11. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 12. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 223–63. 13. Ken Provencher, “Bizarre Beauty: 1950s Runaway Production in Japan,” Velvet Light Trap 73 (2014): 39–50. 14. Abigail Cheever, Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post–World War II America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). 15. Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 6. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 117 16. See Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. 17. ShiPu Wang, Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 160; and Gordon H. Chang, “Foreword: Emerging from the Shadows: The Visual Arts and Asian American History,” in Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970, ed. Gordon H. Chang, Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), x. I thank Kevin Tsukii for this reference. 18. Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 188. 19. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 168. 20. For theories of lesbian cinematic visibility, see Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); for lesbian cinematic representation as theorized through the architecture of apartments, see Lee Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (New York: Routledge, 2009), and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1975 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 21. Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 1. 22. Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., 81. 23. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, Screenwriting, Screencraft series (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2003), 29. 24. Patrick McGilligan, “Irony: George Axelrod Interviewed by Patrick McGilligan,” Film Comment 31, no. 6 (1995): 20. 25. Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 30. 26. Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., 115. 27. Green Acres tweaked this formula slightly, lampooning bourgeois “back to the land” romantics with agricultural dreams. 28. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004). 29. Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., 97. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 118 • Camera Obscura 30. Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 269. 31. Eric Norden, “Playboy Interview: Truman Capote,” in Truman Capote: Conversations, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 160. 32. Lizzie Francke and Elizabeth Wilson, “Gamine against the Grain,” Sight and Sound 3, no. 3 (1993): 32. 33. Rachel Moseley, Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 54–56. 34. Quoted in Moseley, Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn, 44. 35. Hepburn cultivated the impression of a mysterious genealogy, but, in fact, her parents were aristocrats with ties to the British Union of Fascists. See Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story (New York: Conundrum, 1994), 84. 36. This ilm, costarring Shirley MacLaine (who was also promoted as a “kook”), is about two female schoolteachers tacitly accused of being lovers. 37. Truman Capote, “The Duke in His Domain,” New Yorker, 9 November 1957. 38. Francke and Wilson, “Gamine against the Grain,” 30–32. 39. Peter Lehman and William Luhr, Blake Edwards (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 27, 158. 40. Aljean Harmetz, “Mickey Rooney, Master of Putting On a Show, Dies at 93,” New York Times, 7 April 2014. 41. Breakfast at Tiffany’s press releases, 17 October–20 December 1960, Paramount Pictures Production Records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. 42. Breakfast at Tiffany’s press releases. 43. Paramount Pictures Pressbooks, releases season 1961–62, group A-21, Paramount Pictures Production Records. 44. See Provencher, “Bizarre Beauty.” 45. Breakfast at Tiffany’s press release, 7 November 1961, Paramount Pictures Production Records. 46. Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., 169. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018 The Many Lives of Mr. Yunioshi • 119 Melissa Phruksachart is assistant professor/faculty fellow in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her intellectual interests combine Cold War US media and literary cultures, histories and theories of US racial formation, women and queer- of- color critique, and Asian American cultural studies. She has published work in Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, and In Media Res. Figure 2. Rooney as Yunioshi, wearing a hachimaki, in a tub mimicking an ofuro. The Everett Collection, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/32/3 (96)/93/518191/0320093.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 27 January 2018