Mais, c'est pas vrai! (as Holly Golightly might say)

It is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year. I say this with some confidence because, just before reading it, I spent an evening flipping through book catalogues. I started eager, but after a while, I set the pencil down. Finally, I lowered my face to my hands and wept. Okay, I didn’t cry. But I could have, for after wading through all the catalogues, I had marked only two books.

I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing and reading how the fault lies in some toxic combination of blogger and social networking. Sorry. It’s the books. Too many books, too many boring books, too many unedited books, too many overlong books that announce, more bluntly than anything else, publishing’s nearly universal refusal to recognize how the Internet has changed reading habits.(Note to publishers: the neighborhood library thanks you for every book you publish that’s more than 300 pages).

But “Fifth Ave, 5 AM” is the kind of book that could keep me home, and that’s odd, because its nominal topic -how the film of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came to be made, and why Audrey Hepburn was so crucial to that effort -concerns a film I’ve never watched all the way through.

The cool thing: you don’t have to care about any of that to love the book.

You just have to like back lot gossip (and who doesn’t). Paramount’s head of production hated the theme song -“Moon River.” Babe Paley smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, using an ivory holder. Marilyn Monroe lamented that she never had a home, “not with my own furniture.” Colette “discovered” Hepburn. Akira Kurosawa hated Mickey Rooney.

You have to be interested in how things really work. In this case, how, at a time of prudery and censorship, two smart producers, one savvy director and a sharp screenwriter figured out how to take “a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama and an unhappy ending and turn it into a Hollywood movie.”

You have to be interested in a book that has an idea at the center of the narrative - how Audrey Hepburn, a “good girl princess” as pure as Doris Day, helped to change the American distaste for “bad girls” with a single movie. And, just as much, with “a little black dress” that even a mouse of a secretary could afford.

And, finally, you have to respond to a writer who can tell a complicated story in 200 crisp pages -and who can, at will, fire off zingers like “Truman needed her [Babe Paley] too. She looked good on him.” Or this, also about Capote: “If you could measure a man’s ego by the length of his ego, then this one had no end.”

This is a book that’s very inside Hollywood. George Axelrod? Major screenwriter and playwright, almost certainly unknown to you. Mary Jurow and Richard Shepherd –a lunch if you can name, without Google, another movie they produced. Not important stuff, but fun.

What’s especially satisfying: where the story begins. Which is to say: much earlier than you think. In 1951, when Audrey Hepburn was not yet magic. With George Axelrod’s 1950s efforts to get sex -as an adult topic, and rated as such -into Hollywood movies. With Truman Capote becoming Himself. In short, as in real life, the back story is key.

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman”, by Sam Wasson, “it’s a good thing”.