Breakfast at Tiffany's (novella) debt to Christopher Isherwood, one of his mentors, in creating the character of Holly Golightly: ""Breakfast at Tiffany's" is in many ways Capote's personal crystallization of Isherwood's Sally Bowles." Truman Capote's aunt, Marie Rudisill notes that Holly is a kindred spirit of Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, the central character of his short story "Children on Their Birthdays". She observes that both characters are "unattached, unconventional wanderers, dreamers in pursuit of some ideal of happiness." Capote himself acknowledged that Golightly was the favorite of his characters. The novella's prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote "the most perfect writer of
Truman Capote in an extraordinarily intoxicated state, confessed that he had been awake for 48 hours and when questioned by Siegel, "What's going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?", Capote responded: "The obvious answer is that eventually, I mean, I'll kill myself ... without meaning to." The live broadcast made national headlines. One year later, when he felt betrayed by Lee Radziwill in a feud with perpetual nemesis Gore Vidal, Capote arranged a return visit to Stanley Siegel's show, this time to deliver a bizarrely comic performance revealing an incident wherein Vidal was thrown out of the