I think Holly Golightly definitely had sex for money. Not nightly, not as a dedicated professional courtesan, but often enough that it was a major source of income. The guy pounding on her door when she gets home is not a jilted date who bought her dinner, but a paying customer who failed to receive his product. I think this is true. Certainly, a girl forced to runaway at 14–or earlier, since it’s unclear how long she and her brother were out on the mean streets– and marry a much older man is going to be able to do things like that.
When she realizes Paul, who she keeps calling Fred, is really a gigolo, she says “I understand perfectly.” And she does. She also says something like “acting crazy keeps people off balance and its better that way.” So most of what she does is calculated at some level, if only the intuitive and instinctual.
So when she falls asleep next to him, as awkward and weird as it feels in the movie, it’s something–falling asleep in bed with a strange man–she’s done many times.
So Paul/Fred is her secret equal. He too sells sex for money. This creates an instant affinity, in addition to him not being an obvious dick, like most of the men she services.
And this OJ guy must have been with her for a while. He was an obvious skirt chaser, but had no interest any more in her. They likely shared a bed for six months to a year, while he taught her not to be a yokel. When Paul calls him for the money, he says in effect “I don’t owe her.” Then he thinks a second and repeats “I really don’t owe her anything.” Why? He had paid her well. He may have even put up the money for the apartment, which was why he objected to it being a dump; but not too strongly, since he still liked her and had good memories of her, even though she disappointed him by being “fake”, which of course she was. She was playing games with everyone.
And when she was confiding in Paul, she was more or less thinking of him as a true equal, in a world where she was in reality different.
And I think she called him Fred not just because he reminded her of him, but also because he reminded her of her goal of saving money for the two of them.
And obviously she knew Sally Tomato was up to something. She was through all this vastly more clever and calculating than she seemed.
Her character actually reminded me of a woman I knew in college.
But anyway these $50 “tips” for the “powder room” were wink/wink, nudge/nudge payments for going up to her room and having a few drinks and who knows. And no doubt she fulfilled her commission many times. She had been there a year. She went to Tiffany’s to feel classy whenever she felt like a dirty whore, as she likely did when she rolled up at 6am or whatever in the opening scene, following a paid night out (or in).
And it’s hard to know, now, what to think of Mickey Rooney as a buck toothed Japanese man. It’s worth keeping in mind we were at war with Japan as recently as 1945, and our soldiers occupied Japan proper for many years. We were probably still there in 1961, when the movie was made, and so many of those who saw it may well have seen action in the Pacific or been stationed in Japan. Those wounds were likely fading by then, but not gone.
I will make this comment: it takes knowledge and imagination to even have a hope of “looking” at the past the way it would have been seen back then. But any time you do it, you cannot but see progress on many fronts, along with regress on others.
It seems to me that the audiences back then KNEW a lot of things that they did not TALK about. Most of them likely picked up instantly on what took me a couple hours to key in on. If the men were seeing hookers, they didn’t talk about it. For that matter, if women were paying men to service them, nobody talked about that either.
So you have this huge subterranean world that was KNOWN to large groups of people, but which would never show up in books, magazines or of course movies. That stuff didn’t start until maybe the late 60’s.
I will wonder aloud, though, what sort of film OJ had in mind for Holly. I guess there is no way to know for sure, but it likely wasn’t one calling for tremendous acting skill.