pretty is as pretty does

Pretty is eye-catching, pretty is charming; perfect teeth and full lips and slim hips and wide open eyes (or whatever your short list of pretty is, was, or will be) but beautiful is better. Beautiful is where the cracks are, where the light gets in (as Montreal homeboy Leonard Cohen says) and -- unlike pretty -- there’s no shelf life to beauty; it has no expiration date.

And that’s Audrey Hepburn: no expiration date.

As pretty as she is in the opening sequence of "Breakfast At Tiffany’s" (all delicate bones, hair piled high, wearing the most famous little black dress of all time, donut and coffee in elegantly gloved hands – and fully owning the real estate in front of Tiffany’s on a pristine, Manhattan morning in 1960, just by standing there) as perfect as all that is (and it wasn’t; Blake Edwards bitched at her for not getting the coffee sequence right, rattling her, unsettling her) as pretty as she is in every moment of that shot -- that scene, that movie, her whole career -- her beauty shines later in life. It shines when youth is gone and something more settles into every inch of her.

She starved as a child during WW2 & worked for the Dutch resistance, ferrying messages back and forth (stuck in a basement once for days, as a girl of ten) and never forgot the hunger and fear of those panicked, terrifying times: she spent the last years of her life working for endangered children everywhere. And when – almost fifteen years after her death -- Christie's auctioned off the original dress she wore in Breakfast for $807, 000 (one of the highest prices ever paid for a piece of movie memorabilia), the money went -- as if Audrey herself had somehow planned it, somehow reached from beyond the grave, with one perfectly gloved hand, to seal the deal -- all the money went to support the construction of a school for poor children in Calcutta.



And that's just not something pretty alone can do.