Truman Capote’s typed manuscript of his classic 1958 New York novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which tells the story of a young New York socialite in the 1940s, was sold in an auction to a Russian billionaire for $306,000.

The manuscript comes complete with the iconic author’s original handwritten annotations. The most striking note in the manuscript’s 84 pages is the protagonist’s name—from “Connie Gustafson” to the now legendary "American geisha" Holly Golightly.

Amherst, N.H. based auctioneer RR Auction originally offered the manuscript for $250,000. It was in good company—the manuscript was auctioned off alongside a 1954 Marilyn Monroe film and items signed by Humphrey Bogart and Judy Garland, among other members of the 20^th century Hollywood elite.

According to the Independent, the seller of the manuscript, who remains anonymous, has ties to a “very famous” autograph collector in New York. Bobby Livingston, vice president at RR Auctions, told the Associated Press that the manuscript is “obviously quite a treasure, quite a find for us.”

The lucky winner who gets to take the original Holly Golightly home is billionaire Igor Sosin. Mr. Sosin plans to display his treasure in Moscow and Monaco.

(RRauction.com)

EmiliaClarke. Photograph by Jason Bell.

In the Carlyle Hotel’s Royal Suite, Tiffany’s iconic crack-of-dawn window-shopper was having her theatrical coming-out party. We’re talkin’ Broadway here—the belated stage bow of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and Sean Mathias, the British director who’ll bring it to pass March 20 at the Cort, was holding forth.

“This will be like seeing a new play,” he promised a group of journalists. “That is the excitement of this.”

It’s not a musical, though it has musical elements. “Holly Golightly sings a song—just not ‘Moon River,’” he said. “It’s a surprise what she sings. It’s not Audrey Hepburn. It’s not George Peppard. It’s not Blake Edwards. It is Truman Capote, by way of Richard Greenberg.”

Mr. Greenberg, a no-show with three shows about to open, was presumably deep in rewrites in some urban cave somewhere. But Mr. Mathias proved more than an able spokesman for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, having helmed another version of it at London’s Haymarket in 2009, starring Anna Friel of Broadway’s Closer and Joseph Cross of Lincoln, Milk and Running With Scissors.

“I’ve had the title in my pocket now for five years so I have a real relationship with this property,” he declared. “Samuel Adamson, an Australian who lives in London, wrote that one. The Greenberg one is quite different: it’s the New York version.”

The Golightly According to Greenberg, he said, “was instigated by producer Colin Ingram—actually, it was his wife’s idea—so here we are.” For stars, he hired two precisely cast Broadway novices and surrounded them with 13 fairly familiar stage faces.

Holly is Emilia Clarke, currently lording over HBO’s medieval fantasy, Game of Thrones, and the Capone-facsimile sideline-observer (here called Fred) is Cory Michael Smith, the Mormon house-caller of The Whale at Playwrights Horizons.

A gangling youth along the jagged lines of early Anthony Perkins, Mr. Smith said he was shooting for a Capote-Peppard blend in his role. “I like to think Fred is an amalgam of both—a leading man like George and an artist like Truman. He has had an abandoned, neglected childhood so he’s a similarly damaged individual, coming to New York young, running away from something.”

Fred and Holly come together like orphans of the storm. A relationship, and some love, ensue—but it’s hardly as romanticized as the movie. “It’s so daring to try to tell this story and do it on stage.” Mr. Smith ventured. “I appreciate the courageousness of it because I think the play is very much in the spirit of Truman and Holly. It’s a tragic story in a way, but it certainly has elements of comedy. Truman loved big characters, and those are the ones who bring levity to the story. I would like to think that it’s as complex a play as Holly is a character.”

Ms. Clarke said, “The play’s more dramatic than the film was. There’s more heartbreak and soul to it here. I’m Holly Goheavily.”

How really different, Mr. Mathias was asked, are his Hollys? “Every actor is unique,” he tactfully noted, “and what Emilia brings to it more than anything is youth, freshness—I mean, she’s totally charming, incredibly talented, all those things.”

He had seen her at work tending dragons and such on HBO before a casting director suggested she’d have enough crust to request “$50 for the power room” as Holly did on dates. “I thought [Game of Thrones] was very striking, and she was rather wonderful, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a good audition for Holly, so they sent her to me, she auditioned, and I just loved her.”

On Thrones, Ms. Clarke’s character, Dany, is “an exiled princess who turns into a warrior queen—in a sentence,” she said with a giggle. This somehow seems to put her on an equal footing with Holly Golightly in the concrete jungle of Gotham. “What they do have in common is they’re both, fundamentally, survivors.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s marks Ms. Clarke’s stage debut—although she asterisked, “I trained at Drama School for three years. That was the last time I did a proper play.” Stepping from Dany to Holly has been head-swimming. “As in a fairy tale, it just sorta happened. I got the call. I got incredibly excited. I met Sean. We had a very decadent four-hour lunch, followed by an audition the next day, which was wonderful, but the day after the audition, I told a friend, ‘I feel like Wendy, and he’s gone back to Never Never Land.’”

Now, Ms. Clarke must face down the Grendel’s Mother of movie memory. “Audrey Hepburn is Audrey Hepburn, and she is untouchable, isn’t she?” said Mr. Mathias, assessing the battlefield.

“We never refer to the movie,” he said. “Never. I’ve never even discussed it with Emilia. I’ve never even asked her if she’s seen the movie because it would not be helpful. We are concentrating purely on the book.”

Returning to the roots of Holly Golightly is like returning to the roots of Cinderella, as we’ve already seen this season. The public is reluctant to buy it because they have already bought the movie version, and they cling to it.

Mr. Capote acknowledged that the immediate mythology of the movie pretty much covered the trail back to his novella and to the Holly Golightly of his own creation. (That character was supposedly inspired by the personality of Carol Grace, an actress-author who was whispered to be the illegitimate offspring of Leslie Howard and who subsequently wed William Saroyan and Walter Matthau.) “The screenplay of Breakfast at Tiffany’s seems to me excellent,” assessed Mr. Capote at the time, “but more as a creation of its own than an adaptation of my book—no complaints, however ... and, anyhow, Holly is still Holly, except once or twice.”

Audrey Hepburn entered the film aware that she was miscast in a part fashioned for Marilyn Monroe. Never mind that Holly is 19 in the book and she was 31. Also, never mind her English affectations disguised a Texas accent. Having long ago said adieu to realism, Hubert Givenchy was allowed to give new meaning to the phrase “high-end hooker”; in fact, the black frock he whipped up for her entrance in the opening credits is the second most expensive piece of movie memorabilia ever sold at Christie’s London Auction House.

The truest note in the film was struck by Henry Mancini’s sad, surging “Moon River,” which caught the melancholy of the Capote book. Musically, he was merely playing it close to the vest, using only one octave and sculpting the song to Hepburn’s untrained voice.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s may not be Hepburn’s personal-best performance, but it’s the one you want to take to the desert island. The Capote roots got upstaged, lost in all that starry screen stuff, and there have been a few theatrical expeditions to unearth these treasures. Infamously, producer David Merrick tried to bring a stage version to Broadway in 1966 with Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Chamberlain and a Bob Merrill score, and some major scribes tried to break the Capote code—to name names: Nunnally Johnson, Abe Burrows and Edward Albee. The latter killed “Cat,” and Mr. Merrick killed the show after Preview Four—a big million-dollar misunderstanding.

With this new Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mr. Mathias finally gives Mr. Capote his day in court and lets him make his own music. He reminded the press: “Holly Golightly, at the end of the story, says of New York—the city in which she lives and loves—‘this town is dead to me. Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion’—and, of course, that’s exactly what happened to Truman Capote himself many years later. Certain shades of limelight wrecked his complexion.

“We’re not here to restore Truman Capote to you. ... We are here to share our version of this story with you—and one that we think is very touching, very compassionate, full of style and glamour and wit.”

How fitting, then, that the Rockstar Games co-founder is the new owner of an illustrious Brooklyn Heights mansion at 70 Willow Street where Truman Capote, along with some of the borough’s richest men, once lived. The sale, at exactly $12.5 million according to city records, is the most expensive in Brooklyn history, and, by extension, anywhere outside of Manhattan. It surpasses the previous record by a full $1.5 million.

If there was any question that video games had surpassed films, music and books for cultural—to say nothing of economic—primacy, this should bring such debates to an end. In Cold Blood has been dehtroned by Red Dead Redemption.

Even to Nicholas Callaway, the seller of the distinctive yellow home, the digital evolution is apparent. Mr. Callaway is a long-time publisher of over-sized art books. Madonna’s Sex, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings and Georgia O’Keefe’s One Hundred Flowers are among those stacked up on the coffee table of Callaway Arts & Entertainment. With The Times, Mr. Callaway co-published OBAMA: The Historic Journey, a visual catalogue of the president’s reelection.

Two years ago—right around the time he put his home on the market for a staggering $18 million, in fact—Mr. Callaway put his publishing career behind him, at least on paper. With the help of investors, he founded Callaway Digital Arts to publish mobile apps, with a particular focus on the iPad. The company’s motto is “turning beloved stories into beloved digital experiences,” and so far, the focus has been on known brands: Sesame Street, Thomas the Tank Engine, Angelina Ballerina and, the cuddliest of them all, Martha Stewart.

“I have bet the whole ranch on this,” Mr. Callaway told Reuters last year. The same might be said of his former home.

That is if a ten-fold investment over the course of a dozen years can be called a gamble. Though Mr. Callaway only achieved two-thirds his original asking price, he still sold the 9,000-square-foot behemoth for considerably more than the $1.25 million he paid in 1998, according to city records. In 2007, the 18-room manse was offered as a rental for $40,000 a month.

That is actually a relative steal, assuming 20 percent down on $12.5 million and an insanely low 4.2 percent mortgage rate, all of which comes out to almost $49,000 per month—and that is before taxes, not to mention the heating and electric bills it must cost to keep those 11 bedrooms comfy at night.

Yet Mr. Houser and his wife Krystyna must pay back a mere $2.5 million, according to mortgage documents she signed. The house was purchased anonymously through a limited liability corporation, but the mortgage, as well as the filing for the corporation with the state, point to the Housers—the LLC was registered to a condo Mr. Houser owns at 20 Greene Street in Soho. Which proves 70 Willow is not his first sizable buy, given the 4,324-square-foot loft was purchased in 2006 for $6.25 million.

Mr. Houser knows the city well, and not just from his homes on both sides of the East River. He moved to New York in 1998 to join his brother Sam Houser and Terry Donovan in the creation of Rockstar Games. In 2002, they released the vicious go-anywhere, do-anything, commit-any-crime Grand Theft Auto III, revolutionizing the industry, drawing criticism the world over and launching the best-selling video game franchise of all time. The last major release, Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008—there were actually a number of titles in between, and since—was set in Liberty City, an arch replica with exacting details of four of the Five Boroughs (Staten Island was left out).

With intricately wrought copies of Rockefeller Center, Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, the GTA IV not only wowed gamers but real estate geeks, too. It appears a facsimile of 70 Willow was not featured in the game.

One imagines Mr. Houser bringing the same excitement to his exquisitely wrought new home as to the video game worlds he creates. Beyond its massive scale, the 9,000-square-foot, yellow-clapboard mansion features such intricate details as 11 different fireplaces and a soaring spiral staircase connecting all three floors. Layers upon layers of molding line the ceilings and walls.

"38 windows have east, south, and west exposures, including parlor floor Jeffersonian floor-to-ceiling pocket windows and French doors leading to the Federal style columned veranda," Sotheby's broker Karen Heyman enthuses in her listing. (She declined to discuss the sale or the identity of the buyer.)

Outside, there is that rarest of Brooklyn Heights amenities: a driveway. It looks perfect for parking the Infernus. Out back is a large garden facing a 40-foot "Federal style columned veranda," Ms. Heyman's listing notes. It is said this was one of Capote's favorite places to write. It was here, while living in a basement apartment, that the sociable author completed Breakfast at Tiffany's and wrote In Cold Blood and, naturally, In the Heights. The opening line? "I live in Brooklyn. By choice."

So too did Adrian Van Sinderen, a descendent of Revolutionary-era Dutch settlers who commissioned the house in 1839, making it one of the oldest extant homes in the neighborhood. It later housed banker William Putnam, a trustee of the Brooklyn museum and prominent figure in the borough. His wife hosted women's suffrage meetings there, and an account of one from 1894 was recorded by none other than Elizabeth Cady Stanton for The Times.

"A historic home located in Brooklyn Heights," Ms. Heyman's listing concludes, in a bit of understatement, "a quiet refuge just minutes from Manhattan." Hopefully the arrival of Mr. Houser will not disrupt the quietude. That would certainly not be the case if one of the characters from his video games had moved in.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The house, located at 70 Willow Street, was originally listed on Sotheby's in May 2010 for $18 million, but millions have been shaved off as the months went on. The buyer, disguised under an LLC, purchased the house for $12 million.

Had the house been in the West Village, it would have sold for $30 million, the News predicts.

mewing@observer.com

Does the video indicate Ms. Johansson's ready for her passion project, an adaptation of Truman Capote's Summer Crossing? (Her previous attempt at directing a short was cut from the anthology New York, I Love You.) Well, the video features the most lens-flare-y light we've seen since the aliens landed in J. J. Abrams's Super 8 and an single opening shot, panning around the Brooklyn Bridge, that reads like the nightclub scene in Goodfellas with a bit less ambition. Ms. Johansson's great strength is in directing her lead actress to act just like her: either the two are friends due to shared flat affect (possible? likely, even) or the director said "Look forlorn; kind of play with your hair; smile with the left side of your mouth then stop doing that" and gave her star a DVD of Lost in Translation for homework.

Perhaps the greatest question is whether Ms. Johansson's ambition, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut this year, and that weird thing on Lifetime where Demi Moore and Jennifer Aniston got to Make-A-Wish themselves auteurs indicate a trend. In the 1990s and 2000s, every male movie star thought he could be a director. Now it's the ambition of the moment for top starlets! But whether Ms. Johansson is going to end up a Dances With Wolves Kevin Costner or an everything-else Kevin Costner remains to be seen.

daddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Seventy Willow Street is roomy, with 18 rooms spread out over five double-width stories, and in pristine period condition. It retains original interiors by America's Greek Revivalist Minar Lafever (pocket windows, a columned veranda and French doors). It even has cultural cred, having housed Truman Capote in a ground-floor apartment for 10 years.

The Observer kindly asks that someone bite the bullet and throw down the $18 million. You'll have the honor of breaking the borough record for a home sale price, and save us the horror of imagining this American gem empty on Thanksgiving.

SLIDESHOW: 70 Willow Street, Brooklyn Heights

realestate@observer.com

Issued by the Parish of New Orleans, the document entered into the possession of Capote's aunt Lucille Faulk Ingram, who took care of it after the infant Tru and his mother left for New York. It was printed days after Capote's birth on October 3, 1924; if the writer were still alive, tomorrow would be his 86th birthday. It is described as "a bit tattered but still quite bright and clean."

If you know someone so desperate to make it as a writer that they would try to channel Capote's talent through something as arbitrary as a birth certificate, this might be the perfect christmas present for them. 

"I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why." Thus wrote Truman Capote in A House on the Heights, which was authored, along with In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, in the rented garden apartment at 70 Willow Street.

Last week, 70 Willow, a 45-foot-wide, 9,000-square-foot townhouse more Margaret Mitchell than Betty Smith, went on the market for $18 million. This wouldn't shock Manhattan real estate; indeed, the island at any given time boasts dozens of $10 million-and-up listings.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > BROOKLYN LISTINGS OVER $10 MILLION

But this isn't in Manhattan. Seventy Willow is squarely in Brooklyn Heights.

It is the second-most-expensive listing in Brooklyn, trumped only by the Clocktower penthouse at 1 Main Street in Dumbo, which asks a feisty $25 million for its triplex with bi-bridge views.

In fact, despite the oft-cited "Manhattanization" of Brooklyn, the borough has only three residential listings over the $10 million mark, the third being the folkloric Gingerbread House, a landmark of Arts and Crafts architecture nestled in positively suburban Bay Ridge.

Manhattan, according to research site Streeteasy, has 342 residential listings over $10 million-and 54 of them are already in contract, confirming that the price was right. (There are 13 residential listings over $5 million in Brooklyn, but 498 in Manhattan, excluding those in contract.)

"You have to understand the history," Douglas Elliman's Michael Guerra, who runs the agency's Brooklyn office, told The Observer. "One hundred fifty years ago, the wealthiest people in Manhattan built their summer homes in Brooklyn, but these were second homes. There are some fine, unique properties, but they aren't of the same quality as the primary residences in Manhattan. Manhattan is the trophy destination and has the trophy properties; we just don't have anywhere near the same amount.

"If you peel off the trophy properties," he added, "you begin to see the mathematical relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn pricing, and it's about two to one. The same property in Manhattan goes for half the price in Brooklyn."

Still. Asher Abehsera, vice president of sales and marketing at Two Trees, the developer of the Clocktower Building, said, "Brooklyn has graduated. A couple of years ago, it was all French to people-you know, 'What? You're moving to Brooklyn!?'"

A house in Gravesend set Brooklyn's residential sales record when it sold for $11 million in 2006 (there are, however, rumors of off-market deals in the Syrian Orthodox Jewish enclave that exceed that, and of a $15 million Brooklyn Heights deal that has yet to close).

"Specific neighborhoods speak to different groups," Mr. Abehsera said. "In Gravesend, they pay the big bucks for those homes to be close to their synagogue and schools."

But what of the would-be $25 million penthouse in Dumbo? What's setting its price?

"The more you ask for something, the more it's worth," Mr. Abehsera, who is marketing it, said. "People didn't ask those kind of prices because there is no history of things trading at that amount. We're definitely at the forefront of creating that platform for higher prices. It's ballsy to come out in Brooklyn and say, 'I'm going to price this at $25 million,' but we were confident about it because there's just nothing like it. Anywhere."

And that is what unites these three kings of Brooklyn listings: a uniqueness and niche appeal unavailable anywhere else. These are properties that could not be found in Manhattan, which is why they can be priced like properties in Manhattan.

"It would be almost physically impossible to have anything like the Gingerbread House in Manhattan," said Brown Harris Stevens' Bill Radtke, who's listing it.

At Capote's old haunt in 70 Willow, the niche appeal may very well be provenance. In fact, a thread of comments on the blog Curbed aptly represents a pricing dilemma germane to Brooklyn. "I imagine the Capote name prompted the broker to double the asking price from real world value," sneered a commenter tagged only as Royal77. "For $18m. one can own an UES brownstone in a far superior location with the ability to resell in the future. This will be a fun one to watch."

But Karen Heyman of Sotheby's, who has the listing, would disagree. "It's unique; it's like a country estate!"

And, besides, somebody has to be first into the pool. That's how ripples start.

"Collectively, we are raising the platform," Mr. Abehsera said. "If Karen's listing sells, and I think it will, then the neighbors are going to think about putting their homes on the market for $10 million and up."

Go, Brooklyn, go. "If things continue the way they are going, then I believe you will see more of these kinds of listings," Mr. Radtke, the Gingerbread House broker, said. "You're already seeing a hint of it with 1 Main Street, the Clocktower and the other apartment there that's listed at $8.5 million. If those are successful ..."

cmalle@observer.com

VIEW SLIDESHOW > BROOKLYN LISTINGS OVER $10 MILLION

Either way, let’s raise a glass to Holly Golightly, who’ll always be “anywhere between sixteen and thirty.” It should be a martini glass, of course, and in it should be a White Angel (“one-half vodka, one-half gin, no vermouth”). We should be sitting in a quiet Lexington Avenue bar, around the corner from the brownstone in the 70s where she occupied, fleetingly, Apt. 2, entertained a curious mix of gentleman callers and successfully courted scandal. As we drink we can daydream about Holly (or her granddaughter) tripping through the door:

“[T]he ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blonde and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanliness, a rough pink darkening the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.”

Conjure Audrey Hepburn, if you like, but my Holly Golightly has less polish, more sizzle. (Truman Capote thought Hepburn was wrong for the part; he wanted Marilyn Monroe, which is maybe too much sizzle, if there can be such a thing.) Yes, she’s beautiful, but what makes her irresistible is the wild jumble of words that comes pouring out of her mouth:

“I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually it’s essential not to have any ego at all. I don’t mean I’d mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and some day I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Or this glorious, obscure declaration, issued on the Brooklyn Bridge:

“I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”

Wherever Holly is, Brazil or Africa or the Upper East Side (her calling card, remember, read Miss Holly Golightly, Traveling), she belongs to New York like Tiffany’s belongs to New York. Norman Mailer judged that Capote’s novel was “slight”—but he also pointed out that “if you want to capture a period in New York, no other book has done it so well.”

Amen.

Mr. Capote resided in the Sagaponack home, which sits on four acres near the beach, for 23 years prior to his death in 1984. He bequeathed the property to his partner, Jack Dunphy. When Mr. Dunphy died in 1992, the house was passed on to the Nature Conservancy, which then sold it to artist Ross Bleckner in 1993 for $800,000. 

According to a profile of the home published in Dan's Hamptons in August, Mr. Capote moved into the house shortly after the release of the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's and spent much of his time there writing in the mornings (he completed In Cold Blood there). He would venture into town around lunchtime, run errands, and often drive over to historian Robert Keene's bookstore and then to Gloria Vanderbilt's residence to take a swim in her pool—whether or not she was home at the time.

In the evenings, Mr. Capote was a familiar face on the Hamptons social scene, attending parties and spending time with friends in the area such as Ms. Vanderbilt, socialite Lee Radziwill, and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello.  

Gerald Clarke, the executor of Mr. Capote's estate, told Dan's Hamptons:

According to Mr. Clarke, the author decorated the two-story home himself, with wicker furniture in the study, blue boat-deck paint on the floors, and a stark bedroom with a simple bed and table.  

"For me it's a bore to use a decorator...I just don't care to have someone come in and tell me what I need to live with. I know," Mr. Capote once said.

Mr. Bleckner restored the home, enlarged the main house to 2,000 square feet and added a 1,900 square-foot studio, a two-bedroom guesthouse, an outdoor pool and garage. 

The listing agent for the property is Rylan Jacka of Sotheby's International Realty.