French author and philanthropist Dominique Lapierre on Wednesday inaugurated the first of the 15 schools to be built in eastern India with money raised from auctioning a black dress that actor Audrey Hepburn wore in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Two hundred children can be educated up to the sixth grade at the school in Bishnupur, a village about 50 kilometres south of Kolkata. “I am very happy that my efforts are bearing fruit. Things are changing, with more and more children going to school,” Lapierre told the cheering students. The school is one of the 15 to be built in the state with US $807,000 paid by a telephone bidder for Hepburn’s dress at a Christie’s auction in London in December. Lapierre had received the dress as a gift from designer Hubert de Givenchy. Proceeds from the sale went to the City of Joy Foundation, a charity organisation run by Lapierre. Hepburn wore the dress in one of her best-known roles as eccentric Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly in the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel. The opening scene of the film shows Hepburn in the dress emerging from a taxi on Fifth Avenue with her brown-bag breakfast to ogle diamonds and luxury goods in the windows of Tiffany & Co. While he has written many books, Lapierre is best known for City of Joy, a book set in Kolkata, and Freedom at Midnight, about India’s independence from Britain in 1947.
