Any gentleman with the slightest chic will give a girl a fifty dollar bill for the powder room.

Axelrod wrote the original screenplay for How to Murder Your Wife (1965) directed by Richard Quine with Jack Lemmon Verna Lisi and Terry-Thomas. It was adapted for a film but 20th Century Fox had director/screenwriter Frank Tashlin change the story to a satire on television advertising and throw out all of Axelrod's characters except Rita Marlowe (with Mansfield recreating her stage role). He said he contributed to or collaborated on more than 400 TV and radio scripts and wrote for top comedians including Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin before earning breakout success with his 1952 stage comedy The Seven Year Itch a risque social satire about a middle-class man who has an affair while his wife and children are on vacation.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and also adapted Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1962).