You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

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).