by Mark Harris
The Graduate was published by New American Library, a relatively new house under the editorial direction of David Brown, a former executive in 20th Century-Fox’s New York offices who would return to the studio a couple of years later. Webb’s novel represented an experiment for the publishing company, one of two books it was using to test the marketplace for hardcovers rather than the paperbacks that had been its specialty (the other was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a minor gamble itself since the 007 movie franchise was not yet established in the United States).27 But despite Prescott’s warm (if qualified) endorsement of The Graduate, the book made little impact and quickly drowned in a sea of first-time literary fiction.
Its failure was no surprise. Webb’s book arrived at an awkward moment for novels of its kind. The Graduate unfolds in a cool-temperatured, deadpan prose style that would likely have turned off any reader looking for an heir to the slangy, personalized voice of Holden Caulfield. Prescott’s comparison to Catcher in the Rye notwithstanding, the book was a latecomer to the genre of adolescent and postadolescent anomie and a bit too early to be part of the shift from stories of individual alienation that flourished in the 1950s to novels in which alienation was used as the touchstone of an entire generation later in the 1960s. While not autobiographical, Webb’s novel clearly owed a strong debt to a wrenching episode in his life that took place in 1960, when he was barely out of his teens and in his junior year at Williams College. He had fallen in love with a Bennington sophomore named Eve Rudd. Rudd got pregnant, and she and Webb became engaged; when her parents found out, they pulled her out of school and she had an abortion. In the wake of his split from Rudd (whom he eventually married), he began his novel.28
Like his protagonist, Benjamin, Webb was a top student (the novel’s “Halpingham Award” was based on a prize for creativity that Williams awarded Webb in his senior year), and like Benjamin, he was mired in a sense of cultural, geographic, and emotional dislocation; once he had finished at Williams, he moved to Brooklyn Heights, started and then abandoned a novel, then moved to the West Coast and began The Graduate as a short story one morning in the Pasadena Public Library. Webb wrote a first draft of the book while living in Berkeley, then moved back to Cambridge, where he finished it.29 Webb says he was inspired by the writing of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Katherine Anne Porter, and while “J. D. Salinger did strike a particular chord, [it was] the stories, oddly, more than Catcher, for some reason.”30
The Graduate is told almost entirely in long passages of dialogue, with no physical descriptions of the characters, no omniscient explorations of states of mind, and only the barest, most unadorned language (“Two days after he got home from the trip Benjamin decided to begin his affair with Mrs. Robinson”)31 used to describe thought or action. Webb says he later realized that the “particular style used in The Graduate… represented the misdirection of an innate playwriting talent”32 rather than an inherently novelistic approach.
Larry Turman, though, found the book haunting and droll, and he thought the spare, dialogue-driven storytelling made it perfectly suited to adaptation for the movies.33 Turman was a latecomer to the business; he had worked in his father’s fabric company until he was twenty-seven, when he left to make a new professional start on the bottom rung, working for $50 a week at the Kurt Frings agency in New York. A decade later, he had become a rising producer who, working with his partner, Stuart Millar, had already made four films, including the Judy Garland vehicle I Could Go On Singing and an upcoming adaptation of Gore Vidal’s play The Best Man.34 Now, he was ready to split with Millar and start producing by himself, albeit on a shoestring. The Graduate, which had sold only about five thousand copies, wasn’t an expensive property, but Turman didn’t have a lot of cash on hand. He swallowed hard and paid David Brown $1,000 out of his own pocket to option it, with an agreement that he would pay $20,000 if he decided to purchase the novel outright. Casting Beatty, or anyone else, as Benjamin Braddock, never crossed his mind: He would worry about actors later. First, he needed a screenwriter who could work quickly and cheaply and a director whose name could turn The Graduate into an attractive enough package to secure a studio deal and the financing that came with it.35
Turman didn’t have immediate luck finding a writer, especially with the money he was offering. Having Webb adapt his own novel wasn’t an option, since the young man was already ambivalent about his profession. “I wanted during my growing up to be an actor very badly,” he said later, “and it was very painfully that I put this dream aside and took up writing, which in one sense was a second choice frustration for me.”36 Turman sent the novel to William Goldman, who was then a novelist, not yet a screenwriter; Goldman wasn’t interested.37 So, like many producers looking for low-cost writing talent, he turned to off-Broadway theater. A year earlier, Turman had seen a pair of one-acts at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre by a writer named William Hanley. “This guy came to me, Lawrence Turman. He said, ‘I have this book and I’d like you to write the screenplay, and I’ve got $500 to pay you,’” says Hanley. “And I took it.”38
In December 1963, another, much more high-profile pursuit of literary rights was also under way in New York; the quarry was Hugh Lofting’s series of Doctor Dolittle books. Lofting’s first novel about the extraordinary veterinarian of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, had been published in 1920 to instant success; the author, a British civil engineer and World War I veteran who moved permanently to the United States with his first wife and children after serving in the Irish Guards, wrote a dozen Dolittle books before his death in 1947.39 The rights to all of them were now in the hands of his widow, Josephine, who relied on her instincts, her twenty-seven-year-old son, Christopher Lofting, and her lawyer, Bernard Silbert, whenever a prospective buyer came calling.
The Dolittle books, with their plethora of animals and fantastical plots (including, in later installments, an extended trip to the moon), represented both ideal properties for children’s movies and potentially insurmountable challenges for filmmakers. But other than a long-forgotten cartoon short made in Germany during the silent era, Dolittle had never reached the screen. The Fox Film Company, one of the two studios that eventually merged into 20th Century-Fox, had made Hugh Lofting an offer back in 1922. But in the decades after that, Lofting’s primary suitor was Walt Disney.
“Disney tried to get hold of it for years,” says Christopher Lofting, “but the cheap bastard wouldn’t pay anything for it! Disney specialized in public domain properties—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty—that they didn’t have to pay for. The Disney company offered a contract to my father back in 1940 or 1941, supposedly for a movie, but they were asking him to surrender everything: merchandising, television, which was in the contract even though it didn’t really exist yet, and rights to everything that he had ever written and would ever write, for a flat fee of $7,500. My father’s final line to them was, I only have one question—I have a four-year-old son and I wonder why Mr. Disney doesn’t want him, too. What’s wrong with him?”40
As Christopher Lofting grew up, the proposals to his father’s estate kept coming. “I would say there was a serious offer every two to four months through the 1950s and early 1960s,” he recalls. “They circled and circled. And we’d always say, ‘How are you going to handle the animals?’ And then it would collapse over creative issues.”
In 1960, Josephine Lofting, on Silbert’s advice, granted a short-term option on the books to Helen Winston, a former actress and neophyte producer who planned to commission a script for a live-action Dolittle movie and then shop it to studios. By 1962, Winston had a completed screenplay by a writer named Larry Watkin41 but still found no takers for what was guaranteed to be an expensive production, given its fanciful nineteenth-century setting and the complexities inherent in working with a large cast of animals. “She had a lot of bad luck,” says Lofting. “We kept extending and extending her option, but finally we had to say, ‘Look, if you c
ome up with a deal, fine, but you no longer have an exclusive option.’”
The Lofting family’s decision to field other offers opened a window of opportunity for a far savvier and more competitive player. Arthur P. Jacobs—“Apjac” to his friends, colleagues, and clients—was, at forty-one, a pale, roly-poly, chronically tense, hyperactive chain-smoker, “a perfect cardiac profile,” recalls Lofting. He had also, until recently, run one of the most successful public relations firms in the business, overseeing a bicoastal self-titled company and a staff that served not just as publicists, but as career shapers, advisers, image makers, and crisis managers for Beatty, Otto Preminger, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and countless others.
With his motormouth, his stubby brown cigarillos, a bottle of Fresca always glued to his hand, and a set of omnipresent color-coded rectangular note cards on which he would jot down ideas, notes from meetings, phone numbers, and to-do lists (he even kept them in his bathroom),42 Jacobs was easy to spoof as the picture of a Sammy Glick–style Hollywood hustler, but the man underneath all the perpetual motion was widely liked, funny, friendly, and very good at his job. In 1962, he had gotten out of the PR business and set his sights on becoming a producer. By the end of 1963, he had completed his first movie for 20th Century-Fox, What a Way to Go! The comedy was, in a way, a publicist’s vision of what a studio motion picture should be—a big, colorful gift box the contents of which didn’t matter as long as the wrapping looked fantastic. Jacobs had used his industry-wide connections and long client list to pull together a cast of big (if somewhat oddly matched) names—Shirley MacLaine, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly, TV stars Bob Cummings and Dick Van Dyke, even the venerable Margaret Dumont—for a movie that was little more than an extended series of blackout sketches about a hapless young woman (played by MacLaine) whose husbands keep dying on her. The film was extremely expensive, and even by generous assessments uneven in quality, but Jacobs had done at least part of a producer’s job: The money was all up on the screen. Now, five months before What a Way to Go! opened, he was trying to line up his next project before any word of mouth on the last one could slow his momentum.
Jacobs first heard that the rights to Doctor Dolittle might be available on December 5, 1963. Six days later, he met with Silbert in New York, pitched the attorney the idea of doing the film as a musical, and dangled two names in front of him: writer-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and Rex Harrison. By Christmas, Jacobs had met with Josephine Lofting,43 and she and Silbert had agreed to give him an option without asking for a single dollar up front, on one condition. They were no longer willing to wait for a movie that never seemed to materialize. “Bernie Silbert said, ‘You’re not getting two years—you have six months,’” says Christopher Lofting. “‘If you don’t have a deal [with a studio] by then, you’re toast.’”44
Time pressure didn’t intimidate Jacobs, whose years in publicity had taught him that sometimes the way to solve a problem was to move so quickly that everyone was on board before there was time for a second thought. That strategy allowed him to overcome the first of many hurdles he would face over the next four years: the fact that neither Lerner nor Harrison had committed himself to Doctor Dolittle, or even knew about it, at the time he floated their names to Silbert.45 Jacobs gambled that the main lure of the project for each man would be the chance to work with the other again. Lerner was already a major force in both musical theater and Hollywood (he had won three Academy Awards, one for An American in Paris and two for Gigi), and Harrison was a well-respected stage actor who had finally broken through to stardom with Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, which had run on Broadway for six and a half years and proved to be the biggest hit either Lerner or Harrison had ever had. The show’s success had convinced Jack Warner to pay $5.5 million for the movie rights,46 and expectations were high for the movie, which had just finished shooting and was due to open in 1964.
Lerner was the first to be approached,47 and he said yes to Doctor Dolittle with a swiftness that Jacobs might have taken as a warning sign had he been more aware of the writer’s volatility and propensity for overenthusiastic commitment (Lerner was, at the time, battling through his fourth of eight marriages). Jacobs made a deal to co-produce the film with Lerner’s company, and, acting as his own publicist, promptly planted an item in The New York Times announcing the movie, Lerner’s participation, and a budget, apparently completely fictional, of $6 million on January 6, 1964.48
One week later, Jacobs met with Rex Harrison, who had arrived in New York City and was staying at the Colony Hotel.49 Jacobs had plenty of experience dealing with the narcissism, ego, and insecurity of aging stars, and Harrison, not an easy man under the best of circumstances, was at a delicate moment in his career. His most recent movie, 20th Century-Fox’s Cleopatra, had opened six months earlier, and although it was widely regarded as a creative debacle, Harrison, almost alone in the cast, had escaped with his reputation intact. And although the movie version of My Fair Lady was regarded in the industry as an almost sure thing, Harrison had not won the right to reprise his stage role as Professor Henry Higgins without enduring a serious measure of humiliation from Warner Brothers. The fifty-five-year-old actor had to sit by and wait, fuming, while Jack Warner pursued a fresher face, Lawrence of Arabia’s thirty-year-old Peter O’Toole, for the role. Harrison’s feelings were understandably hurt, especially since he knew that Warner had earlier wooed Cary Grant, who was fifty-nine, to play Higgins: “I had heard that the film moguls were saying, ‘Rex looks old,’” he wrote in his autobiography.50 When negotiations with O’Toole finally fell apart, Harrison had to take a salary of $200,000 while his costar, Audrey Hepburn, got $1 million.51 The experience left the actor bruised and paranoid.
Harrison could be explosive, impatient, capricious, and vain, but also charming, apologetic, and compliant, sometimes within the same conversation or at different points during the same stiff drink. That day at the Colony, the actor was apparently at his most amiable. Hearing that Lerner was involved, he agreed to do the picture on the spot. It was January 14, 1964.52 Just five weeks after making his first inquiries, Jacobs now had a star, a writer, and enough publicity to make his rival for the material, Helen Winston, realize that she had been trumped. Now all he needed was a composer, a director, a leading lady, and a studio willing to foot a bill of $6 million, give or take. He had five months left.
THREE
François Truffaut was, it turned out, serious about Bonnie and Clyde. At least he seemed to be. Nobody knew if he really meant to make the movie. He was impetuous, his moods changed quickly, his marriage was disintegrating; push him too hard, and all would be lost. Truffaut had effectively taken the reins of the project the minute he received the treatment, well before it was even translated for him. “Please explain to me your precise relations with the writers of the script,” he had written to Helen Scott in January. “Are they themselves the screenwriters or is there someone else? Did they offer it to anyone else? Do they want to sell it to a producer? Were they commissioned to write it? Was it their own idea to offer it to me?” Truffaut was already thinking about how the movie could be made—“It’s such a simple and inexpensive film to shoot that I could [produce] it myself,” he wrote—and about where to get the money to do it: He wanted to work with United Artists,1 which at the time was alone among the major studios in offering great freedom to independent producers and directors to shape projects without taking away the right of final cut or forcing on them a studio house style, a crew, or contract players.
Simply by being the person on whom everybody else’s hopes were hanging, Truffaut, with his take-charge tone and fusillade of questions, immediately became the de facto engine of Bonnie and Clyde; without having read a word of it, he was now the boss. Benton and Newman were exhilarated by the mere possibility of his involvement and did a couple of readings of their treatment for friends. “One of the people who came was a girl I was trying to get into bed with at the time,” says Benton, “and I
did, so I knew it was a good script!”2 And they started mapping out their own idea for what the movie would be, earmarking the Flatt and Scruggs music they had played while writing as a perfect idea for the score of the film itself and fixing on Timothy Carey, a stone-faced character actor with a cult following from a couple of early Kubrick movies, to play Frank Hamer, the ex–Texas Ranger who tracked Bonnie and Clyde relentlessly in 1934.3 But Truffaut wasn’t ready to talk to Benton or Newman at all in January, much less to discuss ideas that specific.
In New York, Elinor Jones took steps to formalize her and her brother’s role as producers. In February, she had Robert Montgomery start to draft a contract that would give them an eighteen-month option on Bonnie and Clyde.4 Truffaut, unclear about whether Jones or her boss, Lewis Allen, was attached to the script, learned of Jones’s involvement from Helen Scott and cautioned Scott, whom he was using as a go-between, not to overstate his commitment to the film, for which he still didn’t have a completed French translation. “I won’t speak to you about Bonnie and Clyde until I’ve read the script,” he wrote on February 22. “Then I’ll send a detailed note to the writers…in case they start taking it in another direction from the one I want; unless I’m disappointed by it and decide not to do the project.”5
When Truffaut finally got his hands on a translation, he was interested enough to make time for Benton and Newman on his upcoming trip to New York. He had several reasons for coming to the United States: He wanted to continue researching his book on Hitchcock, he needed to meet with Allen about the still gestating Fahrenheit 451, and he was planning a side trip to Chicago to visit his friend Arthur Penn, who was there shooting Mickey One with Warren Beatty and Alexandra Stewart, a young French Canadian actress who was an intimate friend of Truffaut’s.
