by Mark Harris
As 1967 began, Nichols was considerably less cheerful than Jewison; he was beginning to wonder if The Graduate had taken so long to come to fruition that it was in danger of being rendered irrelevant by movies that were already beating it to the finish line. In Los Angeles, he and Buck Henry went to see a movie about a young man who rejects the oppressively bourgeois lifestyle of his parents to take his first timid and neurotic steps into a new world of free-spirited sexuality. The film, an $800,000 comedy called You’re a Big Boy Now, was the MFA thesis project of Francis Coppola, a twenty-seven-year-old UCLA graduate student who had been getting steady work as a screenwriter for Seven Arts (he had written drafts of This Property Is Condemned, Is Paris Burning?, and Reflections in a Golden Eye).24 The movie and its brash director were now being hailed as the first piece of evidence that the widespread emergence of film school programs might have something to offer Hollywood. You’re a Big Boy Now also suggested a glimmer of a new business model for cheap color movies; thanks to a lucrative presale to network TV, the film was already guaranteed to make a profit. Coppola, wrote critic Hollis Alpert, is “new generation, new breed, possessed of talent, boldness, drive; and…now has the chance to prove his genius,” adding, “Chances that might otherwise not have been taken, because of their commercial risk, are now quite feasible, especially if the film can be in color.”25 Henry and Nichols left the theater glumly convinced that the movie they had just seen “had clearly and totally pre-empted The Graduate,”26 wrote Turman. Even Nichols’s usually droll press interviews started to betray his depression as he temporarily lost his perfect pitch. “I’m doing it better than anyone, and I can’t do it at all,” he complained. “I’m a fraud.”27
Nichols and Turman weren’t getting much encouragement from Joseph E. Levine, the Embassy Pictures czar who had agreed to finance the movie but now, in a temporary cash crunch, was threatening to pull the plug. The large and youthful audience that was turning Blow-Up into a hit did not impress the indefatigably lowbrow producer. “Some of these films are liked by the critics and no one else,” he told a group of college students while getting an honorary degree. “Antonioni, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini are known to maybe only 1 percent of filmgoers. Antonioni is getting to be better known because of Blow-Up, but before that, mention the name Antonioni and most filmgoers would think it was some kind of Italian cheese.”28
Levine told Turman not to count on him for The Graduate’s budget, sending the producer on a frantic series of return visits to all of the studios that had rejected the project in the first place. “He said he couldn’t do it—he doesn’t have the money,” says Turman. “And there are no secrets in Hollywood. So, ‘secretly,’ ‘surreptitiously,’ I sent it back out to everyone. For a second time. And they all turned it down again. The problem was, nobody got the book. Nobody liked it. I don’t even think Joe Levine got it, but he saw it as a chance to rub shoulders with class, to do something that would contradict his image as the king of trash.”29
One problem for the studios may have been Nichols’s persistent inability to find the actors he wanted, a dilemma that bewildered the director himself. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to cast,” he told a reporter at the beginning of 1967. “These people are so far removed from stock characters.”30 In early January, Turman announced a “nationwide talent search” for a twenty-two-year-old actor to play Benjamin, a halfhearted attempt at a Scarlett O’Hara–style publicity spin for what was essentially a bicoastal open call for résumés and head shots.31 At the same time, they finally nailed down one of the principals. “I was walking on the Paramount lot,” says agent Leonard Hirshan, “and on the first floor, an office window opened and Larry Turman stuck his head out and said, ‘Can you come in here for a minute? I want you to meet Mike Nichols.’ I go in and they say, ‘We’re very interested in Anne Bancroft for a role in this picture The Graduate.’…So I said, ‘Give me a script,’ and the rest is history. I got her $200,000, which was a nice salary at that time.”32
“I had dated Annie a little bit, long before this,” says Nichols. “She was certainly a beautiful, exciting, wonderful, angry young woman. Which I happened to like. But it took us a long time to think of her. Now, one of the reasons I didn’t think of Annie is the famous thing that she was too young [Bancroft was thirty-five when she was cast]. But then we decided it didn’t matter.”33 Nichols, having just aged the thirty-three-year-old Taylor into a hardbitten middle-aged drunk, knew he could do the same for Bancroft, and besides, says Turman, “she was a name. Not a blockbuster name, but a name Hollywood knew, and a name I could get for a price.”34
Turman and Nichols seemed to be inching closer to signing a Benjamin, especially after the director started to realize a built-in problem with his casting strategy: “I discovered that boys who really were that age couldn’t get the distance to get rid of the self-pity and…have an attitude toward that point in one’s life,”35 Nichols said. Once they started looking at older actors, Charles Grodin, a thirty-one-year-old TV and theater performer with a growing list of credits, impressed them both with a very sharp reading. “Grodin got very close,” says Nichols. “His reading was hilarious, he’s brilliantly talented, and he understood the jokes. But he didn’t look like Benjamin to me.”36
“Chuck Grodin gave the best reading,” says Henry. “And maybe one of the best readings I’ve ever heard in my career, so funny and interesting. He thinks we offered him the part—I don’t think we did. But I don’t remember his screen test, whereas Dustin’s was really memorable.”37
It was Nichols who first asked to see Hoffman, remembering his performance a couple of years earlier in Harry Noon and Night off Broadway. In mid-1966, Nichols had auditioned him for the musical The Apple Tree. Hoffman lost the part to Alan Alda, but shortly after that, he had a true breakthrough success as a New York stage actor for the first time in his career. The vehicle was a comedy by Henry Livings called Eh?, a British import in which Hoffman was playing a distractible teenage night watchman. “The play went through two directors, neither of whom wanted me,” says Hoffman. “The first one wanted me to ‘do’ David Warner, who had done the play in London.” He told Hoffman to go see Warner in the Vanessa Redgrave movie Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment and simply duplicate the performance. “Of course, I reacted negatively to that,” says Hoffman. To the actor’s amazement, Theodore Mann, the artistic director of New York’s Circle in the Square Downtown, where Eh? was being staged, kept Hoffman and fired the director. “The second director wanted a kind of camp performance,” says Hoffman, “and I don’t do camp very well. I don’t think it’s funny. I do farce, but I don’t do camp. So he fired that director, too.” The third director Mann chose was Alan Arkin, who hit it off with Hoffman immediately but, says Hoffman, “was so afraid that this play wasn’t going to be a hit that he didn’t use his real name” in the program or on the posters.38
When Eh?, with staging credited to the pseudonymous “Roger Short,” opened in October 1966—two nights before Nichols’s The Apple Tree—it was an instant sellout hit, and Hoffman, whom The New York Times’ Eliot Fremont-Smith called “one of the most agile and subtly controlled comedians around,”39 was suddenly a local sensation. A follow-up rave by Walter Kerr comparing the twenty-nine-year-old actor to a young Buster Keaton cemented his success.40 Now, Hoffman was also turning up on television with regularity, and not just in one-line roles. He starred in adaptations of The Journey of the Fifth Horse and Maxwell Anderson’s The Star Wagon that aired within a week of each other on public television and in a couple of ABC specials as well. “It’s funny—I don’t think Mike ever saw me in Eh?,” says Hoffman. “He was the hot director, so if he had come, I would have remembered.”
Hoffman was sent the script for The Graduate and a copy of Charles Webb’s novel and sat in his apartment on West 11th Street reading both. On his coffee table was Time magazine’s recent “Man of the Year” issue: at the end of 1966, the editors had selected “The 25 and Under Gener
ation.” The drawing on the cover focused on a blondish, square-jawed young white man with the determined, clear-eyed mien of a future Apollo astronaut. Hoffman looked at the illustration and tossed aside the screenplay. “I thought, that’s your guy. I reacted against all of it. I didn’t want to read for it. I was right. Nichols was wrong. I was not in any way right for that part,” Hoffman says. “I thought, are these people having a breakdown? The guy’s name is Benjamin Braddock, he’s like six feet tall, he’s a track runner.”
After eight years of trying, Hoffman, at twenty-nine, finally had the career he thought he wanted. “I had this kind of chutzpah, this New York coffeehouse-and-Kerouac-and-Ginsberg thing: You weren’t there to ‘make it,’ you were there to be an artist,” he says. “That conceit kind of propelled me. I thought, I’ll work off Broadway for the rest of my life and I’ll be very happy and I’ll have a nice apartment, and I’m not going to screw it up by making a Hollywood movie and being miscast, even though I respected the director.”
Hoffman got a call from Nichols, who was still in Los Angeles doing screen tests. “Nichols said to me, ‘Did you like the script? Did you think it was funny?”’ says Hoffman. “And I said, ‘Yeah, very much.’”41 Taking a couple of days off from Eh?, the actor flew to Los Angeles in mid-January to test with Katharine Ross, a dark-eyed, strong-jawed twenty-six-year-old contract player at Universal who reminded Nichols of his first wife (Barbara Hershey and Kim Darby were among the other actresses who had read for Elaine).42 Although potential Benjamins and Elaines had read for Nichols and his team separately, Nichols preferred to screen-test them in pairs. Hoffman was whisked through a quick meeting with Bancroft—“It was all ‘How do you do?’ ‘How do you do?’—a blur to me,” he says—and then into the makeup room. “It was awful. I had only two or three days to memorize ten pages, and I’m a slow memorizer—I tried to do it on the plane. And then my memory jumps to the makeup chair, and, you know, feeling ‘What am I doing here?’ while they tried to turn my face into an Aryan. I remember Nichols saying, kind of kiddingly, ‘What can we do about his nose? What can we do about his eyebrows?’ I think they plucked me. It was his sly kind of humor, but it wasn’t helping me.”
Hoffman was then marched onto a soundstage that contained a bed, Katharine Ross, and a crane on which a camera was mounted. “He had a crane,” says Hoffman. “How many screen tests use a crane? Maybe he was working something out—it was only his second movie. Or maybe he was trying to see whether I could do a movie at all—‘Can the kid sustain?’ All I know is that through lack of sleep, makeup chair paralysis, and nerves, I couldn’t get through it.” Nichols did take after take, coaching Hoffman, trying to relax him, taking breathers. It was going badly—so badly that Ross began to tense up as well. “He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt,” she thought. “This is going to be a disaster.”43 At one point as the hours dragged on and the two sat wearily on the bed, Hoffman reached over and pinched her bottom, trying to relax her or perhaps energize himself. She spun around in cold anger. “Don’t you ever do that!” she said. “I’m in the wrong place,” he thought. As Nichols seemed to shift his attention to Ross, Hoffman got even more clenched and inexpressive.44
“He was just sitting like a lump,” says Nichols, “not visibly doing much, which of course I’m usually crazy about. But it was a hard day.” Nichols was impressed by Ross—“I thought, this is her, this is how I want Elaine to look, she even knew what to wear”45—but less sure about Hoffman. After twelve hours, it was over. Hoffman shook hands with the director, “and Nichols’s hand was so damp that I really got nervous because I realized how nervous he was.” Hoffman shoved his hands back into his pockets; when he pulled them out again, several subway tokens flew out. “Here, kid,” said an exhausted and annoyed crew member, picking them up. “You’re gonna need these.”
Hoffman flew back to New York, where his costars in Eh?, Elizabeth Wilson and Alexandra Berlin, were anxious to hear if they were going to lose their leading man. He told them not to worry.46 In Los Angeles, enthusiasm wasn’t running much higher. “I looked at it, and it was just this ugly boy playing the part, and I thought, ‘Ugggh,’” Nichols’s editor, Sam O’Steen, said later.47 “There was no ‘Eureka!’” says Nichols. That is, until they printed the screen test and watched Hoffman on film. “He had that thrilling thing that I’d only seen in Elizabeth Taylor,” says the director. “That secret, where they do something while you’re shooting, and you think it’s okay, and then you see it on screen and it’s five times better than when you shot it. That’s what a great movie actor does. They don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know how they do it, but the difference is unimaginable, shocking. This feeling that they have such a connection with the camera that they can do what they want because they own the audience. Elizabeth had it, and by God, so did Dustin.”48
“With that, in one fell swoop, we lost all the blonds we were thinking about,” says Buck Henry. “I remember Mike said, ‘I have the rationalization for Dustin—he’s a genetic throwback. Somewhere in the genes of these people, there was some twisted dark pirate uncle, and that gene got passed on to Dustin. His whole appearance suggests that he doesn’t belong in that laboratory full of blond gods.”49
A few days later, Hoffman got a call from his agent telling him to phone Nichols. It was a snowy Sunday morning, and Hoffman had walked to the Upper West Side apartment of his girlfriend, a ballet dancer named Anne Byrne, to make breakfast with her. “Anne was cooking eggs at one end of the apartment, and I was on the line at the other, and there was a typical Nicholsian pause, and he said, ‘Well…you got it,’” says Hoffman. “And I didn’t say a word, except maybe thank you. And he said, ‘You don’t seem very excited.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, yeah, thanks.’ All I knew was that I was working with the greatest director of my life and that he was about to make the biggest mistake. I hung up the phone and looked at my girlfriend and said, ‘I got it,’ and there was this terrible, sad moment when she said, ‘I knew you would.’ It was heavy. Laden with potential regret that this was going to break us up.’”50 Ironically, Hoffman was now going to have to turn down a second movie role—one that had been offered to him by the husband of his new costar, Bancroft. Mel Brooks was also working for Joe Levine; he too had seen Hoffman’s performance as Harry Noon and Night’s German transvestite and now wanted him to play a Nazi playwright in his new comedy, tentatively titled Springtime for Hitler. “I thought he was the most original, spectacularly funny guy,” says Hoffman, “and I had to call him up and say, I can’t do it.”51
Nichols brought Hoffman to meet Levine in his New York office on a rainy afternoon. The financier was not impressed with Nichols’s choice of star. “The windows leaked when it rained,” Levine said years later. “Mike pushed him through the door with a towel in his hand. I thought it was the plumber who had come to fix the leaks. I pointed to the window that was leaking and said, ‘It’s over there.’”52 But Hoffman, at least, came cheap: He would cost Levine just $750 a week.53 His casting was announced in February 1967; production would begin in April, after he returned from Italy, where he had agreed to spend a few weeks shooting an ultracheap comedy called Madigan’s Millions. A couple of days after the news broke that an unknown young New York actor would star in The Graduate, the Academy Award nominations were announced. Nichols’s adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? led the field with thirteen, and suddenly Joe Levine realized that he had the money to make The Graduate after all.
TWENTY-ONE
I must say that I haven’t known any colored person particularly well,” Katharine Hepburn told a journalist during the making of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “I’ve never had one as a friend.”1 Somewhat more remarkably, given the length of her career, Hepburn had never had a black actor as a colleague, either: She had not shared an extended scene with a well-known African American performer since 1935’s Alice Adams, in which her character watched helplessly as a housemaid playe
d by Hattie McDaniel made a shambles of her attempt at a fancy dinner party. So in early 1967, when Hepburn and Spencer Tracy invited Sidney Poitier over to Tracy’s cottage for a getting-to-know-you dinner party, it was an unofficial dress rehearsal for the awkwardness of the comedy they were soon to play out collectively on screen.
In the decades after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Hepburn developed and cultivated a reputation as a strong-minded Yankee liberal and social progressive—the trousers-wearing iconoclast who was a feminist before the word existed, the high-minded blue blood whose mother had been a pioneering suffragist, the actress who, at least on screen, would confront intolerance with chin-up common sense. But Hepburn’s off-screen politics, such as they were, emanated from more personal and often contradictory standards: Mixed in with her professed approval of independence and strong will was a streak of unreconstructed prudishness, an appetite for indignation, a high level of arrogance, and, in many cases, astonishing naiveté. When Poitier was first taken to meet the actress at her Los Angeles home, he encountered the tough, unsmiling Hepburn that many journalists met in the 1970s and later—the one who knew her own reputation and inwardly delighted in letting people know that they were being judged and, sometimes, found wanting. “Every time I spoke, every response I made, I could imagine a plus and minus column, notations in her mind,” he wrote.2
But Poitier encountered a far milder version of Hepburn when he arrived at Tracy’s home a few days later for a meal she had cooked. As many who knew the couple have noted, Hepburn submerged her personality when she was in Tracy’s presence: She would mute her own power and authority and become deferential and doting, letting Tracy take center stage every time. There is a sameness to the anecdotes about Tracy and Hepburn in the 1960s that has little to do with their on-screen sparring, in which she usually gave as good as she got and then some. The stories, often told as examples of her devotion and their mutual affection, generally come with an undertow of anger and abusiveness; they begin with Hepburn expressing an opinion about something and end with Tracy snapping at her, belittling her, cutting her down, or telling her to be quiet.3
