by Mark Harris
Embassy packed Hoffman off to the Golden Globe Awards, which in 1968 were beginning a period of particular disreputability, having just been banished from NBC over accusations that they had leaked the winners in advance. “No one went,” says Hoffman. “I mean, no one. But they told me to go, and I went.” He sat in the audience and watched John Wayne serve as master of ceremonies. “There was a wire that went from him all the way to the front door. He announced at one point that someone was going to help him open the envelopes, and Sally Field came down the wire as the Flying Nun.” The most humiliating moment in life, he thought. Almost none of the winners were present. Hoffman’s category came up—he was named Most Promising Male Newcomer. He went up to the stage. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight,” he said.16 Everyone laughed. Hoffman went home, back to New York. He tried to stay normal, to feel normal. He didn’t move, but he changed his phone number at his agent’s insistence. He answered his fan mail—every single letter, he says. He started to get offers. He tried to keep his head on straight.
Some members of the young left turned on The Graduate, complaining that it was insufficiently down with the revolution. They treated it as a failed newsreel, a dishonest portrait of their lives that reflected only passivity. Why hadn’t the movie acknowledged Vietnam War protests? Why hadn’t it covered student demonstrations at Berkeley? “Nichols doesn’t risk showing young people who are doing truly daring, irreverent things…to seriously challenge the way old people live,” wrote Stephen Farber and Estelle Changas in Film Quarterly.17 (Perhaps they were angry at Nichols’s response to the question he was asked over and over throughout 1968 about what eventually happens to Ben and Elaine: “They become their parents.”) Jacob Brackman (later Carly Simon’s lyricist) wrote a twenty-six-page takedown in The New Yorker, a stream-of-consciousness rant in which he faulted the movie for, among other things, not including any black characters and never allowing Benjamin to call Mrs. Robinson by her first name.18 “He said he wrote it while extremely high,” says Buck Henry. “It must have taken a lot of marijuana.”19
Charles Webb, then trying to get his second novel published, chimed in with his own complaint: He was still unhappy about Nichols and Henry’s decision to allow Benjamin to wreck Elaine’s marriage after her vows had been spoken. “In the book the strength of the climax is that his moral attitudes make it necessary for him to reach the girl before she becomes the wife of someone else,” he wrote to Stanley Kauffmann. “In the film version it makes little difference whether he gets there in time or not. As such, there is little difference between his relationship to Mrs. Robinson and his relationship to Elaine, both of them being essentially immoral.”20 Forty years later, Webb says, “I cringe at the quote…. Was I really that priggish? Yes, I suppose I was. But then again, if I hadn’t been locked so tightly into that world at the time [that I was creating the character], I suppose it couldn’t have been conveyed in all its nuances.”21
But most of the criticisms about the movie were overshadowed by the magnitude of its popularity. Even Brackman admitted that it had become “a nearly mandatory movie experience…that [crosses] the boundaries of age and class. It also seems to be one of those propitious works of art which support the theory that we are no longer necessarily two publics—the undiscerning and the demanding—for whom separate kinds of entertainment must be provided.”22
The centrality of film culture for young America was becoming impossible to miss. Everyone suddenly wanted to be a director. Andy Warhol had already made the jump from graphic artist to experimental auteur. Norman Mailer was directing his own movies and writing about his enthusiasm for the medium. Hair was about to take up residence on Broadway, and the lyric to its jaunty “Manchester, England”—in which the show’s hero “finds that it’s groovy to hide in a movie” and daydreams about becoming Fellini, Antonioni, or Polanski—perfectly captured the degree to which a European film sensibility had become a signifier of American cool. What could be groovier? Suddenly, being a director had become its own form of rock stardom. By the spring, The New York Times was reporting that sixty thousand students across the country were enrolled in film classes at 120 different schools, a total that had doubled in a year, largely because “Mike Nichols and Jean-Luc Godard have become the heroes of many college campuses.” The piece went on to remark that Hollywood studios were more willing than ever to look to film school programs for the next generation of talent. It noted in particular the case of twenty-three-year-old George Lucas, who “won’t collect his master’s degree from the University of Southern California until the summer [and] has already gone to work full time…at Warner Bros. as an assistant director.”23
Stanley Kramer thought college students were the key. That spring, as the popularity of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner continued to grow, what should have been a triumphant moment for Kramer was undone by his own dissatisfaction and his hunger for something more. The reception of the movie by the general public was all he could have asked, but the reviews stung, especially since the film was being scorned by the very people he thought he’d made it for. Kramer wanted a hit, but he also wanted the approval of what he imagined was his antiauthority, anti-Establishment constituency. He couldn’t understand why nobody saw any element of subversion in his decision to back the white parents into a corner by making their prospective black son-in-law flawless, which he stubbornly insisted was what made the whole thing work; he didn’t know why critics couldn’t see that you had to make certain compromises in order to sell your message to a wide audience. If the people who were attacking his movie as old-fashioned and clichéd knew that he was getting anonymous phone calls from racists, even death threats, surely he would get credit for the bravery and moral courage he felt it had taken to make the movie. What was in play was, in part, the pride of a producer-director who wanted personal credit to accompany his popular success, but Kramer’s self-definition was also at stake: To let the movie be written off as a middle-aged, middlebrow white man’s take on racism would have meant accepting that he was now, and had long been, a Goliath, not a David—a fully functioning part of the system rather than a squeaky wheel within it. From the moment it opened, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner needed no promotional help from anybody, but Kramer decided to jump into the fray anyway. He would take the movie from one campus to another, screen it for undergraduates, and talk about the issue of integration.
Kramer visited nine different colleges that spring. The decision proved to be crushingly misguided. Students couldn’t have been less interested in a movie that felt to them like the same hand-wringing, hypocritical take on race relations that they had been hearing from their own parents for years. The Harvard Lampoon named Kramer’s film the worst movie of the year in its annual awards.24 What most students really wanted to talk about was Bonnie and Clyde. “I enjoyed it,” said Kramer, straining for politeness, “but I don’t know what it means. I lived through that period myself, and the picture doesn’t really represent it.”25 Kramer flew to Chicago with Jack Valenti to speak to an audience of six hundred students at Northwestern University. Roger Ebert, who covered the speech, wrote that the undergrads “heartily roasted” the movie, calling it “a copout.”26 Why couldn’t Prentice have been a postman, like his father? Why was the only interracial kiss shown through a rearview mirror? Why weren’t Poitier’s and Houghton’s characters already sleeping together?
Kramer returned home, bitter and hurt. He wrote a piece about the tour for the Directors Guild of America newsletter in which he complained that students didn’t have respect for George Stevens or William Wyler or John Ford anymore—they all wanted to be Godard. Kids had told him, he wrote, “that I made a film about a problem which the university student maintains does not exist.” He seethed over the emerging dominance of a filmmaking approach that valued “emotional essence” over “content and form.” He complained that all students wanted to see on screen was a “put-on” and that they didn’t understand why Poitier’s character had to be so
“pure and simple.” After he had heard enough kids belittling Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as sentimental—“oh, sentiment, the whipping boy of the film buff, 1968 version,” he sneered back at them—he tossed in the towel, insisting that he felt “no great defeat” and lambasting “bogus intellectual critics” who would rather praise work by “creative cowards” than his own. Kramer held his head high, but by the end of his tour, he was reduced to defending his own movie as “an adventure into the ludicrous.”27 He later admitted that after his cross-country journey, he was “in torment. I agreed with the college students in some of what they were demanding…but I didn’t understand why some of them were attacking me. I had been assaulting the establishment for forty years and now was being smeared with the same brush.”28
“It wasn’t a movie for people my age,” says Katharine Houghton. “I don’t think he realized it on the set. The real event of the film was the relationship between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy—that was what was going on for audiences. The love affair between the white girl and the black man? That was never given any reality. It was a fable.”29
“Everything was happening fast in the ’60s,” Kramer wrote later. “Too fast for me.”30
THIRTY-ONE
I hope to God I don’t win,” said Dustin Hoffman. “It would depress me if I did. Every actor thinks about winning an Oscar. But I don’t honestly believe I’ve earned it for The Graduate.” Hoffman didn’t have a vote—he wasn’t a member of the Academy—but if he had, it would have gone to Rod Steiger. “Without any question,” he said. “He gave a performance that had many colors and facets to it. That’s what acting is all about.”
In 1968, Oscar campaigning was relatively subdued even for the old guard, and newcomers found it downright unseemly. A young actor like Hoffman felt free to say publicly that he expected Bonnie and Clyde to win Best Picture but that he didn’t feel Warren Beatty’s role had “prizewinning dimensions”1 without sounding like a bad sport. Caring too much was undignified, not to mention emblematic of shallowness and false values; in fact, Gregory Peck, the Academy’s president, was working overtime just to convince the acting nominees to show up for the ceremony after years of fashionable and conspicuous absenteeism. Aside from the generational contest that seemed to define the Oscars that spring, it was also the first time since 1962 that all five Best Picture nominees were homegrown and marked the strongest showing for American actors in a decade. As a member of the Hollywood establishment whose liberal political credentials made him appealing to the new, engaged generation of stars as well, Peck was in an ideal position to make sure that attendance was high at the fortieth awards ceremony; his campaign of telephone calls and personal appeals got eighteen of the nineteen living acting nominees to promise they would show up. The lone holdout was Katharine Hepburn, who had dived back into work following Tracy’s death and was in Europe shooting The Lion in Winter and The Madwoman of Chaillot. Hepburn had won a Best Actress Academy Award back in March 1934 and had stayed away; she had received eight nominations since then and lost every time, and she had no intention of making what she believed would be a pointless trip back to Los Angeles, but she did agree to host a filmed segment celebrating the Academy’s first decade. By this time, journalists were all but referring to her as Tracy’s widow: She “doesn’t want to return to Hollywood and memories so soon,” wrote Sidney Skolsky. “She is working and living out her life until it becomes a life again.”2
Columnist Sheilah Graham mulled over the chances of all five women in the Best Actress race and dismissed Hepburn’s shot at the prize with the remark “If we are giving awards for Kate’s devotion to Spencer Tracy, then she will have been the winner.”3 But that kind of guesswork about the awards was the exception, not the rule. Academy Awards handicapping was confined largely to the Los Angeles Times and the gossip magazines and trade papers, where a consensus seemed to be emerging, though with less conviction than usual. “It used to be very straightforward,” says Mike Nichols, only half-jokingly. “If you had been sick, or you were a shiksa playing a whore, you won—everybody knew the rules. And then it started to change a little.”4
Rod Steiger was considered a runaway favorite for Best Actor; Hoffman and Beatty were too young to take the prize; and there was considerable sentiment that giving Spencer Tracy an award would be touching but pointless. Although one Hollywood broadsheet argued that Steiger “is looked upon here as just a ‘commuter,’ whereas Tracy was always the hometown boy,”5 Stanley Kramer himself said shortly after the awards that he was “opposed to a posthumous Oscar…it would not have been right.”6 Best Actress was seen as a contest between Edith Evans for The Whisperers and Dunaway, who had supplanted Julie Christie as the fashion and magazine icon of the moment and whom her pleased Thomas Crown Affair costar, Steve McQueen, was no longer calling “Done Fade-Away.” The runaway success of The Graduate would probably be recognized with an award for Nichols, who had already taken top honors from the Directors Guild. And there was a growing sense that Bonnie and Clyde was going to complete one of the most stunning turnarounds in movie history by taking home the prize for Best Picture. In March, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—which had rated the movie “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations”—presented Beatty, Penn, and Warner Brothers chief Eliot Hyman with a special award, Best Film for a Mature Audience. Variety speculated that such recognition from a religious body would go a long way toward soothing the anxieties of Academy voters who were “nervous about the violence…and are concerned about the ‘image of Hollywood’ which might be created by giving it the top award.”7
Violence, and popular entertainment’s role in either promoting or preventing it, was very much at the center of industry discussions in the weeks after the Oscar nominations. Memories of the previous summer’s urban riots and images of armed National Guardsmen rolling into American cities were still fresh, and on February 29, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—better known as the Kerner Commission—that President Johnson had appointed to study the causes of the rioting issued its famous report, warning that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” and unambiguously implicating “white racism” as a primary cause of the riots.8 The report’s call for sweeping social and economic reforms extended to Hollywood. THINK BLACK, shouted a trade-paper headline, noting the commission’s conclusion that network TV “must hire Negroes, it must show Negroes on the air, it must schedule programs relevant to the black ghetto.”9 The story noted that four of the seventeen new shows scheduled to air that fall would have black actors in key roles, including Julia, a gentle comedy in which Diahann Carroll would play a middle-class nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam; it would be the first TV series ever to star a black woman who wasn’t playing a maid.
Hal Kanter, Julia’s creator, was also the head writer of that year’s Academy Awards, and Carroll, though her experience in movies was limited, was drafted to be an Oscar presenter, ensuring a plug for her upcoming show and also helping Peck in his attempt to make the ceremony look even slightly racially diverse. Louis Armstrong signed on to perform one of the nominated songs, The Jungle Book’s “The Bare Necessities.” Sammy Davis Jr. committed to singing his popular hepcat version of Doctor Dolittle’s “Talk to the Animals.” And in a coup for Peck, Sidney Poitier agreed to present the Best Actress award: “I was delighted I was not nominated,” he insisted. “To sit in that hall knowing full well that you’ll be one of the four losers is not very pleasant.”10
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Kerner Commission Report, which became an instant best seller,11 “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” It was also, for the industry’s bottom-liners, a blueprint for sound economic health. Now that Hollywood had some hard numbers about how essential black urban moviegoers were to the continued success of their product, they were quick to advocate reform; violence that shut down ci
ties was bad for business. When King flew to Memphis at the end of March and a protest rally erupted into shooting and bloodshed, a curfew was imposed and the night streets were empty; Variety’s spin was that “showbiz [was] hit hard” economically by the local racial strife.12
On the night of Thursday, April 4, just before 7:30 p.m. on the East Coast, Walter Cronkite interrupted his own CBS Evening News broadcast with the bulletin that King had been shot and wounded.13 Later that evening, most Americans learned that King was dead when the networks broke into their prime-time entertainment shows to cover the story and await a statement from President Johnson.
In some quarters of Hollywood, the first instinct was to say nothing, do nothing, change nothing. The Academy Awards were scheduled for 7:00 p.m. on Monday, April 8, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium; the show was to be broadcast live by NBC one day before King’s funeral in Atlanta. At first, nobody at the Academy saw any reason for a postponement. But by Friday night, it became clear that if the Oscars proceeded as planned, the awards would be handed out to a largely empty house. Carroll, Poitier, Armstrong, and Davis had all notified Gregory Peck that they would not even consider participating in the ceremony if it took place before King’s burial. Rod Steiger dropped out as well, and Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison, and Arthur Penn all told the Academy they’d be staying home, too.14 “I certainly think any black man should not appear,” Davis told Johnny Carson that evening on NBC’s Tonight Show. “I find it morally incongruous to sing ‘Talk to the Animals’ while the man who could make a better world for my children is lying in state.”15
