In Bed with Mrs. Robinson – My Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Andy Warhol once predicted that each of us will be famous for fifteen minutes. If so, I’ve had more than my share of fame this week. On Tuesday, November 7, my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation was published by Algonquin Books. To commemorate the big day, I found myself booked to do no fewer than thirteen radio interviews, starting at 6 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. As I write this, I’m on tap for eight more today, as well as an evening appearance at one of my favorite indie bookstores, Book Soup. I just hope I can keep my eyes open: I’m normally a stay-up-late kind of gal, but this past week I’ve been springing awake at 4:30 a.m., ready to rumble.  

Yesterday was an off day—all I had to do was drive from my Santa Monica home to Culver City where National Public Radio has its west coast headquarters. There the adorably blue-haired Leo del Aguila fitted me with oversized earphones and made sure I sounded good on mike. Then suddenly I was talking to Robert Siegel, the senior host of All Things Considered, who turned out to be a fellow Baby Boomer with fond memories of seeing The Graduate for the first time. How nice to chat, both before and after the official interview, with a man blessed with a sonorous voice and a good-humored manner, even if he was speaking to me from thousands of miles away. Ah, the magic of modern communications!

The great thing about radio (just ask Terry Gross!) is that no one cares what you look like. You don’t have to wonder what to do with your hands, nor worry about whether you hold your mouth in a funny position when listening to someone else speak. A bad hair day is no big deal on radio. Theoretically you could roll out of bed, pick up the telephone, and do the interview in your jammies. But media experts strongly advise that you freshen up and put clothes on. If nothing else, that will make you feel more professional. I’ve also been told that it helps to speak standing up, and that moving around will give your voice more energy. That’s why, during radio interviews from my home, you’ll find me roaming around the living room, trying out dance moves (yes, really) and checking out spots that my cleaning lady may have missed.

How do I know what to talk about? That’s easy. I know the contents of Seduced by Mrs. Robinson as well as the back of my hand. (Better, actually – I don’t spend a lot of time studying my hands.)  And all the prep work done by Algonquin is really paying off. All my interviewers have received a press release as well as a list I’ve drawn up containing 20 surprising facts about The Graduate. Especially when a radio host hasn’t had time to actually read my book, I get lots of questions like this one: Which soon-to-be famous movie and TV folk had tiny bit parts in The Graduate? (Answer—future Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, who has one line as a college kid, and TV’s Mike Farrell, playing a bellhop at the Taft Hotel.) So far, at least, everyone has been super-friendly. Clearly no one is trying to trip me up. But in any case I know the biggest enemy of radio is dead air, so the essential thing is to KEEP TALKING, no matter what.  Funny thing: as a natural-born chatterbox, I have no problem on that score. 

If you’re curious to hear the results of my All Things Considered interview, here it is! 

Just Like Today? Not a Chance

The Academy Awards ceremony of 1980 honored a bold assortment of Hollywood movies from 1979 that touched on major strands of American life. The big winner was Kramer vs. Kramer: Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep both finally won their first Oscars for portraying an estranged couple fighting over the custody of their child. If you liked cinematic razzle-dazzle and the sense of genius at work, another major nominee was Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. If you were leaning toward an epic with contemporary relevance, there was Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam drama, Apocalypse Now. The China Syndrome broached the environmental dangers implicit in nuclear power, while Norma Rae delved into the challenges of the labor movement. But at the moment the 1979 film that strikes me as particularly relevant to our own times is an odd, surreal adaptation of a novel by Polish-born author Jerzy Kosinski. It’s called Being There.

Being There was not a best picture nominee, nor was it recognized for its craft contributions. One of its two Oscar noms was for the film’s star, Peter Sellers, who had personally optioned the material. Sellers was suffering from a weakened heart, and this tightly controlled performance came at the very end of his life.  The other nomination, which resulted in a win, was for screen veteran Melvyn Douglas, whose career went back to the very beginning of talking pictures. He made Garbo laugh in Ninotchka (1939) and tried to talk Mr. Blandings (Cary Grant) out of building his dream house (1948). Douglas won his first Supporting Actor statuette as the deeply principled father of Paul Newman in Hud (1963). In Being There, he played a more urbane guy, the wealthy and powerful Benjamin Rand, close advisor to the American president (Jack Warden). 

At the center of Being There is Sellers as Chance, a man who’s more than a bit of a cipher. Set adrift at the start of the film by the death of his patron, he’s a childlike figure who seems to know about little more than the estate garden he has tended for so many years. He can neither read nor write, and gets most of his view of the world from watching television. But his elegant clothing (cast-offs from his patron’s wardrobe) and his formal manners give the impression that he’s a person of substance. Through a series of mishaps Chance the gardener is transformed into Chauncey Gardner, It is Douglas’s character, Ben Rand, who welcomes him in, introducing him to American politics on the highest level. 

The underlying joke of Being There is that a man who knows little, who can only talk knowledgeably about TV and gardening, is accepted by Rand and his compatriots as a font of wisdom. Representatives of foreign nations start gravitating toward him as well, convinced he has a deep understanding of their culture and language. Booked as a guest on a political talk show, Chance wows the nation with austere Zen-like pronouncements about the state of the world. Soon the President of the United States is feeling threatened by this attractive newcomer to the political scene, and the end of the film suggests that the various powers behind the throne are on the verge of coalescing behind him in the next election.

Upon the original release of Being There, some moviegoers saw it as a metaphor for the rise of actor Ronald Reagan, who was elected to the presidency in November 1980. Today, of course, it’s tempting to make connections to a certain politician who, without pror experience in elected office, has reached the highest office in our land.

Richard Dreyfuss: The Hello Guy

The other evening I took a timeout from the work piling up on my desk to watch a charming 1977 romantic comedy, The Goodbye Girl. This film, a box office hit that was nominated for five Oscars, was in a sense playwright Neil Simon’s gift to his then-wife, Marsha Mason. She plays Paula, a Broadway dancer who has terrible luck with men. Her ex-husband, the father of her ten-year-old daughter, was incapable of being faithful  And her various romances since that time have all ended badly. As the movie opens, she’s just been dumped by her current squeeze, who’s off to Italy to make a movie. Not only was he too cowardly to break it off in person but he’s secretly sublet their New York apartment to another actor, who appears at her door in the middle of a rainy night expecting to move in. Needless to say, he and Paula end up in an uneasy truce, sharing the cramped (though not by New York standards) space and trying to deal with each other’s worst habits. 

That bedraggled and very arrogant actor, Elliot Garfield, is played by Richard Dreyfuss in a performance that’s a tour de force. When he’s not sparring with Paula, he’s trying to rehearse for his big New York stage debut, playing the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Unfortunately for him, his director has an outlandish approach to the material. He believes Shakespeare’s supreme villain acts the way he does not because he’s a hunchbacked cripple but rather because he’s a closet homosexual, “the queen who wanted to be king.”  So Elliot, having failed to convince his director to change course, is forced to mince about the stage in stereotypically gay fashion. Audiences, of course, are appalled, and the reviews he garners are a supreme humiliation.  

While all this is happening, Elliot and Paula gradually make peace, and eventually end up making whoopee. Is Elliot just another love-‘em-and-leave-‘em guy? Or is he something better? Far be it from me to give away the film’s ending. But Dreyfuss’s performance as Elliot is so vivid and multi-dimensional that he ended up winning an Oscar for Best Actor of 1977. Lest you think it was an easy win, he was up against Richard Burton for his highly charged performance in Equus. Actors in comedies don’t usually snag the big prizes. But Dreyfuss did; at age 30 he was the youngest man to win in this category until Adrien Brody’s Oscar victory for a very  dramatic turn in The Pianist in 2003. 

Of course The Goodbye Girl wasn’t Dreyfuss’s first stab at movies. He made waves in American Graffiti (1973), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). But in The Goodbye Girl he entered territory that had been staked out a decade earlier by Dustin Hoffman: that of a romantic leading man who is not classically handsome. When Hoffman was auditioning for The Graduate, he reasoned that the role of Benjamin Braddock was not for him. In the screenplay, Benjamin is a collegiate superstar, who has scored both in the classroom and on the athletic field. Hoffman reasoned that the part should go to someone tall, blonde, and handsome, like Robert Redford. It took a gutsy decision by director Mike Nichols to go with Hoffman: short, dark, a bit clunky, and unmistakably ethnic. After America unexpectedly fell in love with Hoffman, other ethnic (Jewish, Italian) actors for the first time had a chance at being a romantic lead. So here’s to you, Mike Nichols, for making Richard  Dreyfuss’s Elliot Garfield possible.

Read much more about the long-term influence of The Graduate in my new Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation, out November 7 from Algonquin Books.