Surviving “The Graduate”

When I went down to the pool at the Chateau Marmont, it seemed like everyone knew each other and was having fun in the sun.I had been staying with my parents in L.A., shooting “The Graduate,” but my father was driving me crazy. Every day, I’d get home from the set, and he’d grill me, wanting to know every detail of what happened. And he’d be very critical: Why did you do that? That’s not the way to do it. I lasted maybe five days, and then I couldn’t take it anymore. I was trapped in the house where I’d grown up, totally alienated by the previous generation, just like my character. So I’d moved to the hotel where the cast and crew were staying.Out by the pool, it was like a cabana party on Mount Olympus: the people looked like golden gods among the palm trees. I felt immediately uncomfortable, unworthy. Here I was, playing a starring role in a movie by Mike Nichols, who was the director of the moment, but I felt like I had no right to be there.The shoot went on for months. Mike was in no rush; he had all the time and money he wanted. But I never went down to the pool again.“The Graduate” exacerbated all my insecurities from the start. When my agent said that Mike was interested in me, I didn’t even want to try out for the part. I had read the Charles Webb novel that Mike was adapting, and it was obvious that I was all wrong for Benjamin. A track star and straight-A student, the head of the debate team—this was an affluent, all-American kid, whose surname was “Braddock.” Why would you cast a person who looks as ethnic as I do to play the ultimate Wasp? It made absolutely no sense.It was impossible to be unimpressed by Mike, though. His first film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” had just been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, including Best Directing and Best Picture. I’d enjoyed his version of “Barefoot in the Park” on Broadway, and I loved the comedy routines he’d done with Elaine May. Still—me, playing a six-foot gentile? I had to draw the line somewhere.“I hear you don’t think you’re right for the part,” Mike said on the phone. “So who is right for it?”There happened to be a copy of Time on the coffee table in front of me; on the cover was a sketch of a handsome, blond, athletic fellow meant to represent Americans “Twenty-five and Under.” “The guy on the cover of Time,” I said.“You’re saying you’re not right for it because you’re Jewish,” Mike said.“Well, because Benjamin’s so not Jewish.”There was a pause. Then Mike said, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.”By that time, they’d been trying to cast the part for almost two years. “Robert Redford and Candice Bergen, the ideal couple—that’s what we were thinking,” Buck Henry, the film’s co-screenwriter, said about casting Benjamin and his love interest, Elaine. But they’d already seen Redford—and pretty much everyone else—by the time they got around to me and Katharine Ross. Nothing had clicked. I still maintain that if I’d read for them at the beginning of their search, instead of at the bitter end, I never would have got the part.The irony is that I was just starting to become successful in theatre, the world I’d inhabited for almost a decade. I was in “Eh?” Off Broadway, and I was having a great experience: lots of laughs, standing ovations almost nightly, my face on the cover of the Arts section of the Times. I was finally making a living doing what I loved. It was as if I’d been hiking up a mountain and, just when I could finally see the summit, here comes Mike in a helicopter, offering me a ride to a different peak.Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts. I wasn’t beautiful, and I didn’t want to be trapped. To be honest, I looked down on American movies, compared with theatre. When it came to breakthrough cinema, the kind made in Europe by greats like Truffaut, Buñuel, Antonioni, and Godard, Hollywood had yet to see the light.My agent convinced me that I should screen-test for Mike, despite my reservations. I told my castmates in “Eh?” not to worry; I was sure they wouldn’t need to replace me. Then I walked to my neighbor on Eleventh Street, Mel Brooks, who’d suggested that I play a small part in “The Producers.” I called up to his window: “They’re flying me out to audition for a Mike Nichols movie.”“What part?” he asked.“The lead,” I told him.“Good luck!” he said, suppressing a laugh. “Keep me posted!”I had to learn ten pages in less than forty-eight hours. I stayed up the entire night running lines; by the time I landed in Los Angeles, I hadn’t slept in two days. Mike’s office was a series of palatial rooms with high ceilings, and in my memory it included a bar, which is where I first saw him. “Oh, hi, would you like a drink?” he said. He was always so casual, almost seductive. Then they brought in Katharine Ross, who was outrageously beautiful. I felt foolish, like I had to apologize to her for looking like I did.They took us to get our makeup done in a long room with rows of upholstered chairs. Today, you get made up in a trailer, without a trace of glamour, but this room was a remnant of Old Hollywood. It seemed likely that Betty Grable’s ass had been on the chair before mine.They had these famous makeup artists, the Westmores—six brothers who’d learned their trade from their father. I can’t remember how many of them were there that day, but they were at it for hours. And it’s not like I was getting prosthetics or a toupee. It took them that long just to do something with what little I offered.Mike came in, watched them for a while, and looked at my face in the mirror. Quietly, in his singsong voice, he said, “Can’t you do something with his eyebrows?” Bobby Duvall always said that I had only one. They started plucking me to make two.Then Mike said that my neck looked too thick, so they put me in a turtleneck. But he was still unhappy with what he was seeing. (I, too, was increasingly unhappy.) Mike sounded almost innocent when he asked the Westmores, “Now, what are we going to do about the nose?”I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen. All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place.The scene I did with Katharine was endless. Both of us kept screwing up because—for God knows what reason—Mike wanted to shoot a ten-minute scene in one take. At one point, he took me aside and said, “Why are you nervous? This isn’t a play; the curtain’s not opening. It’s not a movie. It won’t go any farther than this room. So just relax!” I felt that he understood completely, and I thanked him and shook his hand. It was so slippery with sweat that it literally slid out of mine. That’s when I realized that he was more anxious than I was, and this did not put me at ease.It wasn’t just paranoia: everyone thought I was wrong for the part. “I looked at it, and it was just this ugly boy playing the part, and I thought, Ugh,” the film’s editor, Sam O’Steen, later said of my screen test. People imagined the Braddocks as prototypical California gentiles. “All blonde, all healthy,” Buck Henry said. “A family of surfboards is what we called them. And here comes Dustin: clearly not a surfboard.” To save the film, they hoped Benjamin’s parents might be played by Ronald Reagan and Doris Day. “We immediately rationalized it: he’s a genetic throwback,” Buck continued. “Doris Day and Ronald Reagan have had this mutt.”I was so relieved when we finished the screen test. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. As I was thanking the propman, a few subway tokens dropped out of my pocket. He very nicely picked them up, then said, “Here, kid, you’re gonna need these.”Soon after I got home to New York, my agent told me to call Mike at nine o’clock on Sunday morning. It was snowing out, and I was going uptown to my girlfriend’s apartment for breakfast. Obviously, the agent meant Pacific time, but I was such an anxious wreck that I didn’t think it through. When I got to my girlfriend’s place, I called Mike at precisely 9 A.M. New York time and woke him up.I mumbled an apology. There was a long silence. “Well,” Mike said, “you got it.”Stunned is too weak a word. Mike had apparently seen something in the footage. “He had this thing I’d only seen in Elizabeth Taylor, and that I’d certainly not seen in any of the other tests,” he later told his biographer, Mark Harris. “That secret. That deal with Technicolor where you do nothing and it turns out you were doing everything. He was compelling and hilarious and impassive. It was startling. 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 shocking.”I hung up the phone feeling like I’d been hit in the head. I looked at my girlfriend, who was holding a spatula, making our breakfast. “I got it,” I told her.“I knew you would,” she said.We had three weeks of rehearsal, which was unheard of for a film—a testament to just how revered Mike was, how much leverage he had in the industry.“Don’t try to do a character, don’t try to be funny,” he told us. “Start from zero.” Mike took me back to my adolescence—my acne, my barely suppressed horniness. He asked me if I thought Benjamin Braddock was a virgin. I said no, but that I didn’t think he’d ever screwed his mother’s friend before, either. (He liked that response.)Mike was completely open and unusually perceptive. I struggled, for instance, with the scene in the hotel lobby when Benjamin is registering for the room where he will have his first illicit encounter with Mrs. Robinson, the seductive, alienated housewife played by Anne Bancroft. Mike asked me all kinds of questions: What was it like when I lost my virginity? When had I experienced sexual shame? I told him that I could never bring myself to buy rubbers from a female pharmacist—if I was at the register and a woman appeared behind the counter, I had to make a break for it.