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. Mike told me to think of the hotel clerk (played, to hilarious effect, by Buck Henry) as a woman pharmacist. It was such a useful piece of direction, such a helpful way of working.Mike also asked me if I had a role model as a kid. I told him it was my brother Ronny. He had me try a scene as Ronny, who I could imitate perfectly; I used to pretend I was him when girls called him, hoping to see how long I could keep them on the phone. Then Mike asked me if Ronny ever got uptight, and he absolutely did. “Try it again, as your brother, uptight,” Mike said. So I did what Ronny did whenever he was nervous: I held my breath. Finally, Mike said, “Now forget all that and just do the scene.”This time, I still held my breath a lot, but I also let out a little squeak periodically. Mike liked it so much he put in a few extra squeaks in the final edit. You can hear them throughout “The Graduate,” like gas escaping from Benjamin Braddock, who is a balloon of tension.Mike was so wonderful during rehearsal that it was shocking, destabilizing, when we started shooting the film and he was an entirely different person. We weren’t allowed to see any dailies—I later found out it was because Mike didn’t want Anne Bancroft to see the way they were lighting her. (She was only thirty-five, and I was about to turn thirty; Mike had to make that five-year age gap look more like fifteen.) So we had nothing to go on but Mike’s mood, which was frequently sour.I often felt that I was about to be fired. When we were shooting some of the film’s most famous sequences, I remember thinking, I have no fucking idea what I’m doing. The first scene that we shot featured Benjamin in front of a fish tank in his room, where he’s escaped from a party his parents have thrown to celebrate his college graduation. I just sat there on the bed while Mike told me, “O.K., look at the fish. Now look down. Move toward the fish.” We probably spent a whole day on it, and not for one second did I have a handle on what I was meant to be conveying or how to go about it.I did make Mike laugh sometimes, and those were moments of great relief for me. When we started working on Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson’s first scene in the hotel room, I did what I’d done when I had my “first feel” as a teen-ager: I awkwardly and abruptly put my hand on Anne’s bra-covered breast, with absolutely no finesse or passion, without even making eye contact with her. Anne’s response was incredible: without missing a beat, she looked down at the sweater in her hands, noticed a stain, and paid it all of her attention, rubbing the fabric together and fussing with it, while I continued to hold her breast in my paw like a paralyzed animal.It was so funny that I had to walk away, trying to avoid bursting into laughter. That was the worst thing you could do: break character. I started knocking my head against the wall in an attempt to collect myself. Don’t break! Don’t break! Mike interpreted it as an artistic choice, and it cracked him up. When Mike was laughing, I felt he loved the character I was trying to create. It was the only time I knew I was doing something he was happy with.But his mood would shift dramatically. I don’t remember the scene, but I will never forget Mike’s acid voice saying to me, after one take: “What were you doing?”I tried to defend myself: I’d been taught that to give your character depth, you don’t play the text—you play the subtext, which can sometimes be the opposite of the text.“Well, do me a favor,” Mike said. “The next time you get a thought, do the opposite of that.”This is the kind of comment that kept me in a state of constant anxiety. And it wasn’t just my own experience. When we shot a scene in which Benjamin drags Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, to a strip club for their first date, Mike overheard Robert Surtees, the cinematographer, say something to the crew. Surtees was a mentor to Mike, the man who taught him all about the possibilities of light and filmmaking. “I said something snotty, as I often did, to the crew,” Mike recalled later. “And Surtees—I heard him say to them, but it wasn’t for me—he said, ‘It’s O.K. It’s not much longer.’ I thought, Oh man. How could I have been such a shit that this man that I revere feels that way about me? But I was.”Mike was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to creep in. There was a scene in which Katharine Ross had to slap me, and he made us do twenty-seven takes. The scene has Benjamin run into Elaine’s room, soaking wet from the rain, to tell her that he’s had an affair with an older woman; within seconds, Elaine realizes the woman is her mother. Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder. Katharine worried she would hurt me, and I told her, “I’m O.K. Just don’t hit my ear.” Unfortunately, she missed a few times. I was dizzy by the end of that day, and Mike didn’t even use the slap in the film.The next day, we shot an underwater scene in the pool: Benjamin is being forced to try the scuba suit his father has bought for him. The scene was meant to symbolize the way that Benjamin’s parents gave their children material things instead of love. Mike didn’t want me to keep popping up out of the water, so I had to hold myself down: if you watch the movie, you can see that one hand is behind me the whole time I’m underwater, because I’m holding on to the ladder behind me. When I came up for air after a few takes, there was blood trickling out of my ear. Between all the slapping during the previous day and all the water pressure at the bottom of the pool, I’d punctured an eardrum. (They sent me to the best ear doctor in Beverly Hills, and I remember him telling me, “The eardrum is like a pie: you have a slice of pie missing.”)By summer, we were shooting in La Verne, California. We got there the week of the Six-Day War—we all thought the world was going to end. The sound guy, Jack Solomon, heard about it on the radio, on the way to the set, and was so upset that he had to pull over to throw up. It was scorching hot. Anne Bancroft actually fainted when we were shooting a scene. She had to be resuscitated with oxygen, and we stopped shooting for a few days while she recovered.I nearly passed out myself doing the scene where Benjamin, on his way to stop Elaine’s wedding, runs out of gas, has to ditch his Alfa Romeo, and sprints as fast as he can from the highway to the church. Mike could not be satisfied. I remember Sam O’Steen saying to him, “I don’t think Dusty can keep running in this heat.” But we did it over and over and over again, until I was absolutely trashed from exhaustion and dehydration. I remember lying down in the grass in front of the church because I thought I was going to lose consciousness.It was a terrible experience making the movie that changed my life. The whole time, I felt Mike was angry at me, either because I was doing something wrong or because he had realized what everybody else already knew, that he had miscast the lead in his film. My friend Ulu Grosbard, a distinguished theatre director, came and visited toward the end of the shoot, and I told him, “If this is what it’s like doing a movie, I will never make another movie again for the rest of my life.” Ulu was taking Mike out to lunch, and I begged him to do some reporting: Was Mike regretting that he’d hired me? Ulu told me later that Mike had said, Yes, very much.But apparently, after a few decades and some therapy, Mike arrived at a different explanation:It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along—that I was turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, “Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and dad aren’t?” And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was forever a visitor in a strange land?Mike lived in the Waspiest part of Connecticut. He collected antiques and cars and Arabian horses—the ultimate gentile status symbols. But he was very much a Jew, who’d fled Germany in 1939 and arrived in the United States, speaking not a word of English, at the age of seven. Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, Mike always felt ugly. He had alopecia, and he was extremely self-conscious about his hairlessness. (He had a collection of incredible wigs that started with what his fantasy hair would look like freshly cut; on each successive day, the wig would be a little longer, until it was time for a “haircut.” Then he’d start the wig cycle again from the beginning.)Eventually, he realized that he had made a self-portrait out of “The Graduate.” “My unconscious was making that movie,” he said once. He didn’t notice for years that, not long after his professional breakup with Elaine May—his partner in crime, his artistic collaborator since college—he made a movie in which the hero bangs against the glass wall of a church screaming, in anguish, “Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!” He was looking for an alter ego—that’s why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me. I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.The first time that I saw “The Graduate” in a theatre was at a sneak preview on Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan. My girlfriend and I sat in the back of the balcony, because I was very self-conscious and tense. My teeth were literally chattering when I saw the first shot, a closeup of my face.At first, there was a weak reception. None of the humor seemed to be landing. I heard a spattering of laughter. Then more people joined in. About twenty minutes into the picture, the laughs started building. It was as though, little by little, the audience was figuring out where we were coming from. . . . There was a little more laughter, and then quite a lot more, and by the time Benjamin was screaming, “Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!” and she screams, “Ben!” and runs to him, the audience was standing up and screaming, too. It was like they had come to see a fight and had been waiting the whole time on the edge of their seats for this: the knockout.I’ve been doing this for sixty years now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that since. I sat there, buried in my chair, and then I walked out with my girlfriend into the snow. ?This is drawn from “Look at Me.”