Pictures at a Revolution (45 page)

Waiting became the rule. Nichols would not be rushed on
The Graduate
any more than he had allowed his producer or his crew to hurry him along on
Virginia Woolf;
he was more than willing to use all of the capital he had earned with his first film's success as long as Joe Levine, who had rented a soundstage at Paramount for the production, kept footing the bill. For Hoffman, who returned to his room every night at the Chateau Marmont as spring turned into summer and his weeks on
The Graduate
turned into months, exhaustion began to set in. The day he was filming the sequence in which Elaine slaps Benjamin in the face, Nichols didn't like what Katharine Ross was doing. At several points during the shoot, he struggled with the young actress's inexperience, as well as with her natural reserve. When Ross was shooting the scene in which Elaine finds out that Benjamin has been sleeping with her mother, “he wanted me to be crying,” said Ross later, “and I couldn't…and I always felt sort of disappointed in myself.”
²⁰
“She's driving me fucking crazy,” Nichols complained to O'Steen, “she can't do it, she doesn't have it.”
²¹
That day, nothing she did could please him. Patiently, he filmed take after take. Fifteen hard slaps later, Hoffman felt a stinging pain in his ear. The next day, he got into his deep-sea-diving gear for the swimming pool scene; when he jumped into the pool, he felt as if his head were going to explode. He emerged from the water, blood pouring from his ear. Working on the film became an endurance contest, a test of his mettle. When the doctor examining his torn eardrum asked him how he liked making a movie, he replied weakly that the food on the set was good.
²²

Bancroft's mood also darkened as the shoot went on. There were mornings she was hungover, and on some days she had such painful menstrual cramps that she couldn't get out of bed. “She would just lie there in agony,” says Elizabeth Wilson. “And we'd reschedule around her.”
²³
The self-loathing beneath Mrs. Robinson's glacial exterior wasn't a completely foreign emotion for the actress who, before her success in
The Miracle Worker
, struggled to make it as a Hollywood ingenue and had essentially been washed out of the movie business for a few years. Sometimes the role seemed to come naturally to her; on other days she'd keep the character at arm's length, almost refusing to connect with her. The scene in which Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin lie in bed and he begs her to have a conversation with him took days to film; in the draft of the screenplay that Nichols shot, it was almost a one-act play in miniature, fifteen minutes of uninterrupted dialogue (much of it straight from Charles Webb's novel) in which Benjamin almost cruelly forces Mrs. Robinson to open up and learns that she was pregnant when she got married, that she once loved studying art, and that she wants him, above all, to keep clear of her daughter. He turns on her and calls her a “broken-down alcoholic,” gets dressed, and starts to leave; the exchange ends with a grim reconciliation as the two of them start to undress again for sex and Benjamin mutters defeatedly, “Let's not talk at all.” In rehearsals, Nichols and Bancroft had talked extensively about what the scene meant. “When Benjamin says, ‘Art, huh. I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years,' and she says, ‘Kind of,' that's the key,” he told her. “That's it. She just hates herself for having gone for the money, and she's punishing herself with everything she does.” Bancroft understood him completely, but weeks later, when they were ready to shoot the scene, “she just tossed it off,” says Nichols. “I said, ‘Annie! Don't you remember our conversation about this beautiful, crucial moment?' She kind of casually said, ‘Oh shit, yeah, I forgot.' And then she did it perfectly. For me, it was central. For her, it was just a line reading.”
²⁴

That rueful back-and-forth between the characters, punctuated by stage-style blackouts as they keep turning the lights on and off, was the only scene in
The Graduate
that Nichols and Buck Henry still didn't feel they had gotten right once production began—it was too long, too diffuse, and its two-character, one-set, dialogue-based style seemed to belong on the stage, not on screen; it threatened to stop the flow of the rest of the movie. As Hoffman and Bancroft spent every working day in bed, feeling their way through round after round of bitter dialogue in which Bancroft had to play almost every moment with her back to Hoffman and the camera trained mercilessly on her face, gloom hung over the set. “We were not allowed to see rushes,” says Hoffman. “And I think one of the big reasons was Mike couldn't let people see them and not let Annie in, and he didn't want her to see how badly he was lighting her, to make her look older. But I used to have lunch in the commissary at Paramount, and I knew when they were screening it, so I would look through the slit in the door and see a little slit of myself on screen and get very excited.”
²⁵

By June, when Nichols and his cast and crew drove to La Verne, California, where Dick Sylbert had found a modern-looking church in which they could shoot the film's climax, they were so happy to get out of the studio that the several days on location felt almost like a field trip. Hoffman acquired his first groupie, a local girl who would hang out near his trailer and flirt with him between takes. “Beautiful, thin, a real shiksa goddess,” he says. “I think Nichols took that as a sign—at least somebody found me attractive. And it didn't get past me, either!”

The weather was scorching, Bancroft fainted during the scene in which everyone was pushing to get out of the church and had to be given oxygen and sent home, and the minister who had agreed to let Nichols film there was “very unhappy,” says Hoffman, “like they always are after they agree to have a movie come shoot and then see the reality after they say yes and everything starts to get the shit beat out of it.” When Nichols started to film Benjamin pounding on the glass wall, trying to get Elaine's attention as she stands at the altar saying her vows, the huge pane of glass began to shake ominously, and the reverend yelled, “Everybody out! Out, out, out!” Trying to save the shoot, Nichols conferred with Hoffman—“the only time during the entire movie he asked me to compromise,” he recalls—and asked if he could think of any other way to get Elaine's attention. Hoffman came up with the idea of spreading his arms apart and just tapping on the glass tentatively with his open palms. “The clincher was the reviews all saying this was Benjamin's Christ moment,” says Hoffman. “It was a fix. That's all it was. You gotta love critics.”
²⁶

As production of
The Graduate
rolled through its third month and into its fourth, Joe Levine started pressuring Larry Turman to wrap it up. “Levine may have chewed the producer's ass out,” Sam O'Steen said later, “but at that point he was biting the bullet and pretty much left Nichols alone.”
²⁷
“It was endless,” says Elizabeth Wilson, “many, many, many, many takes, as if they had all the time in the world, and then reshoots. There was one point when I was finished and back in New York, and a call came that they were adding a scene with Dustin and Bill Daniels and me. I remember when I walked back onto the set, Mike really seemed up to his neck in something. I said to him, ‘Well, you always wanted to be a director,' and he said grimly, ‘Ha ha ha.'”
²⁸
When the pressure got to Nichols, he rarely let it show, but few who worked for him found the production an easy experience. Nichols greeted each day with a serene opacity that, depending on what he was seeing and feeling as work got under way, could transform incrementally into warm affection or icy disdain without any dramatic change in his demeanor. (“Never let people see what you feel,” he had learned growing up, “because it gives them too much power.”)
²⁹
As had been the case on
Virginia Woolf
, his crew, not his cast, felt the brunt of his anger when it came. “One of the things in my life that I'm saddest about and most ashamed of,” says Nichols, “is that when we were shooting on the Sunset Strip, stealing a shot of Benjamin and Elaine walking toward the strip club, I said something snotty, as I often did to the crew. And I heard Bob Surtees say to them—it wasn't meant for me to hear—‘It's okay. It's not going to be much longer.' And I thought, oh, man, how could I have been such a shit that this man I revere feels that way about me? But I was.”
³⁰

When he had decided to make
The Graduate
three and a half years earlier, Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. “I said some fairly pretentious thing about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,” he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story. “My unconscious was making this movie,” he says. “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?”
³¹

Nichols—the immigrant, the observer, the displaced boy who once said that one of the first two sentences he learned in English was “Please do not kiss me”
³²
—finally understood why it had taken him years to settle on an actor to play Benjamin. “Without any knowledge of what I was doing,” he says, “I had found myself in this story.” And in Hoffman, he had found an on-screen alter ego—someone he could admonish for his failings, challenge to dig deeper, punish for his weaknesses, praise to bolster his confidence, and exhort to prove every day that he was the right man for the role. By the time the actor got into Benjamin's Alfa Romeo to shoot the montage in which he drives across the Golden Gate Bridge to find Elaine,
^*
“I don't think they really cared whether I lived or died,” Hoffman says, laughing. “There was a helicopter and a remote, and the direction I got was, ‘Pass every car.' Traffic was moving fast, and I would hear on the walkie-talkie, ‘Just drive.' I remember thinking, I can't get hurt—this is only a movie!”

Late in the shoot, Hoffman was ragged, wiped out, short-tempered. “It was rough going,” he says. “It was long and it got much longer. I don't think I ever went out. I came home, and I'd study for the next day.” His misery was manifest when he walked onto the set.

“What's the matter?” said Nichols, taking him aside.

“I'm tired,” said Hoffman.

Nichols didn't say anything for a moment, then replied in a quiet, explanatory tone. “Well,” he said, “this is the only chance you're ever going to have to do this scene for the rest of your life. When you look back on it, do you really want to say, ‘I was tired'?”
³³

Nichols might as well have been talking to himself. “There's no question I was in the grip of some
thing
,” he says. “Part of me knew what I was doing in terms of the outsider and so forth, but another part of me, a part that I had no inkling of, must have known that I would never get material so suited to
me
again. I knew all about it. Without even knowing I knew.”
³⁴

O
n June 10, 1967, Spencer Tracy woke up at 3:00 in the morning, got out of bed, walked to his kitchen to make a cup of tea, and collapsed, dead from a heart attack. The official story, swiftly constructed for the next day's newspapers, was that Tracy's body had been discovered by the housekeeper who worked for George Cukor, on whose property he had lived; she then called Tracy's brother and a physician. Tracy's wife, Louise, and their two children arrived next, followed by Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, and Tracy's business manager.
¹
This fiction was in all likelihood the handiwork of Howard Strickling, the longtime guardian of Tracy's reputation at MGM and a friend of Louise Tracy's who escorted her to the funeral.
²
Decades later, after the death of Tracy's widow in 1983, Hepburn began to offer, with increasing frequency and detail, her own account of the last night of Tracy's life. She had run a wire from a buzzer that was by his bedside to a speaker in the room where she was sleeping; she heard him fall, heard the teacup shatter, found him dead, and called Phyllis Wilbourn, her assistant and closest companion. Hepburn asked Wilbourn to take all of her things out of the house before Tracy's family showed up; then she changed her mind and put them all back in. When Louise Tracy arrived, she and Hepburn quarreled briefly over what suit Tracy would be buried in. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,” Hepburn said she told her a few days later. “Well, yes,” said Tracy's widow. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor.”
³
Hepburn's decision to wait until Louise Tracy's death to tell her side of the story was an act of discretion, but one that contained an element of self-protection; by the time she began to talk about—and to embroider on—her own relationship with Tracy, Hepburn had outlived almost everyone who could have contradicted her.

Six hundred people attended the funeral service for Tracy at Hollywood's Immaculate Heart of St. Mary Roman Catholic Church. Stanley Kramer and his wife, Karen, had been in Las Vegas, celebrating the end of production of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, but they flew back immediately after Hepburn called them.
⁴
Kramer served as one of Tracy's pallbearers, along with Cukor, Jimmy Stewart, Garson Kanin, John Ford, Frank Sinatra, producer William Self, and Abe Lastfogel, Tracy's agent at William Morris.
⁵
Hepburn, in her car, followed Tracy's hearse until it reached the church, then turned around and drove home. “Of course, the minute it was over, the inside group went back to her house and told her everything,” says Karen Kramer.
⁶

Hepburn's decision not to go to the funeral was consistent with the way she had managed to give the public glimpses of her relationship with Tracy for many years while saying nothing about it: Her behavior represented an act of self-denial and dignified restraint that still managed to be conspicuous and public. She had made nine movies with him, including his last; while her attendance at the church alongside much of old Hollywood might have raised some eyebrows, she must have known that her absence would be highlighted in every story that covered the service. In many of those reports, she was upgraded from “a friend of many years” to “the actor's longtime companion.” Even
The New York Times
, in its tribute to Tracy, noted that “in personal crises, she invariably appeared near him” and “maintained a vigil at his bedside” when he had been hospitalized.

The death of the man whom the
Times
called “one of the last screen titans of a generation”
⁷
was greeted with a flood of sentiment and sorrow that was unusual for the period; in 1967, critics and the entertainment press could be callous, even cruel, to anyone they felt had overstayed his welcome. Earlier in the year, when seventy-seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin released the catastrophically stiff and awkward
A Countess from Hong Kong
, his first film in more than a decade, reviews had been brutal, not only about the movie but about the man himself:
Time
magazine's piece was titled “Time to Retire,”
⁸
and in
The New Yorker
, Brendan Gill had sneered that he “shows us not a trace of his former genius.”
⁹
Three days later, when Orson Welles's
Chimes at Midnight
opened in New York, the
Times'
Bosley Crowther compared the two movies and wrote, “Chaplin…should not have tried to make
A Countess from Hong Kong
or anything else at his age!…It would have been so apt and charitable if someone could have saved these two men from the embarrassment of their hopeless follies,” and called Welles's movie “a disgusting indulgence.”
¹⁰
Neither director ever completed another dramatic feature. But Tracy, perhaps because he had seemed to care so little for his image or appearance over the years, was one of the few older actors whose appeal was multigenerational; even younger moviegoers eager to dismiss anyone they thought was “phony” claimed him as their own. In the language of the Old Sentimentality–vs.–New Sentimentality paradigm that Robert Benton and David Newman had created in
Esquire
back in 1964, Tracy was like Humphrey Bogart—the rare figure who made the jump from Old to New by making it appear that “a man can both care and not give a damn.”
¹¹

Tracy's death immediately raised the profile of his final movie, which was not due to open for six more months: Magazines and newspapers that had sent reporters to the set of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
rushed their stories into print early.
Life
asked Stanley Kramer to write a first-person tribute to Tracy; Garson Kanin began warming up to write a book-length “intimate memoir” that would retail a wildly romanticized version of Hepburn and Tracy's relationship by penning a tribute in
The New York Times; Look
published a photo portfolio;
Esquire
called its Hepburn profile “The Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies.” The enshrinement of Hepburn and Tracy as the first couple of the screen—“perfect representations of the American male and the American female,” as she herself put it, with little apparent irony—was ordained within a week of his death, as was the valedictory affection with which his last screen appearance would be greeted.

Lost in all the tributes was a remarkably timed piece of news that went unmentioned in stories about the movie: On the day Tracy was buried, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of
Loving v. Virginia
, ruling that laws forbidding racial intermarriage in sixteen states were unconstitutional in that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case had taken almost a decade to reach the Court. It began in 1959 when Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were sentenced to a year in jail for marrying each other, a term that was suspended on the condition that they leave the state of Virginia. (In his initial decision, the trial judge remarked that God had made His will manifest by putting different races on different continents.) The Warren Court examined Virginia's law, which forbade intermarriage only if one of the parties was white, and concluded that it was “invidious racial discrimination…designed to maintain White Supremacy”; the Court also ruled that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
¹²
When William Rose had written
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
a year earlier, he had included a line in which Prentice's father tries to talk his son out of the marriage by saying, “In sixteen or seventeen states you'd be breaking the law!” Kramer kept the line in the movie, but as of June 12, it was no longer true.

The landmark
Loving v. Virginia
decision might have received more attention had it not arrived at a moment when history was unfolding with breathtaking speed. The same day, news broke that President Johnson would, the next morning, announce the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court; meanwhile, the networks' evening newscasts were filled with the aftermath of the Six Days' War, which ended on June 10 and had transfixed much of America. On
The Graduate
, crew members were late to location shoots because they pulled their cars over to the side of the freeway, listening to reports that Israel had decisively won what
Life
magazine called “the astounding war.”
Time
, which had headlined its June 9 cover I
SRAEL: THE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE
, came back a week later with a heroic portrait of Moshe Dayan and the headline
HOW ISRAEL WON THE WAR.
And at Warner Brothers, Israel's victory had an extremely peculiar collateral effect: It helped save
Bonnie and Clyde.

In early June, Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn took their movie to New York to screen it for Warner's head of advertising, Dick Lederer, and distribution chief Ben Kalmenson. Lederer loved it, just as he had loved the screenplay. But Kalmenson thought it was worthless. “Benny really hated it,” says Robert Solo, who was just about to leave his job as assistant to Jack Warner's deputy Walter MacEwen. “He'd say, ‘Warren doesn't mean anything to audiences,' and that was it. He was a crotchety, opinionated guy, a real old distribution hand, basically a jumped-up film salesman. He thought it was a cheap gangster movie, he wanted to bury it, and he did.”
¹³
Lederer lobbied hard to get the movie booked into Manhattan's Cinema I, one of four first-run theaters on Third Avenue between 59th and 60th streets, a stretch of real estate so important to review-driven movies well into the 1980s that it came to be known in the industry as “the Block.” He talked about the value of a red-carpet premiere on the East Coast. Kalmenson wouldn't hear of it; he booked the movie into two far less prestigious theaters, one near Times Square, the other in Murray Hill. He thought so little of
Bonnie and Clyde
that when he handed out a schedule of Warner Brothers' summer releases to his distribution team, the picture wasn't even listed.
¹⁴

Beatty and Penn then took the print to Los Angeles to show it to Jack Warner, but by the time they got there, Kalmenson had delivered his verdict to Warner himself, confirming what his boss had feared when he read the script—the movie was nothing but a bloody retread of the 1930s gangster movies they used to make that were just one step up from Poverty Row. “Warner listened to Kalmenson,” says Solo. “He's the man who was responsible for Jack Warner selling his stock in the studio to Seven Arts. He was really friendly with [Seven Arts head] Eliot Hyman, and Hyman kept wanting to buy the studio, and Kalmenson talked Warner into it. It was really against Warner's better judgment, because after that, he was done. He had the money, but he didn't have his studio.”
¹⁵

Jack Warner was already livid about the amount of time Penn, Beatty, and Dede Allen had taken editing the movie; he had threatened repeatedly to pull their funding during postproduction, to stop paying the rent on the New York editing rooms, to take the movie out of their hands.
¹⁶
“It won't be long before I should be leaving,” he fumed, wondering why he was spending his last weeks at the company he co-founded “waiting around for geniuses to make up their minds, which I am not going to do.”
¹⁷
In the spring, he had told Walter MacEwen, Penn and Beatty's biggest champion in the upper ranks, to crack down on the “thoughtless” director and producer: “If they are going to sit around we will end up with a slow, repetitious picture and anything Beatty is in will go on and on. This is the story on actors cutting pictures.”
¹⁸
Even MacEwen was beginning to lose his patience; Beatty and Penn had insisted on editing the movie in New York against his wishes; they had delayed a small but critical reshoot until mid-May; and they were pushing past the limits of even a liberalized Production Code (“eliminate depiction of fellacio [
sic
],” an appalled MacEwen jotted down, trying several different spellings after watching footage of Dunaway sliding out of frame while in bed with Beatty). In addition, Beatty, whether out of insecurity or annoyance at the difficulties Dunaway had caused during the shoot, had dug in for months in resistance to her agent's demand that she be billed above the title, a star-making flourish that the studio thought would help launch her. Beatty didn't give in until the studio started exploring whether it had legal standing to take the movie away from him altogether. “Would prefer not yielding to threats,” he calmly cabled MacEwen before finally giving in. “In any case you are the boss.”
¹⁹

When Penn and Beatty walked onto the lot, they reentered a world that seemed frozen in time. “Studio life in 1967 was very much the life it had been for years and years and years,” says Sid Ganis, one of a new generation of executives who moved from New York to Los Angeles after Seven Arts' takeover. “It was still the old guard, lots of old guys with great stories about their old successes. But they had all been there for twenty-five years. Jack Warner still had an office and still had his desk with the three steps up to where he sat. But it was the end of an era.”
²⁰

Publicly, Warner was celebrating his approaching seventy-fifth birthday by announcing, “I feel 14!” watching dailies from the production of Francis Coppola's
Finian's Rainbow
,
²¹
and telling reporters, “I intend to go on doing what I am doing. If I quit now, where would I go? What would I do?”
²²
But the truth was that Warner had given away his power and had only the trappings left; just a few weeks after his confident pronouncements, he would resign as production chief.