Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Nichols took chances from the start, commissioning a script from an untested screenwriter named Buck Henry (née Henry Zimmerman), then steering away from familiar movie actors to cast New York theater actors. Most daringly, Nichols decided to cast as the film’s central character, described in the book as a golden-haired WASP, the short, dark-featured, and distinctly Jewish stage actor Dustin Hoffman. The actor was shocked to be considered, but Nichols was adamant. Even if Benjamin Braddock came from WASP stock, surely he could be “Jewish inside.” At that point Hoffman relented, and Nichols’s vision, one that was rooted deeply in the Jewish immigrant experience, was locked in place.

  Nichols was born in Berlin to Russian-Jewish parents. (His birth name was Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky.) His father, a successful doctor, changed the name upon the family’s settling in the United States in 1939, escaping the Nazis days before they stopped all departures. Still, it wasn’t long before their luck ran out. Dr. Nichols died of leukemia in 1942, and his widow tilted into bitter eccentricity. Being a fatherless foreigner would have been trouble enough, but Mike had also suffered a severe reaction to a whooping cough inoculation that destroyed his ability to grow hair on his head. He wore wigs throughout his life, and the childhood humiliation of being a heavily accented foreigner who also happened to be as hairless as a seal never left him.

  Nichols’s realization that Ben’s alienation from his parents’ world of privilege was similar to the immigrant Jewish experience in America girded the film’s generational commentary in feelings that had nothing to do with youth and old age. Presented in the midst of unprecedented social upheaval, The Graduate turned on its head Hollywood’s long-established tradition of de-ethnicizing characters, turning author Webb’s WASP character into the unmistakably Jewish Dustin Hoffman without raising a ripple. Indeed, when the New Yorker published a ten-thousand-word analysis of the film the summer after it was released, the wide-ranging essay didn’t mention it at all, even though The Graduate’s soundtrack, widely acknowledged as being every bit as innovative and daring as the narrative and visual aspects of the film, had also emerged from the Jewish perspective of two other New York–raised artists.

  The director’s fixation on Simon and Garfunkel began about midway through production, when his younger brother sent him a copy of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Struck immediately by the delicately rendered songs of social and romantic isolation, Nichols recognized a connection between the introspective folk-rockers and the internal monologue of his movie’s disillusioned protagonist. No traditional dramatic picture had ever been scored with rock ’n’ roll music,* but that made the idea only more appealing.

  Nichols got producer Larry Turman on the case, and though Paul and Artie were initially dubious (gloss-and-glam Hollywood being the opposite of rock ’n’ roll coolness), a meeting with the brilliant, hilarious Nichols changed their minds, and they agreed to provide three original new songs for the soundtrack. It wouldn’t happen immediately. Their calendar was packed with concerts, including the Monterey festival that Paul was also helping to produce, and they were already overdue on the next album they were expected to deliver to Columbia Records. Unmentioned, but even more troublesome, was Paul’s creative incapacitation. It had been six months since he’d written a new song, and the psychic ice age showed no signs of thawing. Maybe this new assignment, and the addition of another deadline, would spark something good.

  At long last, a trickle: “Punky’s Dilemma,” the puckish vision of pothead life in the midst of middle-class society that they would soon debut at Monterey, seemed to fit the montage of shots alternating between Ben lazing in the Braddock family pool and his assignations with Mrs. Robinson at the Taft Hotel. Then came “Overs,” a stark portrait of a collapsed love affair. Nichols rejected both of them. Not because they weren’t good songs; they just weren’t the right ones. So what else did Paul have? Nichols’s time was nearly at an end: months had passed; he was nearly finished making a final edit of the film. He didn’t need to panic: he’d been using “The Sound of Silence,” “April Come She Will,” and “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” as placeholders for so long that he’d come to realize that he already had exactly what he needed. Those quietly despairing songs seemed to crystalize Benjamin Braddock’s consciousness: his intelligence, his bitterness, his detachment from his surroundings, and his yearning to connect with someone whose spirit was untethered from the reality that the older generation had perpetuated for so long. But if he could have just one new song, something upbeat to use as the movie’s theme song, that would really do the trick. Paul could only shrug. If he had something else ready to go, he’d be happy to hand it over. But as of that moment, he had nothing finished and so nothing to offer.

  Except that there was this one fragment: a few chords, a melody, but no words. Paul hadn’t mentioned it to Nichols during their meeting. But when Artie had a moment alone with the director, he spilled the whole story: that Paul actually did have another song, an incredibly catchy song, in fact, which Artie knew better than anyone because he’d been listening to Paul fiddle with it for months, playing the chords and dee-dee-dee-ing the melody. Artie could already imagine it on the radio: it really did have that indefinable zing. Paul had come up with only a few words, a single line that he repeated: “Here’s to you, Mrs. Roosevelt.” Of course Nichols picked up immediately on the fact that “Mrs. Roosevelt” had exactly as many syllables as “Mrs. Robinson,” the name of one of the film’s central characters, so when Paul returned, Nichols issued something between a suggestion, a plea, and a command: “Get to work on that song.” Change its title to “Mrs. Robinson” and finish it as quickly as possible. Paul agreed to try his best.

  The synergy between Paul’s songs and Nichols’s movie is so perfect it’s easy to imagine Benjamin Braddock as another one of Paul’s alter egos. Dustin Hoffman, while more traditionally handsome than Paul, shares the songwriter’s compact frame, dark hair, and Semitic features, along with the intelligence and melancholy in his gaze. The chain of scenes showing Ben viewing the world through glass (a fish tank, scuba mask, dark sunglasses, and the see-through partition overlooking the sanctuary in Santa Barbara’s First Presbyterian Church) summons the same sense of isolation fueling so many of Paul’s songs in the early and mid-1960s. Buck Henry came from similarly upper-class circumstances in Los Angeles, and with Hoffman in the starring role The Graduate contains a philosophical undercurrent that extends quite a distance from the stone-walled manors of upper-crust Pasadena.

  Paul finished the music for “Mrs. Robinson” in time for the last edits on the finished movie, but he still lacked a full lyric, a problem Nichols resolved by having Paul and Artie record several acoustic guitar and harmonized dee-dee-dee pieces to fit different sequences as Ben pursues Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, from Pasadena to Berkeley and back again. The only words Paul managed to write for the song appear briefly, just as Benjamin’s car thunders across the Bay Bridge on his way to claim Elaine for his own, defying the commands of his elders and the expectations of the American establishment.

  And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson,

  Jesus loves you more than you will know,

  Whoa, whoa, whoa

  Stand up tall Mrs. Robinson,

  God in heaven smiles on those who pray,

  Hey-hey-hey, hey-hey-hey.

  As the film’s final fifteen minutes play out, the increasingly frenetic action is underscored by Paul’s percussive guitar strokes, a raw sound that projects Ben’s growing desperation, climaxing with a triad of ringing chords that announce the character’s arrival at the church where his fate will be decided. When the happy ending comes with the well-timed arrival of a city bus, the couple sprints to the final row of seats, where their delighted smiles fade slowly as “The Sound of Silence” rises around them and the film fades to black.

  As much as Paul and Artie were pleased by the finished film, neither of them wanted anything to do with a soundtrack album for The Graduate. Columbia Recor
ds president Clive Davis had raised the matter after becoming aware of the enormous buzz surrounding the movie in the weeks before its opening in December 1967. As Davis knew, Goddard Lieberson had pioneered Broadway cast soundtracks, allowing Columbia to make a fortune whenever a musical hit big. Movie soundtracks had done well, too, but the appearance of the rock-dominated The Graduate felt like a huge opportunity to Columbia’s barely fledged new president. Even though the one new Simon and Garfunkel song on the record was closer to an outline than a finished tune, they could pull together the older songs that had dominated the movie and sell them to the movie audience along with fans willing to buy anything with S&G’s imprimatur. If The Graduate was even half the hit that the studio executives and other observers expected, they would make a fortune for doing nothing beyond signing off on the project. Nothing to lose, everything to gain, right?

  Not the way Paul and Artie saw it. They were still laboring over their follow-up to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and didn’t want to do anything to delay the album’s release or, worse yet, dilute the demand for new Simon and Garfunkel music. Davis insisted that none of that would be a problem. He’d release the new album the moment it was ready to go out. And if the soundtrack did make it to the top of the charts, then that would be the best possible thing that could happen. And Davis had no doubt that the next Simon and Garfunkel album would be a hit no matter what. Just imagine the publicity they’d get out of having two hit albums at the same time! Paul shrugged that off, too. What sort of artist releases an album with just a shred of a new song on it? And how could they get a full album out of that and the four other songs in the film? Davis had an answer for that one, too: jazz composer Dave Grusin had provided incidental music to the film, so they’d throw that on there, too. Paul still resisted. Why force his new music to compete with his older music? But Davis kept cajoling, pleading, and insisting, and eventually Paul and Artie gave in. The Graduate soundtrack appeared a few weeks after the movie’s premiere and proved an instant hit, quickly becoming the first Simon and Garfunkel–related album to reach the top of the charts.

  All Paul had to do now to complete their real new album was to finish writing the last song or two, get back into the studio with Artie and Roy Halee, and see if Davis’s predictions kept coming true.

  CHAPTER 12

  BOOKENDS

  Just as the four Beatles seemed to merge into one perfectly balanced system of personalities, intellects, spirits, and skills, Simon and Garfunkel seemed like two halves of one creature. While Paul’s songs explored the outer limits of structure and lyrical meaning, Artie kept his ear on the pop mainstream, making sure their records didn’t wander too far from their audience. While Artie, still moonlighting as a PhD candidate in mathematics, often came off as airy and a tad eccentric, Paul spoke to the world in well-measured declarative statements. One was tall, the other short. One was dark, the other fair. One kept his straight hair short and carefully combed; the other let his curls spring in every direction at once. Like so much of the New Generation’s educated middle class, they loathed the war in Vietnam, reflexively questioned authority, and didn’t hesitate to say that they smoked marijuana, had experimented with LSD, and had had run-ins with the same authoritarian cops who hassled all the kids. They had been called generational spokesmen since “The Sound of Silence” topped the charts. Now they truly were, in a voice so distinctively their own that the comparisons to Bob Dylan had all but disappeared.

  When the successful British pop band the Hollies visited New York, they came to the CBS recording studios to pay their respects to the American duo and watch them at work. For the group’s co-leader Graham Nash, the experience was like a master class in the art of making groundbreaking pop music. When Paul started talking up a Bulgarian choir album (Music of Bulgaria, recorded in 1955 but only just released in the United States, by Elektra Records), Nash took the copy Paul handed him and studied it like a text. Al Kooper, their guitar-playing neighbor who had been elevated into the rock ’n’ roll aristocracy by the golden hand of Dylan, carried his copy to Los Angeles, then took it to the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson to play it for him inside his hashish-perfumed Arabian tent, stationed not so far from the living room sandbox that held his magical piano.

  Such was life for those mid-to-late-1960s rock heroes, all abustle in their Arcadian fantasies: Wilson in his hilltop planetarium, Dylan channeling galactic truth in his deep-woods hideaway in the hills of Woodstock, the Beatles sailing the Grecian isles in search of their own utopia. As per the middle-class realism that guided most of their songs, Paul’s version of communal paradise took them to the leafy Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where well-to-do New Yorkers had spent their summers for generations. In the spring of 1967, the young musician rented a vacation home in the town of Stockbridge, where you could stumble upon longtime resident Norman Rockwell or have lunch at Alice’s Restaurant, already canonized in song and legend by Woody Guthrie’s twenty-year-old son Arlo.

  Actually, vacation home doesn’t quite paint the picture. Owned by a former American ambassador to England, the house was a baronial estate with a marble-lipped pool, hand-cut stone patio, and an emerald sweep of immaculate lawns. The ambassador stocked the house’s entryway with a gallery of personalized photographs from colleagues and friends, including Presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman; various secretaries of state; and foreign leaders. When visitors arrived, Paul made a point of showing off the pictures and saying he would soon replace one with a framed portrait of Lenny Bruce. Paul even grew a Lenny Bruce-ian beard, as if to summon the recently deceased comic’s subversive spirit.

  Looking more like teenage house sitters than anyone who could possibly reside in such white-shod splendor, Paul and his friends took full advantage of the sprawling house, inviting friends from the city for country weekends so they could all swim, sun, play tennis, drink, and smoke pot in the manner to which none of them ever dreamed they’d become accustomed. And apart from the greenish tinge of smoke over their heads, they lived a lot like the place’s real residents, taking their meals (prepared by the twenty-two-year-old Irish housemaid whom Paul had hired for the season) around the grand table in the ambassador’s formal dining room. Maybe they weren’t quite as sophisticated as their absent landlord: one evening the maid filled their dinner table wineglasses with sherry, mistaking the sugary dessert wine for the earthy red that would have matched with their meal. They all loved it anyway, emptying bottle after bottle before migrating back to the patio to smoke more joints, spin records, and laugh and laugh and laugh at the wonderful time and their excellent fortunes.

  When word of Simon’s, and often Garfunkel’s, presence crossed the road to the home of Chuck Israels, the highly trained jazz bassist recalled that his guitarist friend Stu Scharf had worked with the duo, and gotten on particularly well with Paul. Eager to escape the music camp his parents ran on their property, Israels walked over one afternoon and rapped on the heavy wooden door. Paul came out and, when he heard Stu Scharf’s name, invited Israels in. After introducing him to Artie and their weekend guests—lawyer Mike Tannen and his writer wife, Mary, and Artie’s architect friend Paul Krause and his wife, Elaine—Paul told Israels to hang out for the rest of the day: go for a swim, get up a game of tennis, or just lie around, eat and drink, whatever he wanted, and be part of the gang. Israels stayed until midnight, leaving with an open-ended invitation to come back whenever he pleased. And so he did, including the Saturday night that became a highlight of the summer.

  Paul hatched the idea just before a three-day weekend. They should have a party! A proper affair, with lots of friends and food and fun, and no strict sense of when it would end. He jumped on the telephone and started issuing invitations: Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul, and Mary was an instant yes; so were the members of the Cyrkle; and a legion of other musicians, friends, and near strangers, including a sixteen-year-old Carly Simon, already gaining attention for her folk club appearances with her sister Lucy.
The sky was cobalt, the sun white hot in the afternoon, and the party stretched out for a lazy golden drift into the evening. It was just right for Paul, who was thrilled to elevate his tastefully freaky flag on a whitewashed pole right there in the heart of the moneyed establishment.

  The days in New York City often seemed just as dreamy. Talking to a reporter at the Stockbridge house, Artie described the partners’ daily routine as a dual existence, both of them starting their days in the late morning, when they’d meet up at manager Mort Lewis’s office to drag him off to a luncheonette for hamburgers and fries. After lunch Mort would go back to work, and the singers would hang out with a friend, grab a bite at another diner, and then head to Paul’s apartment—it was larger and more comfortable than Artie’s one-bedroom bachelor pad a few blocks away—either to check out what he was working on or to listen to the album of the moment or whatever obscurity had pricked up Paul’s ear most recently. Paul and Artie had the same taste in friends, and just ten years after high school each could still spur hilarity in the other with a well-timed wince or slight widening of the eyes. Their photographs telegraphed their closeness in the easy way they posed, arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, or in the midst of a crackup, mouths wide, faces crinkling in the same burst of laughter.