NINE

Every time he made a movie that fell short of his hopes, Stanley Kramer felt “a kind of pain that starts somewhere near the groin and goes up to the chest, as though you’re having a heart attack in your stomach.”¹ Lately, he was feeling it again. His latest film, an all-star adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools, was due to open on July 29, and Kramer could already recognize the onset of the sickening deflation of his own expectations. How could it have been otherwise when, by his own admission, he “had dreamed it would be a great accomplishment, a definitive motion picture showing what the medium can be” and not merely “a good piece of work that didn’t quite fulfill our aspirations”?²

In 1965, Stanley Kramer was, at fifty-one, as enshrined a member of the Hollywood establishment as anyone in the movie business, and there was probably not an active producer or director who would have hated that description more. Kramer had been making movies since the late 1940s. He had started as a producer, overseeing Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, an adaptation of an Arthur Laurents play that dealt with racism in the American military. Kramer went on to produce The Men (Marlon Brando’s movie debut), High Noon, Death of a Salesman, The Member of the Wedding, and The Caine Mutiny in the space of a few years. His movies were emblematic Hollywood prestige projects, and he made sure his name and reputation were so firmly associated with them that by the mid-1950s, moviegoers already knew what a Stanley Kramer movie was—something serious and charged and significant and edifying, if not necessarily innovative or aesthetically unsettling. In the 1955 movie-biz melodrama The Big Knife, Jack Palance, playing a down-on-his-luck movie star, barks at his wife (Ida Lupino), “You know that this industry is capable of turning out good pictures—pictures with guts and meaning!” “Sure, sure,” she replies, “and we know some of the men who do it! Stevens, Mankiewicz, Kazan, Huston, Wyler, Wilder…Stanley Kramer!”

In the mid-1950s, Kramer decided to step behind the camera himself and start directing. “Stanley’s drive has always been to be the boss, the man who wants it done his way,” his longtime associate George Glass later said. “The time came in the industry when directors took greater control over picture making than ever before. So Stanley, in my opinion, decided if that was where the action was, that was where he’d be, by God.”³ He loved tackling topics that would make news—racism in The Defiant Ones, the threat of nuclear annihilation in On the Beach, the Holocaust in Judgment at Nuremberg—but, as many of his own friends and colleagues, including Norman Jewison, put it, “Stanley was a better producer than he was a director,”⁴ and once he was in the director’s chair, he continued to think like a producer, concentrating on the overall package rather than the shaping of individual scenes, performances, and moments. “Guts and meaning” was a label he would have loved, although he sometimes undercut himself by being too willing to trumpet the presence of both qualities in his films. Kramer wanted credit for the politics and moral rectitude that he believed gave his pictures weight and significance, but while he understood that great movies had to be more than the sum of their issues, he didn’t always know how to get them there. He didn’t possess what came naturally to many of the directors he admired—an unforced sense of pacing or camera placement or a particularly visual imagination—and the screenplays for his films (which he did not write) often omitted nuance, surprise, and specificity in favor of a stentorian sense of the wrongness of things that all right-thinking people already agreed were wrong: racism, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Holocaust.

Kramer was respected within the world of old Hollywood as a reliable filmmaker and a staunch civil libertarian. In 1960, he had defied a demand from the American Legion that producers not hire “Soviet-indoctrinated” writers, calling the organization’s stance “reprehensible,”⁵ a position that was not without some risk in a business still very much in the chokehold of McCarthyism. The movies he made were manna for the Academy—his producing career had brought him four Best Picture nominations by the time he won the Academy’s 1962 Irving Thalberg Award, essentially a lifetime achievement honor for a producer—and they were revered by middlebrow reviewers. When Judgment at Nuremberg opened in 1961, The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther pronounced it “persuasive” and said “it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.”⁶

But Crowther, typically, never managed to explain what exactly he had needed to be persuaded about, and Kramer’s appetite for matter over art made him into something of a whipping boy for the critical intelligentsia. In 1965, Pauline Kael, who had not yet been hired by The New Yorker but was building a reputation as a pugnacious contrarian as eager to pick fights with her rivals as she was to tear down the movies they supported, launched a blistering attack on Kramer, using the arrival of Ship of Fools as her pretext. She mocked him, not entirely unjustly, for his tendency to sound self-important and chest-thumping in interviews. His reputation, she said, was “based largely on a series of errors.” She twitted him for mistaking storytelling that “represents a blow for or against something” for “art.” She took apart his films one by one, calling them “irritatingly self-righteous,” “messianic,” and “feeble intellectually”; she belittled the “original sin meets Mr. Fixit” style of his plots. “Kramer asks for congratulations on the size and importance of his unrealized aspirations,” she concluded. “In politics a candidate may hope to be judged on what he intends to do, but in art we judge what is done. Stanley Kramer runs for office in the arts.”⁷

If François Truffaut exemplified, as Robert Benton and David Newman had written in Esquire, “Style over Content,” Kramer and his films epitomized Content over Style—the “Old Sentimentality” of the Eisenhower era. The label was particularly painful for a director who, unlike many in his generation, was an open-minded advocate of the new directions world cinema was taking in the 1960s and an avid fan of Fellini, Kurosawa, and Antonioni.⁸ Kramer had a hard time understanding how critics like Kael could give him so little credit for ambition, especially since his films were sometimes more controversial than those who belittled him acknowledged. His adaptation of Inherit the Wind had been picketed at many theaters; some southern movie-house chains wouldn’t play The Defiant Ones, in which escaped prisoners Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were shackled together as an ironclad symbol of interracial brotherhood. And the critics who charged that Kramer’s movies pandered to what they considered to be a good-liberal consensus ignored the reality that most of the films he directed were financial failures. “All the people who say ‘Messages are for Western Union’ really don’t mean it,” he said. “They mean, ‘Messages that don’t make money are for Western Union.’”⁹ While The Defiant Ones, thanks to its very low budget, squeezed out a small profit, Inherit the Wind lost almost 90 percent of the $2 million that it cost, On the Beach ended up in the red, and despite its Best Picture Oscar, Judgment at Nuremberg lost money as well.¹⁰ How, wondered Kramer, could Kael believe that he was viewed as “some sort of savior”¹¹ when he wasn’t even filling up the pews? And how could other critics fail to see Kramer the way he saw himself, as a lifelong outsider, an independent producer who “took on the establishment within the Hollywood firmament”?¹²

Kramer wasn’t humble, and he knew his weakness for grandiosity in print made him an easy target. In an interview on the set of Inherit the Wind, he proclaimed, “In The Defiant Ones we dealt with the problem of race. On the Beach… concerns the big question, the Bomb. And now I’m dealing with what I consider the third major problem today, freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought.”¹³ But in person, people found Kramer disarming; they were often surprised to discover that the slender man behind the big talk was soft-spoken, witty, and self-aware. And his fiercest detractors might have been surprised, or at least amused, to hear the director’s own assessment of his work and his motives. Kramer once told an audience that he chose to direct “because I’m arrogant and I have an ego and I enjoy it.”¹⁴ But he almost always ended up disappointed in himself and his movies, particularly those he made in the 1960s. After Judgment at Nuremberg, he produced 1962’s Pressure Point, a drama about a black psychiatrist (Poitier) treating a white racist (Bobby Darin). “It isn’t an even match,” he admitted. “You know from the start that Poitier must win…you can blame me for undertaking the project before [thinking] it through completely.” In 1963, he produced A Child Is Waiting, with Judy Garland as a teacher caring for an autistic boy. “When you attempt a subject [that] difficult and delicate…you had better be sure that what you’re making will be just about the best picture of the year. This one wasn’t,” he wrote. When Kramer, in a change of pace, directed 1963’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, he intended, quite sincerely, to make the funniest comedy in the history of motion pictures, and decades later, he still expressed disappointment that his “silly dream” yielded a film that “just had too much of everything.”¹⁵

Kramer thought Ship of Fools, a portent-filled Grand Hotel about the various travelers on a ship bound for Germany in 1933, offered all the ingredients for a prestige blockbuster. Instead, its reception was fairly typical: respectful but not ecstatic reviews, eventual Oscar nominations, and only middling box office. In 1962, when Kramer had started working on Ship of Fools, his decision to make the film at Columbia instead of United Artists, which had been his base of operations for several years, made headlines.¹⁶ Three years later, his cold streak at the box office was so protracted—even It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which audiences loved, was so costly that it wouldn’t make much of a profit—that his switch in studios no longer seemed to mean much.

When Ship of Fools opened, Kramer was feeling particularly heavyhearted; he knew the film might have represented his last chance to work with Spencer Tracy. Tracy was sixty-five and had been in poor health for years; after the deaths of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper within months of each other in 1960 and 1961, he was seen by many as one of the last links to the first generation of sound-era male movie stars. In the past several years, Tracy had acted infrequently, and almost exclusively for Kramer, who had directed him in Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, and in a tiny role in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. When Kramer first read Abby Mann’s script for Ship of Fools, he knew he wanted Katharine Hepburn to play the role of an angry, neurotic alcoholic—a showpiece character turn that captured Hepburn’s interest immediately. But Hepburn would do the film only if Kramer agreed to give Tracy what amounted to the male romantic lead, the role of the ship’s doctor. Kramer resisted; Tracy was far too old to play the part and too frail as well. When Hepburn realized that Kramer wouldn’t cast Tracy, she decided not to make the film;¹⁷ her part went to Vivien Leigh, and Tracy’s went to Oskar Werner, who was more than twenty years his junior.

Ship of Fools did provide Kramer with one happy memory; on the set, he met Karen Sharpe, the woman who would become his third wife and who, by the time the film opened, was already his biggest cheerleader. “I used to get angry with him because he’d say, ‘It’s not as good as I dreamed it.’ It’s never as good as you dreamed it, I’d tell him. You have to make compromises—the sun doesn’t go down at the right time, so you lose that shot you envisioned. Or the actor that you hired because you loved him suddenly says he can’t say your favorite line in the movie. You have to make compromises when you’re working with people. And I don’t think Stanley was completely happy with anything he ever made.”¹⁸

Kramer shook off his disappointment and went back to work. He had long wanted to make a movie about war—perhaps even the movie about war—and he started looking for a book about Vietnam to adapt. With the exception of George Englund’s prescient Marlon Brando drama The Ugly American in 1963, Hollywood movies had barely touched on the war in Southeast Asia. But in 1965, as President Johnson increased the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam from 23,000 to 184,000 and a national antiwar movement began to gain traction, Kramer wanted to mark the subject as his territory. He acquired the rights to a novel called Seek Out and Destroy and made a public announcement that he was planning a major take on the Vietnam War, but he felt there was no need to rush.¹⁹ His next movie was to be an adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s 1955 Civil War novel, Andersonville, a script he had already spent three years developing. He would have time for Vietnam later.

 

That summer, Mike Nichols was ready to get out of Los Angeles. For weeks he had been on the Warner Brothers lot, filming interiors for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; now, he was, at least physically, taking the movie away from the studio, returning to the East Coast to film part of Virginia Woolf on the campus of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Nichols welcomed the time on location, out from under what felt like Warner’s watchful and suspicious eye, and his two stars were proving to be game and reasonably focused. Richard Burton found himself looking at rushes for the first time since the beginning of his career, while Taylor would throw herself into each day of work and then enjoy whatever local entertainment she could find, pursuing it in her characteristic not-quite-incognito style. When a reporter came to visit the production in New England in search of Taylor, Burton informed him dryly, “Elizabeth’s gone to see What’s New, Pussycat? with ten policemen.”²⁰

Nichols was no longer the new guy; he was the boss, successful lion tamer to two of the world’s least controllable celebrities and fearsome taskmaster to everyone else. On the set, he would push Taylor and Burton until she would break down in tears and he would be too shaken to come out of his dressing room,²¹ and they would still return the next day eager for more. Burton wrote in his diary that Nichols was one of only two men he had met (the other was Noël Coward) who had “the capacity to change the world when they walk into a room. They are both as bland as butter and as brilliant as diamonds.” And he was delighted that a director who had never stepped behind a camera and was still learning how to use lenses wasn’t even a little afraid of the biggest star in movies. “I have actually seen people shiver as they cross the room to meet Elizabeth. What the hell is it?” he wrote. “…I know that we are both dangerous people, but we are fundamentally very nice. I mean we only hurt each other.”²² Nichols had just as loyal an ally in Taylor, who was never one to overpraise her own movies or performances and who knew that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the best role she had ever had; she was determined not to hold back, no matter how painful the process or unflattering the results. “I think many people probably will be shocked,” she said at the time, “but they’ll stay, not run out of the theater the way they’re doing at The Sandpiper,”²³ her most recent, and at that time most dreadful, on-screen romantic pairing with Burton.

The shoot at Smith unfolded in an atmosphere of mild urgency, politely expressed by the college’s administrators, who requested that the production be packed up and gone by the time Smith’s young ladies arrived for the fall 1965 term. That was the least of the pressures Nichols faced. Though he was delighted to be away from Hollywood, the exigencies of working for a studio, and handling movie stars, and spending a great deal of money (Taylor received $1.1 million and Burton $750,000),²⁴ caused constant tension. And Ernest Lehman, whom he had started to think of as “the so-called writer-producer who was neither producer nor writer,” had become an adversary. Nichols had discarded one embellishment in his script after another, beginning with “a title sequence [that] included [Burton’s character] George going for a walk and coming upon two dogs fucking. And it said in parentheses, ‘This must be beautifully shot.’ Anthea Sylbert, who later became my costume designer, said, ‘I know just how to do that! Afghans and lots of fans!’”²⁵ When Nichols and Lehman crossed swords, Nichols almost always got his way, but his victories had a price: Feeling excluded from the bond Nichols had formed with his actors, Lehman simply stepped away from any conflict that arose. “This bunch would not only shoot it, they would edit it, cut it, premiere it, distribute it, and sell it to television without telling me,” he grumbled to a reporter on the set.²⁶

With Lehman declining to run interference with the studio, Nichols had to defend every decision and delay himself. There were plenty of the latter: Taylor and Burton, as cooperative as they were, had a propensity for non-negotiably long, boozy lunches, and although Nichols had handpicked Haskell Wexler (who would win an Oscar for his work on the film) to replace Harry Stradling as his cinematographer, their relationship was less than congenial; Nichols couldn’t believe the amount of time Wexler and his crew spent lighting each shot. Unsurprisingly, the film ended up going thirty days over schedule. “Mike was going crazy,” said Sam O’Steen, Virginia Woolf’s editor, later. “He’d walk around saying, ‘Cocksuckers, I hate their fuckin’ guts….’”²⁷ At the same time, Nichols backed Wexler consistently when the studio complained about the shadowy, unglamorous look of the rushes, and Wexler, though he would butt heads with Nichols, was impressed by his ability to draw strong work from his cast.

Nichols himself wouldn’t be hurried, and he occasionally felt the brunt of his crew’s impatience. As the shoot wore on, Meta Rebner, the script supervisor and a formidable southern belle who was intimidated by no one, warned Nichols that he was losing the confidence of some of the union guys on the set.^* If he cared, he didn’t let Rebner know it. In fact, he may have taken a little longer than necessary with the next setup²⁸ just to remind everyone involved that there was only one person in charge of this movie and to drive home the point that if he wouldn’t let Jack Warner push him around, then anyone else who went up against him would surely be fighting a losing battle.

It was during the shooting of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that Buck Henry started to get to know Nichols better. Henry was a good friend of George Segal, who was playing Nick, and he visited the set often. As he spent more time with Nichols, a friendship sparked between them, and they began to talk about The Graduate. “I remember Mike saying, ‘Read this book and see what you think of it,’” says Henry. “As soon as I read it, I got the point. It didn’t take more than ten pages to know that this was something really interesting and to see where all of our lives were intersecting. I think that Larry Turman and Mike and I all thought that we were the protagonist of the book. We were all roughly the same age, we’d all gone to the same kinds of schools, we all sort of liked the same movies, and we all got the same jokes. But hiring me was a leap of faith on Mike’s part. He was really just going on personality and Get Smart, which I wouldn’t have thought would be a direct line to The Graduate.”²⁹

Henry became the movie’s fourth screenwriter and started from scratch with a new draft that retained much of the book’s dialogue but transformed the character of Benjamin Braddock in some crucial ways. Charles Webb had been Benjamin’s age when he wrote the novel, and with perhaps too little authorial distance, he had allowed Benjamin to personify the confusion, arrogance, and uncertainty of a pampered twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t yet figured out a direction for his life but knew he wanted it to point away from his parents. On the page, Benjamin’s ungainly sense of moral severity can become smug; the first time he tries to break off his affair with Mrs. Robinson, he writes her a note in which he says to her, “I don’t know if you were ever taught the difference between right and wrong or not, but since I was, I feel a certain obligation to it.”³⁰ Early in the novel, Webb’s grasp of Benjamin’s sexual inexperience seems to falter and give way to a bluster that feels inorganic; questioned by his father after he takes a hitchhiking trip to northern California, Benjamin tells him that most of the people who gave him rides were “queers…I averaged about five queers a day” and makes a point of adding, “One queer I had to slug in the face and jump out of the car.”³¹ And despite Webb’s skillful use of dialogue to portray Benjamin’s anxiety, the character is, in moments of physical action, a cipher—a hostage to the novel’s spare descriptive style who is rarely described as doing more than frowning, blinking, waving his arms, or nodding his head. After a fight with Elaine, Webb writes, “Benjamin stared at her until she was finished screaming and then continued to stare at her for a long time afterwards while she lifted her hands up from her side and put them over her face to cover it and then finally brought them slowly back down and held them in front of her.”³²

Henry did his writing alone, although he discussed the story and characters with Nichols constantly, and with Turman as well. Some choices were easy: Benjamin’s apparent homosexual panic, his brief adventure fighting forest fires, and his dalliances with prostitutes, which all came early in the novel and seemed poorly connected to the rest of the narrative, would be omitted. (“I think I tried writing [the hitchhiking],” said Henry, “and over a period of time, we dropped it.”)³³ But Henry and Nichols also altered the novel’s tone. “I had a feeling that in real life, Benjamin Braddock was not a person you’d want to know now,” says Henry. “He’s a bit of a prick—he doesn’t give anybody much of a chance.”³⁴ As the story of Benjamin, Elaine, and Mrs. Robinson passed from the hands of a novelist in his early twenties into the custody of a writer and director who were both in their mid-thirties, it became both more detached and more sympathetic. Henry’s screenplay took Benjamin’s earnest, surly struggle to be better than the people around him less seriously than the novel does, and it emphasized the richly funny tension between his human appetites and his stern self-condemnation as a “filthy degenerate.”³⁵ “Even though I felt I was Benjamin Braddock, Benjamin Braddock is a pain in the ass in the book,” says Turman. “What we excised was the stuff that made him a pain in the ass.”³⁶

Henry found Benjamin most engaging in his moments of deepest befuddlement or awkwardness—the initial seduction scene, the mortifying birthday party at which he is forced to parade for his parents’ friends in a deep-sea-diving suit, the episode in which he can barely bring himself to secure a hotel room for his first assignation with Mrs. Robinson. “I knew the book could make an interesting film, because it not only had scenes, it had places for the camera to go, which a lot of books don’t have,” he says. With that in mind, Henry shaped Benjamin’s terrified journeys into the unknown—the bedroom, the bottom of the swimming pool, the hotel cocktail bar—into comic set pieces, and deemphasized his somewhat exhausting tendency to tell off everyone around him. He cut long passages of dialogue in which Benjamin, strangely irritated, tries to talk Elaine into marrying him, and he also dropped a groaner of a moment in which he tells his parents that he wants to spend his life with “simple honest people that can’t even read or write their own name.”³⁷ A scene in which Benjamin humiliates Elaine on their first date by taking her to a strip club and then explains his behavior by saying, “Ever since I’ve been out of school I’ve had this overwhelming urge to be rude all the time,” remained in the movie and stood in effectively for many moments in Webb’s novel in which Benjamin succumbed to that urge.

By favoring Benjamin’s bumbling attempts at moral rigor over his cold, sour narcissism, Henry and Nichols located The Graduate’s comic center in his complete failure to live up to his own standards, and, unlike Webb, they came up with an ending in which it’s not clear if Benjamin triumphs by meeting those standards or by discarding them. In one of the screenplay’s few actual alterations of the novel’s plot, Henry and Nichols agreed that Benjamin would now interrupt Elaine’s wedding seconds after their vows were exchanged, not before. Webb hated the revision because he felt that breaking up a marriage stained Benjamin’s good character,³⁸ but the futility of his quest for goodness was exactly what Henry and Nichols wanted—and getting to the church in the nick of time was the kind of cliché they were striving to avoid.

Nichols and Henry also knew that The Graduate offered a great comic opportunity to dissect a certain stratum of vulgar new-money West Coast culture that movies had not yet exploited for laughs, probably because so many of the people who made them were too close to that culture to recognize anything funny about it. Their version of Benjamin’s story would be a poisoned arrow aimed from New York toward the heart of Los Angeles. “The Graduate is filled with all the stuff you can wring out of the upper middle class,” says Henry. “That hadn’t been very evident in American films for a long time. There were so many movies where you didn’t know what people did for a living, but they lived so well. I had an idea to do a shot of an airplane coming in over L.A., and we would see all the swimming pools, and they would merge into one big pool.” Henry “knew L.A. as well as I knew New York. My mother came from L.A.—we went out almost every year, and we lived there from 1941 to 1945, while my father was overseas.” And Nichols, though a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, “got stuff awfully fast,” says Henry. “It doesn’t take him more than a few moments to understand the behavior of whatever society he’s in.”³⁹ Together, they started thinking of Benjamin as a product of WASPy overprivilege in a society devoted to it.

In choosing to root the script so firmly in contemporary Southern California, Nichols and Henry solved another problem: They brought The Graduate up-to-date. Eisenhower was barely out of office when Webb had first gotten the idea for his novel, but five years later, generational wars that had previously focused on an antipathy toward consumer culture and conformity were now being fought on different fronts. Nichols and Henry were not especially interested in making a “sixties” movie (had the label or its meaning even existed in 1965), but they didn’t want to make a comedy with one foot still planted in the previous decade, either. Henry, in particular, was so worried about the script sounding dated that he came close to dropping the line that became the movie’s first big laugh, when a middle-aged businessman offers Benjamin just a single word of advice about his future (a scene that’s not in the novel). “I worried about ‘Plastics’ for a while,” Henry said, “and even talked to Mike about it, saying, are we too old-fashioned, with what was a sort of fifties…society way of complaining about falseness? But I couldn’t ever think of a better word for him to say.” ⁴⁰