Flashback, June 1968: ‘Mrs. Robinson’ Climbs to #1 on Pop Charts

More than six months after the film that inspired it premiered, “Mrs. Robinson” reached Number 1 on the Billboard pop chart in June 1968, where it stayed for three weeks. The single by Simon and Garfunkel expanded—and, in many ways, fundamentally recast—the lyrics used in a shorter version in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Starting as a fragmentary salute to a former First Lady, it had undergone a metamorphosis into a wistful reflection on the loss of American values and role models.

According to Peter Ames Carlin’s 2016 biography of Simon, Homeward Bound, Nichols had seen Simon and Garfunkel’s last LP, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, as reflective of the same sort of malaise afflicting the emotionally confused protagonist of his film. Nichols’ pitch to the duo had an additional element that must have surely appealed to their ambition: creating a score that, unusually for this period, would be rock ‘n’ roll based.

But Paul Simon did not have an easy time of it. Not only was he mired in a bad case of writer’s block, but he also had to deal initially with rejection. After turning down “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” Nichols asked Simon what else he had. The songwriter, perhaps feeling slightly chagrined over Nichols' coolness toward his initial original efforts, said he just had a few chords, nothing else.

It was Art Garfunkel who later divulged to the director that there was at least somewhat more. It had a catchy “de-de-de-de-de” section, and even an opening line: “Here’s to you, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Nichols, initially struck by the surname so similar to the seductress in his film, urged the duo to develop what they had quickly so he could sneak it into the movie, now in its late production stage. It would be the final piece in a soundtrack that, without being plot-specific, fit the sense of malaise and alienation besetting title character Benjamin Braddock: “Scarborough Fair,” “April, Come She Will” and “The Sound of Silence.”

While able to complete the music for the song, Simon could only manage to finish one verse, a shortfall that Nichols bridged by having the duo sing that de-de-de-de-de as the connective tissue across several scenes toward the end. That sparse version appeared in the film and the bestselling soundtrack that capitalized on it, but Simon was not through with it.

The lines that Simon came up with, for the duo’s LP Bookends, while striking, are also something of a satiric collage, reflecting his working method. He tended to obsess over songs, tinkering with words and chord changes, before returning to his notebook to pull out a line here or there that he could slip in somewhere.

The version of “Mrs. Robinson” that appeared as a single and on Bookends feels less like a direct commentary on the character than a speculation on her life, before and after the events of the film.

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files” is the kind of seemingly innocent statement that the administrators of a mental health or substance-abuse facility might make to a new entrant. “We’d like to help you learn to help yourself,” continuing in the same vein, sounds even more sinister, a way to anesthetize the pain of the bored, cynical woman with little interesting to think of besides revenging herself on her husband with his business partner’s son. Alcohol abuse and a loveless marriage have combined to bring her to a bad pass—most likely after Ben and daughter Elaine have contrived to run away,  

Thus, “going to the candidates’ debate” had nothing to do with any plot point in the film. Mrs. Robinson doesn’t evince the slightest interest even in voting, let alone listening to politicians hash over issues.

So, why this reference? It might be a leftover from the inspiration for the song, Mrs. Roosevelt, who sat through all kinds of debates during her life. But 1968 was an election year, and a few months after the release of Bookends occurred a very important debate between Democratic Presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, which would play a pivotal role in the California primary.

In what way can “Mrs. Robinson” be thought of as the theme for The Graduate? Leave aside the title and it becomes trickier. The closest the song comes in the second verse, referring to a period before Benjamin may even be born: “Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes/Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes.”

What is being hidden could be a liquor bottle, or what The Rolling Stones called “Mother’s Little Helper”: a pill to calm her down when she gets to feel “What a drag it is getting old.”

Mrs. Robinson has more than a few reasons to feel this way. As a result of an affair, she became pregnant, then was forced to leave college and enter a loveless marriage. It is not merely “a little secret, just a Robinson affair,” but a relationship leaving vast wreckage, big enough so she feels the need to “hide it from the kids.”

In a year marked by social cleavage among Americans, it was not surprising that even the sports world was affected. The most significant sign of this was the greater division within sports itself, with Muhammad Ali, for instance, exciting controversy with his defiance of the draft because he had “no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

Through his father, Paul Simon had been raised as a diehard Yankee fan and especially franchise cornerstone Joe DiMaggio. By the time he came to write “Mrs. Robinson,” however, the cultural landscape that had once cheered the 56-game hitting streak of “The Yankee Clipper” as a momentary release from a world engulfed by war had changed utterly.

Casting about for a hero in a simpler time, Simon thought of childhood idol Joe DiMaggio. The reference that incorporated this—“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”—attracted an unusual amount of attention, perhaps surpassed only by Jimmy Webb’s startling image in “MacArthur Park”: “Someone left the cake out in the rain.”

Actually, only one person was really discombobulated by Simon’s lyric: DiMaggio himself. “‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’” the slugger remarked plaintively to friends, quoting the song’s line before remarking, in a tone as puzzled as it was annoyed: “But I never went away.”

But many other listeners knew instinctively what Simon meant because of the line that immediately followed: “A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” An earlier verse had asked Mrs. Robinson to contemplate the “sympathetic eyes” all around her.

Intentionally or not, with that subtle change of an adjective, Simon had captured the sense that America was now losing traction. The mood by the late Sixties had shifted under the pressure of events—violence, changing sexual mores, and the campus unrest that leads Ben to be briefly but ludicrously suspected of radicalism. By this time, Americans felt that time is out of joint, with the middle-aged wondering what had ever happened to their hope of happiness and the young feeling confused about a future whose promise consists of a single word: “plastics.”

Some time after the song’s release, Simon and DiMaggio ran into each other in a restaurant, and the aging Hall of Famer finally got to vent about his consternation about the reference to himself. Simon responded, “I don't mean it that way...I meant, where are these great heroes now?” Hearing this, DiMaggio “was flattered once he understood that it was meant to be flattering," Simon recalled years later.

The baseball legend must have been very flattered indeed. In 1999, to honor this player so used to obeisance that he would only be introduced last at Old Timers Day as “the greatest living Yankee,” the organization prevailed on Simon to play “Mrs. Robinson” as part of a tribute on “Joe DiMaggio Day,” the last time the ailing hero would hear the roar of the crowd.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Graduate,’ When the Cougar Became Cool)

Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman): “Oh my God!”

Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft): “Pardon?”

Benjamin: “Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. Oh no.”

Mrs. Robinson: “What's wrong?”

Benjamin: “Mrs. Robinson, you didn't... I mean, you didn't expect...”

Mrs. Robinson: “What?”

Benjamin: “I mean, you didn't really think I'd do something like that.”

Mrs. Robinson: “Like what?”

Benjamin: “What do you think?”

Mrs. Robinson: “Well, I don't know.”

Benjamin: “For god's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You got me into your house. You give me a drink. You... put on music. Now you start opening up your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours.”

Mrs. Robinson: “So?”

Benjamin: “Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.”

Mrs. Robinson: [laughs] “Huh?”

Benjamin: “Aren't you?”—The Graduate (1967), screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb, directed by Mike Nichols

Anne Bancroft played a heroine—Helen Keller’s indomitable teacher, Annie Sullivan, in her Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker—but in The Graduate she virtually invented an archetype. Long before “Cougar Den” became a Saturday Night Live skit, or before Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon or other actresses of a certain age took up with younger men, she popularized the notion of the cougar in Mike Nichols’ film, which premiered on this date simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles.

It wasn’t the first time Hollywood had paired an older woman with a younger man, mind you: Sunset Boulevard, for instance, had Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond. But that didn’t have the pervasive influence on America’s sexual consciousness as The Graduate, for several reasons: 1) the Hollywood censorship code was still operating; 2) the hold that the silent-screen star had on screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis was monetary rather than sexual; 3) Desmond’s allure had faded a long time ago; and 4) she was, most of all, bonkers.

The above scene in Dustin Hoffman’s film debut couldn’t be more different from the one that Billy Wilder created. It’s the climax of a whole series of events (starting with one that Benjamin doesn’t mention here—Mrs. Robinson barging into his room at his own home, when he wants to escape from his party), all carefully orchestrated. Mrs. Robinson is insouciant, teasing, fake-innocent—utterly in control. Benjamin doesn’t stand a chance.

The blogger at Noir Whale picks up on one neat trick of the film: This scene was “textbook film noir, in a non-noir setting,” with Mrs. Robinson as the femme fatale and Benjamin as her helpless male prey. Yet the scene gains in daring because of its gender inversion of a familiar trope of film and literature (e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses): an older man cunningly, step by step, taking a young woman’s virginity.

For more than a few male viewers, the daring in all of this made Mrs. Robinson more desirable than her daughter. Elaine might have been beautiful, but she was young and innocent—and for a certain type of male, such a woman doesn’t have the appeal that a more experienced one does.

The film’s sleight of hand in this scene in regard to its principal figure (for make no mistake—Mrs. Robinson is not only the force that alters Benjamin’s aimless, frightened stasis in facing adulthood, but also the most complicated character in the movie) was as slick as its now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t nudity. In actuality, Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman, who appeared younger than his 30 years.

Nichols might have been acclaimed as a harbinger of “The New Hollywood,” but in manipulating the age difference between Bancroft and Hoffman, he stood squarely in a tradition between Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (in which Jessie Royce Landis, just seven years older than Cary Grant, played his mother) and Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (in which Sally Field, just six years after playing Tom Hanks’ girlfriend in Punchline, now played his mom).

By today’s standards, The Graduate suggested far more than it showed in its scenes with Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson. But it had swung the pendulum far, far away from the likes of Dr. Dolittle (which, as I noted in a post from yesterday, premiered only the day before). Dr. Dolittle treated the animal kingdom; Mrs. Robinson, in her predatory inclinations, belonged to it. (At the time of shooting,  Nichols had been reading  Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” a novella about a young man waiting for an unusual destiny, and it inspired his decision to have Bancroft clad in animal prints).

One original choice for the role of Mrs. Robinson, Doris Day, might have been flying into the face of her wholesome stereotype had she appeared, but she could not see herself “rolling around in the sheets with a young man half my age.” Ava Gardner, who was also approached by Nichols about taking on the role, shared the character’s strong taste for alcohol and young men, but she took herself out of the running because she didn't consider herself much of an actress, thereby leaving the field open to Bancroft. The latter matched Stifler’s mom in American Pie as a comical cougar, but—in a sign of her greatness as an actress—brought infinitely greater shadings of disappointment and buried resentments.