Here's to you, "Mrs. Robinson"

An iconic 1967 film and song, brought to you by The Graduate director Mike Nichols and folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft

Rock ’n’ Roll with Me is an email newsletter presenting one or more of my favorite danceable rock ’n’ roll songs, from the sixties onwards, along with some fun facts and memories.

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Our song of the day

I just finished watching the documentary about Paul Simon called In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, which I cannot recommend highly enough if you’re interested in Paul Simon’s six-decade body of work or in learning about his creative process. It’s 3½ hours long, but, by the end, I was disappointed it was over.

Paul is a fascinating subject, but it’s also the case that such disappointment happens to me often with films made by Alex Gibney, who has also brought us documentaries about Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti, James Brown, Frank Sinatra, and the Rolling Stones, not to mention what appears to be his specialty — highly controversial topics like the release of top secret government documents by Wikileaks, the opioid epidemic, and the various legally dubious and self-serving shenanigans and machinations of the rich and powerful.

With that kind of social justice streak in his work, it’s no surprise that Mr. Gibney was attracted to Paul Simon as the subject of a documentary, given the significant impact and legacy of Paul’s work with South African musicians during apartheid. But the final part of the documentary dealing with that part of Paul’s life is not what I want to focus on in this post. What I want to focus on here is his work during the sixties with Art Garfunkel, and specifically on the songs he wrote and co-performed for the soundtrack of Mike Nichol’s film The Graduate (1967). And even more specifically, on the song that made the biggest impact — “Mrs. Robinson.”

If you weren’t around at the time, you may not know that both the film and the music were a cultural phenomenon. I was only a kid, but I remember arguing with my mother from the backseat of the car when one of the Simon and Garfunkel songs from the soundtrack, “Scarborough Fair,” started playing on the radio and she dismissed it as ‘that longhair music.’ My mother had a prized hi-fi stereo in the living room and a cabinet of LPs by her favorite crooners and orchestras, not a rock-and-roll record to be found in her stash. My brother and I would soon change that with our own record collections — I remember having a 45 of “Incense and Peppermints” as well as all of the Monkees albums — although I would play mine on a small mono record player in my bedroom.

The argument with my mother may seem like typical teenage musical rebellion against the parental status quo, but my mother’s use of the term ‘longhair’ and my father’s railing against the ‘beatniks’ and ‘hippies’ was a cultural fault line between the older and younger generations distinct to that time and especially to that year — 1967, the year of the infamous Summer of Love. That fault line was reflected, in a somewhat refracted and less threatening form, in The Graduate. Rather than portraying the draft card burnings and anti-Vietnam War protests of the students (“Hell no, we won’t go!”), which sent the blood pressure of the older generation zooming, The Graduate instead portrays a young man, Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, who’s just graduated from an elite college and can’t seem to get motivated by his parents’ paint-by-numbers suburban world of barbeques and martinis around the backyard swimming pool. Nor can he get excited at the prospect of joining the ladder-climbing corporate world that his father and his father’s cronies inhabit, nor by the opportunity they dangle in front of him of getting in on the ground floor of that sure-to-be-lucrative product called “plastics.”

Instead, after spurning her advances, Benjamin eventually allows himself to be seduced by one of his parents’ friends, Mrs. Robinson, played by the divine Anne Bancroft. The innocent young knave Benjamin has indeed been ‘seduced’ by his parents’ world, but not in the socially sanctioned way encouraged by the menfolk, and would have gotten away with breaking their tacit rules about infidelity if only…well, I’ll let you see the movie rather than spoiling it for you. There are many videos online, like this one, giving you highlights from the film, but I encourage watching the film in its entirety and experiencing the music within the context of the story.

The film had a generational message, captured perfectly on the movie poster: “This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.” (The film was based on Charles Webb’s novel written just after he graduated from college.) That message would resonate with Paul Simon, who had himself grown up in the Flushing, Queens suburb of New York City (you can see where he lived in the documentary) and whose songs expressed personal and cultural themes of alienation, disillusionment, and anxiety. After reading the novel, he agreed to director Mike Nichol’s request to provide three songs for the film.

Two of the songs were rejected, “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” which ended up on the next Simon and Garfunkel album, Bookends. But one song Mike Nichols loved despite it’s being incomplete, which was “Mrs. Robinson.” We’ll hear from Paul about the process involved in creating it, but first let’s hear the completed version:

You might assume, as I did, that that is the same version as what appeared in the film and in the soundtrack album, but it’s not. There are two versions in the soundtrack album and they’re both only a little over a minute long, whereas this version is over four minutes, and it only appears on Simon and Garfunkel’s album Bookends that came out the following year (1968). That seems highly unusual, so what happened?

In the clip below, Paul explains to talk show host Dick Cavett how he came up with song pieces for the film “on the spot,” based on a work-in-progress he brought with him but didn’t think Mike would be interested in. As I understand it (but it’s not entirely clear), Paul needed to come up with music for a chase scene playing on-screen and was just riffing and playing a fill when he came up with the opening for the song. And then, because he tends to write in a stream of consciousness, the words for the chorus just came into his head, and he added a lot of “dee-dee-dees” and “da-da-das” because he didn’t have anything else to fill in the screen time. Those pieces ended up becoming part of the film. The actual song that became a chart hit, the four-minute song above, was finished and recorded after the film wrapped.

Dick also asked him about some of the quirky lyrics of the song and Paul shared some amusing anecdotes. I’ll share those in fun facts below, but Paul tells it so much better in this clip:

It’s one of the inscrutable laws of the universe, that some of the best songs come out of nowhere, arriving incomplete and in the moment, and proceed to win our hearts and minds and become icons, representing something important to us even if we’re not sure exactly what that something is. Exhibit number one — “Mrs. Robinson.”

The song reached the top of the Billboard Top 100 chart and was the first rock song to win the Grammy for “Record of the Year.” It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and ranked 6th in the American Film Institute’s 2006 100 Years…100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema.

The soundtrack album and Bookends didn’t do too badly either, both achieving number one on the Billboard Top 200 and going double-platinum. Paul Simon and Dave Grusin won the 1968 Grammy for “Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special,” and Simon and Garfunkel won for “Best Contemporary-pop Performance, Vocal Duo or Group.”

I guess it doesn’t hurt mentioning that the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and won the latter for first-time film director Mike Nichols (who got turned down by every studio in Hollywood!). Or that it also won five BAFTAs and five Golden Globes, including Best Film and Best Director for both. Or that the American Film Institute ranked it the 17th greatest American film of all time in 2007 (ranking it 7th before that). Or that it was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 1996. Or that, adjusting for ticket price inflation, it’s ranked 22nd among the highest grossing films in the U.S. and Canada ever.

Not bad for an independent comedy-drama with a first-time film director that had trouble getting financing. I can’t imagine it having that level of success without the iconic songs by Simon and Garfunkle either, can you?

Some fun facts

• In the first version of the song, Paul sang “God bless you please, Mrs. Roosevelt.” As Dick Cavett quipped, “that would change the plot of the movie a lot.” Paul quipped back that it would “add a political element [Mike] didn’t want in there.”

• Dick asked “How did Joe Dimaggio get in there? Was he playing catch with Mrs. Roosevelt in your mind?” Paul went into a somewhat lengthy explanation and concluded by saying, “I asked myself later what it meant, and well, it means something. It’ll mean something.” [Audience laughter.]

• Anne Bancroft was married to comedic director and actor Mel Brooks, who told Paul that The Graduate was making his life miserable because everywhere he went people sang “Yoo-hoo-hoo, Mrs. Robinson” at him.

• In the Gibney documentary, Paul shared that, even though he and Art played at the Monterey International Pop Festival, they never felt part of the countercultural movement given that they were not political or into drugs like other acts on the bill. In fact, they were considered square and corny. He expressed astonishment at both The Who and Jimi Hendrix destroying their equipment onstage, something he seems to have found foolhardy if not even sacrilegious for a musician.

• Roy Halee was the producer and recording engineer for “Mrs. Robinson.” He worked with Simon and Garfunkel during their tenure at Columbia Records (initially under Tom Wilson, taking over when Tom left) and with Paul on his first two solo albums after the duo broke up. Paul spoke very highly of him in the documentary, as being a skilled technican and engineer and an innovator, with an artistic temperament, a great ear, a perfectionist bent, and a talent for helping create sound collages. Roy won a Grammy for his work on “Mrs. Robinson” and four more for work on Bookends and the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Questions for discussion in the comments

1. Who was your Mrs. Robinson? (Or Mr. Robinson?)

2. What songs did you argue with your parents about?

3. What songs did your parents ban?

4. What’s your favorite Simon and Garfunkel or Paul Simon song?

5. What’s your favorite film starring Dustin Hoffman? Anne Bancroft? Mel Brooks?