Cinema: The Moonchild and the Fifth Beatle

JOHN

Sleep well?

MARY

Yes. (a small grin)

What there was of it. I didn’t wake you up, did I?

JOHN

No, you didn’t wake me up.

John and Mary pick each other up in a Manhattan dating bar. They never quite catch each other’s name, but they go to bed (his place; she has roommates). They spend the next day finding out about each other, fall in love and that evening again head for bed. They speak their final dialogue as the camera follows a trail of clothes across the bedroom floor:

MARY

My name’s Mary . . . What about you . . . ?

JOHN

I’m John.

Peter Yates, the British director who began filming John & Mary in Manhattan last week, calls it a “contemporary love story.” It begins where romantic movies used to end—with the snuggling in the percales. After that, the script lightly flicks such switched-on subjects as astrology, hippies, fags, the Pill, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, May-September adultery, cinéma vérité film makers and, just for laughs, itself. From time to time, for example, it underlines the dialogue with subtitles:

MARY You’ve got a lot of room here.

SUBTITLE

“Is your wife away for the weekend?”

Who are Mary and John? The ad announcing the new production says it in ideographs: Rosemary’s baby carriage perched atop Mrs. Robinson’s knee. Mia Farrow, 23, and Dustin Hoffman, 31. The wandering waif and the victim of the middle class. Mrs. Sinatra and Mr. Acne. Novelist Flannery O’Connor put it another way: “Everything that rises must converge.” The casting together of the two fastest-rising performers in the business was inevitable—it always is. But it once took half a career to manage the box-office mergers of Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The tempo of American cinema has speeded up; it happened to Farrow and Hoffman after one big hit apiece.

Those two hits themselves are significant: they are obviously part of their time and yet, in other ways, out of it. The era is supposed to belong to the politically active and the sexually liberated young; how could anyone hope to succeed with a picture about a male-virgin college graduate whose only politic problem was turning off Mrs. Robinson? This is an age dominated by science, which prides itself on being free of superstition; who would have thought that a story that takes the devil seriously could become a smash? Yet Rosemary’s Baby was not only a bestseller as a book, but already ranks among the top 50 alltime movie hits. The Graduate has become the third largest money earner ($40 million) in movie history.

It is mainly the kids who made the success of these films, suggesting that the image of the new generation free of sexual hang-ups and fascinated only by reality is misleading. The young, in fact, have made a new cult of the occult. The cause, Psychologist Rollo May believes, lies in the disintegration of familiar myths that leaves individuals alienated and adrift. When the medieval myths broke down, he argues, people turned to “witchcraft, sorcery and, in painting, the wild surrealism of a man like Bosch. In our day it is LSD, hippies and touch therapy.”

New myths for old. The Graduate and Rosemary’s Baby spin a new myth of lost innocence, of the individual against the wicked system. The new young actors themselves represent the death of many myths—among them, the one of the movie star. The big press buildup, the house in Beverly Hills baroque, the ostentation and the seven-picture commitment are giving way to a stubborn kind of performer who is as suspicious of the Hollywood system as a student rebel is of the university trustees. Many of the young stars are, in fact, anti-stars, who fight against the inducements and erosions of the big time. People like Olivia Hussey, Robert Redford and David Warner have nothing against fame, but they trade on it to gain freedom—the freedom to choose their roles and their directors. The once-desirable studio contract now looks like slavery.

Did You Touch Him?

The anti-star attitude itself threatens to become a new pose or convention in which the Hollywood swimming pool is replaced by the interesting East Side pad, the Valley ranch by a Martha’s Vineyard retreat, the antic table-hopping by frantic political activism. At any rate, both Farrow and Hoffman live and breathe the new freedom; both have opted for the small apartment over the big house, the East over the West, Both feel that though there may be New York and New York, and Chicago and Chicago, there is only one Los Angeles. “I’m not connected with it,” says Mia, who was born there. To Dustin, who was raised there, “there’s this great emphasis on the external: the automobile you drive, the house you live in. The day The Graduate was finished shooting, I flew back to New York. I just couldn’t wait to get back.”

Together, Mia and Dustin represent a coincidence of other myths: the airborne colleen and the earthbound Jew, Peter Pan and Peter Schlemiel, the miserable winner and the happy loser. Like most myths, they contain an indissoluble grain of truth. Mia Farrow has been cowering from show-business success like a cornered rabbit. Hoffman has been swimming backward in it like a lobster. To Mia, life is colored with pastels and studded with magic stones; to Hoffman, it is a black-and-white documentary. She can skip down Manhattan’s Third Avenue without creating a ripple. When Hoffman is recognized, he becomes a fifth Beatle; every night outside his dressing room is a hard day’s night. Girls choke up and babble when he walks by: “Oh my God, it’s him . . . What a groove, look at that nose . . . It’s so beautiful. Did you dig those muscles? . . . Did you touch him? Yes. Oh my God . . .” Dustin hates it, he says, yet stays the departure of his manager’s limousine to scribble his name on Playbills slipped through the crack of the electric window.

The distance between Mia and Dustin was apparent during the first few days of location shooting for John & Mary. Between interminable rehearsals and takes at an East Side “singles” eatery called Maxwell’s Plum, Hoffman hied himself off to mumble inconsequentially with the bit players and extras clustered around the bar. Mia sat tensely at the table that was the focus of the sequence, fiddling with a fork, making conversation with two other actors, and once breaking into a high, put-on Southern accent. The few times that Hoffman lingered at the table to make a time-killing joke, he addressed it to the table at large, not to Mia; except when the action called for it, he never even looked at her. Obviously—and very tentatively—they were getting to know each other, sizing each other up both in the plot and in reality.

Go Inside Yourself

At first, Dustin comes on all of a heap. His stance is simian, his face an objet trouvé. The hair is from a thatched roof in Cambodia, the nose and chin from a 1948 Chevrolet, the hooded eyes from a stuffed hawk. Even the voice seems assembled, an oboe with postnasal drip. It all appears a shambles—until it begins to work, stunning audiences with articulate force. His current comedy, Jimmy Shine, is a mere vaudeville of the absurd. But within it is the vortical power of Dustin, pulling in the laughs, the cast and the audience. He growls like Durante, drones like W. C. Fields, shambles like Groucho Marx, and dances like a good-natured puppy. Yet the elements are his own—so much so that other performers are already copying them.

The surprise is Hoffman’s secret: it is because no one expects him to be adequate that he excels. From the beginning, he has been the Chaplinesque figure who makes progress through a series of falls. In his favorite posture, looking backward, Hoffman recalled his circular route from Los Angeles to New York in a series of interviews with TIME Reporter Carey Winfrey. Hoffman’s father was a furniture designer, middle-class and Jewish. His mother was a movie fan and named him after Dustin Farnum, the silent-screen cowboy (his older brother is Ronald, for Colman). The game of the name made Hoffman a loser from childhood. “I always used to wish there was another Dustin in class,” he recalls. “When you’re poked fun at—they used to call me ‘Dustbin’—you either goinside yourself or become a clown. In seventh grade, I played Tiny Tim because I was the shortest kid in the class. Because a ninth-grader dared me, in front of all the parents at the Christmas show, I said: ‘God bless us every one, Goddammit.’ I got suspended for that. In high school, the other guys had hair on their chests and played football. I played tennis, had a big nose and acne so bad my face looked like a rifle range.”

It was only after a thoroughly unproductive year at Santa Monica City College that he decided to jettison ambitions to become a doctor and impulsively enrolled in an acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse. After a sketch in which he played an old man, his instructor took him aside and said, “Dusty, it may take you a long time—ten or 15 years—but you are going to have a life in the theater.” Recalls Hoffman, ruefully: “He was sure right about how long it would take.”

After graduation from the Playhouse, Hoffman, who at 5 ft. 6 in. would always be one of the shortest kids in class, collided with California. “Cowboys were the big thing then on TV, and all the guys at the Playhouse would practice drawing on each other in the hallways. I had to get away from all that.”

He got 3,000 miles away, to New York, full of grim expectations. “I used to watch the Dead End Kids on Saturday afternoon, thinking wouldn’t it be fun to swim in the East River and play in dirty streets.” He never did dive from a pier or play stickball; for three weeks, in fact, he slept on the kitchen floor next to the refrigerator, in the apartment of his former classmate, Actor Gene Hackman (Bonnie and Clyde). “I was too afraid to face the fact that I had to go outside and become an actor,” he confesses.

Show Me a Hero

The introvert overcompensated in public. Recalls Hackman, “Dustin wore very long hair, a sheepskin vest with no shirt, leather boots, blue jeans and had a motorcycle—the whole bit.” Like all unemployed actors, Hoffman took a variety of offstage roles: attendant in a mental hospital (“Until my dreams got so bad I had to quit”), typist, weaver of Hawaiian leis, janitor at a dance studio.

Nothing succeeds like failure. His type was Out theatrically, but In socially. His ex-roommate, Actor Robert Duvall, remembers that Hoffman “had more girls than Namath ever had. He had a line standing outside his apartment even when he didn’t have a name.”

It was eventually Hoffman’s antiheroism that made him an antistar. “If the hero is defined as an event-making individual who redetermines the course of history,” wrote Philosopher Sidney Hook, “it follows at once that a democratic community must be eternally on guard against him.” Said F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” Those aphorisms were a long time catching on in America, where the legend of event makers—the cowboy and the gangster, the self-made entrepreneur and the conquering soldier—are dominant dramatic myths.

As comedy grew steadily blacker and as audiences grew steadily younger, hipper and more draftable, the old concepts began to erode. The invulnerables like Peck and Holden and Wayne seemed lost in a country full of people whose destinies were not in their own hands. The nation of cities needed new images, and suddenly Hoffman became an archetype.

In 1967, he was offered the role of Zoditch, a misanthropic 40-year-old Russian clerk in an off-Broadway play, Journey of the Fifth Horse. He won the Obie award as the year’s best off-Broadway actor. Typically, the play closed three weeks later. Next came the role of a beleaguered night watchman in the farce Eh?

Token Gesture

The sound of success reached Hollywood and Director Mike Nichols, who was then casting The Graduate. Summoned to Los Angeles for a screen test, Hoffman took a day off from Eh? and arrived at the studio the next morning, he says, “feeling awful. And paranoiac. I was sure the crew was asking, ‘Jesus Christ, where’d they get him?’ Everything Nichols told me to do, I did wrong.” At one point, to prod some life into a love scene, he grabbed Actress Katharine Ross’s buttocks and yanked her toward him. “When it was finally over I apologized to Nichols and to Katharine,” Hoffman lugubriously remembers. “As I was putting on my coat to leave, a New York subway token fell out of my pocket. One of the crew picked it up and said, ‘Here, kid, you’re gonna need this.’ ”

Six days later, Nichols called Hoffman to tell him that he had won the part—which was to pay him a fast $17,000. “We’re in business,” he said. “You came up with just the kind of confused panic the character is supposed to have.” The rest is mystery. Hoffman himself admits, “If The Graduate were better, it wouldn’t have done as well.” And neither would he. Today his film price is $425,000; for Jimmy Shine, he receives $4,500 a week against 10% of the gross receipts. But then, the cost of living has risen. The psychoanalyst that he started with four years ago used to charge him $3.50 an hour. His fees have risen considerably since then—and Hoffman sees him five days a week.

The anti-star occasionally flashes star temperament. Donald Driver, director of Jimmy Shine, remembers that “Dustin cut his finger on opening night in Baltimore. Long after it had healed, he insisted that the stage manager announce to the audience that Mr. Hoffman was appearing with a cut finger. It was a blatant bid for public sympathy.” It also appears that Dustin never became too big to pick up small change. Jimmy Shine Producer Zev Bufman calls him “a hard bargainer who held us up for half the profits on the $1.00 souvenir programs because we didn’t clear material about him, with him. Traditionally the money goes to the backers. The whole thing amounted to $100 a week.”

Still, apart from the analysis, a new Greenwich Village apartment and a pool table, he remains a champion of inconspicuous consumption. The night of the Academy awards, Hoffman—nominated for The Graduate—called a friend, Actor Stanley Beck. “It was about 1 o’clock in the morning,” says Beck. “The phone rang. It was Dusty. ‘Hey, can you pick me up?’ he says. There he is, out at the Academy awards the night he’s been nominated for an Oscar, and he has no car, no driver, no place to sleep. I told him to take a cab and he could sleep in the living room. He came up, slept, left without making the bed, and I never saw him.”

Four-Letter Incantation

Hoffman’s long ascent is, in its anti-way, heroic. But hardly atypical. For an actor, it is impossible to become a leading man until he has a face: that is his hardship. For an actress, it is possible to become a leading lady as soon as she has a body: that is her handicap. Mia Farrow’s measurements are closely akin to a newel post’s. “I look like an elephants’ graveyard,” she admits. Nevertheless, it is a body. The face is something else; the exquisite bone structure and the fine, flawless skin suggest an antique doll. But so do the faces of other girls. It is the immense, luminous eyes that make her unique, almost unearthly, like someone not born but drawn—perhaps by her old friend Salvador Dali, who calls her “a black moonchild, like Lilith. Her sex is not here,” he insists, pointing to his groin, “but in the head, like a wound in the middle of the forehead.” To Actress Shirley MacLaine she is “all turned in and vulnerable, a child with a highly energetic brain. From the neck up, she’s 80.” To Actor Roddy McDowall, “trying to describe Mia is like trying to describe dust in a shaft of sunlight. There are all those particles.” Her conversation is clotted with such words as amulets, transcendentalism, Utopia—and then, unexpectedly but inevitably, a choice selection of four-letter expletives. Only when Mia uses them, her friends feel, somehow she makes them sound like an incantation.

In a series of interviews with TIME Reporter Jay Cocks, Farrow, speaking in her sotto voce that raises “Good morning” to the level of a state secret, took some of those particles and put them together in vaguely chronological order. In nearly every respect, Farrow began as Hoffman’s polar opposite. He was outside show business with his nose pressed up against the window. In Hollywood, Mia was Old Money: her father was Director John Farrow, her mother Actress Maureen O’Sullivan. The third of seven children, Mia was always the vulnerable one. “I got all the diseases,” she recalls, “including polio when I was nine. The whole family had to be evacuated, and all my things burned. Even my magic box, full of things that were magical to me.”

“Before I could talk,” she says, “I had a private name for myself. And that was part of my magic kingdom.” The name was Mildred, a stand-in Doppelganger who took the blame when things went sour. “Sometimes, the kingdom would become very, very strong and I had to go away—it was a lot like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.”*

Mildred finally died an unnatural death one summer when Mia was six and the family was aboard a ship. Recalls her mother, “I said to Mia, ‘I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to drown Mildred.’ So we theoretically put Mildred overboard into the Irish Sea, and we drowned her. We never did see Mildred again.” Not in that form, anyway.

Hoffman’s education was entirely public; Farrow’s completely parochial. She “had the screaming meemies” the first time she saw a nun—at the age of four. But at ten she decided to become one. “They told me they wouldn’t have me. Incompatible and everything, you know. I really wasn’t their type.” Actually she wasn’t anybody’s type. Underdeveloped, undernourished, she found that only her family and her fantasies could tune in on her.

Plots of Soil

Even in Mia’s childhood, moviemaking was a global business. The nine Farrows trooped from Los Angeles to Spain, then on to London, where a series of tragedies began. “You can’t be Irish without knowing the world is going to break your heart before you’re 40,” goes the Gaelic lament. For Mia the time was halved. Although the Farrow family life was chaotic and neurotic, there were still close alliances within its framework. In London at ’13, she learned that her brother Michael, with whom she had been closest, had been killed in a private-plane crash in California. “It quite simply destroyed the family,” she says. “He had been my confidant, my idol. When my brother died, the rest of us just sort of fell into our own plots of soil and grew.”

More pain was to come. At 17 she visited her mother—then playing on Broadway in Never Too Late. “It was while I was-there that my father died. That was a very big blow.” John Farrow’s reputation as a roistering, reckless womanizer conflicted sharply with the strict, militant Catholicism he displayed at home. But Mia accepted what confounded his colleagues. “He was priest and lover, powerful and incompetent, strong and weak, a poet and a sailor. He was a very complicated man and I loved him very much.” And her mother? “Well . . . like . . . my father was strict, and she was his wife.”

“It was immediately after John’s death,” recalls Maureen O’Sullivan, “that Mia found herself a role in an off-Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which led to a part in a television show that we thought was dreadful. We all sat around and said, ‘Now who’s going to tell her?’ We didn’t tell her because she thought she was pretty horrible herself.”

On-screen she may have been flatfooted; offstage she could have used some lead weights on her shoes. When she first met Dali, he gave her a bit of rock he called “a tiny piece of the moon.” Shortly thereafter, the painter invited the young actress for tea. “That afternoon,” he remembers, “I had received a beautiful box of butterflies, and I had them on the table when she came in. We had English muffins with honey, and as she talked she took one butterfly out of the box, put it on top of the honey and ate it. She finished all twelve butterflies by the end of tea.”

Mythical Suicide

The producers of Peyton Place saw more in Mia than she saw in herself. For two years as Allison MacKenzie, Mia made the soap opera one long disaster aria and attracted the attention of millions of viewers—including Frank Sinatra. It was 1964—a very good year for long-haired swingers and toupeed singers. The way the public pop-psyched it out, at 19, she was looking for a father; at 48, he was looking for his youth. Their life became about as secluded as an airport. The couple took the most curious romantic cruise since the owl and the pussycat, with much the same result: a mismatched marriage.

After the Las Vegas wedding—attended by 37 still cameras, 14 motion-picture cameras and seven writers—show business set in. “Hah!” chortled Sinatra’s ex-wife Ava Gardner, “I always knew Frank would wind up in bed with a boy.” The gossip columnists were scarcely kinder. The pair’s every waking hour seemed to make the wire services. During the affair, when she lopped off her hair, Dali called it “mythical suicide.” After the separation, her behavior seemed more of the same. She flew off to India with her flower-child sister Prudence* for a month of transcendental meditation with Maharishi, the groovy guru. “I got there,” Mia remembers, “and it was just the same zoo all over again. It was scary in the Himalayas, although I was scared of just about everything at that time. There were even photographers in the trees. I was there for my birthday, and I had to wear a silver hat. Two days later, I left.”

A disintegrating marriage has several breaking points: the most obvious occurred during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby with Director Roman Polanski. Sinatra tried to get her to leave Rosemary and join The Detective; she wouldn’t. By night he telephoned her to say that he couldn’t live without her; by day he planned divorce proceedings. Mia heard about them not from her husband but from his attorney. Coolly she announced that she wanted no financial settlement—which apparently stunned the singer more than a countersuit for a million. After the lawyer’s visit, she took Sinatra’s private plane to Los Angeles—where she found an airport full of reporters who could only have been tipped off by Sinatra’s associates. Terrified, Mia talked the pilot into taking off and depositing her at another airport miles away.

Like a child who insists on a happy ending for The Red Shoes, Mia remains transcendentally tranquil about the chairman of the board. Though the divorce decree is final, she still absently refers to Sinatra as “my husband,” still remembers him wistfully as “a gentle, quiet man.” Yet she offers the best clue as to why the marriage proved unworkable: “Maybe it bothered him not being young. He felt things getting away from him. My friends from India would come into the house barefoot and hand him a flower. That made him feel square for the first time in his life.”

Hoffman has lived 31 years, and every month of it shows. Mia has crammed several lifetimes into one—and, on the surface at least, has the dewy quality of a maiden who has just learned that people do not conceive babies by holding hands. Hoffman has settled into a quiet domestic arrangement with ex-Dancer Anne Byrne, a divorcee with a 21-year-old child. Since her divorce, Mia has been seen with a succession of rock singers and film stars—and, most recently, with Conductor-Composer Andre Previn.

Byrne admits that Hoffman lets the air out of his psyche offstage and retreats to his home and his pool table. “We almost never go out,” she says. “He’d much rather come home, get into his bathrobe and lie in bed.” Farrow is almost always up, out and on. “People have a tendency to look at Mia,” insists Previn, “and say, ‘Look at those funny clothes and the way she acts and the things she talks about. Compared, let’s say, with Debbie Reynolds she’s some kind of freak.’ But I think that Mia is the straight one. I think that Debbie Reynolds is the freak.”

Hoffman tends to drone his conversation, compressing his replies into brief, considered phrases. Farrow is a quotable compendium with an entry on every subject:

On film nudity: “There’s no need to show sex things graphically in films. It’s not necessary to show it at all, especially when it will offend people. Why not just do it at home?”

On certain unprintable words: “I would like my children to have these as sacred words. If I cursed at you, it could be a compliment. Couldn’t it?”

On Negroes: “Right now I’m in love with someone, and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference if he was black. Someday it will have to happen that one and one will make two. Just two, no other thing about color or anything else. That’s Utopia.”

On hippies: “They’re great, gentle people. I slept with 16 different people in those communes, and nobody ever touched me.”

On Hollywood: “The system is full of crap. They’ve got it in the darkest part of their minds that everybody’s sleeping together. I just don’t know where their heads are at all, and I’ve given up trying to find out.”

On drugs: “They still haven’t been able to prove that pot is harmful. You can stick it in your ear, sleep on it or do anything you want—it’s a natural thing, a product of nature. Drugs like LSD can be harmful, since they are a product of man.”

On Rosemary’s Baby: “I liked it—the possibility of the Antichrist. It makes a stamp on you, the Catholic upbringing. It’s tattooed on your soul.”

On marriage: “You have to make these promises for the rest of your life. Who can do that? Who knows what’s going to be next year, or even tomorrow?”

On psychiatry: “I know too many people who use it as a crutch: ‘Give us this day our daily analyst.’ I’d rather do it myself.”

Plastic Windup Starlets

Different as they are in conversation, background and life style, Farrow and Hoffman remain peculiarly identical in their view of films and their down-look on Hollywood. For the moment at least, they share a professional bond as foremost symbols of a freshening in American cinema: They are even valid sex symbols: the man with the postgraduate face, the mixed-up, half-hippie woman with fear in her eyes.

Not that the pneumatic uplift of a Raquel Welch is suddenly undesirable. But it is only one of many symbols. There have been haunted girls and unprepossessing men before—Audrey Hepburn was never known for her measurements, and Humphrey Bogart commanded affection even though he looked accident-prone. But there has never before been such a crowd of real faces, so many young actors resembling young audiences—and young audiences pay for 65% of the movie tickets in America.

To expect all the flimflam to be swept away is, of course, absurd. Pressagents and windup plastic starlets are as much a part of movies as acetate; in one way or another, they always will be. And no matter how actors and actresses play themselves down, their films play them up. Movies are wide-screened, stereophonic and 30 times larger than life—so are actors. What is important is that many of the young actors can separate the reflected face on the screen from the original in the mirror.

Wallace Stevens once wrote that a community of originals is not a community. But each year brings more originals, more actresses like Mia Farrow, who asks: “What does it mean to be a star today? The only real value it has is in being offered more and better parts.” And Dustin Hoffman, who says, “I’ve always had this fantasy—every actor has, I guess—that when I made it, I’d be able to do whatever I wanted.” Up in the Hollywood hills, the superstars may grumble at the youngsters who have turned their backs on the old values. But not so long ago, young audiences rebelled against the old ways by staying away from movie theaters. The new anti-stars might just be the prescription for the problem of the antiaudience.

* Hannah Green’s 1964 novel of an institutionalized schizophrenic girl who created a fantasy world where imaginary rules alternately punished and rewarded her.

* For whom the Beatles wrote the song of the same name.