At 89, the star of the Graduate and Ran Man demonstrates both brilliance and a startling lack of self-awareness
The choice of title for an actor’s autobiography can be revealing. Sylvester Stallone went with The Steps, conflating life’s challenging progress with the grand staircase of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Rocky euphorically ran up. Michael Douglas cheerfully and unreflectively called his One Helluva Ride.
Dustin Hoffman’s is one of those that harks back to the poignantly vulnerable youthful world in which the acting bug first took effect. Al Pacino called his Sonny Boy; Anthony Hopkins gave us We Did OK, Kid. Hoffman’s Look at Me is about the yearning to be seen and heard. Or is it about a childish impulse to show off?
On location for the thriller Marathon Man in 1975, playing the regular guy unforgettably finding himself in a Nazi war-criminal’s dentist chair, Hoffman told co-star Laurence Olivier that acting was all about having something to say to the world. “Bollocks,” Olivier crisply replied – and then explained the acting impulse by putting his face close to Dustin and whispering: “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.”
Well, first things first. Any reader of Hoffman’s autobiography will want to know the truth behind another legendary anecdote involving Olivier. Did he really stay up all night in a solemn method-acting inspired bid to look exhausted, only to be told by Larry: “Try acting, dear boy”?
Sadly, the answer is no. And Hoffman’s explanation exposes the sneaky journalistic trick of stripping the intentional irony out of someone else’s story, and re-applying it at the author’s expense. Hoffman had been up all night, yes, partying and doing cokeat Studio 54; he showed up for work looking terrible. Olivier, amused and unshocked, humorously told him to try acting – and the Vanity Fair journalist to whom Hoffman told this rewrote it to make him look like a ridiculous prig.
This book is ghosted by New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, and perhaps in imitation of the manner in which Hoffman spoke into Levy’s recording device, the story jumps grasshopper-like back and forth along the timeline. There are two deeply painful things that stand out: Hoffman’s dad and Hoffman’s exposure to the #MeToo movement. We hear a lot about the first, hardly anything about the second.
Hoffman was the smart, scrappy underdog, the livewire kid from the secular Jewish home in California whose mum tried to persuade him at 12 years old to get a nose job, at the same time as she was getting hers. He took acting classes in college for extra credit and, instantly addicted to laughs and applause, came out east to make it in the excitingly high-minded world of New York theatre. He hung out with fellow young hopefuls Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, themselves seething and simmering with displaced ambition and anger. Hoffman was destined to be a standard-bearer for the gritty American new wave in which leading actors were allowed to be more rough-looking (although this dispensation did not apply to women).
The brilliant young comedian and director Mike Nichols sensationally cast this Broadway up-and-comer against type (people expected a Robert Redford figure) as the young man seduced by an older woman in The Graduate, which functioned as a vivid metaphor for the new cinema and the old.
Hoffman was 30 and made up to look younger; his co-star Anne Bancroft was 36 and lit to look older, a sexist imbalance that didn’t fully register with him at the time. But something jarred when he read the Mad magazine spoof of his Graduate character: “Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and dad aren’t?” Antisemitism played a nasty little part in much of the mockery he periodically endured from the press in those days, ostensibly for not being sufficiently tall and handsome.
View image in fullscreenDustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Lawrence Turman\embassy/AllstarThe Graduate had been Hoffman’s last chance at a juve lead. Then he was the dishevelled, disabled grifter Ratso Rizzo in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, limping along behind Jon Voight, screaming “I’m walkin’ here!” at a New York cab that bumped into him – a line he improvised, because Hoffman really was passionately devoted to being in the moment, method style, a dedication that fascinated and disconcerted costars like Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. And, like Gene Hackman, he was difficult and in the habit of talking back to the director.
He was the tough guy in Ulu Grosbard’s crime thriller Straight Time; the adorable dad in Kramer vs Kramer, which became a water cooler moment and dinner party talking point from coast to coast; the disguised woman in Tootsie; the bleary movie producer in Wag the Dog (not based on Paramount Pictures’ supremo Robert Evans, he says, contrary to popular myth); and the autistic savant brother in Rain Man, opposite Tom Cruise – a fascinating pairing of two performers laser-focused in different ways. It was a part he had based on Peter Guthrie, the autistic brother of all-American Princeton football star Kevin Guthrie. But Hoffman appears genially unaware of the contemporary issues of gender politics and authentic casting that might now colour the reception of some of these portrayals.
The star of this book, in fact its tragic hero, is Hoffman’s angry and opinionated dad, Harry, who had himself longed for Hollywood success and was unreconciled to Dustin’s. He had been head of the prop department at Columbia Pictures and worked on Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington – but got fired for talking back to his superiors in the way Dustin was just about allowed to do a generation later. Hoffman Sr opened a furniture store and angrily – abusively – took his frustrations out on his sons, Ronny and Dusty.
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There is a Dickensian melancholy to the story Hoffman tells about his dad being allowed to come and watch filming of The Graduate. Afterwards, Dustin found the director hilariously regaling everyone with how this absurd man, Harry, had come out from behind the rope and presumed to tell Mr Nichols how to shoot the scene. The humiliation of that is perhaps something Dustin still hasn’t quite processed, although he says he based his stage portrayal of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on his father, with mannerisms that he thought Harry would surely recognise. But Harry came backstage to his dressing room and said: “Wow! That guy is some loser …” Did that mean Harry really hadn’t seen the resemblance? I wonder.
And so to Hoffman being accused, in 2017, of having groped and sexually harassed 17-year-old intern Anna Graham Hunter on the set of the TV movie adaptation of his Death of a Salesman production in 1985, which was followed by his Salesman co-star on Broadway, Kathryn Rossetter, making similar accusations, and two other women, Cori Thomas and Melissa Kester, coming forward. Hoffman denied any wrongdoing but conceded thoughtless, tactless behaviour. But none of this is specifically discussed in the book; no names are mentioned, the issue dispatched in a couple of pages. Of #MeToo, he recalls the “reckoning … making its way around the internet”, which he says he welcomed. And then: “Suddenly, my entire life changed.”
He doesn’t say how, in detail, other than to compare himself to a victim of McCarthyism, and to write that “things were being said about me that just weren’t true”. He asks sonorously: “Is it possible that I’ve been guilty of insufficient empathy? That I was too self-involved to correctly perceive what the people around me were feeling at the time? Sure. Of course.” Well, his accusers alleged something more specific than that.
Dustin Hoffman is a garrulous, grandfatherly, un-self-aware figure in this book, a brilliant, intuitive, era-defining screen actor. Perhaps his continued need to work, and not to fade into retirement as he reaches the end of his 80s, is partly due to a desire to see off those accusations, to ensure they aren’t the last thing in the story.