[msb-alumni] Charles Webb, Mrs. Robinson Creator Turned Off by Success, Is Dead at 81 died on June 16, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:30:36 -0400
BlankCharles Webb, Mrs. Robinson Creator Turned Off by Success, Is Dead at 81.
By
John Leland.
His novel was turned into an era-defining movie, but he was never comfortable
with
its success, and he chose to live in poverty. Charles Webb, who wrote the 1963
novel
"The Graduate," the basis for the hit 1967 film, and then spent decades running
from
its success, died on June 16 in East Sussex, England. He was 81. A spokesman
for his
son John confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not specify the cause.
Mr. Webb's novel, written shortly after college and based largely on his
relationship
with his wife, Eve Rudd, was made into an era-defining film, directed by Mike
Nichols
and starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, that gave voice to a
generation's
youthful rejection of materialism.
Mr. Webb and his wife, both born into privilege, carried that rejection well
beyond
youth, choosing to live in poverty and giving away whatever money came their
way,
even as the movie's acclaim continued to follow them.
"My whole life has been measured by it," he told the British newspaper The
Telegraph
in 2007, when the couple were living in a drab hotel room paid for by British
social
services.
Mr. Webb published eight books, including a sequel to "The Graduate," "Home
School"
(2007), in which the main characters, Benjamin and Elaine, are grown up and
teaching
their children themselves. He agreed to publish it only to pay off a
30,000-pound
debt, said Jack Malvern, a Times of London reporter who was friendly with Mr.
Webb
and helped with that deal.
"He had a very odd relationship with money," said Caroline Dawnay, who was
briefly
Mr. Webb's agent in the early 2000s when his novel "New Cardiff" was made into
the
2003 movie "Hope Springs," starring Colin Firth.
"He never wanted any."
He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money. He
gave away
homes, paintings, his inheritance, even his royalties from "The Graduate,"
which
became a million-seller after the movie's success, to the benefit of the
Anti-Defamation League. He awarded his 10,000-pound payout from 'Hope Springs'
as a
prize to a performance artist named Dan Shelton, who had mailed himself to the
Tate
Modern in a cardboard box.
At his second wedding to Ms. Rudd -- they married in 1962, then divorced in
1981 to
protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration
purposes -- he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry.
Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street,
recalled
that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony,
wearing
the only clothes they owned.
Lots of people momentarily embrace the idea of leaving the rat race, like the
characters in 'The Graduate. Mr. Webb and Ms. Rudd did it, with all the
consequences
it entailed. If they regretted the choice, they did not say so.
"When you run out of money it's a purifying experience," Mr. Webb told The
Times of
London after the couple moved to England. "It focuses the mind like nothing
else."
Charles Richard Webb was born on June 9, 1939, in San Francisco, and grew up in
Pasadena, Calif. His father, Dr. Richard Webb, was a heart specialist, part of
a
wealthy social circle like the one Charles would skewer in "The Graduate."
(Charles described his relationship with his father as 'reasonably bad.')
His mother, Janet Farrington Webb, was, he said, a socialite and an avid reader
from
whom he "was always looking for crumbs of approval."
He said "The Graduate" was an attempt to win her favor; it went decidedly wrong.
A younger brother, Sidney Farrington Webb, became a doctor in Las Cruces, N.M.
Charles went to boarding school and then to Williams College in Massachusetts,
where
he earned a degree in American history and literature in 1961. He said his
schools
had been 'chosen' for him "on the basis of how it looked."
A mediocre student, he nonetheless managed to win a two-year writing
fellowship,
which he used to write "The Graduate."
While at Williams, he met Ms. Rudd, a Bennington College student. She was a
former
debutante from a family of teachers with a bohemian streak -- her brother was
the
avant-garde jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd -- and they both rejected the
bourgeois
worlds of their families. Their first date, they told interviewers, was in a
cemetery.
Their romance, and her mother's disapproval of him, became the basis for "The
Graduate." The inspiration for the character Mrs. Robinson, who seduces young
Benjamin, may have come from one of his parents' friends, whom he accidentally
saw
naked.
Reviewing the book in The Times, Orville Prescott called it a "fictional
failure" but
favorably compared its protagonist to Holden Caulfield of "The Catcher in the
Rye."
With its mumbling ennui and conversations that do not connect, the novel
captured the
moment just before the repressed Eisenhower era blossomed into the Technicolor
1960s.
The characters are not idealistic; they're groping for ideals, their flight
from
their parents' values and lifestyles more solitary than collective.
In the last pages, Benjamin and Elaine are alone on a bus, shaken, heading into
a
future that is opaque to them.
"Hello darkness, my old friend."
So began the iconoclastic journey of Charles and Eve, who later adopted the
single
name Fred, in solidarity with a self-help group for men with low self-esteem.
Despite
her parents' intervention the couple married, then later sold their wedding
gifts
back to the guests and donated the money to charity.
"Their wedding was a total contradiction to the way they ended up living,"
Priscilla
Rudd Wolf, Eve's sister, said in an email. "It was a big wedding; my sister
wore a
white bridal gown; I was maid of honor. It was in the Salisbury School Chapel,
where
my parents taught, and the whole town was there."
She added: "They seemed like a typical all-American couple off to a typical
all-American life. But that wasn't to be."
Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a
California
bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning
things
oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father's family but
was
unable to decline the money from his mother's; so they gave that away, along
with
artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.
As the 1960's bloomed, the couple underwent gestalt therapy. Fred, a painter,
hosted
a one-woman show in the nude as a feminist statement. She shaved her head -- in
order, she said, to shed the oppressive demands of feminine adornment.
They moved to California and then back east to a dilapidated house in
Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in Westchester County, and had two sons, John and
David.
Mr. Webb followed "The Graduate" with "Love, Roger" (1969) and "The Marriage of
a
Young Stockbroker" (1970), which Lawrence Turman, who produced 'The Graduate,'
turned
into a movie starring Richard Benjamin. It fizzled. Critics compared his later
books
unfavorably with his debut.
He refused to do book signings, Ms. Dawnay said, viewing them as "a sin against
decency."
In the late 1970s the couple moved back to the West Coast and took their sons
out of
school, choosing to home-school them, which was not sanctioned at the time. So
the
family moved around, at one point living in a Volkswagen bus, driving from one
campground to another.
In a 1992 interview with The Washington Post, John Webb called that part of his
education "unschooling."
Charles Webb worked menial jobs: clerk at a Kmart, itinerant farmworker, house
cleaner. The couple were caretakers at a nudist colony in New Jersey, earning
$198 a
week.
Mr. Webb complained about being tied to "The Graduate," but in the early 1990's
he
wrote a sequel, "Gwen," narrated by Benjamin and Elaine's daughter. Benjamin
works at
a Kmart and as a janitor at his old school, finding liberation in giving up his
material trappings to serve others.
"Gwen" was never published; Mr. Webb went nearly 25 years between books before
"New
Cardiff," in 2001.
By then the couple were living in England -- they had moved there, he said, so
he
could try writing an English character -- and their sons were grown.
Ms. Dawnay, who visited the couple in Brighton, said they lived with almost no
furniture and only one change of clothes.
Though "New Cardiff" was warmly received, it did not revive Mr. Webb's career,
nor
did the "Graduate" sequel he finally did publish, "Home School."
Fred, Mr. Webb's wife, died in 2019, Mr. Malvern said, leaving him quite alone,
although he is survived by his sons -- David, a performance artist who once
cooked a
copy of "The Graduate" and ate it with cranberry sauce, and John, a director at
the
consulting and research firm IHS Markit -- and his brother.
Mr. Malvern said he did not know whether Mr. Webb had still been writing.
Mr. Webb's death brings to a close a decades-long experiment that was less a
retreat
than an attempt to change the terms of engagement between artists and the
world. As
he once told The Boston Globe, "The public's praise of creative people is a
mask -- a
mask for jealousy or hatred."
By the couple's various renunciations, he said, "We hope to make the point that
the
creative process is really a defense mechanism on the part of artists -- that
creativity is not a romantic notion."
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