BlackBook Magazine

Four decades after an obscure author wrote the racy story of one Benjamin Braddock and everyone's favorite cougar, Mrs. Robinson, the novelist returns with a sequel. And the sex education continues.

By William Georgiades

Dustin Hoffman on The Graduate set, left, 1966.

In the beginning of Robert Altman’s The Player, Buck Henry is seen pitching a movie to an indifferent studio executive. “OK, here it is: The Graduate, Part 2! Ben and Elaine are married still, living in a big old spooky house in Northern California somewhere. Mrs. Robinson, her aging mother, lives with them. She’s had a stroke. And they’ve got a daughter in college—Julia Roberts, maybe. It’ll be dark and weird and funny—with a stroke.”

The 1967 film The Graduate established the careers of screenwriter Henry, director Mike Nichols, and star Dustin Hoffman, not to mention Simon and Garfunkel and the immortal line “Plastics.” The one person who didn’t fare so well was the author of the source material—Charles Webb.

The Graduate, based largely on Webb’s own life, was his first novel, published in 1963 when he was only 24. He received only $20,000 for both the film rights to the book and all future film rights to the characters.

In January, Thomas Dunne will publish Webb’s long-awaited sequel, Home School, which satisfies any lingering wonder about the fate of Benjamin Braddock, Elaine, and Mrs. Robinson, now known as ‘Nan.’ It takes place eleven years after Benjamin rescued Elaine at her wedding, and the couple is living in Hastings, New York, where they home-school their two sons (illegal in the mid-1970s).

The Westchester County school board and a local principal insist that Braddock’s children must attend classes. Benjamin asks his mother-in-law to visit; Mrs. Robinson has given up the booze, but that only seems to have sharpened her sexual appetite and guile. She seduces the local principal, the event is tape-recorded, and he succumbs to the blackmail. This solution causes more domestic problems, allowing Webb’s familiar characters a broad stage to reenact their dynamics.

While Home School is a wry, funny, and hugely satisfying bookend to The Graduate, the author’s own life is as fascinating as anything he could have written. Webb married a woman named Fred (she changed her name from Eve in support of a men’s self-help group), and the couple subsequently started to unburden themselves: they gave away the tickets to the premiere of the film, they gave away their wedding presents, and then they gave away two homes. After that they got divorced as a statement against the institution of marriage, and home-schooled their two sons illegally, causing them to live a life on the run.

In 1999 the couple moved to England, quite randomly, where they have remained. Webb’s principal preoccupation now is reportedly to care for Fred, who suffered a nervous breakdown. Though Webb has continued to write steadily—one of his novels was recently made into the film Hope Springs—his fortunes have been at the mercy of social services and the kindness of strangers.

Home School ends with a gentle finality, and Webb has made it clear that this will be his last novel. Asked recently about the way he and Benjamin Braddock’s lives have differed, Webb told an English newspaper, “We have led the most chaotic, illogical, irrational lives, although the more I look at it, the more I can see that there is a bizarre order to it all.” Forty-four years later, this sequel makes the same point with a lightness expressed with eloquence and hard-won sincerity. The very opposite of “Plastics.”

Photo courtesy of the Everett Collection.