A swarthy Pinocchio makes a wooden role real

f Dustin Hoffman's face were his fortune, he'd be committed to a life of poverty. With a schnoz that looks like a directional signal, skittish black-beady eyes and a raggedy hair-cap, he stands a slight 5-foot-6, weighs a mere 134 pounds and slouches like a puppet dangling from a string. All in all, he resembles a swarthy Pinocchio.

Yet this unlikely leading man has gone from off-Broadway character actor to Hollywood star in one nimble leap. Mike Nichols, comedian-turned-director whose first film effort was the Oscar-bedecked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, plucked Dusty out of nowhere and made him the non-hero of his new film, The Graduate. The role is that of an innocent college graduate, named Ben Braddock, catapulted into a corrupting world. The script depicts him as well-fed, well-bred and handsome -- a "walking surfboard," Dusty calls him. At 30, he was a decade older than the character, but Nichols gambled that Dusty's talents would triumph over his appearance. He has won his gamble.

This will astonish a lot of people, including the actor's own family. Named Dustin by his movie-struck mother after the cowboy star of the silents, Dustin Farnum, he grew up in Los Angeles trying to emulate the weakling in the Charles Atlas ad by lifting tons of weights (the only muscles he developed were in his neck, which now measures a mighty 16 1/2) and making believe he was somebody else. When he was 18 and at Aunt Pearl's for the Passover feast, the grownups started quizzing the kids about later life. Dusty blurted out, "I-I'm going to be an actor." "You can't be an actor," decreed Aunt Pearl. "You are not good-looking enough."

Dusty tried anyway. He set forth for New York, where he was sure his face would be less conspicuous. For six years he was just another one of those driven, twitchy actors around town. "I wanted to play character roles," he recalls. Suddenly he got them, appearing in a series of off-Broadway plays as a middle-aged Russian clerk, as a Chaplinesque Cockney hippie and as a lame, hunchbacked Nazi homosexual.

He was aghast when Nichols beckoned him to Hollywood to try a non-character part. He found himself at the screen test sitting on a bed and instructed to play a love scene with Katharine Ross. "I'd never asked a girl in acting class to do a love scene," he says. He adds, "No girl asked me, either."

Hoffman looked at Miss Ross, sexy in the prescribed wholesome manner. "A girl like that," he said to himself, "would never go for a guy like me in a million years." Miss Ross shared the sentiment. Her first impression of her impossible lover: "He looks about 3 feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt. This is going to be a disaster."

It nearly was. Dusty couldn't do anything right. At one point he felt so hapless, so helpless, so desperately in need of something to reassure himself that he reached out and grabbed Miss Ross by the behind. Then and there Miss Ross advised Mr. Hoffman to keep his hands to himself.

Despite, or because of, all the faux passes, Nichols recognized that Hoffman understood the sufferings of Ben Braddock -- a stunned young man who senses that something is rotten in his world but can't define it. "He had a kind of pole-axed quality with life, but great vitality underneath." He got the part.

The agony of the screen test persisted throughout the filming. "It's never any fun for me," Hoffman says solemnly. "It doesn't matter who I'm working for. I never enjoy it." He often felt bludgeoned by Nichols.

"I get to you sometimes, don't I? You just kind of clam up when I do," Nichols said.

"I guess that's true," Dusty agreed. "In New York I blow my top when things aren't going right. But here I go to the other extreme."

"That's no good," Nichols said. "Just tell me to go to hell."

"I can't do that," said Hoffman.

"Why not?" Mike asked.

"You're the director," said Dusty. And to the end of the filming, when things were going badly, he was forced to agonize inside. The results delighted Nichols. "On screen," he says, "Dusty appears to be simply living his life without pretending."

Dusty is one of the few new leading men in Hollywood who look like people rather than profiles in celluloid. Walter Matthau, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, even Steve McQueen are making it in movies despite of their not-so-ideal looks. Of course, this doesn't move Dusty to forget his face. Besides the mirror there are live reminders. He met the eminent Joseph Levine, who was financing the film for $3 million. "You know," confessed Levine after Hoffman left, "when he first came in I thought he was one of the messenger boys."

- David Zeitler, Life, Nov. 24, 1967.