The most famous song from The Graduate barely mentions the film, was written about a different woman entirely, and asks a question about a retired baseball player that the player himself did not understand.
Here is who Mrs. Robinson started out as, what the DiMaggio line is doing, and why a song about the past ended up attached to a film about the future.
The Short Answer
It began as “Mrs. Roosevelt,” a song Paul Simon was writing about times past and about Eleanor Roosevelt. Mike Nichols heard the unfinished version, told Simon to call her Mrs. Robinson instead, and the syllables fit. The character in the song and the character in the film have almost nothing in common.
The Story Behind the Song
Nichols was a Simon and Garfunkel fan and wanted their music in The Graduate. He approached Columbia to license existing songs and persuaded Simon to write new material for the film.
Touring got in the way. Simon delivered two new songs, “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs,” and Nichols was unimpressed by both. They later appeared on the album Bookends instead.
Then Simon played a fragment of something unfinished, a song he has described as being about times past, about Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe DiMaggio and things of that order. Nichols responded that it was not Mrs. Roosevelt, it was Mrs. Robinson, and the song went into the film.
The completed version appeared on Bookends in 1968 and was released as a single that April. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won two Grammy Awards in 1969, including record of the year, the first rock record to take that category.
How much of it is about the film?
One line, roughly. The song mentions the Robinsons keeping a secret and hiding it from the children, which reads as the affair. Everything else describes a woman who does not match Anne Bancroft’s character at all.
The Mrs. Robinson of the song is somewhere institutional. There is a reference to a place where she can hide what she is taking, a cupboard, a scrapbook, and a stream of encouragement from people who do not know what to say to her. Simon has described the writing as stream of consciousness, and the result is a suburban wife adrift rather than a predator.
Why Joe DiMaggio?
Because of what he stood for and because of how the name scans. Simon has said the DiMaggio line arrived at the very beginning of the writing, before most of the rest existed.
Simon was a bigger Mickey Mantle fan. On The Dick Cavett Show, Mantle asked why he was not in the song instead. Simon’s answer was that it came down to syllables and beats.
DiMaggio himself was confused by it, and asked Simon why he was wondering where he had gone, given that he was still around. The line was never about his absence from public life. It was about the disappearance of a certain kind of public figure.
What did Simon say when DiMaggio died?
He wrote about him in The New York Times in 1999. In the piece he set DiMaggio against a period of presidential scandal and televised confession, and mourned the loss of the man’s grace, his privacy, his loyalty to his wife’s memory and the power of his silence.
Simon performed the song at Yankee Stadium in DiMaggio’s honour the same year. That sequence, thirty years after the record, is the clearest statement anyone has made of what the line meant.
Is it a happy song?
It does not sound like one but it is not. Underneath the strumming and the wordless chorus there is a woman being managed, a country that has lost its heroes, and a set of reassurances about heaven that nobody in the song appears to believe.
That gap between the arrangement and the content is the trick. The Graduate uses the song over scenes of aimless driving, and the brightness of the recording does the same work in the film that it does on the record: it makes the emptiness easier to sit through.
Why does a nostalgic song fit a generational film?
Because the film is more nostalgic than its reputation suggests. The Graduate was received as a young person’s attack on their parents, and the song attached to it is a lament for a vanished America.
Seen from a distance, the two things fit better than they did at the time. Both are about people who cannot see a future they want, and neither of them offers one.
How successful was it?
Number one in the United States and the duo’s second chart topper after “The Sound of Silence.” Two Grammy Awards at the ceremony in 1969, for record of the year and for best contemporary pop performance by a duo or group.
It has been covered by Frank Sinatra, Bon Jovi and The Lemonheads, among many others, and it remains the song most people name when the duo comes up, ahead of anything on the same album.
Why it lasted
Because the question at its centre has no answer and keeps applying. Every generation reaches a point where it decides the admirable people have gone, and this song has been available for that feeling since 1968.
Simon wrote it about Eleanor Roosevelt, a director renamed it after a fictional adulterer, and it ended up being about a baseball player. Very few songs survive that much interference and come out coherent.
Film songs are the ones people carry longest without ever learning the title, because the credits roll too fast; when you have the melody and a scene, our song lyrics search closes the gap.