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months—some in Hollywood still couldn’t believe that Columbia’s black comedy, which went leagues further than any prior studio movie in its near nihilistic savaging of cold war politics, would open at all. But Beatty had been awed by an early screening, and the film’s thirty-five-year-old director was now on his list. 18
    The movie Beatty wanted Kubrick to direct was What’s New, Pussycat? , a comic take on sexual liberation and psychotherapy that Beatty’s friend and mentor, the talent agent Charles K. Feldman, had been trying to produce for ten years. After four dark-spirited movies in a row, Beatty was aching for a change of pace, a broadening of his range, and an image tweak. “I wanted to play somebody who was not a neurotic, sensitive type,” he says. “I thought the whole idea of sex and psychoanalysis was funny”—all the more after Lilith ’s humorless take on the same subject—“and I wanted to play a compulsive Don Juan.” The project had its earliest origins in Lot’s Wife , an old script by a Hungarian playwright that Feldman had initially hired Billy Wilder’s writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond, to overhaul. Beatty had since worked on the idea and made it his own, starting with the title, which was said to be one of the actor’s signature off-camera come-ons, and he had handpicked a new writer, Woody Allen, after seeing him do a stand-up comedy routine. “I thought he was funny as hell, and I said, ‘Charlie, let’s get this guy.’ Charlie was willing to spend $30,000. Woody wanted $40,000. I said to Charlie, ‘Well, I’ll pay him the extra ten, cheapskate,’ and Charlie said, ‘No, no, no, I’ll pay him,’ and then Woody said, ‘I’ll do it if I can be in the movie, in a little part.”’ After that, with rewrites progressing nicely, Beatty started shopping for a director. At first, he talked to another comic performer, Mike Nichols, who was considering making his first foray into directing. “I wanted a guy who’d never done a movie,” says Beatty. But Nichols, at that moment, had his eye on theater, not film, so they both moved on. 19
    Beatty was as skilled at courtship professionally as he was personally; alluring phrases like “It has to be you” and “You have to save this project” could work wonders when spoken by someone who could turn on ardor and charisma as effectively as he did. But Kubrick, not one to say yes precipitously, wasn’t susceptible to charm—and he wasn’t interested in directing What’s New, Pussycat? The meeting ended pleasantly but inconclusively; a few minutes later, all thoughts of it were swept away by the day’s news. 20
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    As 1963 drew to a close, Beatty wasn’t feeling a great deal of urgency about getting Pussycat into production. He felt as charged with excitement about the French New Wave as everyone else and had already committed himself to his next film, 21 a low-budget, black-and-white absurdist comedy-drama that would pay direct homage to the French style, entitled Mickey One. Once again—as he had done with Kazan and Roman Spring ’s José Quintero—he would be working with a New York theater director: Arthur Penn. And after Mickey One , if What’s New, Pussycat? still wasn’t ready, there were other possibilities. Beatty had never bought a property to develop for himself before, but Inge had been urging him to read a first novel by a twenty-four-year-old writer that had just been published 22 and had a perfect part for him, comic, sexy, contemporary, and within his age range. The book was The Graduate.
    Although it sounds unlikely, the protagonist of Charles Webb’s novel appeared, on the page, to be tailor-made for Beatty. In The Graduate , Benjamin Braddock is the scion of an apparently WASPy family, a cocky, aloof college track star who returns home for the