A Father Finds His Son

By Gerald Clarke

The magical looking glass of Dustin Hoffman

Ratso Rizzo, the crippled hustler of Midnight Cowboy. The grizzled old codger of Little Big Man. The myopic counterfeiter of Papillon. The eager virgin of The Graduate. Carl Bernstein of All the President's Men. Dustin Hoffman has played them all in a career of dazzling virtuosity. But in Kramer vs. Kramer, he has assumed perhaps the most difficult persona of all: Dustin Hoffman.

The plot does not follow the facts of his life, of course, but many parts of Ted Kramer have been consciously modeled on the actor. "We wanted Dustin to draw on his own volatile, engaging personality in creating the character," says Director Robert Benton. "We tape-recorded our talks and took endless notes on his language. Everything was carefully worked out." If Kramer is brash, egocentric and often obnoxious, so too is Hoffman. If Kramer is tender, loving and often vulnerable, then Hoffman is as well. Like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, he has turned the screen into a mirror, a magical looking glass into his own head and heart.

In his last two movies, Straight Time and Agatha, Hoffman had bitter rights with the studio, First Artists, over the script and editing. In Kramer vs. Kramer, he made certain that he would be involved from the beginning. To find the right boy to play his son, he sat in on a hundred or more casting sessions, then did video tapes with 40 finalists before choosing Justin Henry. Together with Benton and Producer Stanley Jaffe, he worked and worried for months over the character of Kramer, trying to get him exactly right. "I've never seen anybody come to the party with more to offer than Dustin does," says Jaffe. "He had a whole palette of colors." Reflecting a second, Jaffe adds, "But we had some terrific fights."

Nearly everyone who has ever worked with him says the same thing, sometimes with less admiration than Jaffe. Hoffman, 42, is known in Hollywood as the archetypical difficult actor. But for all those critics Hoffman has a word of caution. "They should think twice before they rail against me," he told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "They may have done their best work with me. I'm like that clocker who is always saying, 'Come on! Come on! Come on!' "

"Dustin is obsessed with his work," explains Playwright Murray Schisgal, who is probably Hoffman's best friend.

"Consequently, he is not an easy guy to work with. He wants to examine all aspects of a line before he commits himself to going with it." They met in 1966 when Hoffman, then an unknown, was doing three of Schisgal's one-act plays in Stockbridge, Mass. The author liked to take early-morning walks, and every day when he left his hotel, Hoffman would be waiting for him. "He'd have the script and a million questions to ask: 'What's your thought here? What's your thought there?' I had never worked with an actor like that. He is eternally dissatisfied with what he has achieved. Right now he isn't negative about Kramer. But I have no doubt that in six months he'll be saying, I should have done it differently.' " Maybe not this time. Kramer is more than just another film to Hoffman. He has a special feeling toward children--and they toward him. "He's one of those natural fathers," says Benton. "Kids drift to him instinctively and immediately. For that reason I worked out an arrangement.

Any time I had direction for Justin, I'd give it to Dustin. Then he'd pass it along to the child. Justin totally believed in Dustin, who was a genuine friend. And Dustin was a fantastic acting coach. He knew just what buttons to press."

Instead of being given a script, Justin was told by Hoffman what a scene was about and then allowed to say whatever he wanted. "When kids learn lines," says Hoffman, "you can't cut them with an ice pick." Camera angles were kept simple so that father and son, who were expected to improvise, could move wherever they wanted. In one early scene Justin, who was supposed to be rebelling against Hoffman, showed his defiance by eating a bowl of ice cream after he had been told not to. But Justin, suddenly the improvisational actor, turned the battle into a ferocious clash of wills by taunting Hoffman with an upraised spoon. "It shocked me when he fought back," says Hoffman.

Hoffman understands kids so well that he finds it a particular injustice that nature has provided for only one sex, the opposite one, to carry children and give birth. When he was preparing to play Ted Kramer, he kept staring at young mothers and pregnant women, especially pregnant women wheeling children in baby carriages.

"They have an aura that you don't see in a man with his kids. I hear music when I see them--definitely strings." He even imagines himself angrily taking his case for male pregnancy to God, a bureaucrat behind a desk in the Revised Hoffman Version. " 'I don't understand,' I pipe up. 'Why don't I get to carry it?' " God tries to explain, but when Hoffman continues to complain, God brusquely ends the conversation: "I don't want to talk about it. I've spent a lot of time on this." When his own child Jenna was born, Hoffman did what little he could to make up for such obvious discrimination. He was there, helping, and he had a photographer stationed outside the delivery-room door, ready to capture the first moments of new life.

Another reason Kramer was so important to Hoffman was that he knew while he was making it that his marriage to Dancer and Actress Anne Byrne would probably be over before it opened. That seems to be the case. They have been separated for more than a year and are negotiating for a divorce. Anne, 35, has been a professional dancer since she was 17, but she virtually abandoned her career when she married Hoffman, in 1969. Several years ago, however, she became restless and started dancing again.

Their marriage, which apparently had had troubles for some time, foundered two years ago when Hoffman was shooting Straight Time in Los Angeles. He was under enormous pressure, fighting with the studio even as he was trying to create a difficult character, and he asked Anne to stay with him. Her own career was beginning to take shape, however, and she decided not to leave New York. A friend points out in Anne's defense that Hoffman is inconstant in his emotions: after an enormous outpouring of charm and affection, he can turn icily distant.

Anne is now living in their Manhattan town house, with Karina, 13, her daughter from a previous marriage, and Jenna, 9. Dustin has just bought a co-op apartment overlooking Central Park, with an extra bedroom that the girls can sleep in when they come to visit. Last week he was seeing them in between publicity appearances for Kramer. Jenna arrived for one meeting with her appointment written in green pencil on the back of her hand: "Daddy--3:15."

Another reason for his breakup with Anne may have been his fast and roving eye. He loves to flirt and he does it constantly, as if it were an involuntary reflex. As he walked into the crowded elevator of his New York hotel last week, he suddenly blurted out to the operator:

"Kathy, I must have your answer. Is it yes or no? I have to know now." Down in the lobby he saw a long-legged beauty.

"Wait!" he said, blocking her way. "Give me five minutes of your time. Please! It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Hear me out!" The woman did, but when she agreed to everything he proposed, he left in a hurry. "I was embarrassed," he explained later. "She said yes too quickly."

Meryl Streep, who came to admire him while working on Kramer, nonetheless has an unpleasant memory of one such encounter several years ago, when she was auditioning for a play he was directing.

"He came up to me and said, I'm Dustin--burp--Hoffman,' and he put his hand on my breast. What an obnoxious pig, I thought."

More than many people, however, Hoffman frequently enjoys being alone. He gets up very early so that he can enjoy the morning's quiet time by himself, and he spends a lot of time exercising, often jumping rope for an hour to a loud rock cadence from a tape recorder. He has a small group of friends in New York, people like Schisgal and Writers Joseph Heller and David Goodman. In Los Angeles, where he also has a house, he keeps company with Screenwriter Robert Towne and Director Hal Ashby. "But I don't hang out that much," he says. "I don't seek out friends. I seek out work."

Hoffman spent years in analysis, trying to compensate for lack of height (he is 5 ft. 6 in.) and his relatively poor childhood; his father was at one time a salesman, whose life Hoffman sadly compares to that of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman.

Dustin also had, he believes, the worst case of acne in Los Angeles, where he grew up. At one point an analyst asked him what he wanted out of life. Hoffman, who was then living on New York's Lower East Side and struggling on off-Broadway, told him: he wanted to be employed, he wanted to be married and to have kids, and he wanted to own a Manhattan town house. "My life is a jump-cut," he says rue fully. "Suddenly I'm married, successful beyond my wildest dreams, and I have a town house. But the same person is still on the couch."

Which is to say that the brilliant Hoffman mirror is showing him the same face-- with a few new flecks of gray in his hair-- that it did back then. "I don't know what happiness is," he insists. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? I'd strike out happiness.

Make it life, liberty and the pursuit of growth. Walk down the street and look at the faces. When you demand happiness, aren't you asking for something unrealistic?"

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