“Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel is one of those rare, synergistic examples of music and film combining forces to lift one another. In the case of “Mrs. Robinson”, its cinematic counterpart was The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols. The film crew began working with the folk duo through Columbia Records, which brokered a deal with Embassy Pictures that would pay the musicians $25,000 to provide three new songs for the film starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.
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Paul Simon’s first offerings to Nichols were “Punky’s Dilemma” and “Overs”, which didn’t win over the filmmaker nearly as much as the duo’s hits like “The Sound of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair”. So, Nichols, Simon, and Art Garfunkel continued to brainstorm music that felt authentic to the duo and would work in the movie.
Paul Simon later said during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, “Mike Nichols was almost finished with the film. What would happen is, in order to fill up a scene, we would take a piece of music and put it there, just to hear what the music would sound like.” During the film’s iconic wedding scene, Nichols told Simon he specifically wanted “guitar music. So, I was just riffing, playing that opening lick.”
“It wasn’t working,” Simon added. That’s when he pulled the winning song, still half-finished, out of his back pocket.
How Simon & Garfunkel Settled on the Name “Mrs. Robinson”
Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 hit, “Mrs. Robinson”, is so synonymous with The Graduate that it’s difficult to imagine the folk duo writing the song for anything but Mike Nichols’ film from the same year. After all, Mrs. Robinson is the woman behind the memorable leg scene—the wife of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock’s dad’s law partner. With the character’s name right there in the title, it would be easy to assume the song was tailor-made for the movie. But in reality, “Mrs. Robinson” was more of a placeholder than an actual reference to The Graduate.
Art Garfunkel later described the stalemate meeting where Mike Nichols and the musicians struggled to reach a creative consensus, per Marc Eliot’s Paul Simon: A Life. “Paul had been working on what is now ‘Mrs. Robinson’, but there was no name in it. We’d just fill in with any three-syllable name. And because of the character in the picture, we just began using the name ‘Mrs. Robinson’ to fit. One day, we were sitting around with Mike talking about ideas for another song. I said, ‘What about ‘Mrs. Robinson’?’ Mike shot to his feet. ‘You have a song called ‘Mrs. Robinson’, and you haven’t even shown it to me?’”
To Simon’s credit, the duo had reached no definitive conclusion that they would use “Mrs. Robinson” as the song’s titular character. In fact, Simon was previously singing “Mrs. Roosevelt” before they decided to try out character names from the movie. Had The Graduate character had one more or one less syllable in her name, the song might not have become the iconic track that we know it as today.
Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
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