Unhappy prospects ... Dustin Hoffman
in The Graduate
Photograph: AP
Reality supplies the unhappy ending for fiction once more as the bailiffs loom for the man who wrote The Graduate. Charles Webb, who based the characters played by Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross on himself and his partner, has told the Times that the couple are "two months in arrears on our rent and defaulting on our bank loans".
The 66-year-old writer's screen credits don't stop with the novel behind the £60m-grossing Graduate. His latest novel, New Cardiff, was released in a version starring Colin Firth as Hope Springs in only 2003. So how come he's facing eviction?
After his debut novel became an award-winning film Webb seemed set fair for fame and fortune. But a one-off payment of £14,000 was all he received for the film, and a combination of bad reviews and a retreat from the limelight saw him take a succession of menial jobs. New Cardiff was his first novel for 25 years and received mixed reviews. The film adaptation, for which he is reported to have received £60,000, bombed at the box office.
Webb, who has been living in Britain for six years, is hoping that a benefactor will offer somewhere for him and his partner - who changed her name to Fred as a gesture of solidarity with a men's support group - to stay while he tries to sort out a publishing deal for his latest novel, a sequel to The Graduate called Home School.
The book follows the adventures he and his partner had after removing their children from school. Home-schooling was illegal in California at the time, so they avoided the authorities by living in a succession of nudist camps.
Finding a publisher for this extraordinary story is proving to be fraught with difficulties. The film rights to the characters in The Graduate - and hence in Home School - are owned by the French media company, Canal Plus, a situation Webb is challenging in the French courts. And as if that weren't enough, he is also devoting much of his time to looking after Fred, who suffered a nervous breakdown five years ago and has been clinically depressed ever since.
But perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised at Webb's fate. The old joke about the young actress who was so stupid that she slept with the screenwriter contains an element of truth. When the Society of Authors surveyed children's writers last year they found that a third of their respondents earned less than the national minimum wage. In a world where the latest five-figure advance is worth nothing more than a couple of headlines, maybe it's no surprise that life's tough, even after you graduate to being a published author.
