At his second wedding to [Eve] Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes — he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry. Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street, recalled that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony, wearing the only clothes they owned....In case you were wondering what happened to Elaine and Benjamin after that bus ride they're taking in the end of "The Graduate."
Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg....
In the late 1970s the couple moved back to the West Coast and took their sons out of school, choosing to home-school them, which was not sanctioned at the time.... Charles Webb worked menial jobs: clerk at a Kmart, itinerant farmworker, house cleaner. The couple were caretakers at a nudist colony in New Jersey, earning $198 a week....
ADDED: One of the sons is "a performance artist who once cooked a copy of 'The Graduate' and ate it with cranberry sauce."
AND: Eve Rudd's brother was the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd:
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34 comments:
Roswell Rudd lived in Woodstock for a while and I jammed with him. Hell, I jammed with everybody in Woodstock during a certain era.
Don’t know if he’s still around. Being a “legendary trombonist” doesn’t necessarily translate into making much money doing it. I’ve met and played with a whole bunch of legendary jazz musicians who couldn’t pay their bills.
It’s important to have the right amount of money, not too little and not too much, depending on one’s circumstances. I have just about the right amount for my circumstances.
Being the towel guy at the nudist colony would be an interesting gig in another life.
I hope he enjoyed his life.
If anyone here is thinking of giving away a California bungalow, please feel free to contact me.
he chose to live in poverty
But, in the late '70's he was earning $198 a week....
$198/week*52weeks/year==$10,296/yr
poverty?
My 1st computer operator job, in Chicago, in 1981 paid $13,100/yr (plus a %10 shift bonus)
That's a LOT more than $10,296; but i was comfortably well off;
enough, to buy a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda (with a 383magnum V-8 and the Hurst 4speed)
the FIRST YEAR i was working), you subtract that car from my wages and i was about $10,200 a year. You know what i WASN'T I wasn't in Poverty
Journalists are REALLY Ignorant, they should call them all Igna
GOD i Miss that 'cuda!
Weird.
I came across the book not long after I saw the movie back when it came out, and I read it. I was struck by how much the book was dialogue-driven, and the lines in the movie were lifted directly from the novel. Buck Henry was famously given screenwriting credit, but from what I could see he had very little work to do.
Ah katherine ross who was also in the stepford wives and even on the dynasty spinoff (where she was supposed to be john james characters mother)
Family of nuts. I hope the line died out.
For once it is possible to say "He literally had a consuming interest in literature" and be grammatically precise.
"At his second wedding to [Eve] Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes"
A real man of principle, there.
Caretaker at a nudist colony, eh? Lots of Windex for the exercise equipment and the leather sofas.
I hope he was content. It sounds like a dull and stressful way to go through life. It would not surprise me if there were something like OCD at work too.
If you do not make any money, you do not spend any money. You do not support anybody, and you do not pay taxes to support the community you live in. That means nobody benefits from your existence. Although I envy that situation and the freedom it must bring, it is selfish, and I just don't have the balls to throw out that big a fuck you. At least not yet, but I'm working up the courage.
The son was my best friend in 5th grade. Then he left school and we lost touch. Among much else he told me his father was an author who wrote the Graduate. There was no way the head of such a family had done something so mainstream. Both his parents had shaved heads when I knew them and wore scarves as hats. And they behaved funny, kind of floating above everyone else and treating their sons to much as adults and unlike any other parents in our small town. Their house was old and they had few possessions. But my friend was one of the smartest people I have known and more wordly than anyone I had met. Then I got older, learned what the graduate was and believed he had lied to me. I felt embarrassed that I had told others what he told me as it so obviously could not be true and just his joke on me. He joked a lot in sophisticated ways. Then I grew older yet and learned about Charles Webb’s life. I realized that I had tricked myself about being tricked. David, if you read this drop me a line!
Maybe they should have taken that advice -- "Plastics." As for money, one of Gandhi's close assistants put it well. "It cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty."
""He had a very odd relationship with money. He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money.""
These people were parasites.
They contributed nothing and sucked the life out of productive parts of society.
They would be summarily murdered in almost every part of the world not occupied and protected by the United States unless they found some tribe that would indulge them.
Totally their choice to do this. But people should recognize what they were.
If they wanted to live in a country where people were lazy and didn't contribute to anything other than their own entitled selfishness they could have moved to Afghanistan or Iraq or any other 3rd world shit hole that is populated by people just like them. Those societies reflect the laziness of the population.
There are a lot of people that need to get the fuck out of the country and go where their beliefs and sense of justice are already implemented. At least for a year or two.
I respect those old school, illegal times homeschoolers. Very punk.
Hey, St. Anthony would walk away from his hut every other year or so and set fire to it so he wouldn't get attached to worldly goods.
I've said it before & I'll say it again -- there are a lot of people who would be better off in monastic communities if only they could get beyond that teeny-tiny matter of actually having some faith.
You'll meet some woman who homeschooled when it was illegal and she'll seem sweet, and she'll can and quilt or whatever, and then the conversation will come around to the government, and it's basically, "I don't deal with The Man. Fuck The Man." She won't use those words, but that's what she'll say.
Mental illness sucks.
I’m grateful I’m not afflicted with it.
While I admire someone who actually lives their ideals, and I share his fondness for anarchy as a political attitude, it’s important to note that his lifestyle was only possible because the economic system of the broader society was not anarchy. He lived off the wealth generated by capitalism. Anarchy doesn’t mean squandering your talents to live off menial jobs made possible by other people’s excess.
Yeah, ST - Roswell Rudd was "out there" wasn't he? I remember hearing him and Steve Lacy in NYC digging out Monk tunes I never heard before way back in the 70's, IIRC.
re: Webb and family. It bothers me not a bit that they chose to live in this way. The difference between that time and now is the will to impose their choices on all to "make a better world."
Literally a dying breed
@Freeman Hunt
You probably read the book "Educated."
I just can't go along with making his life so difficult. Why not accept the income stream, live as frugally as possible, give all that you don't need to live to charity, and keep all your time and use it to live a noncommercial life, to love your family, and to write, using your gift? What is the good of working in low-paying jobs, giving all your time to that?
I see that he wrote a book about home schooling his children and how he and his wife lived in later years, and I was going to put it in my Kindle and read it immediately, but it wasn't available.
@NYC JournoList
Assuming you're not tricking us about tricking yourself about him tricking you, that's quite a story. You should try to contact the man. It's not so hard to find people these days. Alternatively, you could write a memoir on this topic. You could do both, with the search for your old friend an aspect of the memoir.
Charles Webb worked menial jobs: clerk at a Kmart, itinerant farmworker, house cleaner.
Damn, I hate the way we devalue honest work while elevating dishonest occupations such as influencer, politician or journalist
I like to say that the things you own end up owning you. This may be extreme but I can't say I disagree with his basic point in living this way. If you can be content with having very little, you'll always be a rich man.
I love that movie. It's so damn good.
Dressing up for, and playing the part of, a poor person is a lot easier when you have to work at "shedding" your possessions.
I love blog posts like this. This is what originally brought me to Althouse. I find this story very interesting. There are people among us who think in a such completely different way than the rest of society. So much so that they cannot even properly communicate with the society around them. (and no- I'm not talking about the simpletons roaming the streets of our cities these days.) In some cases they are considered 'nuts'. But this guy...he wrote The Graduate, which seems to be such an insightful portrayal of certain types of Americans in a specific era. His story does appear to make him seem...not normal. Many brilliant people are not normal.
But his life...so clearly tied to the 60s culture in his way of dropping out. Home schooling before it had appeared enough in society to even bothered to be castigated by those on the payroll of the teachers unions. His life story would be a better story than The Graduate. Except he would have no say in how Hollywood portrayed him.
gilbar said...
Journalists are REALLY Ignorant, they should call them all Igna
--------==========
I see what you did there - nicely sly dig at Inga
also @ Achilles said...
""He had a very odd relationship with money. He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money.""
These people were parasites.
They contributed nothing and sucked the life out of productive parts of society.
-------------
- if Webb gave value for value in free contract in what way can he be called parasite?
- why are you letting emotion win against rational thought.
"...owning things oppressed them."
So they gave away things.
So they passed that oppression on to their friends?
I never saw the point of that movie. Hell, I never saw the point of Dustin Hoffman. The chick was OK, but hardly worth all that fuss. Basically, it was about the Mom, I guess.
@ Althouse
I read Educated for a book club, but I'm not talking about people like that. Nothing cool about abuse or educational neglect. I'm talking about people I've met locally.
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