COVER STORY : Down to the Basic Hoffman : The actor’s perfectionism has earned him quite a reputation; but as he sees it, details are everything and nobody is as hard on Dustin Hoffman as Dustin Hoffman

Few actors are lucky enough to come up with a single role that informs the psyche of a generation or else slips into the cultural vernacular, like a Captain Queeg or a Vito Corleone.

At 54, in a career that spans 23 movies, Dustin Hoffman has had at least four: in “The Graduate,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Tootsie” and “Rain Man.” The number goes up to five if you’ll concede “Kramer vs. Kramer” as a telling response to the popularly overlooked pain of marital breakup, and a ‘70s male alarm at America’s burgeoning feminist revolt. Six if you see in his dogged portrayal of Carl Bernstein in “All the President’s Men” a playing out of the tacit idealism that, for many young people, made investigative journalism seem a heroic calling.

“They’ll know him from ‘Hook,’ ” says playwright Murray Schisgal, speaking of yet another generation of young audiences who will discover Hoffman in the upcoming Steven Spielberg adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” in which Robin Williams plays Peter and Julia Roberts plays Tinkerbell.

Schisgal, who has been a close friend of Hoffman’s for more than 25 years, adds: “It’s one of his best roles. What pleases me as his friend is to see how often he goes after roles he can easily fail at. ‘How good are you?’ I like to ask him. ‘How’re you going to play a woman, an autistic person, a Hook?’ These are the kinds of roles which, if he fails, he falls flat on his face.”

Hoffman, of course, has no such intention. Some actors absorb their characters into an inner process beyond cognition and then turn them out again in performance. The two-time Academy Award winner (for “Kramer” and “Rain Man”) and four-time Oscar nominee puzzles over his characters from every conceivable angle of approach. He intellectualizes them. He speculates about them (“I sometimes see Ratso having a meal with ‘Tootsie’s’ Dorothy,” he recalls of his “Midnight Cowboy” role). He brackets them between the circumstantial and the particular. Of Captain Hook, for example, he says:

“Barrie said you leave your innocence, your selfishness and your self-centeredness when you grow out of being a kid. Not Peter Pan. What does he become? A corporate lawyer, a pirate, totally self-absorbed and obsessed with power. Why does Hook hate Peter? Because he took his hand. And what can he do to hurt him most? Win the love of his children.”

That’s the circumstance. Then Hoffman zeroes in on the character: “I took a traditional approach: Eton, the accent and the wigs and costumes and manner of Charles II. Bob Hoskins and I hit it off right away in the way he thought of Smee. It became like ‘The Dresser.’ We’re two old queens. What are pirates? They’re on ship a lot. It’s like two married people. It was a little like doing ‘Tootsie’ again, finding through the costume and makeup a character that didn’t seem to lie.”

(One magazine reports that advance word has “Hook” failing to live up to expectations and that Hoffman and Spielberg have “distanced themselves” from the movie, with Spielberg claiming that Hoffman had in effect directed himself. But other reports contradict this, and Hoffman says of the director: “He listens to everybody. We not only felt free to make suggestions, he actively asked us what we thought. But there was never any doubt whose movie this is, or who made the decisions at the end of the day. He’s like a wonderful, wide-eyed 10-year-old; this is his baby.” Spielberg is reportedly in Europe and unavailable for comment.)

Such constant worry and rumination are among the things that have labeled Hoffman a difficult actor to work with, difficult , in Hollywood parlance, being a word that often connotes something worse.

“He can’t distinguish between a pimple and a tumor,” says Arthur Penn, who directed Hoffman in “Little Big Man.” “Everything involves his total attention. He has the kind of meticulousness that doesn’t settle for ‘OK, let’s just get it in the can.’ Truffaut once said that you start every picture with the idea that it’s going to be a masterpiece, and halfway through, you just hope you can get it finished. That’s not true of Dustin. He’s ‘up’ all the time. It’s wonderful, but it’s exhausting. He does take up a disproportionate amount of time and space.”

The tag has followed Hoffman around like something stuck on the heel of his shoe. He sees himself as someone whose preoccupation with Getting It Right has been misconstrued into Getting It His Way, and other people’s failure to distinguish between them clearly bothers him.

“I’m my own toughest critic, in that banal phrase,” he says. “I look at my work on the screen and say, ‘That’s not good.’ I do have a conceit: I’m not a good-looking guy, but I have a gift, and that is, what affects me is not private or esoteric. What affects me affects a lot of other people.

“The star is fair game. I understand that. But what goes on between an actor and director changes meaning when it’s reported to the public. With ‘Tootsie,’ when it blew up between me and Sydney Pollack, I was the producer. He had come on at the eleventh hour. Murray (Schisgal) and I had thought up the story, even the title.” (Larry Gelbart has a co-credit for the script, but other writers reportedly worked on it as well.) “Sydney wanted to make it his. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a wonderful relationship. Our problems weren’t in the work process. They were in the conceptual process.”

Hoffman’s unease is also based on the inevitable frustration of knowing that it’s the director who determines how the actor will be seen. (Early in his career he said: “Acting, especially film acting, seems to me to be more of a female profession. The director, who has all the creative power, really uses the actor.”) That discomfort also extends to interviews, for the same reason--if you substitute the reporter and editor for the director.

Hoffman was recently in Chicago to begin filming “Hero,” the new Stephen Frears film, and he showed up for an appointment in the restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel with such a dour expression on his face that he looked as though he’d been forced into the room at hidden gunpoint. He was cordial, but tense and wary, and opened the conversation with a couple of small-talk questions. Once he warms up, he’s a voluble, convivial figure. When he feels particularly strongly about a topic, his voice drops with surprising force from that plaintive Ratso Rizzo level in the sinuses to a more cavernous region in his chest. Once settled, he marched unguided to the question of his reputation:

“(Critic) Leonard Maltin says to me, ‘I hear you’re difficult.’ How do you answer that? My wife says, ‘Once they ask that, you’re at a loss,’ and I should just joke about it. You have to say something. The truth of the matter is that the press, to the surprise of some, has a stronger effect on movies than probably ever before.”

Hoffman’s meticulousness has often, to him, run at odds with the generalities and unanticipated nuances that come out in interviews. (“I keep saying I’ll never do another interview, but I keep hoping for redemption.”)

Never did the press seem more like a rogue elephant to him than during the hoopla that attended the making of the disastrous “Ishtar,” after which he told American Film magazine: “How can you open any movie when the audience has heard so much negative stuff about it first? . . . In many ways I can’t evaluate it, because it’s the only movie I’ve ever been on that was attacked like that. Before ‘Ishtar,’ I never realized there was this desire to kill a film.”

The box-office collapse of a movie can hurt the actor more than anyone else involved in the film. That, together with the increasing saturation of entertainment values in ‘90s American life, has made Hoffman more pained about the press than ever.

“There’s an increasing obsession with how movies are made, and your dealings with the press are made on the assumption that if you don’t do this, they’ll do that,” he said. “It’s like they were calling ‘Billy Bathgate’ ‘Billygate’ because of the difficulties that came up making the movie.” (Vanity Fair reported that Hoffman had warned Disney Pictures Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg that the movie would never recoup its costs if changes weren’t made.)

“It affected me,” Hoffman said. “I felt I had to back off saying anything. So in another interview (NBC entertainment reporter) Jim Brown gives me this look of horror and says, ‘Oh, come on, Dustin. Does this mean you’re a wimp on movies?’ What am I supposed to say to that?”

The critical consensus on “Bathgate” is that it’s a handsome but empty movie, and that’s precisely how Hoffman’s dramaturgical eye saw it from the first.

“I told (director Robert) Benton that if he was going to go up against Coppola and Scorsese, he was going to have to come up with something new,” the actor recalled. “I thought we had it in the idea of a Jewish Mafia, which had never been depicted before. I did a lot of research. I even went down to the Lower East Side of New York to meet some of those old hit men. They were funny, like Catskills comics.

“He didn’t want to do that. Then, the problem with my character was that it had no arc. If you didn’t know who Dutch Schultz had been, you couldn’t feel the force of his decline. Benton wanted it to be a love story, a triangle. But there was no catalyst, no second act. The girl flies off in a plane. That’s it. I said that the tension has to be that Billy is a troubled boy, ready to be brainwashed, ready to become a Brown Shirt for Schultz, and that I’m his father figure. But that didn’t happen either.

“I thought Benton and I would work as partners, like we did in ‘Kramer vs. Kramer.’ But when I saw that wasn’t going to happen, I just said, ‘It’s your movie. I’m just here to serve.’ There was no friction on the set. He put his arm around me and said, ‘This is the best experience I’ve ever had.’ ”

Hoffman attributes his reputation for being troublesome to a 1979 suit he filed against First Artists (a corporation formed by a group of actors, including Hoffman) and Warner Bros., which he claims reneged on a promise to give him the final editing rights to “Agatha” and “Straight Time” in exchange for working on a percentage of the grosses.

He lost the suit, as well as the friendship of Ulu Grosbard, whom he had hired to direct “Straight Time.” Afterward, Grosbard said of Hoffman in a Rolling Stone interview: “He’s very bright and very charming, but he can turn it on when he needs something from you and turn it off when he no longer needs anything.”

Hoffman continued: “The question is: How much do you hold the actor responsible for a picture? It is amazing how insecure you feel at the top, or near the top. Look at David Lean. After he made ‘Ryan’s Daughter,’ he didn’t work again for what? Fifteen years? It’s something I think the critics should take into account more. It’s like what Rainer Maria Rilke said in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’ I can’t remember the exact quote, dammit. He says that only love can benefit the artist.”

A somewhat portly, thoughtful-looking man walked by the table, looked at Hoffman gravely and stopped to introduce himself. “I’m one of the surgeons who treated your mother in La Jolla,” he said, handing Hoffman his card.

“I remember your name,” Hoffman said, fishing out a pair of half-spectacles to peer at it. “She was a sprite.”

“She was a spritzer,” the surgeon replied.

Hoffman stared at the card for a moment after the surgeon left. It was a succinct reminder of what had to have been the most arduous period of his adult life. In June, 1980, Lillian Hoffman suffered a heart attack and then a stroke. The following year his wife, Lisa, had to have a Cesarean section to deliver their first son, Jacob. She had literally come within an hour of losing her life. A day later, the infant turned blue and began gasping for air--he was suffering from hyaline membrane, a disease of underdeveloped lungs (the same disease that took the life of John F. Kennedy’s son when Kennedy was President).

Hoffman’s wife and son recovered. His mother did not, but she was uppermost in mind as he began filming “Tootsie” in 1981. “It was a tribute to her, and I was disappointed that no amount of Hollywood makeup could make Dorothy beautiful,” he said of his character. “Men have no idea what it’s like to be a woman. If I didn’t have such a low threshold of pain, and the makeup didn’t take four hours to do, I’d make a sequel.”

The actor described his mother as a live wire: “When she was young, she wanted to run away and become a showgirl. She never lost that desire.” Certainly she brightened an emotionally miserable childhood in which, as an undersize, scrawny kid, he suffered in comparison to his older brother Ron, a strappingly built athlete and an A student who went on to become an economics professor and is now a lawyer.

It was at Los Angeles High School, his mouth wired with braces and his face ravaged by an acne so severe “that I looked like a rifle range,” he said, where he came to a conclusion: “Either you’re in the ‘in’ club or you’re in the ‘out’ club. I was always out. It hasn’t changed after 40 years.”

Hoffman’s father, Harry, was a first-generation Russian Jew, stern and emotionally remote, who worked as a prop supervisor at Columbia before becoming a furniture salesman. “He was a child of the Depression,” Hoffman recalled, “very materialistic. Things took the place of love.” Hoffman first said of “Death of a Salesman,” before he went on to play Willy Loman on Broadway: “I felt my family’s privacy was being invaded.”

He had mediocre grades at Santa Monica City College, but a professor there turned him on to theater, and Hoffman enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he became friends with another student, Gene Hackman. This was during the era in which the Troy Donahue model was in vogue; Hoffman, understandably, opted for New York (as did Hackman).

Though he studied under Lee Strasberg, he had to scuffle through those first years. He worked as an attendant in a psychiatric hospital. He was a waiter, a dishwasher, a typist, a Times Square headline crier during a newspaper strike. As a practical joker and Macy’s toy salesman, he very nearly sold off Hackman’s son as a lifelike doll.

New York in the ‘60s was a good place for a young actor. It was the decade of early Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, La Mama and Cafe Cino, where a new American theater was beginning to take shape away from Broadway, and Hoffman was in the swim of it. (Robert Duvall was also starting out at the time and later said of Hoffman, who had become his best friend, “Dustin had more girls than Joe Namath.”)

After a slow start, Hoffman’s career began to move, when in 1965 he drew notice in a role that was a precursor to Ratso Rizzo--the crippled German homosexual Immanuel in Ronald Ribman’s “Harry, Noon and Night.” A year later he won an Obie for the role of Zoditch in Ribman’s “Journey of the Fifth Horse.”

Mike Nichols, who was preparing to make “The Graduate” in Hollywood, remembered Hoffman from Henry Livings’ farce “Eh?” at the Circle in the Square, and called the actor out for a screen test, which was such a disaster that when Hoffman dropped a subway token, a crew member bent down and picked it up for him, saying, “Here kid, you’re gonna need this.” Nichols stuck with him, of course, and “The Graduate” was an instant sensation, becoming the third-highest-grossing movie in history at the time.

A couple of years earlier, Hoffman had been seriously burned in a kitchen fire. While he was recuperating, he would look out the hospital window at the comings and goings on the street. “I vowed that if I ever got out of there,” he said, “I’d never take life for granted again.”

More than 25 years later, he thought of the incident once more: “I used to have this fantasy when I was a kid, a variation of ‘Am I the son of God?’ As a Jew, I couldn’t have that, exactly. Instead, I’d wonder if life would go on once I died. When I got burned, I thought it would. Now I’m not so sure. It may be coming to an end. The richest and most powerful people can’t escape the world anymore. They can’t run off to Gstaad or protect their kids in private schools. We may be coming to the end of what has turned out to be a special group of species. We may be all on the same sinking ship.”

Along with talent, an actor needs a sharp nose for the subtleties of political drift in Hollywood if he or she expects to stay on top. Hoffman is represented by Creative Artists Agency’s Michael Ovitz, a fact that affords him access to plum projects (he also has his own production company), and his keenness on having Tom Cruise aboard in “Rain Man” was viewed by some as a calculated move by an actor in his early 50s to join forces with a co-star popular with a younger audience.

Still, talent alone, or talent in tandem with behind-the-scenes political savvy, wouldn’t be enough to lend that crucial edge Hoffman brings to his best roles. Is it this sense of foreboding that makes him plot every part like a doomsday scenario?

“Being a celebrity allows the barrier of fear to be alleviated somewhat,” he said. “But you’re still living and dying at the same time. I feel very connected with people. The one gift I have, the thing I don’t have to work at consciously, is the knowledge that if I follow the things that mean most to me, if I can become emotionally affected by a character and really get inside, the audience will see it.”

Just then Lisa Hoffman herded the couple’s four young children into the restaurant toward his table. She’s a fine-boned, ethereal-looking woman with luminous, translucent white skin, like a rose petal. The children--Max, Rebecca, Jacob and Alexandra--share her skin tone and her full mouth, and were dressed up for Allie’s 4th birthday party--the girls in full-length floral dresses--like a family group in a Jane Austen background sketch.

The boys offered up sweeping high fives in greeting--”Don’t hit too hard,” their mother warned them. Allie clutched her mother’s skirt and glowered with injured innocence--her father’s interview was holding up the party.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. They filed out.

“I’m still surprised to see how well ‘Rain Man’ has done in other countries,” he continued. “I did so much research on it. It was so difficult to find the key. There’s an autistic novelist--such a thing is possible--Temple Grandin. What she said, all the doctors say: The autistic person can’t stand to be touched. Can’t stand it! But what she added was: ‘When I was growing up, I wanted nothing more than to hold someone and have someone hold me.’ ”

Hoffman rose. His face grew florid and he gave a pained, chesty laugh. “That’s everybody, isn’t it? It’s endemic in the world! “

The next day he was up at 6:30 in the morning for a daily tennis match with his trainer, a young teaching pro from Beverly Hills. On the drive over to the court, he talked about making “The Graduate”:

“A movie is like life in that everything depends on just a few decisions you make at the beginning. Mike Nichols wanted to cast against type--the character in the book is actually a blond WASPy guy. They were originally going to cast Robert Redford. We created a whole new character in rehearsal. The hard part for me was not playing someone nine years younger; it was catching the virginal quality, the Oedipal panic. Gene Hackman was originally cast to play Mr. Robinson, but he got fired and then picked up to do ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ and his career took off.”

Just before “The Graduate” was released in 1967, producer Lawrence Turman held a screening in his house, and someone said, “Great movie. Too bad the lead is miscast.” In retrospect, the opposite is true: Hoffman’s performance carries a surprisingly humorless, sketchy film, laced with a precious Simon & Garfunkel score.

“Nichols knew there was no second act--the Berkeley segment was all filler till we got to the wedding scene,” Hoffman said. “But he had those performances so keyed that we could’ve done it on a stage.”

The silences of Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock were not limp and self-pitying, as they may have been in another young actor. They were filled instead with the shunting suspicions and discontent that mirrored a young generation fearful of seeing itself harden into “plastics.” (He was paid $20,000 for the role; his salary now is reportedly in the $6-million range.)

In 1968, Life magazine ran a lengthy spread pitting Hoffman against John Wayne. It was supposed to contrast the old with the new, Wayne as “strong, decisive, nearly always a winner,” Hoffman as the new Everyman, “uncertain, complex, and by any familiar standard, (a) loser.” But in truth it described two Americas in perpetual conflict (the John Wayne figure re-emerging in the Reagan era), and two distinctly different approaches to acting.

Through Strasberg and Arthur Miller, Hoffman’s pedigree goes back to the Group Theatre of the ‘30s, the most important seminal troupe of 20th-Century America. He’s a scion of its urban disquiet.

At noon Hoffman showed up for his first day’s shooting of “Hero,” the Stephen Frears comedy in which Hoffman plays a small-time con artist on the lam who witnesses a plane crash and rescues all the passengers, but then has to hide while someone else (Andy Garcia) takes credit for the feat. “It’s quite a statement on the media and how Americans view heroes,” Hoffman said.

The shoot consisted of a single scene--his view of the plane screaming over the roof of his car in a shower of sparks during a downpour. How to make a plane crash funny is a daunting task, but Frears shot through the windshield, with Hoffman peering up and out like a face bobbing in an aquarium. (Hoffman stayed soaked for hours but kept up his spirits with nonstop chatter in a High Anglican accent and by telling jokes.)

Frears is not an autocratic director. His face has the shadowed, faintly viscid bloat of a blue-collar type who works long hours indoors and doesn’t watch what he bolts down by way of food and drink. His cheery ordinariness masks the sensitivity and shrewdness that shows up in his work (“My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Dangerous Liaisons”), and he’s adroit at keeping things going on the set to avoid tension.

He and Hoffman locked into each other like old pros who understand the monosyllabic shorthand of their game--a day’s shoot isn’t for long, earnest discussion; it’s for tactical adjustment. An arc light went out and an eight-minute break was called.

“An actor couldn’t call an eight-minute break to discuss his part, could he?” Hoffman said jokingly. He was testing Frears, who merely chuckled and busied himself with a monitor adjustment.

Schisgal stood off to the side, his heavy-lidded eyes conveying an ancient Hasidic mournfulness. “I come in early along and we talk,” he said of his relationship with Hoffman. “If he’s getting along with a director, like Barry Levinson or John Schlesinger or Mike Nichols, he doesn’t need me. He had trouble with Pollack and Benton. But that happens. Making a movie is like a marriage. Sometimes the tensions get too great.”

“We did three plays in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1965,” Schisgal said later, looking back on his first meeting with Hoffman. “He was in all three, with Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons. I’m an early riser. I’d come down at 6:30 and he’d be there on the porch, with a script and a million questions. I don’t know what drives him. Maybe it’s the younger-brother syndrome. He’s by nature an intense, passionate person. He goes until he conks out.

“With him, everything has to be good about a film: the sets, the costumes, the lighting--all the ingredients. He’s smart enough to know that if the film isn’t good, it won’t matter what he does. Dusty has a great sense of audience. He always addresses himself to that, not to some abstract notion of art or craft. Acting is never a dance for his own delectation.”

Frears agrees: “What he has, more than any other actor I know, is a sense of complicity with an audience.”

Adds Terrence Rafferty, film critic for the New Yorker: “I think he’s smarter than most actors, and probably smarter than a lot of the directors he’s worked with too--that’s what may get him into the trouble we’ve heard about. Obviously, getting ‘The Graduate’ was a stroke of luck, but he had had a brilliant stage career that prepared him. I really think that the quality that makes an actor great is the capacity for surprise. He has that to a greater degree than anyone else I know.”

“So many actors are concerned about their persona, but not him,” says Barry Levinson, who directed “Rain Man.” “I think his concern and interest for all the characters in a movie is the movie. He’s always pushing himself inside his character. He zeroes in and doesn’t let go. And he has no fear. He’ll try anything to see where it takes him.”

It was nearly 10 o’clock when Hoffman slumped in his seat on the drive back to the hotel and sipped an Amstel Light. His anxiety about working with Frears had been undetectable until now, when he and Schisgal began sharing notes. “He listens. That’s very good,” Hoffman said.

“I liked the feel of the first day,” Schisgal replied. “I hope he lets you use video. You can see what you’re doing so much sooner.”

“I’ll mention it,” Hoffman said. “I like that he’s not threatened. We can communicate. I think it’s gonna be good.”

A few days later in Los Angeles, a packet arrived in the mail. Hoffman had sent some e.e. cummings tapes on art, and a copy of the Rilke book, with the quote he couldn’t remember. It read: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just towards them.” To send the book was, once again, his way of getting it right.