Robert Benton Remembered

The first time I met Robert Benton, I asked him, “Off the record, who’s the most difficult actor you worked with?” His response: “This is ON the record: Dustin Hoffman!” But then he went on to acknowledge the actor’s important contributions to Kramer vs. Kramer, the film that won them both Oscars.

Hoffman won for best actor, emerging star Meryl Streep won for best supporting actress. Benton won for best director and best screenplay, and the film for best adapted screenplay based on the novel

Hoffman was notorious on set. At one point, according to a Vanity Fair article in 2016 looking back on the making of Streep’s career and the seminal role the movie played in it, Hoffman slapped Streep across the face and, to get her to an anguished emotional state as an actress, goaded her with taunts about losing the love of her life shortly before filming began. And of course the movie was set in New York, filmed at the old 20th Century soundstage at West 54th Street and Tenth Avenue, and in Central Park, and in J.G. Melon, the pub on East 74th Street. Hoffman was the star, and in the early film posters Streep’s role was considerably underplayed.

“He’d come in every morning,” Benton recalled, and the first thing he’d say was, ‘Now, don’t say no.’ That’s every director’s nightmare, but then he’d offer a great idea not in the script, like making French toast with his kid.”

Robert Benton died this week, at the age of 92. We stayed friends, though he became pretty much a recluse after his wife, the artist Sallie Benton, died, in 2023. I had lunch with him a few months back. His routine by then was unchanging: lunch at Orsay on Third Avenue, next door to where he lived. He was trying to write a final script, with the author Richard Russo. Alas.

We talked a lot about Paul Newman, with whom he’d worked several times, including on Nobody’s Fool and Twilight, a final film few saw but I highly recommend. The cast was Newman, Gene Hackman, James Garner, and Susan Sarandon. He directed others to their Oscars, including Sally Field in Places in the Heart and of course Streep for her role in Kramer.

When I told him I would soon be meeting Joe Morgenstern, the former award-winning film critic, he said, “Tell him he saved me.” Why? Because Morgenstern had the unique courage in 1967 to follow his negative magazine review of Bonnie and Clyde, which Benton co-wrote, with a rave the following week.

You couldn’t not admire and enjoy this Texas-born man. Sybil Sage, a longtime comedy writer, recalls, “He was incredibly sympathetic when I told him about our [Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernie] Madoff money situation, and then someone mentioned that he worked at a soup kitchen (not something you’d expect of a successful, powerful Hollywood personality). So, when Benton said he hoped we’d see each other again, I told him it seemed likely, given that he worked at a soup kitchen.”

Peter Emerson, a political strategist, met Benton at a film festival in Nantucket and then stayed friends and political comrades. “Benton was one of the most perfect imperfect humans I’ve ever known,” says Emerson. “His love of Sallie, his wife, and John, his son, was absolute and always the first topic of conversation. He was cosmically wise and with a forgiving love. Wise in his reflections of going back to see the truth, not the myth, of his childhood—and life—and his unconditional love of friends. His humor and capacity to laugh at himself—and me—was addicting.”

He was a loyal friend. He came to see an off-Broadway show I’d written and spoke of our daughter’s onstage appeal: “You can’t take your eyes off her,” he said. Could anything be better than having those eyes on someone you love?