Ariel Levy first met Dustin Hoffman in 1984. It was a couple of years after Tootsie came out, in which Hoffman plays a difficult actor who reinvents himself as an actress named Dorothy Michaels. Levy, who was 10 years old and with her parents, spotted the actor at the museum. “We followed him around and around the Met because I was so into him,” Levy tells me.
Fortysome years later, Levy feels more or less the same. She co-wrote his memoir, Look at Me, which is out this week, and tells me, “He’s the Dustin Hoffman you hope Dustin Hoffman will be.” The first time they met as adults, at his home in Los Angeles, Hoffman, now 89, played piano and they looked at pictures together. Disappointingly, he didn’t remember the time at the museum. Everyone who has spotted Hoffman over the past 60 or so years would have a story like that.
“After The Graduate, he was so famous. Time magazine called him the fifth Beatle,” says Levy. We’re at the Chelsea Hotel. Levy sips a Manhattan, while I take down a Negroni and french fries. Apparently, Hoffman hated the attention. “He was like ‘It was unbearable. I wanted to climb out of my skin,’ ” says Levy. Hoffman was no one’s idea of a leading man: short, with a “screechingly Semitic” face, says Levy. His friend, actor Robert Duvall, said he looked like “Barbra Streisand in drag.” Duvall, plus his friends Gene Hackman and Robert Redford, died while he was writing the book. Did that have Hoffman thinking about his legacy?
“I think he thinks that’s too much to hope for,” says Levy, recalling the Arthur Miller quote that “immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.”
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