It started six years earlier, before the Sixties really got going, with a bona fide graduate. Charles Webb left Williams College in Massachusetts in 1961, went home to California, and started writing a novel about a recent graduate who goes home to California and embarks on an affair with the wife of his dad's business partner. The real-life model for Mrs Robinson was apparently a Mrs Erickson, although there was no affair. As for the author, the real Charles Webb is far too unreal ever to be in a movie. He married a lady by the name of Eve but calls her Fred out of solidarity for a support group for men with low self-esteem. They've been together for half-a-century but got divorced some years back to protest the institution of marriage. He received $20,000 for the movie rights plus a ten-grand bonus, which isn't a lot for a film that grossed $105 million