If you heard “and here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson” just now, in your head, clear as a bell, you are not alone. That melody has never really left us.
In June 2026, Far Out magazine ranked it the best song of the summer from the entire 1960s. That is saying something, considering the competition. Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” from 1963 was on that list. So was The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” from 1964 and The Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” from 1965.
But Simon & Garfunkel took the top spot.
The Song That Almost Wasn’t
The story of how “Mrs. Robinson” came to exist is a good one. Director Mike Nichols was working on The Graduate, the 1967 film starring Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson and Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and he reached out to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel during production.
Nichols sent them Charles Webb’s 1963 novella, the book the film was based on. He wanted the duo to create mostly original music for the movie. In the end, though, The Graduate‘s score drew mostly from Simon & Garfunkel’s existing catalog, songs like “Scarborough Fair / Canticle” from 1966 and “The Sound of Silence” from 1964.
As for “Mrs. Robinson” itself? Paul Simon told the story on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970. He said the song was “made up on the spot” while the two were working on the film’s score. Simon had been playing around with a piece that already included the now-famous line about Mrs. Robinson. He even had an early version with a lyric about Mrs. Roosevelt, as in Eleanor Roosevelt, that was later cut.
The No. 1 Hit and the Man Who Suffered for It
The song hit the Billboard Hot 100 at number one in June 1968. By then, it had already appeared in The Graduate the year before, and audiences could not get enough of it.
There is one more piece of this story that Paul Simon could only laugh about later. Director Mel Brooks, who was married to Anne Bancroft for more than 40 years until her death in 2005, once told Simon the song had made his life miserable.
Fans of The Graduate would see Bancroft out in public and spontaneously start singing “Mrs. Robinson” to her. Simon, now 84, recalled the moment with a grin: “I ran into Mel Brooks the other day. I had no idea how miserable that song had made his life.”
A number one hit, made up on the spot, still earning its place at the top of the charts nearly 60 years later. Not bad for a song that almost had a line about Eleanor Roosevelt in it.