\n<\/p>\n
Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, which included a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film \u201cSummer of \u201942,\u201d<\/a> died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.<\/p>\n His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the death, in a hospital.<\/p>\n Mr. Raucher spent the 1950s and \u201960s writing scripts for anthology television series and advertising copy for the Walt Disney Company and various agencies.<\/p>\n But recollections of his own summer of \u201942 lingered. So did the memory of one of his close friends, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher\u2019s 24th birthday, in 1952, while caring for a wounded soldier during the Korean War.<\/p>\n \u201cSummer of \u201942\u201d tells the story of three 15-year-old friends \u2014 Hermie, Oscy and Benjie \u2014 and their early exploration of girls and, tentatively, sex, during a summer vacation on a Nantucket-like island early in World War II.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) becomes infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O\u2019Neill), a woman in her early 20s. In one scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she hands him boxes for him to place in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking occurs after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed in the war.<\/p>\n The scene parallels Mr. Rauch\u2019s real-life experience at age 14 with a woman on Nantucket, Mass.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in love with her before the incident ever happened,\u201d Mr. Raucher told The Stuart News of Florida in 2002.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSummer of \u201942\u201d won an Oscar for Michel Legrand\u2019s original score and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher\u2019s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in today\u2019s dollars) at the box office.<\/p>\n Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a traveling salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher said in an interview, possibly a gun runner in Cuba. His mother, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in marketing and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and magazine. He was soon hired by 20th Century Fox as a $38-a-week office boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served two years stateside during the Korean War.<\/p>\n After being discharged, he got a call from Disney \u2014 he did not know how the company discovered him \u2014 and he worked in the company\u2019s advertising department. He also wrote for ad agencies in the 1950s and \u201960s, and was hired by Gardner Advertising as a vice president in 1964.<\/p>\n He had begun writing for television and the stage in these years, including scripts for the anthology shows \u201cStudio One,\u201d \u201cThe Alcoa Hour\u201d and \u201cGoodyear Playhouse,\u201d as well as a play, \u201cHarold,\u201d starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, that opened on Broadway in 1962 but closed after 20 performances.<\/p>\n Mr. Raucher adapted his unproduced play, \u201cSweet November,\u201d<\/a> into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for \u201cCan Heironymus Merkin<\/a> Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?\u201d (1968), which was a notorious failure. Mr. Newley, who was also the star and director, plays a singing star simultaneously making and showing a movie about his self-indulgent life.<\/p>\n Mr. Raucher\u2019s next film, \u201cWatermelon Man\u201d<\/a> (1970), starred the comedian Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance salesman who overnight turns Black. Critics were not kind; writing in The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said the \u201cscript is so uninspired and the direction so inept that \u2018Watermelon Man\u2019 runs out of gas long before the end is in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Raucher told the film website Cinedump<\/a> in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned \u201cWatermelon Man\u201d into \u201cmore of a Black power film than I\u2019d wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Then came \u201cSummer of \u201942,\u201d his biggest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, but movie companies had rejected it, by his count, 49 times by the time Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970 and put it in the hands of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for directing \u201cTo Kill a Mockingbird\u201d (1962).<\/p>\n \u201cBob fell in love with the screenplay,\u201d Mr. Raucher told Cinedump. \u201cThey asked how big a budget it was, he said a million dollars,\u201d he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. \u201cThey said go make it; they never read the script, they left us alone.\u201d<\/p>\n The studio did, however, ask that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan told The San Francisco Examiner, \u201cThe story deals rather simply with the process of growing up, not unlike Salinger\u2019s \u2018Catcher in the Rye,\u2019 which has some of the same comic spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n In the film, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell note. The same thing happened to Mr. Raucher.<\/p>\n Sometime after the film\u2019s release, Mr. Raucher said, he received a letter, with no return address, from a woman in Ohio who he believed was the widow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShe wrote that the ghosts of that time were better left alone,\u201d he told The New York Times in 2001<\/a> when a stage musical version of \u201cSummer of \u201942\u201d was being performed in Connecticut.<\/p>\n Mr. Raucher wrote several more screenplays, including \u201cClass of \u201944\u201d (1973), a sequel to \u201cSummer of \u201942\u201d; \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d (1976), which was inspired by Bobbie Gentry\u2019s song of the same name<\/a> and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and \u201cThe Other Side of Midnight\u201d (1977), based on Sidney Sheldon\u2019s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.<\/p>\n He also wrote the novels \u201cA Glimpse of Tiger\u201d (1971), about two con artists; \u201cThere Should Have Been Castles\u201d (1978), about a playwright and a dancer in the 1950s; and \u201cMaynard\u2019s House\u201d (1980), about a troubled Vietnam veteran who is bequeathed a house in Maine by a slain comrade.<\/p>\n Besides his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by another daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His wife, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.<\/p>\n After the filming of \u201cSummer of \u201942\u201d was completed, it was in postproduction for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay.<\/p>\n \u201cAs fate would have it, the book comes out and becomes a best seller,\u201d he told Cinedump. \u201cSo when the movie is finally released, the ad line is \u2018Based on the national best seller.\u2019 Which is absurd, because the book was written after the movie!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n