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Reprinted from the Sunday, April 26, 1998 edition of The Guardian: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980425-34.html.
To say David Mamet is polite is to underestimate the possibilities of the word. The more you interview him, the politer he gets and the more his politeness becomes uncomfortable and even menacing. So while he says all the right things in a patient and modest manner, he also gives you to understand that he probably holds totally different views in private. Actually, I do him a disservice - he was quite frank about it. "I've been spending a lot of time this year lying to the press," he said thoughtfully at the end of our breakfast, "but, er, you get to meet a lot of nice people, and it probably helps pay for the advertising."
My impression was that he thinks interviews are demeaning, and I agree: as one of the world's greatest living writers, he is perhaps above being asked what dishes he can cook. But lately he has been giving interviews for all sorts of projects: his current film Wag the Dog, a political satire with extraordinary echoes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the Iraq crisis; his new film, The Spanish Prisoner, due out in September; his film-in-the-making, The Winslow Boy; and his two new books - a novel, The Old Religion, and a guide to acting, True and False (published by Faber next month). Since he refused for years to talk to the press, this seems like a bit of a U-turn. When I asked about this, Mamet said easily: "Oh, I didn't do interviews for a long time. But someone said of one of my projects, 'I'll finance it, but you've got to do some interviews.' Then, having done that, somebody on another project said: 'If you'll do interviews for that damn project, you can do interviews for my damn project.'"
Of course, the truth might be that Mamet enjoys them more than he pretends - they offer such delicious opportunities to play games with his hapless victims. (He once wrote off the interview process as one 'in which the interviewee is constrained to adopt some version of a humble demeanour - who, me? - and the interviewer poses as an honest seeker after truth'.) When I asked if he disliked revealing himself, his reply was a case in point. "That's probably a very good question," he said mildly. "And I'm not sure I know the answer to it. One might as well ask that question of a fan dancer. You know what a fan dancer is? A striptease lady. Because a moment of scant reflection might cause the writer or fan dancer to realise that if he or she did dislike revealing themselves, they were in the wrong profession."
I think I detected a ghost of a smile flit across his face at that moment, but I may be wrong. It was at moments like these that Mamet reminded me of Charles Ryder's father in Brideshead Revisited, snuffling and toying with an American guest. Mamet didn't snuffle, of course, but he displayed the same lethal tactics.
However, it is wonderful to have the privilege of interviewing him at all. He is a literary legend. At 50, his oeuvre includes Oleanna, which sparked a frenzied debate about political correctness, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross (which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Cryptogram and Speed-the-Plow, which premiered with Madonna in the lead. He has also written and/or directed such fted films as House of Games, Hoffa, Homicide. Mamet's gift is the ability to turn the dreary stuff of modern life - estate agent's deals, sexual harassment, presidential spin campaigns - into great art.
"I do hope you realise," a scriptwriter friend told me sternly, on hearing of this interview, "that he is a genius."
I first met the genius in the surreal setting of a group interview to publicise The Spanish Prisoner. We were in his suite at the Athenaeum hotel in London. There was a New Zealand girl, a Spanish girl, an Italian girl, a German girl, the German girl's assistant and me. As soon as he walked in - virile, sturdy, muscular, wearing a woollen shirt, his brown hair in a crewcut - we thrilled with excitement. But he clearly didn't view us with the same enthusiasm; when he caught sight of us, his eager little group, his face closed. "Good morning," he said politely. "Good to see you."
"Hello!" we chorused.
Mamet sat down; he folded his hands primly. Thoughts were obviously going through his head, but it was impos-sible to guess what they were. He volunteered: "I'm here making a new movie." A frisson went over us. The German girl said: "What is that?" Mamet said: "It's a version of The Winslow Boy. By Terence Rattigan." (He had clearly decided to get the plug in quickly.) "Who is going to be in that?" asked the German girl. "Great cast," said Mamet. "The woman is being played by my wife Rebecca Pidgeon, who you saw in The Spanish Prisoner, and Nigel Hawthorne plays the father."
Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but as the interview went on I found myself on the verge of giggling. Not all of us had good English, and this difficulty was compounded by the fact that Mamet was rather deaf, which led to some bizarre exchanges. One of my favourites went like this.
German girl: "Are you quite an anglophile?"
Mamet: "Quite what?"
German girl: "Are you quite an anglophile?"
Mamet: "I think so. Sorry to ask you to repeat yourself. I'm deaf as a post. But I, I think I am. I've been coming over here for about 25 years, doing my plays here, and the British are extremely supportive."
German girl: "They love the theatre."
Mamet: "What?"
German girl: "They love the theatre."
Mamet: "Yes I do. I do love the theatre."
Mamet was certainly patient. Though one felt his spirit was elsewhere, he appeared to try his best. The only time he showed any animation was when he described the fiendishly complicated plot of The Spanish Prisoner. This is about an executive called Joe Ross - played by Campbell Scott - who invents a wildly profitable 'process' (typically, we never learn what this is) for his company, begins to distrust his bosses, and gets conned. It stars Steve Martin and Rebecca Pidgeon. As Mamet explained with relish, the title refers to one of the oldest cons in history, in which the conman pretends he has escaped from Spain, leaving his fortune behind, and borrows money from his victim to get it out. The loans mount up but the mythical fortune never materialises. (My foreign colleagues liked it very much, though the German girl remained perplexed. "But what is ze message?" "Well, there isn't any message. It's an entertainment.")
This sort of stuff went on for a while, with Mamet getting more and more polite, until we got personal. Then he did start to lose his patience.
New Zealand girl: "Are you quite trusting?"
Mamet: "I've no idea."
New Zealand girl: "In the interviews I've read, you seem quite a private person."
Mamet: "Hope so."
New Zealand girl: "But are you guarded with people?"
Mamet: "I don't know."
Me: "Well, how do you compare with other people?"
Mamet: "I don't know. I haven't thought about it."
Me: "I think that's unlikely!"
Mamet: "No. I just, I mean, what I do for a living, I make up stories."
German girl (who has unexpectedly rallied): "Yes, but what does this tell us about you? You ask the same questions in your work many times, about who is telling the truth, who is trustworthy. It must say something about you."
Mamet (grimly): "Probably. But I don't have to psychoanalyse myself."
Italian girl: "How old is your daughter?"
Mamet: "Three. She dances a lot."
Italian girl: "Do you dance with her?"
Mamet: "Yes."
New Zealand girl: "You like living out of the metropolis?"
Mamet: "Oh yeah. I like living where it's quiet." (This with undue emphasis.)
Me: "How do you spend your money?"
Mamet: "Food. I love shopping."
Italian girl: "Do you like cooking?"
Mamet: "I can make about two dishes, which my wife refers to as Eggs Dave and Spaghetti Dave."
German girl's assistant: "But they're delicious?"
Mamet (completely fed up): "I dunno. I like 'em."
The next morning Mamet was even more polite. We met at the Athenaeum for breakfast. He sat heavily at the small table in the restaurant and skewed himself sideways, apparently trying to block out the businessmen at the next table. He was wearing a black waistcoat and stout ankle boots - this eccentric style of manual dress, like his crewcut, which he calls an 'honest haircut', is one of his trademarks. For breakfast he wanted tea made with loose leaves and sausages cooked so they were 'dry.' "Do you have prune juice?" he asked. The waitress and I stared at him in surprise. "No," she said. "Oh," said Mamet, looking disappointed. "Well, a little white toast. Very well done."
Today his method of defence is different. He is vague. So whenever I ask him anything, he either agrees too easily - "Sure" - or claims he doesn't know. Did he live in a Vermont farmhouse to distance himself from Hollywood? "I dunno." Is money important to him? "I dunno - those things I'm sure about, I'm probably in error regarding them." Did he ally himself with the working class in the way he dressed?
"I dunno. It's so hard to say." (Important things to know about Mamet: he had a perfectionist father. His parents divorced when he was 11. His stepfather was violent. He is very in love with his second wife, Rebecca. He uses Enid Blyton exclamations like "Gosh" and "Goody gumdrops".)
While we endured this stilted Q&A, Mamet's producer, a friendly woman called Sarah, lapped up her breakfast at the next table. Occasionally Mamet referred questions to her, and she returned the favour by asking him to sign various papers. At one point he interrupted himself to turn to her. "By the way," he remarked, "I got a beautiful telephone message from Steve [Martin] on the answering machine saying he just saw The Spanish Prisoner with a bunch of people who were just thrilled, absolutely thrilled. Nice to hear." She agreed, and Mamet turned reluctantly back to me.
Mamet once said writing stilled two warring needs - "the need to be accepted and the need to be revenged" and his sister, Lynn, also a screenwriter, has said he is full of anger, "a coiled snake". Did he feel driven to succeed? Mamet speared a bit of sausage. "Oh yeah," he answered, as if this was self-evident. Because of his father? "Most likely. My sister's like that too. She works all the time." Was it hard for her, to be his sister? "Probably. I'm sure it's no picnic. But she's a terrific writer. The first screenplay she ever wrote got nominated for an Academy Award for the best short drama."
It is Lynn who has been most forthcoming about their horrible childhood in Chicago. "We lived in an emotional hurricane. We were safe for each other." Mamet's obsessive theme of betrayal makes sense when you learn about this period. Their parents were children of Polish Jews who came to America to escape the pogroms. Mamet says his father, Bernie, was "a child of immigrants. They were very poor and he had the immigrant drive to make something of himself, to succeed. He was a stranger in a strange land, with no one there - no one there but you. You'd better get busy. And that's how he lived his life. He was a lawyer, a one-horse lawyer, who worked very, very hard." His demanding standards shaped Mamet's life.
One of Bernie's favourite stories was how a father persuades his son to jump off a mantelpiece into his arms. The child jumps and the father steps aside. "That's the first lesson," he would tell his son. "Don't trust anybody." ("There seems to be no aspect of the relationship of father to son that they did not explore to hell," says the director Gregory Mosher.) Did Bernie expect too much? Mamet paused. "Um. He probably did, yeah." Wasn't that hard to live up to? "Well. There's two ways one can do it. One is by failing, the other by succeeding. Children want to please, it's what they want more than anything, they're really machines to emulate... The psychological consequences are perhaps unfortunate."
Mamet's mother was "a housewife", he went on. "She grew up in the Depression. Got married very young, raised a couple of kids. She was very beautiful, very striking woman. Very elegant. Extremely funny." When David and Lynn were in their teens she left Bernie Mamet for one of his friends, also called Bernie. The foursome moved to a former show home on an unfinished housing estate where the plastic covers were never removed from the sofas. Their stepfather was violent. In The Cabin, Mamet wrote about this - it is interesting that, whenever he writes about himself, his prose seems to seize up as if he can hardly bear to express the emotions. The family ate their meals on a glass table, he wrote, and "it was noteworthy for that glass, for it was more than once and rather more than several times, I am inclined to think, that my stepfather would grow so angry as to bring some object down on the glass top, shattering it, thus giving us to know how we had forced him out of control. And it seems that most times when he would shatter the table, as often as that might have been, he would cut some portion of himself on the glass, or that he or his wife, our mother, would cut their hands picking up the glass afterward, and that we children were to understand, and did understand, that these wounds were our fault."
The essay hints at further abuses. Once, Mamet writes, his sister could not sleep. So she got up and went to the master bedroom. And she saw my grandfather sitting on the bed, and my stepfather standing by the closet and gesturing. On the floor of the closet she saw my mother, curled in a fetal position, moaning and crying and hugging herself. My stepfather was saying, "Say the words. Just say the words. And my grandfather was breathing fast and repeating, "I can't. She knows how I feel about her. I can't." And my stepfather said, "Say the words, Jack. Please. Just say you love her." At which my mother moaned louder. And my grandfather said, "I can't."
Sometimes, the essay continues, the family would go out to dinner. "My stepfather and mother would walk to the car, telling us that they would pick us up. They would drive up in the car, open the passenger door, and wait until my sister and I had started to get in. They would then drive away. They would drive 10 or 15 feet and open the door again, and we would walk up again, and they would drive away again. They sometimes would drive around the block. But they would always come back, and by that time the four of us would be laughing in camaraderie and appreciation of what, I believe, was our only family joke."
One of the keys to Mamet is his sense of being an outsider, which is linked to his Jewishness. His family performed their religion "in an atmosphere of shame," he once wrote. "We were Jews, and worthless." "The virtues expounded were not creative but remedial: let's stop being Jewish, let's stop being poor," says his sister. When I asked if he felt like an exile as a child because of this, Mamet grunted. "Uh-huh? Well, I once wrote that nobody with a happy relationship ever went into showbusiness. I think that's true. Most people go into showbusiness because they feel like an exile from something... One of the lovely things that showbusiness seems to offer is a good deal of solidarity between working people."
David Mamet clearly loves the feeling of community which a film set can give. He calls it "film camp" and often works with the same actors, usually people whom he has known since he started a theatre company as a struggling young actor in Chicago. Mamet's sets are famously happy. In the safe and secure environment that he creates for himself, almost invariably with his wife cast in the lead role, he can indulge an unexpectedly silly sense of humour. A "joke reel" is always recorded.
The comic Jonathan Katz, co-creator of the plot of Mamet's first con movie, House of Games, says his friend is "one of the funniest and silliest people I have ever met". "We would have this running gag," he told the New Yorker. "Whenever one of us was meeting the other guy at an airport, we would be in disguise. One of my favourites was when he was sitting in an airport with a paper bag on his head and smoke coming out of it." A more warped example of this has been experienced by people who wrote to him to complain about the bad language in his plays. Mamet would send a photocopied letter back: "Too bad, you big crybaby."
Mamet once said that, if he hadn't been a writer, he would probably have been a criminal - "another profession that subsumes the outsider, or, perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not-very-well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise". Was that still the case? "Oh yeah." Could he have engineered a real-life con? "Well, I lived on the outskirts of the demi-monde for a while and was involved at a low-level in a basically fraudulent real-estate scheme," was his typically indirect reply. "I used to hang out with criminals and play cards with them every day. It was kind of where I fitted into the socio-economic scheme of Chicago at that point in my life, right on the edge of the Lumpenproletariat.
"Anyway, I was an out-of-work actor, and I answered an ad in the newspaper for a temporary employee, in an office, which was a real-estate firm which was selling desert land in Arizona and New Mexico as housing tracts. So I worked there for a while on the telephones and they offered me a full-time job, which I took because they were paying a fortune for me at that time, $250 a week, which in 1969 was five times as much money as I'd ever made."
And did he feel he was doing something wrong?
"Oh, yeah."
Did he care?
"Yeah. I wasn't very good at it, because I kept identifying with the people with whom I was dealing."
As with his films, you can spot all the clues in Mamet's personality, but it is harder to work out how they fit together. He can be pugnacious - for example, he has written that the "coldest, cruellest, most arrogant behaviour I have ever seen in my professional life has been on the part of women producers." Similarly, he will throw himself into masculine pursuits like hunting or shooting, or state high-handedly that actors should leave characterisation in "the hands of the writer, which is where it belongs". Yet he is openly nostalgic about his youth, the pool halls he hung out in, those days when he had no money and would wash his own windows "happy as I had ever been before or ever have been since."
He is also openly adoring of his wife Rebecca, whom he will mention apropos of nothing. "My wife's Scottish," he'll say, out of the blue. "She's just great. A great person." Yet if he decides he wants something, he can be ruthless. He was married when he first met Rebecca Pidgeon at the National Theatre in London, when she was rehearsing the part created by Madonna in Speed-the-Plow. He began wooing her at once. "Mamet came up to her and said: 'You know, I always wanted to meet a girl like that,'" says the actor Colin Stinton. "She blushed, and was sort of flattered by it, I think." Pidgeon herself was reportedly stunned by this sudden courtship from a man who was 19 years older than herself. "I had imagined him as this old, tall, very intellectual, cold, godlike kind of writer, and then I see this young, vibrant kind of street urchin." He courted her for two years. They married in 1991, the year he got his divorce.
Rather chillingly, Mamet had done exactly the same thing with his first wife, the actress Lindsay Crouse (whose father co-wrote The Sound of Music and who herself starred, brilliantly, in House of Games). He saw her in a Paul Newman movie called Slap Shot and told his friends, "I'm going to Hollywood to marry Lindsay Crouse." It was 1977, and by the end of that year they were married. Crouse got Mamet his first film job and is credited with smoothing out his rough edges. The playwright John Guare explained: "She said to me: 'Just look at him. Do you realise that this man has made himself? He's been given no help." She was so sublimely proud of him - until she wasn't.' By her, David Mamet has two daughters aged 14 and nine, and with Rebecca Pidgeon he has another daughter, Clara, who is three. (When I asked if he was in touch with his first wife, Mamet gave a warning hiss and said: "Oh, sure. You've got something you want me to convey to her?")
It is rather poignant to see how completely Rebecca Pidgeon has replaced her predecessor. Crouse used to play the lead in Mamet's movies; now Pidgeon does. With one wife, then the next, David Mamet has made them part of every aspect of his life. Is this a control mechanism, or do we put it down to insecurity? It seemed to me that his tough shell might conceal a childish neediness and possessiveness - I was struck when Mamet complained bitterly that in his early days with Pidgeon, when she was at the National Theatre, "it was kind of hard sitting alone all night while she betrayed me for the pleasure of 800 people."
Deceit; betrayal; distrust. Nothing is certain in David Mamet's imaginary world, yet his real one seems filled with loyal friends, adoring wives, the world's adulation. Perhaps you can never get over such a childhood. Perhaps this is why he so obsessively creates nurturing environments for himself, whether on the film set, or in his tiny Vermont town where he makes a point of knowing everyone.
Perhaps, having been on the wrong end of the balance of power with his violent stepfather, he now finds it necessary to have the power himself - he certainly manipulates his audiences' emotions with a fearful amount of skill. On the other hand, he seems to be becoming more trusting. He recently allowed the release of The Cryptogram, his autobiographical play about a boy who is torn between his parents. Lynn Mamet says Rebecca Pidgeon is the reason for this new openness. She says she has made him feel that "it's OK to be scared, it's OK to be upset, it's OK to fail."
"I decided to have my childhood at the beginning of my life so I could get it out of the way," David Mamet told me. But it never goes away, does it? I said. Mamet for once paid attention. "Yes," he said. "That's probably true." It is in the light of all this that one grasps the terrible significance of knives in Mamet's work. "You take a knife, you use it to cut the bread, so you'll have strength to work," he is fond of saying. "You use it to shave, so you'll look nice for your lover. On discovering her with another, you use it to cut out her lying heart."
Copyright © 1998 Guardian Media Group