David Mamet talks about new book and gangsters
“The question is, then,” Mike said, “what is evil?”
“Well, that is decided,” Doyle said, “by the fellow holding the gun.”
David Mamet wrote those words, the most recent of thousands he has memorably placed into the mouths of hundreds of characters of his own creation.
The two men above are some of the colorful folks in his new novel, “Chicago,” a Prohibition-era tale of murder and mystery, gangsters, love, friendship and betrayal. It “stars” two hard-boiled reporters for the Chicago Tribune and is peppered, as is all of Mamet’s work, with hustling, humor and heartbreak. And, of course, that distinctively fast, clever, edgy dialogue that has come to be known as Mamet Speak.
Now, Mamet speaks, saying, “I have thought about how my life should end. It’s four o’clock in the morning. I’m drinking bourbon, smoking Camels and playing the piano in a Chicago whorehouse. That would be heaven.”
The prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter-director and writer of many books is in Santa Monica, Calif., a place that, for one coming in from snow-clogged, icy Chicago, is a passable rendering of heaven — sun shining bright and temperatures in the 70s.
He is inside a multilevel townhouse that functions as an office that he comes to five or six days a week. There are guitars on the floor, a piano in the corner, art on the walls, comfortable furniture and, among many talismans of Chicago (old postcards, old button pins), a small framed poster from Riverview, the bygone amusement park.
“I never know what I’ll do here when I walk in the door,” he says. “I get here about 10 and leave late in the afternoon. It’s sort of magical. I’ll screw around. I’ll write in my journal. I’ll write letters. I’ll play the piano. Maybe I take a nap. Maybe I wake up at four in the afternoon with all these thoughts and characters in my head and ask myself, ‘Now what’s all this?’ and start to write. I really don’t understand any of it but it sure beats working.”
Born and raised here, he worked a lot of jobs when he was younger: actor, busboy at the London House and The Second City, carpeting salesman, editor at Oui magazine, cab driver … the list is a long one.
But once he started writing seriously while attending what he calls “hippie-dippie” Goddard College in Vermont, he has never stopped. And he has been able to sell a great deal of what he has written and make for himself and his family a comfortable and rewarding life.
“I really am so fortunate to have discovered the career that I have,” he says.
And so there is a new play sitting on the kitchen table: “I was talking with my Broadway producer and he said, ‘Why don’t you write a play about Harvey Weinstein?’ And so I did.”
He long ago and powerfully explored the matter of sexual exploitation in his 1992 two-character play (later a movie) “Oleanna.” “I think about this a lot now. I have a bunch of daughters, a young son,” he says. “Every society has to confront the ungovernable genie of sexuality and tries various ways to deal with it and none of them work very well. There is great difficulty when you are switching modes, which we seem to be doing now. People go crazy. They start tearing each other to bits.”
Also on the table is the script for a film. He is adapting the best-selling 2017 Don Winslow novel “The Force,” about a revered New York City cop caught in a web of dirty drugs deals, racial tensions and corruption, for a Fox film to be directed by James Mangold.
That film is set to be released March 2019. The play? To be determined, though it’s currently titled “Bitter Wheat” and there has been great interest in the lead role expressed by a Chicago stage legend who is now a movie star.
The most pressing conversational concern is the pile of books stacked in one of the kitchen cabinets. They are copies of that new novel, “Chicago,” his first in nearly 20 years but really a lifetime in the making.
“It is made up in part by some of those stories that we all grew up with,” he says. “I have always been influenced by the city’s darker traditions, its collective fondness for gangsters and con men. I realize how physically close I have been to places where those dark things happened — the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the kidnapping of little Bobby Franks, the Levee District — and it was impossible for me not to hear the echo of the past.”
And so we encounter in “Chicago” such people as Al Capone and his associate Jake Guzik, the African-American aviatrix Bessie Coleman, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (perpetrators of the “Crime of the Century” for the murder the aforementioned Franks), lawyer Clarence Darrow, North Side gang boss Dean O’Banion, who ran a flower shop across the street from Holy Name Cathedral, and his sidekick Samuel “Nails” Morton, kicked to death by a horse in Lincoln Park.
But most of the novel’s major characters come from Mamet’s imagination, his busy brain, and they started to come to life on paper in this townhouse a couple of years ago.
“One day I just started writing a little bit, this Chicago thing,” Mamet says. “And when I finished, I said to Pam, ‘I don’t know what this is. What do you think of it?’”
Pam is Pam Susemiehl, a delightful and protective woman who has been Mamet’s assistant (a word that does not come close to capturing the many facets of her job) for the past 15 years. She has written screenplays and a play, none yet produced. For a time she had worked as a newspaper photographer. She liked the “little bit” Mamet gave her and she told him so.
And so he kept at the “Chicago thing,” writing as he has done on all his many projects, in longhand in leatherbound journals and then transferring those words onto paper by means of a manual typewriter before having Susemiehl enter them into a computer.
“Writing has never been anything but fun, except when it’s a pain in the ass,” he says. “It is easy for me to write scenes. The problem with this novel was to take those scenes and craft them into a book, to cobble them together.” The book is released today. “Plays, movies, novels. … They really have nothing to do with one another, though some of the skills are transferable,” he says. “A play is actually a poem, a poem written in different voices. A movie is like a comic book, an exhibition of pictures. In a novel, it is the challenge to match the content with the form.”