Mamet speaks: On writing, gangsters, and a beloved city
The celebrated, controversial American playwright and screenwriter releases his first novel in nearly 20 years.
“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 colourful 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, humour 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 Prizewinning playwright and Oscarnominated screenwriter-director is in Santa Monica, California, in a multilevel townhouse that functions as an office that he comes to five or six days a week.
“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.”
He worked a lot of jobs when he was younger: actor, busboy at the London House Hotel and The Second City improv nightclub, carpeting salesman, editor at Oui magazine, cab driver ... the list is long.
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.
Chicago is his first novel in nearly 20 years but was 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 realise how physically close I have been to places where those dark things happened – the St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929), the kidnapping of little Bobby Franks (1924) – 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 AfricanAmerican aviatrix Bessie Coleman, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (perpetrators of the “Crime of the Century” for the murder of the aforementioned Franks), and civil liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow.
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 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.
The lack of a computer hasn’t stopped Mamet from building a pile of work that contains some 25 plays, nearly 50 films, a few TV shows and more than 20 books – collections of essays, nonfiction work and novels.
“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.”
When he finishing “cobbling” Chicago, he was pleased. But it says a great deal about the screwy state of the book publishing business that Mamet had difficulty finding an agent who would handle his novel. Eventually he did find David Vigliano, who suggested some minor revisions and then quickly sold the book to Custom House, a division of William Morrow.
The book is a great novel, sure to draw favourable comparisons wih the work of Elmore Leonard or George V. Higgins. It will also put some in mind of Mamet’s work on The Untouchables, the 1987 movie for which he wrote these memorable words for actor Sean Connery, who won the Academy Award as best supporting actor in the film: “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way.”
“I hope people like it,” Mamet says. “But I am not anxious or nervous. I stopped reading reviews of my work a long time ago.” That is probably a wise thing, for in recent years reviewers have not been kind to his last couple of plays (China Doll, a 2015 Broadway production starring Al Pacino, and 2017’s The Penitent, also in New York) or to some other writings (2011’s book The Secret Knowledge ,whichafew critics deemed his drift into rightwing politics).
Still he writes and writes. “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.”
In conversation Mamet is thoughtful, smart and funny, filled with stories about all the people he has known. He laughs easily, eats lunch nearly every day at a nearby Italian restaurant where he is greeted warmly by the owner and the busboy, and at the end of every office day he goes home to his wife.
She is the British-American actress-singer Rebecca Pidgeon. They were married in 1991; the couple’s two children are Clara, who is 23 and a musician and actress, and Noah, recently off to college in Utah.
Family has not always been so joyful. He and his younger sister Lynn, a writer/producer with whom he is currently estranged, were born and raised in the Hyde Park and South Shore neighbourhoods of Chicago, the children of labour attorney Bernie Mamet and his wife Lenore (Lee). It was a rocky childhood for both – “not a bundle of laughs”, Mamet has said, though he rarely likes to detail his early years – and the couple divorced in 1959.
“I was a terrible student,” Mamet says of his schooldays, “always cutting class and going down to the main library to read books all day, going to the Clark Theater to watch movies. There was a freedom to explore the city when I grew up.”
He went off to college and then came home for a few years to launch his theatrical career. After the success of American Buffalo in New York in 1977 he was gone for keeps, since living in many places, including Vermont, Boston, New York and California.
California is where he celebrated at his home his 70th birthday on Nov 30 last year with such old friends as actors Joe Mantegna, Bill Macy, J.J. Johnston and Jack Wallace, and his wife and kids.
“It was a great time. Lots of laughter,” he says. “Sometimes I feel old. Sometimes I don’t.”
He doesn’t look old. He looks California healthy. He walks. He does yoga. He’s a black belt in jiu-jitsu. He still makes waves, as in his recent threat to slap a US$25,000 (M97,000) fine on any theatre that holds post-performance discussions of his plays.
He is sitting at the piano now – he started lessons when he was four and has kept at it ever since, so capably that he is never reluctant to perform in public as he did when he played with Woody Allen’s band in New York – as the afternoon drifts toward sunset.
There is only music in the room for a while as he watches his fingers move across the keys. Then Mamet speaks: “Whenever I get back home I say to myself, ‘Why did I ever leave?’” – Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service