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Excerpted from the November 17, 1997 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. This excerpt was originally obtained from http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/971117-001.html. For the New Yorker home page, click here.
Where did the playwright get his gift for the swagger of American speech?
When I met David Mamet this summer, he made me the gift of a Boy Scout knife. On one side of the knife was the Scout motto: "Be prepared." The words, which invoke both prowess and paranoia, seemed to sum up the twin themes of Mamet's work, and of his guarded life. We were sitting in the back room of his headquarters, on the second floor of a two-story yellow clapboard building on Eliot Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a table with a large Second World War poster hanging over it which read "Loose Talk Can Cost Lives! Keep It Under Your Stetson." There was no identifying name on the bell to the front door or on the office door. You had to feel your way along until you found Mamet hidden away, which is how it is with him. Mamet, who is masterly at communicating his meanings in public, is prickly in private. He is a small but powerfully built man; in the stillness of his presence and in the precision of his sentences, he exudes an imposing, specific gravity. "Fortress Mamet" is how Ed Koren, the cartoonist and Mamet's Vermont neighbor, refers to the emotional no-go area that Mamet creates around himself, and I was acutely aware of this hazardous moat as Mamet eased into a chair across the table from me, wearing his summer camouflage: a khaki baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a purple-and-brown Hawaiian shirt. Over the years, Mamet has adopted many fustian public disguises to counterpoint a personal style that Albert Takazauckas, the director of his first Off Broadway hit, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, in 1976, characterizes as "blunt, blunt, blunt." He adds, "It's his lovely cover." As the star of Chicago's booming Off Loop theatre scene in the early seventies, Mamet affected Che's guerrilla look: fatigues, combat boots, a beret, and, for good measure, a cape. After his Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), his play about salesmen in a cutthroat real-estate competition, Mamet assumed a Brechtian swagger: cigar, clear plastic eyeglass frames, and open collar, which consolidated in one iconic image the powerhouse and the proletarian. Now, in his mellow middle age, Mamet has forsworn the cigar and adopted the posture of rural gent: work boots, bluejeans, Pendleton shirt, and trimmed beard. In all these guises, the one constant is Mamet's crewcut, which dips like a tree line over the craggy promontory of his broad forehead and gives him an austere first appearance. "The crewcut... is an honest haircut," he has written. "It is the haircut of an honest, two-pair-of-jeans working man -- a man from Chicago."
Mamet is certainly a workingman, even though, at a million and a half dollars a movie, he's far from a wage slave. He has written twenty-two plays, six collections of essays, two novels, and fourteen films, five of which he also directed. He belongs in the pantheon of this century's great dramatists; he has done for American theatre at the end of the century what his hero, the iconoclastic sociologist Thorstein Veblen, did for American sociology at the beginning: provide a devastating, often hilarious new idiom to dissect the follies of American life. Mamet's muscular imagination strips dialogue of literary nicety and robs plot of that naturalistic decoration which has progressively tamed theatre. His plays, though rooted in reality, are fables, whose uniqueness lies in their distinctive musica terse, streamlined orchestration of thought, language, and character which draws viewers in and makes them work for meaning. No other American playwright, except perhaps Tennessee Williams, has ranged so widely. (Mamet is the only major American playwright ever to succeed as a screenwriter.) Three of his movies -- The Edge (with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin), Wag the Dog (with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman), and The Spanish Prisoner (with Steve Martin), which he also directed -- are being released this year, which turns out, on November 30th, to be his fiftieth.
Mamet claims he doesn't lose his temper, but anger still defines him. "He's a coiled snake," his forty-six-year-old sister, the screenwriter Lynn Mamet, says. To those who have passed the test of loyalty, Mamet is an amusing, endearing, vigilant friend. "He was and continues to be one of the funniest and silliest people I've ever met," says the comedian Jonathan Katz, who has been Mamet's best friend since their days at Goddard College, in Vermont, and with whom Mamet conceived the film House of Games. "He was a master of disguises. We would have this running gag. Whenever one of us was meeting the other guy at the airport, we would be in disguise. One of my favorite disguises was when he was sitting in the airport with a paper bag on his head and smoke coming out of it. He was smoking a cigar under the paper bag." In public conversation, however, Mamet is courtly and wary; his style of discourse is not so much straight talk as Indian wrestling. He wrong-foots the listener with a curious brew of slang and erudition, mixing words like "ain't," "marvy," "jolly," "vouchsafe," "desuetude" in the same breath. There's a jaunty smile in these sentences, but a smile with cold teeth. "Oh, goody gumdrops," he said when I told him I'd be able to join him in Cabot, Vermont, where he owns a farmhouse and a hundred-acre parcel of rolling land. "Goody gumdrops from the gumdrop tree."
As I attempted to ask him unwelcome questions about his childhood, the presence of the Boy Scout knife on the table reminded me of the knife that the distraught ten-year-old boy John flashes in Mamet's autobiographical masterpiece The Cryptogram -- a play about the betrayal of the boy by his parents. He is on the stairway looking down at the living room, where his mother, abandoned by his father and unable to meet his emotional needs, sits in the tortured last beat of the play. At whom, exactly, is the boy's murderous energy aimed, himself or others? His gesture foreshadows the life of the playwright, who learned to turn aggression into art: the knife became a pen. Knives are tools of creation as well as of destruction, and Mamet likes to whittle. His specialty is carving animal figures for his three daughters -- Willa (fourteen) and Zosia (nine), both from his twelve-year marriage to the actress Lindsay Crouse, which ended in 1991; and Clara (three), from his marriage, in the same year, to the Scottish actress and singer Rebecca Pidgeon. The knife as an ambiguous symbol of penetration is the central metaphor of "Three Uses of the Knife," a collection of Mamet's lectures about theatre to be published later this year, in which he recounts an anecdote first told by the blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, who once said, "You take a knife, you use it to cut the bread, so you'll have strength to work; 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." In its affecting irony, this progression illustrates for Mamet the essential elements of dramatic structure; it also demonstrates, he writes, "the attempt of the orderly, affronted mind to confront the awesome."
If Mamet felt affronted now, it was by my request that he turn back to the memory of his past. "My childhood, like many people's, was not a bundle of laughs. So what?" he said. "I always skip that part of the biography." After a while, he added, "This might help. There's a movie I'm hoping to do in the fall about making a movie. The female movie star is having a breakdown. She's crying. She says, 'I never had a childhood.' The director puts his arm around her. He says, 'I had one. It's no big deal.'"
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