Getting literary with Steve Martin

By Hillel Italie, Associated Press writer

A writer sits at a corner table in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel. He is drinking hot tea. He is drinking iced tea. He's wearing a loose dark jacket, loose dark pants, lime-green socks and loose dark sneakers. He is a tall man, a silver-haired man, an intelligent man once attacked as a source of "anti-intellectual" values.

His name is Steve Martin.

Under the same roof where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and others boozed and bantered through the night, a clear-eyed Martin meets midmorning with a reporter. The lounge, with its oak panels and demure green carpets, is intimately lighted and nearly empty. Martin is ready, just about, to answer questions.

Piano music plays from the sound system and Martin asks that it be turned down. His wish is granted. A waiter then recognizes Martin and says how much he loves his movies. He is surprised, pleasantly, to learn that Martin has completed a book, the novella "Shopgirl."

"I will make sure to look for it," the waiter tells Martin.

"Thank you," replies Martin, who smiles, as he often does, self-consciously.

For the past decade this zaniest of stand-up comics has been stepping, at times self-consciously, into the relatively unzany literary world. He's had essays published in The New Yorker. He's written a hit play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." He was host of the National Book Awards in 1999 and will be again this year. He is general editor for a series of classic humor books being reissued by the Modern Library.

"Twenty years ago you wouldn't have thought of Steve in the tradition of James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, but now he's really established himself as a prose writer," says David Ebershoff, the Modern Library's publishing director. "Steve is a rare figure in American humor because these days, rightly or wrongly, humor is thought of in terms of performance and not writing."

Martin is 55 years old, and seems much younger, a precocious grown-up. He speaks with clear, concentrated energy, as if each word had been selected from a panel of five. His face is unweathered, his laugh soft and endearingly goofy. You hear it and imagine a boy whose teacher just sat on a wad of chewing gum.

In interviews during the 1980s and '90s, with his "wild and crazy" act still definitive in many minds, he sounded at times like so many funny men who didn't feel so funny anymore. He wanted to do dramatic work. He hoped, he once said, to make a film without a single laugh in it.

Now, feeling the old image has safely faded, Martin sounds reconciled with his entertainment background. Show business is his first love, his true love, and he calls himself a "comedian, my proudest label." But he takes writing seriously and wants others to do the same.

"Every once in a while a critic would say about 'Picasso at the Lapin Agile,' 'This play is only being put on because of Steve Martin's name and it keeps people from seeing good plays,' " he says. "But I really do feel that if you're going to criticize me on that level, then, well, let's compare work. I know it's not perfect and I know it's not bad."

Many critics agreed. The AP's Michael Kuchwara found the play "often quite funny and occasionally insightful."

"Shopgirl" has some funny moments, but mostly it's an intimate study of three single people in Los Angeles. Mirabelle works in the glove department at Neiman Marcus by day and paints at night. Jeremy is a slacker who stencils logos on amplifiers. Raymond is a businessman, a middle-aged millionaire and bachelor who has convinced himself that he can have sex with women without any commitment.

They will meet, sleep together, misunderstand each other, learn from each other and move on with their lives. Like his film, "L.A. Story," it's a fable on modern love, the dream of it, and the truth of it.

"Some of this comes out of the fact that I can't believe I'm 55 and still dating," jokes Martin, who is divorced from actress Victoria Tennant and has dated actress Anne Heche, Broadway star Bernadette Peters -- his co-star in "Pennies From Heaven" -- and singer Linda Ronstadt, among others.

Martin began the book about two years ago and went back to it off and on. He said no particular person or event inspired the story. It came together through observations, stories he had heard and firsthand experiences.

"Shopgirl" is a far more conventional work of prose than his New Yorker essays. The humor emerges from language and action rather than from one-liners, and the narrative is entirely straightforward. Writers write for themselves and Martin, who labels himself a "dumb reader," makes sure you always know exactly what's going on:

"She traverses Beverly Boulevard, the chameleon street with elegant furniture stores and restaurants on one end and Vietnamese shops selling mysterious packaged roots on the other. In fifteen miles, like a monopoly game in reverse, this street dwindles in property value and ends at her second-story apartment in Silverlake, an artists' community that is always bordering on dangerous but never quite succeeding."

Reviews so far have been respectful, if not ecstatic. Book List, published by the American Library Association, called it "a very skillful bit of writing business." Publishers Weekly, though, found his prose "sometimes flat" and concluded the book was "neither a triumph nor a disaster."

Comedians have long looked humbly upon the written word. Groucho Marx, who corresponded with T.S. Eliot among others, once said that his most cherished work was not any of his movies, but the pieces he wrote for The New Yorker. Woody Allen also has contributed to the magazine and otherwise has lamented that he couldn't be a great novelist. Carl Reiner has often spoken proudly of his novel, "Enter Laughing."

Martin sees himself as both peer and fan among writers. "I've written 20 essays in The New Yorker, so you can no longer consider me a dabbler," he says. But he also contacts authors he admires and gets a kick out of hearing back from them; novelists Martin Amis and Mary Karr, and poet Susan Wheeler are among his friends.

When he wants to spend an evening being funny, he does so with his fellow comics: Eric Idle, Martin Short, Richard E. Grant. He calls them "the best people I ever met. The smartest. The funniest.

"When you go and hang out with literary people you realize that ... show biz is friendlier," he says. "The literary world is so specific. 'No, we're writing in this style.' And, 'This style is out,' and, 'This style is in.' It's almost too structured to be fun."

Born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Southern California, Martin says he had no thoughts of literature as a young man, only show business. Not until junior college did he take up books -- and it wasn't his brain that led him there.

"I fell in love with a girl," he recalls, "and she got me to read Somerset Maugham's 'The Razor Edge.' And I read it and I thought, 'Oh my God, I've got to become really smart!' "

He majored in philosophy at Long Beach State College, thought about becoming a professor, but was overwhelmed by the will to perform. He dropped out after three years and appeared at some night clubs in the Los Angeles area. He wrote for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," Sonny and Cher and many others and emerged as a stand-up comedian in the mid-1970s. He was a smash in live concerts, a popular host on "Saturday Night Live" and occasionally filled in for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show." By the end of the decade, he was one of the world's biggest stars.

On the surface, you wouldn't mistake his work for Tolstoy's. He was so stupid, he was smart; so sleazy he had integrity. He danced impulsively and called it "happy feet." He complained he didn't trust his cat. He bragged that he dated Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after meeting her at a Laundromat. He wore an arrow in his head.

Some critics thought his act had an arrow it its head. Marvin Kitman of Newsday complained that his "anti-intellectual" jokes marked the decline of American humor. Don Shirley of the Washington Post wrote that Martin "tickles the mind without really piercing it."

"I always believed my act existed on several levels," Martin says. "On its primary level, it was stupid and simple. But on the most sophisticated level, it was something more philosophical: absurdist, anti-comedy, you could say."

He had always written his own material, and even wrote poetry in the early '70s. He turned to prose about 10 years ago when a comic essay, "Yes, in My Own Backyard," was accepted by The New Yorker after being rejected by The New York Times.

Martin is modest about what he can accomplish as a writer. He has called his essays "after-dinner mints to the big meal of literature" and no major entrees are planned. He has not begun a new work of fiction and doubts he could write a full-length novel, believing he doesn't have it in him to sustain the plot.

If his comedy fans were surprised to see Martin turn to writing, those who knew him saw it all along.

"Anyone who's a gifted stand-up comic is also a writer," says Martin's friend, Nora Ephron. "What's constantly astonishing about Steve is that just when you think you've got him pegged he does something different. I was totally knocked out by 'Picasso and at the Lapin Agile' and then he turned around and started all those short pieces. And now he's writing fiction."

Top / Subscribe / Letters to Editor / Contact Webmaster / Staff Directory
Please mail any comments to Newsroom@S-T.com