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Steve Martin: The Late Period
by Adam Gopnik

This is the quintessential profile of Steve. Written by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, it draws on his access to Steve's friends and his own cooperation.  It also came at a turning point in Steve's life -- just as he was emerging as a playwright, just as he was withdrawing somewhat from movies, and just as his marriage was getting ready to go south.

There is a shorter version posted elsewhere, but this is the complete version and well worth reading. Lots of insight into the man at a crucial time in his creative and personal life.

Steve Martin’s humor has always been unpredictable, which may explain why, after transforming himself from the wild and crazy guy into Hollywood’s perfect comedic talent, he has decided that his real future may be as a playwright.

ONE evening last April, a group of actors and writers assembled at Steve Martin’s house, in Beverly Hills, for the first reading of a new play. The play, written by Steve, was called “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” and it told the story of an imaginary encounter between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in 1904. The actors, who had agreed to perform for the evening out of friendship and curiosity, included Tom Hanks, who would read the part of Picasso; Chris Sarandon, who would read the part of Einstein; Martin Mull, who would read the part of Sagot, an art dealer; and the actress Rita Wilson, Hank’s wife, who would read the part of Picasso’s ‘girlfriend. David Dukes, Joanna Gleason, William Petersen, and Anthony LaPaglia would read the smaller parts. The audience was composed of Steve; his wife, the actress Victoria Tennant the writer and director Nora Ephron; and her husband, the writer Nick Pileggi. (“Steve asked, me if I’d read,” Nick said. “But I didn’t know he meant out loud. I had to decline. I’m going to watch.”) 

Steve’s house, like so many Beverly Hills houses, seems to repel permanent occupation. It’s as if it were being inhabited for the sake of the next resident — not so much Steve Martin’s house, as the house that will someday become The Steve Martin House. What seemed most real, and lived in, about the house were the paintings, part of Steve’s exemplary collection: a good Kline, a more than ordinarily good Fischl, and what is probably the single best picture in “Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series. Tom Hanks, his hair cropped in a crewcut (he had recently finished the Jonathan Demme film “Philadelphia,” for which he had to have his head shaved, because he plays an AIDS patient) looked around at the paintings. “Steve is almost finished with that one, and he’s almost done with that one, and soon he’ll finish that one,” he said. Then he stopped and sighed. “Why am I doing these dumb modern-art jokes?” he asked no one in particular. 

Hanks and Nora Ephron were several weeks away from the release of their movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” Steve had been to a screening the night before, and now he said, emphatically and a little belligerently, “It’s a great light comedy, which is the best you can have in the movies.” 

“Do we open. against the dinosaurs?” Tom asked. 

“No,” Nora answered. “We open the weekend after the weekend with the dinosaurs.” 

“Nothing opens against the dinosaurs,” someone else said. 

Steve began to arrange the readers on two facing sofas, and to pass out copies of the script to those who didn’t have one. 

The reading was his first public attempt to resolve a private crisis in his career. “There are certain moments in your work when you feel you’ve passed through a door,” he had said one day a few weeks before, while pacing the floor of the apartrnent he keeps in New York. “When I finished ‘Housesitter,’ I thought that it was one of those moments. ‘Housesitter’ was kind of the last stop on the bus for me.  In ‘Housesitter’ and ‘Father of the Bride’ I was pleased with my performances for the first time. I felt that I had gone as far as I could go in a certain kind of light comedy, and that to do another one right away seemed silly.  So after I made ‘Leap of Faith’ I postponed making movies for a year, and I’ve decided to take this year off to write, and see if I can accomplish something new.  The thing is, I’m not sure about movies right now. Right now, I believe that my body of work will consist not of major films but of major moments. I used to be convinced that a movie was either a commercial success or an artistic success. But it’s really only about commercial success. I don’t mean that cynically. I love good middlebrow art. I’m incredibly proud of ‘Father of the Bride.’ It’s a movie that should be made every twenty-five years. You could argue that perfect, honest, well-made comic entertainment is the best thing that movies can do, or ought to do. If you miss with something ambitious, you can miss so badly. And you can’t be sure if it’s ambitious or just pretentious. You know what I loved about ‘Father of the Bride’? No one stretched. It was just good work. But making a movie means five thousand people with opinions, two years of work, twenty-five million dollars of somebody else’s money, and then I have to go on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’“ He shook his head. “I want to do something else. I want to do something else. I want to do something I can have more immediate control over like doing standup. I miss the feeling I had when I was a night-club performer, and I didn’t need anybody. No one can deny you when you’re the draw. When I was the funniest I ever was, people were coming because of word of mouth. I miss that kind of clean connection.” He dropped his voice into a region of mock pomposity. “I’ve passed through my Early Period. And then I went through my Middle Period, which for a while it didn’t look as if I’d have. But now I’m approaching” — he lowered his voice still further —”my Late Period, and I want to find something worth doing.” 

He heightened the irony simply by raising his eyebrows. In repose, wit his silver hair and broad features, Steve Martin can look exceptionally, almost suspiciously, handsome; he has the good looks of a minor, syndicated crime fighter — a Leslie Nielsen or Lloyd Bridges. The moment he mobilizes his face, however he becomes a parodist. Every expression immediately seems to be placed in inverted commas. If he raises one eyebrow, it becomes a stereotype of conspiratorial pleasure. A smile runs over with insincere charm. Perhaps as a consequence, his normal expressions are severely regulated. He keeps his eyes down and his face preoccupied and immobile. Often, he wears a  full regalia of cover: glasses, beard, and a baseball cap.  At times, this austerity gives the impression, even to friends, of coldness or indifference. He’s a man kept under house arrest by his own gift for irony. 

The two clichés about the comedian — the Chaplinesque funnyman who is serious, and even sombre, in private, and the Mel Brooks-like comic, who is perpetually, even exhaustingly on — both hold ‘for Steve. One moment, he is an intense, eloquent writer and art collector, with reading glasses dangling from a chain and with a theory of comedy backed up by quotations from Kundera. The next, he is “Steve, his own puppet: eyebrows raised, face ‘split by the familiar jack-o’-lantern grin, complacent fatuousness beaming from his eyes. One of the pleasures of being with him is to “watch him go on and off, like Christmas lights. Once, sitting in a room with a couple of friends, he was leafing through a book of photographs of the forties in America. He came upon a picture of Robert Oppenheimer.  “I have an interest in Oppenheimer,” he said softly. There was a respectful, pregnant silence. “No, no!’ he suddenly cried out in absent-minded remorse. “It’s Wisenheimer I have an interest in!” 

This doubleness has fuelled Steve’s growth as an artist—a growth so prodigious that it was now something of a surprise to find him in the midst of even mild artistic crisis. Over the past decade — that Middle Period -- many people had come to feel that Steve Martin had figured out what almost no one else had: how to function as an artist at the end of the twentieth century in  America: First (and, in the Hollywood scheme of things, most important), he had secured his base, and his freedom of action, through his appearances in a series of films: ”All of Me,” “Parenthood,” and particularly, “Father of the Bride” — that had made vast sums of money and had allowed the mantle of Spencer Tracy to fall, however improbably, on his shoulders. He had become America’s Dad. Second, he had written and produced a pair of “personal” films — ”Roxanne,” in 1987, and “L.A. Story,” in. 1991 — that were among the most charming, limber, eccentric, and strangely gallant American comedies of their day. Even Pauline Kael, at a time when she was turning over trash barrels and peering up drainpipes to find anything at all to like in American movies, had liked those movies immoderately. (“Martin seems to crossbreed the skills of Fields and Buster Keaton, with some Fred Astaire mingled in,” she wrote about his performance in “Roxanne.”) Martin seemed one of the few American artists of any sort who, working within a late-modem, ironic, self-conscious sensibility, have found access to a vein of real feeling and genuine poetic invention, without ever becoming sentimental, precious, or self-congratulatory. 

            “So I’ve been looking for a way to escape the horrors of movie promotion,” Steve said that day in New York. “I’ve written a screenplay based on George Eliot’s ‘Silas Marner,’ because I thought, Here’s a great story. When, the story’s working I don’t have to be constantly funny. At the moment, it’s called ‘Twist of Fate’ and I hope to shoot it in the fall. Right now we are looking for a director.” He said this as though an adaptation of George Eliot in modern dress were a normal money in-the-bank proposition. 

Just then, Victoria came in with an armful of flowers. (She is far more beautiful in life than in the movies. Her face, which on screen can seem merely pretty, is beguiling and almost luminous in person.) 

“What lovely flowers,” Steve said, evenly and emphatically. 

She looked at him just a little quizzically, as if she were not quite sure if the emphasis was Steve’s or “Steve’s.” 

“I’ve also spent the winter finishing a play,” Steve added, referring to “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” “I’ve been working on it since 1991. I don’t know what I want to do with it, exactly, or what it has to do with what I do next. The trick about a play is that the audience is New York, and what playwrights have done is allow their work to enter a system where one person evaluates it. And the conventional theatre audience might not be the right audience. This play might be for a segment of the audience completely different from the established, playgoing one. I have an idea that this play, if I do anything with it at all, might be right for a midnight cabaret in Seattle. 

“I think this is a Breakthrough Moment for me. You can never be too sure about those moments, though. Once, when I had been appearing on the ‘Tonight Show’ for a couple of years, I came on after Sammy David, Jr. He was just starting to appear regularly on talk shows then. I did some bit, and at that moment they happened to cut to Sammy, who was laughing so hard that he actually fell off the sofa. Slipped right off onto the floor. I thought, Wow, what a nice endorsement from the Old Guard! It seemed like a real breakthrough. I was so pleased about that. Sammy Davis, Jr., actually fell off the sofa. It took me about a year to discover the truth. Sammy always fell off the sofa.”
 

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