Famous Just Right

By Meghan Daum, The Believer. Posted May 13, 2005.

Everyone who ever had a crush on Steve Martin developed an even bigger crush when he started writing for the New Yorker almost 10 years ago. His first piece, a satire of middlebrow art world pretensions in which the narrator claims to own a birdbath sculpted by Raphael, reminded us of what we already kind of knew: that Steve Martin is a serious person who conveys his seriousness by sending it up.

No matter how much recognition he receives as an art collector and patron--he recently donated $1 million to the American art collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.--and no matter how many times he appears in the New Yorker or at the 92nd Street Y or anywhere else that we don't expect superstar comedians to appear, his voice will always carry traces of Navin Johnson in The Jerk. Martin is nothing if not the embodiment of the fusion of high and low; a wacky, broadly comedic entertainer who cleans up astonishingly well. But unlike most of the affable, suburban characters he now tends to play (his upcoming turn as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther notwithstanding), Martin seems coiled with ambition, focus, and an utter lack of goofiness.

Martin's screenplays for The Jerk, Roxanne, and L.A. Story led him to begin writing stage plays, which include The Underpants and Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In 1998, he published the humor collection Pure Drivel, which was followed in 2000 by a not-so-comic novella called Shopgirl (which is currently being made into a movie for a late 2005 release). A quiet, smoothly arced love story between Mirabelle, a young woman with a melancholic disposition, and Ray Porter, a mysteriously aloof older man, Shopgirl is like a tiny box of very dark chocolates, a meditation on loneliness and detachment that is simultaneously bleak and hopeful.

Martin upped his own thematic ante in the next novella. The Pleasure of My Company, published in 2003, is like a slightly larger chocolate box into which someone has slipped Quaaludes. Here he introduced us to Daniel Pecan Cambridge, a marginally functional eccentric living a highly regimented life in Santa Monica, Calif. Unable to drive a car or step over curbs, Daniel walks miles out of his way (always counting his steps) so that he may cross streets only where there are driveways. He secretly yearns for his social worker, Clarissa, as well as a pharmacist at his neighborhood Rite Aid named Zandy.

Steve Martin gave this interview at his home in Los Angeles. At one point, a bird flew through a window into his dining room and he spent several minutes trying to coax it out without frightening it. He also played "Sleigh Ride" on the banjo and apologized for messing up the tricky part.

--Meghan Daum

I. Depression is like the flu

Did you always think of yourself as a writer? It seems that being a comic actor is so rooted in sketch comedy, where there's a definite writing element.

Writing has a lot of definitions. I always thought that writing for my comedy act was writing. It was a very simple progression for me. When I was in high school and college, I loved poetry. And I was very moved by certain poems and certain sentences. And then I became a comedian and a comedy writer and that was a whole other form. After I'd done my comedy act during the late 70s, I started writing a screenplay for The Jerk. And that went on and I started writing more screenplays. I remember being in New York and seeing a comic play, and I thought, "I should be able to do that. I've written screenplays and I've performed live." So I started fooling around, writing my first play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The play had more, let's say, thoughtful passages. And those thoughtful passages encouraged me to be able to write. For example, in Pure Drivel there are a few stories that are more thoughtful, and I have these thoughtful sentences. And those few sentences encouraged me to be able to write Shopgirl.

Did it feel natural to you to write the more thoughtful sentences?

Once I got a little bit of confidence, yeah. Because you don't know if it's the corniest thing in the world until you put it out there in the world.

How dark would you consider your sensibility on a color scale with darkest on one side and lightest on the other?

Certainly not the light side. But I am a happy person. I don't know anymore. You go through periods of your life where you're skewed more dark and you're skewed more light. Right now, I'm sort of dead in the middle.

In Shopgirl the main character, Mirabelle, suffers from some form of clinical depression. Your description of what it's like to be in that state seems so accurate. Are you writing from firsthand experience?

I haven't been depressed in that way. I've been depressed situationally, but the information comes from talking. Well, it comes first from experiencing temporary depression. But it's also from talking to people who have experienced it. I knew a girl who was depressed and I asked her what it was like. She said, "The closest thing I can compare it to is having the flu." And I thought, "Oh, I can kind of understand that." You don't want to get out of bed, you don't want to do anything. She made it a real concrete thing rather than, "Oh, I feel this or I feel that."

Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection "My Misspent Youth" and the novel "The Quality of Life Report." Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Vogue, and the Los Angeles Times.

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