Actor-writer-philanthropist Steve Martin gives Lawrence Grobel the straight dope on who makes him laugh, how much his new-found respect means to him, and why he won't look his fans in the eye.
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During the last days of shooting L.A. Story, Steve Martin's new movie, Rick Moranis began acting a little weird. He'd walk around the lot with a box filled with pictures of himself and ask anyone who said hello if he or she would like an autographed picture. He was doing it, he said, because a lot of people had kids and they were always asking for autographs, but there were no kids on the set, and some of the people he was signing pictures for were not even married. When Steve Martin came by he asked Moranis for a picture, which Moranis dutifully began to sign.
''Make it to my gardener,'' Steve said. ''And I'll have another one for my mechanic, and another for the mailman. How about giving me five or six, I've got a lot of people who would be real interested in this.''
Moranis wasn't fazed by Martin's gentle ribbing. It was part of the business, as far as he was concerned. But for the shyer, more introspective Martin, dealing with the public's desire for a piece of him is not the lark it is for Moranis. To dispense with having to give autographs, Martin had business-size cards made up, which he's signed, that read: ''This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent and funny.''
''This way,'' he says, ''I just give it to them and keep on walking.''
Some of the young crew members were disappointed by Steve's aloofness on the set of L.A. Story. His public persona--the records, the appearances on ''Saturday Night Live,'' the movies--led them to expect an extroverted, effortlessly hilarious guy. But Martin is no Robin Williams, entertaining everyone within earshot with a stream-of-consciousness rap. His demeanor is purely professional. He knows his lines, he does his work, and then he retreats into his trailer until the next shot. There he reads, plays Boggle, updates his script on his Compaq portable computer, and, when she's there, talks with his wife, Victoria Tennant.
On L.A. Story, in which they act together for the second time (they met while filming All of Me), he and Victoria had adjoining trailers. While she passed the time in hers reading a book by Russian Republic president Boris Yeltsin, Steve amused himself with William Goldman's book Hype and Glory. One day, when Victoria came in to tell her husband something, Steve gave her a particular passage in Goldman's book to read. It had to do with The Princess Bride and the casting of ''the prettiest girl in the world,'' for which, according to the story, Whoopi Goldberg had been suggested.
Fifteen minutes later Victoria returned and said, ''That's one of the two funniest things I've ever read. I've got to send this book to some people. It's especially funny since we know who Whoopi's agent is.''
''We do?'' Steve asked, pausing to think.
''Of course we do,'' Victoria continued. ''Everybody knows.''
''They do?'' Martin said, now becoming Navin Johnson, the naive, innocent, unworldly character Steve created in his first movie, The Jerk. When Victoria left, Steve sat staring at Goldman's book on the table in front of him and said to the book, ''I don't.''
LA. Story is Martin's 16th picture in 11 years. Like Woody Allen before him and Robin Williams after, Martin started as a stand-up comic. By the time he hit the movies in 1979, his act had become phenomenally successful: he regularly played to audiences of 20,000. His comedy albums like ''Let's Get Small,'' ''Wild and Crazy Guy,'' and ''Comedy Is Not Pretty,'' sold into the millions. His one book, Cruel Shoes, became an instant best-seller. His guest appearances on ''Saturday Night Live'' were among the most popular in the show's history. The guy from Garden Grove, California, who grew up learning magic and balloon acts at Disneyland's Golden Horseshoe Revue and performing them at Knott's Berry Farm's Bird Cage Theater, was quickly becoming America's top comedian.
After breaking into the movies with the hugely popular The Jerk, Martin made four films--Pennies From Heaven, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, The Man With Two Brains, The Lonely Guy--which weren't particularly well received. Then came All of Me with Lily Tomlin, and the critical raves suggested that Martin had finally broken through. But the box-office wasn't up to the reviews. Martin next appeared in Three Amigos!, with Chevy Chase and Martin Short. It was a film the actors had more fun making than audiences had watching. But Martin's movie career was on the launching pad, and his next five films--Little Shop of Horrors, Roxanne, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Parenthood--were both critically and commercially successful. (His most recent film, My Blue Heaven, was an unequivocal flop.)
In addition to the usual badges of success--homes in L.A. and Santa Barbara, for example--Martin has achieved a few of the more elusive ones: a happy marriage that he makes every effort to keep out of the public eye, and the kind of art collection that admittedly requires a superstar-level salary to assemble, but also bespeaks an abiding interest in art for more than its value as an investment. Steve Martin seems to have reached the pinnacle of Hollywood with most of his humanity intact.
Lawrence Grobel: You grew up in Southern California and you have a West Coast sensibility. In your new movie, L.A. Story, you're taking on Los Angeles as Woody Allen did New York in Manhattan. How do you see L.A.?
Steve Martin: When I think of L.A., I think of a big blue sky and a palm tree and a wide street. I think of warm, silky, summer nights. You don't think about it as a place where people are. It seems to be about emptiness. You always think of L.A. at its best, not as it really is: a smoggy, traffic-laden city. The way it's presented in the movie is very fantasy-like. It's presented as the greatest place on earth.
LG: Is L.A. Story a departure for you?
SM: I see it as a synthesis of everything I do. It's dramatic, it's comedic, it's got jokes, it's got situation comedy, it's surreal, it's silly. I don't think I could ever write it again, this is my last shot--my only shot at something like this.
LG: What makes L.A. Story so different?
SM: It's got a different version of beginning, middle, and end. Its conclusion is not implied at the beginning. It's not standard plot stuff.
LG: Sounds like it must have been hell to pitch: it doesn't start at the beginning and it doesn't have a standard plot line.
SM: Yeah. It's about different things. It's about meeting the right person in your life. It's about the intensity of romantic feelings. It's about magic.
LG: You've gone from being a comedy actor to becoming a dramatic actor. Are these the natural stages of a comic's career?
SM: I don't know, but it seemed the natural order for me.
LG: Critics are beginning to compare you to Chaplin, and to Buster Keaton as well.
SM: If it were only true, it would be great. It's nice to have it said about you, but there is a long way to go before I get into that status. Chaplin was very much an inspiration, but not in my formative years--he was too adult, too sophisticated for me.
LG: So we're seeing a humble Steve Martin here.
SM: I feel like I have a niche, but I'm not going to put any qualitative value on it. What I've done or am still doing is slightly off-base. There isn't anybody really doing it. Don't ask me why. I always feel like I do things, finish them, and move on to something else. Like stand-up comedy, then my early films which were kind of silly, dopey comedies, and then they started changing, getting into more legitimate stories. I feel that L.A. Story is the end of some kind of cycle for me. I don't know what I'll do next.
LG: Some of your choices after The Jerk didn't go over very well. Was that discouraging?
SM: My early films are less logical than my later ones and so they are probably harder to catch on to. But a lot of them do have this sort of afterlife. Like The Man With Two Brains--they even showed it on TV in England. Pennies From Heaven is the same thing. It was vilified when it came out. But I was extremely proud to be in something with that goal and that sophistication.
LG: Still, Pennies was quite a leap after The Jerk.
SM: I didn't want to do Jerk II. I remember I was in Vegas after The Jerk doing my act. And I thought, what am I going to do? This act? Then The Jerk again? And is that it? I wasn't so much depressed as I was tired. And Vegas is the worst place to be tired and questioning what you do. And then Pennies From Heaven came along.
LG: You never liked being on the road, did you?
SM: I'd been on the road for 12 years and my only memories are hotel rooms and a spotlight. I didn't even see the halls I was playing in. You walked out and just saw a spotlight, you couldn't see anything else.
LG: Still, you were pulling in a small fortune by the time you were doing Vegas.
SM: I was making $450,000 a week. The highest I ever got was half a million a week. By then I thought, I've worked hard to get this act together, I've got to run it into the ground. I had to exploit it or I would have been an idiot. But I only did it for three years, and then I stopped.
LG: Was it more fun before you were a hit?
SM: Before I was a hit I had infinite room for experimentation. But when you are a hit you have to go over. You can't take five minutes out of your hour show to try something when you've got 18,000 people out there.
LG: Ten years ago you thought Richard Pryor was the funniest person in America. What happened to Pryor?
SM: I think he got tired. I saw him at ''The Comedy Store Special'' two years ago, he was brilliant. And I said, ''God, he's still got it.'' I remember when I was in college studying philosophy I had this chart of when people do their best work. With poets it was generally 20 to 25; philosophers started at 75 to 90. I tend to think about that a lot. Comedy comes in the mid-thirties to mid-forties. Like Jerry Lewis.
LG: Where does Bob Hope fit in, since he's still going?
SM: He proves the case, because he was brilliant and then became a card reader.
LG: What do you think of Jackie Mason?
SM: He's really funny. My first encounter with him was when I was a writer on the Smothers Brothers show. He came on and did 20 minutes and was fantastic. I'd never seen anything like it before. I saw his show on Broadway and it was hilarious.
LG: Your friend Chevy Chase doesn't like him, thinks he's dated.
SM: You don't have to agree with what someone is saying in order to enjoy it. It's like looking at a painting of the Madonna, you don't have to be a believer to appreciate the painting.
LG: So who's the funniest guy in America today?
SM: I was going to say John Cleese but... for a while I thought Sam Kinison was a funny guy, but he sort of fell. Kevin Kline is certainly funny as an actor. He was really hilarious in A Fish Called Wanda. I know he was funny because I saw it and I wasn't jealous.
LG: When do you feel jealous?
SM: It's mainly over very petty things like when I think my film is better and their film does better.
LG: That sounds like what Chevy Chase said in his Movieline interview. He was upset that your pictures and Robin Williams's pictures got more critical respect than his. He said, ''They're good, but Steve's pictures aren't all that much better or worse than mine.''
SM: I read that.
LG: Does he have a legitimate beef? Why aren't his films taken as seriously as yours?
SM: Because what he's really great at is acting stupid. He plays Clark Griswold and it makes you laugh, so that automatically discounts any kind of critical success. Because nobody wants to be praising somebody who's acting stupid. And those kinds of films generally don't get Sydney Pollack or Mike Nichols to direct them. They just don't have the craft. A lot of comedies--not Chevy's comedies--aren't made with the craft that they should be to get recognition. Films have to look good before they can even enter the ring.
LG: You and Chevy both have had your ups and downs and yet I sense that Chevy doesn't feel he's appreciated in the same way you are. What's the biggest difference between success and failure to you?
SM: The one I've been experiencing in the last six years which was new to me is respect. When you start to get respect it's a whole different world than just how the picture did or how big you are or who's hot and who's not. Respect seems to cut through everything. The other kind of success is where you make shit and still make millions. Which is a very powerful [kind of success], by the way.
LG: Do you feel you're on a steady roll now?
SM: All of us go through cycles wondering: ''What am I supposed to be doing? What's a good script? What makes a good movie? What do I want to say?'' Three years ago a producer said to me, ''You know what you ought to do? Go back on the road again and do your [stand-up] act, it would be great.'' And I said, ''I don't have anything to say, I've said it. I wouldn't know where to begin.'' But I feel I have something to say with movies.
LG: Let's talk about some of your movies. Not counting your cameos in The Muppet Movie and Movers and Shakers, how many films have you done?
SM: This is my 14th. I would count them up but I don't want to look at the names. I'm very bad at going back over these things, giving comments, because I never look at them again. I only sort of hear what people say and it just doesn't count for anything for me
LG: So you ignore the Siskel & Eberts of this world?
SM: Well, they're mixed on me. But it drives me crazy when I hear them say that they long for something original and then Pennies From Heaven came out and I remember thinking, ''Just wait till you see this picture.'' And they killed it.
LG: Yet you consider that film one of the seminal ones of your career, don't you?
SM: When I think of my career I spotlight on three or four things. I think of The Jerk as something important; Pennies From Heaven is something important; and All of Me, Roxanne, and L.A. Story.
LG: You've left out Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
SM: I agree, I should include that because I really have to respect that film. It's one of the first films I did that was touching.
LG: And how about that crazy dentist you played in Little Shop of Horrors?
SM: That was a splashy role and I really enjoyed it. I can look at that film because it's not me up there, it's somebody else. While the other things are kind of close to me.
LG: Like the mob squealer you played in My Blue Heaven?
SM: That was very much character-oriented. I probably never played such a precise character in my life.
LG: The reaction to My Blue Heaven was mostly negative. What was your feeling about it?
SM: Ultimately, I feel as if everybody put out a lot of effort for nothing. It had everything going for it. Nora Ephron, Herb Ross, Rick Moranis, Joan Cusack. In a different world it would've been a hit.
LG: John Huston believed that you should only remake pictures that initially failed. That's what you did with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was a remake of Bedtime Story.
SM: I remember seeing Bedtime Story as a kid and saying, ''God, that's funny.'' And I see it now and it's sort of a mess, amateurishly made. But I didn't watch it again before we shot Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. When I did, I thought Brando was hilarious in a couple of things and I went, ''Why didn't I do that?''
LG: Brando told me that it was one of his favorite pictures to make, that he and David Niven giggled like girls throughout it.
SM: We laughed a lot too, because Michael Caine is hilariously funny.
LG: Weren't you originally to do Caine's role?
SM: Yeah, but we couldn't find anybody to play Freddy. So I thought, what if I moved over? Then it started to click in rehearsal. Actually, Kevin Kline and I were fooling around with doing it at first. It was easier to cast the Michael Caine part than it was to cast the Freddy part. I don't think I ever really quite got into Freddy's brash character, I never did it right. But I think I was pretty good in the Ruprecht stuff, which I really loved.
LG: When David Puttnam saw Roxanne he got nervous about it and decided to cut back on the number of screens it was released on. Was that a mistake?
SM: That was a major mistake. The movie was set to open on 1,200 screens and they cut back to 850. It did $4.5 million the opening weekend. If it had been 1,200 screens it would have done $6 million. So that was a mistake.
LG: There was a lot of talk that you would win an Oscar for your performance in Roxanne, yet when the nominations came in, you were ignored. Did you feel cheated?
SM: I'll be philosophical about it: it's their contest.
LG: Now be less philosophical. You must have been aware of the talk.
SM: You do get excited because you hear it so much. You think you are going to be nominated, that it's a fait accompli.Then when you're not, you realize, well, of course not. I just don't think the Academy is a comedy institution. Drama is really king and comedy is perceived as a step-child. If you have a choice of voting between a great comedy and Born on the Fourth of July, you'd vote for Born on the Fourth of July.
LG: Chevy Chase told us that Three Amigos! was hurt by director John Landis's ego. Did you feel that way too?
SM: It wasn't really what I wanted it to be, but I'm not going to put the blame anywhere because I was the executive producer and one of the co-writers. What Landis did deliver was a great look. Big. Movies are group efforts and. . .1 don't know what to say about it. Three Amigos! wasn't a flop. It did $40 million.
LG: And it gave you, Chase, and Martin Short a reason to have Three Amigos! dinners.
SM: Yes. With the wives. It's hilarious. They are both really funny, Marty and Chevy. And everybody gets along and everybody's mate gets along.
LG: Now that you brought her up, how did your ''mate'' feel when Time described her as a swan ''in the moat around the castle of her husband's privacy''?
SM: She hated it. Because she's not that at all. She is truly her own person.
LG: You met during All of Me. When did you marry?
SM: A couple of years after we met. We've been together since All of Me. But I'm not really comfortable talking about it. About my wife or my romantic affairs.
LG: You're also not comfortable appearing with Victoria on the cover of magazines. Why is that?
SM: Because we aren't trying to sell ourselves as a couple. Our careers are separate and neither one of us talks about our relationship or what goes on at home. It's some kind of an invasion of privacy to me. We have got to keep in our world something private. Otherwise you feel like you get up to go to the bathroom and it becomes a possible anecdote for an interview.
LG: What do the two of you like to do?
SM: We socialize, read, watch a film on laser discs, go for walks. During L.A. Story we hung out in the trailer and talked and played cards, chatted and laughed.
LG: Have you thought about having children?
SM: I'm really uncomfortable talking about things like that in a magazine. It's really between me and her.
LG: There's nothing that wrong about talking about children, is there?
SM: It's never come up, really. I've never really known kids until I did Parenthood and I like them. But it's not something I think about one way or another.
LG: You seem to be receding into those adjectives that have most described you over the years: that you're introspective, serious, worried, studious, shy, private, distant. Do those words seem to capture you?
SM: No, I think I've changed quite a bit. Obviously there's a little bit of that. I'm kind of uncomfortable around strangers. A lot of that came from touring and being a celebrity. If you talk to someone it's always about you. Pretty soon you just shut up, you just don't talk to anybody. That was then, now is now. If I'm with the right people, meaning people I'm comfortable with, I'm a different person than I used to be.
LG: In what ways?
SM: I'm much more capable of having fun. I enjoy going out. Though I still have a very strong private home life.
LG: Is it married life or the professional respect you've received which has changed you?
SM: A little of both.
LG: Do you find you have a lot in common with Victoria?
SM: It's always amazing how much you have in common with the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with. It's like, I'm a vegetarian, but I eat fish, so I'm not a true vegetarian. And the same is true of her. It's like: why should she only eat fish too? It's just amazing.
LG: Your marriage aside, what do you feel has been your greatest accomplishment to date?
SM: The writing of Roxanne and L.A. Story. Because it makes me more than an actor in the movies. Although I'd written movies before, co-wrote maybe three or four films before Roxanne, it was that one which made me an actor/writer in my head. I don't get a big kick about being an actor. There are a lot of actors and a lot of good actors and to me, I want to do something more. Although sometimes in my head I just want to stop all this writing and worrying and sweating over getting it right. Actors get fabulous scripts and they go out and do them and they are lauded, but really, they just acted it. They didn't have to do the slaving part of writing it and worrying about it. When I got the Writers Guild Award I was really pleased. Really, really happy.
LG: What about directing? Do you see yourself as becoming a triple hyphenate?
SM: No, not for me. Even if I directed a movie it doesn't mean that it would come out the way I wanted it. I like being the writer and the actor. And I like the fact that someone's out there thinking about the directing independently. It brings something to your work, because film is collaborative. I like having another brain in there.
LG: Do you still get surrounded by crowds when you go out?
SM: It depends. If I'm walking down the street, no. But if you are at an event where there's a lot of photographers and people who came to see the celebrities, then it can be hairy.
LG: Do you get a lot of people who claim to know you?
SM: A lot of people will come on like they are your best friend and there is a moment where you think, ''Do I know this guy or not?'' And then nine times. .. no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred you don't know them.
LG: Do you ever blank out on somebody you do know in a public situation?
SM: A perfect example of that is when we went to that Warner Bros, celebration. We were milling around and ran into Kevin Costner, who lives up where we live in Santa Barbara. He said, ''Let's exchange numbers.'' So now the dinner's going on and I feel somebody come over and say, ''I've got to ask you to do this.'' And he puts a card and pen down in front of me. I write ''Steve Martin.'' Then I look up and it's Kevin Costner. He's waiting for my phone number and I've given him my autograph! Because part of it is not to make eye contact, because then you can get into a conversation.
LG: Do you watch much TV?
SM: No, I've kind of quit watching television. I might watch when I'm exercising but if it's the news, so much of it is fights and interviewing people whose sons have just been killed and people crying and people who don't know what the fuck is going on, that I hate it.
LG: What movies have you really liked?
SM: Casablanca was a perfect film. Killing Fields was a great movie, so powerful. Cinema Pamdiso was fantastic. So was Broadcast News. Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing, every time I see it I'm on the floor laughing, but it's not crafted like a great film. Still, it's a great comedy. A lot of the time comedies can be killed by fabulous values. Comedies seem to work really well when they are a little clunky, like Annie Hall, which is a great film. The movie opens in the middle, goes to the beginning, and then goes to the end. It wasn't crafted like a perfect film although it ended up one. It really has an energy that comes from spontaneity in the writing and editing stages. Then you go to Manhattan, where you can tell he's learned something from Annie Hall, and now he's crafted a great film. Crimes and Misdemeanors was fabulous. Underrated, too. If that movie had been released in December with a different name on it, then everybody would have been stunned. But we've come to expect such fabulous work from him that we take it for granted. Each of Woody's films has a radical idea which you'd think you can't make a movie about. In Manhattan he's sleeping with a 17-year-old. In Crimes and Misdemeanors one of his characters gets away with murder.
LG: David Lynch sometimes seems to get away with murder. Weren't you supposed to make a film with him, One Saliva Bubble?
SM: Oh, I want desperately to do it. It's just finding time in our schedules.
LG: What's it about?
SM: I don't know how to describe it. It's very different than anything he's done. It's a real comedy.
LG: What did you think of Wild at Heart?
SM: I really liked it. I wrote David a note saying, ''There must be some new kind of comedy out there, even smart comedy becomes formulaic, and there must be a way to think about comedy like I thought of it 15 years ago. There must be some kind of laugh that's not structured.'' And that's what I thought Wild at Heart delivered.
LG: How did your doing Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center come about?
SM: Mike Nichols called me up two years before we did it and said, ''I have an idea of Waiting for Godot with you and Robin Williams.'' Then we all sat down and read it--Robin, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Irwin--and we felt really good about it. Beckett never saw it, but I have a feeling he would have liked it. What made me want to do it? Same reason I wanted to do Pennies From Heaven. The quality of the writing was so high, it's like doing Shakespeare.
LG: Was acting in a play a very different experience for you?
SM: When I was eighteen I worked at the Melodrama Theater in Knott's Berry Farm for three years. Did four shows a day, six or seven days a week. And the difference between that and doing Lincoln Center was only the words. When I walked out on stage it was like I was back.
LG: So what you're saying is there's no difference between performing at an amusement park theater and Lincoln Center?
SM: Yeah. It's all about having it ingrained in your head: your vocal level, how to face the audience and not make it look like you are facing the audience--obvious actor's stuff.
LG: I understand you have a great bit which you sometimes perform: The Great Flydini. How did that come about?
SM: Ever since I stopped doing stand-up I'd get requests to do things. I thought about it for years: If I just had a good five minutes. One day it struck me, the idea of Flydini. It's like a vaudeville or magic act where a guy comes out and unzips his pants and removes an enormous amount of things from his fly. I pull out eggs, a lit cigarette, a telephone, a puppet that looks like Pavarotti and sings ''Pagliacci.'' And bubbles come out. It's completely not dirty. I have a tape of it from Carnegie Hall.
LG: We haven't talked yet about politics and art--two subjects every comedian should have opinions about. Have you voted for any president since McGovern ran?
SM: Yeah, I voted for Dukakis. You know what I realized? That it doesn't matter with any president anymore. It's a job and it mattered when there'd only been 30 presidents. But now there's been 40 or 45 and it's like, ''Oh, I see, he's president this year.''
LG: You were recently in Saudi Arabia. What were your impressions?
SM: There were several reasons I went. I felt we'd ignored our troops in Vietnam. That was a mistake, blaming them for the political scene. I'm not a supporter of war, I've always been a peacenik. I felt it was a humanitarian visit. Secondly, it's hard to ignore something like this. After you've had a successful life, your country's given you all these possibilities, it's hard to say no when you're sitting in your air-conditioned house.
LG: Did you get a sense that our troops are antsy to fight?
SM: No, I got a sense of, they knew their presence there was important. They had a sense of mission. I asked one soldier, ''Would you rather fight now, or sit here for six months?'' He said, ''I'd sit here for three years if I didn't have to fight.''
LG: Was it more dismal than you expected?
SM: It would really be dismal if the troops weren't there. But I thought their morale was good, and they seemed extremely competent. The Air Force is really sharp, the equipment seemed incredible. Of course, I'm a buffoon, I don't know how to evaluate things like that.
LG: One thing you do know how to evaluate is modern art. You used to collect 19th-century American art. Why'd you switch?
SM: Frankly, a 19th-century American painting isn't that interesting. Except for a couple of great artists. So as you become more sophisticated you naturally move up.
LG: You've endowed a gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. What does that mean?
SM: It means that when they were building this wing I gave them some money and as an honor they put my name in a room.
LG: How much have you given them?
SM: I'm not trying to go on record as a big philanthropist but I've probably given the County Museum $700,000, maybe a million in gifts and paintings. I paid for half of the Francis Bacon exhibit.
LG: What painter most defines L.A.?
SM: The obvious is [David] Hockney. But the director Mick Jackson feels that Rousseau is more like L.A., thick with foliage, hidden secrets, and hidden places. And through him I've seen a lot of things that I wasn't aware of. You go to houses and they are drenched with palms and there's the hlue sky or the full moon with the clouds moving across it. It's quite lush. But as my wife said, ''If you turn off the sprinklers it would die.''
LG: What do you think about artists like Andy Warhol?
SM: Warhol will last because his images are so powerful. Sometimes paintings are about paintings and sometimes they are about image. He's strictly about image. But, I mean, who cares about what people think? El Greco wasn't even famous until the 20th century. The cream definitely rises to the top.
LG: Guess that might be said about you one day.
SM: I don't know what to say about that.
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Lawrence Grobel is the author of The Hustons and Conversations with Capote, and a frequent contributor to these pages.