MOVIES : The Guy Who Lived Our Lives : For years Jack Lemmon has been our Everyman, but at 67 he doesn’t always get the best roles. Now he has his teeth into David Mamet’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and there’s a new Mamet role in the offing.

He came of age in an era when grown men could use the word baby with other grown men and get away with it. Or kiddo . As in “I’m fine, kiddo,” as he is saying into the phone now.

“Listen, I read David (Mamet)’s script over the weekend and I just went crazy. I don’t know if anybody will go see this except David and me but I think it’s just terrific. I called him. He’s coming out here in 10 days and I told him he should definitely continue writing. Yeah, he has a definite future.”

That is vintage Jack Lemmon--an overt sincerity, a bantamish enthusiasm bordering on the manic and the fillip of a bad joke earnestly delivered so that it becomes, if not exactly funny, then touching in its intent.

He has been giving these controlled, wired performances for more than four decades. In nearly 50 films, comedies as well as dramas, Lemmon has played ordinary men struggling with extraordinary circumstances. Whether it was the frantic career machinations of Ensign Pulver in “Mr. Roberts,” the maniacal transvesticism of Daphne in “Some Like It Hot,” or the quieter moral dissolution he exhibited in “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “Save the Tiger,” Lemmon played, as critics said, our Everyman.

He insists he doesn’t see himself in that Regular Joe way, “although I understand what they’re getting at,” he says. And Lemmon is not above delivering a mannered, schtick-littered performance. Remember “Dad”? Nonetheless, his career--honored by the American Film Institute in 1988 and scheduled to be saluted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center next spring--can be seen as a pop culture mirror for post-war America.

Harold Lloyd, the silent-screen star who personified comic optimism, saw Lemmon as his heir. He was a Harvard man who brought that offstage reality to a screen persona that was Cheeveresque; we saw ourselves, our fathers, in his canon of fallible men. No matter the role, Lemmon always seemed to be the man in the gray flannel suit with a bone-weary sadness in his eyes. But it was a weariness streaked with a zest that lept to the surface in unexpectedly manic moments. He’s won two Oscars, a Janus-faced pair--”Mr. Roberts,” a 1955 comedy, and “Save the Tiger,” a drama in 1972. As one writer once described the actor’s Chekhovian talents, “He is our clown for the Age of Anxiety.”

Now, in his latest role, playing real estate agent Shelley Levene in the screen adaptation of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the actor adds another morally susceptible businessman to his oeuvre. “A total misuser of the American dream,” says Lemmon, who compares Levene, a failed Shylock, to the cynical Harry Stoner of “Save the Tiger.” The film is Lemmon’s first starring role since “Dad” two years ago and the word is that his performance, which earned a best actor prize at this year’s Deauville Film Festival, is a likely Oscar contender.

This partnering of Lemmon and Mamet is an obvious, if late-in-coming, marriage between a foremost chronicler of 20th-Century American manhood and one of its quintessential portraitists. It has also provided the 67-year-old actor a welcome coda to a career that seemed ready to head for bit parts, such as his piano-playing cameo in Robert Altman’s “The Player.”

“How often do you get a literate script these days?” he asks. “Not too often. At my age, I can’t expect to get another part as rich as this one in ‘Glengarry.’ The son of a bitch has ruined me.”

Already Mamet has tapped Lemmon to play the lead in the screen adaptation of the playwright’s drama “A Life in the Theater.” “I got this other script from David and I’m so excited I can’t even see straight,” says Lemmon. “Two scripts like this? I can’t believe it. I feel 10 years younger. I’m even hitting the (golf) ball farther.”

Sitting in his memorabilia-filled office--photos and trophies from golf matches and films--Lemmon seems the embodiment of country-club ease. Dressed in a short-sleeved sport shirt, casual slacks and beige loafers, he cuts a slim, somewhat restless figure. Although the actor is known for ably filling his non-working hours--he is a staple in celebrity golf tournaments and an inveterate family man--Lemmon seems genuinely excited not only to be working again but to be entertaining the media.

“Connie, do we have any soft drinks?” he calls to his assistant, before settling onto the office’s beige leather sofa to talk about his role in “Glengarry,” his career and the changes he has seen in Hollywood in the nearly half-century he has been acting.

“I remember in the ‘50s when I was a kid I used to say, and I meant it, that I can’t wait to get older because the parts get richer,” says Lemmon. “It’s true. They do get richer, but there are fewer of them. That’s what they didn’t tell me.”

Indeed, to talk to Lemmon is to encounter a man occupying that shadowy space between actor and role, that somewhat edgy territory where a performer is forced to play himself. Although garrulous and amiable to a fault, Lemmon, like his friend Johnny Carson, possesses an awkward affability, a veneer of pleasantness that does not quite mask a deeper unease. To meet him is to discover that link between the actor and his screen persona, which, as one critic put it in a review of “Mr. Roberts,” is a conflicted “nice guy/yes man.”

Kevin Spacey, a co-star in “Glengarry,” who has worked with Lemmon several times, including the 1986 Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” says the actor “is not like Peter Sellers, dull in real life but outrageous in character, but Jack is comfortable in someone else’s skin.”

Gene Saks, who directed the “The Odd Couple,” describes Lemmon in terms of being a quintessential actor. “Jack has a facade so clever and so attractive, but you still wonder what is really behind there. If true greatness has escaped him as a performer, it is because he is so damn good at acting, which is, in truth, faking it.”

Even though he had seen the stage production of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” during its Los Angeles tour in 1985, Lemmon hadn’t considered playing the role of Shelley Levene (portrayed on Broadway by Robert Prosky) until he got a call three years ago from producer Jerry Tokofsky who was shopping for a cast for a possible screen version of the play).

“I read the screenplay and I thought it was better than the play,” recalls Lemmon. “But I wondered if this film would ever happen, because there is no sex, no violence, no special effects.”

Indeed, it took five years, during which two other directors, Ulu Grosbard and Sidney Lumet, were attached to the project, before Mamet’s black comedy came together as a New Line film directed by James Foley (“After Dark, My Sweet” and “Who’s That Girl”). The film’s cast--in addition to Lemmon and Spacey includes Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris and Alan Arkin--was assembled largely by Creative Artists Agency, which represents most of the actors. “Once we had Jack and Al and saw them read together,” says Foley, “that was it.”

In “Glengarry,” Pacino and Lemmon play the two top salesmen, Ricky Roma and Shelley Levene, in a real estate agency (relocated from Chicago to New York for the film) where business--pitching worthless plots in a Florida development called Glengarry Glen Ross--has been pinched by a recession economy. The agents, an embittered, cynical “dying breed . . . in a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, office workers,” as Roma says at one point, exhibit even more desperate behavior when a management consultant, played by Baldwin, tightens the screws with an up-or-out sales contest that is certain to drop most of the agents onto the unemployment rolls.

The Baldwin character Mamet created for the screenplay, added to the film to bolster the dramatic tension, was one of several changes Mamet made when translating the play to the screen. The playwright also eliminated most of the play’s long soliloquies, including a pages-long opening riff by Roma, pared and reordered several scenes and refocused the play from essentially a two-man drama into an ensemble piece. All were changes that Lemmon applauded. “The film version is clearer and more cohesive,” says the actor. “And the Alec Baldwin character solved a problem I had with the play in understanding the real pressures on these guys.”

The play’s story line, however, remains intact. Indeed, if anything, the events of “Glengarry,” “prophetic in 1985,” as Spacey puts it, have only become more timely today.

“I think if Jerry had gotten the film off the ground when he first had the rights it would not be nearly as meaningful as it is today,” says Lemmon, who suggests that similarities exist between “Glengarry” and “Save the Tiger,” not only in the films’ chilly hearted, expedient protagonists, but “both films confront a topical problem of their era--that everybody is out there scratching like hell to make a living.”

If “Glengarry” gained a sense of verisimilitude from recent events, Foley considered Mamet’s screenplay sufficiently stylized and emotionally “opaque” to insist on a three-week rehearsal period prior to the film’s New York shoot last year. “It’s seductive when you have language like Mamet’s and good actors who can say the lines so cleverly,” says Foley. “But you want a greater emotional truth, so when you come in on a close-up you see the mask masking all (the characters’) bravura.”

Foley said he was particularly alert to any “sentimentality” evinced by Lemmon, who was playing what was potentially the film’s most sympathetic character--a salesman in his late 50s facing involuntary unemployment with mounting medical bills from his daughter’s hospitalization. “That would sink the whole thing,” says Foley. “The moral here is not ‘poor old Shelley Levene.’ Levene is as much one of them as Ricky Roma is.”

Lemmon concedes that the challenge in playing Levene was “figuring out how not to get sympathy with this character. There are a lot of ways you can skin the cat, play a scene,” says Lemmon, who chose to make Levene “as unpleasant as possible every chance I got. He’s not a very nice man--he’s conniving, a man with no dignity left, but he is still out there going for it.”

If that approach raises questions about how an actor plays a character he dislikes, Lemmon again cites “Save the Tiger.” “Like with Harry Stoner, I didn’t like him as a person, but as an actor I loved him. He cops out, his is a total misuse of the American dream. Why? Because he has a daughter in the hospital? That’s no damned excuse. He would have sold that daughter if he could.”

Lemmon also credits Mamet’s script and his fellow cast members, nearly all of whom have extensive stage backgrounds. “The writing was so good and I was working with actors I respect as much as any,” says Lemmon. “And with three weeks of rehearsal, by the time we started shooting, we were like a play ready to open.”

Foley concurs that the shooting of “Glengarry” was “by far the most polite set I’ve ever been on.” As for any pecking order, Foley puts it this way: “Al is a big star, but Jack is too and he is also older, so Al was deferential to him and Jack was deferential to everybody.”

Spacey, who played Lemmon’s son-in-law in “Dad” and his boss in “Glengarry,” considers the actor’s performance as Levene “very clean of ‘Lemmonisms,’ those quirks he uses as an actor when the material is not dense enough.” Spacey adds: “Jack comes from the theater and he has a great deal of respect for lines. He likes to spend a lot of time discussing possibilities, the various ways to say a line, but he still manages to make it sound fresh. There were times when (his character) was pleading with me when I just wanted to say, ‘OK, OK, I’ll give you what you want.’ ”

Although Lemmon insists he is not the type of actor who stays in character during a film’s shoot--”that’s the worst thing you can do, become so immersed in the part that you become the character and lose all control”--Foley describes Lemmon as “a well-oiled supple machine” who is “more of a Method actor than he thinks he is.”

During one day’s shooting, Foley spotted the actor silently moving his lips while standing in the midst of the crew while they performed an hours-long lighting change. “I asked him what he was doing,” says Foley. “And Jack just said he always likes to rehearse his lines on a set with all the noise instead of in the silence of his trailer. He likes to work with a certain amount of authenticity.”

Lemmon agrees. “That set was like an office to us,” he says sounding almost wistful. “It was on the second floor of the sound stage and climbing those stairs every day, it was like going to work. There was a wonderful feeling of reality to it.”

Lemmon pauses. “And now, to get this second Mamet script?” he says, coming to life again. “At the end of 40 years, at the end of doing everything--plays, TV, films--to get parts like this, after what I’ve been lucky enough to get? That just doesn’t happen.”

Actually, there are two tales told about how John Uhler Lemmon 3d grew up to become an actor. One has to do with his self-taught piano-playing talents and a boyhood dream to be a songwriter like George Gershwin. The other is the story of his first comic role performed in his parents’ living room when he was 7 years old.

Jack Lemmon--the only child of John Uhler Lemmon Jr., a vice president of the Doughnut Corp. of America, and Mildred LaRue Lemmon, his party-loving, wisecracking wife--had come up with a snoring routine that he performed for company. He’d mastered two dozen different snores, including one that sounded exactly like a freight train. Amusing party fare in the 1930s in this wealthy Boston suburb, except that the younger Lemmon had come up with the sketch, so the story goes, about the time that his parents started sleeping in different bedrooms. His father snored, Mrs. Lemmon had explained to her son. But as Lemmon recalled it some years later in an interview, “I had a happy childhood but it was tempered by an acute awareness of the pain (of their marriage).”

It would not be the first time that Lemmon attempted to relieve anxiety with comedy. By the time he reached the first of several private schools he would attend--Rivers Country Day, Phillips Academy in Andover and Harvard University--his father was away on numerous business trips, his mother was spending more and more time at the Ritz Carlton Hotel bar and Lemmon had become a shy but popular boy who entertained prep-school chums with piano-playing and stand-up comedy routines.

“He would go down and study the comics at the local burlesque house,” recalls Fred Jordan, one of his oldest friends, the former president of Raleigh Studios who met Lemmon during their first year at Andover. “But mostly he was into music, Gershwin. He wasn’t the outgoing guy he is now. When he was at the piano, then he was comfortable, like Linus with his blanket.”

Lemmon nearly went to Yale to study drama, but pressure from his father, who had by then separated from his mother, as well as a desire to stay near home in Boston caused Lemmon to enroll at Harvard in 1943. He was admittedly a mediocre student, but a standout in his extracurricular dramatic activities. By his junior year, Lemmon was president of the satiric Hasty Pudding theatrical club. It is telling that Lemmon traces his own performing abilities to his parents.

“If I was (naturally comic) I didn’t know it,” he recalls. “I remember I tried to be funny and both of my parents were terribly funny. My father was also very dignified, but my mother was an absolute ding-a-ling, a ripper. Whenever I think of her, I think of her laughing.”

After graduation, and a brief stint serving as a naval officer during the final months of World War II, he borrowed $300 from his father and moved to New York to become an actor. While searching for theater jobs, Lemmon supported himself by playing piano in various bars. He got his first break in 1948, a part in a radio soap opera. “Wow,” he recalls. “Then I could eat.” But it wasn’t until he plugged into the burgeoning live television industry--he appeared in more than 400 programs in five years--that Lemmon began to banish “the great self-doubts” that plagued any young actor.

“All I had thought about was the theater,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t get an agent, couldn’t get anything and I was scared nothing was going to happen. I’d borrowed money from my dad, who was petrified for me. And I began to get little dizzy spells. I’m sure it was just an emotional thing.”

Television, Lemmon says, “came out of the blue. But I gained a tremendous amount of self-confidence from it. I didn’t know one TV camera from another. And it was weird the first time I got a lead part. But boom, it worked. Once the show started, I didn’t remember anything until it was over. I was just going, I just kept talking.”

He married one of his co-stars, actress Cynthia Stone, and in 1953, made his Broadway debut in a revival of “Room Service.” A talent scout from Columbia Pictures offered him a screen test and eventually a film contract, which Lemmon says he accepted reluctantly. “I took it because it wasn’t exclusive. Which was good because I made my third film, ‘Mr. Roberts,’ at Warners.”

Although Lemmon would establish his reputation with his Oscar-winning performance as Ensign Pulver, it was his first film, George Cukor’s “It Should Happen to You,” co-starring Judy Holliday, that gave the actor a taste of his own talents.

Lemmon had suggested to Cukor a way to shoot a crucial comic scene: “After this huge fight with Judy, I made an exit, slammed the door, opened it, said, ‘Are we still on for Friday lunch?’ She says, ‘Yes,’ and I say, ‘Thank you very much’ and closed the door. It was my idea to stage it that way and I was thrilled that Cukor let me do it.”

He attended a preview, and after witnessing the audience’s enthusiastic reaction, “I remember saying to myself, ‘That’s good. We’re both good,’ ” Lemmon recalls. “Meantime, Judy was sitting behind me, beating me on the shoulder saying, ‘You’re terrific.’ I had never had that feeling about myself. The most I’d felt was satisfied.”

That story seems to encapsulate something of Lemmon’s off-screen personality as well as his public persona--a nervous enthusiasm checked by an inherent modesty. “Jack has a certain noblesse oblige about him,” says Jordan who remains a close friend, and weekly golf partner, of Lemmon’s today. “He is gracious, doesn’t hold grudges and is very good at never thinking ill of people; that infects his screen presence.”

John Ford spotted that inherent good-naturedness in Lemmon when he handpicked the 29-year-old actor to co-star with Henry Fonda in “Mr. Roberts.” Accosting Lemmon on the Columbia lot, Ford urged him to take the role by spitting in his palm and sealing the deal with a handshake with the nonplussed actor who had no idea he was talking to Ford. “All true,” says Lemmon with laugh. “A 100% Hollywood story and it’s all true.”

Although Lemmon followed “Mr. Roberts” with some less memorable films, “You Can’t Run Away From It” with June Allyson and “Operation Mad Ball” with Ernie Kovacs, he also won Oscar nominations for performances in two Billy Wilder comedies--”Some Like It Hot” with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe and “The Apartment” co-starring Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray. He would go on to make a total of seven Wilder films in what would become one of the most pivotal relationships of his career.

“You learn from everybody that’s good,” says Lemmon. “But Billy was also one of the great writers, so you’re working with terrific material. About half-way through filming ‘The Apartment,’ I realized that it wasn’t just what good writers write, but what they don’t write. I made seven pictures with Billy Wilder and I never changed a word.”

Walter Matthau, who worked with Lemmon in six films, including the film version of Neil Simon’s hit comedy “The Odd Couple” as well as “Kotch,” which Lemmon directed, says that the actor “has a great deal of depth. People think that comedy is just fun, but it is a form of drama and Jack has no fear of trying anything or of looking foolish. He is so good he can make any direction his own. A director says, ‘Put a laugh here,’ and he’ll get a laugh there.”

Indeed, if comedy seemed to be Lemmon’s oyster during the ‘50s and early ‘60s--for two years he played the captain on TV’s “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”--by 1962 the actor was looking to expand his range.

“After ‘Mr. Roberts’ nobody in the world was offering me anything but comedy and I knew as an actor I had much more range,” Lemmon says. He found “The Days of Wine and Roses,” a bleak tale of an alcoholic couple that almost went unmade until Jack Warner gave the nod. Lemmon’s performance with Lee Remick earned critical praise from reviewers.

“That helped some,” says Lemmon, who spent the next 10 years filming sex farces, “Under the Yum-Yum Tree,” “Good Neighbor Sam,” and several comedies including “The Out-of-Towners,” “The Fortune Cookie” and “The Odd Couple.”

“The big turning point,” says Lemmon, “came in 1972 with ‘Save the Tiger.’ From then on, I’ve been offered both comedy and drama in equal amounts.”

He won his second Oscar, for best actor, playing the disillusioned Los Angeles garment manufacturer, Harry Stoner, who arranges for an arsonist to burn one of his factories for the insurance money. Although some critics faulted John Avildson’s film for excusing Stoner’s corruption, “Save the Tiger” caught some of the country’s mood of angry cynicism in the early ‘70s, and Lemmon’s nuanced, underplayed performance was universally hailed as “one of the best portraits he’s given us,” as a review in Britain’s Guardian put it.

Although Lemmon says shooting that film “was one of the few times I got into trouble as an actor because I identified too much with the character and experienced sort of a walking breakdown like Stoner’s,” he insists that it is serious dramatic parts--”Save the Tiger,” “China Syndrome,” “Missing” and now “Glengarry Glen Ross”--that satisfy him most.

“I think it’s fine to entertain,” he says. “You cannot write and direct comedy any better than Mr. Wilder. The message there is ‘Laugh your ass off.’ But they don’t make comedies like that anymore.”

Gene Saks, who is perhaps best known as a stage director of nearly all of Neil Simon’s comedies, says Lemmon’s career is the result of “the ideal actor who goes to hell and back for you. He’s like a good newspaper man with a deadline. There is no artistic temperament.” He adds, “If there is any fault to be found, it is that his talent sometimes gets in his way; somebody with less technique would be forced to be more primitive. Maybe one day he will let down all his defenses and stand there naked.”

Lemmon, however, is one of those actors of the old school who maintains that “acting is a healthy release. I’ve worked with actors who might be totally screwed but damn when the curtain went up if they weren’t someone else.”

Partly to keep his instrument honed and partly to add to his roster of dramatic roles, Lemmon has frequently returned to the stage. He performance as Scottie Templeton in Bernard Slade’s “Tribute” on Broadway in 1978 earned him a Tony nomination. He has occasionally performed in London and Los Angeles and starred as James Tyron in Jonathon Miller’s controversial staging of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway six years ago.

“I’ve tried to do (stage work) every couple of years or so because films are seductive and you can fall into bad habits and start only working from the neck up,” says Lemmon. “But on the stage, that curtain goes up and you have to use your whole damn body. It’s very demanding.”

Today, Lemmon leads a largely sedate, private life by Hollywood standards. He has been married to his second wife, actress Felicia Farr, for 30 years and lived in the same Beverly Hills house just as long. He is devoted to his grown children, daughter Courtney, an international relief worker, and son Chris, an actor and songwriter and the father of Lemmon’s first grandchild. He also travels, is a regular at celebrity golf tournaments and is politically active, especially on environmental issues.

If there have been any profound changes in Hollywood during his four-decades-long tenure--he began at Harry Cohn’s Columbia; today he is represented by Creative Artists Agency--Lemmon is diplomatic.

“I don’t really involve myself,” he says. “I check on Monday to see who is running what studio. But you know, I really don’t care and I don’t think my work as an actor has anything to do with that. What has to happen is that a director has to want you and that has nothing to do with so-called Hollywood.”

Like many actors of his generation, Lemmon finds the dearth of good scripts for older actors “dispiriting. You read a lot but you can’t find anything in your age bracket that is exciting,” he says. “So you fall into the trap, which I’ve done, of saying ‘Yes’ to something because you need the loot, or you’re sick of not working. I was resigned to just waiting it out, like you’re semi-retired except you’re not.”

Indeed, ask Lemmon about retiring and he speaks for a minute about his father, who took early retirement “in those days it was a feather in your cap to retire at 60,” moved to Santa Monica “and just went nuts.” The actor seems content to do “A Life in the Theater,” Altman’s “Short Cuts”--”I play a father who won’t shut up for about five pages of dialogue”--and see if his recognition for “Glengarry” will result in more scripts.

“I find the most terrific part is the most recent one,” he says, growing reflective. Ask Lemmon to assess his career, name his favorite roles, and he shrugs. “I’ve had so many parts,” he says, “and sometimes, the ones that were not so successful but the doing of them was great.” He ticks off the obvious favorites--”Some Like It Hot,” “Days of Wines and Roses,” “Save the Tiger” and “certainly ‘Glengarry,’ ” he adds. “When I have been able to touch the current nerve of this country and our problems, that pleases me most, makes me very proud to be an actor.”

FILMS OF JACK LEMMON

It Should Happen to You

(1954)

Phfft (1954)

Three for the Show (1955)

Mister Roberts (1955)

My Sister Eileen (1955)

You Can’t Run Away From It (1956)

Fire Down Below (1957)

Operation Mad Ball (1957)

Cowboy (1958)

Bell Book and Candle (1959)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

It Happened to Jane (1959)

The Apartment (1960)

Pepe (1960)

The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960)

The Notorious Landlady (1961)

The Days of Wine and Roses (1962)

Irma La Douce (1963)

Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963)

Good Neighbor Sam (1964)

How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

The Great Race (1965)

The Fortune Cookie (1966)

Luv (1967)

The Odd Couple (1968)

The April Fools (1969)

The Out-of-Towners (1970)

Kotch (dir. 1971)

The War Between Men and

Women (1972)

Avanti (1972)

Wednesday (1973)

Save the Tiger (1973)

The Front Page (1974)

The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)

The Entertainer (1977)

Alex and the Gypsy (1976)

Airport ’77 (1977)

The China Syndrome (1979)

Tribute (1980)

Buddy Buddy (1981)

Missing (1982)

Mass Appeal (1984)

Macaroni (1985)

That’s Life! (1986)

Dad (1989)

JFK (1991)

The Player (1992)

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)