A Cynic Jabs Again

You probably heard about this on “Hard Copy”:

Schenectady urologist Ernie Haas--clad, as usual, in a size 8 dress and carefully coordinated pantyhose--was having sex with his wife, Audrey, when he had a heart attack and died. Unfortunately, Audrey was, as usual, handcuffed to their antique stove and unable to get help. Worse, Ernie remained (how shall we say this in a family newspaper?) tumescent. And so, faced with the prospect of remaining love-locked with her now late husband, Audrey removed the problem. With a Sunbeam electric carving knife.

OK, so you didn’t hear about this on “Hard Copy.” Actually, it’s the opening sequence to Peter Lefcourt’s fourth novel, “Abbreviating Ernie” (Villard, 1997).

Yeah, just the opening.

See, after that, things get weird.

Through a combination of circumstances involving, in part, a deaf-mute Native American burglar and the Haases’ Rottweiler, Siggy, Audrey goes on trial for her husband’s murder and quickly becomes a cause celebre as the news media, feminist lawyers and a host of others descend upon the latest sordid story to captivate America.

Audrey, a vapid woman addicted to Prozac and television, becomes a very unworthy feminist heroine; the lawyers jostle for the limelight; and somehow, in the middle of it all, two tabloid reporters find true love.

Needless to say, this is funnier than all get-out. And yes, it’s based on a true event--though not the one you might think. But to get to that you have to have the back story, as they say in Hollywood, on Lefcourt.

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A screenplay, of course, brought the New York native to Los Angeles in 1972, and said screenplay’s demise brought him to television. Various stints included an Emmy for writing and producing “Cagney and Lacey” and gigs writing TV movies that adapted Danielle Steel or starred Joan Collins. But then that dried up.

“I had antagonized a lot of people because I say what I think,” Lefcourt cheerfully recalls, sitting outside his Hollywood Hills home (he describes its curious architectural melange as “Tuscan ski lodge”). “Screenwriters are supposed to shut up and take dictation, not voice an opinion. I voiced my opinion one too many times.”

Unable to get work, Lefcourt followed his agent’s suggestion and wrote a book. “The Deal” (Random House, 1991) was a scathing satire of Hollywood that some consider even funnier and more on the money than “The Player.” Despite such gleeful biting of the hand that fed him, in what Lefcourt calls “the perverse logic of Hollywood,” the book produced fresh screenwriting offers.

Next, Francophile Lefcourt (who spent some years living part time in Paris) drew on his fascination with France’s notorious 1890s Dreyfus Affair, wherein a Jewish officer was unjustly convicted of treason. Even as anti-Semitism was acceptable in France of the time, Lefcourt believes that a certain amount of “low-grade” homophobia is accepted among even the most liberal in our country today.

And so came about his “The Dreyfus Affair” (Random, 1992), only Lefcourt’s was a literal affair between a shortstop and his second baseman.

But it wasn’t until his next book that Lefcourt, despite what some might believe were his best efforts, really annoyed people.

After writing a TV movie about Britain’s royal family, which involved copious research, Lefcourt had to do something with his by now vast knowledge of Princess Diana. Lefcourt posed to himself a “what if” situation.

“What if a guy like me met Diana,” he wondered, “a nice Jewish screenwriter from California, a completely inappropriate guy for her, and we fell in love?”

The answer, said Diana’s step-grandmother, romance writer Barbara Cartland, was “ghastly and unnecessary.” Which promptly turned Lefcourt’s book, “Di and I” (Random House, 1994), into a scandal. Never mind that the book was a rather sweet fable, as Lefcourt calls it, wherein Di and her beau, Leonard, eventually find happiness running a McDonald’s in Cucamonga.

“My book crossed over two lines,” Lefcourt explains. “Sex and America. Diana has sex in it, with, God forbid, an American. Plus, I also implied she was unhappy. Which everyone in the world knew, but the theme is better to be happy flipping burgers in Cucamonga than loveless in Windsor Castle. And that’s something the Brits have trouble accepting.”

Thanks to Cartland (who never actually read the book), Lefcourt was suddenly getting calls from Fleet Street at 3 a.m., interviews with “Entertainment Tonight” and other “news” outlets, all wanting to know, “What was it like to sleep with Princess Diana?”

In between protests (and probably giggles) that this was fiction, Lefcourt was bemused at his burst of fame. But it ended quickly, specifically on the night of June 17, 1994, when Lefcourt was doing a book signing at a Bookstar in the San Fernando Valley.

“It was supposed to be from 5 to 7 p.m.,” he recalls. “No one was in the store at all. Even the employees. No one comes in at all. Not even to buy a yoga book. I’m thinking, ‘Did the world end?’ As it turns out, they were all watching O.J.’s white Bronco media event. Those two hours were the exact same time as that.”

O.J. bumped Lefcourt out of People magazine, never to return.

“This experience taught me the ironic vicissitudes of fame. I was for 15--no, 14--minutes very famous. What was perfect was I had no business being there in the first place. If Barbara Cartland hadn’t said what she said, the book would have come out, been reviewed, and that would have been that.”

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But out of that brief “14 minutes of media madness” came “Ernie.”

“I wanted to create a sordid domestic-violence episode that can be seen 12 different ways, and twist it into an enormous media event,” Lefcourt says. “The book ended up being more about the lawyers and how the actual justice of the case no longer makes any difference. The trial becomes its own kind of self-perpetuating entertainment vehicle.”

For “Ernie’s” merry skewering of political correctness, Lefcourt cheerfully predicts that he will be “attacked by the feminists, Native Americans, cross-dressers, urologists and dog lovers.”

And yet, despite his sensational, or at least pop-culture-friendly subjects, Lefcourt’s books always come back to the same point--a charming love story develops in each and remains in place at the end.

“Evelyn Waugh said satirists are failed romantics,” Lefcourt says. “And I think I am. And there is something lovely about the intimacy between the reader and [the author] and a book. People have told me they read my books in the bathtub or in bed. There is something very intimate that you have a direct communication with the reader. It’s almost tactile.”

Next up for Lefcourt are a couple of TV pilots, including one with Brandon Tartikoff, a satire of the television industry he describes as “ ‘Network’ for the ‘90s.” Given Lefcourt’s recent piece in Buzz magazine, a killingly accurate parody of jargon-heavy studio notes for “Hamlet” (“Some consider ‘Hamlet’ the greatest play ever, but I wanted to show that according to Sid Fields’ screenplay book there are a lot of problems with it”), the industry should tremble.

Lefcourt’s next book will be prompted by the research he recently did in Washington for an HBO screenplay he wrote about the Bob Packwood scandal. He found plenty of material on Capitol Hill.

“Here is the Ethics Committee,” he says, “deciding how far Packwood had his tongue in someone’s mouth and whether that was a French kiss or not.”

Though Lefcourt laughs when asked if he scared himself coming up with the lurid scene that opens “Ernie,” he doesn’t quite cop to the probable inspiration.

“Lorena Bobbitt was obviously in my subconscious because that was also politicized,” he says. “But of course, they sewed John’s penis back on. And now he’s a porno star. That’s a story I would have loved to have created. That’s classic Peter Lefcourt.”