Peter Lefcourt, '58

(All of the text below was taken from Peter Lefcourt's own website on 9/21/03.)

Peter Lefcourt is a refugee from the trenches of Hollywood, where he has distinguished himself as a writer and producer of film and television. Among his credits are "Cagney and Lacey," for which he won an Emmy Award; "Monte Carlo," in which he managed to keep Joan Collins in the same wardrobe for 35 pages; the relentlessly sentimental "Danielle Steel's Fine Things," and the underrated and hurried "The Women of Windsor," the most sordid, and thankfully last, miniseries about the British Royal Family.

He began writing novels in the late 1980's, after being declared "marginally unemployable" in the entertainment business by his then agent. In 1991 Lefcourt published The Deal -- an act of supreme hubris that effectively bit the hand that fed him and produced, in that wonderfully inverse and masochistic logic of Hollywood, a fresh demand for his screenwriting services. It remains a cult favorite in Hollywood and was one of the ten books that John Gotti reportedly ordered from jail. The book is being republished in a new edition by Washington Square Press in January, 2003.

His most recent sortie into the world of film and television was a stint as Show Runner/Executive Producer of the late, lamented Showtime succes d'estime, "Beggars & Choosers," a show that he co-created with the late Brandon Tartikoff and that ran for 42 episodes, from June, 1999, through February, 2001.

He has divided his time between screenplays and novels, publishing The Dreyfus Affair in 1992, his darkly comic look at homophobia in baseball as a historical analog to anti-Semitism in fin de siecle France, which has been published in four countries and smuggled into three dozen others and whose film rights The Walt Disney Company has optioned twice and let lapse twice in paroxysms of anxiety about what it says about the national pastime and, by extension, Disneyland. He is hopeful that a major(or even minor) motion picture will be made from this book in the author's lifetime. The book continues to sell well in paperback and is in its fifteenth printing.

In 1994, he published Di And I, a heavily fictionalized version of his love affair with the late Princess of Wales. Princess Diana's own stepgrandmother, Barbara Cartland, herself no slouch when it comes to publishing torrid books, declared Di And I "ghastly and unnecessary," which pushed the British edition briefly onto the best-seller lists. Di And I was optioned by Fine Line Pictures, in 1996, and was abandoned after Diana's untimely death. Someday, however, it may reach the screen -- when poor Diana is no longer an historical icon but merely the misunderstood and tragic figure that she was, devoured by her own popularity.

Abbreviating Ernie, his next novel, was inspired by his brief brush with notoriety after the appearance of Di And I. At the time he was harassed by the British tabloids and spent seven excruciating minutes on "Entertainment Tonight." He was subsequently and fittingly bumped out of People Magazine by O.J. Simpson's white Bronco media event of June, 1994.

Lefcourt's research on a movie for HBO about the 1995 Bob Packwood canard was the germ for his next novel, The Woody. He began to see that the former senator's battle with the Senate Ethics Committee was a dramatization of the total confusion in America regarding appropriate sexual behavior. Packwood became the sacrificial lamb -- taking the pipe for an entire generation of men. Basically, he got it caught in the buzzsaw of the zeitgeist. After President Clinton got his caught in the buzzsaw as well, The Woody became all the more topical. It asks the question: What is the relationship between a politician's sexual competence and his popularity in the polls? If Packwood had been as smooth as Clinton, he would be the majority leader of the Senate today instead of the poster boy for Sexual Harassment.

His current book, his sixth, is entitled Eleven Karens -- an erratically erotic memoir of his love affairs with eleven woman, all of whom happened to be named Karen. So far it has received an enormous wave of indifference from the movie companies, which he takes to be a good indication of its literary value.

Peter lives with his wife Terri, who is not a Karen, in Santa Monica, California, in a modest, but not unsubstantial, house that is seven minutes from the Pacific Ocean, where he often walks to sort things out.

JAMAICA HIGH SCHOOL NOTEWORTHY ALUMNI : : : : FEEDBACK: D. Jensen, Librarian : : : : : : : : 09/21/03