Everyone loves a royal love story, and I think everyone’s entitled to one,” says writer, playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick. “People love these Cinderella tropes, but they also love a fresh spin on that story.”
And that’s just what Rudnick’s new novel Playing the Palace offers. This “all-out romantic comedy” is the story of the gorgeous, gracious, and openly gay heir to the English throne, Prince Edgar, and one Carter Ogden, a Jewish “associate event architect” (party planner) from New Jersey. The premise is both outrageous and delightful, and the novel is, too.
“The idea of a royal romance had been percolating for several years, but I wasn’t sure where it was going to land — as a screenplay, play, or a novel,” recalls Rudnick, whose many screenplay credits include Addams Family Values, and the romantic comedies In & Out and Jeffrey, which was based on his own Broadway hit and starred Patrick Stewart. But “Once I got the main character’s voice, suddenly the material felt right,” as a novel. As his narrator Carter — a warm-hearted, insecure and lovelorn 20-something — took shape, “I wanted to be in this guy’s brain as he encountered the royal family.”
And so from a meet-cute with Prince Edgar in New York City to a date at a suburban Jewish wedding, we’re in Carter’s brain, and it’s fantastic. Playing the Palace is part satire, part farce, and entirely perceptive about celebrity, the media, and love. When Carter reveals, “I want what maybe everyone wants: to make being human feel like a superpower,” it’s a startling insight slipped among the one-liners.
The plot unspools in a series of absurd and entertaining scenes: At a children’s hospital, Carter accidentally triggers an international incident by telling the patients a fairy tale that ends with Prince Edgar marrying Spider-Man. Later, a bout with food poisoning leads to a disastrous live appearance on a Great British Bake-Off-style competition.
Rudnick edited the book during the pandemic lockdown, and the experience “was the most wonderful escape, and just what I wanted the book to be: a complete celebration of, and a justification for, the possibility of true love.” As befits a wonderful escape, Playing the Palace is full of larger-than-life characters, including Carter’s “helplessly insane as opposed to deliberately evil boss,” Cassandra, and Carter’s adoring sister Abby, a celebrity-obsessed paediatric surgeon. Then there’s Carter’s great aunt Miriam, who corners Prince Edgar to sympathise, “Being the king is a tough job. My late husband, Morty, may he rest in peace, he ran a carpet business, he was the Broadloom King of Ronkonkoma out on Long Island, so it was a similar responsibility, only maybe it was even harder, because I bet no one ever asks you for a 15 per cent friends and family discount on wall-to-wall in a wool/nylon blend, am I right?”
Playing the Palace is one of several recent romances about gay English princes who fall for commoners, all authored by Americans. What’s the appeal? “America harbours such an obsession with the English royal family,” observes Rudnick. “We treat them as a form of movie star; we love their glamour and their mystery. I think English royals have maintained a certain distance, far more than American celebrities have. So we can project all our fantasies on to them.
“The royals are figures in a narrative, which is why they lend themselves to novels and romantic comedies,” he continues. “They’re telling us a story,” encouraging us to imagine, “‘What if we were born into lives of such wealth and power? How would we handle it?’”
While all royals are subject to intense public scrutiny, the first openly gay prince would face additional pressure, Rudnick points out: “When you’re a gay role model, you’re always being told how to behave, or told you’re too gay, or not gay enough, or not gay in the right way. … It’s fascinating to me, how people cope with celebrity at that level.”
Playing the Palace’s emphasis on fame and the media (both mass and social) showcases Rudnick’s particular comic genius: writing with wit and compassion about people whose deepest longings have been moulded by films and expensive ad campaigns — that is, most of us. It’s hard not to laugh, or fail to empathise, when Carter considers “the most critical and thought-provoking question of all” about his relationship with Prince Edgar: “who would play me in the movie version, and in the sex scenes on the royal jet, would there be frontal male nudity, and would I have approval of a body double?” Despite being, in his words, “too aware of surfaces,” Carter is tremendously appealing: generous, self-effacing, and loving. And gaffe-prone. All in all, a perfect rom com hero.
Like his hero, Rudnick is a gay, Jewish, New Jersey native living in New York City. But while Carter suspects he’s an underachiever, Rudnick has written a total of more than 20 plays and screenplays, not to mention five novels and two collections of essays. In the process, he’s won an Obie (Off-Broadway Theater Award), an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Hugo nomination. A graduate of Yale, Rudnick (and his film critic alter ego, the incorrigible Libby Gelman-Waxner) regularly contribute to The New Yorker, and he’s currently writing the book for the musical version of The Devil Wears Prada, set to première in 2022. As American memoirist David Sedaris says, “Paul Rudnick is a champion of truth (and love and great wicked humour) whom we ignore at our peril.”
As a humorist, Rudnick’s influences include “The greats: Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Molière — the people who invented satiric and romantic comedy.” I know little about Molière’s preferences, but it hasn’t escaped my notice that both Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde were gay. Do gay writers have an affinity for romantic comedy? Rudnick is circumspect: “I wouldn’t want to pigeonhole their enormous talent. On the other hand, both Coward and Wilde shared a certain outsider perspective.” This “gives you a great satiric point of view, and allows you to see the way the world works, see why you might be excluded from it, see a way into it, and also be wildly entertained by society in a way that maybe people who are right at its centre can’t quite manage.”
He adds that this outsiders’ perspective is common among people with minority and/or marginalised status, and, like being gay, it “can be a great asset to observation. It gives you a certain perch to view the madness of the world from.” And as a gay writer, “I think you tend to not take as much for granted as maybe a straight writer might. I don’t think gay writers are necessarily better or funnier or wittier — but it doesn’t hurt.”
Rudnick’s observation about outsiders’ tendency toward humorous insights is likewise applicable to another traditionally marginalised group whose members have achieved significant and much-discussed success in American comedy: Jews. Moreover, “There’s a great Jewish tradition of using humour as salvation and a balance wheel,” Rudnick points out. “When you’ve experienced a lot of prejudice and a lot of intolerance, if you can make a joke, you’re way ahead. You’re finding a way to enjoy yourself and your particular tribe or community. I think it’s true of gays and Jews, and why there’s that great tradition of gay and Jewish comedy as something to be so cherished, as something that keeps you sane.”
He adds, “In my family, there was a sense that if you could crack a joke, it helped put the world in a certain perspective. Nothing could be that bad if you could find some humour in it. I pay endless tribute to that particular Jewish comic tradition, which you see throughout the history of American movies, musical theatre, stand up, and TV work.”
Rudnick enjoys an impressive knowledge and appreciation of popular entertainment, and he’s especially fond of “musical comedy, in which I think romance is essential, and the addition of song and dance sort of transforms and elevates romance to this ultimate peak.” In fact, if musical comedy had a print analogue, it might be Rudnick’s novel, with Carter and Prince Edgar’s story playing out amid ballads featuring Carter’s musings about love, and big chorus numbers incorporating the hilarious, if hostile, public commentary that dogs Carter.
Rudnick also loves romantic comedy. In print, there’s Jane Austen, in which “there’s so much intelligence and common sense at work there, and it’s all in service of people, however reluctantly, falling in love and making marriages,” and Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries series. On screen, he admires the “great history of American romantic comedy movies,” and the people who made them, including the late Jewish novelist and screenwriter Nora Ephron, author of When Harry Met Sally, Heartburn, and other classics. In fact, Rudnick loves the genre in all forms. As he puts it, “I’ll look for romance pretty much anywhere.”
Playing the Palace is published by Berkley
