Novelist Robert Plunket: ‘There's a cruelty in human nature that publishers pretend doesn't exist'

Telegraph

09-02-2025

When Robert Plunket chats to fellow residents of the Florida trailer park where he lives, he tends not to mention that he is a comic novelist revered by Madonna and Larry David. 'I used to say to people, 'Oh, I write novels', but they had never heard of me. So I stopped. None of my neighbours know.'
That may be about to change. Plunket's debut novel My Search for Warren Harding, which received good reviews when it was published in 1983 but failed to make a lasting impact, was reissued in the US in 2023 to a fanfare of critical acclaim. Now it's
A crackling farce about an unscrupulous academic, if it feels like a book whose time has come, that's perhaps because its cathartically mean-spirited comedy is so out of step with
'Nobody would publish it if I was starting out now, absolutely nobody,' Plunket declares. 'My publisher was really going out on a limb when they [reissued] it. But in fact, people were delighted to have something to read that is politically incorrect. It shows that this whole sensitivity thing [in publishing] is going off on the wrong track. There's a part of human nature that's very cruel and unkind and we can't pretend it doesn't exist, but publishing does pretend that.'
Talking over Zoom from his trailer, Plunket – genial and moustachioed – turns 80 in May. He was an ex-actor working for the New York State Council on the Arts when he embarked on My Search for Warren Harding in the early 1980s. The protagonist, Elliot Weiner, wants to write a biography of US President Warren Harding (who died in office in 1923).
'In England you won't even recognise the name,' says Plunket. 'He was a very minor president, but his life was fascinating because it was full of scandal.' Elliot discovers that one of Harding's old mistresses is still alive, and callously romances her unprepossessing granddaughter in order to get his hands on a cache of love letters from the president.
The plot owes a debt to Henry James's 1888 novella The Aspern Papers. It is clear to Plunket that the amoral biographer in James's story is a repressed homosexual: 'It's obvious to anybody with any sense of literary gaydar.' The implication in Plunket's book that Elliot is another in-denial gay is pretty obvious, but not obvious enough for the book's original reviewers, none of whom noticed that the novel is poking fun at a man whose confused feelings about women manifest in misogynistic wisecracks.
Plunket admits that My Search for Warren Hastings 'clicked with men who don't particularly appreciate women'. One guilt-inducingly hilarious slapstick set-piece has Elliot's obese love interest, unable to haul herself back on to a yacht after going swimming, flailing in a winch as the US Coast Guard attempts to rescue her.
Plunket slightly regrets this scene, if only because he based it on something that happened to a friend. 'A large woman, yes. She's still no longer speaking to me after all this time. I feel a little guilty about that and I apologise.'
Was he drawing on his own experiences of being in the closet when he created Elliot? 'I'm very much still in the closet!' he insists. Although he is approaching icon status on the US gay literary scene, Plunket doesn't advertise his sexuality to his conservative trailer-park neighbours.
He was born in Texas but spent much of his childhood in Havana, where his father was president of the US-owned Cuban Electric Company. 'We left suddenly, when they started executing Americans during the Revolution. My mother insisted that we smuggle the family silver out. I was 15 and I would have been put in a Cuban prison if they'd found the 200 lb of silver in my suitcase.'
He became an 'off-off-Broadway' stage actor, and appeared as the timid man who picks up Griffin Dunne in Scorsese's After Hours (1985). 'I improvised a 10-minute monologue. Mr Scorsese wasn't expecting it, but he loved it. But [the film] was so long people were walking out of the early showings, so it was cut from the movie.'
In the 1990s, Larry David asked Plunket to write for Seinfeld but changed his mind a week later. Plunket suspects that in the interim David had read his second novel, Love Junkie (1992), which he describes as 'a very farcical comedy about Aids. Maybe it went too far for him. But I know he would tell his writers to read Warren Harding.'
Plunket's third novel, about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, was turned down by 22 publishers. 'That's a very clear message,' says Plunket. 'It was traumatic. I gave up writing fiction. But it looks like now it's going to finally be published. My books have this funny way of, decades later, getting rediscovered.'
Having moved to Sarasota, Florida, and found that trailer park life suited him, Plunket spent many years working for Sarasota Magazine as a gossip columnist – 'Mr Chatterbox', a sobriquet he borrowed from the gossip writer in Vile Bodies by his hero Evelyn Waugh – and became a leading figure in local society. 'I was cultivated by the local politicians because they all wanted to see their names in print. And of course every third-rate celebrity with something to sell ended up in Sarasota so I interviewed them all – Pia Zadora, Eva Gabor.'
He covered George W Bush's trip to Sarasota in September 2001, and witnessed the then-president being told about the Twin Towers attacks while reading to the children at an elementary school. 'I can remember his face the moment he figured out what it meant. And then there was just chaos.' And naturally he was on the spot when Paul Reubens, aka the wholesome kids' comedian Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecent exposure at a Sarasota adult cinema: 'It was owned by a friend of mine, in fact I helped him programme all the movies.'
These days, Plunket lives 'with my friend Tom, who's taking a nap on the sofa here – say hi, Tom! – and he has got Mickey the chihuahua on his lap.' Plunket will be leaving trailer life behind, however. 'Something's happened in Florida. I don't know anything about climate change but I do know that every summer [now] there are terrible hurricanes that damage your trailer,' he says.
'I've had one trailer destroyed and the one I'm in now was damaged in the last hurricane. I'm going to have to move to some kind of condo that's made out of concrete. I'm not gonna go through that again.'
It was Hurricane Ian in 2022 that destroyed his previous trailer. Having initially decided not to evacuate, he and Tom realised that their home was going to be pulled to pieces and made a belated escape, driving through floodwater for 40 miles.
Plunket took with him his two most precious possessions: a Cartier watch and a fan letter from Madonna. The singer adored Love Junkie and they collaborated on an unrealised attempt to film it. 'She kept telling me how smart I was and I kept telling her how smart she was, that's the way to deal with anybody.'
Claiming he has 'no political opinions whatsoever' – he is happy to see the Trump family back in the White House because 'they are so bizarre and entertaining' – Plunket is splendid company, and never says the expected thing. For example, he argues that if the novel is in decline these days, that's because of the quality of what is posted on social media.
'The jokes or observations people make, many of them are absolutely terrific,' he marvels. 'I think that because of social media the average person really figured out how to write, how to be insightful and concise. If I was 30 years old, I'd not be writing novels, I'd be doing some kind of Instagram thing. But I'm an old man, that door's closed for me.'
He is finally writing a new novel – 'about an old man who's had a very unsuccessful life and he decides that he would have been much better off if he'd been a woman, so he's going to transition. Now talk about a book that people are gonna hate because it's politically incorrect!'
Plunket is revelling, in his deadpan way, in being rediscovered. 'I always thought I would be, but after I was dead. Now I picture myself lying on my deathbed with a little grin on my face.'
My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket (Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99)