What do princesses really want? Princess Di's in love. At last. After all the fuss about Charles and Camilla, the cellular-phone tapes, the sweaty workout photos, Di's finally found the right guy - Leonard Schecter, an American commoner with a taste for long-legged blondes and epic poetry. In Peter Lefcourt's brilliantly funny Di and I, our love-starved pair meet at a Togolese embassy reception in London, stare into each other's eyes, and go weak in the knees. They carry on a tempestuous affair under the noses of...
What do princesses really want? Princess Di's in love. At last. After all the fuss about Charles and Camilla, the cellular-phone tapes, the sweaty workout photos, Di's finally found the right guy - Leonard Schecter, an American commoner with a taste for long-legged blondes and epic poetry. In Peter Lefcourt's brilliantly funny Di and I, our love-starved pair meet at a Togolese embassy reception in London, stare into each other's eyes, and go weak in the knees. They carry on a tempestuous affair under the noses of Diana's bodyguards, her regal in-laws, young princes William and Harry, paparazzi, and Barbara Walters. Their passionate romance sweeps them from the Royal Box at Ascot to a McDonald's franchise in Rancho Cucamonga, where they flee to seek a better - and - private life. Di and Leonard's wild jaunt to freedom makes them the subject of an intense couple-hunt by the FBI, MI6, Scotland Yard, and, of course, Prince Charles. It is a chase that culminates in an unforgettable showdown between the Prince of Wales and the only man to ever find the way to the heart of the woman who walked out on the English throne. Hilarious, romantic, and madcap, Peter Lefcourt's Di and I is the most unlikely and charming love story since Edward VIII ran off with Wallis Simpson. Only this time, the tale is a lot funnier.
In this uproarious send-up of British pomp, Hollywood sleaze, royalmania and the institution of marriage, Lefcourt ( The Dreyfuss Affair ; The Deal ) takes readers behind closed doors with Princess Di and the Windsors. Leonard Schecter, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, is drafted to go to London and write a miniseries on ``the real Diana,'' but his assignment changes from profession to passion when he meets the princess and, scandalously, dances with her at a Togolese embassy reception. Spontaneously, he tells her that he is writing an epic poem-- The Dianiad --in her honor. The two soon embark on a romance that has them sneaking all over the realm, one step ahead of the voracious media. Schecter, an all-American wiseass of Polish-Jewish extraction, soon appears at Ascot, Balmoral and Princess Margaret's private poetry reading even as the Windsors attempt to discourage his attentions to Diana and the press reports him luring her off to Hollywood and film stardom. But the couple's real adventure begins when they steal away from Spanish King Juan Carlos's private Bahamian island and go incognito (with princes Wills and Hal) as the Keats family, traveling across America in a minivan and settling in California to run a McDonald's. Lefcourt delivers laughs at every turn in his fast and witty first-person narrative, lampooning both high and tabloid culture with dead-on accuracy while deploying a winning yarn that is both a captivating romantic fantasy and a clever, backhanded homage to the American dream. (June)
Library Journal
In his earlier The Deal (LJ 4/1/91), Lefcourt's maverick producer is advised to get the ball over the plate and keep it low. Now that same producer gives a rootless scriptwriter whose life is disintegrating the same advice. Happily, this cryptic chestnut of sports wisdom yields similarly hilarious results. The writer, already fantasizing about Princess Diana, agrees to pen a series about her for TV. Entranced by her charms after the briefest of meetings, he woos her with promises of an epic in rhyming verse. Di, who is besotted after the first couplet, packs up her tiara and her boys and slips away from their handlers to set off on a picaresque adventure along American backroads. Lefcourt deftly skewers the egregious shills and panderers of the celebrity stratum and those who aspire to that status. Himself an Emmy AwardR-winning screenwriter and producer, Lefcourt gives new meaning to ``up close and personal'' by thwacking royals and nonroyals alike with a vigor that even Punch and Judy would envy. A perfectly literary antidote to much of the tabloidese found in supermarkets and on television, this comedy belongs in most libraries.-Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
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