Peter Lefcourt’s `The Dreyfus Affair’ not politically correct for Hollywood

THE DREYFUS AFFAIR: A Love Story, by Peter Lefcourt, Random House, 290 pages, $20.

It’s 1995 and Randy Dreyfus is the best-hitting, best-fielding and most happily married shortstop in the American League West. As he leads his expansion team, the Los Angeles Valley Vikings, through a pennant-winning season, Dreyfus seems to have it all, including a pending $21 million three-year contract extension and a seeming lock on eventual selection to the Hall of Fame.

Then it happens. In Cleveland, wouldn’t you just know it.

Taking stock of the situation after having gone 0-for-5 at the plate, the young star arrives at a troubling conclusion: He’s falling in love with his equally talented black second baseman, D.J. Pickett — a turn of events that gives new meaning to the term “double play” while providing the plot for a pretty funny novel.

Talk about getting to second base.

With no apparent infield fly rule to restrict him, Lefcourt runs the bases with abandon until a surveillance camera in a Neiman-Marcus dressing room catches his sizzling double play combination smooching.

Then it’s out of the closet for the dynamic duo, with hell to pay from The Establishment, which does not take kindly to anything deemed to be “conduct detrimental to the best interests of baseball.”

The lovers, tossed out of the game amid a nationwide uproar, set off on a cross-country trip (a honeymoon?) in D.J.’s Jaguar, accompanied by Calvin, the Dreyfus family Dalmation which Dreyfus recently had sought to have assassinated by a hit man.

Enter stage left, a Maine angle.

Four and a half days later the trio, fast running out of country, winds up at the Devil’s Island Cabins “on Lake Pinoski in northeastern Maine about 20 miles outside of Caribou,” where they learn how to fish.

From there the plot takes another comical twist as Lefcourt clears the bases, but that’s all you’ll get out of me.

Lefcourt, Emmy award-winning writer and producer (“Cagney and Lacey”) got the idea for the book from the “first” Dreyfus Affair, the infamous anti-Semitism scandal that rocked France in the 1890s. “When I asked myself what would be the equivalent in 1990s America the answer was `homophobia,”‘ Lefcourt told a reporter for Los Angeles Magazine.

Chances that the book will be made into a movie appear slim, the author said, because the theme is not politically correct in Hollywood at the moment.

Which is why it makes a good read.

Kent Ward is a free-lance writer who lives in Winterport.