Sarasota author Robert Plunket enjoying a second shot at fame with ‘Warren Harding’ novel

Sarasota Magazine writer and columnist Robert Plunket’s first novel “My Search for Warren Harding” was greeted with great acclaim when it was first published in 1983.

Novelist Ann Beatie described it as one of the things she’d most want on a desert island. “That way, at least, I could die laughing,” she wrote. In 2002, The Washington Post included it on a list of the top five works of comic fiction.

Despite the praise, the book has been out of print for more than 25 years. Fans loaned it to friends, which led to a unexpected twist Plunket never saw coming.

New Directions Publishing has printed a new edition, which has been been welcomed with the kind of attention most authors can only dream about once, let alone twice.

There was a feature in The Paris Review, written by Danzy Senna, the novelist who introduced the book to New Directions. After reading it, she wrote, “I sat in a kind of silent, focused delight. I held in my hands one of the best, and most invigorating books I’d read in years, and certainly the funniest – and yet, how was it out of print? Why had I never heard of this novel before now?”

Senna wrote the introduction to the new edition. Plunket said, “I never met her and now she’s my new best friend.”

The New York Times wrote a glowing story and then The New Yorker magazine sent a writer to follow him around Sarasota for a couple of days.

“That’s a lot of attention,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s a little overwhelming. I’m trying not to get too much of a swelled head about it. I always thought I was a little underrated. I thought maybe I’ll be rediscovered after I’m dead.”

There was a book reading last month in New York, and last week, he sold out a reading at Bookstore1Sarasota.

“My Search for Warren Harding” launched him on a career as a full-time writer, though perhaps not quite the way he expected.

“You might have noticed I have not written a lot of novels. It didn’t give me a career as a novelist, but it gave me a career as a writer,” Plunket said.

In a conversation, you might feel like he’s confiding something special, even though you know he’s told others the same thing. And there’s a humorous twinkle in his voice that makes you wonder if you should believe what he’s saying even when he’s telling the truth, prompting him to add, “I know, I can’t believe it either.”

‘What were they waiting for?’

He followed “Warren Harding” in 1992 with “Love Junkie,” a book that Madonna apparently optioned for a film that never happened. New Directions plans to republish “Love Junkie” and Hollywood is calling again. “We’ve already heard from some very big producers,” he said.

But his focus over much of the last three decades has been writing features and columns for Sarasota Magazine, where he developed a following as Mr. Chatterbox, the author of a popular gossip and society column.

Plunket is loving all the national attention, even if he wonders what took so long.

“What were they waiting for? Were they waiting for The New York Times and New Yorker to say wonderful things about it? If something is published in a reputable publication, people tend to believe it.”

On the day we spoke, Plunket agreed to postpone his usual afternoon nap for a chat. “I’m 78 you know. We need our naps.”

He admitted to feeling a little down, and not just from a recent bout with COVID.

“Success brings problems of its own. I haven’t gotten a good review or article all day today,” he said. “I miss it and I want it. It creates a kind of addiction so you better be good.”

Literary connections

There’s a literary history behind much of Plunket’s work. “Warren Harding” grew out of his obsession with the nation’s 29th president, and his love of the work of author Henry James. Loosely connected to James’ “The Aspern Papers,” his novel is about a young, homophobic and closeted gay man who hopes to help his academic career by getting one of Harding’s mistresses to share the love letters they exchanged.

He has no regrets about not producing more books while he focused on making a living at the magazine

“Between you and me, it’s not that easy to write a book, and you have to have a really good idea and you have to work hard,” he said. “I try to camouflage the fact that it’s hard work, but it is,” he said.

He’s started several novels that didn’t work over the years.

“I’m in awe of writers who write a novel every year,” he said. “They get up in the morning and that’s their day-long activity and some of them make a lot of money at it. I can’t imagine sitting in a chair all day dreaming up things, which is why I enjoyed working at Sarasota Magazine all those years. It’s the exact opposite. It was being in the middle of things, tracking down interesting people, telling their stories and learning interesting things.”

Becoming a celebrity as Mr. Chatterbox

And he found plenty of interesting people to cover at galas and other social gatherings with Sarasota’s version of bold-faced names.

“Look at the characters Sarasota gave me. You’re one of them Jay. There was Marjorie North, Annette Schermann. And there was this whole crowd of wackos. Some were such egomaniacs always trying to get attention, coming up with screwy ideas, most of which were awful and flailing around in the small town atmosphere. It was so much fun to watch.”

In his own humorous style, he captured the essence of social events and the people attending, skewering them to a degree without being nasty.

The column began after the magazine’s previous society columnist, Pat Ringling Buck, stepped down. Magazine founder Dan Denton said he wanted to create something similar to what Details magazine was doing with its own New York society column.

“It was pretty much the highlight of the magazine, and the first thing you’d turn to,” Denton said. He asked Plunket to consider trying something like that in Sarasota.

First Plunket asked Denton to read Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Vile Bodies." “It has this Fleet Street newspaper that has a column called Mr. Chatterbox written by a series of anonymous people who keep getting fired because they make up things about parties they didn’t go to,” Denton said.

Plunket agreed to do a column if was called Mr. Chatterbox and written anonymously.

“It was anonymous at the beginning. We hired a plane to fly over town with a banner asking, ‘Who is Mr. Chatterbox?’” Denton recalled. Though Plunket’s association was an open secret, it took a few years before he was more clearly identified as the writer.

“He was writing about the most influential people in town, but like a roast they would line up to be roasted,” Denton said. “If they were ever annoyed, they would never say so. It was all too much fun.”

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Taking to the stage

Plunket became the kind of celebrity who he might have targeted, though he was always a central figure in the columns. In 1991, he created a stage show called “Mr. Chatterbox’s Sentimental Journey” that was presented at Florida Studio Theatre and featured some of his column subjects in a rotating series of guest appearances.

(At one performance, he approached me while I was reviewing the show for the Herald-Tribune and publicly tried to hand me a $20 bill to get a positive review. Red-faced and laughing, I returned the money.)

One of his guests was former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris back in the days before she held public office. At the time, she was known for her involvement on various boards and philanthropic causes.

He had his guests perform the Chicken Dance. During the height of the 2000 presidential election, when Harris played a pivotal role in who received Florida’s electoral votes, various media outlets wrote about that experience, incorrectly describing it as Harris’ “nightclub gig.” In 2008, Plunket himself set the record straight after the release of the HBO film “Recount” about that election. He says he and Harris are still friends.

“One of the reasons I was as successful as I was was that I was nonjudgmental about people’s politics,” he said. But that’s not possible today. “That’s why I don’t miss it. I would love to get dragged into that mess of what’s going on with the (Sarasota County) school board and what’s going on with New College. But people turn on you so easily.

Last year, Plunket wrote a harrowing yet comical account of how he survived Hurricane Ian, providing all the warning others need to be better prepared when a storm approaches. He is now finding pleasure in working on a new book.

“I got to the point in my life where writing fiction is a wonderful escape from the real world for me,” he said. “I do it every day. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I’d fallen so far off the literary landscape that I was assuming I couldn’t get a novel published and now all of a sudden the situation is a little different and maybe I could.”

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: New fame for Sarasota author Robert Plunket thanks to 1983 novel