Talking With Joe Keenan:
A Sitcom Writer Moonlights as a Comic Novelist

Keeping on the Sunny Side

By Emily Gordon

If you've admired a writer for nearly two decades, is it polite to bemoan his career moves? Possibly, if that writer is the debonair novelist-screenwriter Joe Keenan, who disappeared from fiction for 15 years into the sunny abyss of Los Angeles to write and produce television shows. It complicates matters that the siren show was "Frasier," which is about notably suave and articulate people, and for which Keenan won an Emmy and numerous other honors. His new CBS sitcom, "Out of Practice," is also disconcertingly witty.

Given those circumstances, perhaps it's all right for Keenan to have waited a bit to finish "My Lucky Star" (Little, Brown, $24.95), the third in a trio of novels about the capers of a smart songwriting duo and their charming troublemaker pal. It's also hard to stay grouchy when that novel is actually in bookstores, a New York performance of a Keenan musical is on the way and the author is cooking up a fourth in what can now be referred to as a series.

Keenan grew up in Boston, then moved to New York for college, an MFA in musical theater writing and his share of bleak uncertainty. While struggling, he wrote the two novels that I've given to nearly everyone I know: "Blue Heaven" and "Putting on the Ritz." All three books star a trio - Philip Cavanaugh, Gilbert Sel- wyn and Claire Simmons, two childhood friends/ex-lovers and their more sensible female friend - who make Keenan's novels part high satire, part "Will & Grace" and part clue-sniffing Nick, Nora and Nick.

In love with trouble, Gilbert creates escapades (get-rich, get-married, get-produced, and frequently get-fired and get-arrested schemes) for the three; the escapades quickly turn into debacles, and the comic drama begins. "I'm not at all like Gilbert myself," says Keenan, obviously hugely fond of the character most likely to make unwise decisions. "I don't have his indestructible, albeit misplaced, self-confidence and unwavering faith that the next scheme will work out brilliantly no matter how disastrously all its predecessors have."

Gilbert's ancestor may well be Bertie Wooster, and Keenan is aware of how often he's compared to P.G. Wodehouse. Of course, he's pleased by the comparison, but demurs: "I just wanted to apply some of the techniques he mastered - the elaborate farce-plotting and the comic diction - to characters and situations that interested me. As a gay man, I wanted to employ a gay narrator [Philip], a young man whose naive and hopeless crushes often serve to propel the plotlines."

Philip and Claire, broke but safe in New York until California convert Gilbert shows up, are this time nearly done in by his machinations in the newest book. The fortune, reasons Gilbert, lies with a family of Hollywood legends, the Malenfants, who are bad seeds indeed. The chief attraction for Philip, and the chief problem, takes the magnificent form of Stephen Donato, a Malenfant and leading man who's gay, married and full of secrets. Once Gilbert arrives somewhere, however, nothing remains as it was. Enter shady masseurs, self-inventing divas, new levels of naughty business, an Amish teenager hungry for knowledge (not precisely in the plot, but referred to quite a bit), serious criminal activity, risible scripts and - as always - a very disgruntled Claire.

That "My Lucky Star" exists at last can be credited to Keenan's yearly vacations. In the opening sentence of the novel, Philip makes a dark observation that for the struggling artist, "a short road leads to panic, and from panic to despair, self-pity, desperation and, finally, to Los Angeles." Thanks to a lucky break that landed him in sitcomland instead of aspiring-screenwriter hell, Keenan's L.A. has been far from that. But the book kept calling, and for the few weeks he had off from TV each year, he wrote.

Or rather, walked. "I did a lot of the book on vacations, walking around Central Park all day, stopping on benches to scribble it down in little notebooks," he recalls. "One year we went to Paris. My partner, Gerry [Bernardi], saw everything while I wandered the streets all day with a voice recorder and wrote chapter eight." Keenan notes that mapping out his endlessly twisty plots is the biggest challenge. "The actual writing's a lot more fun."

Happily, there's more of it. Years ago in New York, Keenan - like Philip between Gilbert schemes - worked "a variety of demeaning clerical jobs, most of which required no more than a scholar's mastery of alphabetical order." He drew on those days for another project: a musical comedy with a dark side called "The Times," about an aspiring actress and writer couple in New York who either follow or compromise their original dreams. (There will be a concert reading of "The Times" March 6 at the Collaborative Arts Project at 18 W. 18th St.)

His lifelong passions for theater and literature notwithstanding, the possibilities for good TV delight Keenan; he says of the "Frasier" finale, a particular high point, "I felt going into it like we were running an egg-and-spoon race with a Fabergé egg - we just wanted to get it over the finish line without dropping it." As for "Out of Practice," which returns from a hiatus on March 22, it's about a family of comically overachieving doctors (including Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler as exes). Still, what about beloved Philip, Claire and Gilbert? "I'm kicking around a few notions involving a new sort of scam Gilbert might be perpetrating, but it's all very preliminary since 'Out of Practice' has been the priority this year," he says. "But vacation's coming up." He'd better have a great pair of walking shoes.