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He feels the same about the Rudnick clan of Piscataway, N.J. Paul's father Norman was a physicist at Gulton Industries, which, Paul says, "developed a lot of things that to this day I do not understand: capacitors, transistor devices that would go into everything from Osterizers to rocket ships." Later he edited one of the first textbooks on AIDS. Selma has worked for Partisan Review, for the Pennsylvania Ballet and now for a Philadelphia concert producer. Paul's older brother Evan, a jack-of-all-trades, lives near Ithaca, N.Y. "He has long hair and a beard and is very good at all the things that I'm not."
Selma, a big Paul Rudnick fan who has seen Jeffrey three times -- "Is that more than David Mamet's mother saw Oleanna, do you suppose?" -- recalls that her son was a clever child. "But he was not the Paul we see today," she says, "because parents don't really see that. A parent is always trying to get a child to do what he doesn't want to do. And Paul's response to this was, 'No, I won't clean up my room.' At the time, I didn't find that particularly witty."
Paul's homosexuality was no big deal to his parents. "Although they've always been incredibly supportive," he says, "and could not have been more loving and 'there' for me, it was the kind of thing that wasn't discussed. It was quietly acknowledged. I still don't discuss my sex life with my parents, and I don't think I would if I were straight either."
He was a good student, who on his SAT tests got "great verbal, nonexistent math. I was so bad at math I assumed any college would say, 'Well, we just won't ask him to add.' " The college turned out to be Yale. By now Paul knew he was gay, but he didn't worry about the local reaction. "Anyone from Jersey," he says, "would assume everyone at Yale was gay. Once you're educated above a certain point, to the rest of the world you're a big sissy."
At Yale, Long was already ornamenting the graduate drama school. "I was trailing clouds of lavender smoke," he avers, "and Paul wanted to catch some of it. We were all sort of larger than life -- in our own minds." If Rudnick had that self-image, he soon grew into it. A few years after graduation, he had his own off-Broadway play: Poor Little Lambs, an engaging pastiche about Yale's Whiffenpoof singers. Rudnick worked on a movie version (never filmed) and was eventually introduced to Rudin, his Hollywood mentor. "Over the years," Rudin says, "Paul has changed, in a really gratifying way. At the beginning, there was this sense that he was not fully committed to being a writer. It wasn't so much irresponsible as sort of slightly flaky."
As flaky, perhaps, as Libby Gelman-Waxner, the yenta film critic whose column appears in Premiere magazine. Rudnick denies he is Libby: "She is a genius. I wouldn't dream of taking credit for work of that caliber." He is too modest; the Rudnick voice can be heard in every purring line. Example: "Howards End transported me, the way movies and catalogs are supposed to; I wanted to call up and order Emma's life, Helena's skin and all the jewelry."