Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 7, 1993 TAG: 9309040087
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID L. LANGFORD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
It's a day as sunny as it gets in Brooklyn Heights and Kathryn Falk is sipping herbal tea at an umbrella table in her dazzling flower garden, across the East River from Manhattan's throbbing financial district.
Her thoughts are on romance, the potential it holds, and the gorgeous men in her life, the brawny sex symbols she helped create, Fabio and Steve ... and Tye, the brainy one waiting in the wings.
Her men, Kathryn knows, are stirring millions of women across America with their Tarzan bodies and cascading hair, clutching beautiful maidens to their cleanshaven bare chests on the covers of a plethora of romance novels.
Her men, she figures, helped turn romance into a growing $750 million-a-year enterprise, with some 120 novels coming out every month and fans devouring as many as 20 to 40 a month. Romance novels account for 46 percent of the entire paperback market, including whodunits and science-fiction.
Romance videos are next ...
"Enormous," Kathryn says to a visitor, taking a delicate bite from a plump black olive. "The social implications are enormous."
A few days later, on the other side of the flooding Mississippi ...
The mobile phone rings as Judith McNaught, writer of romantic best sellers, is motoring toward Houston International Airport. Her new novel, "Perfect," has already made it to the New York Times best-seller list, her bank account has had another huge infusion, and she's off for another fabulous vacation, first a wedding in Newport, R.I., and then a Mediterranean cruise.
"What do you think about all those hunks on the covers," the voice on the phone asks.
"I don't [any longer] have naked people in clinches on my covers," she replies. "I think it's embarrassing to a lot of women, and it's certainly embarrassing to me. It doesn't represent what's in those novels.
"I don't do gratuitous sex scenes."
Still later, on the other side of the Atlantic ...
It's midafternoon in London and novelist Diana Stainforth is taking a nap in her deck chair, exhausted after having just finished the first draft of her latest novel, her fifth female adventure. The phone rings from America.
"How do you handle sex scenes?" the American asks the aristocratic woman who taught herself to write after years of flitting around Europe from job to job, winding up as a disc jockey in Italy.
"I always write them in the evening," she answers in her upper-class British accent. "I have a couple of glasses of wine and I write the sex scenes from start to finish. You can't leave it sort of dangling in the middle. I can't have coitus interruptus.
"I don't start on a Friday evening with his hand halfway up her thigh and then come back to it on Monday morning.
"Mine don't read like a sex manual. But if I'm in a racy mood when I write, I might read it back a few days later and think, `Good heavens, I can't have this!' Then I might tone it down a bit and read it a month later and think, `Good heavens, this could have been written by a nun!' "
Such thoughts would never cross the mind of Diana's fellow British writer, Dame Barbara Cartland, the 92-year-old friend of the late Lords Beaverbrook and Mountbatten, step-grandmother of Princess Di, and undisputed doyen of the romance industry. Her virginal maidens always find Mr. Right and live happily ever after.
It's happened 586 times.
"That's right. I just finished my 586th novel," says Dame Barbara, who also recently completed a screenplay about her life for a movie to be shot at Pinewood Studios next year. "That's a world record. I turn out a novel a fortnight."
When she's not dictating to one of her five secretaries, these days Dame Barbara is fretting about finding an actress pretty enough to play her as a young woman in the movie. She says she's already nixed Joan Collins, Sharon Stone, Helena Bonham-Carter, Miranda Richardson and Emma Thompson.
"In my 20s," she says, "Randolph Churchill said I was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. I had 49 proposals before I married and since then 56 men have asked me to be their wife. I can't think of a greater compliment."
"She's a riot," says Dame Barbara's friend, Kathryn Falk, owner of Romantic Times magazine and author of "How to Write a Romance and Get it Published."
"She lives like she writes. She has the most fantastic lifestyle. Last summer, I went over on the QE2 to visit her and the first thing she asked was, `My dear, did you meet any men on the ship?' "
Dame Barbara nothwithstanding, how sexy are the stories behind those sexy covers of romance novels?
"Hot, but within boundaries," says Falk. "Romance is really everything but going to bed. It's sexual chemistry, it's anticipation, it's all that courting, all that being turned on. It's all that leads up to sex."
Romantic fiction, which had its genesis in the pulp magazines of the early part of the century, now covers a broad spectrum of historical, contemporary, time-travel and science-fiction plot lines and widely varying story lengths. The sex runs the gamut from the prudish to the steamy, the so-called bodice rippers.
"Writing explicit descriptions . . . hardly ever works," says former actress Mayo Loiseau Gray, author of "The Savage Season," the story of political intrigue and an interracial love affair on a Caribbean island, inspired by her own experiences in Grenada. It's a book that doesn't fit the typical romance novel genre and got a good review in Publishers Weekly.
"Graphic sex usually comes out more funny than sexy."
It was in the 1970s that the door opened on bedroom scenes in historical romance novels, beginning with Avon's publication of "The Flame and the Flower" (1972) by Kathleen Woodiwiss. One writer described it as a story "replete with passion, drama, adventure, and an unprecedented emphasis on sensuality, rendered in explicit but loving detail."
The book's success prompted other publishing houses to cash in, notably Warner's 1976 promotion of "Love's Tender Fury" by Jennifer Wilde, really written by a man named Tom E. Huff, one of the few males writing in the genre.
And writers found a lucrative market that's still growing.
"Danielle Steel can write a novel in 16 days," Falk says. "She puts on her favorite flannel gown, sits down by her old-fashioned manual typewriter, and creates love stories that bring tears to her eyes - and $6 million to her bank account.'
Now the men on the covers are getting a piece of the action.
San Diego, Calif., May 1993 ...
It's the 11th annual Romantic Times Booklovers Fair and Convention and about 1,000 published and aspiring writers and enthusiastic readers have gathered in a hotel decorated with pink and white balloons and posters promoting the books "Viking Flame" and "Apache's Desire," all presided over by the ubiquitous Kathryn Falk.
The First Annual Mr. Romance Paperback Cover Model contest is under way, a hunkorama with amateur models partially dressed as pirates, shieks, knights, Tarzan and other symbols of male virility parading before the ogling, cheering crowd of mostly women.
And the winner in the under-40 category is ...
David Johnson, 29, of Encinitas, Calif., a chicken inspector for the Department of Agriculture.
And the winner in the 40-and-over category is ...
James Fox, 40, of Oceanside, Calif., a loan consultant for a mortgage company.
Johnson and Fox each will appear on the cover of a Zebra novel as one of their prizes, but it's unlikely they'll actively pursue a modeling career. The real battle of the beefcake is big-time stuff.
Big, as in Fabio. Strolling among his panting fans like a proud warrior, his blond mane swaying from side to side, this Italian bodybuilder is the reigning monarch of the macho set, his 48-inch chest and 18-inch biceps displayed on the covers of hundreds of romance novels, more than 1,000, his agent says.
Already a regular on TV talk shows, he has a leading role in a new TV series called "Acapulco H.E.A.T." He got a $100,000 advance to write three romance novels for Avon and has a 900 phone number to dispense advice about romance. He's marketing a calendar, a poster and a life-size likeness, and his first record was released this summer.
Was there a Fabio before Fabio?
"No, and there won't be one after him either," says Falk. "He's bigger than life. He's an icon, a presence. He has a mystique, charisma."
But what about The Topaz Man, Steve Sandalis, the one on the covers of all those Topaz novels?
In a TV interview, he's seen spread out bare-chested on a beach, looking into the camera and saying, "They're looking for someone who can be masculine, yet sensitive and vulnerable. That's me."
"He's sweet, the boy next door, and there will be others like him," Falk says. "But Fabio is one of a kind. He was the first and that puts him in a category of his own."
But wait, there's Tye Damon, the one Falk, wearing her "romance consultant" hat, recently lined up to be a star model and spokesman for Zebra.
"He's absolutely, unbelievably gorgeous," she says. "Incredible. He's 6-foot-3 and has that brooding thing. And he can write, he can speak. He's very well-versed and he comes from a good family."
Back in her flower garden, Falk talks of female fantasies and romance.
"They want their fantasies to come true. They would like to see their fantasies in reality, and that's what these cover models represent."
by CNB