THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996 TAG: 9607180026
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
LENGTH: 126 lines
WHEN DEAD people talk to Patricia Cornwell, she doesn't just listen, she takes notes. It's not Eleanor Roosevelt she communes with, it's anonymous stiffs, especially ones who met a particularly ghastly end. But the creator of the wildly popular crime-novel series about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner, insists she's not ghoulish.
``If I were just interested in dead bodies, I might have a funeral-home director as the main character. But it's the dead speaking, telling us what happened and telling us the way they lived, which usually leads up to the way they died. It's the mystery of all that,'' she said.
Just six years after Cornwell published her first novel, ``Postmortem,'' communing with the dead has put her in the big leagues. Her new contract with Putnam - three books for a reported $24 million to $27 million - works out to about $8.5 million a year, the same salary that baseball's highest-paid player, Ken Griffey Jr., recently negotiated.
``Cause of Death,'' the seventh Scarpetta book, debuts at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list next week, knocking out John Grisham's ``The Runaway Jury.'' But success attracts scrutiny, and Cornwell, who protects herself with an office staff she calls a ``machine,'' is in the middle of a made-for-tabloid scandal.
Former FBI agent Eugene Bennett alleges that in 1991 she began an affair with his wife, Marguerite, at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., where Marguerite was teaching and Cornwell was doing research. In divorce documents now under seal, but originally obtained by Washington radio station WTOP, Eugene claims he saw the two at ``romantic candlelight dinners'' and ``hugging and kissing.''
Virginia police allege that Eugene kidnapped his estranged wife's minister last month, threatening to shoot him and to blow up the church unless he called Marguerite to arrange a meeting. She showed up, cops claim, shot at Eugene and missed.
Charged with four counts of criminal behavior, Eugene is being held without bond in a county jail and undergoing psychiatric evaluation. (According to his lawyers, he thinks he has an evil alter ego, Ed, whom he locked in a garage.) Eugene declined to comment; no one can locate Marguerite, and Cornwell won't talk about the case or the alleged relationship.
``My personal life is not anybody else's business,'' she said last week, sitting calmly in a Manhattan hotel suite, wearing jeans, a suede jacket, a ``Cause of Death'' T-shirt and a cross. ``I don't believe people should be defined by their sexuality,'' said Cornwell. ``People can think what they want. There's nothing I can do.''
She wore the same T-shirt and gold cross for a 2 p.m. book-signing stint at a Richmond Barnes & Noble on Saturday. Hundreds of devotees spent hours in line for the event, copies of ``Cause of Death'' pressed to their chests, as a large blue and white Virginia Blood Services van did a brisk business in the parking lot. In exchange for a few pints of blood, Cornwell fans could get a free ``Cause of Death'' T-shirt in their choice of gray or white.
Cornwell, according to VBS spokesperson Laura Cameron, thought up the book-signing/blood drive concept herself. Blood may spill in Cornwell's novels, but it gets collected at her public appearances. At least in Virginia.
``We did wonder if people would find it unseemly,'' said Cameron. ``But she is such a celebrity, her fans are so devoted, her books keep getting better and better. We finally decided that when someone of that stature says, `I give blood. I hope you will, too,' that's a good thing.''
Cornwell arrived late at the book signing, in a phalanx of bodyguards and staff.
Since she began writing best-selling crime novels, she says, ``I've been stalked, blackmailed. I have a huge list of inmates who can't wait to meet me. You wouldn't believe half of the stuff I've been through. But it's just part of life. I deal with it.''
Cornwell seems so hellbent on security that she is almost enslaved by it. She bought six lots in the gated community in Richmond, Va., where she lives alone. She sleeps with a loaded handgun next to her bed and has bodyguards at book signings.
``It's a big, bad world,'' she said. ``To me, this is life insurance.''
If the 40-ish Cornwell seems overinsured, it may be due to her almost Dickensian childhood. At 7, she moved from Miami to Montreat, N.C., with her mother, Marilyn, and two brothers. Two years later Marilyn, now divorced, became severely depressed.
``We were out of food, out of fuel. She couldn't function,'' said Cornwell. It was a bleak house. So her mother turned to Billy and Ruth Graham, who lived nearby. Marilyn entered a hospital, and the Grahams placed the kids with missionaries. The children were not allowed to call their mother, who eventually came home, only to be hospitalized again later.
Cornwell, an A student who was as driven then as she is now, survived, but at a price. During her freshman year at college, suffering from anorexia nervosa and bulimia, she was put in the same hospital her mother had been in.
``It was like something out of my own novels,'' she said. ``A lot of people having shock treatments. You would hear them screaming. I was always the overachiever, and now I was in a mental hospital.''
Back in school, she fell in love with her English instructor and married him. Eventually they divorced, and Cornwell, who began keeping a journal in adolescence, tried to sell a mystery. She asked an editor for advice and sold ``Postmortem,'' which won every major crime-book award.
Cornwell isn't interested in the interior lives of psychopaths.
``I prefer to focus on science and law enforcement. For me, that's a healthy preoccupation.''
The first four Scarpetta books are full of surgical precision, creepiness and enough of an underpinning of sadness to give them humanity. Cornwell stumbled in the fifth, and fell flat in the sixth, ``From Potter's Field.'' She has recovered some ground in ``Cause of Death,'' a story that begins as a taut thriller but lapses into apocalyptic melodrama with terrorists taking over a nuclear-power plant. If Cornwell isn't actually Scarpetta, she does share her character's childhood losses and her troubled psyche.
``If you have an original wound, you do things that keep putting your finger back on it. Which is probably why I chose to write about crime. I went into the darkest thing you can think of, and that is where I feel most at home,'' she said.
Cornwell has finished the next Scarpetta book, is working on the movie of ``Potter's Field'' and has a ``satirical'' police novel, ``Hornet's Nest,'' due out in the winter. Fame has isolated her, but she hasn't entirely given up on romance. ``I'm a big risk taker,'' she said.
Until she finds someone worth the gamble, she has all that work - not to mention all that money - to keep her warm. MEMO: Staff writer Laura LaFay contributed to this story from Newsweek
magazine. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hundreds of fans waited hours Saturday to meet crime-novelist
Patricia Cornwell at a Richmond bookstore.
Photo
JOHN EARLE/G.P. Putnam's Sons
Patricia Cornwell has finished the next Scarpetta book.
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