Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

"In the beginning the heroine was the cover focus, and the hero was just a handsome prop," Vivian noted. "That was the heyday of the 'bodice ripper' covers that gave the genre such a bad name.

Remember the heroine with her hair flowing over her shoulders and her front falling out of her dress?"

"The Love Is a Wild Assault days," Susan agreed. "Don't look askance at me, Temple, there really was a romance novel titled that. As women readers became more open about what they wanted in romance novels, the heroine went from a passive, reluctant object of unwanted masculine onslaught to--"

"An adoring, willing, ogling prop at the feet of the new romance cover star--the mighty hero." Kit shook her head.

Temple smiled. "I take it some of you dislike the new hero-central covers."

"Some of us," Vivian said, "have loathed the old clinch covers and the intermediate 'dueling cleavage'

covers of bare-chested hero and half bare-breasted heroine all along. Now we loath the newest wrinkle: he alone in all his muscular, hairy glory, although he can't have hair on his face or his chest, for God's sake. Male models are waxed and air-brushed into unreality just like female ones. And, in the process, somehow women have been pushed off center stage in what's considered a women's genre, written by women for women."

"Oh, Viv, you're just griping because you have a master's degree in history to protect you from intimations of sleaze."

LaDonna's face beamed as the waitress wafted a large round pizza tray onto her end of the table.

"Face it, honey. Hunks are in, so we writers might as well enjoy the view. Besides, it's liberating to have men as sex objects for a change."

"What do you think?" Temple asked Susan as the second pizza tray hovered and then descended like an aluminum UFO in their midst.

The group separated their chosen slices from the artery-clotting herd and installed them on bread plates. Discussion stalled as cheese extended into thin strings and knives excised edible bites.

Susan thoughtfully nibbled a sauce-gored slice. "The new covers offer positives and negatives. Lots of romance covers nowadays have beautifully embossed and foiled fronts with more mainstream and neutral subject matter: flowers, fabric, and precious objects. The front cover opens to an interior step-back painting: the old clinching couple--or the man alone in a few cases."

"Now those you could take on the subway, or a bus." Sophisticated Vivian, with her black blunt-cut bob, managed to fit her comment in between swallows. She was attacking her pizza like Attila the Hun.

"But hunks sell books," LaDonna insisted between bites.

"Do they?" Kit was breaking her pizza slice into tiny pieces with fork and knife. "Sure, Fabio was a twelve-day wonder, but will anyone pull down the attention and the money the first and most famous male cover model did?"

"Even if they don't match his take, so what?" LaDonna answered. "The Incredible Hunk contest is a big chance for these guys. Most are models who wanna be actors, or actors who wanna be models. Not only is there a little barbell money in cover modeling, but the hunk contest itself is fodder for tabloid TV, so whoever is named Incredible Hunk gets a lot of exposure."

"I guess." Kit rolled her eyes at the unconscious double entendre. "Possible calendars, game show appearances, film jobs, syndicated TV show parts, maybe even a stab at the America's most famous houseguest/hostile witness title."

"Ooh, what a great idea!" Lori's eyes were shining to match her glossy hair. "Kato as an IH

contestant."

"Which one do you have in mind?" Vivian asked in an indifferent drawl. "The dude or the dog?"

Temple wanted the talk back on track. "Is that kind of media exposure worth killing for?"

That stilled knives and forks and mouths. Kit leaned close to mouth dramatically: "Motive Number One: Model Competition."

"Fame and fortune is always a worthy motive," Vivian said.

"So a rival hunk could have killed Cheyenne?"

"Sure." LaDonna shrugged. "Except one dead dude wouldn't guarantee another the title. The judging is honest, as far as I know."

"There are early favorites," Vivian objected. "You know that, LaDonna. You've seen the guys chat up the convention-goers. Prince Charmings by the pack. They charm them, then sweep them off their feet--"

"Is that what it's called?" Temple interjected. "Charming?"

"Temple was 'swept' by Fabrizio in the registration line," Kit explained.

"That Fabrizio." Lori sounded disgusted. "The original Mr. Unoriginal. He comes on as all muscle-man, but he only picks up the petite women. What a wimp! Fabio should sue."

"What makes Fabio king of the Prince Charmings?" Temple asked.

"He was the first romance cover model to emerge as a personality in his own right. Then he won the first cover-hunk contest, parlaying it into international celebrity," Susan pointed out. "Is his career so different from what Arnold Schwarzenegger or any other muscle man since and before Johnny Weissmuller did? Only nowadays, a media muscleman can have his own profitable 900 line, his romantic music cassettes, etcetera, ad nauseum. Thanks to romance novels selling forty-nine percent of all paperback book titles, he can be marketed directly to women without making a single Hollywood film."

"Whoa!" Temple's attention had really caught fire. "Forty-nine percent of all paperback books? Does that include nonfiction?"

"You bet." LaDonna crumpled her paper napkin into a lump like a bloody tomato and threw it onto the empty pizza platter.

"Why aren't you all rich then? Or are you?"

Amid hoots of laughter, Kit leaned close to whisper: "Motive Number Two: the Woman Scorned."

"Many are called, but few are chosen," Vivian quoted acidly. "Women writing romances have always been the most exploited group in publishing. Our royalty percentages are often lower than those of other writers. Sometimes our very pen names are not our own to take to another publisher. We have been production-line workers expected to toil forever for minor rewards. And, of course, as the icing on our very plain cake, we get no respect for what we do. Romance novels are just silly women nattering on, especially embarrassing when we write about sex without using the clinical, unemotional prose male writers have institutionalized since Hemingway was immortalized, to make men feel good about being afraid to feel anything."

She paused to catch an indignant breath. "The earth moved.' Really captures the moment, doesn't it, ladies? Hell, Hemingway was just too uncertain of his masculinity to convey more than terse little nothings about sex."

"My land o' Dixie!" Kit fanned a hand before her face, a swooning southern belle in intonation as well as gesture. "Our little Vivian is shorely all fired up about that most unsuitable topic!"

"Kit's got it," Susan said. "What really makes the male-oriented world of publishing and criticism uneasy about romances is that they present a female quest in female terms. Every young girl who enters the dating game perceives that it's one she can lose terribly. She bears the greatest consequences of sexual activity: pregnancy and loss of reputation, ergo self-esteem. How can she learn to be sexual without being betrayed by her body and the society that demands such an impossible role of her?

Virginal but desirable. Sexuality without experience. Eternal love discovered without trial and error."

"Too true," Temple said.

"And now," Vivian put in, "romance novels are the focus of national media attention, and do we get a more enlightened, less sexist, revised view of their underlying issues? No, we get swooning features on cover hunks, which makes our work look even less socially relevant."

LaDonna put down her ice tea with emphasis. "What's even worse, and what drives me nuts, is that quarter-of-a-million deal Fabrizio made to 'write' a series of books. Makes it look like there's nothing to writing a romance. And we all know who's really writing those Fabrizio books--an underpaid, unsung female romance writer. I wonder how Sidney Sheldon would like it if the cover models for his heroines made oodles more money than he did. Wouldn't put up with it for a nanosecond."