CJ Hollenbach, romance novel cover model ... - Joshuah Bearman

CJ Hollenbach, romance novel cover model, posing with a romance novel convention attendee.

The Only Muscle I Can’t Control IN SEAR CH OF THE NEXT ROMANCE NOVEL COVER MAN NONFICTION BY

Joshuah Bearman P H OTO S B Y B R A D FA RW E L L

ome books are meant to be judged by their covers. You know the kind: Comanche Rose, Petticoats and Pistols, Tender Warrior, Sea of Desire. You see them lined up in airport bookstores and supermarket wire racks, their embossed titles accompanied by a shirtless he-man clutching a swooning, bosomy maiden. The ardent couple might be sitting astride a black stallion, standing amidships on a schooner, or admiring a vast, castle-containing idyll. Perhaps there is a stately carriage, or thunderclouds streaked with lightning, or a hawk perched on the hero’s outstretched arm. Shirts are unbuttoned, bodices unlaced. The light is right, the palette is warm, and the hair is always flowing. These are the pastel dreams of romance novels. But behind each passionate Regency nobleman or brooding sheikh, there stands a real man—a man named Fred, or Travis. I know this because I am lost in a thicket of aspiring romance heroes right now. “Tight, tanned, and in command,” as one of them puts it, these guys have assembled at the Downtown Houston Hyatt for the fourteenth annual Mr. Romance Cover Model Competition. This is the proving ground for future Fabios. Mr. Romance is a multi-day marathon competition, and what’s about to get started is the Saturday-night highlight, the moment when one man will walk away with the crown. A service area behind the Houston Hyatt’s Imperial Ballroom is doubling as an improvised green room, and this is one place where alpha males are not afraid to accessorize: capes, kilts, and fringed vests are paired with spurs, quivers, bandoliers, and at least one yarn-headed hobbyhorse. Near the emergency exit an Indian warrior is slipping a beaded band over a massive bicep. A permed knight puts down his sword to fluff his hair.

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Joshuah Bearman has written about real-life superheroes, CIA missions, and the world’s greatest Pac Man player for Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and This American Life. He’s working on a memoir, called St. Croix, to be published by Riverhead.

A cowboy shimmies into chaps, ties on a red bandana, and announces that “It’s bandito time!” Out beyond the curtain awaits the grand prize: a guaranteed appearance on the cover of a book by this year’s sponsor, romancepublishing giant Dorchester. I look around the room. Some day soon, one of these anabolically proportioned young men will be rendered in oils, bedecked with a headband or Viking helmet, his windswept locks beckoning readers in checkout lines across the nation. Lured by this opportunity, a dozen contenders have assembled from far and wide. Collectively, they represent the full range of wellgroomed, gym-derived masculinity. Jason Santiago is one of this year’s strongest challengers—a confident and chiseled actor who’s been here before and fallen just short of first place. On the opposite end of the dreamboat spectrum, Travis Greiman is a shy country boy; he’s making the soft sell. Next to him stands Fred Williams, an energetic African American with rib-eye musculature who’s playing the gregarious showman. Shirtless and twirling toy six-shooters, Fred comes with a complement of rotating outfits, like an action figure. “I got it all worked out, with props and everything,” he says. He gives me a tour of his various looks: Western Fred, Formal Fred, Dancing Fred, Feudal Chinese Aristocratic Fred. “It’s gonna be off the chain!” he tells me. With a few minutes to curtain, everyone focuses on finishing touches. Travis coils his bullwhip. Jason does pushups for pectoral inflation. Fred arranges and rearranges his props. Oddly, there’s no mirror back here, so everyone is forced to tell each other how they look. “It’s cooler if you hold the sword with two hands.” “Your bolo’s crooked.” “I like them fangs!” Beyond appearances, and fangs, the competition is also about courtship, or what the official Mr. Romance program calls “Romance I.Q.” Throughout the competition, each of these guys needs to prove that he is the most romantic among the suitors—the sweetest, most tender man a woman could want. For that, they also came prepared. At one point, Fred furtively opens a black leather bag to give me a The Panorama Book Review 33

glimpse of his “secret weapon”: a bouquet of roses. But not just any roses—“Chocolate roses! Brought ’em all the way from St. Louis for that special edge.” Mr. Romance isn’t just about muscles, he says—“It’s about understanding women.” r. Romance is the main event at Romantic Times, a vast annual celebration of all things romance writing–related. Imagine a temporary portal to a parallel dimension dedicated to a perpetual bachelorette party and you will have some idea of what it’s like. I arrive on the second day, and am greeted in the lobby by Cindy Walker, the contestant wrangler. Cindy is the one who located the candidates, vetted their applications, and scheduled them in the program, which promises all visitors the chance to see “a dozen gorgeous young men” in competition. Around us, the hotel is overflowing with those visitors: several thousand romance-crazed readers, editors, agents, authors, cover artists, and publishers, all gathered for the workshops (“Hijinx and Hot Kisses”), panels (“Adding Trends to Today’s Historicals”), social events (Cinnamon Buns Mixer!), and, of course, the drama of Mr. Romance. For many of these women, Cindy explains, Romantic Times is their vacation. Leaving their husbands at home, they take a few days each year to explore in person the fantasies they love to read. They bring costumes. They stay up all night. They playfully paw every man in sight. “A few come from as far away as New Zealand for the fun,” Cindy says. Foreign contingents aside, the clichés about romance readers appear to be true—they tend to be middle-aged ladies from the South and Midwest. There is a tremendous preponderance of floral print, bangs, paunch-concealing blazers, puffy-painted and/or bedazzled sweatshirts, and QVC jewelry. But I will also say this: everyone here is unfailingly kind. They may be lumberjack-fantasy devotees on an extended raunchy weekend, but they are still heartland mothers, instinctively warm and friendly, and they make all visitors feel instantly welcome. Especially the Mr. Romance contestants, who by design are the physical focal point of a hotel’s worth of concentrated estrogenic imagination. “Constant mingling,” Cindy says, “is a key part of the competition.” The judges’ identities are unknown until Saturday night, Cindy explains, meaning that the contestants spend four days proving their “romance skills” to as many women as possible. They get their chance to do so at a dense schedule of photo ops, costumed dances, and water-volleyball tournaments, as well as at the “wild and wacky” panel, and the themed galas, like “Mystery Chix and Private Dix,” and tonight’s extravaganza: “Vampires of the Wild, Wild West.” For the young men competing this weekend, the appeal of all this is the apparent reciprocity of the fantasy. “It runs both ways!” says veteran Mr. Romance presence CJ Hollenbach. Let’s face it, CJ says: who wouldn’t want to spend a few days as a Scottish warrior surrounded by women? Plus, there’s the career advancement. “I entered in the first contest in 1993,” CJ says. “And things really took off. I mean, look at me now.” At forty-three, CJ still has ass-long hair treated to a straw blond, pointed sideburns, and unnervingly light gray eyes. Appearing in Odalisque repose on dozens of covers and calendars, CJ looks like he could transform by night into a Siberian husky. He didn’t win his first Mr. Romance—“It was much tougher back then”—but just appearing in it jump-started his career. He’s appeared on such covers as Viking

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Above right, CJ Hollenback demonstrating a traditional cover pose with a fan. Below, Hollenbach on the cover of Viking Seduction. 34 The Panorama Book Review

Mr. Romance is the main event at Romantic Times, a vast annual celebration of all things romance writing– related. Imagine a temporary portal to a parallel dimension dedicated to a perpetual bachelorette party. Seduction and Lady of Sherwood, and his honors include 2001’s Brazen Heroine Fantasy Hunk of the Year. CJ always returns to Mr. Romance—for the fun, for the fans, and, he says, “to mentor the upand-comers.” He tells the new blood that it’s tough to make a living at this, especially if you’re not in New York. “But it is possible,” he says. “I mean, Fabio—hello?” Because of his hair, CJ bears a superficial resemblance to Fabio, which he relishes. He doesn’t even mind that some people call him “Fauxbio”—being an ersatz Fabio goes a long way in the romance community. Here, the Legend of Fabio is a foundational myth: he is the man against whom all other men are measured. At times people talk about Fabio as if he were a magical being. His eyes shine like moonlight, they say, even during the day. Crowds part for him like the Red Sea making way for Moses. CJ himself once wrote that his first glimpse of Fabio, years ago, felt like gazing upon “a sturdy Italian sequoia.” And don’t forget that inside that bristling body beats a loving heart. Fabio does charity work, speaks out against smoking, and, according to the Romantic Times fact sheet, “wants to promote a world without all the guns, hatred, and anger.” Fabio made two hundred thousand dollars on covers in 1992— and that was before his massive brand expansion, including fitness videos, a series of novels under his own name, an album of love songs called Fabio After Dark, a 900-number chat line, and those ads for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! No one since has created that kind of success, CJ admits, but Fabio serves as a beacon to all who follow. The first cohort of Fabio’s heirs included John DeSalvo and Steve Sandalis, who went on to grace fifteen hundred and six hundred covers, respectively. Then there were Jim, Kurt, and Kris Bartling, three hog farmers from Unadilla, Nebraska with matching platinum manes who took a page out of Fabio’s marketing notebook and created their own “romantic” sausage line, called Hickory Hunks. “A win at Mr. Romance can create all kinds of opportunities,” says CJ, who has yet to get into perishables. “That’s why the stakes are so high.” ave you ever read a book by Nora Roberts? Me neither. We may well soon be in the minority, though; Roberts regularly outsells Clancy, Grisham, and King combined. There are 400 million copies of her 189 titles in print. And Roberts is just one of many—if you ask Heather Graham, sponsor of tonight’s Vampire Ball, how many books she’s written,

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she can’t even remember. “Stopped counting at a hundred and twenty-two,” she’ll say. Want some more dazzling figures? Romance boasts $1.5 billion in sales; 55 percent of all paperbacks; one out of four books sold; 60 million readers in the United States alone. Cindy says that many of those 60 million readers read twenty or thirty novels a month. Among the devoted core, some women can read several steamy paperbacks a night. These books are popular for a reason, Cindy says. For the women in the Downtown Houston Hyatt, what those novels and their covers communicate is an extremely powerful idea, one that makes this seemingly obscure exercise in kitsch a direct window into some kind of structural fantasy etched into the female mind. “Romance is a very potent, universal message,” Cindy says. “And that’s what so great about the Mr. Romance competition. For four days, all these men have to live that message.” n recent years, the romance message has broadened into many overlapping sub-genres of commodified desire. You can see them on display around the convention floor; traditional categories like Historical, Regency, and Western Romance sit alongside Romantic Suspense, Future Romance, Time-Travel Romance, and Paranormal Romance, which deals in vampires, werewolves, and the occasional shape-shifter. (As Marianne La Croix, a successful paranormal romance author, put it to me, “Some of us like that beast in a man.”) There’s even interest in extraterrestrial romance—Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind is a typical title—and at one point I overhear a group of fans and authors debating whether they’d prefer to be seduced by Darth Vader or Yoda. (The crowd seemed evenly split.) The candidates for this year’s Mr. Romance are equally diverse. Mark Posey, a Canadian professional wrestler who goes by the name Mr. Intensity, strikes stern poses cribbed from the ring; Ozzie, an Argentine gaucho who sired eight children by age thirty-five, signs various non-fatherhood-centric calendars; and Chris Hayes, a twentytwo-year-old jujitsu instructor, tells me he’s debating what to focus on these days—trying to decide between “this romance novel thing and maybe getting into Ultimate Fighting Championship.” At another table I find a stack of copies of Men of Desire, its cover featuring an intensely gazing Jason Santiago armed with a pistol. Then I look up and see the real Jason entertaining admirers with the same intense gaze. “I’ve already had a couple meetings,” he says during a lull in the crowd. “And I’m feeling good about my chances.” A self-described professional model and actor who “just made the big move” from Akron, Ohio to Salt Lake City, Jason tells me that Mr. Romance is supposed to be a stepping stone to his dream, which is TV and movies. As I wonder about the television opportunities in Salt Lake City, Jason says that his manager thought he needed to test the waters in a smaller pond before going to a place like Los Angeles. In the meantime, Jason is looking forward to the finals as an acting opportunity. The Cover Posedown, one of several decisive events, is the Mr. Romance contestants’ big creative moment, a time to show the judges their interpretive strengths—to be, for a few minutes, a figure out of fantasy. “I have to play an Indian Warrior,” Jason tells me. Jason’s shirt advertises that he’s one of “The Cavemen,” meaning that he’s sponsored by Ellora’s Cave, a relatively new publisher specializing in Erotic Romance. Traditionally, romance novels have described sex with a uniquely euphemistic vocabulary (e.g., the “waves of pleasure” a young woman might experience in “her dewy folds”),

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but in recent years Ellora’s Cave—a double entendre I’m not sure is intended since it is never once acknowledged by anyone—has built its reputation on books that read more like Penthouse Letters. Some readers, Cindy among them, remain skeptical of the harder-edged stuff. The divide came into focus during last year’s Mr. Romance, when Ellora’s Cave sponsored a group of contestants who got out of line. “A lot of them were strippers,” says CJ, “with corresponding attitudes.” They formed an insular, aggressive clique, and Jason followed their lead. “At first I didn’t want to let him back in,” Cindy explains. After a turbulent contest, Jason realized the error of his ways, apologized, and won her over. Some guys misunderstand what this is about, Cindy adds rather assertively. “We have to keep things classy.” This year, unfortunately, the classy mandate is creating tension again. Julian Fantechi, a strong Mr. Romance contender and fourtime Playgirl centerfold, is over at the booth for Between Your Sheets, a management service for romance authors, signing copies of his first cover: Ashley Kath-Bilsky’s The Sense of Honor. Cindy says Playgirl modeling is not appropriate for Mr. Romance; Julian is in the current issue. Reportedly, Julian was told to leave hard copies of the magazine at home, but he brought them anyway, earning a reprimand from Romantic Times authorities. “We have rules here,” Cindy says. “And Mr. Romance is a PG operation.” ith their experience and exposure, Jason and Julian seem to have some institutional momentum, but Fred is working hard to chip away at their lead. In the back corner of the hall, he’s commandeered an empty space for his own makeshift booth, where he’s been waging a very effective charmbased counter-campaign. “I’m a writer, too,” he says, showing off stacks of postcards he’s made, with his poems superimposed over pictures of himself. At six feet and 220 pounds, Fred is seriously yoked for an AT&T network technician and part-time poet from St. Louis. He flips through a binder holding his oeuvre to date, which is available for anyone who wants to take a closer look. “This a great time to network,” he says, as befits a network technician. You never know who you’re talking to.” And Fred likes talking to everyone. A cheerful extrovert who throws his arms around the ladies, Fred asks about their sons and playfully inscribes books with Keep last night between us, or Had a great night—will get shoes later! Fred also seems to be a dyed-in-the-wool romantic: his poems are about roses, beating hearts, and lovers on beaches. In other words, Fred seems to understand what Cindy believes is the strategic key to winning Mr. Romance: “Providing the whole package.” Mountainous, hard-earned abs might get you attention, but it’s “that sense of romance” that seals the deal. “Mr. Romance,” Cindy says, is a place where “nice guys don’t finish last.”

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y now, my own favorite nice guy is Travis Greiman. Tall and handsome, twenty-two-year-old Travis is well proportioned but by no means a bodybuilder, and he’s come to Romantic Times for years with his mother, Lois Greiman, a moderately successful author of Scottish historicals. “One year, she put me in a kilt at her booth,” Travis says when I catch up with him not far from where Lois is signing some of her books. “There was also a raffle for my sword.” Travis may be too nice: he’s painfully shy, which makes him all the more sympathetic for allowing his mother to dress him up

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Chris Hayes, a twenty-twoyear-old jujitsu instructor, tells me he’s debating what to focus on these days—trying to decide between “this romance novel thing and maybe getting into Ultimate Fighting Championship.” to attract attention. “But it worked,” he says, “so I come back with her each year.” At the moment, Travis has more of a cowboy look, although I discover it’s not really a costume. “We live on a farm in Minnesota,” Travis says. “Raising horses.” So the hat and boots are real, and the buck knife too. He even brought his own bull-whip. At home, Travis spends several days a week helping a quadriplegic man take care of three adopted kids. He’s also entering med school next year, so he’s not really interested in modeling. “My mom convinced me to enter the contest,” he says. “So really, I just do it for her.” In fact, the only reason Travis is here this year is because his mom promised she’d take him camping in the Ozarks on the way home. Out in the parking lot, he says, their car is filled with gear. Travis starts telling me about how much he likes the outdoors, less for hunting than for hiking, and pretty soon I’m imagining his carefree farm life with his mom—splitting wood, smoking jerky, and spending crisp autumn mornings picking wild berries for breakfast. When I ask him what else happens on his magic idyll of a homestead, he softly adds, “Me and my mom also breed golden retrievers.” Incredibly, Travis is an involuntary bachelor. He has never had a real girlfriend, he says with an embarrassed smile—an alarming discovery, because if Travis is coming up empty, what does that mean for the rest of us? Somehow the altruistic, handsome cowboy and future surgeon who spends his free time surrounded by foals and puppies hasn’t figured out how to attract a woman. “I don’t know,” Travis says with a sigh when I press for details about his love life. “I guess I just don’t know what women want.”

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The feverish train cries home, home because it cannot remember where it comes from. In recompense the men tear up its tracks and put an end to its nightmare of motion. —Troy Jollimore

ere’s what a few minutes in the Houston Hyatt’s groundfloor bar reveals about what women want: “A bad boy who is secretly kind.” “Sexy but dedicated.” “A conqueror who turns out to be loyal.” “Someone who shakes up your life and seduces you, and then decides to settle down.” These descriptions are all variations on the inviolate formula of romance novels. First, a pretty girl encounters a mysterious hero; then, a sensual cat-and-mouse game ensues, complicated by obstacles to love both external (warlords, earthquakes, etc.) and internal (the prickly English rose is too haughty, the Greek tycoon is too stubborn); eventually, though, the dust settles, and a couple is left standing. “Readers want an alpha male who can commit,” says Jo Carol Jones, the Romantic Times convention director. “That’s the fundamentals.” It’s a commitment that entails transformation. “The romance protagonist is always flawed,” explains author Ashley Kath-Bilsky. “And all he needs is a good woman to straighten him out.” In its guidelines for aspiring authors, the Romance Writers Association calls this “an Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending.” With the inevitable ESOE payoff, the books function as relationship procedurals. Just like they always get their guy on Law & Order, romance novels always deliver a cosmic emotional justice. Women who take risks are rewarded with true love. For Romantic Times regulars, the greatest example of an ESOE is what happened last year, when Evan Scott (First Runner-Up, 2003, Kansas City) secretly arranged to stop the show midway through so he could take the stage and propose to his astonished girlfriend in front of everyone. As you can imagine, the entire place went freaking nuts—or so I gather when I ask witnesses to recall the moment now, a year later, and their eyes glaze over like it’s happening all over again. The consensus is that it was the most wonderful thing they have ever seen. Evan Scott is here again this year, and when he tells me the story himself over a few drinks, he says he came up with the idea by just following the cues from the novels his girlfriend reads. “You can learn a lot from what’s in those books,” he says, adjusting his straw hat and sleeveless gingham shirt. “If more men read them, there would be a lot more happy women out there.” What Evan is indirectly saying is that there is a secondary fantasy at work here. Over the course of the contest, we’ll witness the ESOE transformation almost literally, with costumed courtship being traded for a final appearance Saturday night in nuptially appropriate formal wear. But many romance readers are already married. For them, what’s really appealing is the notion of changing a man at all. They don’t need to turn a hero into a husband; they want their husbands to become heroes. They’re after a glimpse of “the whole package”—robust but caring guys, the kind of guys who might take a bit of extra time to appreciate their wives the way Evan Scott does. Sure, these things are clichés. But they’re sturdy, satisfying clichés—easy for their men to live up to. And is that really asking so much?

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Top, a romance enthusiast meets Sasha White (left), noted romance novel author. Middle, a cover man meets a fan on the pageant stage. Below, romance readers meet Mark Johnson, another contender.

hen I run into Travis and his mom again, she’s wearing a homemade campaign pin with his face on it. “I’m trying to spread the word,” Lois says, smiling at Travis, who blushes adorably. By now, I basically want to be Travis, the most

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eligible bachelor alive. So far, though, Travis seems to be getting little traction at the competition, according to my preliminary polling around the hotel: JULIAN:

15 12 FRED: 6 TRAVIS: 1 JASON:

Perhaps predictably, the actor and former troublemaker Jason is coasting along, while friendly Fred and trusty Travis are struggling to make a dent. And then there’s Julian, leading the charge, despite turning out to be, in Cindy’s words, “a real problem.” He has been late to events, if he shows up at all. At the water-volleyball tournament, he refused to go in the pool. And earlier today, Julian was caught with those Playgirls again. “That’s not how a man who wants to call himself Mr. Romance behaves,” Cindy says fretfully. Around the convention, everyone agrees that the “bad-boy question” is the central dilemma of Mr. Romance. Even the Yoda versus Darth Vader discussion turned on this issue. “Darth may be evil, but he’s tall, dark, and handsome,” one woman said. “And no matter what people say, there’s no way little wrinkly Yoda would win Mr. Romance.” All of which brings me back to high school, when I first started suspecting that the deck was stacked, perhaps even biologically. Since then, my suspicions have only deepened: a recent scientific paper entitled “Male Pheromone-Stimulated Neurogenesis in the Adult Female Brain” was translated in the mainstream press with headlines like WHY WOMEN LOVE HUNKS. It described a study showing that simply being near dominant males triggered brain growth in females. These were mice, not people, but the implications are clear, and thinking about it now, I can’t decide if proof of a neurological imperative that hardwires women to gravitate toward assholes would be tragic or a relief. But science aside, when Cindy talks about her nice-guy theory of Mr. Romance and says that Julian’s aggression will be self-defeating, I really want to believe her. I’m soon marrying the girlfriend I’ve had since college, but in solidarity with Travis and his worldwide beta-male cohort, I have developed a vested interest here. Finally, a chance to turn the tables! Because what Cindy has promised, after all, is a corrective to human gender relations. Alpha males will be tamed; nice guys will be rewarded. And yet when I return to my survey, there’s Fred still busting ass to stand a chance for second place and poor Travis barely in the running. What’s wrong with these women? Don’t they understand? While arguing his case with some conventioneers, I realize I’ve crossed the line from rooting for Travis to push-polling: “So, that handsome Travis sure seems like a shoe-in for Mr. Romance, right?” “Well, I kind of like Jason.” “Hmm, interesting. But did you know that Travis raises horses and takes care of a quadriplegic’s children?” “Well that’s impressive. And sweet.” “Yeah. That Travis is really something special.” ater that night, the Vampires of the Wild, Wild West gala is getting started. The book tables have been replaced with banquet tables, and there’s dinner, but more importantly there are two full bars. Parading around the room are grown, girthy women in corsets, capes, black gowns with empire waists, and epic folds of red velvet. At one table Travis’s mother Lois is admiring her

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Around the convention, the “bad-boy question” is the central dilemma of Mr. Romance. “Darth [Vader] may be evil, but he’s tall, dark, and handsome,” one woman says. “And no matter what people say, there’s no way little wrinkly Yoda would win Mr. Romance.” son’s costume. “Doesn’t he look great?” she asks. “I thought about being a vampiric cowboy,” Travis says, “but I didn’t have any fangs.” Soon, everyone is drunk. At one point I find Fred entertaining an extraordinarily amorous senior citizen named Jan, a romance author from Texas; she has one hand on Fred, the other on the quarter-empty fifth of Jim Beam hanging out of her purse. “When yer seven-tee-one yeers old,” she says with a sway, “yew cain’t give a damn no more!” “I shouldn’t encourage you,” Fred says with a big smile, which has the effect of encouraging her even more. “Whah don’t yew give this fei-stee ol’ gran-ma,” she singsongs, rubbing Fred’s arm, “a re-uhl…”—she pauses, takes a breath— “…big…”—takes two breaths— “…kick tonight!” Now she’s hyperventilating, like a prank caller. She puts her hand on Fred’s chest. “Hey now!” he yells, with mock indignation. “Oh, par-DONE,” Jan declares, “but that right there is some reSERCH!” Jan offers me her bottle—“And where’s YER hooch?” “I already had a few.” “Well, we cain’t have yer hands empty!”—and then disappears into the evening’s swelling revelry. Another aspiring author, Maggie Wiseman, runs past clad in black with a bowl of red Maraschino cherries propped up square in her cleavage, a daring use of props which probably pushed her over the edge to win the costume contest. When passersby empty Maggie’s bowl, she heads to the bar: “Time to get a refill!”

O F A L L T H E .. .

Involved in a conundrum I pass it along to the consumer. You can afford it. Does everything have to be tragic, and why can’t the world get up and play tennis? —John Ashbery

That’s all fine by her husband, Jesse Wiseman, a thirty-two-yearold sergeant in the United States marines whose wife started writing steamy scenes to pass the time while he was deployed. With his crewcut, aptitude for field-stripping an AR-15, and collection of Warhammer books, Jesse seems out of place at Romantic Times. And he’s somewhat skeptical about the Mr. Romance competition. “At first glance,” he says, “they’re not the type of guys you’d want in your foxhole.” At the moment, those guys are fanned out across the dance floor, humoring the competing advances of clusters of women twice their age. Jason, in a black suit and flaring crimson lapels, a bloodsucker by way of Havana, is posing with a sanguinary Marie Antoinette for the benefit of camera-wielding onlookers. Fred, sporting smoked shades and a decidedly contemporary suit for a vampire, looks like Blade’s nightclub alter ego as he jumps between partners. And when Travis, in fangless cowboy gear, limbos all the way to the floor, he surprises everyone by snapping back upright like Jet Li. As the Vampire Ball lurches toward the small hours, it starts to feel very comfortable in the Downtown Houston Hyatt. Like maybe this is our home and we have all been here forever. The smiles are euphoric. Identities have been transformed. Lives at home are forgotten, and the future is put on hold as the dance floor is united by Jim Beam and an unyielding faith in transformative love. This is how the fantasy that lives in the covers of those novels is animated for a few nights each year. Judging from the faces on the dance floor, no one’s going anywhere until the music stops. The mutual mission of Mr. Romance has finally erased the inhibition barrier. Michael Jackson reminds us to Leave that nine-to-five up on the shelf. Kool & the Gang instructs the crowd to Get down on it. Lionel Richie suggests we do it All night long. And that’s exactly what we do. he next day I wake up at noon, amble downstairs, and discover that scandal has struck Mr. Romance. “We had to kick out Julian,” Cindy says. She shakes her head at the magnitude of the situation. “They’re escorting him from the building now.” Around the room, there is hushed chatter about Julian’s fate. This is clearly an unprecedented punitive event at Mr. Romance, and Cindy says she’d prefer not to discuss it. Surprisingly, I have to cultivate multiple sources with various offers of background, deep background, and double-secret-probation background to get the details, which are these: Julian was caught distributing his Playgirl centerfold again. This morning it was on the floor of the convention—the final straw. CJ was sitting next to Julian and suspected some fishy commerce beneath the tabletop. “I can’t be sure,” CJ says. “But I think he was selling them for $25 apiece.” CJ thinks Julian made a mistake, but also points out he’s seen far worse “hanky panky” at Mr. Romance. It’s a fine line they tread here, trying to keep actual sex away from an industry premised at least in part on sexual fantasy. “I mean, come on!” he says. “Everyone stays up all night, drinking in a hotel. People get carried away.” Fans, CJ says, have been known to put pictures of themselves, scrawled with room numbers, under the doors of the Mr. Romance candidates. And there are enough younger women here to tempt the contestants. This year CJ claims to have information that certain unnamed people have been “intimate” with conventioneers. Last year there were rumors of a three-way involving a contestant and two fans—a mother and daughter. “And this place is full of gossipy women,” he says. “They all know the score.” “I don’t care what else is going on, but rules are rules,” says Annette

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Above, former Mr. Romance Mark Johnson sings a song from A Story from My Heart: The Only Muscle I Can’t Control. Below, Fred Williams, Mr. Congeniality, poses with a fan in the lobby.


Batista, the contest director. Julian and the others all signed a contract in which they agreed to conduct themselves in “a gentlemanly and respectful manner.” Grounds for disqualification include soliciting convention attendees, a felony record, and, of course, sabotage. When I ask if bringing stacks of one’s own Playgirl spreads constitutes sabotage, Annette says it’s a larger issue. “We had to send a message,” she declares, “that Mr. Romance will not tolerate divas.” Cindy adds that Julian failed to respect the dignity of the office he was seeking. “When you are Mr. Romance,” she says, “your place on those covers means something. It’s larger than you. You have to be more than a sex object. You have to represent a grand idea.” Perhaps that’s why Cindy asks Jesse Wiseman, the marine, to replace Julian. That and the fact that “he’s one of the few men in the building.” She catches Jesse upstairs and gets him to agree to be ready in two hours. Jesse says yes mostly to make Maggie happy. “If the guys in my platoon ever saw this,” he says, “I would never hear the end of it.” t’s Saturday night, the main event. DJ Big Tom just kicked off the final pageant with “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” The stage is set with hay bales, wagon wheels, and a fake bar draped with feather boas. The judges are seated, their identities revealed: three honchos from Dorchester and a local romance author. Starting with Travis, the contestants emerge one by one, and a speculative fever grips the room. I don’t mind confessing to some excitement of my own. A round of additional polling during rehearsal suggested a narrowing race. Now comes the moment of truth, decided over several events: three “Posedowns”—Cowboy, Cover, and Formal—and the notorious Date Round, where the men will woo women with their words. Quickly, the field starts shaking out. Young Travis holds his own in the Cowboy Posedown, but for the Cover he’s only moderately convincing as Connie Mason’s Highland Warrior. The audience can tell his heart just isn’t in it, and what they favor instead is the hammedup, rippling machismo offered by Fred and Jason. When Fred distributes his chocolate roses, the audience lets him know that his secret weapon is striking its target—“Arrest me, sheriff !” is heard from the crowd. Later, Jason is given his promised star turn lamenting his squaw’s tragic death while, bizarrely, the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme plays. No one notices the incongruity, lost as they are in the moment’s pathos. What they do notice are Jason’s smoldering stare and his fringed loincloth, a winning combination that causes someone to yell: “Show us your peace pipe!” The only surprise is Jesse, a crowd-pleaser despite being shorter, smaller, and, as he says, a man who lives up to his infantry nickname Dogface “for the obvious reasons.” It’s Jesse’s backstory that wins the room over: he’s done three tours in Iraq, and he’s shipping out again next week. In the minds of romance readers from mostly red states, this is powerful stuff. Everyone also knows that he’s here with Maggie, who just sold her first book. “He’s a real-life hero,” Annette says. Soon, it’s halftime—and why not slow things down with a little mood music? Mark Johnson is yet another former Mr. Romance contestant, a one-time stuntman at Medieval Times who left all that behind to write his own songs “inspired from everyday experiences.” (Which I suppose accounts for the fact that, yesterday, Mark saw one of CJ’s beefcake photos and said he would write a song about it. “He said he was moved because it was so beautiful,” CJ said. “Weird,

I


Fans have been known to put pictures of themselves, scrawled with room numbers, under the doors of the Mr. Romance candidates. Last year there were rumors of a three-way involving a contestant and two fans— a mother and daughter. huh?”) Mark has just recorded an album called A Story from My Heart: The Only Muscle I Can’t Control, and once he starts singing, I understand what CJ meant when he said that the talent-show portion of Mr. Romance from previous years had been cancelled “for humanitarian reasons.” As saccharine as he is sincere, Mark has taken the cloying emotional elixir that stirs the romance novel and set it to music. And the women love it. Especially when Mark takes a moment between songs to look the entire audience in the eye and tell them how he loves being a “natural-born hugger.” When the show starts up again, we’re in the Date round—the treacherous stretch that relies on wits—and some gaffes emerge. The women are pulled from the audience at random, and await the men on stage. When Travis takes the chair, he looks nervous, like a freshman who accidentally wound up at the prom, and what should be his impeccable Mr. Romance resume—puppies, horses, the quadriplegic— gets lost in a steady stream of stammering. Fred makes the mistake of leaving his glasses on throughout the date. He’d planned to say “I’m blinded by your beauty,” but didn’t get the chance before the crowd noticed. It’s Jason, though, who steps into the biggest disaster when he sits down opposite his date, turns ninety degrees, and starts telling the audience how much he loves sports and working out. “Talk to the lady!” someone yells. Jason looks stunned, tries to change course, but he’s screwed. Oh I’m sorry, he says, I’m really sorry, well a little about me… and then the buzzer cuts him off. It’s Jesse who makes the simple but noble gesture all these women are waiting for: enough about me, what about you? He yields

T H E C L O U D Y VA S E

Past time, I threw the flowers out, washed out the cloudy vase. How easily the old clearness leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it. —Jane Hirshfield

his time to hear from his date, a woman named Beth from Cleveland, and the crowd goes wild. Hands folded, he listens attentively while Beth talks about what a nice time she’s having here at Mr. Romance. It’s a tactful move, one that sets the stage for the contestants’ final appearance, the Formal Posedown. Fred repurposes his suit from the Vampire Ball as he escorts an adoring heroine around the stage, while Jason predictably sidles up to his woman in classic Latinlover mode: red silk shirt, gold cross, three buttons undone. Then it’s Jesse’s turn. We see a woman at the end of the catwalk, waiting, forlorn. Suddenly Jesse appears, in the sharp lines of his pressed Class A uniform, ceremoniously displaying his stripes and ribbons. He puts down his bag, she runs to him, and as the pair reenact a soldier’s homecoming the room erupts into a massive standing ovation. Out in the audience, the moment rings true for Maggie. She starts crying. Then other women start crying. Even one of the judges gets misty as Jesse carries the woman into the figurative sunset. By now, it’s clear that my hopes for Travis have been misplaced. I thought his soft touch and solid credentials might exert a quiet power, like a submarine that runs silent but deep before triumphantly surfacing, torpedoes armed in all ports. I was wrong. Travis is a distant memory to the women in the audience, for whom Jesse’s performance introduces the distinct possibility of an upset over Jason. The judges tally their score sheets, and then, one by one, the results are announced: Mr. Congeniality, the feel-good award chosen by the other contestants, goes to… Fred Williams! Fred hugs everyone on stage. He’s still waving to the crowd as another sealed envelope is delivered to the stage for the coveted Reader’s Choice Award. And Fred takes it again! More bows and hugs for each contestant. Should Fred take all three, I calculate, we will witness a minimum of sixtyfour man hugs by the time the ceremony is over. Then comes Jesse’s name—for First Runner-Up. He walks slowly to the judges’ table, clicks his heels, and snaps a crisp salute. Maggie is overjoyed, shocked that Dogface ranked at all. She’s still trying to regain her composure when the announcer calls out that “THIS YEAR’S WINNER IS JASON SANTIAGO.” eep down, I think, we all knew this moment was coming. You can see it on the faces of Travis and Fred, who clap graciously as Jason explodes out of the lineup blowing two-handed kisses in his first moments as this year’s official Mr. Romance. Travis just didn’t have enough spark on stage. Fred’s natural charisma gained some ground at the end, but not enough to overcome Jason’s semi-professional bearing and raw appeal. Inhabiting his newfound mini-celebrity, Jason is soon surrounded by fans, his sponsors, and a local news team looking for a reaction. “After this,” he says into the microphone, “the sky is the limit! Now anything is possible!” Then Jason gets a bonus hug from Mark Johnson. “I would have preferred Fred,” says a fan named Isabella. “I thought he worked harder to make every woman here feel special.” Another woman says that Jason should have been docked for his unforced error on The Date. “They just chose the look,” she says. When I talk to the judges, they confirm as much. Sure, Romance I.Q. and all that is important, says Lisa Williams, one of the judges from Dorchester. “But the cover has to sell books too.” Just as I suspected, Darwinian sexual selection triumphs: Fred is plenty goodlooking, but not quite as good-looking as Jason, and no amount of charm could make up for that, especially once Jason took the stage in

D


nothing but a suede loincloth. The package, it seems, might be more important than the whole package. None of the other contestants seem disappointed. Fred looks ecstatic with his dual trophies. Travis’s mom thinks he should have won every prize, but Travis says Jason deserved it. Even Jesse is shocked at what nice guys all these pretty boys turned out to be. “But to be honest,” he says, “I’m glad I’m not going back to Iraq as Mr. Romance.” After the show, Cindy diplomatically tells me she liked all the contestants equally. “And don’t forget Jason has come a long way,” she says. She reminds me how he turned himself around after falling in with the rowdy, uncooperative Cavemen last year. “It took awhile,” Cindy says, “but Jason learned to be a real gentleman.” As they’ve said all along, the true measure of romance is transformation. Travis started as a sweetheart, Fred was always a charmer, but Jason traveled the ultimate romance trajectory: from last year’s cad to today’s well-groomed man of manners. Even more than nice guys, it seems, Mr. Romance rewards men who let women show them the way. And this may be the genre’s larger, more universal fantasy: simply the power to change a man at all. “No man starts off as the perfect hero,” Cindy says. “They all need a different kind of kick in the pants. And that’s what we women are here for.” b

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

“a stance of mystery and not knowing towards the world” I thought about that for a while and even tried standing like one-third kung fu the other two an amalgam of disco and weather. —Matthew Zapruder

ONE TIME

Didn’t we already eat? “But That Was When I Ruled the World” on frequent rotation, 2009 —Rae Armantrout

LOVE POEM

I ache for you with all of the teeth that fell out of my mouth when I was a child —Troy Jollimore 42 The Panorama Book Review