Nobody has ever, in my life, accused me of having good taste. I own a leather jacket with DEF LEPPARD emblazoned on the back. I know what Grave Digger is. When I first started writing at an alt-weekly paper, back when I was known as “Chelsea the Intern,” I covered a cocktail festival because nobody with a salary wanted to do it. For good reason, it turns out— it was just a ballroom filled with aspirational 30 proof purchases encased in bunting, disguised as community event. In true alt-weekly fashion my editor concealed my alcohol ignorance with an angle: A Cocktail Festival Through the Eyes of Someone Who Only Drinks Natty Light. Three sheets to the wind and one laboriously unfunny article later I had an epiphany: I’m a little bit gauche.
This realization kept me on the fringes of most tedious romance Internet discourse of the early pandemic. Is the Stigma of Reading Romance Going Away? Can We All Stop Being Embarrassed, Now that The Youth Love Emily Henry? I had bigger fish to fry. I was emailing the webmaster of the Fabio International Fan Club.
Her name is Donnamaie White, she has a doctorate in engineering, and she writes romance under the pen name Caliente Morgan. If anyone’s a Fabio authority, it’s her. She’s been interviewed by Book Riot and the People in the 90s Podcast about the man, the myth, the legend.
White has been in the trenches for decades. A 1993 article in the Los Angeles Times chronicled White providing Fabio with essay he inspired, telling the reporter that, “He can bench press me anytime he likes.”
Donnamaie et al. ignored my request to join the Official Fabio International Fan Club on Facebook (a wise decision), but she did respond to my email. The Fabio fansite has been updated in recent years - it now looks like a generic template, but back in 2021 it was delightfully Web 1.0. I was particularly charmed by the email button, emblazoned with “email goes to webmaster - NOT to FABIO!”
What ungodly, salacious things had people been emailing Donnamaie White, thinking she was Fabio? I had to know.
She responded my query quickly, but vaguely: “Maybe tomorrow — we have a nice thunder storm going on.”
But White never followed up, leading me to conclude that climate change has done a real number on the webmaster community.
That was years ago, and I don’t think it would be fair to reach out to her again, knowing what I know now about Fabio. White and I have competing interests. She once spent thousands of dollars on a dinner date with Fabio, and is dedicated to preserving his legacy. After creating four hours of podcast material about the man, I want to dig a really deep hole and and persuade him to climb into that hole and to think of that hole as his forever home.
Victor Gadino is a veteran romance cover artist who, like most of his contemporaries, has also painted Fabio. A few years ago Gadino told The Advocate that what catches his eye is “extreme beauty that verges on the grotesque.”
There’s a common, obnoxious mantra that genre romance is “for women, by women” that often bleeds out into gender essentialist pablum about what women want and what women desire. So if Fabio was the most popular face on romance covers in the 80s and 90s, naturally he, or a man that looks like him, is what these women yearned for above all else.
This thought, this assumed sexual attraction to characters (and their visual counterparts) in romance novels, has always annoyed me for a glaringly obvious reason. I have hundreds of vintage romance novels, loads of romance cover hunk memorabilia, the more risqué cover hunk issues of Playgirl — and I’m gay. You could write me off as an oddity, but Gadino’s quote was illuminating for me in a way that I hope it will be for others. These covers were excess: an excess of time, of money, of color, of muscle. Oftentimes your eye roves over them restlessly, there’s no comfortable place to settle for more than a moment. They’re gorgeous, they’re hideous, they’re compelling.
During the height of Fabio’s fame, he was effortlessly ubiquitous. LA Weekly wrote in 1993 that Fabio Lanzoni “does the minimum and reaps the maximum.” His fitness tape was called Fabio Fitness even though the real instructor was an aerobics champion named Brenda Dykgraaf. His manager boasted that Fabio received the highest payout for a debut romance author ever in 1993, never mind that most other debut romance authors don’t utilize a ghostwriter. His novelty album, Fabio After Dark, had tracks by Dionne Warwick, Billy Ocean, and The Stylistics — Fabio never sang a note.
He did model for romance covers from 1986-1993, but when he broke out of being Romance Famous and became Mainstream Famous, he downplayed not only his romance modeling work, but the work of his colleagues. In Fabio’s version of events, he became a cover model because authors saw a picture of him in a fashion magazine and said, “I want my hero to look like this guy.”
In reality, Fabio’s manager sent his photograph to Robert Osonitsch, a New York photographer that specialized in shooting reference photos for pulp fiction. In an interview with Illustration Magazine, romance cover artist Elaine Duillo said that when Bob Osonitsch declined to hire Fabio, his wife Arlene asked Elaine if she wanted to use him in her art. “I looked at the photo and said this guy could really get the women started,” said Elaine.
Elaine Duillo, sometimes referred to as the “Queen of Romance,” is one of the most beloved artists of the clinch cover days. Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Elaine popped off in the book cover world when she started illustrating westerns in the 1960s. Her later historical romance covers, painted in acrylic, are her most iconic work. She painted covers for heavy hitters like Rebecca Brandewyne, Bertrice Small, Lisa Kleypas, and, most famously, Johanna Lindsey.
Johanna Lindsey published her first book, Captive Bride, with Avon in 1977 and quickly became a genre icon. She wrote books that some people would categorize as “bananas” — she dreamed up the most excessive, outrageous stories of pirates, vikings, etc. — and her fans loved her for it. Lindsey’s early books were painted by another renown cover artist named Robert McGinnis, but in 1987 Elaine Duillo took over with a book called Hearts Aflame.
Hearts Aflame was also Fabio’s first major romance cover.
In his romance heyday, Fabio said that he shot anywhere from 12-16 romance covers a day. Romance cover shoots are quite rapid — 45 minutes to an hour for the whole shebang including dress, hair, makeup, and the photoshoot itself. It was a team effort: you had the publisher’s Art Director, the cover artist, the photographer, the models, and the rest of the studio team all working together to create magic out of a brief encounter.
I made my name on TikTok as a vintage romance collector, so naturally people love to ask me what I think of modern romance covers, which are made digitally and are mostly vector art. They want me to say, “We should go back to clinch covers! Back to painted covers!” but that nostalgia feels fruitless and a bit naive about why we don’t have them any longer. Modern technology is often a one-two punch: first it makes your life easier, then it makes it worse in ways that you never imagined.
In the 90s, romance cover art started going digital. Photographers stopped shooting on film, making it easy to send in the results to the illustrator faster than ever before. Cover artists started to work digitally as well, saving time by using Photoshop to achieve a painted effect. "I do a brush stroke in oil and it's not right, I have to take a rag and wipe it off,” cover artist John Ennis told Newsweek in 1997. “With the computer, I just hit the 'undo' command.''
But, as always, technology created for artists’ ease was fundamental in edging them out of their field. With the invention of tools like Procreate, a lot of publishers took art in-house. Instead of hiring out upwards of six people, it was the job of a single person to create a cover. With all respect to these artists, the new covers aren’t as good. Skill isn’t a factor: it’s resources, funding, collaboration, and time.
In 2024 the status of cover art is even more grim. AI artwork, with no human hand involved, has prospered with indie authors on Kindle Unlimited. AI isn’t “intelligent” at all — artists have been sounding the alarm for years that image generators just copy images fed into them, images created by human artists. Indie authors used to create their covers with a stock photo and a prayer, but now a not-insignificant swath of them have decided that an AI cover is their best foot forward, moral quandary be damned.
The Big Five publishing houses, famously keen on saving a buck, are not exempt from this behavior. A lot of new clinch covers in tradpub verge into the uncanny valley, and a closer inspection tells tales. Why are the curtains and the woman’s dress blowing in the opposite direction? Why are there five different light sources? Why do some of these bodies look like they’ve been warped by that app the Kardashians use to appear skinnier? These are not decisions a trained human artist would make.
So many people love old school clinch covers because they’re beautiful, but I love them because they verge on grotesque. I like the weirdness, the ties to 1980s bodybuilding culture, and the unabashed sexuality that still gets people in a dither, thirty years after they went out of fashion.
The romance world that made Fabio famous, that helped his colleagues put food on the table, is dead. I don’t mind if newer readers think the covers that fascinate me so much are a relic or a little bit gauche. If something is for everybody, it’s for nobody.
I do mind seeing professionals get pushed out of the field, and how the endless discourse about book cover preferences (tedious! circular!) ignores the steady devaluation of labor.
I highly recommend Brian Merchant’s book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Justice for the Luddites! His newsletter is also fantastic.
I think people are sleeping on the best historical romance release of 2024, which is Elizabeth Kingston’s medieval, One Burning Heart. "For all my life, I have trained my sight on the empty space between what men of God have taught, and what they have done." (I kind of hate doing these types of pitches but if it gets more people to read it, I’ll try: It’s Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened meets Meredith Duran’s Written on Your Skin meets the Duke of Jervaulx’s final speech in Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale.)
Fabio: Part One and Fabio: Part Two are out on the Reformed Rakes podcast. I know I say this every time I do a deep-dive into a controversial romance figure, but making these episodes drove me absolutely insane and I think they’re also my best work.
We also recently recorded an episode on Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union, which is an immaculate historical spy romance. Semi-related, but I’ve been working on a piece about American romance authors writing Scottish characters, and Cole gave me so much to think about with her depiction of Malcolm, the Scottish immigrant love interest. (The TL;DR is Cole is a breath of fresh air! So thoughtful.)
Loved what you said about the evolution of romance covers and technology, I’ll be thinking about that for a while :/
Loved this piece!