“My name is Chelley Kitzmiller and I have recently become involved in the romance industry about a year and a half ago. I began by reading a novel, a historical romance by the title of Sweet Savage Love written by Rosemary Rogers, and it was the beginning of a whole new life for me,” Chelley Kitzmiller, holding one of her two chihuahuas, announced to director George Csicsery.
“Who can explain why you like a particular type of fiction, what turns you on?” she continued. “I don’t know! It just completely overpowered me and took me by storm.”
Csicsery’s 1987 documentary Where the Heart Roams partially follows the 1983 cross-country Amtrak trip for romance authors and fans called “The Love Train,” which began in Los Angeles and culminated at the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in New York. The Romantic Times, which started as a newsletter in 1981, quickly expanded into an influential monthly genre magazine peppered with gossip, publishing announcements, and book reviews. Kitzmiller, an aspiring writer who was afraid to fly to the Booklovers Convention, organized The Love Train with the help of Romantic Times founder and perennial showwoman, Kathryn Falk.
Kitzmiller's husband’s take on her interest in romance was not particularly flattering. “Chelley started reading romances when she needed, I think, a fulfillment in her life,” he said. “The kids were older and she had never worked and she used that to fill the gap.”
Ted Kitzmiller, the self-appointed voice of reason, relaxed so far into his armchair that he had to tilt his head forty-five degrees to address the camera crew for his interview. He slowly rocked the chair as he spoke, the friction making his leather jacket irk-irk-irk along with him in emphasis. “I think it’s just like fishing, you know? This is probably completely off the subject but fishing… I believe that ten percent of the fishermen catch ninety percent of the big fish. And of course the other people — just you know, too bad. And it’s the same in the romance industry. Ten percent of the people are published and write romance novels and the other ninety percent of them are people that tag along as followers. And this is probably where Chelley kind of picks up.”
In their review of Where the Heart Roams, the New York Times aligned with Ted Kitzmiller’s point of view, saying the documentary is “as much about barren lives as it is about living happily ever after,” but not before hedging that it was still “a good, informative documentary-feature about romance novels, the women who write and edit them and the women who, by buying and reading them, have turned paperback junk into a $300 million-a-year industry.”
The paper of record might have gotten the last word, but not the last laugh. The back cover of my DVD copy of the film boasts: “… good, informative documentary…” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times.
The Observers
George Csicsery was born in 1948 to two Hungarian parents who emigrated first to Germany, then later to the United States when George was three years old. Where the Heart Roams was his first feature film, but by that time he already had filmed a variety of subjects, including 1975’s Hookers, a short documentary chronicling the work of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a sex workers’ rights organization) after they kicked off the inaugural Hookers Ball in 1974. With the release of 1993’s N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, Csicsery found a niche — filming mathematicians.
"I am interested in people who can find happiness in creating their own world," George Csicsery told Doniphan Blair at cineSOURCE. "That is true of mathematicians and romance writers. These people are creating universes different from where they live."
Along with Csicsery’s camera crew, the Love Train also had a journalist onboard — the exuberant E. Jean Carroll. Kitzmiller contacted Playgirl to cover the Love Train, but Playgirl wasn’t interested until Carroll heard about it. Carroll still had to pay her own way to find out, in her own words, “how to catch a man.”
Carroll specialized in first-person narratives — her style was interesting but not always illuminating. Her book, Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars and Other Modern Girls has a chapter chronicling the events on the Love Train and the Romantic Times convention (called “Fast Women”) through a series of punchy, disconnected scenes. In one of her more lengthy paragraphs, Carroll described romance novels as junk food. She loved them, but after an overindulgence, she had to cut down. “Some people read forty or fifty romance books a month. I do not see how they can eat that much. Fanatics are frightening.”
Female Difficulties, if I’m being generous, was mostly an exercise in highlighting the absurdities and contradictions of heterosexual courtship and relationships. Carroll would set up an interviewee for an absurd statement, then cut, move on! It worked for the frenetic pace of the Love Train and Falk’s convention spectacle, but in other avenues (particularly the “Frigid Women” chapter) it’s more mean-spirited than funny.
There’s a humorous moment in Where the Heart Roams where Lori Herter read a detailed love scene from one of her Candlelight Ecstasy romances, All Our Tomorrows. The camera zoomed in on Herter’s face through the low eager murmurs and feverishly strained bodies, and after the climax (pun intended) pulled away to reveal her buttoned-up husband wearing an attentive, almost somber, expression.
In the documentary, the couple spoke about Gerald Herter’s discomfort with bedroom scenes being what he saw as an invasion of their private life, but Gerald went on to say, “When I first married her I pictured her as a sweet innocent girl needing someone to protect her, and I’ve watched her over a few years grow into a confident, assertive woman. Her novels have provided a means for her to assert herself and bring up points about women requiring more equality or an equal position with men and not be portrayed as shrinking violets as they have in the past.”
In Female Difficulties, Carroll overlooked this aspect of their relationship in order to reduce both Herters to goofy sexual novices, with Lori concluding that she was a virgin until marriage because she “was a bit of a dud.” In a scathing Book World review, humorist Florence King said Carroll “settles for ventriloquism instead of real observation,” which would explain why Carroll was so wrong about the Herters.
Carroll seemed to hit her stride a decade later with her long-running advice column in Elle, “Ask E. Jean.” Most women wrote in to ask about sex and love, and her punchy, often biting witticisms (“Darling, if the old snake has done nothing but help your career, why are you still an assistant?”) were not so far removed from the (raunchier, gayer) directives to DTMFA (“dump the motherfucker already”) in Dan Savage’s concurrent “Savage Love” column.
“One of the reasons I went on the Love Train is that I wanted to find out how to catch a man, and I found out,” Carroll, holding back a smile, told the documentary crew while smoking in a New York hotel lobby. “Barbara Cartland told me the way to catch a man is to find out what he wants, and give it to him.”
Across the Pond
The film poster for Where the Heart Roams was an exercise in studied opulence: Barbara Cartland, wearing a mountainous pink gown and oversized costume jewelry, sat upon a gilded throne with crimson roses across her lap. Doves were edited into the frame — the idea of flying doves over the Romantic Times ceremony was discarded when Cartland learned that they were not “house trained” — and Cartland serenely smiled beneath what E. Jean Carroll called her “baby possum eyelashes.”
Cartland — who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-eight and is, to this day, the best-selling romance author of all time — was any documentarist’s wet dream. Her obituary in the Telegraph called her “the most reliable soundbite artiste of her times” — she was stridently anti-feminist in the Phyllis Schlafly oeuvre of “Do as I say, not as I do,” daring to preach the importance of lifting up your man while she simultaneously sucked all the air out of the room.
Kathryn Falk wanted you to associate Barbara Cartland with Princess Diana (“Princess Diana’s step-grandmother!” she gushed in a 1997 issue of Romantic Times), a tactic that, for the most part, has worked. It’s common knowledge that not only did Cartland’s only daughter Raine marry Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, but Diana also voraciously read Cartland’s novels in her youth.
The asterisk in this connection is that Cartland did not attend Diana’s wedding with Prince Charles and was annoyed by how it pulled focus from Barbara Cartland. “After all, this was supposed to be the Barbara Cartland year,” she told Noreen Taylor in a 1981 interview for The Daily Mirror. “My year. My eightieth year, my 300th book, my cassette of songs, my two scents and all my lovely sheets and curtains. Instead it has all been a frightful bore, with everyone being horrid and bitchy.”
It feels a bit misleading to align a notably regressive Cartland with a woman nicknamed “The People’s Princess,” but her close ties to the aristocracy, if not the insular royal circle, was real. Not only did Cartland have a decades-long friendship with Lord Mountbatten, but her society gossip writing at The Daily Express in the 1920s allied her with the paper’s owner, Lord Beaverbrook, a strong force in Conservative politics who introduced her his intimate circle of politically powerful friends including Winston Churchill, Viscount Castlerosse, and Sir James Dunn. (Beaverbrook, who was married, did not not have pure motivations. “Like several dozen better-looking and much younger men before him, Lord Beaverbrook clearly fancied the young Barbara Cartland,” wrote Henry Cloud in Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink.)
This would, of course, be appealing to Kathryn Falk, a Brooklynite who famously purchased herself a vanity title (is that redundant?), Lady Barrow, and raffled off the chance to win a date with a titled man at the 1983 Romantic Times convention. One of the best scenes in E. Jean Carroll’s book described Falk’s last-minute telephone call scrambling for a suitable candidate: “His grandfather was like a minor nobleman. But he does have an inherited title. Size forty. No, he doesn’t have a tuxedo. He has a mustache. He looks pretty good from the side. And if you get him in a Hussar uniform, he’ll look super!”
While the very English Cartland featured heavily in the promotional images of Where the Heart Roams, the film tracks the rise of the American romance novel. It’s difficult to imagine a time when Americans didn’t dominate the contemporary market, but in the early 1970s Mills & Boon and Canada-based Harlequin primarily published English authors.
Janet Dailey might not have been Harlequin’s first American author (hat tip to archivist and historian Steve Ammidown) but she was Harlequin’s first American superstar author. With an output and sales that surpassed everyone but Cartland, she was the industry’s golden goose, the queen of Ted Kitzmiller’s “ten percent.”
Dailey was raised in small-town Iowa with ambitions of becoming a secretary. When she met her future husband, Bill Dailey, he convinced her to drop secretarial school in lieu of learning on the job at his construction company. They married shortly after, and Janet continued to work for him for another thirteen years, until she became a full-time author. According to Paul Grescoe in The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance, Dailey distinguished herself by writing heroines with “a certain American-style spunk, a Katherine Hepburn sparring with Spencer Tracy.”
In Where the Heart Roams, Csicsery interviewed the Daileys in what appeared to be a large shopping mall. “After Jan wrote her third book, basically I asked Janet one day, ‘Do you want to become the #1 author in the world?’” said Bill Dailey. “And she said yes, if that’s what I wanted. So I started laying out plans.”
“Perhaps no husband threw himself into the role with such abandon as Bill Dailey. He became Janet’s full-time manager, researcher, stylist, and even chauffeur,” wrote Paul Grescoe in The Merchants of Venus. “The Dailey’s working relationship may not have been a feminist’s dream. Janet would begin writing at 4:00am and served Bill coffee and juice in bed when he woke at 7:00am.”
Towards the end of the documentary, Janet spoke in front of an audience at the Grand Hotel wearing a neat, pinstripe blazer. After being introduced, she sheepishly informed the crowd that she was asked to reveal the secret to her success. “This is going to be the shortest speech on record. It’s three little words: marry Bill Dailey.” There were a few awkward titters, but the room was mostly silent. She continued, “But Bill as you all know, he’s a big factor in my career and he’s to blame for me ever starting writing. He’s the one who told me to get up off my rear, write the book, or shut up.”
This was a common interview anecdote from Dailey for over a decade, and in the 90s when she admitted to plagiarizing passages from Nora Roberts’ books, it would become public fodder. While covering the scandal, Anne Sullivan of The Romantic Times went on a bizarre, multi-paragraph tangent comparing Roberts’ husband with Dailey’s, culminating with: “Unlike Nora, whose second husband continues to work as a master carpenter, Janet’s business became Bill Dailey’s.”
According to Nora Roberts, when she initially pitched to Harlequin the publisher told her that, since they had Janet Dailey, they didn’t need another American romance author. (Roberts’ first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.) Very soon after that, Harlequin changed their mind.
“At the end of 1980 I started a line of books called Candlelight Ecstasy romances which were a little more sensual. These books took off and sold extremely well even though Dell only published about 60,000 copies per title,” editor Vivian Stephens, lounging in a purple beret and thoughtfully twirling a white carnation, told George Csicsery. “After about eight months I was approached by Harlequin to come with them to really develop a new line that would appeal to American audiences because most of their readers, at that time, were in this country.”
Stephens was was 47 years-old when she was hired by Dell in 1978. According to Texas Monthly, she developed an interest in romance publishing after reading a Charlotte Vale Allen novel with a heroine who was her own age, and could easily imagine immersing herself in romance day in, and day out.
When Stephens started the Candlelight Ecstasy line at Dell, she had certain rules: there would be a heightened level of sensuality, a heroine would have to be over 25 years old, and she would have to have a job that took precedence over her love interest. “She began to seek out and publish writers of color, whose books were characterized as “ethnic romance” and sold on separate shelves in bookstores,” wrote Mimi Swartz in Texas Monthly. After she moved to Harlequin, Stephens edited the major publisher’s first Black romance, Adam and Eva by Sandra Kitt.
Even though she was a successful and groundbreaking editor, Stephens was let go from Harlequin when they bought their major competitor, Silhouette, in the mid-1980s. Without her presence and advocacy, the door Stephens opened for authors of color slid nearly shut for another decade. American romance continued to flourish — but not for every American.
Soft Porn
”The romantic novel has gone through some pretty dramatic changes, hasn’t it?” A reporter posed the question to Barbara Cartland at the Love Train’s final destination in New York’s Penn Station. This was, of course, Barbara Cartland’s favorite subject.
"Yes it’s become soft porn, which is a terrible mistake.” Cartland smiled as she responded, her ostentatious jewelry winking under the flash of the cameras. “Because it isn’t really love, don’t you see? The real love is the love that’s been written about — it wasn’t invented by me although everyone thinks I did. It was invented by Botticelli when he did all these beautiful pictures, Shakespeare when he wrote all those marvelous sonnets, and of course all the poets like Browning and Byron, all that lot. That was romantic love.”
Cartland, who was so insistent that her heroines remain abstinent that they were nicknamed “Barbara Cartland’s virgins,” might have had what felt like antiquated beliefs by 1983, but the fact that “soft porn” made its way to the ultra-conservative octogenarian’s vernacular was indicative of a larger, less clear-cut cultural view of pornography.
Cartland’s historical novels were eclipsed (but not replaced!) by the bodice rippers of the 1970s. The blockbuster success of Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower is heralded as a shift in explicit sexuality in popular romance, which some romance fans try to pigeonhole into a narrative of feminist sexual liberation. The truth is, as always, more complicated. Woodiwiss was closer to the Cartland oeuvre than her books place in history would suggest: she was not a fan of feminists, a sentiment that was returned in kind.
But 1972, the year The Flame and the Flower was published, was several years into the so-called “Golden Age of Porn,” where pornographic films were as mainstream as they’d ever be. That same year, newspapers reported in disbelief that middle-aged women were attending screenings of Deep Throat in New York City.
“The sex by itself can border on pornography, but it can be softened by sensuality, it can be softened by romance, and yet it can have elements of realism because that’s what everybody wants in real life.” Vivian Stephens told George Csicsery after pushing back on Cartland’s rigidity. “I have sometimes in workshops given little lectures on the texture of kisses, the different kinds of kisses that can be described in the book. If you say, “he pressed his lips to hers” it doesn’t really conjure up any image, but if you talk about the softness, if you talk about the firmness of the lips, if you talk about what his hands are doing above the waist while the kiss is going on, whether they are at her throat or at her ear, in her hair, on her shoulders, it tends to add to the sweetness of the scene.”
At a panel Stephens attended later in the documentary, romance author Tom Huff — best-known for writing the 1976 bodice ripper Love’s Tender Fury under the pen name Jennifer Wilde — instructed a room full of writers on the anatomy of a love scene: “You see the rumpled sheets, you see the texture of the skin, you see the look in the eyes, you see and feel and smell and touch and this is what sensuality is. Sensuality is mood, it’s atmosphere, it’s feeling. For example, nudity. That’s not sexy is it? Nudity. Alright but you see a woman in a very beautiful, low-cut gown — this is sensual.”
Before he was known for his documentaries, George Csicsery worked as a self-described “script girl” — a well-paid gig overseeing continuity in adult films. By the time the Romantic Times convention of 1983 rolled around, the landscape for pornography drastically changed. The Golden Age of Porn was coming to a close, adult films were more readily available on VHS and thus, more of a private matter. When the budgets decreased, so did the burgeoning idea of the controversial films’ artistic merit.
What differentiates romance from porn, according to common wisdom, is the emotion, the artistry. These are also distinctions that we’ve learned, with time, that self-appointed media sensors, along with genre skeptics, don’t give a fuck about.
James Bond
“I have many, many friends who read romance books, and in part they were afraid to admit to the public that they were reading romance books.” said Brenda Trent, who wrote category romance under the pen name Megan Lane. Trent explained to the documentary crew that media interest in romance reduced shame around the genre, and that “they gave great respectability to it so that other women learned it was perfectly alright to read these books… They loved escape fiction just as much as men loved James Bond, as much as men loved westerns.”
If this feels familiar, it’s because forty years later we are still speaking about romance novels this way; apparently eliminating stigma and shame around art and leisure is work we renew for each generation. As tired as I am of this conversation now, in the 1980s it was uncharted territory for a genre testing the boundaries of mass-market-approved sexuality.
“The universality of this product is that all women, throughout the world, respond to romance, to love, to fantasy, and the benefits that accrue as a result of that fantasy.” John Gfeller, President of Silhouette Books in 1983, told Csicsery. Gfeller was not the first person interviewed in this documentary to conflate romance novels with a fantasy life, or generalize about all of womankind, but he had the zenith credibility of a publishing executive who, presumably, knew how to market to women as a monolith.
Where the Heart Roams has no shortage of universal, gendered declarations — a phenomena in romance that continues in 2023 — but if Canby’s New York Times review was any indication, “Who cares what these women want, think, and feel?” is only answered by capital. Canby, a critic famous for backing film auteurs during the New Hollywood era — differentiated art from product as part of his job. To him, romance readers weren’t engaging in works with artistic value — merely acting as ideal consumers.
The defense of James Bond, but for women! makes a lot more sense knowing this. Books that Canby called “paperback junk,” and E. Jean Carroll likened to junk food could force their way into the public sphere through sheer popularity and spectacle. But even in the 1980s, you could see the cracks in this binaried wisdom.
“The romance book is doing exactly what James Bond did,” Janet Dailey informed E. Jean Carroll in Where the Heart Roams. “He turned a woman into a sex object. We are turning men into sex objects.”
“In a much more tender way.” Carroll amended.
“Of course!”
“I think men should be turned into sex objects. Don’t you?” Carroll goaded. “I think men should be roughhoused, I think men should be thrown down on the floor and smacked around. Don’t you?”
Dailey smiled into her coffee cup before adding an emphatic, “Nah!”
Roam Free
Vincent Canby’s rude New York Times review of Where the Heart Roams damned its director with faint praise, saying that “Mr. Csicsery doesn't make fun of the women - he doesn't have to. That's the sad part. It's ineffable because the sight of so many people devoting themselves so earnestly to such easily parodied wish-fulfillment leaves one nearly speechless.”
This seems like it’s mostly targeted at Chelley Kitzmiller, who, awash in her triumph after organizing the Love Train, experienced an extremely relatable “What am I doing here?” moment once she reached her destination. “My emotions were somewhat in a turmoil when I got to New York” she told Csicsery, later elaborating that, “I am not a published author. Unfortunately, while my friends around me are going out to lunch and dinner with their editors, I’m not, and I kind of felt left out.”
She rebounded later, but her husband’s about-face was more aggravatingly striking. “When Chelley first started the Love Train I thought that she was crazy,” said Ted Kitzmiller. “I went through four to five months of turmoil not knowing my wife, not really having a family life. One day I woke up and she was in New York. I picked up the newspaper and saw her name all over. I picked up Newsweek and saw her picture in there, and I realized that you know, my wife had done something that the average person walking down the street or the average person walking down Hollywood couldn’t do. How many people could get their name in Newsweek, let alone their picture?”
Chelley Kitzmiller did get published in the early 90s. It would be tidy to end this essay on that triumphant flourish, but the truth is that Kitzmiller’s historical romance novels were in the then-popular genre that the Romantic Times called “Indian Romance” — where white writers treated Indigenous people as stereotypes and historical artifacts, rather than human beings.
I kept thinking of another documentary, Frank Simon’s The Queen, when viewing Where the Heart Roams. The Queen, a 1968 documentary about a drag pageant hosted by Flawless Sabrina, has minimal narration and follows the spectacle of talent as queens in a niche community prepared for their performance. Sabrina’s protegé, a handsome young blond named Richard who performed as Rachel Harlow, took the crown at the end. Standing bemusedly with her award, you can’t help but notice that Rachel looked a little crunchy, and the film famously ended with another drag queen, the stunning Crystal LaBeija, objecting to Rachel’s win with a monologue that includes the scathing, “You know she didn’t deserve it. All of them, the judges too! She was terrible.”
If anything is missing from Csicsery’s documentary, it’s an acknowledgment that the “ten percent” of successful authors didn’t get there by chance alone — the game is rigged not from the critically elite Vincent Canbys of the world, but from the extremely white, stratified publishing industry.
Where the Heart Roams ends with Barbara Cartland’s rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” a performance with a weird melancholy that’s somehow enhanced by Cartland’s struggle to hit the high notes.
She was terrible.
Janet and Bill Dailey are such a huge part of Where the Heart Roams that I’d be remiss if I didn’t write about them here. That said, I’m working on a piece about Janet’s plagiarism scandal and am hesitant to give you a glimpse of her without the full scope of both her transgression and the response to it. I hope you keep reading this newsletter to find out.
Speaking of longform, you’re interested in hearing more about Barbara Cartland, I’m sure? Her strikebreaking, her stint as a health guru, and her fight with Jackie Collins? We cover it all on next week’s episode of Reformed Rakes! Subscribe to our podcast.
I briefly mentioned Chelley Kitzmiller’s writing career, but if you want a more in-depth scope of the racist genre that was called “Indian Romance” by the Romantic Times, check out this piece on Romance History by Steve Ammidown.
Huge shoutout to Rob Imes for creating and hosting the Romantic Times index, an invaluable resource!
Thank you Chel for this entertaining and concise overview/history of romance. You did your homework <g>! There have been full books devoted to the subject, over the years, but l enjoyed your being inclusive in so many insider elements of the industry, especially as it related to the very brief era of Vivian Stephen’s attempts to introduce writers of color. She was strong and stubborn in her beliefs that the time had come for stories by Americans who weren’t white. And you are right that the acquisitions door slammed shut for Black writers for ten years…except for me.
After ADAM AND EVA Harlequin did not accept another book from me if the main characters were not white. But l got around that by introducing important secondary characters who were Black.
One of my editors at Harlequin once shared with me that at one point early in my Harlequin career l was among their top 25 authors. But Harlequin was not going to tell me that or advertise to their readers that l was Black. This was confirmed in a chance encounter l had at an RWA conference in New York with a white reader!
I had a wonderful time early on with my career, and had amazing support from Kathryn Falk, some editors and publishers. But there were many opportunities that were not given me, because l was Black.
Thanks for the memories.
Sandra Kitt
This is a terrific read. Thank you!