Rosemary's Babies

By Brad Darrach

WICKED LOVING LIES by ROSEMARY ROGERS 667 pages. Avon. $1.95.

Flickering torchlights and wine forced between her lips .. . With a feeling of shock she found her thighs nudged apart .. . There was a stabbing shaft of agony. Her last thought, as she slipped into a state halfway between sleep and unconsciousness was, "And I don't even know his name."

Millions of readers do, and they utter it with a masochistic tremolo last in fashion when lovestruck ladies knelt before candlelit glossies of Rudolph Valentino carrying a horsewhip. The cute brute of the moment is Dominic Challenger, hero of a new novel called Wicked Loving Lies that sold close to 3 million copies in the first month of publication and forms the leading edge of a new wave of mass literary entertainment. Abandoned by Hollywood as too corny and too expensive to produce, shunned by television as unsuitable for the small screen, the costume epic is taking over the bookstalls. Not since the desperate '30s and wartime '40s brought forth Anthony Adverse, Gone With the Wind and Forever Amber have U.S. readers attempted collective escape into the past on such a scale. In 1976 U.S. softcover publishers issued more than 150 historical novels, many of them as paperback originals, and sold better than 40 million copies --about two books a second. In 1977 sales are expected to improve.

The new upsurge of historicals, not surprisingly, is a women's movement: as always, 98% of the people who read paperback historicals and almost all the people who write them are female. Fawcett Books publishes 14 historical romancers, all women, whose books sold 6 million copies in 1976. Bantam's Barbara Cartland, 75, the grandma of the genre and a one-woman fiction factory who can dictate a 180-page book in seven days, has 212 titles to her credit. Last year she wrote 21 love stories of beribboned yore in which, as usual, all the heroines remained virgins to the end.

But it is the "Avon Ladies," as they are known in the trade, who have struck the richest vein. In 1971 Editor Nancy Coffey of Hearst's Avon Books found in her "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts an interminable 800-page tome about love in the midst of the American Revolution by a 35-year-old New Jersey housewife named Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Published in 1972 as The Flame and the Flower, it has sold an astounding 2,348,000 copies --more than enough to convince Avon executives that millions of women readers were yearning for "frequent long vacations from the 20th century."

Rough Diamond. Avon has supplied them. In addition to Author Woodiwiss, Editor Coffey has discovered Laurie McBain, a 26-year-old Smith graduate whose 428-page Devil's Desire has sold 1,268,000 copies, and Joyce Verrette, a former NBC secretary whose 475-page Dawn of Desire has sold 150,000 more than that. But the biggest discovery was made late in 1973 when a rough diamond as big as the Ritz dropped through Avon's transom.

Rosemary Rogers, a fortyish typist and mother of four from Fairfield, Calif., shipped Editor Coffey the manuscript of a 636-page romantic extravaganza called Sweet Savage Love. The first novel she had ever submitted for publication, it became the first of four swashbuckling herstoricals that have moved more than 10 million copies off the racks, made Rogers one of the world's bestselling authors, with a million-dollar annual income, and opened to hordes of escapists some wild new terrain.

The difference between R.R. and most of her rivals is intensity. Almost all the others write in pink ink about horse-and-carriage love and marriage; Rogers pumps out purple prose about red-blooded males and females living at white heat in electric-blue relationships. Passion drives her tales, and passion to Rogers is not a pretty thing. It is a volcano of hatred that relieves itself in violent sexual expression. In most histo-romances, the climax is the kiss, but Rogers realistically noted that a new mass market for pornography exists --and that vast numbers of respectable women would become avid customers if only they did not have to admit that what they were purchasing was porn. So R.R. perfected the soft-edge sex scene in which, just as the worst is about to happen, all the heavy breathing seems to steam the reader's glasses and the details fade discreetly into daydreams.

Savage Animal. Sadomasochism in costume is a Rogers specialty. Dominic, for instance, the swarthy, arrogant 18th century hero of Wicked Loving Lies, is "a savage dangerous animal" with "steely" muscles, eyes "like shards of splintered glittering glass" and a contemptuous conviction that "all women are whores at heart." Marisa, the heroine, is a "strange mixture of defiant child and mysterious woman" with "dark-gold curls [and] panther eyes" --not to mention a will of custard. Dominic and Marisa meet on page 42. On page 62 he rapes her. On page 86 he ties her to a bedpost and assaults her again. On page 192 the hero rips the heroine's gown to the waist before raping her a third time. On page 277 he brands her thigh with a red-hot fleur-de-lis.

All in all, Marisa, who as the goddaughter of Napoleon's first wife Josephine de Beauharnais might be expected to live a somewhat sheltered life, is violated twelve times on three continents by five men. On top of that, she gives a command performance for Napoleon, suffers a miscarriage, undergoes captivity in a Turkish harem and is sold as a slave in Louisiana. Why is the heroine subjected to all these horrors? Cynics might imagine that Marisa's martyrdom is merely intended to offer the bored middle-class female a succession of vicarious masochistic thrills, but Author Rogers seems to think that regular ravishment can raise a woman's consciousness. "I'm tired of being raped," Marisa announces at last on page 654. "Don't I count as a person?"

Avon's editors believe the question echoes a cry from the hearts of millions of American wives and mothers. These women, says an Avon executive, are sick of being used as domestic drudges and emotional garbage bags. "They identify with Rosemary's heroines because the heroines do everything the average housewife longs to do -- they travel to exotic places, meet famous people, have passionate affairs with fascinating men, and in the end fall madly in love and live happily ever after." Identification is made easy because Rogers' heroines -- and her heroes for that matter -- are at worst stick figures to hang costumes and projections on, at best somewhat friskier avatars of poor sat-upon Jane Eyre and surly Rochester.

But even a reader who cannot identify with the author's rude stereotypes is likely to feel the urgent excitement of these books. Author Rogers possesses theatrical flair and truly grand vulgarity. Her books are built, like action movies, from a rapid series of short, vivid scenes. Readers who do keep reading have no time to pause and reflect on the preposterousness of what is happening. Seized by the throat, the poor geese are force-fed events events events as the action mounts to a terrific climax in which lust sprouts little pink wings and Beauty fetters Beast with a golden wedding band . Brad Darrach --

"My heroines are me," says Rosemary Rogers. With her big dark eyes, full red lips, mass of raven hair and Las Vegas body, she looks the part -- and she has lived some of it. The oldest child of a wealthy educator who owned three posh private schools in Ceylon, Rosemary Jansz was raised in colonial splendor: dozens of servants -- never did a lick of work -- summers at European spas -- impossible to go anywhere without a chaperone. A dreamy child, she wrote her first novel at eight, and all through her teens scribbled madly romantic epics in imitation of her favorite writers: Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini.

At 17, initiating the pattern her heroines now follow, Rosemary rebelled against a feudal upbringing. After three years at the University of Ceylon, she horrified her family by taking a job as a reporter. Two years later she married a Ceylonese track star known as "the fastest man in Asia." Unhappily, says Rosemary, he often sprinted after other women. At 28, she packed up her two daughters and took off for London, there to try the flamboyant high-and-low life her heroines always have a fling at. One day a middle-aged multimillionaire offered her a fancy flat in Paris and a huge allowance, but Rosemary had already fallen for a black G.I. named Leroy Rogers. "He was the first man," she recalls, "who made me feel like a real woman."

After getting a divorce from the track star, she married Rogers in his home town, St. Louis. Six years later, when that marriage broke up ("It turned out we had only one interest in common," she explains), Rosemary was left with two sons and two daughters to support on her $4,200 salary as a typist. In 1969, in the face of a socialist takeover of Ceylon, her parents fled the island with only -L- 100, giving Rosemary two more dependents. At 37, the rich girl from Ceylon was on her uppers in Fairfield.

Third Eye. What happened might strain credulity even in the context of a Rosemary Rogers novel. Working only at night for more than a year, she rewrote one of her childhood tales 24 times, then mailed it to Avon. Today the author lives quietly in a small dramatic villa perched on a crag above the Pacific near Carmel. Her three oldest children are now away from home. "I'd like to live with a man," she admits, "but I find men in real life don't come up to my fantasies. I want culture, spirit and sex all rolled up together."

Rosemary sleeps all day. But "when the sun goes down, I come alive," she says. In late afternoon she slips into jeans and meditates. "I've done yoga for years. It got me through the worst times. I can activate the third eye now and feel the light above my head. Meditation gives me the feeling of being part of the universe." At suppertime she sits down to breakfast, and about 8 p.m., with the roar of the sea and the light of the moon streaming through the windows, she flicks on the stereo system and plays mood music to arouse her fantasies --Mozart for a scene at court, flamenco for a seduction or a rape. When the fantasies are flowing, she begins to type at stuttering speed, scarcely stopping until eight in the morning.

"My books come to me in mind movies," she explains. "I see the action in Technicolor on a wide screen in my head, and I hear the characters speak every line of dialogue before I write it. All my heroes look like Clint Eastwood --I've had this absurd crush on him for years." Her heroines she imagines as Jacqueline Bisset or Olivia Newton-John. "I just write what comes to me. Sometimes I turn a passage in to Avon without rereading it. I'm just now learning to rewrite competently. But I could never do things to please critics or an intellectual coterie. I write to please ordinary people--I write the kinds of books I want to read. Sometimes I go back and read one of my own books, and you know, I really like them. Wow, I say, that's good!"

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