She was definitely admonishing the wrong crowd. Most of the Love Train crew were among the new generation of romance writers and readers who don't like having the boudoir doors slammed shut. To them a book with a heroine who is Pure and Untouched, as a 1981 Cartland novel was titled, is in peril of being unread. Recruited by Chelley Kitzmiller, president of the Orange County (Calif.) Romance Writers of America, the travelers included a scattering of males, among them several authors' husbands and one husband-author, Clayton Matthews, who with his wife, Patricia, writes such pulse-pounders as Midnight Whispers. Everyone had been served heart-shaped pancakes, imbibed pink champagne, and guessed each other's romantic fantasies (Jude Deveraux confessed a yen to handcuff a man to a bed "and have my way with him"). On the four-day rail trip from L.A., they gang-wrote a romance, A Hunk on Top of a Bunk, at which Babs would not be amused.
The folks who greeted them at stations across the U.S. ranged from a jostling 200 in Pasadena, Calif. to a single handicapped woman who waited for the train at 4:20 a.m. in Canton, Ohio. Conference organizer Kathryn Falk, publisher of the bimonthly Romantic Times (circulation: 70,000), went out in her PJs to thank the fan and give her a book bag. Why take the trouble? Romance addicts, notes Falk, are "cute ladies, and the books mean everything to them."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
