The Clinch

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
Quick note — our episode today, is really fun and joyful, but it does include talk about sex and mentions of sexual violence. So use discretion.

Roman Mars:
When producer Katie Mingle’s mom, Pam Mingle, retired from a long career as a fifth-grade teacher, she started writing books. First, she published a time travel novel for young adults, then she wrote a Jane Austen spinoff novel. And eventually, she decided to write a romance.

Katie Mingle:
My mom, a huge Jane Austen fan, took a page from her favorite author and set her first romance during the Regency period in England, so around 1812. The plot involves two people who start out as friends, Cass and Adam, and get engaged because Adam needs a reason not to marry someone that his family wants him to marry. Cass and Adam aren’t in love and they don’t necessarily plan on actually getting married. But then …

Pam Mingle:
They start to fall for each other. And of course, there are many, many obstacles in their path, which they have to overcome.

Katie Mingle:
That is of course, my mom.

Pam Mingle:
I’m Pam Mingle. I am the writer of six published books, four of which are romances.

Katie Mingle:
In 2015, a small publisher called Entangled, bought my mom’s first romance manuscript. They decided on the title of “False Proposal.” And eventually, they also came up with a cover design for the book, which they showed my mom.

Pam Mingle:
I believe they sent me… Yes, they sent me an email that had the cover attached and said, “Isn’t this a beautiful cover? And we love it. And we hope that you will.”

Katie Mingle:
“Well, what did you think when you saw it?”

Pam Mingle:
“I thought it was lushly romantic, I guess is what you could say. I do think I was a little startled by the bending backwards and the very dramatic pose. I didn’t necessarily expect that, but I thought it was beautiful. And I loved the colors.”

Roman Mars:
The color of the book is a deep purply blue background and it prominently features an image of a man and a woman dressed in ballroom clothing. The man is clutching the woman’s thigh, kind of pulling her leg up toward his hip and leaning her backwards. Almost like he’s laying her onto a bed. Their eyes are closed and their mouths are almost touching.

Katie Mingle:
The first time I saw this cover, I guess I was a little embarrassed. I knew my mom had written a romance. I’d even read the manuscript, but I didn’t realize it was going to have a cover like this.

Katie Mingle:
“And what do you remember my reaction being?”

Pam Mingle:
“Well, we were in the car somewhere. Your dad was driving and I was relating a story of a friend of mine who had just said to me, ‘Wow, that book looks like a real bodice-ripper.’ And generally, romance writers don’t like to have their books called bodice-rippers. It just has all these connotations that romance writers don’t like, one of which is sort of rape. And I was relating this conversation to you and your dad. And then you said … I don’t remember exactly what you said, but it was something like, ‘Well, why do you have covers like that if you don’t want people to think that?'”

Katie Mingle:
Oof. Okay. I don’t remember saying that exact thing, but here’s what I was thinking about the cover. I thought it was corny and it didn’t do justice to the strong writing and complicated characters inside the book. And also yeah, I thought the dynamic, the dominant man, the submissive woman was old-fashioned and kind of hetero-normative. I don’t recall exactly what I said that day in the car, but I do remember registering that I had hurt my mom’s feelings.

Pam Mingle:
“I remember just going completely quiet and not even responding to what you said, because it really upset me.”

Katie Mingle:
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

Pam Mingle:
“I forgave you long ago for that.”

Katie Mingle:
My mom may have forgiven me, but I still hadn’t sorted it out. Was her cover and others like it sending out signals that I just didn’t like, or speaking a language I didn’t speak? It all made me want to understand these covers better, where they came from and why my reaction to them was so negative. I think a good place to start with all of this might be, what even is romance?

Sarah MacLean:
Hi, my name is Sarah MacLean and I’m a romance novelist.

Katie Mingle:
Someone told me I should talk to Sarah MacLean about romance covers and the history of the genre more generally. That’s why I reached out to her. And I swear, I only learned after the fact that she had written a romance novel based on a 99% Invisible episode.

Sarah MacLean:
I’ve been listening to 99% Invisible forever — like forever. It was the “Perfect Security” episode.

Roman Mars:
Episode 160, it’s about lock picking and designing an unpickable lock. When Sarah heard it, she had an idea for the heroine of her next novel.

Sarah MacLean:
I was like, “Oh my God, she’s going to be a lock pick.” I put together this whole plan of how this lady lock pick would pick an unpickable lock, because of you.

Katie Mingle:
Anyway, Sarah says that the genre people call romance, the one my mom was writing in, it’s always had a basic pact with the reader.

Sarah MacLean:
I’m going to take you on this wild ride and there will be massive highs and massive lows. But at the end, they live happily after.

Roman Mars:
The happily ever after, or HEA if you want to sound in the know, has always been a distinguishing feature of the genre.

Katie Mingle:
And by this definition alone, you could argue that someone like Jane Austen was basically a romance novelist. And some people do. But Sarah believes the modern era of romance really started in the 1970s, with a woman named Kathleen Woodiwiss.

Sarah MacLean:
And she described herself as a Midwestern housewife. She lived with a husband who read adventure novels, and she would read the adventure novels that came into the house with him. And at one point she said, “Well, I don’t understand why none of these have a woman as the adventurer at the center of the stories.”

Katie Mingle:
So Kathleen Woodiwiss sat down and wrote one. It was called “The Flame and the Flower,” and it was a romantic adventure story with a female protagonist. And it had something else, something that would become another distinguishing feature of the genre.

Sarah MacLean:
She has sex on-page, and real sex. She has sex and achieves orgasm on-page, in long-form.

Katie Mingle:
I mean, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy could never.

Roman Mars:
But “The Flame and the Flower” was also deeply problematic.

Sarah MacLean:
In “The Flame and the Flower,” the hero rapes the heroine four times in the first 100 pages of the book. And the heroine in her own POV, her own point of view, names it rape, calls him a rapist, loathes him for the act, punishes him for the act, and granted by the end, marries him and lives happily ever after with him, which is problematic in 2021. But it wasn’t 2021.

Katie Mingle:
It was 1972. And whatever was happening in that book, it didn’t keep people from buying it. It sold 2.3 million copies and its first few years on the market.

Sarah MacLean:
Publishers were like, “Wait a second. Women buy books.”

Roman Mars:
The floodgates were open and a lot of books, similar to “The Flame and the Flower,” hit the market. That is, historical romantic adventurous stories that often included sexual violence.

Katie Mingle:
There was a lot of non-consensual ripping of bodices in those early books, hence the term bodice-ripper, which obviously the genre continues to be saddled with to this day. But Sarah says, even though there was rape in these books, they can’t be completely dismissed. And they aren’t even necessarily anti-feminist. One thing about romance that’s been true from the very beginning of the genre is that the women are always the heroes of their own stories.

Sarah MacLean:
The heroines take action and claim their happiness. These books were the only place where women could see themselves and see the trauma that women in the world often have to deal with, on a page. And then also, see themselves in triumph and in hope, and in happiness and love. These are powerful, subversive ideas.

Roman Mars:
Subversive ideas packaged with over-the-top sexy covers.

Katie Mingle:
As the ’70s rolled into the ’80s, you really see the classic romance cover come into being. You know the ones, like my mom’s cover, but even sexier. A man and a woman, his abs glistening, her hair blowing in the wind. They’re locked in a passionate embrace.

Sarah MacLean:
The ’80s were the heyday of the half nude painted men, women with their bodices half off and gravity-defying hair.

Katie Mingle:
This type of cover became so ubiquitous in the romance genre that it got a name, “the clinch”.

Roman Mars:
Clinch is an interesting word. It can mean to secure something, like they clinched the deal. But the second definition comes from boxing. You know that thing that boxers do when they hug each other? That’s called clinching. It’s basically to keep your opponent from hurting you. Fighters clinch. And on romance covers, lovers also clinch.

Katie Mingle:
In the 1980s, no one was doing a more epic clinch on her covers than the author, Johanna Lindsey.

Sarah MacLean:
She was the biggest name in romance during this time.

Katie Mingle:
In 1985, Johanna Lindsey published a romance called “Tender Is the Storm.” And the cover is really a sight to behold. It’s by an illustrator named Robert McGinnis. And it’s a painted image of a man and a woman in a clinch. They’re outside in some sort of desert landscape, and the man is 100% naked.

Sarah MacLean:
He’s fully nude and backed into some sort of sage bush or something. (laughs)

Katie Mingle:
The man’s nether parts are conveniently hidden by the woman, who’s collapsed against his body in a full swoon. She’s completely limp and literally appears to be unconscious.

Sarah MacLean:
She’s just lost to him. Just ravished by him.

Roman Mars:
The man on this cover looks like Clark Kent with short, wavy dark hair. But Johanna Lindsey would soon introduce the world to a blonde model, who would become forever and ever, ‘til death do them part, married to the genre of romance.

Sarah MacLean:
So Fabio was on most of Johanna Lindsey’s covers during this time period. He was on many other covers, too, but he was the hallmark of the Johanna Lindsey covers.

Max Ginsburg:
He was a big guy and he was a very nice and gentle person.

Katie Mingle:
This is an illustrator named Max Ginsburg who worked with Fabio a few times in his career. The way covers were made back in the ’80s was that models like Fabio, would pose for a photoshoot. And then an illustrator like Max would render that photo into a painting, adding in new backgrounds, like a beach or a meadow. But Max was there in the photoshoots, too.

Max Ginsburg:
Yeah, I was sitting there like the director in a movie. You know, hold the girl a little more firmly, or a little more tenderly, whatever, you know? And we’d have a procedure a little bit like Norman Rockwell had, where you would trace the images from the photographs. And then once you did that, then you would start to paint.

Katie Mingle:
Max says he never understood why Fabio became such a big thing.

Max Ginsburg:
I thought that actually, I don’t think he was much of an actor. He didn’t know exactly how to project himself. He was just a big, overpowering-looking guy. But for some reason, he made it big.

Roman Mars:
In some ways though, in being a rather unemotive brute, Fabio was getting his role exactly right.

Sarah MacLean:
If you read the books of the ’70s and early ’80s, heroes are impenetrable. They are blank slates of just intense masculine pride and arrogance. And they lack a capacity for emotion and for feeling. And they’re ciphers.

Katie Mingle:
In any case, Fabio and other hyper-masculine men in passionate embraces with their leading ladies were plastered all over romance covers in the 1980s.

Sarah MacLean:
And wrapping the books in these covers, really, it did two things in my opinion. One, it said, this is the book you’re getting. You’re going to get a woman who is in touch with her sexual identity and in touch with her pleasure, and the center of the story. And she’s going to triumph at the end. And you’ll be able to read this and explore safely your own fantasies.

Sarah MacLean:
And also, the cover said, “Men, keep out, this isn’t for you,” which both increased the likelihood that women would buy these books. And also, increased the level of disdain that society started to have for these books. Because if they’re for women, then surely they can’t have value.

Katie Mingle:
You can hear the contempt that the larger culture had for romance in this episode of “Nightline” from the 1980s. The segment is one part news about the success of the genre and one part unsolicited lecture.

[ARCHIVAL TAPE: NIGHTLINE]

HUGHES RUDD:
[THESE PRODUCTS HAVE ABOUT AS MUCH TO DO WITH CLASSICAL LITERATURE AS BIG MAC HAS TO DO WITH THREE-STAR FRENCH COOKING. BUT OF COURSE, NOT EVERYBODY LIKES RICH, SOPHISTICATED FOOD. SO IF WILLIAM FAULKNER OR ERNEST HEMINGWAY GIVES YOU HEARTBURN, THEN THESE BOOKS WOULD JUST BE YOUR BAIT. HUGHES RUDD FOR NIGHTLINE, IN WASHINGTON.]

TED KOPPEL:
[WHEN WE RETURN, WE’LL TALK LIVE WITH TWO WOMEN WHO MAKE THEIR LIVING OFF ROMANCE NOVELS AND UNDERSTANDABLY, THINK THERE’S MORE TO THE GENRE THAN CIRCULATING TRASH. AND LATER, I LOOK AT SOME OF THE HISTORIC ACCOMPLISHMENTS THIS WEEK ABOARD THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER.]

Roman Mars:
Ooh. Yikes.

Katie Mingle:
Through the years, people like Ted Koppel and his correspondent and God, I guess maybe me, have found lots of reasons to look down on romance. Romance is formulaic, predictable, badly written.

Sarah MacLean:
The genre is very used to being judged on the whole. Julia Quinn, who wrote “Bridgerton,” one of the things that she says a lot and I think is really valuable is, “Other genres get judged on the very best of their writing and romance gets judged on the very worst of it often.” Romance gets dinged for so many unfair things that I think are almost entirely related to patriarchy.

Katie Mingle:
Did I not respond well to romance and romance covers because of straight-up sexism? That feels possible, I’m not dismissing it. But I think also, maybe through most of my life growing up as a queer person, I just didn’t see myself in those clinches. And I wasn’t the only one who didn’t.

Nichole Perkins:
It was usually white couples on the cover.

Katie Mingle:
This is Nichole Perkins. She writes about pop culture, hosts a podcast called “This is Good for You,” and is a long-time reader of romance. Even though as a young Black person in the 1980s, she also didn’t see herself in the covers.

Nichole Perkins:
And what I would do is I would stay away from blonde people. If there were blonde people on the cover, I did not pick those up. And so I would pick up the covers with dark-haired white people because I would pretend that they were Black and just very fair-skinned.

Katie Mingle:
In 1974, a writer named Ann Shockley put out a lesbian interracial romance called “Loving Her,” but you’d have had a hard time finding it in any mainstream bookstores. And then in 1980, a Black editor at Dell named Vivian Stephens published a few Black heterosexual romances. But by and large, the genre was white and straight. And the early Black romances tended to be a little more chaste.

Nichole Perkins:
Yeah. If I recall correctly, sex seemed to be more alluded to, because I remember that was also part of my frustration with the early Black romances that I read. I was a preteen, and then an adolescent, so I wanted the good stuff.

Roman Mars:
But then came the author, Beverly Jenkins.

Nichole Perkins:
She was definitely a big deal.

Katie Mingle:
Beverly Jenkins is Black and she writes deeply researched historical romances featuring Black characters. And while her sex scenes in those early books weren’t extremely explicit, they weren’t completely hidden behind a closed door either. She also gave the world the first truly steamy clinch cover featuring Black characters. And she kept going book after book, with Black people in passionate embraces on the covers.

Nichole Perkins:
To see those covers, obviously at the time, people were still teasing women for reading romances and things like that. But it was still also a point of pride to be able to showcase a book with Black people in these very intimate, expressive embraces that were clearly indicating there’s some physical intimacy here and somebody is going to be kissed along their spine at some point. (giggles)

Katie Mingle:
Over the next couple of decades, romance would continue to change with the times. Rape scenes disappeared almost entirely. The women in the books got more assertive and the men got in touch with their emotions. And although the industry would remain predominantly white and straight, it’s not nearly as white and as straight as before, which means the clinch cover has been claimed by more and more kinds of people.

Sarah MacLean:
I’m thinking about Cat Sebastian’s books.

Roman Mars:
Cat Sebastian’s romances are often about queer characters and feature those characters in very classic-looking clinches on the cover.

Sarah MacLean:
There’s something so awesome about seeing the clinch but queer, right?

Katie Mingle:
Yes!

Sarah MacLean:
This is our time for the clinch to be owned by everyone because there’s no doubt that obviously the clinch was exclusionary for many, many years.

Roman Mars:
The style of the clinch covers has changed, too. The images aren’t rendered into paintings anymore. They’re photographs, albeit photographs that have been worked over in Photoshop. Abs have never had more definition.

Katie Mingle:
Covers aren’t all clinches anymore either. There are lots of variations. Like now, you might just have a single figure on the cover, like a man in a kilt with his shirt off, or a woman in a dress throwing you a sultry glance over her shoulder. There are lots of kinds of covers probably because there are so many kinds of romances. There are Scottish Highlander romances and Amish romances. There are thrillers and vampires and shape-shifters. And romance readers are plowing through these books as fast as publishers can get them on the shelves.

Sarah MacLean:
Romance readers are voracious and we read on average 10 to 12 books a month.

Katie Mingle:
Notice the universal we in that sentence. That’s because romance readers and writers really are kind of a big community that goes to conferences and meetups, and has a surprising amount of kinship. And also, a bit of infighting and controversy, but a kinship nonetheless, with a shared language, some of which is coded in the covers themselves.

Sarah MacLean:
If you show me or any romance reader, a series of covers, they’ll be able to tell you that’s a paranormal, that’s a medieval, that’s a Regency, that’s a contemporary rom-com.

Katie Mingle:
Nichole Perkins is particularly good at this game.

Nichole Perkins:
Okay. So when I see a bare-chested man, maybe his face isn’t even in the shot, it’s just torso, I know that it’s going to be a fairly steamy romance. And if it’s a blue background, the hero is some kind of law enforcement or a military person, or something like that. And then the green background or a yellow background, or kind of a goldish, then I know there’s probably going to be some sort of paranormal element to it. Like, maybe he’s some kind of werewolf or weretiger.

Katie Mingle:
And that’s just some of the signaling for paranormal and contemporary romances. For historicals, Nichole says it can be a little trickier to figure out what you’re getting.

Nichole Perkins:
But I have found – and again, it’s not foolproof – but I have found that if the cover is lavender or a lot of purple, or some very deep blues, then there’s going to be some explicit sex, or something that’s really steamy.

Katie Mingle:
Well, it’s funny you should say that, because my mom’s first romance novel actually has a purply blue cover.

[Katie & Nichole laugh]

Katie Mingle:
When I think about what a book cover is supposed to do, it feels like generally the answer is get people like me to pick it up and maybe buy it. But I had this realization talking to Nichole and Sarah. The covers aren’t necessarily trying to appeal to me, Katie Mingle, an outsider to the genre.

Katie Mingle:
“I feel like part of what you’re saying is that romance covers, they’re not trying to get me to read them exactly. They’re trying to get all of the people who are already in this genre to choose this particular one.”

Sarah MacLean:
“Yes. The cover doesn’t have to say, like hey, what’s in here is also smart and feminist, and thoughtful.”

Roman Mars:
Because romance readers already know that.

Sarah MacLean:
It just has to say, “You love most of the other books that have covers like this. So try this one, too.”

Roman Mars:
But the target audience for romance covers might be changing.

Sarah MacLean:
In the last decade, illustrated covers have become more prevalent.

Katie Mingle:
Okay. So not to be confused with those classic covers that were paintings of real people. An illustrated cover of the figures are much more cartoonish and abstract. Like, something you’d see in a graphic novel. The vibe is more cute than sexy, and they’ve become more and more popular. For example, a book like “Beach Read” by Emily Henry.

Roman Mars:
Beach Read’s cover features an illustration of a man and a woman, but they’re not in a clinch. In fact, they’re just kind of sitting on different sides of the cover. In between them, in big white lettering, is the title of the book. It really looks like it could be any other piece of contemporary fiction.

Sarah MacLean:
It sat on the “New York Times” list. It’s a straight up romance novel, but it really lingered on those lists because the cover doesn’t look like a romance novel cover at all. This is a way to get romance in front of the eyes of people who might not ever walk into the romance section.

Katie Mingle:
Sarah says that a lot of indie booksellers don’t carry romance at all. And in more mainstream bookstores, the romance section is usually hidden way in the back.

Sarah MacLean:
In mine, in Brooklyn, the romance section is in the literal furthest place from the door.

Katie Mingle:
Illustrated covers are an attempt to sort of Trojan horse romance novels into the general fiction section and win over readers who would maybe be a little bit embarrassed to buy a book with a clinch cover.

Sarah MacLean:
Well, maybe people like you would be more willing to pick up a romance novel if it didn’t have a clinch on the cover.

Roman Mars:
She’s calling you out, Mingle!

Katie Mingle:
“I feel so bad that I was one of those people.”

Sarah MacLean:
“Don’t worry about it.”

Katie Mingle:
“I do. Now, I’m just like, what was wrong with me?”

Katie Mingle:
The thing is, maybe illustrated covers can bring new people, like me, into the genre. But the people already there, they’re not necessarily thrilled about this new direction. All of that coding that the classic romance cover does to tell romance diehards what they’re getting, it’s kind of lost in the illustrated covers.

Alyssa Cole:
It’s getting a bit difficult to figure out. Is this women’s fiction? Is this adult romance? Is this YA?

Katie Mingle:
This is the romance writer and reader, Alyssa Cole. Alyssa has written several romances featuring Black, queer, and other marginalized characters. Beyond sending out a quick signal to readers about what’s inside the book, Alyssa believes one of the romance cover’s most important functions is to say, “Hey, you, person who has not always been depicted in romantic stories, love is for you, too.” So she likes the covers where you can clearly make out people’s features. Sometimes in the illustrated ones, you can’t.

Alyssa Cole:
A lot of these covers have illustrations with no faces. My main thing is I’m fine with doing an illustrated cover, but you absolutely have to be able to tell that the book is about people of color.

Roman Mars:
Alyssa Cole doesn’t want to lose clinch covers. She just wants them to become even more inclusive.

Alyssa Cole:
I love clinch covers. I love covers where people look like they’re in love, which is what romance novels are about.

Katie Mingle:
Look, I know that I started out this journey saying clinch covers were corny and old-fashioned. And to be honest, I still see some of that in those images. But I see the covers, particularly the clinch covers, in a new way now, too. I see them as a type of marketing, yeah. But also as almost a flag, a flag for a club in which membership has long been associated with a certain amount of shame, shame about desire and sex, and also shame about pleasure. Because as we all well know, we are supposed to feel guilty about reading things for pleasure.

Katie Mingle:
Again, the one and only Pam Mingle.

Pam Mingle:
Romance was so joyful. When I began reading it, I just got this sense of joyousness that I had never experienced really in other kinds of fiction. Certainly moments of that, but not to the degree of a romance.

Katie Mingle:
Still, even my romance-writing mom used to feel a sense of guilt about reading romance.

Pam Mingle:
I kept telling myself, “You shouldn’t keep reading these books.” I don’t know. I don’t really know why or understand why I would feel that way. I guess, because maybe I went through this period of just reading a lot of them. And then I would quit for a while. And then I would go back, every time I would go back because I missed it. I missed feeling those great feelings that I got from reading romance.

Katie Mingle:
Now, when I look at my mom’s cover, that classic clinch pose, it feels different. It feels like a flag boldly planted. Like, keep making fun of us patriarchy, but we are out here enjoying ourselves.

Roman Mars:
This story was produced by Katie Mingle and edited by Emmett FitzGerald. When we come back, we’ll hear from someone who has been in many a clinch cover photo shoot on how to get complete strangers to clinch like they mean it. After this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
So I’m back with producer, Katie Mingle. And there was one person that you couldn’t fit into this story, but you wanted to tell us about her.

Katie Mingle:
Yeah. So she’s actually the kind of person that just needs her own episode. Her name is Kris Noble and she’s an art director at a publisher called Kensington. And that means that she’s basically the person who designs book covers. And not just romance covers, but she’s done a lot of romance covers over the years.

Kris Noble:
When I came out of art school, I wanted to go into the biggest design studio and design packaging. But I’m like Coca Cola is Coca Cola. And so unlike books, every story to me is different. Every character brings something out of me that challenges me.

Katie Mingle:
But the art director job is also a hard one because you really have to please everyone.

Kris Noble:
Everybody. Marketing, publicity, sales, the editors, the publishers, the therapists of the author, the dog of the author, and that one friend they have who’s a graphic designer.

Roman Mars:
And I’m sure every single one of those has their own opinion about what they want.

Katie Mingle:
Yeah. And basically, most of the time, they want something that someone else already has.

Kris Noble:
They show me samples of books that are already out and they go, “I like this cover. I want it to look like this.” And I’m like, “But your book is coming out two years from now. It’s going to already look old.” So what I do is I give them what they want. I design what I think they want, and then I go out and I do my thing. Some books I lose out on and I’m like, “Okay, I might be wrong and sales is right. Or marketing is right.” And then there are some that I’m very adamant about. And I’m like, “No, trust me. People are going to come to this.”

Roman Mars:
Yeah. And this is something we don’t really talk about in the main story, and I have my own experience with this. But do authors usually get a say on what their covers look like at all?

Katie Mingle:
I think essentially, that depends on how famous of an author you are. So, how famous were you, Roman? I don’t know….

Roman Mars:
(Laughs) I was famous enough. I think they definitely were trying to appeal to me, but it was very clear in the contract language that it was their decision, not mine.

Katie Mingle:
Right. In the end, I think publishers generally get the final word. But they also don’t want to make their authors unhappy.

Kris Noble:
It is their book, it’s their baby. And we don’t just snatch it out their arms and go running.

Katie Mingle:
But yeah, appeasing authors can be a lot of work.

Kris Noble:
There was a woman, an author who I worked on her book cover and everybody loved it, including her. But she took it to her psychic.

Roman Mars:
Oh, no.

Kris Noble:
And the psychic said that this wasn’t right for her because this color wasn’t … And to the point that the psychic was sending me messages. And the author would not budge because her psychic said, no matter what sales, marketing, publicity, the editor, the publisher said, she was adamant that she did not want that cover.

Kris Noble:
And I changed the cover and the book became very successful. So I always worried about whether or not it was me or the psychic that actually designed the book and made it work.

Roman Mars:
It was her.

Katie Mingle:
Yeah, it was probably her.

Roman Mars:
I’ll call that ball for her.

Katie Mingle:
So over the years, Kris Noble has been in a lot of photoshoots for clinch covers. And she’s full of interesting info as you can imagine, like this.

Kris Noble:
The male models tend not to be as tall as the female models, so we have to put this dude who’s supposed to be this big, hunky cowboy on a box.

Roman Mars:
Why is that?

Katie Mingle:
Yeah. Of course, I asked that also. And basically, it’s because of the men tend to do sports catalogs, whereas the women tend to be regular, like fashion-

Roman Mars:
Like runway models?

Katie Mingle:
Yeah.

Roman Mars:
They’re selected for being tall and can wear clothes like on a runway. And the men just have to be built.

Kris Noble:
They’re short and stocky and muscular.

Katie Mingle:
Okay.

Kris Noble:
So we want the big muscle chest because that’s what the ladies are looking for.

Katie Mingle:
I got it. So my favorite anecdote of Kris’ was about this one particular shoot that she did for a clinch cover.

Kris Noble:
One specific time, I got these male and female models and they were very timid with each other. They didn’t want to touch. And this was a contemporary, very hot. This was during the time of “50 Shades of Grey.” So the content was very hot and sexy. And they were acting like they were giving the church hug, like this. And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to really go in.”

Roman Mars:
Wow. I never really thought about it, but the models are most likely strangers when they come in.

Katie Mingle:
Yeah, they are. And I think sometimes they know what kind of shoot they’re going to do. And sometimes they don’t even know that.

Roman Mars:
Oh, my God.

Katie Mingle:
Yeah. And that was the situation with this couple that Kris just mentioned. They didn’t feel comfortable with each other at all.

Kris Noble:
The photographer I tend to work with, he was really good at setting the mood. So he would turn down the lights. We would get a lot of people off the set, put on the right kind of music. We got some R&B. We got some old Motown. And so about an hour in, they really started to relax. So we set up a bedroom scene. And so there’s a bed and they were laying on the bed, and we’re shooting above. So we’re looking down on them and they’re laying on the bed, and we’re getting that shot where their bodies are entangled. Her hair is all over the place. By the end of the shoot, I could not stop them. It had gotten that hot. This is between you and I – and the other people who are listening – the photographer and I were going, “Okay, that’s it. It’s a wrap. It’s a wrap.” And they were going in.

Roman Mars:
Between you and I and the rest of the people who are listening. Yeah, you’re right. She really needed her own episode.

Katie Mingle:
Truly. Someone, give her a podcast.

Roman Mars:
Well, thank you, Katie. That was so interesting. The whole episode, I just absolutely loved it. I love that it comes from you and your mom, too. That’s the greatest part of it all.

Katie Mingle:
Thanks, Roman.

———

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle. Edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Ameeta Ganatra. Music by our director of sound Sean Real. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Chris Berube, Sofia Klatzker and me, Roman Mars.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Semmelhack, Vida Engstrand and Vivian Stephens.

If you’d like to know more about Katie’s mom’s books, or read Sarah Mclean’s romance about lockpicking inspired by an episode of this very show, or listen to the incredibly charming podcasts that Nichole Perkins has hosted, or… or… browse through prints of Max Ginsburg’s classic, vintage clinch cover paintings, well we’ll tell you how to do all of that at 99pi.org.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and enjoy discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find 444 old but still amazingly relevant episodes of this show and other shows I love from Stitcher on our website. It’s 99pi.org.