This guest post is from Steve Ammidown. You may remember hearing him recently on Episode 618. The Romance Reader’s Handbook with Steve Ammidown, where we discussed another piece of romance history, The Romance Reader’s Handbook, and from his recent post about romance memorabilia and ephemera.
Please be advised: Some of these images are NSFW!
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The family of legendary artist Robert McGinnis has shared that he passed away on March 10th of this year, at the age of 99. Even if you haven’t heard of Robert McGinnis before this moment, you probably know his work.
One of the most prolific illustrators of his generation, McGinnis is known to have done more than 1400 book covers, as well as some of the most iconic movie posters of all time. Audrey Hepburn with her cat and cigarette? Jane Fonda as Barbarella? James Bond? All McGinnis.
After graduating from Ohio State with a degree in fine art, where he also played football, McGinnis made his way to the advertising scene in New York in the late 1950s. Like many of his peers, McGinnis also began designing covers for the now booming paperback industry. From his first Mike Shayne covers for Dell, his talent for drawing women made him a fast favorite in the pulp detective world.
His style for these covers was so distinctive that his femme fatales became known as “The McGinnis Woman”, with sensuality practically jumping off the cover and only as much clothing as editors required.
As one of the house artists for Avon (alongside other legends like H. Tom Hall) Robert McGinnis was present for the birth of the modern romance novel. The simple but effective McGinnis cover for Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and The Flower took his work into millions of homes and was just a hint of what was to come from this master.
Through the 1970s, McGinnis and H. Tom Hall traded off romance covers for “The Avon Ladies”- Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers, and Bertrice Small among others, with McGinnis providing the evocative cover of Small’s first novel, The Kadin:
But it was in 1977 that Robert McGinnis entered into the partnership he is most known for within the romance genre. Beginning with her first novel, Captive Bride, McGinnis would illustrate the first 13 books by Johanna Lindsey.
While Captive and its follow up A Pirate’s Love followed Avon’s standard small illustration/big text format, McGinnis’s cover for Lindsey’s third book, Fires of Winter (1980), broke all the rules. In an illustration occupying the whole page, we see a barely-clothed dark haired woman lying down vertically on the page, in between the legs of a clearly naked man, on a white background.
While women in various levels of undress had become the standard for historical romance since the mid 1970s, McGinnis’s naked man was something new. And it wouldn’t be the last time.
Over the next ten Lindsey books illustrated by McGinnis, nine featured naked men. Robert had turned his expertise in the female form, which he used to such great effect for detective novels, on its head, providing sensual, detailed, nearly naked eye candy for the straight women who were seen as the primary market for Lindsey’s books.
All of Johanna Lindsey’s books made the New York Times bestseller list, so it’s not that surprising that a couple of McGinnis’s illustrations caught the eyes of censors. It’s reported that the woman on the original Fires of Winter cover was also nude (but tastefully covered), but Avon made Robert add clothes.
That was nothing compared to Tender Is The Storm (1985), though.
The first printing of Tender Is The Storm featured a side shot of a fully naked man, with a well-dressed red headed woman leaning up against him in, a, um, titillating way.
This was too much for some, and the second printing featured what appeared to be a hastily added speedo on the man’s hip. Speedos of course being very prevalent in the 1800s West, the publisher thought better and replaced it in the third printing with a giant starburst sticker proclaiming the book’s best seller status.
Tender wasn’t McGinnis’s first use of naked man hip on a Lindsey book, though. Two years earlier, the cover of A Gentle Feuding featured a man sitting in a sort of The Thinker pose, with a woman at his feet. Most of the editions cut the man off at the mid-thigh, but one of the South American editions shows us that there was more of a full moon quality to the original painting!
The publication of A Heart So Wild, which doesn’t have a naked man on the cover, in 1986 would mark the end of the McGinnis/Lindsey partnership. From that point on, Lindsey worked with Elaine Duillo, leading to the Fabio era.
Robert McGinnis eventually retired from illustrating, devoting himself to the fine art painting he’d loved early on. He kept painting well into his 90s, long enough to see his old artwork come back into style thanks to retro pop culture like Mad Men. A 2017 Vanity Fair profile shows him as quiet and unassuming, but still hard at work- hardly the type of fellow you’d expect to have produced some of the most sensual romance covers ever made.
With Robert McGinnis’s death, we reach a sort of end of an era. Elaine Duillo, H. Tom Hall, and their contemporary artist colleagues are gone as well, as are all of the Avon Ladies that McGinnis helped make famous.
Especially at a moment where oil painted covers are gone along with most outward sensuality on covers thanks to the combination of book bans, TikTok, and an expressed dislike of sexually provocative cover art among a certain segment of romance readers, it’s important to remember the visual vocabulary of romance that these artists made.
In many ways, it’s what made the genre the behemoth it is today.