Love, Sex and
Blue Blood
Buchreport Magazine
Eleanor Herman finds royal mistresses
much more interesting than their wives. She had devoted her first
non-fiction book to them, and made herself a bit royal along the way.
Cordelia Borchardt, promotional director at S. Fischer, almost sank
into a deep curtsy a year ago in the hallway of the publishing house
when a lady in a magnificent Renaissance gown, with a little crown
perched on her artfully updone hair, rustled by carrying a leather
bound folio under her arm.
The
beautifully dressed lady named Eleanor Herman swept directly into
the office of Karin Herber-Schlapp, who is responsible for popular
non-fiction at Kruger. In the folio she had the manuscript of her
book “In Bed with the King,” a history of royal mistresses.
In the face of such magnificence, Kruger
bit quickly, more quickly than any US publishers. That’s why
the book will appear first in a German translation in March and then
in the USA in July (at William Morrow.)
An
American, Herman doesn’t always wear velvet gowns; until she
began working on her book she was employed as a journalist, among
other places, in Bonn. She has always been fascinated with blue-blooded
European history since she was a little girl and her father told her
that her family sprang from royal stock. Herman began to research
her lineage in the past year and actually proved that her line goes
back 42 generations directly to Emperor Charlemagne. Her full name
is Eleanor Stauffen Herman.
Wives are more boring than mistresses. Once she started researching
the lives of European royals, she determined that it was not the wives
of kings that interested her, but their mistresses. Mistresses were
much closer on the emotional level to kings because they married their
wives for political convenience. For pragmatic reasons Herman decided
to write non-fiction rather than a novel. “I had heard that
it was easier to sell non-fiction,” she said.
She researched the mistress books already on
the market and determined that no one had really answered the central
questions about the lives of royal mistresses. “Were they all
beautiful? How much money did they make? Did the queens hate them?
What happened to them when they got old?”
If
the book is a success, Herman wants to buy a castle with goblins on
the wall and candles in the stairwells, she says with a wink. She
already bought her husband, a “conservative management consultant
in eternal gray suits” a velvet costume with lace and leather
knee breeches, but “he has refused to wear it. I do believe
he thinks I am a bit strange.”
She
is currently working on another book. This one – balancing the
scales – is about the lovers of queens. |
