Adams says he got his first book cover because “I looked really good with my shirt off.” (Shirley Green)
This cover lover is quite the swordsman. (Shirley Green)
Twelve inches. That’s the size of Timothy Adams’ shoulder-to-waist ratio. “It helps with the romance covers,” he shrugs.
So does his chiseled 6-foot-1 visage of rippling biceps, tousled sandy locks, penetrating blue eyes and heaving pecs.
New York’s newest Fabio has ravished the covers of more than 100 romance novels in the past seven years. The Jersey-born, East Village-dwelling hunk’s scorching body of work includes “My Immortal Assassin,” “Sins of the Highlander,” “Welcome Home, Cowboy,” “Caressed by Ice” and that literary classic, “Unfinished Business with the Duke.” Adams ticks off his titillating roles: “I’ve been a gladiator, a cowboy, a dad, a tycoon, sometimes shirtless, sometimes with costumes, sometimes with women in a clinch.”
Wait — a clinch? “Two people embracing,” he explains.
“Whether it be with clothes on, half-dressed, almost into a kiss — there’s all kinds of clinches.” Most of his throbbing clinches were shot in the Union Square studio of photographer Shirley Green (she collaborates with an illustrator to incorporate the pics into painted background art). Green calls Adams her first choice in the cover lover business.
“He’s completely professional, he’s always 100 percent and he brings his game,” she says of Adams, the former head of a trucking business. “He’s an actor, not just a model.” Indeed, Adams has landed recurring roles on soaps “All My Children,” “One Life To Live,” “Guiding Light” and “Sunset Beach,” as well as gigs on “Law & Order,” “Rescue Me” and “30 Rock” — where he played a
New York Post reporter on the episode “MILF Island.”
Adams, who’s 43 and still working steadily, says he came late to the pulsing flesh world, shooting his first cover at age 36. His secret to scoring that first naughty novel? “I looked really good with my shirt off,” he says simply. “Broad shoulders, six-pack all year round, nonstop action going on — that’s what it takes.”
It also takes plenty of effort, although for Adams, exercise is “a lifestyle for me — I don’t think about working out. When you’re hungry, you eat, when your body needs to work out, you train.” To that end, he rides his bicycle everywhere he goes, rain or shine, biking between Manhattan and Brooklyn several times a week and carrying armfuls of groceries as he goes. He runs up stairs and notes, “I walk on my hands and do pushups on my hands whenever I feel like my muscles need to be activated.”
He also trains private clients about 10 hours per week, scuba-dives and teaches a twice-weekly group class in “dynamic functional flexibility.”
And if that weren’t enough, he also devises an annual “feat of endurance” for himself, which involves an extremely challenging physical activity that takes several weeks to build up to. His endurance feats have included doing 1,000 push-ups and 1,000 lunges in 67 minutes, and running 189 flights of stairs in 48 minutes. This year, he’s working toward 400 flights of stairs and 1,000 push-ups in about two hours.
“It’s a lifestyle for me, but I give all the credit to my mom for making [me] this way,” he says, with a humility befitting one of his romance Romeos. But if his workout regimen could make many a fitness freak swoon, it’s his fantasy-inducing face that has romance readers’ loins quivering.
“This guy’s very special,” says Sarah Wendell, co-founder of the romance review site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. “There are only a handful of people you see over and over again that become an icon in the romance-novel cover world.”
Wendell notes that publishers usually put Adams’ entire head on covers, a rarity in the “decapitated-male-model central of the romance novel aisle.” And with romance fiction sales totaling $1.36 billion in 2009, according to the Romance Writers of America, the choice of cover stud is crucial.
“The cover is a very big draw, especially for impulse shoppers,” says Wendell. “If you’re very lucky, you’ll get pectoral muscles that could shelter you under a rainstorm.”
Pec umbrellas or no, romance models typically earn about $200 per one-hour shoot, with no royalties. Still, the “happily engaged” Adams (who was married to Daisy Fuentes in the early ’90s) says it’s not a bad rate for embracing attractive women for an hour. So, has the bodice ripping in the studio ever spilled into real-life?
“That’s very unprofessional; it wouldn’t be appropriate,” Adams says. Firmly.
Ewa Da Cruz, Adams’ frequent love interest on covers, says their shoots stir up more laughter than sparks. “It’s always lifting up the skirt or a lot of cleavage, or he’s kind of on top of me . . . but he’s the perfect gentleman,” she says. “It can be sexual, but it’s all work.”
And what does he think of all the breathless Fabio comparisons? “I find myself the antithesis of Fabio,” he insists. “He’s got long hair, I have short hair; he has dark skin, I have light; he has an accent, I don’t.”
Still, Adams enjoys shooting period pieces with Regency wear, Victorian riding boots or cowboy gear. “And then there are days they just tell me to take my shirt off and pose looking heroic with a sword — that’s fun, too,” he laughs.
The Harlequin hottie says he’s occasionally spotted on the streets of New York by “nannies and moms,” but they recognize him from his soap work rather than his covers. (“I don’t know if the audience for romance novels are living in New York,” he surmises.)
Adams certainly isn’t letting his steamy success go to his hunky head. “It’s just work at this point,” he says, admitting he’s never actually read any of the books he clinches for. “I saw one of them once in CVS; I looked at the cover, laughed and left.”