Tom Perkins may be the last person you’d expect to write a romance novel, let alone a steamy one. The 74-year-old author of Sex and the Single Zillionaire, published last month by Regan Books, is far better known as the co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
“I surprised myself by doing it,” Perkins says. “The truth is, I had never read a real bodice-ripper novel before.”
Inspiration hit Perkins in 2003 when a reality-TV producer asked him to star in a series where he would meet and cavort with a bevy of 20-something bombshells; at the end of 13 weeks, he could marry his favorite. Though Perkins declined, he thought such a show could be the stuff of a novel by his ex-wife, famed romance writer Danielle Steel. Instead, Steel urged Perkins to write the novel himself. He took the challenge. In January 2004 he holed up in his 16th-century, moat-encircled country estate in East Sussex, England, and banged it out in 30 days.
The protagonist, 60-year-old investment banker Steven Hudson, dates a string of bimbos, grifters and unabashed gold diggers in the course of his TV series. But in the end he falls for the show’s producer, a much-older single mother who is sincere and smart.
To promote the book (whose profits will be donated to his alma mater, Harvard), Perkins has agreed to have dinner with the top three finishers in an essay contest, sponsored by the Romantic Times Book Club, in which women will write on why they deserve a date with him. The winners will be chosen at the club’s May 20 annual convention in Daytona Beach, Florida. The event will feature tutorials for women on writing romantic fiction as well as hunky male cover models showing off their chests.
Like Hudson, Perkins is a wealthy financier, a widower with two children (his first wife died in 1994), and a yachtsman. There are important differences, however. “I made Steven Hudson an investment banker rather than a venture capitalist, who would have been too smart to fall into those traps,” he says, noting that “I kind of torture the guy.” As for the hero’s adventures with the opposite sex, Perkins demurs: “He’s younger than myself. He’s got more steam.”
