The Erotic Hero of a Steamy 1991 Sally Quinn Novel Was Based on...Anthony Fauci

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In 1991, Sally Quinn—doyenne of the Washington intelligentsia, who was then on a streak of popular novels—published “Happy Endings,” which climbed the bestseller list. Across 500-plus pages, Quinn unspools the juicy romance of a widowed First Lady who falls head over heels for a dashing and cutting NIH scientist (who, by the way, has recently discovered a therapy for AIDS) while a white-hot and secretive love affair takes wind. Bellinis are spilled, love is made, hearts are broken and mended—all for the singular and mysterious scientist, who goes by the name of Michael Lanzer.

Or better known by his real name: Anthony Fauci.

Part searing romance, part roman à clef, “Happy Endings” made the bestseller list during a year when HIV-related deaths were then the highest ever recorded in the United States. By then, Fauci was the government scientist best known for combatting the virus’s spread as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It was around this time that Quinn first encountered the real-life Fauci, at a Washington function where the two were paired as dinner partners. With his tie askew and from behind enormous glasses, Fauci left an impression of earnest brilliance, enough to inspire the main character of Quinn’s upcoming novel.

“I just fell in love with him,” Quinn told me recently, recalling their evening together. “Usually those dinners, you make polite conversation, and that’s it. But we had this intense conversation, personal conversation. I though, ‘Wow, this guy is amazing.'”
Spoiler alerts ahead: ‘She,’ in this instance, is Sadie Grey, the fictitious First Lady whose amorous travails over two novels and three presidential administrations would leave Flaubert slack-jawed. Quinn packs the pages with enough political and domestic intrigue—The President’s son is illegitimate! The President is dead! The President has AIDS! The President has resigned!—that by the time a sandy-haired and wiry (sorry—”sexy”) NIH scientist named Michael Lanzer makes his entree on a Bahamian beachfront to strike up an affair with a widowed Fist Lady, it comes as a partial reprieve.

But not for long: Sadie and Michael (who is married and Orthodox Jewish, though Fauci is not) start a long-simmering romance that, while playing out over months at mostly glacial pace, doesn’t lack for imagination. Before long, Grey is mewing over Lanzer’s “low, melodious, sexy, almost hypnotic” voice. Suffice it to say that readers who are wise to Lanzer’s true identity will more than once find themselves confronted with a very naked Anthony Fauci.


 

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