ISN'T IT ROMANTIC?(The Talk of the Town)(Melanie Craft)

Among romance novelists, as among porn stars and career criminals, the use of a pseudonym is a time-honored practice: the best-selling author Carly Phillips is also the slightly worse-selling author Karen Drogin, while Jayne Ann Krentz and Amanda Quick will never be seen in a room at the same time. Last week, a party was held at Le Cirque to toast the publication of "Man Trouble," a new romance by Melanie Craft which draws on the convention of the nom de plume for comic effect. The heroine of Craft's book is Molly Shaw, a mousy, twin-set-wearing professor of women's history who secretly writes steamy piratical novels as Sandra St. Claire, and who is persuaded to adopt the va-va-voom guise of her literary alter ego in order to seduce Jake Berenger, a billionaire hotelier.

Craft does not write under a pseudonym, though she does have an alter ego: Mrs. Larry Ellison, the fourth wife of the billionaire C.E.O. of Oracle. Craft, whose resume includes an undergraduate degree from Oberlin and stints as a bartender, a pastry chef, and a safari driver, married Ellison five months ago in a simple back-yard ceremony--if any ceremony can be said to be simple when it takes place in a back yard that consists of forty-five acres, is performed by a congressman, and is photographed by Steve Jobs. Craft has honey-colored hair and the kind of radiant beauty that is testament to genes and grooming working together in perfect concert. She is thirty-four years old. "Man Trouble," she said, was inspired by an article in the Post several years ago suggesting that "Melanie Craft," the romance novelist whom Ellison was alleged to be dating, but was never actually seen with, was, in fact, a creation of the Oracle P.R. department. "The character of Jake is not based on my husband, though if it were it would be good for book sales," Craft said, demonstrating both a graceful tolerance for the obvious question and the commercial author's concern for the bottom line, in spite of the fact that her lines have recently become bottomless.

Marriage has not diminished Craft's ambitions--"Fifty-four per cent of paperback sales are romance novels," she said, explaining why it's better to be a pulp author than a literary one--even though advances are not what keep her in ink cartridges these days. "I ...