'M A BIG FAN OF YOURS, MISS FOSTER," THE MAKEUP ARTIST at CNN remarked as she made slow, careful strokes over Diana's shiny shoulder-length hair. "My mother and my sister and I all read your magazine from cover to cover, every month."

The room where makeup was applied to guests while they waited to go on the air was like most of its kind in every television studio in the country, except CNN's was a little larger. Two long Formica countertops stretched the length of both sides of the narrow room, with chairs spaced at six-foot intervals along them and brightly lit mirrors lining the walls. At each makeup station, jars and bottles of cosmetics fought for counter space with lipsticks, eyeliners, eye shadows, and an assortment of brushes and combs.

Sometimes all the stations were occupied by guests being made up for television, but this afternoon, Diana was the only one scheduled for an interview, and the young woman who was applying her makeup was bursting with enthusiasm: "For my sister's birthday, we used your grandmother's recipe for vanilla pudding cake. We topped it with fresh sugar-glazed blueberries, just like the picture in magazine. Then we gathered armfuls of peonies for a centerpiece, and we decorated our own gift wrap by using rubber stamps cut in the shape of peonies. I used a gold stamp pad for mine, but my mom used a silver one, and they were both really great!"

"That's very nice to hear." Diana flashed her an absent-minded smile, without taking her attention from the urgent memos that had arrived by fax at her hotel late that morning.

"My mom finally got my dad to try your grandpa's special trick for raising giant, juicy strawberries, and they turned out huge, and were they ever delicious! When my dad first looked at the picture of them in the magazine, he said you were using trick photography and they were probably crab apples, but his turned out fantastic, too! Next, he built that compost box your grandpa showed in the magazine. Now he reads Foster's Beautiful Living from cover to cover, just like we do!"

Feeling that some response was again required, Diana gave her another smile before she turned to the second page of the fax from the Foster Enterprises office in Houston. The smile was all the encouragement the enthusiastic young woman needed. "Practically everybody I know reads your magazine. We just love the ideas you put in it, and the pictures your sister takes are really gorgeous! Gosh, the way your mom writes about all of you, I feel like I know your whole family. When Corey had her babies—the twins—we sat right down and crocheted those adorable little booties for them. You know—the ones that look sort of like high-top running shoes? I hope she got them."

Diana looked up and smiled for the third time. "I'm sure she did."

The young woman dusted a light coat of blusher on Diana's high cheekbones and stepped back. "I'm finished," she said almost regretfully. "You're even prettier in real life than you are in that picture at the front of the magazine."

"Thank you very much," Diana replied, laying the faxes aside and looking up at her.

"You have about ten minutes before they'll come and get you and take you into the studio."

When she left, Diana looked over at Cindy Bertrillo, the public relations director at Foster's Beautiful Living magazine, who had accompanied her to Atlanta and had been sitting nearby while Diana's makeup was applied. "Are there any other faxes?" Diana asked as she scribbled instructions on two of the faxed memos and handed them to Cindy to send to the office when they got back to the hotel.

"Nope, that's it," Cindy said, stuffing the memos into her briefcase. With her short-cropped black hair, oversize glasses, and swift, energetic movements, the tireless thirty-two-year-old publicist looked, Diana thought, as if she was constantly searching for new things to benefit Foster's. And she was.

Diana glanced at her watch and grimaced. "I hate these interviews. They take away too much time from work. I have six meetings tomorrow, the accountants want to go over the preliminary P-and-Ls, and I should be finalizing the arrangements for the new coffee-table book. I'm behind schedule on everything!"

Cindy was very familiar with Diana's killing work schedule. At thirty-one, Diana was more than a successful businesswoman; she had become a reluctant celebrity, an unwilling idol—a state of affairs that owed itself to her remarkably photogenic features and her ability to look outwardly serene even when the situation was chaotic and her nerves were unraveled. Despite Diana's wish to maintain her privacy and keep a low profile, her classic features, vivid coloring, and natural elegance had made her an increasingly popular subject for journalists and photographers—and television talk-show hosts.

Cindy smiled sympathetically as she repeated what she always said in these circumstances. "I know, but the television cameras love you, and interviews help sell magazines." She tipped her head to one side, assessing the effect of Diana's buttercup yellow crepe suit against the auburn highlights in her hair and striking green eyes. "You look terrific," she said.

Diana rolled her eyes, dismissing the remark. "Please try to book Gram and Mom for more of these interview shows, or even my grandfather, but not me. Gram and Mom are the Foster Ideal; they're the soul and spirit of the whole concept; they are the magazine. Put Corey on television, for heaven's sake; she's the one with the photographic genius that makes the magazine look so spectacular. I'm just the figurehead; I'm the business end, and I always feel like a complete phony when I do these shows. Besides, I'm just too busyfor this."

When she ran out of argument, Cindy said very pleasantly, and very firmly, "The media wants you, Diana. And anyway," she added with a rueful smile, "we can't let Gram do any more live interview shows. She's gotten much too outspoken in her advancing years. I didn't tell you this, but last month, when she taped the show for the Dallas CBS channel, the host asked her to explain the difference between Foster's Beautiful Living magazine and its closest competitor, New Style."

Cindy waited, with raised brows and an expression of ill-suppressed mirth, for Diana to ask the obvious question. "What," Diana asked warily, noting the telltale look, "did Gram say?"

"She said when she followed New Style's instructions for making a hand-decorated lamp, she nearly burned the house down."

Diana muffled a horrified laugh.

"Then she said she'd eaten better-tasting plaster than New Style's special wedding cake."

"Good God!" Diana said, laughing in earnest now.

"If that show had been live, instead of taped, Gram's candor would have gotten us a nice fat lawsuit," Cindy continued wryly. "As it was, I threw myself on the host's mercy and begged him not to use what would have been the juiciest part of the interview." Cindy leaned forward and jokingly confided, "He agreed, but I have to sleep with him the next time I go to Dallas."

"That sounds reasonable," Diana said, straight-faced, and then they both laughed. "Gram doesn't say things like that to be spiteful," she explained, sobering. "In her advancing years, she's suddenly decided that she doesn't want to waste what breath she has left on polite lies—or something like that."

"So she informed me in Dallas. Anyway, I do book your mom and Corey or your grandparents whenever I can; you know that. I can arrange network specials for them, where they demonstrate all their wonderful projects, and the shows are always a big hit, but when it comes to talk shows and personal interviews, it'syou the public wants to see."

"I wish you'd do something to change their minds."

"Change your face, and maybe I could," Cindy countered with a grin. "Get ugly, get fat. Get a little conceited, or a little pushy, or a little crude. The public will spot that instantly, and you'll lose your commercial appeal."

"Thanks, you're a big help," Diana said.

"Can I help it if you've become an icon? Is it my fault the public sees you as America's Favorite Domestic Goddess?"

Diana made a comic face at that phrase, which had been coined by a CBS commentator when he interviewed Diana last year. "Don't tell anyone that I haven't had time to cook a real meal at home in two years, will you?—or that I had to pay an interior designer to fix up my apartment because I'm too busy working."

"They couldn't pry it out of me with pliers," Cindy joked, then she sobered. Shoving cosmetics aside, Cindy perched her hip on the edge of the countertop and said very seriously, "Diana, I've heard you joke about things like that several times in the last few months, and it's been making me increasingly nervous. When you first started the magazine, you had a wide-open field, but all that's changed radically in the last two years. I know I don't have to tell you how much the competition has grown, or how much money they have behind them, or how far they would go just to topple you and Foster's Beautiful Living out of first place. You have major publishers putting out their own magazines and books and trying to build their own 'icons.'

"If they find just one real weak spot in you, they'll use it to bludgeon you—and the entire Foster Ideal—all over the media. No matter how inventive or talented your mother and grandmother and all the assistants at the magazine may be, it's you the women of America see as the real Foster Ideal.

"I know you're exhausted, and I know you resent the hell out of having your private life mixed with your business life, but until you and Dan Penworth are married and in a house of your own, decorated with lots of pretty projects we've featured in the magazine, you cannot afford even to joke about your lack of domesticity. If our competitors get wind of it, they'll make you look like a complete fake in the press."

Diana tipped her head back, fighting to keep the angry resentment out of her voice. "I'm an executive with a large and growing corporation. I do not have the time to stencil borders on my wallpaper."

Cindy was stunned by the sound of tears in Diana's voice, and for the first time, she realized that Diana, who always seemed to be the embodiment of vitality, optimism, and serenity, was actually strained to the breaking point. It was little wonder, considering the responsibility she shouldered. Her work schedule practically eliminated any personal life. In addition, she had kept her fiancé waiting patiently in the wings for nearly two years for a wedding that had to be the embodiment of the Foster Ideal. "I'm sorry," Cindy said gently. "I wouldn't have upset you for the world. Let me get you something. How about some coffee?"

"Thanks," Diana replied, flashing a rueful smile at Cindy. "I'd love some."

Cindy left, closing the door behind her, and Diana turned in her chair. Her face gazed back at her from the mirror, and she shook her head in amused irony at the vagaries of fate. "Tell me something," she softly said to her reflection. "How did a nice girl like you end up in a place like this?"

The woman in the mirror looked back at her with a wry smile. The answer was so obvious: necessity and desperation after her father's sudden death after a stroke eight years ago had driven her to take risks and defy the odds in order to keep the family together. Timing and luck had propelled the family far beyond their modest hopes. Timing and luck—and probably a little celestial help from Robert Foster.

After the funeral, when her father's lawyer revealed the true state of their finances—he'd finished droning on to the grief-stricken family about cross-collateralized assets and the stock market's fatal plunge a few months before— Diana alone had been capable of absorbing the meaning of it all: after her father's debts were paid, the family would have nothing except the house they were living in and the furniture in it.

In a desperate effort to keep everyone together, Diana had decided to try to turn the family's locally acclaimed flair for style into a money-making proposition. Somehow, she had managed to get good advice, draw up a business plan, and borrow the start-up money they needed. And in the end, she had managed to turn her family's unique way of life into a multimillion-dollar business.