She arrives without any implements, but with a friendly smile. She has long, wavy brown hair, lovely blue eyes and the demeanor of someone who was brought up right.

She tells me right off that most of her readers are not in the S&M community; they see the book as a way to learn about what other people do, or just as a good story.

And her background is not in any way filled with violence or chains. She was a reporter in Davis, Calif., ran a couple of restaurants in Southern California and was born in Iowa, of all places. She decided to write as a kid, after reading Nancy Drew. “I thought, maybe I can’t be a detective, but I want to be a writer.”

The obvious question is, how do you know so much about S&M? Are you into it?

I decided from the first book ["Topping from Below"] not to answer that. It doesn’t make any difference. As a result, because I don’t answer, people have written that I was an S&M queen. I am a private person; I don’t have a need to tell the world about my private life. A reporter once asked me if I was straight or lesbian. I said, “I’m open-minded.”

Does anything embarrass you?

I blush very easily, but not on sex stuff. I can talk or write about anything. It’s important not to censor yourself.

Why is sex so important?

This is the 21st century and we’re still so puritanical. Parents scream if kids see sex, but not violence. I think we have this attitude that if we talk about sex people will go crazy. I think we need to go back to pagan days and put sex in its place of honor, where it deserves to be.

Is it erotic or porn? What’s the difference?

Well, people say that “what I like is erotica, what you like is porn.” Erotica may be a little softer, but they’re really the same thing. I wouldn’t call “Panic Snap” erotica or porn. It’s fiction, literature.

Why do people like S&M?

Well, the classic reason is they want someone else to call the shots. There are people who are in charge all day and then they want to say, “Do me.” Of course there is the flip side: the prim and proper librarian who brings out the whip. But you can never tell. As Carl Jung said, “Summoned or not, the gods will appear.”

Are there a lot of people into this that we don’t know about?

In my experience, people say, “Oh no, I’d never do that” about S&M, but then they say, “Oh, occasionally we’ll use a blindfold” or “One time we did a little spanking.” That’s S&M, but there’s just a broad spectrum.

Why is S&M so important to people?

You can check in your control and intellect; you can find out who you really are. You may have these other needs, but if you don’t allow it to show, it will come out in different ways. For some, [S&M] can be therapy; for others, it’s acting out in an unhealthy way, of course; but for women especially, it can be good in that S&M can draw out the sexual experience and prolong it. It can take hours. Some are into rituals, scripted scenarios and talking about it beforehand. It can bring about a high degree of communication skills.

What, then, is the theme of “Panic Snap” for you?

I write love stories. But they are real love stories [not fantasy romance]. “Panic Snap” is about obsession, seduction and the blurry line between seduction and violation. It’s about the fact that love doesn’t always take you where you think it’s going to.

Whatever a “shoulder shimmy in a kitchen” is, it apparently got the “newsbabe” the first interview with Gates since the judge’s ruling. It aired Wednesday morning on “Good Morning America.”

Did Sawyer trade a celebrity appearance for Microsoft for a big interview? It’s actually not clear.

When I called Sawyer for a response, her publicist, Eileen Murphy, said of the video appearance: “This is something that is completely innocent. There’s no connection to the interview she did with Bill Gates. You don’t owe anyone anything [when you do something like appear in a company video]. She didn’t violate any policy. It’s completely innocent.”

But then she called back an hour later to add: “Diane made that video at Sun Valley and had no idea it would be shown anywhere but at that private gathering.” Sun Valley is financier Herb Allen’s annual Idaho retreat for corporate bigwigs and (it seems) newsbabes as well.

He found it in Bruce and so have millions of others. Bruce fans are
special. Like Bob Dylan’s, they are interested in his mind. Like Elvis’, they
are interested in his sexuality and show-biz pizazz. Like Woody Guthrie’s,
they love his common-man compassion. And he sings a romantic story in a way
that attracts not only gals who love his macho sensitivity, but guys who
want it. But Bruce’s fans go one step further. They think he’s a god. They
don’t talk about it, most don’t admit it, but for them he is a religion.
And there’s good reason for this. He, alone among rock performers, has not
sold out. He is pure, heroic. He’d be uncomfortable talking
about how his fans worship him — just another reason for them to do so.

Bruce wasn’t born in a manger; he was born in Freehold, N.J., on
Sept. 23, 1949, son of a pool-playing job drifter/bus driver who gave
him a hard time and a secretary/housewife who gave him unconditional love
and his first guitar. He is Irish, Dutch and Italian, has two sisters and told Time in 1975, “I lived half of my first 13 years
in a trance or something.” When he was a teenager his parents moved to
Northern California. Bruce stayed in Jersey, woke up from the trance, got a
guitar and started making hard history.

The career can be divided into at least four parts. The first is
Bruce the unknown, and that’s the shortest. After playing hundreds
of gigs in Jersey and Manhattan bars throughout his teens he hooked up with
the aggressive Mike Appel as his manager. In 1972 Appel got Bruce in to see
Columbia Records ur-A&R man John Hammond (who had been astute enough to
sign people like Billie Holiday, Dylan and Benny Goodman). After
hearing Bruce, Hammond said, “The kid absolutely knocked me out. I only hear
somebody really good once every 10 years, and not only was Bruce the best,
he was a lot better than Dylan when I first heard him.” Within a week, Columbia had signed Bruce to a contract. His first record, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.,” hit the streets in the summer of 1973. Bruce was 24.

The album didn’t sell well, maybe because Bruce was promoted as the next
Dylan and that was a turn-off to DJs — and not true. But Bruce, undaunted
and with lots of material he’d written while crashing at friends’ after his
parents went west, came out with album No. 2 in the fall of 1974: “The
Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.” Like “Greetings,” it got good
reviews but foundered without airplay.

But even without garnering huge sales the two albums gave the world what
were to become anthems. From “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” came “Blinded by the Light,”
“Growin’ Up,” “Spirit in the Night” and “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the
City.” And from “The
Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” came “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),”
Incident on 57th Street” and “Rosalita.” To this day any one of those can bring down
the house, and they were all produced in the first year of Bruce’s professional career.

Meanwhile, Bruce was playing the clubs and gathering the following that is
his alone. Once you see him perform, you’re either a fan for life or you don’t
get it. Pretty soon, radio was forced to pay attention because those who
got it kept calling in requests, forcing him into fame.

The second phase is all about that fame and “Born to Run.” As classic as
the first two albums now seem, they are collections of wild short stories.
“Born to Run,” released in 1975, is a novel. Is there an American rock song
more classic than “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road”? Is there a song more
indelibly linked to its composer? Bruce was a leather-jacketed Holden
Caulfield, roaring down the Jersey Turnpike in a burned-out Chevrolet. This
is the album that solidified his image and propelled him onto magazine
covers. It’s about the struggle to be a man, to make it in this world
without compromise. It’s about masculinity, finding a soul mate and
freedom. Like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, he is yearning for the orgiastic light
in the final, climactic “Jungleland”:

Beneath the city two hearts beat
Soul engines running through a night so tender
In a bedroom locked
In whispers of soft refusal
And then surrender
In the tunnels uptown
The Rat’s own dream guns him down
As shots echo down them hallways in the night
No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light …

Is it going too far to see this as an American tragic drama? Perhaps, but
the album is as important to Bruce’s career as Gatsby was to Fitzgerald’s.
And whether or not it’s literary, it’s powerful. When Bruce whispers,
“Tonight” in the last line of “Jungleland,” it’s a spine-tingling
expression of animal passion and human fragility.

Which brings us to the core of any rock god’s appeal: Bruce is way sexy.
And it’s not a tight pants, shake your hips, overt kind of sexy, but a
primal force he exudes that attracts both sexes equally. He is testosterone
and poetry. When he sings, in “Born to Run,” “Wendy, let me in, I wanna be
your friend/I want to guard your dreams and visions,” it’s the most romantic
phrase one can imagine by a guy in black jeans singing. But then he
balances that tenderness with “Just wrap your legs round these velvet
rims/And strap your hands across my engines,” and you know you’re in the
hands of one tough dude.

One woman in her 40s, who’s been a fan since the beginning of Bruce’s
career, says, “I so do not want to be Bruce’s girlfriend. I don’t want to
meet him, either. The reason I love him is because he is so damned romantic
and deep and gives me faith that a man can be tender and loving and in
love.”

A man of about the same age, also a lifelong fan and now a father and husband,
echoes the passion. “What’s important about Bruce, when I listen to his
records, but especially when I see him live, is not what I learn about him,
but what I learn about myself … His ideas always seem to shed light on my
own struggles … What does it really mean to ‘be a man’ in this fucked-up
society of ours? What does it mean to be ‘tougher than the rest’? Bruce has
been struggling to come up with a definition of manhood that’s all about
commitment, community, family and strength of the sort that makes everyone
better off, rather than the zero-sum definition that so much of our culture
worships. It’s a definition of manhood that’s tough-minded enough to be
soft-hearted — from a guy who could kick Sly or Arnold’s ass any day of
the week.”

In this second, fame-laden phase, Bruce struggled with these what-is-a-man
issues but did so with the power of the record companies behind him. He
released “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978), produced by his new best
friend Jon Landau. Then came “The River” (1980), a sprawling two-record
set that looked to his childhood and the tests of manhood. After that, he
pulled back and did the spare, acoustic Hemingway-meets-Woody Guthrie “Nebraska,”
before launching into the huge “Born in the USA” album (1984) and a
marriage to model/aspiring actress Julianne Phillips (1985). Both “Born in
the USA” and the marriage were misunderstood. The first was co-opted by
Ronald Reagan, who used it as a hook in a campaign speech and brought out Bruce’s only
negative political statement (No, President Reagan, said Bruce, the song is
not a call to patriotism; it’s about how rough this country is on vets).

And the marriage — well, both Bruce and the country went through some
growing pains in the 1980s, and die-hard fans still criticize him for
marrying “down.” What can we say — rock stars marry models because they
can. She was a gorgeous gal who came backstage one night and swept Bruce
off his feet; who can blame the guy for wanting it all? “Born in the USA”
gained him the devil’s-pact popularity of the masses for the first time. Bruce even looked
different in this phase: He pumped up from hip Jersey waif to don’t mess
with me front man.

It also propelled him into his third phase: becoming an adult. He had to
deal with fans at concerts who knew him only from “Born in the USA” and
weren’t familiar with the struggle days. He had to deal with a wife who
didn’t want children right now (so we hear; he never said as much) and with
mainstream success (a Grammy in 1985 for “Dancing in the Dark” as well as
the mega-hit status of the album).

We hear his struggle on “Tunnel of Love” (1987), which he dedicated to
Julianne (in a line on the notes: “Thanks Juli”) but which contained one of
the most devastating pieces of poetry about a struggling relationship ever
written. “Brilliant Disguise” builds slowly, almost in monotone, as he muses
(the black-and-white video shows him strumming a guitar in his kitchen as a
camera comes in for a close-up):

Well I’ve tried so hard baby
But I just can’t see
What a woman like you
Is doing with me
So tell me who I see
When I look in your eyes
Is that you baby
Or just a brilliant disguise …
Tonight our bed is cold
I’m lost in the darkness of our love
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of.

So, it was no surprise that in 1989 he split — with wife and band — and hunkered down to rediscover his reality.

He found it with Patti Scialfa, a Jersey girl who’d been a backup
singer in the band since ’84. There may have been some overlap in the
marriage and the love with Patti, and that’s a sore point for those who
think Bruce has to be perfect. But Bruce, more than anyone, has always sung
about taking risks for love. In his 1992 double release, “Human Touch” and
“Lucky Town,” put out after he’d had a son with (1990) and married (1991) Patti, we
hear him dealing with the harshness of life and love but making that leap
of faith that it will all work out.

These albums are often overlooked or demoted to also-rans, but they contain two of his tenderest love songs — “If I Should Fall Behind” (“I’ll
wait for you/And should I fall behind/Wait for me”) from “Lucky Town,” and the lullaby “Pony
Boy,” the last cut on “Human Touch,” written for his child. Bruce has come through his need to jump on some wheels and
peel out. He’s staying home now and singing to his wife and kids — knowing
all the while that this, like everything else, will not be easy.

As he raised a family (he has three children), won three Grammys and an
Oscar (“Streets of Philadelphia”) and released a career-summarizing
“Greatest Hits” album (1995), he also worked on the sparest of all of his
albums, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (1995). Filled with
compassionate laments to Depression-era and immigrant pain, this album — together with the wrenching song from the AIDS-themed “Philadelphia” — was
a public offering of the love and compassion Bruce was nurturing at home.
With another Grammy in 1997 for “Tom Joad” for best folk album, Bruce had
come full circle. He was rich, with a family and homes on both sides of
the country.

But — and this goes back to why he’s a spiritual presence for his fans –
he’s the same guy he was more than 20 years ago. The two albums end on a
similar note: the beautiful tragedy of being human.
“The Ghost of Tom Joad” ends with “My Best Was Never Good Enough”:

If God gives you nothin’ but lemons then you make some lemonade
The early bird catches the fuckin’ worm
Rome wasn’t built in a day
Now life’s like a box of chocolates
You never know what you’re going to get
Stupid is as stupid does and all the rest of that
shit
Come on pretty baby call my bluff
‘Cause for you my best was never good enough.

The words are blunter now. He uses the f-word for the first time. Back in
’73 his imagery was lusher:

I had skin like leather and the
diamond-hard look of a cobra
I was born blue and weathered
but I burst just like a supernova
I could walk like Brando right
into the sun
Then dance just like a Casanova
With my blackjack and jacket
and hair slicked sweet
silver star studs on my duds
just like a Harley in heat …
Them gasoline boys downtown
sure talk gritty
It’s so hard to be a saint in
the city.

But the sentiment is similar: Life beats you down, but you gotta be tougher
than the rest. A middle-aged die-hard Bruce fan from Jersey sums up his
hero’s enduring attraction. “He is a spiritual force. He inspires you. He
makes you realize there’s beauty in just going on.”

One might react cynically to such a thought. After all, Bruce isn’t just
existing. He is a supernova of success. This is his fourth phase, marked by
a reunion tour with the E Street Band (Roy Bittan, Clarence Clemons, Danny
Federici, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa, Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt and
Max Weinberg). It started in April in Barcelona and hit the States this
week in New Jersey. Success isn’t an issue (15 shows in Jersey — more than
300,000 tickets sold in 13 hours). But it’s a special kind of success
that isn’t in the raw numbers of albums or tickets sold. Bruce has stayed
who he is through the musical phases that swirled around him: disco, punk,
grunge, house, retro-folk and girl-diary confessional. That was there, but
it influenced him less than his demons, his soul searching and his
obsession with telling the truth did.

Bruce has never been one to wax eloquent in interviews. He recently spent
an hour with Charlie Rose that was a waste — both because Bruce was on
his best, formal behavior and because Rose obviously didn’t know the music.
But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need any answers that aren’t in the music.
We know that, whatever happens in his career, Bruce will never be in a beer
commercial, he will never act in a Bruce Willis movie and he will never dye
his hair blond.

In 1975 he sang, “Someday girl, I don’t know when/we’re gonna get to that
place/Where we really want to go/And we’ll walk in the sun/But till then
tramps like us/Baby we were born to run.”

The sun is shining, and Bruce is still that tramp. Thank God.

Without looking up, he’d ask us to find newspaper articles for him (“It’s on the left side of the front page of the second section of the New York Times within the last three weeks”), get someone on the phone (his way of orchestrating his escape to his paper-strewn warren when he was ready) and inject occasional questions about the outside world, like “What movies are people seeing?”

Ralph Nader didn’t have time to do things like see movies. He has been busy since 1968 being the most vigilant citizen in America. He works harder than any president or member of Congress. He has affected your life as a consumer more than any man, but you didn’t elect him and you can’t make him go away. All of us Naderites (there have been thousands over the years) call him Ralph, even though we all have the deepest respect for him. We call him Ralph because that’s what fits. Like Uncle Ralph. Or Father Ralph.

Nader really is like a priest. He is little affected by the world he affects. He has never been married, never had children. No one knows for sure if he has a love life. He has never owned a car and has lived in the same inexpensive Washington boardinghouse for many years. “Fashion” is not a word he could define: He has the look of a man who cuts his hair with kitchen scissors and his idea of great bedtime reading is the Congressional Record. His hero is baseball legend Lou Gehrig because Gehrig was a modest man who just kept going, playing in 2,130 consecutive games. Ralph has served in the nation’s capital for 30 years now, dueling with its entrenched political and corporate interests and trying to rouse the citizenry. These are, arguably, comparable feats.

Nader’s accomplishments have become part of the fabric of American public life. You know that clause on plane tickets that says that if you’re bumped, the airline has to reimburse you and put you up for the night? Nader got bumped from an overbooked flight and got angry, and that’s why you get treated fairly now. Remember the days before seat belts and air bags? Nader wrote an article for the Nation in 1959 titled “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” and ranted as early as 1975 to Congress that all auto manufacturers should have to install air bags in their cars. People said Nader was a nut. Now car companies advertise that their air bags are the best.

And remember the march on Washington after the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island? Nader organized that and was a key player in changing
this country’s attitudes toward nuclear power.

Ralph Nader was born in 1934 into a loving middle-class family of Lebanese descent in Winsted, Conn. His dad, Nathra, ran a restaurant called the Highland Arms, and he and his wife, Rose, raised Ralph and two daughters, Claire and Laura, and another son, Shafeek. The family talked politics and good citizenship over dinner, and Mr. and Mrs. Nader felt responsible, as do many immigrants, for seeing that their children should do better than they had.

Even while growing up in the self-satisfied 1950s, Nader was eager to launch crusades. He majored in economics and Far Eastern regional studies at Princeton, where he fought to ban DDT from the school after he found dead birds on the lawns. He attended Harvard Law School in 1955 but, after becoming disillusioned with the complacency there, started writing freelance articles for the Nation and other publications. After the 1959 piece on auto safety he started practicing law and began research for a book that was published in 1965 called “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which was to his career what “Born to Run” was to Bruce Springsteen’s. The book detailed the flagrant carelessness of the American auto industry, especially General Motors with its fragile Corvair. In it Nader wrote, “A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.”

After GM tried (and failed) to get dirt on Ralph by sending call girls to ambush him in the cookie section of a grocery store, he sued and became the Nader we know today — the white knight who goes to battle for all of us against the corporate dragons who abuse their power.

He won the GM suit, got $425,000 in the settlement and used it to start the first Public Interest Research Group in Washington, D.C. (they are now tilting at windmills in most states). He came up with a plan for recruiting young idealists from all over the country. He spoke to college students many times a year and appeared on lots of television shows such as “Donahue,” “Merv Griffin,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Dick Cavett,” talking about sexy subjects like auto safety, job safety and utility rates. In 1966 he led almost a one-man crusade for the Traffic Safety Act that called for mandatory seat belts in American cars. Since then countless lives have been saved because of his tenacity.

Once upon a time, this kind of passion for justice and safety got young people excited. We watched as Nader in all his geeky glory walked into college gyms and got standing ovations from the same kids who’d been cheering rock stars the night before. He inspired wave after wave of what one writer termed “tweedy acolytes” to head off to Washington to help. It’s true, you had to be at least middle class to afford to live on the meager salary Ralph paid (about $500 a month when I worked for him). That was part of the plan: He paid very little, so people would stay for an average of six to nine months and then move on, inculcated with Nader’s spirit, vigor and distrust of those in power. It was a training ground for activists. And they helped him crusade for some of the most important reforms this country has seen in the last half-century, including the Freedom of Information Act (1966), the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Consumer Protection Agency (1978).

He also started groups to oversee the public officials who are supposed to work for us. In 1971 he began the Congress Project (which later became Congress Watch), a comprehensive examination of all members of Congress that ended up as a 21,000-page report drawing on the labor of nearly 1,000 volunteers. That same year, he started the Health Research Group and Public Citizen by sending out two mailings to 62,000 contributors that raised more than $1 million.

Some Naderites have gone on to high-profile careers in politics and media. Ray Bonner is an intrepid foreign correspondent for the New York Times; Mark Green is the elected public advocate of New York and widely touted as a leading contender for Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s job; Ron Brownstein is a nationally prominent political reporter for the Los Angeles Times; Bill Taylor (who was editor of Ralph’s Multinational Monitor) started the magazine Fast Company; and Joan Claybrook, who now runs Public Citizen, served as head of Jimmy Carter’s National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

Most of those who work for Nader soon leave, burned out by the grueling hours and monkish pay. (There are a few exceptions, such as John Richard, Nader’s longtime right-hand man, who came to the Center for Study of Responsive Law in 1978, shortly after I did. Over the years, Richard has acted as Nader’s buffer to the outside world, advising him on which ideas are most feasible and which might be a bit wacky — like the anti-siren campaign Nader started in 1979. Richard is the son Ralph never had.)

Nader was, in fact, like a father to many of us. He’s a strange kind of alpha male; though he doesn’t draw attention to himself, he is the center of any room he enters, and people listen to every word he says. He is handsome, like a bookish cousin of Alan Alda. He is shy, but he can make you laugh with him and at him (we’d laugh with him when he did his stinging impressions of famous people he’d met; we’d laugh at him when he asked things like, “Is that singer Jackson Gray going to perform at the Musicians United for Safe Energy Concert?”). He can be awkward if he has to make small talk, and attractive women sometimes make him nervous. He could be blunt and demanding, asking for the impossible and demanding we give ourselves the way he did. Projects could drag on for years, some never completed. Boxes stuffed with papers would pile up in the office, making information-gathering or simple navigation of the hallways almost impossible. Sleep deprivation was rampant. Still, we came back the next day.

We came back because Ralph, like Lou Gehrig, kept coming back. One day Ralph pulled up a chair and joined us as we prepared a mailing of 3,000 form letters to private citizens who had contributed to Public Citizen, his nonprofit umbrella group. Ralph sat there and signed every letter by hand, with a ballpoint pen. When we asked why he didn’t just use a stamp or a printed signature, he said, “They’d know.”

And he kept us entertained. One day in 1979 a couple staffers were taking Nader to the airport. We rolled up to a stoplight next to a Honda Civic with a Reagan bumper sticker. Nader rolled down his window and shouted at the driver, “How can you drive a Honda and be for Reagan?!” He was serious. He genuinely wanted to know.

On another occasion, in the middle of a staff meeting, he plopped his foot on the table, pulled back his pant leg and pointed to his socks, by way of illustrating the importance of frugality. “See these socks? I’ve had these for 20 years! Army surplus. They’re cheap and they last forever!”

Critics would get on Nader’s case for being a nag, for being single-minded, for not getting certain issues. Gloria Steinem once told me that she thought Nader never understood the women’s movement. He was always more interested in general consumer issues than feminist causes like the Equal Rights Amendment or abortion rights.

And while he has tried to stay current with consumer causes, organizing a conference last year on Microsoft’s monopolistic power several months before the Justice Department launched its antitrust suit against Bill Gates’ empire, some observers question whether the 64-year-old activist has lost his ability to touch the public’s nerve. His office says he communicates regularly with the Clinton White House, but not since Jimmy Carter’s days has Nader operated at the center of Washington’s political circles.

But bestowals of presidential favor have never been of much importance to Nader. There is a heroic quality to his unfashionable obstinacy. Henriette Mantel, a comedy writer and actress who worked alongside me in Nader’s office for two years, says, “He’s just a great man. He’s a walking, talking Jefferson Memorial, except he doesn’t have as much sex.”

One hopes Nader would laugh at this. I once asked him if he ever wanted a wife and kids, to have a family like the one he grew up with. He said he had considered it, but felt that he couldn’t give all of himself to both family and work, so he had made a choice.

He chose to work for us. And, like the priest-ballplayer he is, he sits long into the night, surrounded by mounds of paper, books and his poster of Gehrig. When I asked via fax how he wants to be remembered, he wrote: “For helping strengthen democracy, for making raw power accountable and enhancing justice and the fulfillment of human possibilities.”

Let the record show he has lived up to this epitaph.