Beauty And The Beast On `NYPD Blue'?

Week after week, the audience of "NYPD Blue" has watched affection and passion bloom between Detective Andy Sipowicz and prosecutor Sylvia Costas.

Sylvia is a lovely young woman. Andy is - and let's be charitable - 50 pounds overweight, with a hairline disappearing over the horizon and a face that would stop a clock. He sweats when he eats.

"You expect to hear a lot of questions about why is Sylvia Costas attracted to this guy," says Jim Gordon, a publicist for the show on ABC.

That is not what the show hears. Fan mail to the show and to actor Dennis Franz, who plays Sipowicz, comes from women who support the idea of Sipowicz as romantic lead.

The letters, says Franz's press agent, Cynthia Snyder, express such sentiments as: "I find you sexier than David Caruso." Caruso is the other male lead - leggier, more traditionally handsome.

Gordon says the show recently got a call from a woman who had heard the show was making one of its periodic trips to New York to shoot outdoor scenes. "She said, `Just tell me where he's going to be. I've got 50 friends who will be there with me.' "

Looking deeper

Sipowicz/Franz is just one example of how women look beyond appearance and even summon up ardor for homely guys. Lyle and Julia. Ric and Paulina. Billy and Christie. Woody and anybody.

Beauties love beasts. Princesses kiss frogs.

What are the chances of the reverse happening?

It just doesn't, says Laura Schlessinger, California talk radio psychologist and author of "Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives" (Villard).

"The reverse would not have been made. `Handsome and the Witch?' I don't think so," she says. "I think that diminishes men, but there you are."

In other words, men are pigs. In this regard, their swinehood can be numerically expressed. "The Evolution of Desire" (Basic Books, $22), a new book by David Buss, draws on studies of the mating habits of 10,000 people in 37 countries.

Buss cites studies in which men and women were asked to express the importance of good looks in a partner on a scale from 0.00 to 3.00. The studies have been done every decade since the 1930s, and although the numbers change, the gap between men and women is astonishingly constant. It's always more important to men by about 0.5 on the scale of 3.

"Regardless of the location, habitat, marriage system or cultural living arrangement, men in all thirty-seven cultures ... value physical appearance in choosing a mate more than women," writes Buss. "China typifies the average difference in attaching importance to beauty, with men giving it a 2.06 and women giving it a 1.59."

There are a bunch of theories about why that might be.

The problem, says Helen Fisher, is that we stopped living in trees.

Among tree-dwelling pre-humans, "a female did not need a male to survive and rear her children," says Fisher, an anthropologist on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History .

A baby could ride on her back. Her arms were free to take care of business, and you don't need a breadwinner when the main course is foliage.

When we came down to the grasslands of Africa, says Fisher, females found themselves out in the open, carrying - now in their arms - "a 20-pound bowling ball that's noisy."

Females needed a strong protector and provider.

"It was adaptive to be attracted to men who had access to resources," says Fisher, author of the 1992 book "Anatomy of Love" (Fawcett). "Women still like that."

It was not important, Fisher says, that the man look like Fabio or Richard Gere, provided he could spring for gazelle haunch now and again.

This is what Henry Kissinger meant when, in his Jill St. John days, he said power is the greatest aphrodisiac.

By contrast, Fisher says, it was adaptive for men to select women with "clear skin; bright eyes; swishy, long, flowing hair; white teeth, (which are) direct signals of youth and the ability to bear young."

These "evolved psychological mechanisms," according to such theorists as Buss and Fisher, crept into our DNA millions of years ago and will stay there, barring new Darwinian circumstances that drive them out. And they rule us even when we don't want to procreate.

"We tend to have these sexual preferences even when we're not looking for a mate," Fisher says. "Even the guy who doesn't want a young girl won't take the young girl, but he'll still take the middle-aged woman who acts buoyant and peppy."

`Trophy wife'

One of the phrases to come out of the 1980s, "trophy wife," has its roots in some of these ancestral impulses, says psychologist Buss, who shares many of Fisher's convictions.

Buss says men acquire social status by having an attractive mate. Studies in China, Guam, Germany and Poland found this to be a consistent trend and found that women do not benefit to the same degree from having a handsome spouse.

Attractive women, therefore, offer men multiple benefits.

"They're more reproductively capable, so they're more sexually arousing, and they increase social status," says Buss.

Buss' book cites studies in which people were asked to evaluate men for prestige and status. The best thing to be was an unattractive man with an attractive wife - better, even, than an attractive man with an attractive wife.

"People suspect that a homely man must have high status if he can interest a stunning woman," writes Buss.

No all men wind up with Cindy Crawford partly because the importance of good looks to men isn't 3 on a scale of 3. Also, Buss says, each of us tends to wind up with someone whose "mate value" - the sum of all our desirable traits - is approximately the same or a little better.

If Buss and Fisher are right, though, why does male beauty matter at all? If power, wealth and protection rule women's choices completely, why isn't Arnold Schwarzenegger a bigger sex symbol than Richard Gere?

Because, says Buss, ancestral women also had to worry a little bit about whether men were healthy and fertile.

Male looks aren't trivial

"Physical appearance is important to women. It's not trivial," he says.

A tight butt and good pecs suggest a man who could defend you against other aggressors. Symmetrical facial features and good skin suggest a male who did not, during development, suffer some environmental insult or injury that would impair his reproductive capacity.

Back to Andy.

Breakfasting with two woman friends, potter Rona Berkowitz of West Hartford, Conn., discovered that they, like her, had succumbed to the Sipowicz allure.

"Physically, this is a relatively unattractive man," she says. "But there is something about how, over time, they've portrayed him. He's opened up. I've started changing the way I react to (his looks). He's had a lot of problems. He still has emotional problems .... He's an honest person as much as he keeps things inside."

"He's kind of tough/fragile," says Buss. "He has the kindness inside. He cares about people. That's a devastating combination for women. They wouldn't like all that kindness in a wimp."

The tough and gruff exterior with the soft core is what would hook Sylvia Costas, says Sandra Beckwith, who publishes The Do(o)little report, a Fairport, N.Y.-based newsletter about men and women.

"She sees a heart and sensitivity and a challenge. And women like a challenge," says Beckwith.