Nautical Knights -- For Women Who Want To Dance All Night, Gentlemen Hosts Come To The Rescue Aboard Many Cruise Ships

hile cruising the Panama Canal in 1982, Dick Revnes noticed groups of older women sitting around the ship's dance lounge wistfully watching couples glide by.

Encouraged by his wife, Revnes asked one of the women to dance. As she waltzed in his arms, she started to cry.

When Revnes quipped that he knew he was a bad dancer but hadn't thought he was bad enough to drive a partner to tears, the woman, about 70, told him he was the first man to ask her to dance since her husband died 10 years before. He had made her cruise, she'd said, and she would never forget him.

Nor did Revnes, the late president of Royal Cruise Lines, forget her.

That night he decided to create a program that provided a core of dance partners for unattached women passengers. No longer would they need to sit out their evenings all dressed up, but with no way to dance.

These "gentlemen hosts" would be single, retired, and over 45 - in effect, peers of the usually widowed or divorced mature women, who might be intimidated by younger, flashier guys.

Basically, the hosts would be charged with putting more magic into the solo woman's cruise experience.

In addition to Fred Astaire duties, they would be dinner companions to groups of women, assist them on shore excursions, and be available for couples shots when the ship's photographer took aim.

Now, 12 years after Revnes launched his host program, every cruise aboard Royal's three ships includes 6 to 12 hosts, who may range in age from 50 to 80.

At least seven other cruise lines have some form of host program - Royal Viking, Cunard, Regency, Delta Queen Steamboat, Crystal Cruises, Holland America and American Hawaii.

The host programs are so popular with unattached women age 50-plus - who make up 10 to 25 percent of many cruises and far outnumber single older men aboard - that more lines are contemplating adding hosts system-wide or to selected sailings.

"I wouldn't think of booking a cruise on a ship that didn't have hosts," said Grace Pearl Adams, a 68-year-old widow who has been cruising for 10 years and tried her first hosted sailing two years ago aboard Cunard's Queen Elizabeth II.

"I love to dance and the host program allows me to have a ready dance partner but otherwise be independent throughout my trip," said Adams, who usually takes at least one long cruise a year.

"Before hosts came along, I had to just sit in the audience and watch everyone else dance. I felt so isolated, so frustrated. Now I can be a full participant in the dancing part of the cruise as well as all the other parts, and that's certainly added to the joy of cruising."

While hosted cruises are intended to serve active women who, but for a partner could have danced all night, the program also is a boon for gregarious men who relish dancing and traveling.

Recruited directly by the cruise line or booked through an outside agency (which generally charges the men a fee for each assignment), hosts are not paid for their services.

Instead, they receive a free cruise, including accommodations (usually shared with another host), a bar and laundry allowance, and, in most cases, round-trip air tickets to embarkation and disembarkation ports.

They are expected to show up for duty with a tuxedo, white dinner jacket, natty sportswear. Plus loads of energy since they could be dancing three to seven hours a day, with little time to sit out dances if demand is strong from the ladies.

"Hosting proved the perfect thing for me to do after retiring," said Ed Fanelli, a 70-year-old former telecommunications executive from New York. Just before he retired in 1986, he read about Royal Cruise Lines' host program.

"I thought I could dance well enough, but I'm a bachelor and I was nervous about all the social pressure to entertain all those women," he said. (On his debut assignment there were 180 solo women and 6 hosts).

"The ladies turned out to be so appreciative, I got very comfortable very fast," said Fanelli, who has been a host on 60 Royal cruises.

"Being asked to dance put them in seventh heaven. I remember one woman, two weeks shy of her 80th birthday, who just couldn't believe all these guys were asking her to dance.

"At the end of the cruise she signed up then and there for another sailing . . ."

Tony Laudari, 70, a retired banker from Santa Rosa, Calif., who has hosted aboard 100 Royal cruises, said he looks out for women with special needs.

"On one cruise to Europe we had two elderly ladies in wheelchairs who wanted to explore Rome but couldn't do the regular shore excursion there because they couldn't keep up," he said.

"They asked me to help. We rented a limousine and toured on our own, with the limousine driver and me wheeling them around the Vatican. It was so heart-wrenching to see how much pleasure they got and how grateful they were. We became great pals."

Pals is the operative - and imperative - word when it comes to cruise hosting, where the unequivocal motto is "Dancing, not romancing."

Hosts are expected to spread their attentions to all the ladies in their realm, and gently brush aside any intimate advances.

No entering ladies' cabins (even for the most chaste reasons), no rendezvous in the wee hours, no strolling off in a twosome during shore excursions. Any violations of the platonic code could see a host unceremoniously booted off the ship at the next port.

That's not to say that romances haven't been born at sea - but a host is only to contact a woman (and only at her bidding) after the cruise.

"Just go and have a good time and don't expect the Love Boat," said Lauretta Blake, whose Santa Clara, Calif., company, The Working Vacation, recruits and screens hosts for several cruise lines.

The G-word (for gigolo) was a dicey issue when lines first started their host programs.

"A lot of people worried that the concept would attract gold-diggers stalking wealthy elderly widows and divorcees," said Mimi Weisband of Royal Cruise Lines. "We had travel agents telling us, `We're not putting our clients on with those geriatric gigolos'."

When women came back from the cruises raving about the experience and specifically requesting hosted cruises for future vacations, those skeptics changed their booking tunes, Welsband said. She said many women even call ahead to find out which sailings will include their favorite hosts - and book accordingly.

Judi Dash is a freelance writer based in Cleveland, Ohio.