Fabio Inc. : A touch of talent, a heap of hype: He’s not just a hunk, he’s a conglomerate.

This story is for you alone.

It’s about the answer to your dreams. No, it’s about your dreams themselves, a pair of eyes the color of the Mediterranean fixed on you and only you.

Never mind that the circulation of this newspaper is 1.1 million.

This fantasy break is brought to you by Ecstasy ‘90s-style, a pleasure that’s entirely legal, fat-free, nonsmoking, condom-wearing, red meat-eschewing, iron-pumping and goes by the name of Fabio.

“Hi, Sweetie.”

Fabio had arrived at the Sherman Oaks Bullock’s men’s fragrance department minutes earlier to the sweet tune of screaming women. They had amassed to experience their one true Fabio Moment, free with a purchase.

And now a tall woman was slipping out of a long, undulating line of fans awaiting their moment, which generally consisted of a hug, an autograph, a photo taken with their own camera, and maybe, if they were very lucky and reasonably female, a quick smooch.

But this woman wanted more. Susan Starks, 33, had slid out of work for this and even if the earth didn’t move, she wanted to give it a nudge. She put her trembling lips to his ear.

“I’d like you to stand for your picture behind me,” Starks said, “and make it look like you really want me.”

“Absolutely,” breathed the barrel-chested Italian. “That’s not a problem. I do.”

Now Fabio is a friendly guy, but he wasn’t embracing hundreds of strange women out of the goodness of his great romantic heart. He was there to promote Mediterraneum, a new Versace fragrance and the latest in a long chorus line of high-stepping Fabio products.

Indeed, Fabio, 32, is selling mountains of products with his imprint, in quantities and varieties so vast they verge on Fabio imperialism. He’s doing it by taking one bold step forsworn by many brave men before him:

He’s telling women what they want to hear.

“He’s the first man to come forward and say, ‘Listen, guys, you’ve got to meet them halfway,’ ” says Liz Perl, spokeswoman for Avon Books, publisher of the romance novels he models for and writes.

What’s more, he does it with such, well, big muscles.

“He’s terribly big and has very long hair and classic Roman coin features, so it’s hard to forget what he looks like,” says one acquaintance, Cosmopolitan Editor Helen Gurley Brown. “I find him so astonishing looking that you can hardly concentrate on what he’s saying. Plus, he has got good promoters who make you aware of him.”

Thanks to Fabio’s People, Fabio has sprung full-grown from two-dimensional book covers into a spokesmodel/author/crooner/cottage industry.

He can’t write, but he has a new book out, a romantic fantasy tellingly called “Pirate,” which debuted earlier this month at No. 37 on USA Today’s bestseller list.

He can’t sing, but he has a CD out, tellingly called “Fabio After Dark,” in which he moans his romantic philosophy between other people’s songs.

He can’t act, but he plays the billionaire owner of a Puerto Vallarta hotel in a critically ravished new TV show called “Acapulco H.E.A.T.”

But don’t view Fabio’s, shall we say, freshness in these fields as a disadvantage. His People, a.k.a. Beverly Hills agent Peter Paul, present his inexperience as a plus.

“He doesn’t emanate from having this incredible ambition, which usually comes out of some neurotic drive to succeed in one particular area,” Paul says. “He just happens to use all media to project himself.”

Fabio will even project himself into your living room, where he will do what he does best--stand around looking hunky, although you might find the $25 life-size Fabio cardboard cutout a little flat.

Coming soon are a picture biography called “Fabio” and more romance novels sort of by Fabio--he thinks up a story and someone else writes it. (His tale of the condom-wearing, nonsmoking “Pirate” was written by Eugenia Riley, although her name appears nowhere on its cover.)

Also on the Fabio front are two calendars and three videos--a making-of-the-calendar video, “Fabio Fitness” and “A Time for Romance,” an hourlong version of a novel.

“It’s the first time anyone has tried to take the romance novel format, which is a formula, and turn it into a movie,” says Paul, who met Fabio through a mutual friend.

Peter Paul, bearded, balding and bespectacled, is given to blue blazers and sedate gold pinky rings, if a gold pinky can be called sedate. His Fabio press package contains lots of firsts and biggests: “first male romance writer writing under his own name,” “biggest advance ever paid for a calendar” and “highest paid first-time romance writer in history” with a $100,000 contract for his first three books and another $100,000 each for the fourth and fifth. And--are you sitting down?--”the November ’92 issue of McCall’s feted him along with Jonas Salk, King Juan Carlos and Paul McCartney as one of the ’15 Greatest Men On Earth. ‘ “

It’s tough work being a phenomenon.

“In the last year and a half, I can count in a hand how many days off I had,” Fabio says. “I’ve been working every single day, up to 17, 18 hours a day. I’m not even going to the gym anymore.”

Fabio, nee Fabio Lanzoni, is slouching in a chair in the bowels of Bullock’s after his fragrance signing. He wears a blue shirt with gold studs, a leather belt with silver studs, torn jeans and cowboy boots. He looks across the table at Paul.

“I told him, ‘If you book me for one more thing, I’ll kill you.’ ”

Paul would do well to buy a cemetery plot. There’s talk of casting Fabio in a couple of $40-million action movies--with no gore and no nudity but, of course, love and romance!

“If I see a woman in lingerie, for me it’s a hundred times more turn-on than to see a total naked woman because after she’s total naked, I saw everything. There’s no more fantasy.”

And in an ironic reversal of his metamorphosis from romance novel fantasy cover boy to real-live hunk, he’ll pose as a real-live Thor on the cover of the fantasy Marvel comic book.

Another first.

“He looks like Thor. He looks exactly like Thor,” Paul says. “He really is a live super-hero.”

It’s hard to figure where Fabio/Thor fits into Paul’s eclectic client list. Trained as a lawyer and an erstwhile philosophy major at Dartmouth, he has over the years “packaged” Salvador Dali, Buzz Aldrin, Muhammad Ali and, now, Fabio.

“What have all these people shared in common?”

Yes, what have all these people shared in common?

“Muhammad Ali and Fabio had a presence about them, a spirituality that permeated their being,” Paul says. “When we started working together, I suggested building (Fabio’s) career around his philosophy. That really was appealing to me, which is why I dedicate myself to this activity.”

“This activity,” of course, is packaging projects and products. So now they’re talking about packaging Fabio’s romantic philosophy and fitness products and distributing them in a kind of Amway setup. After all, if you think Thor is some pop culture icon to live up to, try thinking really big--think Mary Kay.

“It would allow people to join Fabio in proliferating his philosophy and lifestyle,” Paul says, “and it would empower women to generate funds for themselves.”

And for Fabio too, of course, although Paul says he’s too spiritual to be materialistic (OK, OK, so he has a Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, Mercedes and Porsche).

“Money, power is beautiful if you take just as fun. OK? If you don’t get attached,” says Fabio, who keeps a Manhattan apartment and a Hollywood Hills house. “I have all the things I can desire in life, but if I don’t have love from people, and if I don’t be able to give love to people and receive love, I will not be happy even with all my success and all the money I make.”

Which is no easy task when you’re a phenomenon. He says he broke up nine months ago with his girlfriend of four years and hasn’t managed to replace her.

“It’s hard to find a person who accept you and love you for who you are, not for what you have, and I’m very careful of that because of course with my position. I prefer to find the Cinderella with the beautiful soul.”

His female fans love hearing that sort of stuff, and Fabio loves to give it to them. “Fabio is conveniently safe sex,” says Kathryn Falk, owner of Romantic Times magazine.

You could pay $1.99 a minute to hear his romantic frissons by dialing (900) 90-FABIO. But “the spokesperson for classic romance” is always happy to discuss relations between the sexes for free.

“Woman is very much more in contact with their feeling than a man. As a matter of fact, woman always teach to men how to love. But the tendency of the man is always to lie to bring them to bed.

“In every single thing I’m trying to tell the man, ‘Be honest, OK? Tell the truth. Maybe you gonna get laid less, but tell the truth.’ ”

Paul: “He doesn’t mean get laid.”

Fabio: “I’m trying to tell men, ‘Really show yourself. Do not be macho because the biggest turnoff for a woman is a macho guy because women, they’re very sensitive. They know you’re macho because you’re insecure.’ ”

No wonder Hillary Rodham Clinton flirted with him on a recent White House visit. Some women find contact with the fitness-focused Fabio so salutary that merely meeting him is slimming.

“The man freaked me out so bad that in the first two weeks after I met him, I lost 30 pounds,” says Tina Jakes of Atlanta, who edits his newsletter, the Gentle Conqueror. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I’ve lost 104 pounds in the year and a half since we met.”

That’s been the reaction since 1991, when Liz Perl suggested that “A Current Affair” do a story about the real live man on the illustrated covers of hundreds of Avon’s romance novels.

“It was like the floodgates were loosed,” she says. “No one knew the man on the cover was real, and all of a sudden I was getting truckloads of mail.

“It’s really bizarre. The marketing came in response to the public’s awareness. Usually, you market somebody and shove it down the public’s throat.”

If Fabio’s mere existence opened the floodgates of consumerism, he’s certainly surfing the swell and it’s been a wild ride. But marketing experts warn that it could be a brief one.

“With a very few exceptions, celebrities tend to be short-lived, and in particular, with his being identified with so many different products, there’s a point where he becomes saturated,” says David Stewart, a USC marketing professor. “Because if you’re identified with everything, you’re really identified with nothing.”

Don’t tell that to Donnamarie White, a middle-age single mom and engineer who’d already had a Fabio sighting in San Antonio before schlepping up from San Diego for his Bullock’s fragrance signing.

During her Fabio Moment, White had thrust into his welcoming hands a few pithy essays she’d penned in his honor: “He can bench press me any time he likes.” And now, she had emerged clutching a photo of herself clutching Fabio in San Antonio. He’d autographed it in gold ink, a flourish that for the first time in her life made the long trek home on Interstate 405 look good.

Sighed White: “He’s got enough charm to melt rocks.”