The advice would be writers are usually given is “write about something you know”, but if your life is average and short on excitement, embroidering the reality and adding more than a little spice can work wonders for one’s sales figures.
Which is exactly what Judith Krantz did. Krantz, who has died aged 91, was happily married and led a comfortable middle-class life, writing lifestyle articles for various magazines. However, by the time she hit her late 40s, with her two boys grown up, she was getting slightly bored. She could have got herself a lover to explore some of those wild sexual fantasies of hers that even Cosmopolitan magazine had deemed too raunchy for publication, but she had no intention of ruining her marriage.
So she did the next best thing: she put all her fantasies into a book, populated it with absurdly beautiful characters who led absurdly glamorous lives, had never-less-than-amazing sex and when not having sex loved – absolutely loved – to shop, as Krantz herself did.
It worked. The first of what would become known as Krantz’s ‘sex and shopping’ novels, Scruples (1978), was a runaway success even if the critics turned up their noses, dismissing it as ‘trashy’ and ‘pure escapism’. Never mind: on the basis of Scruples’s sales (200,000 hardback and over 3 million paperback copies),Krantz secured what was at the time a record advance for the paperback of her next novel, Princess Daisy: a whopping $3.2 million, equivalent to £9 million today.
Judith Bluma-Gittel (Yiddish for lovely flower) Tarcher was born in Manhattan to Jack, who ran his own advertising agency, and Mary Brager, a lawyer who would later work for the Legal Aid Society.
The family were wealthy but not ostentatious: the walls of their Central Park West apartment may have been adorned with Renoir, Degas and Soutine but Judith complained that she was unpopular at her private school because Mary made her wear unfashionable clothes. Years later, the queen of ‘shopping fiction’ would confess to a magazine: “I didn’t have romantic fantasies. I had clothes fantasies.”
After gaining a bachelor’s degree in English from the prestigious Wellesley College – which she found “too conservative” – Judith spent a year in Paris working as a fashion PR, pure heaven for the clothes-obsessed young American. Back in New York, she met Steve Krantz, a TV producer, and they married in 1954 after a whirlwind romance.
The huge success of her books – there would be 10 in all – meant that Krantz was able to move to a mansion in Bel Air where she could enjoy the same jet-setting lifestyle as her characters and indulge in her taste for Chanel, Hermés and other luxury brands.
Although her husband was hugely supportive, reading the drafts of her novels and producing many of the films and TV series they spinned off, her mother reportedly found them hugely embarrassing.
But Krantz, whose reading tastes included Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, was candid about her output, explaining that “people think that I am not writing on the level that I should…they think that I am really Isaac Bashevis Singer in disguise. But I can’t write any better than this”.
However, she bridled at the ‘sex and shopping’ categorization, insisting that her critics appeared to ignore the fact that her heroines were career women who were also sexually confident.
Although there’s some truth in that, the fact remains that Krantz’s heroines’ ultimate goal is the love of a man who is insanely rich, insanely handsome and fantastic in bed.
And that is perhaps, not exactly a feminist dream.
Judith Krantz’s husband Steve predeceased her in 2007. She is survived by two sons, Tony and Nicholas, and two grandchildren.
JULIE CARBONARA
Judith Krantz: born January 9, 1928. Died June 22, 2019
