Judith Krantz (1927-2019)
June 23, 2019 6:01 PM Subscribe
Judith Krantz, bestselling author and pioneer of the sex-and-shopping novel, has died of natural causes at 91. Krantz, who wrote prolifically for women's magazines, did not attempt fiction until later life. She published her first novel, Scruples ("about the staggeringly luxurious life of a Beverly Hills boutique and the people who work in it"), when she was 50.
“Now, I would say to young women, do something you have a true feeling for, no matter how little talent you may believe you have . . . Let no masterwork be your goal — a modest goal may lead you further than you dream.”
“Now, I would say to young women, do something you have a true feeling for, no matter how little talent you may believe you have . . . Let no masterwork be your goal — a modest goal may lead you further than you dream.”
Thanks for this. Teenaged me was a mega-fan.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 7:05 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Valancy Rachel at 7:05 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
I loved -- LOVED -- Scruples, and I will always love her for that.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:23 PM on June 23, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:23 PM on June 23, 2019 [4 favorites]
.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 7:29 PM on June 23, 2019
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 7:29 PM on June 23, 2019
Krantz was an early and strong influence on my work as a romance novelist; she taught me so much about creating strong characters and witty dialogue. And her Sasha Nevsky from the Scruples trilogy remains my favorite of her characters, with a powerful speech in “Lovers” that stays with me to this day. My paperback copy opens to that page on its own.
“I’ll never apologize for [my past]. I had the right to dispose of myself as I wished. If you’re waiting for me to feel ashamed, you’ll wait forever... I see that I was a Great Slut, as I used to call it, and what of it? I’ll never regret using my freedom for as long as it belonged to me... My days as a Great Slut are definitively over, never to be repeated, but otherwise I’m me, I’m Sasha. Tell me why you think you have a right to blame me now... it’s beneath you.”
“It wasn’t beneath you to go from man to man?”
“No it was not. I was true to myself.”
It took my breath away as a Southern girl who went to church every Sunday and was awash with Evangelical purity bullshit. I suddenly saw so clearly that I, and only I, had the right to say what I would or wouldn’t do with my own body, and that I had to answer only to myself. Literally life changing. I have a lot of gratitude to Judith Krantz for that, and for Sasha.
posted by angeline at 8:39 PM on June 23, 2019 [24 favorites]
“I’ll never apologize for [my past]. I had the right to dispose of myself as I wished. If you’re waiting for me to feel ashamed, you’ll wait forever... I see that I was a Great Slut, as I used to call it, and what of it? I’ll never regret using my freedom for as long as it belonged to me... My days as a Great Slut are definitively over, never to be repeated, but otherwise I’m me, I’m Sasha. Tell me why you think you have a right to blame me now... it’s beneath you.”
“It wasn’t beneath you to go from man to man?”
“No it was not. I was true to myself.”
It took my breath away as a Southern girl who went to church every Sunday and was awash with Evangelical purity bullshit. I suddenly saw so clearly that I, and only I, had the right to say what I would or wouldn’t do with my own body, and that I had to answer only to myself. Literally life changing. I have a lot of gratitude to Judith Krantz for that, and for Sasha.
posted by angeline at 8:39 PM on June 23, 2019 [24 favorites]
I read a lot of Judith Krantz growing up. This bums me out, but she was kinda gone a long time before she was gone. I am impressed that she got started at age 50. I'm surprised her writing career only lasted ten years and the last two were rather decline-y. I wonder how long she's been going downhill.
My thoughts:
* Scruples: Better than I expected it to be. Ugly duckling turns into swan, gets married to rich old guy who dies, starts a Saks ripoff that with the help of two more fun people, becomes a store I would have actually wanted to shop in. It was a shopping amusement park (with restaurant, as I recall) before its time. Also briefly features Jessica Thorpe, the original unapologetic Great Slut with three Jewish boyfriends at a time* that she bangs without intent to marry and ranks them all in numbers. What happens if you meet a Jewish ten? "I'd run like a thief, I hope," but she marries the dude. Also features Dolly Moon, who unapologetically gets pregnant by a random cowboy, keeps the baby, still finds true love and wins an Oscar and has an Oscar scandal.
* I was always amused that she raved about Jewish guys so much. I guess she knew from life experience.
* Scruples 2: Turns the happy ending of the first one on its head within 24 hours, leading Billy to get a quick divorce and keep the surprise stepdaughter Gigi, who is very sweet and an awesome writer about her antique lingerie collection. Also features Sasha Nevsky, the second Great Slut who boinks three dudes at a time unapologetically. Has a brief uncomfortable interlude in which BIlly gets a boyfriend and tells him she has a different name, which ends poorly. Scruples burns in a fire, leading the surviving partners to be apart for years before reforming again to start Scruples 2, the mail order catalog. The "five-minute" fire drill exercise. The...uh, scene in which Josh gets straight up raped, has a hard time explaining the situation ("...intromission...") and I don't recall if he ever quite explained what happened. Billy hooking up with Spider after all those years.
* Lovers: This one's Gigi's story, in which she loves her boyfriend and her job but gets fed up with both and dates a few more guys and gets a job at an ad agency that actually made me think it sounded interesting. Abbondanza! Welding the earrings into the ship and then punching her boyfriend in front of the media. Getting back together with Josh. Sasha's husband from the last book finding out about her Great Slut past, throwing a shit fit and never getting over it (see above speech) and divorcing him, finding love again with Gigi's dad(!) and immediately confessing her Great Slut past and he's all "I hope they realize how lucky they were." Gigi being weirdly cool with all of that.
* Princess Daisy: I did not like this one and have generally blocked it out. Mostly because I hated the idea of twins in which one of them had Down syndrome and yet the twins were somehow still identical? Pretty sure that's not how science works (and foreshadowed Arrested Development?).
* Mistral's Daughter: Odd premise about an arrogant painter who boinks a mother and a daughter and knocks up the latter. Fauve herself is a nice girl with a nice boyfriend. The whole Jewish heritage, combined with Mistral's shitty behavior during WWII, plays out well.
* I'll Take Manhattan: One of my very favorites, about the magazine business, with the moral of the story being "The best fun is work." I really liked that message, actually. I also loved Maxi going through all of the magazines on the newsstands, getting super mad at how all women's magazines are about trying to fix yourself, and yelling, "If I read one more article about bulimia, I'll throw up." Therefore she creates her own magazine that "loves you" and is just there for fun. I wish B&B existed. I also love Toby and India's relationship and feel for poor Justin.
Weirdly enough, this book also has the plot of Hamlet (feuding brothers, one killing the other and marrying his wife) without actual Hamlet, as none of the kids ever find out what went on with that.
However, it does have some divey shit: everything involving Cutter is awful (to be fair, he's the villain), Maxi seducing her boss(?) while still age 17 (it's telling that when she gets knocked up, her family is just all "Poor Rocco" and not blaming him at all because Maxi is a damn hurricane and you can't stop her), Maxi pretending to be a widow (?), boinking the airport security guy so she can cheat the duty-free...whatever, and the Maxi-and-Rocco "rape" scenes in which she seduces him and then he grumbles afterwards she raped him even though he seemed pretty well consenting. Also, during one of those she just randomly grabbed his penis and it went to nookie. What?
Horrible disclaimer: Maxi lives in Trump Tower and Trump has a cameo in it.
* Till We Meet Again: Krantz's other historical novel about WWI/WWII, featuring a family of women. While most of the book is dedicated to pilot Freddy's love life--she marries a nice guy who fits in wartime but not afterwards and takes forEVER to get together with Jock instead--I preferred Delphine's extremely odd relationship with Armand. Delphine takes up acting and uh....apparently gets orgasms while hanging around a set and this makes it look like she can act (whaaaaaaaat?) and Armand is the director who seriously punctures her ego bubble and she falls in love with him even though she hates the idea. It's perverse and I liked it.
Divey shit: Bruno is a horror, but again, he's the villain character and I'm relieved for the poor girl who doesn't end up marrying him.
* Dazzle: Another favorite of mine: An Annie Leibowitz-ripoff photographer/daddy's girl whose dad owns an enormous ranch in California. The two older half-sisters are generally kinda unpleasant and after he dies, they have to figure out what to do with their shared inheritance. While the ah, historical "compact" plot pretty much makes no sense and obviously has no legal basis to stop the other two from selling to the highest bidder, the sisters eventually resolving things is nice. I also enjoyed the clumsiness of Casey (I actually recognized a mention of a Madame Gres dress later in life) and seethed at Gabe and Phoebe.
This book also basically explained to me as a kid why lesbianism is a thing. I was all "ohhhhh, that makes sense then." Make of this what you will.
* Spring Collection: The last two books of hers were not that great by comparison and I don't remember much about them. I remember that she was trying to make "trisexual" happen (it didn't) and Maxi had a mention of a new magazine, Zing.
* The Jewels of Tessa Kent: Features an actual virgin pregnancy because the guy's dick is too short to actually penetrate the hymen but the sperm gets through, whaaaat? Kind of an odd one to go out on.
Here's to you, Judith. I enjoyed reading you.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:54 PM on June 23, 2019 [22 favorites]
My thoughts:
* Scruples: Better than I expected it to be. Ugly duckling turns into swan, gets married to rich old guy who dies, starts a Saks ripoff that with the help of two more fun people, becomes a store I would have actually wanted to shop in. It was a shopping amusement park (with restaurant, as I recall) before its time. Also briefly features Jessica Thorpe, the original unapologetic Great Slut with three Jewish boyfriends at a time* that she bangs without intent to marry and ranks them all in numbers. What happens if you meet a Jewish ten? "I'd run like a thief, I hope," but she marries the dude. Also features Dolly Moon, who unapologetically gets pregnant by a random cowboy, keeps the baby, still finds true love and wins an Oscar and has an Oscar scandal.
* I was always amused that she raved about Jewish guys so much. I guess she knew from life experience.
* Scruples 2: Turns the happy ending of the first one on its head within 24 hours, leading Billy to get a quick divorce and keep the surprise stepdaughter Gigi, who is very sweet and an awesome writer about her antique lingerie collection. Also features Sasha Nevsky, the second Great Slut who boinks three dudes at a time unapologetically. Has a brief uncomfortable interlude in which BIlly gets a boyfriend and tells him she has a different name, which ends poorly. Scruples burns in a fire, leading the surviving partners to be apart for years before reforming again to start Scruples 2, the mail order catalog. The "five-minute" fire drill exercise. The...uh, scene in which Josh gets straight up raped, has a hard time explaining the situation ("...intromission...") and I don't recall if he ever quite explained what happened. Billy hooking up with Spider after all those years.
* Lovers: This one's Gigi's story, in which she loves her boyfriend and her job but gets fed up with both and dates a few more guys and gets a job at an ad agency that actually made me think it sounded interesting. Abbondanza! Welding the earrings into the ship and then punching her boyfriend in front of the media. Getting back together with Josh. Sasha's husband from the last book finding out about her Great Slut past, throwing a shit fit and never getting over it (see above speech) and divorcing him, finding love again with Gigi's dad(!) and immediately confessing her Great Slut past and he's all "I hope they realize how lucky they were." Gigi being weirdly cool with all of that.
* Princess Daisy: I did not like this one and have generally blocked it out. Mostly because I hated the idea of twins in which one of them had Down syndrome and yet the twins were somehow still identical? Pretty sure that's not how science works (and foreshadowed Arrested Development?).
* Mistral's Daughter: Odd premise about an arrogant painter who boinks a mother and a daughter and knocks up the latter. Fauve herself is a nice girl with a nice boyfriend. The whole Jewish heritage, combined with Mistral's shitty behavior during WWII, plays out well.
* I'll Take Manhattan: One of my very favorites, about the magazine business, with the moral of the story being "The best fun is work." I really liked that message, actually. I also loved Maxi going through all of the magazines on the newsstands, getting super mad at how all women's magazines are about trying to fix yourself, and yelling, "If I read one more article about bulimia, I'll throw up." Therefore she creates her own magazine that "loves you" and is just there for fun. I wish B&B existed. I also love Toby and India's relationship and feel for poor Justin.
Weirdly enough, this book also has the plot of Hamlet (feuding brothers, one killing the other and marrying his wife) without actual Hamlet, as none of the kids ever find out what went on with that.
However, it does have some divey shit: everything involving Cutter is awful (to be fair, he's the villain), Maxi seducing her boss(?) while still age 17 (it's telling that when she gets knocked up, her family is just all "Poor Rocco" and not blaming him at all because Maxi is a damn hurricane and you can't stop her), Maxi pretending to be a widow (?), boinking the airport security guy so she can cheat the duty-free...whatever, and the Maxi-and-Rocco "rape" scenes in which she seduces him and then he grumbles afterwards she raped him even though he seemed pretty well consenting. Also, during one of those she just randomly grabbed his penis and it went to nookie. What?
Horrible disclaimer: Maxi lives in Trump Tower and Trump has a cameo in it.
* Till We Meet Again: Krantz's other historical novel about WWI/WWII, featuring a family of women. While most of the book is dedicated to pilot Freddy's love life--she marries a nice guy who fits in wartime but not afterwards and takes forEVER to get together with Jock instead--I preferred Delphine's extremely odd relationship with Armand. Delphine takes up acting and uh....apparently gets orgasms while hanging around a set and this makes it look like she can act (whaaaaaaaat?) and Armand is the director who seriously punctures her ego bubble and she falls in love with him even though she hates the idea. It's perverse and I liked it.
Divey shit: Bruno is a horror, but again, he's the villain character and I'm relieved for the poor girl who doesn't end up marrying him.
* Dazzle: Another favorite of mine: An Annie Leibowitz-ripoff photographer/daddy's girl whose dad owns an enormous ranch in California. The two older half-sisters are generally kinda unpleasant and after he dies, they have to figure out what to do with their shared inheritance. While the ah, historical "compact" plot pretty much makes no sense and obviously has no legal basis to stop the other two from selling to the highest bidder, the sisters eventually resolving things is nice. I also enjoyed the clumsiness of Casey (I actually recognized a mention of a Madame Gres dress later in life) and seethed at Gabe and Phoebe.
This book also basically explained to me as a kid why lesbianism is a thing. I was all "ohhhhh, that makes sense then." Make of this what you will.
* Spring Collection: The last two books of hers were not that great by comparison and I don't remember much about them. I remember that she was trying to make "trisexual" happen (it didn't) and Maxi had a mention of a new magazine, Zing.
* The Jewels of Tessa Kent: Features an actual virgin pregnancy because the guy's dick is too short to actually penetrate the hymen but the sperm gets through, whaaaat? Kind of an odd one to go out on.
Here's to you, Judith. I enjoyed reading you.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:54 PM on June 23, 2019 [22 favorites]
Thank you for that, jenfullmoon! I actually haven't read any of her books, although I think I read something dishy making fun of Scruples at some point on the internet. I can pick one out now.
I decided I should give her an FPP because her life story, particularly the advice she gave, spoke to me where I'm at right now. When I was younger, I thought of her as tacky, hardly even an author -- a "creative typist," as Stephen King called Harold Robbins (IIRC). And I still would not be her target market.
But since then I've learned a lot about the influence of misogyny, internal and external, on the perception of women's leisure reading. And I'm also in a place where I've realized I am not Literature, that what I want to do as a writer -- heck, as a person -- is to make people happy, and I wish I'd learned that earlier. And it clearly wasn't too late for Krantz to learn how to do that. So she is, after all, an inspiration.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:12 AM on June 24, 2019 [4 favorites]
I decided I should give her an FPP because her life story, particularly the advice she gave, spoke to me where I'm at right now. When I was younger, I thought of her as tacky, hardly even an author -- a "creative typist," as Stephen King called Harold Robbins (IIRC). And I still would not be her target market.
But since then I've learned a lot about the influence of misogyny, internal and external, on the perception of women's leisure reading. And I'm also in a place where I've realized I am not Literature, that what I want to do as a writer -- heck, as a person -- is to make people happy, and I wish I'd learned that earlier. And it clearly wasn't too late for Krantz to learn how to do that. So she is, after all, an inspiration.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:12 AM on June 24, 2019 [4 favorites]
There was a question on Ask a few weeks ago about successful people who had started after 50, and Krantz hadn't shown up on the listings I'd seen. She absolutely should have been, since her work was EVERYWHERE and I remember just how many times I'd see people reading her work back when I was younger.
posted by xingcat at 6:49 AM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by xingcat at 6:49 AM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]
Though it definitely has some major issues (ugh, ugh, ugh, the offensive gay stereotypes) Scruples was probably the first book I sneaked from my parents shelf that showed (at least some of the) women as confident sexual beings instead of semi-willing victims (I'm looking at you, Rosemary Rogers). Thanks for that, Judith.
posted by pangolin party at 7:53 AM on June 24, 2019
posted by pangolin party at 7:53 AM on June 24, 2019
Yeah, I went to sleep last night thinking about how as much as I liked Krantz novels, wow, she sure had a thing for writing Bitchy Gays, Closeted Men In Power, and Predatory Lesbians, didn’t she?
posted by angeline at 9:12 AM on June 24, 2019
posted by angeline at 9:12 AM on June 24, 2019
iirc daisy's twin dani was brain damaged in childbirth .
her memoir is worth a look
posted by brujita at 9:18 AM on June 24, 2019
her memoir is worth a look
posted by brujita at 9:18 AM on June 24, 2019
Along with Anne Rice & Jean Auel, Judith Krantz's work was HUGELY important to bi-curious pre-internet teenaged me whose only access to porn was the public library.
(I think she also taught me some weird generalizations about the sexual expression of Jewish men that I've had to unlearn? Small price to pay though really.)
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posted by taquito sunrise at 8:46 PM on June 24, 2019
(I think she also taught me some weird generalizations about the sexual expression of Jewish men that I've had to unlearn? Small price to pay though really.)
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posted by taquito sunrise at 8:46 PM on June 24, 2019
I've only read Scruples II. I probably got it at the university library, over 20 years ago. I guess at the time I mentally lumped it in with the other fluffy romances I was reading at the time with "just a little more edge" tag. But I still remember quite a lot about it, while I couldn't tell you much, if anything, about the other books I categorized it with.
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posted by bunderful at 5:24 AM on June 25, 2019
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posted by bunderful at 5:24 AM on June 25, 2019
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I didn't realize she'd started with fiction so late in her career -- thank you for posting this!
posted by Narrative Priorities at 6:59 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]