Judith Krantz: Pioneer of the ‘bonkbuster’, and a glitzy target for literary critics 1928-2019
Bestselling author and purveyor of sex among the rich gave Donald Trump a role in raunchy TV show
● Judith Krantz, who has died aged 91, became one of the world’s bestselling authors as a pioneer of the “sex ’n’ shopping” novel — the genre known as the “bonkbuster”.
After many years as a successful magazine journalist, when she was 50 she published Scruples, the first of 10 brick-thick, glossy-covered novels about life in the jet set and the fashion world, in 1978.
It set a template from which her subsequent novels rarely deviated. Her heroines were competent, ambitious and ravishing. “I could write a book about a plain woman,” she told one interviewer, “but it would be damned hard.” Her heroes were handsome, devious and on the make.
Although invariably drubbed by the critics, Krantz, who had lived in Paris and done publicity work for fashion houses, could write lightly and perceptively about couturiers, designers and models, and about the very tough, very rich ladies who were their clients. She believed, rightly as it turned out, that it was a world millions of people yearned to read about. One estimate puts her total book sales at more than 100-million.
Scruples was swiftly made into a TV miniseries by the author’s movie mogul husband, Steve Krantz. He did the same with many of her subsequent novels, including Princess Daisy (1980; the adaptation featured an awful performance by Ringo Starr as a camp designer), Mistral’s Daughter (1982) and I’ll Take Manhattan (1986).
Donald Trump appeared in the latter book — “the brilliant, ambitious young real estate man whom [sic] even his enemies had to admit was disarmingly unaffected” — and played himself in the miniseries.
Fifty shades of criticism
The sex scenes in Krantz’s novels — she once admitted she was simply committing her own fantasies to paper — were frequent, but now seem tame in the era of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Her prose usually came in for savage critical comment. Reviewing Scruples Two (1992) in The Sunday Telegraph, David Robson observed: “I particularly enjoyed ‘The heavy globes of his testicles lay on the mattress between his legs’ as if men normally kept their testicles under their armpits.”
And Clive James wrote: “To judge from the photograph on the back of the book [Krantz] is engaged in a series of hard-fought delaying actions against time. This, I believe, is one dream that intelligent people ought not to connive at, since the inevitable result of any attempt to prolong youth is a graceless old age.”
Krantz insisted, however, that she spent her days in sweatpants at her desk, glamming up only occasionally for publicity purposes. She identified with her heroines, reported The New York Times, in that her books were “not so much about glamour as about women working hard, very hard, to create the illusion of glamour”.
Writing, naturally
She was born Judith Tarcher in New York City on January 9 1928. Her father was an advertising executive, her mother an immigrant from Lithuania who studied law and practised in the city’s legal aid system.
Her father taught her to write advertising copy and she studied creative writing at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Her spelling was not brilliant and she was given a B, which, she claimed, put her off trying to write fiction for 25 years.
In New York she took a job at Good Housekeeping. After she married Steve Krantz in 1954, she freelanced articles for Cosmopolitan and other magazines. Her most widely discussed article was entitled “The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm”.
By the mid-1990s, however, the bonkbuster genre had come to seem rather soulless and Krantz and fellow practitioners, such as Jackie Collins, no longer dominated the literary market. “I know perfectly well that I’m not a literary writer,” she once said. “I just write the way it comes naturally.”
Her husband died in 2007. She is survived by their two sons.
I could write a book about a plain woman, but it would be damned hard