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Judith Tarcher
Krantz '48 "Just in time for my 50th birthday, I discovered that I could write fiction. My husband had urged me to try fiction for 15 years before I did. . . . I believed that if I couldn't write 'literature,' I shouldn't write at all. . . . 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." Judith Tarcher Krantz '48, at her 40th Reunion Krantz grew up as Judy Tarcher, youngest, smartest, and shortest girl in her class in New York City's upscale Birch Wathen school. She graduated from high school at age 16 and soon arrived at Wellesley, "shy, apprehensive, and breathless with excitement," as she described it in her autobiography. Her dorm mates nicknamed her "Torchy," and Wellesley became, for her, "a magically wonderful place to be." But not for the academic reasons that you might expect from the smartest girl in her high-school class. Torchy had much more interesting things to do. "I got only one A-plus, and that was in English 101," she told the Boston Globe in 1982. "I had a B-minus average in English, my major, and made C's and C-minuses in everything else. But I didn't come here to get good marks. "I came here for three things: to get out of here [graduate], which I did; to read every novel at the library; and to date. Well, actually, that's the wrong order. I came to date, read, and graduate." In dating, Torchy was the undisputed champion. She held the dorm record, "the only one to go out 13 consecutive evenings with 13 different men," the Globe reported. During her sophomore year, Krantz took a short-story class. The professor, who disapproved of Krantz's dreadful spelling, informed her that she would receive a B instead of an A for the class. Why? To teach Krantz a lesson, she said. She learned it, all right: She didn't write fiction for the next 31 years. When she graduated in 1948, Torchy, the social butterfly, wasn't ready to slow down yet. She spent a blissful year in Paris, working in fashion public relations, attending high-class parties in borrowed couture gowns, meeting Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Hubert de Givenchy, and Edith Piaf, and—of course—falling in love. "Aside from meeting my husband," she later said, it was "the high spot of my life." She reluctantly returned to New York City in the summer of 1949. There, she began what would become a nearly 30-year career in magazine journalism, first at Good Housekeeping and later, as a freelancer, for McCleans, McCalls, the Ladies' Home Journal, and, inevitably, Cosmopolitan, for which she wrote her best-known article, "The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm."
Nine months later, she had produced her first novel, Scruples, about the lives and steamy loves of people who work and shop in a Beverly Hills boutique. It was published in 1978, the year Krantz turned 50, and hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And the rest, as they say, is history. Krantz has now published nine more novels: Princess Daisy, Mistral's Daughter, I'll Take Manhattan, Till We Meet Again, Dazzle, Scruples Two, Lovers, Spring Collection, and The Jewels of Tessa Kent. The first three after Scruples also became number-one bestsellers, and except for the last four, each one has been made into an eight-hour mini-series. There are 80 million copies of Krantz's books in print worldwide, in some 50 languages. What makes her books so popular? Alex Witchel, writing for the New York Times, had a theory: "Every woman knows that a good clothes fantasy is the only thing to rival a good sex fantasy. If your air conditioner is broken, it might even be better." Krantz's books generally fulfill both requirements, so, one can safely assume, they're intended to be page-turners no matter what climate the reader is in. Another constant in Krantz's oeuvre, she told the Boston Globe Magazine in 1986, "is a working woman in a man's world. If there's one common theme in my novels, it's a woman succeeding." And while critics have often derided Scruples and its successors for their lack of literary weight, Krantz has learned to deal with that. "I know perfectly well that I'm not a literary writer," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I just write the way it comes naturally." Read an interview with Judith Krantz in Modern Maturity
magazine Visit Judith Krantz's official web site Written by Liz Ruark
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If
you really want to know everything there is to know about
author Judith Tarcher Krantz, then her recent autobiography, Sex
and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl, is probably
the best place to start. But really, once you've read that title,
you've already learned a lot about her. Sex and shopping— two
of the vital topics in her unimaginably successful novels—
have made Krantz famous. And being a Nice Jewish Girl (she likes
it capitalized) is a way of life for her, and has been . . . well,
forever. 
Then,
in 1976, Krantz's husband, film and television producer Steve Krantz,
made what turned out to be a momentous decision: He took flying
lessons. Judith Krantz, who was afraid of flying, decided to face
her fears and took lessons, as well. With that anxiety conquered,
she looked around for other old demons to exorcise. And so, for
the first time since her Wellesley days, she sat down to write fiction.
