Judith Krantz obit

Judith Krantz obituary

American author best known for her ‘sex-and-shopping’ novels such as Scruples and Princess Daisy 

She was not on the list.

The shopping in the novels of Judith Krantz had an intensity the sex could never match. There were antiques, art and bibelots on offer, plus real estate in select venues, but fashion always came first. Krantz believed that clothes comfort women and she was fervent about sartorial transformation, “I write about clothes as magical things that can change you … the character suddenly appears”, and that those characters were desirable and desiring only when perfectly dressed.

Krantz, who has died aged 91, published her first novel, Scruples (its title was the name of an imagined Beverly Hills boutique) in 1978, when top international brands had not yet been absorbed into conglomerates and did not have branches around the globe nor advertise across multiple spreads in the glossies. Couture was mutating into a spectacle confected to sell perfumes, and fashion had been for over a decade more about young fun than serious spending. Krantz grasped that women were now curious about the exact details of highest-end luxury – a mere mention of mink was no longer enough.

She filled 10 novels with long-researched detail; they sold 85m copies in more than 50 languages, and the proceeds replaced the quality ready-to-wear in Krantz’s Bel Air closet with racks of Chanel suits and Tiffany jewellery.

Unlike some of her heroines, Krantz did not start out poor, but she still felt she had been denied; she told the New York Times that she kept dreaming in childhood that her mother would bring her home, among other goodies, a big package of cashmere sweaters. Mother never delivered. “If she had, I never would have known the power, magic and mystery clothes could have. Out of that yearning you get fiction.”

This deprivation had not been for lack of cash. Her mother, Mary (nee Braeger), known as “Mickey”, had clawed her way from migrant poverty to a law degree; her father, Jack Tarcher, a serial philanderer, owned an ad agency, and later was vice-president at Doyle Dane Bernbach. Judith was born and bred in New York City, advancing from Birch Wathen school on the swanky Upper East Side to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her real education, according to her memoir, Sex and Shopping (2000), was a post-college year in Paris in 1949, conning funds from her father to support her in fashion PR and pursuing romance with a Frenchman who proved, though older and sexy, not rich enough.

She admitted that it was thanks to “out and out nepotism” that a job awaited back home on Good Housekeeping magazine. By 25, she was its fashion editor; at 26, via an introduction from her schoolfriend Barbara Walters, she became Mrs Stephen Krantz, wife to a former comedy writer conniving his way (often in monetary dispute with the creatives) to producing cartoon films and television shows, culminating in the successful Fritz the Cat (1972).

The couple lived in New York, Canada and France, settling in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. While raising their sons, Nicholas and Tony, Krantz wrote features for middle-market mags. The Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown loved her Myth of the Multiple Orgasm piece, but nixed her idea for a round-up of sex fantasies as too raunchy. Krantz saved the material for later.

That future arrived when, with her sons grown and her husband’s income stabilising, Krantz at 50 determined to do what she never thought she could: learn to fly and to write fiction. Her husband also took flying lessons, and was writing a novel, too, but never matched her success.

Scruples was nine months in gestation, tended by a top agent and rejected only once before Crown Publishers was impressed by the power of its fulfilled longings, if not by its overstuffed prose; she was offered a record advance for a second novel even before Scruples was published. She hired a publicity manager to make sure Scruples reached, and stayed on, the New York Times bestseller list, and secured a highest-price-so-far deal for paperback rights for novel No 2, Princess Daisy (1980), before she had finished it.

Krantz personally identified with the “best friends” who featured in her stories and made them cheerfully free of the familial, marital and financial tribulations she heaped on her heroines, who were born beautiful, made over classy and at last, after many woes and assholes, rewarded with sexy, rich husbands.

But like those heroines, Krantz eagerly learned how the glamour world worked and then made it work for her; her women entered retail and design, glossy mags, modelling, movies and television production, always wearing the precise label that would signify who they had become, and dropping the names of real celebs.

The lead of I’ll Take Manhattan (1986), for instance, borrows finance for her magazine from Donald Trump himself; that he would make such a loan seems excessively fictional. Krantz’s husband produced many perm-laden, shoulder-padded TV miniseries adapted from her books, keeping profits in the family and funding her Hermès handbag habit, though she was never quite as rich as her creations.

She retired from novels in 1998, by when the fashion business, especially at its luxe end, had become everybody’s business, and the inside info about glamour that had been her stock-in-trade was freely available: Krantz’s fairytale fictions could not compete with the likes of the Kardashians, even though their world had been very much shaped by her imaginings.

Her memoir, subtitled The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl, revealed that she was not nice, but spoilt, manipulative and driven. It included the requisite sex, but her most vivid memories were of the frocks, described right down to the trimmings on her first best dress.

Her husband died in 2007. Her sons survive her.