Pretty in Pink

Let’s begin by judging the book by its cover. A photo of an effervescent Judith Krantz, then age 70 but looking 50, tops, features prominently. This is a woman with a fantastic life--the life, in fact, of a character from a Judith Krantz novel--and it shows. I covet her face lift (she’s had two, she unabashedly tells us). I covet her pretty pink suit (I believe it’s a Chanel). I covet her Tiffany’s gold cuff bracelet (one of the many many gifts from her husband). And while I’m at it, I covet her handsome husband (the successful TV producer Steve Krantz, who is not on the cover but appears in several snapshots inside the book).

Krantz’s memoir “Sex and Shopping” doesn’t just end happily ever after. It begins happily ever after and stays pretty happy throughout. Yes, she had a mother who was over-critical and competitive with her, inclined not to read Judith’s magazine pieces and books, and a father who cheated on Judith’s mother and was emotionally absent in the family despite the 26 psychoanalysts he visited (one session each). Yes, she was unpopular during grade school even after acquiring a camel’s hair coat, which was then seen as the height of fashion. And yes, she sobbed for hours aboard the ship taking her home to America after her heart had been broken in Paris by her first great love. But these are the misfortunes of the fortunate. Judith Tarcher was born to a family of privilege, graduated from Wellesley, lived in Paris twice, palled around with Laurence Olivier and Marlene Dietrich and wrote 10 bestsellers whose combined sales approximate $85 million. She has collections of Kelly bags and Porthault sheets. Plus, she’s thin. I hate her.

Actually, I don’t. Anyone who can write, “Rome was a blur, except for a visit to Gucci” is someone I’d probably enjoy hanging out with. Krantz’s active interest in consumerism, however, might be difficult to keep up with. “My love of Gucci leather was transferred to Hermes,” she writes, “where it has remained ever since. In a changing world, for a woman who loves handbags, Hermes is a rock in a raging storm.” You have to have a lot of money to believe that. Krantz does, but mercifully she does not take her prosperity or her success for granted, recognizing that she has been “lucky beyond words.”

Krantz doesn’t chalk it all up to luck, however. In a journal she kept while writing “Princess Daisy,” she wrote: “I see my limitations as a writer so clearly but I have an unquestioned ‘talent to amuse’ as Noel Coward once said of himself.” Comparing oneself to Noel Coward may seem a touch grandiose until you consider that more people have probably been amused by Krantz than by Coward, especially at the beach.

Krantz has lots more to say about her writing. She tells us that the reason every one of her novels includes at least one character who loses her virginity is because she found her own rite of passage so momentous, an experience that is elaborately documented in this memoir. She also points out that she has never written a character who has experienced a multiple orgasm for, as she wrote in a Cosmopolitan article in the 1970s, she does not believe that such a phenomenon exists. And finally, Krantz observes that nearly all the mothers in her novels die young. Krantz felt her own mother was cold and not maternal. I leave you to come up with a connection.

As with many memoirs, “Sex and Shopping” contains a remarkable number of memories, some told in such staggering detail you sometimes marvel at Krantz’s power of recall and other times doubt her veracity. (She kept a journal for only a brief period of time.) Krantz remembers what she served at parties nearly 50 years ago. She also remembers a dress she borrowed in 1953 from a friend who was taller than Krantz, explaining to us that, although she was 10 or 12 pounds heavier in those days, the dress fit because “that weight was almost all concentrated in my breasts.” Hmmm.

How does she remember so much? I suspect that Krantz’s psychoanalysis, which she began when she was in her mid-60s, may have a lot to do with her wealth of recovered minutiae. In fact, she informs us that writing this book was a sort of therapy, affording her the opportunity, as she says, “to look back upon my life and learn things about myself.” In the process, Krantz tells us so much about her mother and father that I feel I now have issues with them. *